Our welfare state needs Labour's aid

LABOUR'S ship is rocking; panic is rising. Things look more grim than after the miserable local elections when the party was punished for the cuts being made to various benefits.

- YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society.

There is and always will be.

She bullied the unions, made people selfish and individualistic. Yet the post-war foundations laid down by Labour still survived. But for how long?

Last week, MP John McDonnell reproached them for instigating “a series of policies that fly like a knife to the heart of what we believed the Labour Party above all else stood for”.

He was referring to the planned impoverishment of low-income mums, the disabled and pensioners.

McDonnell was suspended for voting against Labour's child benefits cap. To Starmer he's a leftie nobody.

But now more than 200 Labour MPs are getting agitated about the £5billion worth of welfare cuts, to be voted on later this month.

Even Morgan McSweeney, the all-powerful unelected controller of strategy, has heard “the roar from the electorate about the funda-mental crushing of living standards over many years”.