Share this post:

Tory Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride has unveiled his party’s latest attempt to regain public confidence — by intensifying austerity against working- and middle-class voters while continuing to ring-fence the super-rich.

It is a policy package so harsh that no amount of carefully chosen words can disguise it: a school-bully attack on the poorest, most vulnerable, and disadvantaged, dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

Stride announced that, if elected back into office, the Conservatives would extract an eye-watering £47 billion from public spending over the following five years.

Presumably this is an attempt to answer the Tories’ own claim that there is a £40-50 billion “black hole” in the public finances at the moment.

But the answer is not to take money out of the economy; it is to ensure that money going into it is used to the best effect. Economists talk about “fiscal multipliers” – that’s when money injected into the economy creates profit that then, circulating through the system, creates more profit – thereby making it possible to fill in any “black hole” that is bandied about.

So Stride is intentionally planning to do the wrong thing.

Now we’ve established that, let’s look at what he’s actually planning to achieve:

The largest portion of the planned cut – £23 billion – would come from the benefit budget. Shockingly, Stride intends to target people with “mild or moderate mental health conditions” including anxiety, depression, and ADHD.

Stride suggested that those affected could “find a better-paying job or work additional hours,” or even “return to other parts of the world.”

The implications are clear: ordinary people, already struggling with health challenges, are being punished while dog-whistle and racist rhetoric signals that some groups, particularly immigrants, are undeserving.

The benefit cuts do not stop there. The Tories plan to review exemptions from the household benefit cap, meaning more families will face reduced support; and the VAT subsidy for Motability, which allows disabled claimants to lease vehicles, could be restricted.

These are not minor adjustments – they are targeted, malicious attacks on the ability of vulnerable people to survive financially.

The Conservatives previously refused to back the Labour government’s attempt to cut £5 billion from disability and health-related benefits, claiming that they wanted “fundamental reform” rather than quick savings. But these proposals demonstrate that their “fundamental reform” is simply further punishment of those who rely on the welfare system.

Stride’s austerity extends further. He announced that he plans to sack 132,000 civil servants – reducing staffing to 2016 levels.

This would remove critical capacity from essential services at a time when local authorities, education, and health services are already stretched.

And what about immigration? Processing of asylum claims was practically halted because the Tories got rid of so many assessors, while their decimation of Border Force left our coastlines open to anybody with a small boat (as the headlines so often tell us).

The Conservatives also hope to cut £7 billion from the overseas aid budget, reducing it from 0.5 per cent of national income to a negligible 0.1 per cent. Aid organisations have described this as “reckless, short-sighted, and morally indefensible.”

The cuts would damage international development programmes, harm vulnerable populations abroad, and diminish the UK’s global influence. Stride wants to turn what was once the greatest power in the world into a ghetto.

Environmental policies would be rolled back: Stride proposed cutting £1.6 billion in subsidies, including support for heat pumps and electric vehicles. This makes environmentally sustainable living less accessible to low- and middle-income households while slowing progress toward climate targets.

At the same time, £4 billion would be removed from social housing and benefits for non-UK nationals, and £3.5 billion from the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, leaving the most vulnerable at risk of homelessness or substandard living conditions.

The human impact of all these measures would immediate and severe.

People with mental health conditions would be denied support that allows them to live independently and safely. Where would they go and how would they survive?

Migrants and foreign nationals would face exclusion and hardship.

Families relying on welfare would see benefits curtailed, while the wealthy would continue to profit from assets and passive income – as they have continued to do under Labour.

Stride justifies all this by insisting that harder work guarantees prosperity. What a crock! It is outdated and morally reprehensible when the lazy rich are enjoying passive income from assets the rest of us can’t afford to enjoy.

Some have suggested that these measures are a “return to austerity” – but this is ridiculous because austerity has never ended. Spending on government departments has not returned to pre-2008 financial crisis levels, so this is a plan to turn the screws even tighter. Stride wants to squeeze the poor dry.

This intensification of austerity would strip resources from an economy that desperately needs investment, while harming millions of ordinary UK citizens.

Far from delivering prosperity – or even a pathway towards it – these plans threaten deeper poverty, social instability, and widened inequality.

Mark my words – in fact, share them with everyone you know so you can all refer back to them if the Tories are ever permitted to return to office.

Now let’s turn to the carrot Stride offered us in a half-hearted attempt to hide the stick he would use to beat us.

At the top of his speech – strategically positioned to lead media organisations by the nose – Stride offered a £5,000 “first-job bonus” for first-time home buyers, framed as a reward for young people entering full-time employment. He said he would take it from the National Insurance paid by these people; he would give it back to them.

But this rebate is symbolic. Stride cannot seriously believe that he’ll need £47 billion in cuts to fund such a scheme because that would require 9.4 million first-time buyers – and that is completely unrealistic. For a start, most people who are likely to want to be first-time buyers would need another £25,000 for the deposit on a new property – and where are they going to get that?

The rebate is a smokescreen, intended as nothing more than a distraction from the scale and cruelty of the austerity measures rather than to provide meaningful support to young people struggling to get on the housing ladder.

Reading between the lines of Stride’s speech – and I’m sure he did not want this – the Conservative plan is designed to benefit a privileged few while forcing ordinary citizens deeper into financial precarity.

The £5,000 rebate is a half-hearted attempt to conceal the moral and social cruelty of punishing people with mental health issues, restricting benefits for migrants, slashing foreign aid, weakening environmental protections, and intensifying economic inequality.

The real question here is: who would benefit from this planned squeeze – and in what way?

Share this post: