Dear John,

In the week where Labour announced their plans to reform the welfare system, Vlad kept Donald waiting for an hour and the UK Trade and Business Commission met for the first time, here is your Weekend Wire…

Wel-fair?

The big story of the week in the UK was the welfare reforms announced by Liz Kendall on Tuesday. It would be fair to say that these reforms have proven to be highly controversial, hardly a surprise when you consider the criticism the Labour Party rightly levelled against the Conservatives during the austerity years. 

The Prime Minister has defended the plans in recent days arguing that it is ‘morally indefensible’ that a million young people are going from education onto benefits. Liz Kendall has argued that without reform the welfare system would come close to collapse in coming years, highlighting the rapid rise of working-age individuals on welfare payments following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Government has reintroduced re-assessments for people on incapacity benefits, increased the minimum score that those on PIP must attain to continue receiving their benefits, increased the Standard Allowance above the rate of inflation, and delayed access to the health element of Universal Credit until someone is 22.

There has been discontent on the Labour backbenches over a cut to disability welfare that goes beyond anything attempted by George Osborne at the height of Tory austerity. Disability charities have called the plans “immoral and devastating”, while Child Poverty Action have claimed that the reforms will undermine Labour's child poverty reduction strategy. The think tank The Resolution Foundation believes that the changes to the welfare system will mean that between 800,000-1,200,000 people will be affected by 2029-30, each losing between £4,200 and £6,300 support a year. 

Click on the image to watch Best for Britain’s CEO Naomi Smith discuss the topic in more depth on Politics Live this week.

Air Force Don

Vlad Phone Connection

Perhaps he had got his dates muddled? Perhaps he had the wrong number? Or perhaps Vladimir Putin was showing Donald Trump who was in charge when he left him waiting on the line for an hour before their phone call on Tuesday.

It is news that will come as little surprise to anyone on this side of the Atlantic, Putin has been emboldened and feels, with a Trump Whitehouse, that he holds the cards. After the call it was announced that Putin had rejected the idea of an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, instead agreeing to a ceasefire solely on energy infrastructure. The call was seen as a victory for the Kremlin by those in Russia and it was reported that Putin had raised the idea of a US-Russian minerals deal with the American president. 

Improving trade relations was welcomed by Trump, attracted by the potential value of Russian rare minerals for the US economy. Following the call, Russia launched a massive aerial offensive against Ukraine and its people. The attack by Russian forces illustrates the ridiculousness of Donald Trump’s claim to having engaged in successful diplomacy. It seems unlikely that Trump will be able to navigate the complex, time consuming and intricate process towards a fully fledged peace agreement on current evidence.

Department of Truth

Two announcements from the Trump administration caught your writer's eye this week. The first was the announcement that funding would be cut from the Voice of Americamedia platform. Voice of America, founded during the Second World War as a counterbalance against fascist and communist propaganda, has provided uncensored information to millions of people living under repressive regimes around the world for decades. 

Last year Voice of America reached around 427 million people a week in 63 languages and in over 100 different countries, a much larger audience than the BBC Worldwide Service. The service was a vital source of information for resistance groups trapped behind the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, and in recent years had been one of the few independent media outlets accurately reporting news from inside North Korea or some parts of China. The suffering of Uyghur Muslims in Chinese ‘re-education’ camps were largely derived from the work of Voice of America journalists. By cutting  Voice of America, Donald Trump will only emboldened despots and authoritarian regimes and the decision was met with glee in  China and Russia.

The second story, not wholly unrelated, was the decision by Trump to sign an executive order on Thursday to dismantle the Department of Education. Despite only 13% of school funding coming from the federal level, it is important to note that the US Department of Education’s budget last year was around $238 billion and any cut to that spending will have hugely detrimental effects, particularly on the poorest sections of US society.

Announcing the cuts, Trump claimed that the department had been indoctrinating young people with racial, sexual and political material. Reacting to the news, Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader said; “Class sizes will soar, educators will be fired, special education programs will be cut and college will get even more expensive”.

This week the reconvened UK Trade and Business Commission met for their first evidence session. The group, for which Best for Britain acts as the secretariat, discussed what could be achieved at the upcoming UK-EU summit on 19 May.

The UKTBC is chaired by Andrew Lewin MP (Labour) and is made up of a collection of cross-party MPs, foreign policy and business experts. The UKTBC’s aim is to better understand how Britain can maximise its trading opportunities in a post-Brexit and increasingly volatile environment.

Ceasefire collapses in Gaza

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas collapsed this week after Israeli jets launched a fresh bombardment on the Gaza Strip killing hundreds of Palestinians including over 100 children. 

Israel’s Defence Minister said in a statement that  residents of Gaza should “Take the advice of the president of the United States. Return the hostages and remove Hamas, and other options will open up for you – including the possibility of leaving for other places in the world for those who want to.”

After nearly two months of  ceasefire which saw the slow but steady return of hostages to Israel and a marked reduction of fatalities amongst Palestinian civilians, this heartbreaking return to violence was lamented around the world.

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, established following the murder of 69 people in South Africa during protests against apartheid in 1960. With Donald Trump currently undermining progress on racial equality in America, solidarity against racism remains vitally important. During his short time in office, Trump has enacted policies which either directly or indirectly undermine the elimination of racial discrimination. Scrapping DEI initiatives, gutting USAID, and threatening to enact drastic funding cuts to Medicaid, are all deeply damaging to the mission of racial  equality.

The policies enacted in the White House have far reaching consequences, for the UK we have seen the adoption of similar rhetoric surrounding policies like DEI and deportation by British politicians. 

In one example, Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick earlier this month repeated Trump-like claims that ‘DEI is a respectable Trojan Horse for anti-white discrimination’. Jenrick has also described people of Pakistani origin as ‘people from alien cultures’, comments that were defended by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Meanwhile, Rupert Lowe has repeated calls to sack all DEI officers across the public sector and has displayed his support for mass deportations, two policies straight from the Trump playbook.

Such policies are rooted in misguided beliefs that (whether through ignorance or malice) refuse to recognise the presence racial inequality in the UK. The reality is that Britain remains a country where more needs to be done to expand equality of opportunity, research by Amnesty shows that;

• 47.4% of children of colour live in poverty compared to 24% of white children.
• Police are 6.5 times more likely to strip search black children than their white counterparts.
• Under joint enterprise black individuals are 16 times and Asian individuals 4 times more likely to be prosecuted for the same crimes as white individuals.
• Black individuals are at least twice as likely to be in a form of insecure work than their  white peers.

Policies like DEI are imperative in a country where men and women of colour are more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts, it is clear that our country remains one of racial inequality. It is of vital importance that British politics rejects the adoption of the divisive trends currently pervasive in American politics, that we continue to call out the fallacies of arguments made by politicians like Lowe and Jenrick, and push for a more equal society for the future.

Cringe Column 

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and that the sun continues to shine, thank you and see you at the same time next week!

Joshua Edwicker

Content Officer

Best for Britain