KEIR Starmer is leading the "most right-wing government in a generation," a former Scottish Labour MP has said.
Tom Harris, a former minister in the department for transport who now works as a public affairs consultant, made the comments in an opinion piece for The Telegraph.
He said Labour Party members must be concerned at "how unapologetically right-wing Starmer’s government has turned out", and remarked any money saved from potential redistribution of wealth "will go towards defence spending in an attempt to gain favour with the most right-wing American president in living memory".
Starmer is currently in Washington DC to meet US president Donald Trump.
Harris (above), who served as the MP for Glasgow South, formerly Glasgow Cathcart, from 2001 to 2015, said although all Labour governments are considered at times to have "reneged on their commitments to socialism", Starmer's has went that step further with the cut of the Winter Fuel Payment and its lack of contempt for creeping NHS privatisation.
He wrote: "Where are the traces of those 10 Corbynite pledges that Starmer so enthusiastically signed up to in order to get the support he needed from party members to get elected as leader five years ago?
"Consider where the Government now stands: this week it announced the slashing of the foreign aid budget, which, one way or another, will negatively impact on the world’s poorest communities. Was this ruthless accounting device aimed at redistribution of wealth within the UK? Will health budgets or social care services benefit? Perhaps the lower paid will receive an uplift in their tax credits?
"Nope. The money saved will go towards defence spending in an attempt to gain favour with the most right-wing American president in living memory."
He added: "Meanwhile the Government has struck the latest blow against the concept of universal benefits by forcing better off pensioners to pay more towards their domestic heating bills.
"That mighty icon of the Labour movement, the NHS, looks finally set to receive some less-than-tender loving care from a Labour health secretary who at least sounds serious about radical reforms that involve a heavier dependence on the private sector.
"Meanwhile those who have become comfortable living on benefits may receive a rude awakening from Work and Pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, when she unveils plans to force them to earn a living like the rest of us.
"The party of high tax, high immigration and record NHS spending now sits on the opposition benches in the Commons, while the party of strong defence, the champions of the private sector, of forcing 'wealthy' pensioners to pay their own way, the party determined to force benefit scroungers off their backsides and into work – they’re sitting on the government benches."
Harris went on to quote George Orwell's Animal Farm to show the lack of difference in the Tories and Labour on government benches, concluding: "This is not an appropriate metaphor in this case, for telling the difference between the pigs and the men is a perfectly simple task – they’re still distinct.
"But now they just happen to be sitting in each other’s places."
