My money-saving tips for Rachel Reeves

It is always upsetting to watch a woman enmired in distress and so I thought I might ride on my trusty charger to the assistance of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, with a few suggestions as to where she might make spending cuts. Rachel needs these cuts because she can’t raise taxes and the British economy is lying flat on its back in an alleyway with wee dribbling down its leg. Growth is what we need, plus some serious savings to the Exchequer.

Clearly, most civil servants should be sacked – bringing a bounteous gift to the nation’s coffers

My first suggestion would be to cut the rate of benefits by 25 per cent across the board. This would immediately save about £70 billion but, more importantly, would convey to those people who survive on benefits the extraordinary notion that getting a job might be a good idea, all things considered. We have approximately 9.3 million people aged between 16 and 64 not in or looking for work, some 800,000 more than before that overrated little Chinese virus struck us in 2020. The gap between what a family gains in benefits each week and the average wage is far too narrow to convince an even half-sentient person that working is a preferable option.

There will be complaints that my 25 per cent cut will harm those who are out of work for no reason other than that they are ‘sick’. OK, sure. But here we need to sort out the malingerers from the truly deserving and Rachel can do precisely that using my new simple chart which categorises some afflictions as genuine and others as being a tad ectoplasmic. So, for example, having no legs, being terminally ill, having half a brain removed in an industrial accident and so on would all qualify those suffering for a perhaps greater rate of state benefits. Whereas feeling a bit anxious about stuff, or down in the dumps, or having backache or fibromyalgia, would not. I can send Rachel my chart, which has been coloured in by my young nephews, right this minute.

The second thing she could do is sack everybody involved in the Home Office report on extremism given to the government last summer and very shortly afterwards leaked to the Policy Exchange thinktank because it was so truly stupid. This report suggested greatly broadening the definition of ‘extremism’ so that it took in lots of people who are not remotely extreme. So, for example, our security services should get themselves really worked up about pro-Khalistan extremism on behalf of a tiny minority of Britain’s 500,000 or so Sikhs. There was an article about this extremism not so long ago on The Spectator’s website, and the writer outlined some of the outrages which have occurred: ‘Sikhs have even had their turbans knocked off by fellow Sikhs. One public servant said they “live in fear” of a backlash if they… challenged activist ideology.’ It is, of course, iniquitous to have one’s turban knocked off, but the trauma occasioned is perhaps a little less than that which would be engendered if one were stabbed to death on London Bridge by a deranged jihadi screaming the old Allahu Akbar business.

I accept, of course, that this is a subjective judgment on my part. The Home Office dossier also suggested including ‘extreme misogyny’ and ‘Hindu nationalism’ as being grave threats to the security of our nation, although undoubtedly the major problem came from ‘right-wing extremists’. The report was very clear about how ‘right-wing extremists frequently exploit cases of alleged group-based sexual abuse to promote anti-Muslim sentiment, as well as anti-government and anti-“political correctness” narratives’. So, in short, anybody who feels a little tetchy about hundreds of girls being raped by gangs of largely Muslim men, and thinks that perhaps we ought to investigate a little more deeply how this happened, is a ‘far-right extremist’ who poses as big a threat to the country as the rapists and those jihadis with their knives and bombs.

Indeed, the whole purpose of this exercise seems to have been to dilute the meaning of extremism so far that it has become effectively meaningless – and thus to exculpate Islamists from their murderous crimes: look, you see, we’re all extremists really. It’s not just you. I think the report went on to suggest that the term ‘extremist’ should be broadened to include: ‘Anybody who has voted Conservative or, more importantly, looks like they might vote Conservative at some point in the future. Anybody who has polished shoes with leather soles, or smells a bit of beef. Anybody who does not know what “guacamole” and “quinoa” is. Men who use aftershave. Anybody seen in public reading a book by W. Somerset Maugham.’ But perhaps I have got that wrong.

Clearly, most civil servants should be sacked – bringing a bounteous gift to the nation’s coffers – but those Home Office halfwits are a good place to start. Charged with the task of analysing the means by which we might tackle the one real and present terrorist threat to us all – the aforementioned deranged jihadis – the authors deliberately did the reverse. Get rid of them, quickish.

Rachel might also like to study a new report from the Centre for Social Justice which highlights the very strong link between our mental health epidemic and broken families. One leads, fairly ineluctably, to the other – and we have the highest rate of family breakdown in Europe. Given the enormous amount of money which mental health illnesses soak up via the NHS, a repeal of the Divorce Reform Act, plus a concomitant pledge to make the act of marriage a serious and lifetime commitment, would save more than enough wonga – which Ed Miliband might use to affix wind turbines to the heads of everybody in the country, and then some.

These are just a handful of suggestions for how to save upwards of £100 billion in a comparatively short space of time. I trust that Ms Reeves, as she flounders away in her job like an eel trying to ride a motorbike, will find them helpful.