“After 14 years of hell, public services don’t deserve further pain”

Listening to the screams of horror coming from the Tories you’d think Rachel Reeves’ plan to fill the £22 billion black hole they left behind was a sort of Taxes Chainsaw Massacre.

The Conservatives fear Reeves will take so much money from the “hard-working middle classes” that bloodbaths will flood Home Counties’ conservatories as entire families slash their wrists.

As if the only people who work hard are the middle-class, and fuel duty, pensions and inheritance tax are only enjoyed by Reggie Perrin and Hyacinth Bucket (sorry, Bouquet) clones.

The Daily Mail is apoplectic at Keir Starmer showing “his true socialist intentions” by going after “the already squeezed denizens of Middle England” peddling the inevitable scare stories about how the “wealth-makers” are set to stampede out of Britain.

Although they never do. Just as all those private schools they threatened would close after Labour vowed to make them pay VAT are still going strong.

My favourite wail of anguish came from Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath who, under the headline “Labour’s tax onslaught will be a mass extinction event for the middle-class” wrote “this is going to be the worst budget in decades” because Reeves is waging “a socialist war on wealth”.

This from the same editor who called Liz Truss’s hari-kari budget “the best budget I have ever heard a chancellor deliver, by a massive margin”.

And there’s the nub of all this invented persecution. A succession of lying, cowering Tory governments hid the scale of Britain’s dire finances to stay on the side of their membership, donors and the right-wing media.

They brought in National Insurance cuts they knew we couldn’t afford, hid billions of overspend on asylum, and let jails reach breaking point without admitting the prison system was bankrupt.

We now hear Truss was so desperate to pass her catastrophic budget, which would have gifted £45bn of unfunded tax cuts to the rich, that she looked at cancelling free NHS cancer treatment.

That’s how low the Tories sank trying to appease their City chums and well-off core voters and that’s why Starmer is right to argue that those “with the broadest shoulders” must foot the lion’s share of the bill to rebuild Britain.

But what Labour must not do is punish those whose shoulders are slumped from 14 years of public spending cuts by ushering in a new era of austerity.

Our NHS, care services, schools, roads, local government and legal system need lifting off their knees not being slashed further. Starmer owes it to Labour voters to play up to the worst Tory fears and show “his true socialist intentions” by investing heavily.

Pensioners and low-income families don’t deserve the cold shoulder from a Labour government which is why the two-child benefit should be lifted and cold weather payments reinstated to all but the richest pensioners.

The highest earners have seen their wealth balloon in recent years through bonds, shares, dividends and property portfolios, while those on middle and low incomes have seen theirs flatline or plummet.

Labour’s loyal supporters don’t expect overnight payback from Starmer but they do expect to be looked after just as the Tories cared exclusively for their own.

They haven’t waited 14 years to be told to put up with the same old Tory policies.

They expect hope not gloom.

And they deserve it.