Labour MPs blaming Rachel Reeves over welfare cuts are like teenagers blaming their mum for telling them to wear a coat when there are bloody great storm clouds on the horizon. It’s silly and it won’t save them from getting soaked.

But this is emerging as part of the blame game over Labour’s welfare debacle, where the party’s MPs forced the government to shred its own welfare bill by threatening to vote it down at second reading. ‘She must be toast,’ a Labour MP told the FT. The Times quotes a senior Labour source accusing Reeves of having ‘very little political acumen’. The argument, apparently, is that Reeves is at fault for trying to find £5 billion of savings on a welfare bill that is currently on course to reach £373 billion by the end of the decade – or 10.8 per cent of GDP.

Instead of thanking Reeves for her realism, her colleagues would rather throw her under the bus

Reeves, of course, isn’t the problem here. She’s a Labour politician who actually understands that governing means dealing with the world as it is, not as you might wish it to be. The backlash against her following the government’s welfare U-turn is pure displacement activity – the product of a party that still hasn’t come to terms with the hard facts of the public finances.

A lot of this........

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