The announcement from Westminster that there will be a massive cut amounting to more than £6billion from the Welfare budget, Workers Party rep is a matter of great concern for Northern Ireland as we have learned from the winter fuel payments debacle that where Westminster goes our Executive very quickly follows. These cuts are aimed primarily at the most vulnerable people in our society through making it harder to qualify for disability benefits and Personal Independence Payments and forcing people who are ill to take jobs.

The Workers and Pensions Minister says she wants to get more people into work and the system is broken and must be fixed. But what she is really doing is penalising people who are ill and poor through no fault of their own. Working class people have suffered the full brunt of the financial crisis, through the efficiency savings they were required to shoulder because of the bank bailouts. They also suffered the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis across every aspect of their lives.

If the Minister is so concerned about getting people in to work, she should be lobbying her cabinet colleagues to ensure that well paid sustainable employment is introduced. Not at some point in the future but now. Or would that upset the big multinational companies and the low wage employers, who are the real welfare queens and kings. We the taxpayers foot the bill so they can accumulate profits as the majority of those on benefits are the working poor.

Perhaps they should be looking with the same enthusiasm at those companies, corporations, and individuals who have Tax Avoidance down to an art form and deprive the treasury of billions in lost revenue. In a week when the Prime Minister and his cabinet announced increased spending on the defence budget and cut international aid in order to send weapons ammunition and bombs to fight a war.

 We should be questioning whose interests is the UK Government really serving. It’s certainly not the many millions of working-class people who voted for change and got the same old story about tightening their belts. Our own cross-sectarian coalition is no different: they are too busy with their own vested and tribal interests to worry about the needs of the working-class people who elected them and will continue to show them the same indifference and neglect as long as each election is a sectarian headcount.