 Once again, Marcus Rashford, England's striker and Britain's most successful campaigner, is attacking the government about their abandonment of poor families. This time he has his sights set on a £20 cut in universal credit due to come into force in October. Rashford tweeted, instead of removing support through Social Security, we should be refocusing efforts on developing a sustainable long-term roadmap out of this child hunger pandemic. Rashford also tweeted the following. 4.3 million people, including 2.5 million children, the reality of food insecurity in the UK over the last six months, because higher than those recorded in the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic and a massive 27% higher than pre-COVID-19. The intervention from Marcus Rashford is likely time to coincide with an opposition day debate, which Labour will be putting forward this Wednesday. This has happened before Marcus Rashford makes an issue popular. Labour put it forward in an opposition debate, and they try and peel off Tory MPs to threaten the government with a loss in the Commons. Labour are speaking out against this cut. Labour Shadow Work and Pension Secretary Jonathan Reynolds. Labour is giving Conservative MPs the chance to do the right thing, stand up to the Prime Minister and defend their constituents from this devastating cut. Once again, this government's record doesn't stand up to reality. They promised investment in the North and Midlands, but are instead pulling billions out of local economies. A letter to the government last week signed by groups, including the Royal College of Pediatricians and Child Health, similarly, called on the government to scrap the planned cut. They said it would amount to the biggest overnight cut in social security since World War II, and that it would push 500,000 people into poverty. Ash, Marcus Rashford has forced U-turns on this government before. Do you think he's going to manage it again? I mean, look, he may well do. And I think we've danced this dance before, which is Marcus Rashford essentially operates as an outrider for the social safety net. Labour follow, the government is forced into doing something embarrassing, sending out people to defend the indefensible in the morning TV round, and then there's a U-turn. I think one of the things that is going to be interesting with this one is that it's not necessarily something as immediately emotive as free school meals provision during half-term and summer holidays. It's something very, very tangible and immediate about that. It's food out of the mouths of poor children. With this, then you kind of have wrapped up in it how people feel about benefits claimants, who we know have been stigmatized because of a, well, more than two decades now, but a really concerted drive towards seeing benefits claimants as lazy scroungers, feckless, and all the rest of it. So it will be interesting to see whether that moral clarity that Marcus Rashford possesses, and I think quite a unique place within popular culture, if that's going to be the beginning of something of a fightback and a pushback against those years of negative stereotyping. I think one of the things to bear in mind is that when it comes to talking about the social safety net, the British media is shit. It's just, it's just complete trash. I'll never forget when this proposed cuts to the £20 uplift was first proposed, you had Laura Coonsburg going on TV saying, well, it's not really a cut, but you know, it does kind of feel like one, as if taking £20 out of the pockets of some of the most deprived families in this country is simply a matter of perception, as though it's merely subjective. And the way in which I think, you know, the establishment media in this country talks about the social safety net simply as kind of another chess piece in a grand political game, I think is one of the reasons why politicians have been able to get away with such brutal and draconian policies for so long. And the positioning of Marcus Rashford, because of how strong his independent social media following is, because of the fact that he is unconnected to the kind of horse trading and, you know, dirty business of self-serving and venal Westminster politics, he can often cut through that kind of noise and obfuscation. So I really hope that he's able to inflict another U-turn on the government. And it's something which I think Keir Starmer could learn from, which is don't get tied up in process and procedure and all will have a look and I'll be subject to a review and rest assured that I will float an idea or a hint of a policy in six to 12 months time, just say the thing you want to happen and fucking go for it. You talked about the dishonest media there. This is also a topic on which Tory politicians are consistently dishonest and the main driver of this cut is understood to be Rishi Sunak who wants to find ways to lower government spending as the pandemic nears its close or at least moves on from its emergency phase. This is how Sunak defended the cut to universal credit back in August. One of the things I'm proudest of over the past 12 to 18 months is that we have looked after the most vulnerable in our society and all the figures show that, that those on the lowest incomes have seen the most support from this government at what has been a very difficult time and we're not done supporting people. My firm belief is the best way to help those families is to make sure that they can have well paid work and we've got a suite of things that we're doing, the national living wage is going up. We're also helping them with new skills training to find better jobs, the kickstart scheme where the government is fully funding high quality jobs for young people at risk of unemployment. Those are the types of things we're doing and they will all make a major difference. Extending that temporary uplift in universal credit though is clearly going to help the most. Why won't you do that? No, I don't think that will help the most. That temporary uplift was indeed temporary. It was the right intervention for the particular part of the crisis that we've experienced but now as the economy is reopening and businesses are hiring again, the right thing to do is to help people find really well paid jobs which is why the kickstart scheme is important. It's why we're giving companies huge cash incentives to create new apprenticeships for people and it's why the Prime Minister's lifetime skills guarantee is crucial. Ten million adults who don't have a level three qualification will for the first time be able to get one from the government. We know that that can have a transformative impact on people's ability to get a new job or get a better paid job. Those are the right ways to help people. There's a really disgusting argument there by Rishi Sunak because again he's sort of making it this zero sum game between having a decent social security system whereby families don't have to live in poverty and struggle to feed their kids or good well paid jobs and there is no association between the two of those. It's not the case that bosses think, oh I won't bother to pay people more because they're getting money through universal credit anyway. That's not how it works. That's not how bosses decide on wages. Bosses decide on wages based on who is willing to work for them at what wage and things like the power of trade unions. So Rishi Sunak really cared about increasing the wages of Britain's workforce. He wouldn't be cutting social security benefits. He would be empowering trade unions. He would be raising the minimum wage to something which is genuinely enough to live on. Not just something he's called the living wage even though he's plucked it out of a scenario and it has nothing to do with what the living wage foundation say is actually a wage that people can live on. It is potentially a smart argument though. It's Rishi Sunak trying to sound progressive, trying to sound left-wing. I care about high wages and that's why I'm cutting benefits. Ash, do you think the public will buy it? Well maybe because we've got really stupid media ecology as I've already pointed out. So what the public will believe is often a reflection of how hard politicians are being pushed on the hypocrisies and outright lies within the arguments they're making. So maybe, maybe not. One of the things which I think is really important to point out is that over a fifth of universal credit claimants are in work and are judged to be earning so little from the work that they're doing that it's not come subject to work conditions like you have to prove that you're searching for work X many hours a week. So that means that somebody is essentially in a full-time form of work and not earning enough to survive, to feed themselves, to clothe themselves, to keep a roof over their heads, to look after their kids and their loved ones. And what Rishi Sunak is saying is well what we need to do in order to encourage people into full-time work, which as we've seen a fifth of universal credit claimants are already in, is hurt their income even more by taking away this 20 pound uplift. It doesn't make sense. It's a completely dishonest argument which I don't see either Rishi Sunak or anyone in the government being pushed on hard enough. And I also don't see Labour I think doing nearly enough to get these kinds of arguments out there because what it would require is taking a step back and saying actually it's not just the welfare system that's broken, it's employment. It's the way job creation is working. It's what kind of jobs are available for people. You don't see that kind of political sense making and that kind of narrativising which links together these seemingly disparate bits of people's economic and social existence into a unified explanation of what's going on. And I think that that is the single biggest weakness in Labour at the moment. And that's also conversely one of the biggest gifts given to the Tories because it creates all of this room politically for Rishi Sunak to come out and spend some absolute fraff about how he cares about high wages and how he cares about quality employment. And that's why he's getting rid of the 20 pound uplift which is actually helping support people who are already in work and are on poverty wages. Sorry, I'm angry about this. The level of deception and dishonesty and the room which is given by some of the best paid and most well regarded journalists in the country for that deception and dishonesty really winds me up.