Some pizza delivery drivers in Scotland are upset because the £1.45 they got on top of wages each time they went out with a takeaway was withdrawn.
The company involved says this was a “discretionary driver commission”. The drivers say they need it to pay for fuel and running costs.
Their union Unite has now taken up their grievance. Imagine, if you will, how much angrier the drivers might have been to discover the firm’s finance director suddenly running around in a chauffeur-driven limo, though this is purely hypothetical. There is no suggestion this has happened.
Rachel Reeves is the finance director of UK plc embarking on a major cost-cutting exercise. She must be aware it will put backs up if she uses her position to snaffle a freebie while making people with disabilities worse off.
Not a chauffeur-driven car in her case - the Chancellor already has one of those - but free tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter concert at London’s O2 Arena while ordinary people have to pay. Even her fellow minister Matthew Pennycock suggested this was a mistake.
The housing boss said it was not “appropriate” to go to the O2 without paying for it - even though the Arena is in his own constituency.
Ms Reeves’s defence is that the hospitality seats were necessary for security. A well-worn and, frankly, unconvincing excuse.
Has she never seen that old Yes, Prime Minister sketch in which the cynical fictional PM Jim Hacker says: “You can blame security for anything.”
If the Chancellor needs seats her security people think would be more secure because, in her words on ITV, she wants to “carry on doing the things that normal parents do with their kids”, there is still nothing to stop her paying for them like ordinary parents do. You might think this is a minor gripe given the big problems the Chancellor has to wrestle with.
But perception is all in politics and this creates a bad one. The 50 per cent cut in the health element of Universal Credit she announced in her Spring Statement will see those in line to receive it lose £208 of their £416 a month. That adds up to a lot of Sabrina Carpenter tickets.
To Jeremy Corbyn on LBC that is “deliberately impoverishing extremely vulnerable people”. To former Cabinet minister Lord David Blunkett “the severely disabled should be protected and supported.”
Rachel Reeves launched her spring statement on Wednesday
PA
More than three million families on benefits are to lose out and, according to the Government’s own impact assessment, an extra 250,000 people will be thrown into poverty, including 50,000 children.
The Chancellor says these figures do not take into account those who will be pushed into work because of the stick she is now wielding, but that is another hypothetical.
Among them will be those who simply cannot work. Her deputy Darren Jones did not help by comparing this to cutting pocket money for his kids to force them to get a Saturday job, a crass comment for which he later apologised.
But it makes the Sabrina Carpenter tickets all the more galling. Rachel Reeves should have learned from the fuss Keir Starmer stirred up when he got £13,000 worth of free tickets from the Premier League and seven English clubs to see his beloved Arsenal.
There was also the £4,000 worth of hospitality he took to watch a Taylor Swift gig at Wembley Stadium last June. He cited security, too, though that didn’t seem to bother his predecessor Rishi Sunak who was happy to watch his own team, Southampton, triumph, or not, from the stands.
Keir Starmer was chastened enough to pay back £6,000 to cover the cost of Taylor Swift and his wife’s freebie frocks.
But he could have avoided the media storm, and all that political angst and voter anger, by dipping into his pocket in the first place.
So should Ms Reeves. She says her favourite Sabrina song is “Please, Please, Please.” So please, please, please, Chancellor, pay your way
