Reeves vows to purge waste with an iron fist – we’ll believe it when we see it

Wasted words

“EVERY pound” of spending will now be scrutinised to get value for taxpayers’ money. We wish we had a pound for every time Governments have promised that.

They all say it. And the gargantuan Whitehall waste continues.

We wish Chancellor Rachel Reeves well if she really is intent on “totally rewiring how the Government spends money”.

But politics will always prevail.

Foreign aid, for instance, is now a byword for waste, totalling billions a year. Will ministers really axe it?

How about the idiotic deal where we PAY to give away our Chagos Islands? Or the vast bungs to France despite them failing to keep back migrants?

Ms Reeves vows to act with an “iron fist against waste”.

Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden yesterday had warm words about Elon Musk’s US efficiency drive.

Forgive our scepticism, but we’ll believe Labour’s purge on waste only if — this time — it finally bears fruit.

Bins laden

A LOCAL council has no duty more ­fundamental than collecting the bins weekly or at the very least every fortnight.

So it is staggering that the Government has abandoned Tory plans to force local authorities to do so.

The omens are not good.

In Labour-run Wales only a handful of councils still collect each fortnight. The rest do so every three weeks or even every month.
The result, predictably, is maggots, rats and rotting rubbish spilling from bins.

Yet, incredibly, council tax will soar again next year because Town Halls have been allowed to raise it by an inflation-busting five per cent.

A word of warning to all politicians:

Voters tend to notice their streets degenerating into stinking, vermin infested slums.

They will not forgive the councillors responsible, nor the Government which let it happen.

Keep them out

SHAMIMA Begum must have no right to return to Britain regardless of whether chaos now engulfs the Syrian camp where she is held.

She made a life with IS terrorists and is rightly paying the price with the loss of her citizenship.

The same ban must extend to the British wife of Syria’s fugitive ex-dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Asma Assad is up to her neck in the blood of his tyranny, whatever she might try to pretend.

She and the butchering billionaire have been given sanctuary by the Kremlin. A pity, but let them live out their days in Moscow looking over their shoulders in fear of vengeance.

She must not return to London.