Sympathy for the devil.

Rachel Reeves cried for herself. We should save our tears for those victims of callous government policies like the one she wanted to implement.

Rachel Reeves cried in the Commons yesterday, and across the country, people with lived experience of this brutal welfare system watched her tears fall with all the sympathy you'd feel for a rabid dog being put down.

If it was pressure that brought her to the brink, what a luxury that is. The pressure of a bad day. The pressure of criticism. The pressure of political consequences.

Not the pressure of having your electricity cut off.

Not the pressure of being handed a Fit for Work notice when you’re suicidal.

Not the pressure of starving to death alone in your flat because a government department took away your social security and left you to rot.

The real tragedy isn't what Reeves felt yesterday—it’s what people have endured under the very policies she’s championed.

She didn't cry when she told the country Labour would be “tougher than the Tories” on benefits.

She didn't cry when she waved through a welfare bill so obscene that it triggered cross-party revulsion and talk of rebellion.

She didn’t cry when disabled people begged her to reconsider.

But she cried for herself.

Cry, instead, for Errol Graham, a man with severe mental health difficulties who starved to death in Nottingham after his safety net was ripped from under him. He was 57 years old and weighed just four and a half stone when they found him.

The gas had been cut off. There was no food in the flat. His family said he’d pulled out his own teeth.

He missed a single appointment and that was all it took to vanish from the system. The DWP, under a regime Reeves supports and intends to build on, never checked in with his GP. Never called the family. Never cared.

Cry, instead, for Philippa Day, who died after a long fight with the same system. A young mum with complex mental health issues, she was found in a diabetic coma after overdosing on insulin following months of benefits turmoil.

Her payments had been stopped in error. That “error” killed her.

An inquest ruled that 28 separate failings contributed to her death, most of them involving the DWP’s handling of her case. The stress—real stress, as opposed to, say, Lindsay Hoyle saying some less than nice things to you—pushed her over the edge.

What she needed was care. What she got was cruelty, by process and by design.

These aren’t just isolated incidents. They’re part of a pattern.

The Department for Work and Pensions has carried out hundreds of internal reviews into deaths following benefit cuts or sanctions.

Hundreds, okay?

The National Audit Office confirmed at least 69 suicides linked to DWP decisions—but watchdogs admit that number could be a serious underestimate. One academic study found that hundreds of additional suicides were associated with the government’s Fit for Work tests. Another showed a 6.6-point increase in psychological distress in areas where welfare assessments were most aggressively applied.

This is the real human cost of the welfare “reforms” Reeves supports.

This is what “tougher than the Tories” means: it means policies more savage than the cuts which caused all that grief, all that pain, all that suffering.

This is what happens when politics decides the poor are an acceptable sacrifice.

When bureaucracies are incentivised to say no instead of help.

When the most vulnerable are forced to navigate a maze designed to make them fail.

So yes, Rachel Reeves cried yesterday.

But unless her tears are followed by repentance and reversal—not more warm words or white papers—they mean nothing.

The people crying out there in the real world? They’ve been crying for years. They’ve buried parents, children, partners. They’ve survived hunger, fear, destitution.

They’ve lived with the knowledge that the country they live in saw them not as citizens, but as costs to be cut.

We are not moved by the tears of the executioner.

We ought to have no sympathy for the devil.

Government cuts are not just abstract. They have real-world effects.

And this particular welfare bill would have resulted in 250,000 such stories, all in the name of fiscal prudence, balancing the books—and doing so without raising a penny in tax from those who could have borne the burden without even missing the money.

If sympathy for Rachel Reeves seems to be in short supply today, then that’s exactly as it should be.

Because her kind of callousness—this government’s kind of callousness—should damn these people for eternity.

The backlash to her moment in the Commons has been predictably branded as misogynistic. The implication is that Reeves is only being mocked because she's a woman, because people equate female tears with weakness.

That argument doesn’t hold up for a second. It’s not her gender that makes people angry—it’s her hypocrisy.

It’s the staggering disconnect between the tears shed in Westminster and the pain inflicted outside of it. It’s the reminder that she is, in fact, capable of human emotion… just never in response to the suffering of others.

Not when people like Errol Graham or Philippa Day were begging for help. Not when the most vulnerable were being driven to despair by policies she has championed.

Those who leap to defend her on the basis of that “human moment” should take a second to consider the logic of their position.

Because what’s jarring for most people isn’t that she cried. It’s that she cried now, when she was under pressure—not when others were.

The moment was only powerful in that it exposed how disengaged these people are from the human cost of their own decisions.

It revealed the chasm between what they feel for themselves and what they feel for the people they’re paid to serve.

Which isn’t to say it wasn’t a symbol of weakness—because of course it was. But it’s a weakness that transcends gender.

It could just as easily have been a male frontbencher choking up under fire. Because that’s the defining trait of the Labour right: weakness dressed up as pragmatism, cowardice cloaked in tough talk.

They love to punch down, but they wilt the moment they are urged to take on interests who have the power to hit them back. They are morally bankrupt political bullies.

Thousands of people across this country spent yesterday in fear—real fear—of what this government, with Reeves as its economic enforcer, was about to do to them. They were terrified of the cuts in that bill.

Many of them are still afraid, because they know this isn’t over.

Because those cuts haven’t vanished—they’ve only been delayed. The damage will still come.

And the kind of stress it will cause is something Reeves will never understand. She’ll never sit by a dead meter, or a freezing child. She’ll never hide from a bailiff at the door.

She will never be hungry, or hopeless, or sanctioned into despair.

She has choices. This government had choices. They all do—and this is the path they chose.

That’s what damns them.

People speak sometimes of the banality of evil—evil that doesn’t cackle or rage but simply signs off on suffering, then goes to lunch.

This should be the textbook case.

They should all want to shed a few tears—and the disgrace is that they don’t.

Because if these people don’t cry now—if they don’t cry for the lives already lost and the lives still at risk—then what the hell are we to conclude about them?

That they simply don’t care, or that they can’t?

Because that’s the real defining characteristic of sociopathy.

The inability to feel empathy.

The inability to feel the suffering of others.

But they feel their own.