HARRIET HARMAN is getting hated on for declaring Labour won’t oppose the Tories’ benefit cap. Harman also says Labour won’t oppose other cuts in their Welfare Bill, like a benefits freeze.

Something serious is obviously going on here, because words have become their opposite. The “Welfare” Bill is designed to make people fare badly, not fare well. And the Labour opposition has decided it doesn’t want to oppose because they don’t want to represent labouring people.

But I think the Harman haters are a little bit unfair, because Harman is just doing her job as she sees it: she is a conscientious interim Labour leader who wants to stand in the mainstream of the party. And she is only reflecting the policy of the party’s mainstream in not opposing anything the Tories do. In fact lots of worse things are happening inside Labour HQ, but Harriet had the misfortune to be noticed.

Harman’s announcement on the BBC’s Sunday Politics was stark and direct and seemed starkly and directly absurd: “We won’t oppose the Welfare Bill, we won’t oppose the household benefit cap,” or indeed oppose a whole host of other policies, because “what we’ve got to do is listen to what people round the country said to us and recognise that we didn’t get elected — again.”

Having lost the election because Labour wasn’t not Tories, Harman’s solution is to stop opposing the Tories. This cunning plan did not occur to the Labour Party any time in the last century.

Thankfully. Or we would not have a welfare state, or health and safety law or equal pay acts.

Harman’s “They won, we surrender” approach seemed so ridiculous that even Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper rebelled against it, joining a disgusted Jeremy Corbyn.

However, Harman said she was reflecting the ideas within the shadow cabinet. In fairness to Andy Burnham, he has already reportedly disagreed with her “don’t fight Osborne on benefits” stance. But the “I surrender” approach is popular among Labour’s leadership. It goes way beyond Harman — she is following as much as leading.

It is particularly popular with shadow chancellor Chris Leslie, who twice this month has proposed the “hands in the air” approach. Chancellor George Osborne is pushing for a “budget surplus law“ which will force governments to cut spending or raise taxes every year to generate a budget surplus.

It is designed to shrink the state, regardless of any judgement about government spending being economically or socially necessary. So Leslie was asked if he would sign up to this mix of political stunt and reactionary law and said: “Absolutely. It stands to reason that any government should want more income coming in than expenditure.”

So Leslie has effectively put Osborne in charge of Labour economic policy. Then Leslie was asked about Osborne’s policy of freezing public-sector pay. Again, surrender was “sadly necessary”

Of course lots of businesses — and lots of families — borrow money to invest, and this keeps the economy moving. But Osborne has ruled out the government doing the same, so Leslie agrees. Equally, a public-sector pay freeze will exacerbate shortages for teachers and health workers, and so weaken the economy. But Osborne says no, so Leslie agrees.

Leslie hasn’t had the attention that Harman got because I don’t think many people know who he is, let alone that he is shadow chancellor. Leslie is a little-known Blairite. He was under-secretary of state for constitutional affairs from 2003-5.

That’s it. He got kicked out of Parliament, then ran the New Local Government Network, a New Labour think tank funded by privatising corporations. The New Local Government Network promotes privatisation in local government, so it is simultaneously right-wing and boring and drew no attention to Leslie. By accident — because Ed Balls lost his seat — this nonentity became shadow chancellor. He controls Labour economic policy, but has decided to let George control him.

While Harman gets the flack, Leslie is quietly turning Labour into an Osborne fan club.

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ONE of the “business A-list” directors hired by the Tories to run the government also runs firms fined millions of pounds for pollution and financial cheating.

Back in December 2010 Francis Maude, the “brains” behind Cameron’s privatisation programme, put “top business people” on the boards of each government department. They were supposed to “shake up Whitehall.”

One of them, Sara Weller, sits on the board of the Department of Communities and Local Government. She is the lead non-executive director, so the top dog on the board. She meets Secretary of State Greg Clark regularly. Her job includes “ensuring the secretary of state is aware of any concerns.”

But she isn’t likely to be telling Clark about the need to crack down on polluting companies, because she runs one. Weller also sits on the board of water firm United Utilities, a post she has held since 2012. This March, United Utilities was fined a record £750,000 for pumping raw sewage into the Duddon Estuary near Morecambe Bay. The firm had taken a pump out of a sewage station for repair, but forgot to check the remaining machines were working, leading to the big filthy pollution spill in 2013. The judge imposed such a large fine for what he called a “reckless failure.”

Nor is Weller likely to tell the government to make sure finance firms don’t cheat customers, because she helps run one.

In February 2012 Weller joined the board of Lloyds. The bank say she is “a strong advocate of customers” at the bank.

Not strong enough to stop Lloyds being fined £117 million for “failing to treat their customers fairly when handling payment protection insurance (PPI) complaints between March 2012 and May 2013.”

Amazingly, Weller was given a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June for helping the Tory government. The CBE was awarded within months of the big fines against her firms United Utilities and Lloyds, which means the government thinks pouring 7 million litres of shit into a river and cheating thousands of bank customers out of cash is “honourable” behaviour.