Harriet Harman says Labour voters are privately relieved the party lost the General Election – Mirror Online
What a lot of horse… manure this woman talks!
Labour went out of its way to be the party that doesn’t support people on benefits – or at least, that’s how it felt to the people in question. It’s one of the reasons the party lost the general election.
When millions of sick and disabled people are telling Labour the work capability assessment regime that Labour imposed is rubbish, and Labour refuses to even offer to make changes, it’s no surprise that Labour lost the people’s confidence.
“Labour was seen as supporting ‘people on benefits’ but not those who ‘work hard’.
She said: “It doesn’t matter how many leaflets you deliver if the message is not right.”
The fact is, Labour wasn’t seen as supporting “people on benefits”.
People on benefits saw very clearly that Labour politicians were only interested in supporting themselves.
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When the rhetoric is defined as ‘Labour doesn’t support the people on benefits’ is there any wonder? but re-define it as ‘Labour didn’t support people needing Social Security that many have paid for in NI’..and its paints a different picture!
I think the real issue is “Labour only supports Labour”.
Much to kind, she is in fact…A class Z closet Tory
Stephen Bee, don’t try to fix the damage now. Rachel Reeve did the damage, quote “we are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen and we’re not the party to represent those who are out of work”. This from the then shadow minister for the DWP.
I sought some sort of clarification from the local Labour Party and from HQ. I don’t like platitudes, but I like being ignored even less. Presumably this dreadful woman has gone back to academe. Perhaps to study the history of the party and the part compassion used to play in it.
No, the Rachel Reeves quote isn’t relevant here at all – and in any case, you didn’t finish it because you know the last part undermines your case. She added that she wanted the welfare state to continue, and to continue providing support for everybody who needs it.
Labour and Harriet also completely missing the point that most people on working age benefits, are actually working. The polls show clearly that Labour failed to inspire swing voters, especially families, that they’d be any better off under Labour. Given Labour’s failure to say anything useful about tax credits (and Balls’ disgraceful stunt on freezing child benefit at conference), it’s hardly surprising.
We can hope the new hopeful Labour leader that anti austerity of Jeremy Corbyn gets the 35 Labour MP endorsement he needs to have a chance of winning.
New Labour are all the current Labour leader hopefuls, who all lost the Labour vote.
We don’t need a PASOK.
We need a SYRIZA.
Miliband and my local Labour candidate both ignored me totally about the truth of the con of the flat rate pension.
They had nothing to say to the women who stayed home and worked in raising children, who will now get NIL STATE PENSION FOR LIFE by the end of Housewife 60 per cent state pension for new pensioners and also the end of Pension Credit (savings).
Neither can they inherit that pension, nor get it if a divorcee.
Is it widely known that the lowest waged are OUT of the National Insurance scheme, the welfare state and the state pension and have been for years?
How many know of Lower Earning Level where the poorest get nil automatic National Insurance credits.
Only once getting closer to the Living Wage do you get the automatic credits.
Nor that the flat rate, for the first time since 1978, has merged the mythical SERPs opt out (because you were still paying SOME NI) with National Insurance record, wiping each other out, even for the years contracted back into the full standard rate of NI.
As the government is using some weird calculation as an average over all your working life, to work out the BASIC state pension next year.
This year, you get the basic state pension by years of NI, whether opted in or out, which was til this year just about the amount of TOP UP extra above the basic state pension amount.
And how many of the people sanctioned, suffering benefit delays or losing benefit altogether, then have nil credits against National Insurance history.
So why did Labour ignore this glaring cut to the state pension to over half of new pensioners next year, that also hits pensioner benefit of Pension Credit.
Whilst the raised retirement age for women for 6 years from 2013 til at least from 2019 onwards, is a CUT to pensioner benefits of Winter Fuel Allowance.
I await my reply from Mr Jeremy Corbyn MP on that subject.
I can’t fully trust Labour anymore.
I give up more blair babys talk yet they cant understand its them and drawing pictures for this greedie lot will not open their eyes to it
Mike your last sentence says it all and she is right a lot of people were privately relieved, me included a lot has come out since the election which the electorate should have known beforehand.
I am a strong Labour supporter but I won’t be much longer if this person has any top role in it.
There is no connection between National Insurance and working age Social Security entitlement, except for determining entitlement to contribution based Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment Support Allowance.
Twas ever thus right from the outset that NI was a tax, but had to be called insurance to overcome objections from those not needing (and never expecting to need) Social Security to pay for those needing it at times of unemployment and in their old age.
In other words, the whole debate about scroungers et al is over a century old. In fact, it is over four centuries old as evidenced by references to sturdy beggars in Elizabethan Poor Law and people across the social spectrum have always bought into the scroungers argument. Scrooge may be a fictional character, but he was exemplifying a viewpoint popular amongst Dickens’ contemporaries.
In the 1980s, I interviewed people in Jobcentres who said that many of their fellow claimants were skivers etc. Sadly, it is an attitude hard wired into our society’s DNA. For some, there is always someone, somewhere out there, getting something to which they are not entitled and which, of course, the complainant cannot get, despite having paid for it. I actually had people telling me they would be on a higher rate of JSA (even though there was only one), if they were black.
The real issue is that cons like that perpetrated by Churchill and Lloyd George prove just how far progressives have had to go to persuade people to accept and pay for measures that are in their own personal interest. They did so whilst those they sought to help were being told by the Tories and the Daily Mail (then as now) that they will not be the beneficiaries of such measures.
We need to work out not just how to fight that war, but win it too. Time, perhaps, for some to accept that a tiny few do play the system, but that the vast majority do not and that the system exists for them (and that it is for them we fight). Moreover, that Social Security, including the State Pension, is funded out of general taxation at the times when individuals need it.
There is no National Insurance Fund. We do not each have a government held shoebox with our contributions held within it. Today’s taxpayers pay for today’s pensioners and even people on JSA contribute towards pensions, some through Income Tax. There is no get out of paying VAT card for those on Social Security (or those working in the public sector)!
Time for a grown up debate about Social Security. Time for a new Beveridge Commission so we may shape a Social Security system that addresses today’s society (and is regularly reviewed to ensure it continues to do so). The system needs reform, but not for the reasons espoused by IDS and echoed by the Daily Mail.
Labour should set up its own non partisan Beveridge Commission and move the debate beyond the rhetoric.
PS I spent most of my Civil Service career trying to help people, particularly the most disadvantaged, into jobs. Since being invalided out of DWP, I have blogged and commented about issues that were always to me, as someone from the Jobcentre as opposed to benefits side of the operation, somewhat peripheral.
I had a good grounding in Social Security. I could not do my job effectively otherwise. I fell ill, in part, due to seeing DWP moving to sanctioning people off the register rather than helping them into work and thereby reducing Social Security expenditure and increasing tax revenues (and my chance of a pay increase).
Incidentally, ESA was widely welcomed as a replacement for Incapacity Benefit. ESA really began to fail as a way of providing help for those in need, many of whom do want to work, after IDS inspired changes in October 2010. However, I did argue the point with a Labour DWP Minister, when ESA was introduced, that the spin doctors were as usual focusing on the new system catching out the tiny minority playing the system and that was unhelpful to the vast majority not doing so (and those across the public, private and voluntary and community sectors seeking to help them).
Would Shakespeare, if alive and working today, substitute spin doctors for solicitors?
What Harriet Harman is saying the is that the public don’t like welfare claimants and voted conservative
My gut instinct here is that the small majority of people in the UK do not like welfare claimants or immigration and that is how the conservatives won, as that is there territory
If this is the case, it may be impossible for labour to continue with a soft touch on benefits as society has moved on.
But Labour didn’t have a soft touch on benefits in any case!
i think it came across as a mixed message and your right mike labour don’t like welfare also
All i know is that the days of being sick and disabled and living in the UK supported by the state will be coming to a end and that’s a fact
I see this on the agenda albeit on the quite in the privacy of those that live alone and labour needs to wake up to this and act otherwise there is no point in a labour party at all as without the disadvantaged the labour party would never have come about in the first place
I gave Anne begg former labour mp every bit of information on the deaths of the sick and disabled as and when they happened and spoke to her monthly so that she was up to speed on everything welfare
And what did she do for the sick and disabled over the 5 year period (NOTHING ) SORRY TO BE BLUNT BUT THAT IS HOW IT IS AND WAS
Thankfully she is no longer a mp as that would be just rubbing salt into the relatives wounds of those sick and disabled that have died in going through welfare reform
Harriet was always a third rate politician. She’ll be banished to the back benches and will begin to be forgotten by the end of the year… I hope. If only I had a penny for every clanger this lady dropped throughout her long (and intermittent) career I would be a wealthy man. Labour must do better than her to have any hope of improving its current position.