On the same day This Site published an article that in part detailed how former Labour MP Chris Williamson was smeared and vilified, the personal views of the gentleman concerned have been aired elsewhere.
You can read my piece here. In it, I discussed how Mr Williamson had been accused of anti-Semitism after he rightly stated that Labour had been “too apologetic” in response to accusations of the same against other party members; his point was that evidence should have been evaluated before any concessions were made.
Mr Williamson’s own perspectives are well worth recording. He stated that the accusations against him were “trumped up charges at the behest of the Zionist lobby and a ragtag and bobtail bunch of revolting right-wingers”.
He went on to say that left-wingers in the party failed to support him, and this “timidity” in turn led to “Labour’s catastrophic election defeat in 2019, followed by Jeremy [Corbyn]’s suspension in 2020, and Diane Abbott’s earlier this year.”
And he stated:
The left now has even less influence over the Labour Party today than it did under Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Truth be told, the left has no influence whatsoever anymore and there is no prospect that it ever will.
The mechanisms that enabled Jeremy to be elected leader, or allowed me to become a Labour MP have been obliterated.
Not only will a leftwinger never be allowed to stand as the Labour leader in the future, no leftwinger will ever be allowed to even become a Labour parliamentary candidate.
But although the Labour left has been comprehensively crushed, Labour’s deplorable right-wingers, who now have complete control of the party, are still resorting to desperate lies and smears against the left.
But these smears are doing right-wing Labour little good, stated Mr Williamson, who seems to support the expelled former party members who won victories against Labour in May’s local elections:
There were some startling reversals for the party, where former Labour Party members, who had been kicked out by Sir Keir Starmer’s regime, stood as independent candidates. One such case was in Winsford, which is a district of the West Cheshire and Chester local authority, where Labour was all but wiped out by a new grouping called Salt of the Earth. The Labour Party’s dirty tricks failed to hoodwink local voters there.
So all the betrayals have weighed against Labour, rather than earning it voters.
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The genius at the top of the Labour Party has shot himself in the foot – again.
Keir Starmer has ditched yet another of the pledges on which he managed to get elected as leader of the Labour Party – and has already been lambasted for it in the pages of The Spectator:
It begs the question, as one BBC journalist put it to Starmer, ‘Why should we believe your five pledges when you binned your ten leadership pledges once you were elected?’”
The article states – rightly, it pains This Writer to admit:
In the latest wheeze to … prove that Labour is now a Serious Party of Government, the spin doctors at Labour HQ have opted to ditch the party’s long-standing pledge to abolish tuition fees.
As recently as 2021 he was lambasting it as ‘a huge debt for young people that they carry around for a long time’ which is ‘why we rightly committed at the last election to get rid of tuition fees.’
Starmer told Radio 4’s Today programme that: ‘We are likely to move on from that commitment because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation. But I don’t want that to be read as us accepting for a moment that the current system is fair or that it’s working.’ So, er, the system is broken but we’re not going to fix it? So much for an end to sticking plaster politics…
The abolition of tuition fees was of course one of Starmer’s ‘ten pledges’ that secured him victory in the 2020 leadership race, back when he was live action role-playing as a Corbynite. Among those include ‘common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water’, ‘defend free movement as we leave the EU’, ‘increase income tax for the top five per cent of earners’, ‘abolish Universal Credit’ and ‘end outsourcing [in the] NHS, local government and justice system.’ All this at a time when he’s asking the country to vote him in on the basis of his so-called ‘five missions’.
It begs the question, as one BBC journalist put it to Starmer, ‘Why should we believe your five pledges when you binned your ten leadership pledges once you were elected?”
The relevant trade unions – and remember, Labour relies on the unions for support – hate the new posture:
Real shame for young people & 2 things come to mind, first is when the differences between the parties become so slight it’s easy for Tories to steal policies & upstage Labour by going further, plus the election increasingly becomes precariously about the character of the leaders https://t.co/8hkUfOXaEC
— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) May 2, 2023
Others are picking out video clips of Labour figures talking up the former policy to flag up the hypocrisy of the new position; representatives who proudly proclaimed that they would end tuition fees now have to proudly proclaim the exact opposite:
"And we will scrap tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants. Free education for all throughout your life. That is the prospect that [the Tories] would have us believe is so terrifying"
And others are bringing it home by tying it to the local elections on Thursday (May 4):
Abolishing tuition fees wasn't a "commitment". It was a lie.
Starmer doesn't do "commitments". He tells lies to win elections, then does everything the corrupt establishment wants.
A vote for Labour on Thursday is a vote to endorse an establishment-approved fraud. https://t.co/P07p3CTpvZ
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) May 2, 2023
It’s nauseating. We’ve gone from “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” to “Ugh! Keir Starmer!”
The current Labour leader has abandoned everything that distinguished Labour from the Conservatives.
Voting for his party – now – means voting for no change at all.
And that is as true with the local elections as it is with a general election: he has made sure all party representatives are terrified of dissent so electing them is putting in place somebody who will do their best for Starmer… and not for you.
If you were thinking Labour looked like a smart choice, you’d better think again.
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Offensive gesture: ‘where are Labour voters going to go?’ is the question Starmer seems to be asking. He seems to think left-wing voters will have no choice but to support his hard-right sub-Tory version of the party. Is he correct?
Labour’s leader has betrayed the party’s members yet again.
After wooing leadership voters two years ago with a vow that the 2017 manifesto, devised under Jeremy Corbyn, that brought millions of voters back to the party was its “foundational document” and that “we have to hang on to that as we go forward”… he’s ditching it.
It’s the latest volte face against the policies on which he was elected party leader in 2020 – and possibly the last. After turning his back on his “10 pledges”, is any of his original leadership platform left?
What does it mean, in practise? Well, “left-wing campaign group” Momentum had this to say to The Independent:
“Our country faces huge challenges, from the cost-of-living crisis to the existential threat of climate breakdown. The status quo is failing millions of people – and socialist solutions like public ownership and raising the minimum wage enjoy widespread support amongst the British public.
“But the truth is that the Starmer leadership is avoiding facing these challenges in favour of a reheated and deeply unpopular Blairism. Whether it’s abandoning transport workers fighting for their livelihoods, or offering a windfall tax less ambitious than that of the Tories, Starmer’s tepid, unprincipled approach will neither tackle today’s challenges, nor invigorate a winning electoral coalition.”
And Ian Hodson of the Labour-defying Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, tweeted this:
Starmer to move @UKLabour further towards alignment with Tories to satisfy Murdoch and potential big donors. They will also align to enable Tories a safe home inside the party. https://t.co/DpJPtMbi9R
But with Labour taken over by Tory squatters (including Starmer himself), where will the 10 million who voted for Corbyn’s – authentic – version of the party go?
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Keir Starmer: A suit, a haircut, and flag-waving fascism. Labour supporters – and the whole of the UK – deserve much, much better and we won’t get it from this gaslighting fake.
If Keir Starmer really thought he could deflect criticism by reshuffling his cabinet and removing any remaining socialists from control of the Labour Party, he was badly mistaken.
The following Twitter thread was written before the reshuffle but identifies the reasons Labour members and supporters are not going to accept Starmer’s leadership any more.
Already, CLPs (local party units) across the UK are preparing motions of “no confidence” in his leadership. Anticipating that the party’s unelected general secretary, David Evans, will undemocratically try to rule them “out of order”, they are being advised to frame them as motions of confidence, with wording like, “This party has 0.1 per cent confidence in Keir Starmer’s leadership” – and then vote against those motions to show that they don’t have any confidence in him at all.
“Roadside Mum”, below, provides many reasons party members have no confidence in the man who has been dubbed Labour’s worst ever leader, a betrayer of the values that brought the party into being and a deceiver who is trying to hoodwink voters into supporting the removal of their democratic rights.
These include:
The campaign to punish Labour left-wingers.
The campaign to silence criticism.
The erosion of Labour’s share of the electorate.
Starmer’s support for the loss of our right to protest.
Starmer’s attempt to gaslight us into thinking Jeremy Corbyn is responsible for Labour’s loss of support.
Starmer’s sustained support of Conservative policies and legislation.
Starmer’s support of the so-called Spycops Bill in particular.
Starmer’s adoption of fascist symbolism, in line with the Tories – flags, haircuts and suits preferred over socialist policies.
Efforts by right-wing Labour Party officers and representatives – many of them unelected – to disenfranchise party members and deny them representation.
And an attitude of entitlement that tries to tell us that we must accept Starmer sneering at us because he thinks he knows better.
There is even an addendum copying in a message, presumably from a Starmer supporter, actually proving the last point: “These elections are a lot more complicated than you think.” No, they’re not.
It’s a statement that insults the intelligence of “Roadside Mum” and every other Labour voter who expected – and deserved – better from Starmer, from his leadership team, and from every other party officer who enabled the betrayal that the party has endured for more than a year.
Labour won’t improve with the removal of left-wingers from positions of power and their replacement by anti-Semite-supporting fascists like Rachel Reeves, that’s for sure.
It can only get worse.
And the rot is seeping down from the top.
This is not simply about removing a bad leader.
It is about saving a political movement – and saving a nation from sliding into Boris Johnson-controlled fascism that Keir Starmer supports with all of his heart.
Here’s the thread. Read it for yourself.
I have been polite and I have been nice for a Really Long Fucking Time at this point (over a year). My patience just wore out.
At first I didn't have anything but defence for Keir Starmer because the initial Tory attacks were both bollocks and within my capacity to refute.
All the time, we are told put up with it, shut up for the greater good, if you don't accept this, you keep in power the most ruinous bunch of far right serpents ever to darken the corridors of power.
Keir Starmer does not give a flying fuck that the protest rights which brought into being every important social change of the last 2 centuries are being dismantled. Soon you will have no voice at all. At 10PM the night before that vote, he still was whipping to abstain.
Labour increased the vote share under Corbyn by record amounts in 2017 and even in 2019, he retained a greater vote share than either two leaders before him. The loss of seats was not in any way reflective of the support of the public and the way KS team has endlessly hammered/
I've watched Labour Leaks lay bare the lengths to which half this party is invested in ensuring that the working class British voter, upon who's blood, sweat and tears, this movement was founded, fought for, built and defended, may not ever experience actual representation.
Ummuna was of course on the list of Labour MPs who, all of about 6 months after Corbyn won in a LANDSLIDE accross every membership demographic, decided to try to take him out of power.
It backfired. Members strengthened Corbyn's majority even harder. But/
And you know who else was in that coup too don't you.
Starmer.
Starmer, deep down, is no better.
Ultimately, he thinks he knows what you want more than you do. You only *think* you want not to be legally murdered by spycops and other agents of the state. Silly you.
I am done being nice. I voted for an arsehole today. An arsehole with 6000 Twitter likes from telling people like me, that we only believe in fairness because we are inferiors.
Inferiors like our forebears who literally built the services, that arsehole wants to control.
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Brexit lies: Boris Johnson said he had an “oven-ready” Brexit deal waiting to slot into place with the EU.HE LIED.
Boris Johnson seems to think that negotiations are proceeding too slowly – and is pushing the EU to give him the ‘no deal’ Brexit he wants.
That’s the only interpretation that can be put on the revelation that he is planning to break the withdrawal agreement that he merrily signed in January.
EU negotiators will see that no deal struck with the UK under his leadership will carry any weight. This Writer would not be surprised if they walk away from the negotiating table in disgust.
On the eve of negotiations resuming, the Financial Times reported that the Internal Market Bill would “eliminate” the legal force of the Withdrawal Agreement, struck less than a year ago, in areas including state aid for business and Northern Ireland customs.
As part of the terms of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the region is expected to continue to follow some EU rules after the transition period ends on 31 December 2020 to ensure there is no hard border.
But Mr Johnson is expected to say later that if no agreement is reached by 15 October, both sides should “move on”.
The prime minister will tell EU counterparts that completing the UK’s exit from the bloc without a trade deal would still be a “good outcome”.
It won’t be.
We have already learned that huge numbers of UK farmers are likely to go out of business if there is no deal and now Johnson is practically guaranteeing it.
This Site has already said we should not necessarily sympathise with them because the vast majority of farmers voted for Brexit, no matter what it meant.
But this latest move is likely to mean tariffs of 40 per cent on UK goods being sold into the EU – a huge extra cost that means most of them will be unable to trade in that bloc in the future.
The economy is not strong enough to weather this, so it seems the hedge fund bosses who (may or may not have) supported Johnson in his bid to be prime minister will get what it’s been said they want: an enormous recession and the collapse of big name UK brands.
By legislating to cause this, Boris Johnson is signalling that it is what he has wanted all along.
Now's the time to write to MPs, esp Conservative ones, also Conservative associations. They need to understand how angry we are about the broken promises, about the #ovenreadydeal They need to get that Johnson does not have carte blanche to screw-up our future.#BrexitRealityhttps://t.co/9088PBxLnn
One of the easiest deals in human history. Four years of total Tory incompetence… and we're still no closer. Our Economy is already near collapse… a #NoDealBrexit will push us over the 'cliff-edge'. #BrexitRealitypic.twitter.com/HIESoLLgG5
Ahead of this noisy week: – the EU is better prepared for “no deal” than the UK – the EU is not terrified of “no deal” – “no deal” will affect the UK far more than the EU
Oh, and for all those who voted Conservative in December last year, basing their decision on the slogan that Johnson would “Get Brexit Done”… How does it feel to be betrayed?
This is a complete u-turn on the plan and a betrayal of every Tory voter who thought Johnson would achieve an advantageous Brexit:
Boris Johnson campaigned in GE2019 on his Brexit deal.
He won the GE, and is now going back on his deal.
It is yet another mark of incompetence & dishonesty.
I bet shortly after he pushed ’no deal’ through, Boris will step down and leave the UK. His reign of destruction is completed. He destroyed the country, as voted for by the people who were not capable enough to see through his lies. #BrexitReality
I was chatting to a friend last night and they are predicting rationing books to be reintroduced into the UK after December 31st and I think that they are correct. #BrexitReality
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More than half a million members have heard that party staff spent years working to stop the party from winning at elections, and to foment distrust by – for example – failing to do anything about anti-Semitism.
They have been told that the party they joined – and into which they paid subscriptions – has been actively working against their wishes.
And over the last week, they have seen the new leader of that party doing his very best to protect the perpetrators of this monumental betrayal.
So it seems likely that many of them – huge numbers, in fact – will follow the example of Sarah-Jane McDonough and demand the return of the subscriptions they rightly feel were taken under false pretences.
If enough of them do that – and many may band together to demand it through the courts if the party tries to deny them what they want – Labour will run out of money and cease to function.
So Keir Starmer is likely to be facing a choice – either now or in the near future.
He can make explicitly public efforts to clean up the Labour Party – or he can learn to live with being the disgraced leader who killed the Party of the People. It’s up to him.
A Labour councillor is demanding that the party fully refunds all her membership fees and donations following the revelation that senior HQ staff conspired to sabotage Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Stevenage councillor Sarah-Jane McDonough has written to request a refund of payments from May 2015 to the present day on the grounds that they were taken “fraudulently.”
Her letter was sent after an internal Labour report, titled The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014-2019, was leaked last weekend.
Management and staff on the right of the party were found to have used abusive language in WhatsApp chats to disparage Mr Corbyn and his supporters, along with other left-wing MPs and party employees.
The culprits also boasted of doing no work for months and conspiring to sabotage election campaigns and Labour’s attempts to deal with anti-semitism complaints.
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MPs debate the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, July 20, 2015.
This is a roll call of shame.
The Conservative Party has launched yet another attack on the poor, the disabled and the disadvantaged in the UK and – rather than stand up for those people – all but 48 members of the Parliamentary Labour Party just stood aside and let it happen.
Apologists for these so-called representatives say there will be time to oppose particular measures in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill during the Committee Stage, but they conveniently forget that it is easier to push objections through if one has not already stood aside to let the legislation reach that stage. In short: Nobody will take these objections seriously.
Here is the list of Labour MPs who betrayed their constituents:
Heidi Alexander
Rushanara Ali
Graham Allen
Jon Ashworth
Ian Austin
Adrian Bailey
Kevin Barron
Margaret Beckett
Hilary Benn
Luciana Berger
Clive Betts
Roberta Blackman-Woods
Tom Blenkinsop
Paul Blomfield
Ben Bradshaw
Kevin Brennan
Lyn Brown
Nick Brown
Chris Bryant
Karen Buck
Richard Burden
Andy Burnham
Liam Byrne
Ruth Cadbury
Alan Campbell
Ronnie Campbell
Sarah Champion
Jenny Chapman
Vernon Coaker
Ann Coffey
Julie Cooper
Rosie Cooper
Yvette Cooper
Jo Cox
Neil Coyle
David Crausby
Mary Creagh
Stella Creasy
Jon Cruddas
John Cryer
Judith Cummins
Alex Cunningham
Jim Cunningham
Nicholas Dakin
Simon Danczuk
Wayne David
Gloria De Piero
Stephen Doughty
Jim Dowd
Jack Dromey
Michael Dugher
Angela Eagle
Maria Eagle
Clive Efford
Julie Elliott
Louise Ellman
Bill Esterson
Chris Evans
Paul Farrelly
Frank Field
Jim Fitzpatrick
Rob Flello
Colleen Fletcher
Caroline Flint
Yvonne Fovargue
Vicky Foxcroft
Mike Gapes
Barry Gardiner
Pat Glass
Kate Green
Lilian Greenwood
Nia Griffith
Andrew Gwynne
David Hanson
Harriet Harman
Harry Harpham
Helen Hayes
John Healey
Mark Hendrick
Stephen Hepburn
Meg Hillier
Margaret Hodge
Sharon Hodgson
Kate Hoey
Kate Hollern
George Howarth
Tristram Hunt
Rupa Huq
Huw Irranca-Davies
Dan Jarvis
Alan Johnson
Diana R Johnson
Graham Jones
Kevan Jones
Susan Elan Jones
Mike Kane
Barbara Keeley
Liz Kendall
Stephen Kinnock
Peter Kyle
Chris Leslie
Emma Lewell-Buck
Ivan Lewis
Ian Lucas
Holly Lynch
Fiona Mactaggart
Justin Madders
Khalid Mahmood
Shabana Mahmood
Seema Malhotra
John Mann
Gordon Marsden
Chris Matheson
Steve McCabe
Kerry McCarthy
Siobhain McDonagh
Pat McFadden
Conor McGinn
Alison McGovern
Catherin McKinnell
Alan Meale
Ed Miliband
Jessica Morden
Ian Murray
Melanie Onn
Chi Onwurah
Albert Owen
Matthew Pennycook
Toby Perkins
Jess Phillips
Bridget Phillipson
Steve Pound
Lucy Powell
Yasmin Qureshi
Angela Rayner
Jamie Reed
Steve Reed
Rachel Reeves
Emma Reynolds
Jonathan Reynolds
Geoffrey Robinson
Steve Rotheram
Joan Ryan
Naseem Shah
Virendra Sharma
Barry Sheerman
Gavin Shuker
Andrew Slaughter
Ruth Smeeth
Andrew Smith
Angela Smith
Jeff Smith
Nick Smith
Owen Smith
Karin Smyth
John Spellar
Keir Starmer
Wes Streeting
Gisela Stuart
Mark Tami
Gareth Thomas
Nick Thomas-Symonds
Emily Thornberry
Stephen Timms
Jon Trickett
Anna Turley
Karl Turner
Derek Twigg
Stephen Twigg
Chuka Umunna
Keith Vaz
Valeria Vaz
Tom Watson
Catherine West
Alan Whitehead
Phil Wilson
Rosie Winterton
John Woodcock
(Thangam Debbonaire also abstained, but this was because she has been diagnosed with cancer and was in Bristol having chemotherapy. She was ‘paired’ with a government MP so her absence did not affect the outcome of the vote.)
(Natascha Engel and Lindsay Hoyle could not vote because they are Deputy Speakers and are automatically paired with government MPs.)
(Fabian Hamilton was, we’re told, recovering from surgery. Otherwise, according to a commenter, he would have voted against the Bill.)
(Lisa Nandy was on maternity leave.)
(Christina Rees was abroad on an all-party working group, according to a commenter to the blog.)
If your Labour MP is among the above, then This Writer encourages you to contact them and request an explanation for this betrayal. You may also ask them to explain why they think they should be trusted to fulfil the role expected of them in Parliament, which is to oppose the Conservative Government’s destruction of the Welfare State and the fabric of British society. You may even wish to request their resignation (although this is only likely to succeed if enough people in the same constituency make the same demand together).
The cowardly rejection of responsibility by the above-named Labour MPs has already earned the contempt of many very well-known figures in the Left of politics.
Harry Smith, the 92-year-old who spoke movingly in support of the NHS at last year’s Labour Conference, tweeted: “To abstain against austerity is to accept austerity.”
He added: “During days of Thatcher Labour fought her tooth & nail & stood up for the vulnerable but today we washed our hands of them.”
Owen Jones, the 30-year-old Leftie columnist, tweeted: “Abstaining on the Welfare Bill means saying you are on the fence about driving the kids of low-paid workers further into hardship.”
You can have this, from Green MP Caroline Lucas: “Labour frontbench defends indefensible & accepts principle of arbitrary benefit cap – how much extra child poverty are they relaxed about?”
Even Abby Tomlinson, the teenage creator of ‘Milifandom’, had to speak up against the abstention of her idol: “Really worries me that MPs would compromise their principles just to toe party line. If they think the bill is morally wrong – oppose it.”
Fortunately for the future of the Labour movement, there were some who were prepared to stand up, not only against the vile Conservative legislation but also against the wrong-headed complicity of their own party leadership – 48 of them.
Leading the rebellion was Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn. He made his views clear in a statement: “We introduced tax credits to fill the gap between wages and the cost of living. Osborne’s proposals do nothing to close that gap, while taking away the vital lifeline that tax credits have provided.
“Research by Savills shows that the lower benefit cap would make all of London and most of southern England uninhabitable for families – based on three-bed properties at market rent.
“Disabled people were hardest hit by welfare cuts in the last Parliament. Reducing ESA rates to JSA levels will send more disabled people into poverty at a time when poverty in disabled households has hit record highs.
“Freezing working-age benefits for four years will mean more homelessness, more people using food banks, more child poverty and more misery. This Bill is the unspeakable attacking the vulnerable. It is indefensible.”
In contrast, Twitter user David George King told another leadership candidate, Andy Burnham: “You’ve a bloody cheek claiming you think this tax credit cut is wrong then abstaining – total copout.” Burnham, like fellow leadership candidates Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, abstained and let the Tory Bill proceed.
Debbie Abrahams, who has done such sterling work keeping my Freedom of Information request on benefit-related deaths in the public eye, said, “This is a wicked Bill.”
And John McDonnell made his own feelings even more plain: “I would swim through vomit to vote against this Bill.”
What a shame so few of their fellow MPs were prepared to take a principled stand. Labour desperately needs a leader who will purge the party of its dead weight – and only one candidate had the courage to stand against the tide this week.
Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall need to discover that they can’t expect the support of the people if they are happy to stab the people in the back.
If nothing else, this vote has shown that Jeremy Corbyn is clearly the man who should be leading Labour out of the dark.
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Will somebody from the Common Sense wing of the Labour Party please stand for the leadership?
Today The Guardian is reporting that leadership favourite Andy Burnham has decided to pander to big business rather than stand up for the common people.
He said he was prepared to support cuts to social security in order to counter claims that Labour gives scroungers an “easy ride”.
What stupidity!
He would do better to counter the claim that all political parties give an easy ride to lazy business bosses who exploit the working classes and hide their massive profits in tax havens – especially as he was making his speech at the HQ of tax avoidance tzars Ernst and Young.
The company, now branded EY, is one of the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firms that have been helping the Tory Government rewrite tax law to make it possible for big business to use tax havens and avoid paying.
Regarding benefits, the simple fact is that the fraud rate is 0.7 per cent – a miniscule amount. People claiming benefits deserve to have them – especially as they have paid into the relevant fund for their whole lives; the money belongs to those people, not any government – Labour or Tory.
If Burnham really wanted to bring down the amount of benefit claims, he would have been telling businesses to buck up their ideas and start paying the living wage, rather than scrounging the rest of the money their employees need from the government.
He would have been telling landlords to start charging reasonable rents, rather than pushing them up and up and expecting the government to pay what tenants cannot afford in housing benefit.
And he would have been proposing a strategic remodelling of the system to prevent people falling into the kind of difficulties that force them to claim benefits – including a revamp of Health and Safety regulation to ensure that people do not fall prey to long-term illness caused by conditions at work.
Will somebody step forward who can actually do the job?
Labour leadership favourite Andy Burnham has indicated he would support further welfare cuts, including government plans for a £23,000 cap on benefits if it has adequate safeguards.
At a speech in London, the shadow health secretary said he wanted to counter the perception his party wants to give “an easy ride” to people who do not want to help themselves.
“Labour does need to win back those people who have that feeling about us,” he told business leaders at the headquarters of EY (previously Ernst & Young) on Friday. He added that the party would not be re-elected unless it showed people it was on the side of those who wanted to “get on” and succeed.
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Scotland’s economic disaster [Image: SNPfail – it’s a Liberal Democrat-run site but the figures are accurate].
The poorest Scottish people are losing public services due to a Council Tax freeze by the SNP-run Scottish government, while £1 billion provided by the Westminster government to alleviate poverty has been used to patch over cuts in local authority budgets.
Scotland’s 32 local authorities have still racked up a record £12-15 billion worth of debt as a result of the council tax freeze – but the SNP still claims it is a socialist party, and still claims it is economically responsible.
The SNP has kept council tax frozen every year since it took power in Holyrood in 2007. The party claims this helps all households – but of course it helps some more than others. The richer you are, the more you have to pay if council tax is increased, while the increase on poorer people is less. Therefore, if council tax is frozen, the rich see more benefit from it. Add in the fact that average wages have been stagnant for almost the entire period of the Scottish council tax freeze and is becomes clear that poorer people have seen little or no benefit at all.
Scotland’s local councils have borrowed billions of pounds to help survive the swingeing budget cuts from the Scottish government – and now owe more than twice as much per head than English and Welsh local authorities, equal to debts of £6,166 per household, compared with £3,100 per home in England and £2,825 per household in Wales.
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Some facts about education in Scotland. SNPfail is a Liberal Democrat site but the information is accurate.
That’s right – betrayal. For all its bluster about free University tuition, the SNP government at Holyrood seems more interested in providing cheap education for the already-well-off than helping the disadvantaged achieve their potential.
Holyrood abolished tuition fees for Scottish universities – but who did that help? According to research by Edinburgh University in 2013, it helped those who were already wealthy.
The report on widening access to higher education was submitted to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) after Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the university principal hand-picked by SNP ministers to review higher education, said abolishing tuition fees has mainly benefited the middle classes.
The report found the lack of fees in Scotland has meant initiatives to widen access have had “lower priority” and less funding.
The amount of grants available to poorer Scots has fallen and the funding packages offered north of the Border are virtually the same, regardless of the student’s wealth.
Meanwhile, there has been a huge drop in the number of students attending colleges since the SNP came to power in Holyrood and inflicted “savage spending cuts”, axing part-time courses which MSPs derided as “hobby courses”. The figures came from the Scottish Funding Council and show that 130,000 college places and teaching staff have been lost.
Those most affected by the cuts are young people who are less academic and are looking for vocational qualifications, and women returners – it was said that 100,000 fewer women were in education as a result of the SNP’s cuts.
And almost 4,000 teachers have been lost since the SNP took office in 2007. The party froze council tax that year, meaning local authorities were forced to make cuts in their spending.
As a result, instead of reducing class sizes to 18, the loss of enough teachers to fill 50 average-sized secondary schools has pushed class sizes to more than 30.
Again, the well-off are the winners. They benefit more from the council tax freeze because it leaves them with more disposable income; lower earners still have to spend most – if not all – of their income on the bills. And wealthy parents can afford to supplement their children’s education with extra, private, tuition – or opt out of the state system altogether and send them to private school.
So the SNP’s education policy is to penalise the poor and reward the rich. So much for that party’s left-wing credentials!
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![Scotland's economic disaster [Image: SNPfail - it's a Liberal Democrat-run site but the figures are accurate].](https://i0.wp.com/voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/150427SNPeconomy1.jpg)
