Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Labour Oppose 1% Cap On Benefits!

Tory front Bench After Delivering Grim Autumn Statement
Which Will Affect Hundreds of Thousands of Poor,
vulnerable and middle income earners
Yesterday in the House of Commons the glee on the Tory benches when Shadow chancellor, Ed Balls announced that Labour will be opposing the 1% cap on benefits, confirms once again, (if it needed confirming after last week's disgraceful display in the House after Osborne's Autumn Statement) that the Conservative party really have become a sick joke.

The fact that the Tory and Liberal Democrat front bench see the Labour opposition's intention to stand up for the poor, vulnerable, disabled and low waged as a "weakness" explains a lot about the type of people Cameron, Osborne, Alexander and Duncan Smith are.

In what could prove to be a significant move and a turning point for the Labour opposition, Labour are attempting to draw clear boundaries between the three parties. The Tory controlled coalition government's policy to cut the benefit of 60% of low income wage earners and the unemployed etc, is something that the Labour opposition obviously feels they cannot support, for Labour, doing the right thing, for the right reasons is far more important, even though it may harm their support in the country. If opinion polls are to be believed the public want welfare spending cut, however, I believe that David Cameron and George Osborne and their immigrant hating, welfare loathing right wing advisers have totally misjudged the public, they have made the politically fatal mistake of believing their own spin and have fallen for their very own hype. This is the danger of governing in this media obsessed way, the Tories have forgotten that right wing newspaper tycoons and editors no longer have the influence they once had and the public are far more savvy than they realise.

The government believe they have backed Labour into a corner, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were they. Ed Miliband has gone out on a limb over bankers, Leveson etc and been proven to be in line with public thinking. Today we have the release of the unemployment figures, we are asked to believe that unemployment fell by 82,000. This figure is a totally misleading figure:

  • August and September figures have already been counted, so that just leaves October
  • So again we have double presenting of the Olympic effect in these figures
  • Overall employment figures include 200,000 public sector worker jobs being reclassified as private sector jobs.
  • Up to 500,000 people who are being forced to work for nothing on government work schemes and courses etc are being taken OFF the unemployment register (ONS)
  • Part-time jobs have risen sharply as employers take on two part-time workers because the government have made it cheaper for them to do this through employer national insurance contributions, rather than employ one full-time worker.
  • Manufacturing output fell sharply.
  • Construction fell by 2.4% last quarter and by 10.8% over last 2 years. Manufacturing and construction are our two main industries for proper full-time jobs.
  • Subsidiary companies that depend upon manufacturing and construction are not hiring or making jobs
  • So where are all these private sector jobs being created - exactly?
  • We have millions UNDEREMPLOYED like subbie builders waiting for the phone to ring, who are NOT registered as unemployed.


The public are not stupid many people are reporting that they go for jobs but full-time proper positions are becoming fewer in number and harder to get. Underemployment is the real picture, but the government, far from acknowledging it and doing something about it, they are actively encouraging it as it helps them in their deception and misleading of the public.

We have travelled from secure full-time employment to a position where most jobs today are precarious and people are employed in low paid part-time positions with unstable hours and no contracts and it is these very people that the government are now attacking and it is these people that the Labour party are trying to defend.


Now that Labour have drawn the boundaries, where does this leave Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrat party? Do they support the Tories and risk alienating still further many of their supporters who have just about clung on during this past 2½ years, or do they side with the Labour party? If the Liberal Democrats back this move, I believe their remaining support will erode, how could left leaning supporters support an attack on 60% of low wage part-time workers?
How do the Liberal Democrat leaders explain away underemployment? Most people living in poverty today are actually in work, so how can the Lib Dems support an all out assault on them?

It's not the Labour party that have been pushed into this position, it is the Liberal Democrats and by the party they are supporting to actually do it.

From April 2013, many low paid workers will have their housing benefit capped, they will also lose tax credits if they cannot force their employer to give them more hours, For many of these people the sudden change in their circumstances will force them under and they will be evicted from their homes for non-payment of rent.

Does Cameron honestly believe that when the public start seeing and reading about families being evicted from their homes and their children taken into care because their parents can no longer afford to keep them or pay their rent, that people are going to back his outrageous attack on the poor and most vulnerable in society? What Cameron and Osborne are doing is bullying people they feel cannot fight back and who they think have no voice and will not speak up to defend themselves. In an act of despicable cowardice they are using people they deem are weak as tools to get other people to vote for them. They are trying to turn working people against working people, just like they have caused a rift between private sector workers and public sector workers.

I believe Cameron and Osborne have seriously misjudged the mood of the majority of the general public. The Labour party are opposing the government's unfair bill on  the grounds that it is unfair not only to those that exist on benefits, but to the 60% who work for a living in low paid jobs. They are opposing it not because they think it will win them votes (because the polls say otherwise), they are opposing it because  they believe that this is the right thing to do by people.

Since the Tory controlled coalition government assumed power, the use of food banks has soared to  FOUR times the number it was 2 years ago and now over a quarter million starving Britons will have used emergency food banks by the end of this year. It's a shocking indictment on the sixth richest country in the world, that we have a government that are purposefully forcing people into poverty in order to score cheap political points.

Will Nick Clegg keep in power the party that is now causing a class war and attacking the poor in order to pay for the rich tax cuts? Over £170,000 each? The ball is in his court, not the Labour party's.

And remember this is the government that find all this highly amusing!



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliantly said and written, about time Labour stood up for the people of Britain; they also need to stop all these Sanctions by the Sanction Centre (Job Centre).
The Sanction Centre are making threats to claimants that if they don't join their website they will stop benefits even if that person proves they are looking for work, say all you need to know about the DWP policy.

GWB1983 said...

The photograph say's it all and tells you all you need to know about the lot of them.
They snigger, laugh and enjoy everything they do to people, I myself don't believe we are in austerity and that this Tory Goverment jumped on the bandwagon so that could inflict their extreme right-wing ideolgy upon the gullible British public, all this goverment has as a policy is BENEFIT CUTS that is all they are obsessed with.

Gracie Samuels said...

I agree with you GWB1983, I think that austerity is just a smokescreen Cameron and Osborne are hiding behind. They also treat the public as if we are clueless and brainless, I find it very insulting.

For a start when the Tories were in opposition, they deliberately and purposefully run down Britain's economy wholly for political reasons and far from the right wing press exposing this treachery, they joined in with the Tories and deliberately and systematically talked down our economy and they made the situation far worse than it need have been, just in order to get Cameron and Osborne elected, but as we saw, not all people were taken in by their lies and treachery and voted against them. If they could not manage to get a majority then, they are not going to get one in 2015 (if they last that long).

Why the Tories are allowed to get away with their constant lies about the deficit is amazing.
In the early 1990's after 11 or so years of Tory recessions and just about to enter another, the then chancellor, Norman Lamont, faced a record deficit of 8% which was HIGHER than that of 2010 when it was7.6%. This bit makes me laugh, Cameron is always trying to bully Ed Balls about his time in the Treasury, but when the deficit was higher under the Tories mismanagement in the 1990's, David Cameron was Lamont's special adviser!

"Finally, Labour in 1997 inherited a debt of 42% of GDP. By the start of the global banking crises 2008 the debt had fallen to 35% - a near 22% reduction (page 6 Office National Statistics report)

Surprisingly,under the Tories a debt of 42% was not seen as a major problem and yet at 35% under Labour and a 22% reduction suddenly the sky was falling down?

NO NEED FOR THIS AUSTERITY, the Tories are just carrying out their ideological warfare on us, in order to privatise the NHS, education, the police, defence and welfare and the sooner people start realising this the better. Preferably before this government completely ruin this country.

The lies must stop and they must be exposed.

Gracie Samuels said...

Anonymous I am going to compile a blog about these so-called "sanction centres", they are an abomination and stink of Russian like state control!

Gracie Samuels said...

Also as a footnote to my post above, under Labour we not only managed to reduced BOTH deficit and debt but we also managed to finish paying the US loan for WW2!

Labour are not bad with the economy, in fact they are very good, it is the Tories who continually mismanaged the economy and cause horrendous problems each time they are in government.

Could you imagine what things would be like now if the fiscally illiterate and utterly incompetent Cameron and Osborne had to cope with the worse *GLOBAL* recession for over 100 years and an international banking collapse? It would have been horrendous!