Why I'm No Longer A Labour Voter...
"the principle underlying welfare reform is the principle of the workhouse... you make claiming benefit so degrading and so difficult that people don't want to do it.... that was the principle of the workhouse and that is the principle that the very lovely James Purnell is introducing into welfare"Diane Abbott 'This Week' 4/12/08
As, the 'very
Income Support rate for single adult over 25: £64.30 per week.
Carer's Allowance : £53.10 per week
Please take time today to email Labour and remind them of their role in introducing Employment Support Allowance and the politics of the workhouse.
5 comments:
I've NEVER been a Labour voter, but credit where it's due so I've emailed my Labour MP Sheila Gilmore to thank her for putting a lot of work into interrogating the Welfare Reform legisation in the Commons. Labour Lord Anne Begg has been doing impressive work getting us heard while chairing the Work and Pensions Committee also.
No, the party hasn't exactly come out in our defence but is that their job?
Actually, it should be their job. Labour was founded as the party of capitalism's victims. The fact that they're doing the opposite is betrayal pure and simple.
Maybe as a 48 year old party member who left in 2005 I should put up the formation document of the Labour party or the LRC which it was.
Labour put in place the WCA with Freud great socialist with Purnell another barking mad socialist.
It is labour and sadly two MP's voice are not being heard.
This morning BBC breakfast show,
Miliband said this.....
Welfare has to change due to the banking crises.
So we are repaying the banking crises
My mother was born into the St Georges in the East (Wapping) Workhouse hospital...one of eleven survivors (out of seventeen kids we know about)... the sons and daughters of a drunken casual dockworker...
As a family we were blessed with being (mostly) physically fit, (barring calcium deficiencies, mostly arising out of WWll rationing), and generally have thrived...
So how have we, as immaculately qualified potential Labour voters, fared?
Of my deceased mothers siblings I believe there are four surviving (one went of with some gypsies)...two are Labour voters, two Tory...I don't know how the others voted...
There are, as far as I know, thirty three (surviving) of us cousins...(and a plethora of further descendants).
What I find remarkable is, that as far as I can ascertain, nearly all the cousins (twenty two excluding myself) have voted conservative for all their lives...most of them strongly distrusting Labour, three Liberal (myself included), two Labour and the rest unknown...I'm not even going to bother with the next generation down...
In terms of raising the masses against the prevailing government it's clearly no use looking along traditional lines alone...
As descendants of a true working class society (in which there were few if any welfare benefits) it would seem that we are NOT be the product of our ancestry, but the product of our ambitions...which in itself isn't a bad thing, but given the voting choices today available, is worrying!
Frankly, having lived through the "never had it so good" MacMillan years and the "three day week, unburied bodies in the streets", years I voted Labour first year I left school, never could bring myself to vote Tory, voted Liberal every election since, but don't know where to go next time yet...
Any ideas anyone?
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