Labour Party - leadership news

With thanks to Martin Rowson and the Guardian for the cartoon.

It quite probably won't make a jot of difference to the jobless nor to the looming cuts in benefits, but the Labour Party have elected a new leader.

My fervent hope is now the 4 (yes 4!) months of politicking within the Labour Party is over, that Ed Miliband and his new shadow cabinet can get their act together.


Let's face it, the coalition Government have been allowed to steamroller ahead almost unopposed in the House of Commons. Since the June Budget the coalition have been able to reel off a great big list of ALL these cuts they claim they need to make in order to save the nation. It seems there has been barely a peep of protest with the Commons.

I can only conclude that this is because the Labour Party have been looking elsewhere. They have been deciding who is going to lead the opposition. So while the Government has been lining up these huge cuts the so-called opposition has been navel-gazing.


So the very first thing I would like to have seen Ed Miliband and his new shadow cabinet do was to start to build a coherent, credible opposition to these vicious cuts. That would mean coming up with credible alternatives. I saw him interviewed by Paxman on Newsnight the day their conference finished, he failed to mention the Welfare State.


Right now I feel that the poorest and most vulnerable in the UK are crying out for someone to speak up loudly on their behalf. Cuts in benefits is State bullying of those least able to speak up for themselves.



Whatever happens come October 20, I'll probably be OK. (Depends how the Housing Benefit cap pans out.) I'm single and unemployed and I'm used to being skint and bitched at by the DWP. I've only got myself to look out for. But there are an awful lot of people who have more responsibility than me and are going to bear the brunt of this much more than I will.

MPs and Expenses

I sat bolt upright in bed the other morning when I heard on Radio 4 that the new intake of Westminster MPs were complaining they were being "treated like benefit claimants " under the new expenses regime.

This complaint is wrong on so many counts. The first thing this implies is that it is fine to treat the poorest in our society, ie benefit claimants, like benefit claimants.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I'd assumed that the unemployed, the elderly, the sick and the disabled are entitled to the benefits that they claim. I tend to be of the opinion that how a society looks after its poor and its disadvantaged is some kind of barometer of how civilized it is. Surely it's a measure of its national attitude, of how much it cares about its own.

So why then is it deemed fine to treat people who are in need of support from the state so poorly? To understand this I suppose we have to fall back on the vernacular of Radio 5 or the tabloids.

I'm certain we've all read those stories of Mr So-and-So, the scrounging benefit cheat. The man who runs his son's football team two or three times a week whilst claiming untold thousands from the state. He is able to claim this money due to his crippling arthritis which patently renders him unable to work. Now I'm not for a moment suggesting these people don't exist, but I feel they are very few and far between.

They run these adverts on the telly to phone this number and grass up your neighbour as a benefit cheat. I've yet to see an ad where you can ring up the taxman and tell him you suspect your neighbour of fiddling his tax returns.

Don't get me wrong, fiddling the social is wrong. It's shabby, cheap behaviour and the state should do what it reasonably can to prevent it. But that shouldn't give the state carte blanche to treat ALL benefit claimants as badly as it does. We do hatred so well in this country and benefit scroungers are up there in our national consciousness with illegal immigrants (if you listen to Radio 5, that is).

We should be glad of our Welfare State and we should have a drastically different attitude to paying taxes. I want to live in a society that looks after its citizens. Does my attitude sound too simplistic?

Another thing I learnt this week, courtesy of Miranda Sawyer in the Mirror, is that 18 out of 23 members of the cabinet are millionaires (23 people doesn't strike me as many people to be responsible for running the country but there you go). I just hope that none of those millionaires were whingeing about being treated like benefit claimants!

Rather than MPs complaining about expenses, somebody should be complaining about the abysmal way benefit claimants are treated.