I am not a radical. My best friends wouldn't call me a radical. But, for pity's sake, when a piece of legislation is up for debate which will make your supposedly core voters much worse off, people who are likely to have no financial resilience and won't easily be able to make up the proposed loss of income, it seems like a no-brainer to oppose it.
So, what the hell are the Labour Party doing, proposing to offer up the gesture of an amendment which includes the phrase;
a benefits cap and loans for mortgage interest support are necessary changes to the welfare system
and bemoans the impact of cuts in tax credits in the most hand-wringing way imaginable?
All of the evidence is that the Conservative proposals will make a lot of vulnerable people considerably poorer in the short term, in the hope that, in four years time, they won't be quite as impoverished in four years as they will be next year. Hell, I oppose them, and I'm a middle-class, comfortably off, bureaucrat.
It seems that Labour Party strategy (and I note that many Labour activists are as aghast as I am) is to demonstrate that they are 'fiscally responsible', regardless of how many poor and vulnerable people, many of them in work and therefore not 'skivers' (and I hate that word), will be thrown under the bus as a result.
Yes, we need to do something about the size of the welfare budget. Frankly, I wonder if we haven't gone too far with pensions, guaranteeing as we now do that pensioners will be better off in real terms every year through the triple lock. But even if you think that tax credits are too generous, you need to give those affected some time to adjust their spending, seek more work and make necessary arrangements.
And, in some places, finding additional work will not be that easy. The opportunities are still not there in some parts of the country, and not everywhere is like Mid Suffolk, with its 2.7% unemployment rate.
But who are Labour trying to impress? The right-wing media? George Osborne? Perhaps I ought to explain. They don't want you to win. You could propose the sacrifice of the first-born from migrant families and they would still rather have a Conservative government. Instead, you have to at least make sure that those who have put so much faith in you for so many generations have someone to stand up for them.
I am proud that Liberal Democrats will be voting against the proposals this evening. I am pleased that they will be standing together with the SNP, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and even the Democratic Unionists. I hope that Labour MPs will join them, defying a whip which deserves ridicule.
As a Liberal Democrat, I sat by over five years, watching our MPs cast votes that I truly wish they hadn't had to cast. Coalition is like that - you get some of your stuff, and they get some of theirs. And, if there are more of them than there are of you, they get more than you do.
But if you aren't bound by a coalition agreement, why for the love of God would you put party discipline above the views of your own members? Is it that gaining power is more important than remembering why you wanted it in the first place?
I pity Labour Party activists this evening, I really do...
No comments:
Post a Comment