Why you Tories lost the local election.
Every budget has its good points – but……….Memories of the nasty party run deep and long. You lost the trust and so the election. Osborne claimed yesterday that his budget was fair. But actually, continuing a time dishonoured pattern, he forgot to avoid being nasty.Child benefit frozen. Do you know that when the benefits stop say because of stolen identity which happens all too often, then single mothers unbelievably survive on child benefit? It seems to me from the budget detail that not only Jobseekers but also Housing Benefit will be reduced by 10% after 12 months of being on JS. Harriet Harman was so right to say that the budget is same old Tories and same old ideologies. Did you study the faces of the guilty Liberals? And the schoolboy sniggers of the front bench? And the gloom on the face of IDS. Hammer the poor during a financial crisis to satisfy the dross of the low minded Daily Mail brigade. Give the poor a nice little taste of 20% VAT – progressive was it? An Income tax rise with a greater increase on the personal allowance would have been FAIR. I don’t know what it is that you Tories have got a crush on the outdated purchase tax mentality.As for Disability Living Allowance. Did no one tell Osborne that DLA is about Personal care needs and not Nursing care needs? What do right wing - only got 5 minutes for you - doctors know about Personal care needs? What indeed do doctors know about the benefits system anyway? And yet Osborne says DLA will now be assessed by doctors.And as for downright stinginess and mean mindedness. It probably goes back to the 18th century, that giving money to the poor is not just for food and shelter. It is to give a modicum of physical or mental relief as well. Certainly seen it in the UN charter somewhere. But you lot have stolen free swimming from children and the elderly. It was only ever going to cost £40M for the whole country.Oh, I don’t like scroungers anymore than anybody else. Try asking annually whether people on ordinary Benefits, as opposed to DLA/AA, own a car. That should give the understaffed Fraud Office some leads. Ok reduce the JS but nothing else by X%. Neither party built housing for decades, but don’t tell me you now want people on the streets. No mention of changing housing law so as to ‘encourage’ people out of London. And you don’t mind an incentive to increase the black market - or crime which, despite Tory lies in the Council Chamber, is on the up in Ealing. Osborne gave the country more money for the police, did he? When Thatcher wrecked our society – a concept she had difficulty in recognising, the unemployment explosion was accompanied between the mid eighties and early nineties by the fastest increasing crime rate ever on record. Same old Tories. It was only the Labour party who actually got a grip, since when crime overall – but not Ealing, has been dropping. Councillor Bell please note.Growth under the Tories is forecast lower because the cuts have been increased by one half more than those proposed by Labour. Pardon! Are the Tories mad? Odd that even Obama said don’t cut too sharply until the economy starts to recover. Odd that the G8 or was it the G20 are not too keen either. Darling has been so dedicated to improving the economy with diligence, but he was never a fool. Do you honestly believe that with the incentives introduced by Osborne that private business is going to soak up public sector redundancies at the same rate? Are we really going to have a small overall increase in unemployment because we will be saved with new private sector employment in a synchronized timescale orchestrated by the private sector? And what happened to the famous cry of Cameron and IDS that more money must go to the charities to absorb people from the public sector and from the public generally. Silence on that eh? Tax levy on the banks of 0.7%. Sounds impressive does it?Knowing only too well that massive cuts were coming, Local Tory Councillors gambled away £6M to, well um, lose the election and then make it even harder for the future administration to make ends meet. And now on the macro level we have Osborne the speculator in chief followed by his poodles in the Treasury.So you can rightly blame the last government for not investing when the sun shone, but the really evil seeds of the crisis were sown by Reaganomics – i.e. your lot. Greed defended by arrogance – which is far more powerful than wrong economic judgement. Short term-ism, versus the Gaullist 30 year planning philosophy and French personal lending rules. So bash the Labour as you will and rightly so TO A DEGREE, --- but your own worse sins still haunt us, because they also seduced and sucked in the Blairs and Browns. Without the banking crash we would never have been in this crisis.
George Knox ● 5941d14 Comments