The owner of the YouTube channel I’ve embedded the video below from describes it as the “most scaremongering of all of New Labour’s election broadcasts”.
The election broadcast used a kind of Orwellian group of grey-suited state apparatchiks to frighten voters into voting for Labour. It talked about how the Tories would cut child tax credits and other benefits just weeks after getting into power. This clearly didn’t happen. And perhaps it never would have done. Even if they had won the election fair and square.
But after the government decided tonight to ensure support was cut for cancer patients, can we honestly say with our hands on our hearts that the thesis outlined in the video was so very out of the trolley?
Labour got the timeframe wrong. It got the details wrong. But it didn’t get Tory instincts wrong.
Now did it?
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Update to this post: today, the morning of the 2nd February, the Herald Scotland website has published this damning assessment of how the political class is either looking to recreate Dickensian Britain (the Tories), is right but relatively ineffectual (Labour) or is ending up being downright two-faced (the Lib Dems). As it so cogently summarises:
The true face of the Welfare Reform Bill is wheelchair users losing mobility benefits, terminally ill cancer patients being assessed for work and accident victims who have always worked being driven back on to basic means-tested benefits after a year. Thousands genuinely unable to work will be forced into unsuitable jobs or dire poverty. (In yesterday’s debate one Tory backwoodsman seriously described being sick or disabled as “a lifestyle choice”, to the righteous fury of Scots wheelchair-using MP Anne Begg.) These changes are being forced through without any evidence base to suggest that they will work at a time of lengthening dole queues with the long-term unemployed stuck at the back, furthest away from meaningful employment.
Well worth your time in its comprehensive description, criticism and deconstruction of the wider Tory strategy.
