Reflection of the day for 5th November

What is it with Labour governments?


The first thing they always do - is slam pensioners in the kidneys

  • With Gordon Brown and Tony Blair it was a £5 billion a year raid on pension funds which, as was accurately described by the late Frank Field, one of the few Labour MPs I ever had any time for, transformed Britain from having some of the best-funded peNsions in Europe to one of the worst.
  • With Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, it was adopting a policy on pensions which Labour themselves had argued in opposition would lead to 3,850 pensioner deaths each winter.


 The second thing they always do - is bash the countryside

  • With Tony Blair it was crippling policies on small farms combined with the ideological application of a rigid approach to country spots which showed a grave lack of understanding of the countryside.

  • With Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, it's a tax and inheritance policy which appears guaranteed to result in the break-up or closure of hundreds of family-run farms each year.

 

The third thing they always do - is betray students

  • Tony Blair promised before his first election that he had no plans to introduce student tuition fees.
  • Blair then introduced student tuition fees
  • He promised in a subsequent election that Labour opposed top-up tuition fees and had legislated to prevent them
  • After that election substantially he claimed that a further big increase in tuition fees was central to his government's programme, and implemented that increase.

  • Where Tony Blair blazed the trail of betrayal, Sir Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson follow. Starmer promised when standing to be leader of the Labour party that he  wanted to scrap student tuition fees.
  • Much more recently, Bridget Phillipson said she had "no plans" to raise them.
  • But this week, far from scrapping them, or even keeping the \promise not to raise them, Labour have announced that that they are ending a seven-year freeze in tuition fees by the last government and will indeed increase them.

And do you know why Universities need the money?

  • The estimated cost to Universities of the rise in Employers National Insurance Contributions is £400 million
  • The estimated extra revenue for Universities from the increase in tuition fees is £390 million.

So every penny raised by the extra burden on students, and another ten million, will go to cover the cost to universities of a tax raise Labour had promised during the election they would not implement.

One broken promise to pay for another broken promise.

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