Opinion: Angus Clark

Jo lies down with Coalition Tory Bedfellows- Yet again!

(Published in this weeks Bearsden /Milngavie Herald)

Only weeks ago in their autumn party conference in Glasgow the Lib Dems condemned the’ bedroom tax’ for discriminating against the most vulnerable in our society. I was therefore disappointed but not surprised to discover that local MP and Cabinet Member Jo Swinson gave her backing to the bedroom tax at a recent crucial Parliamentary vote. It confirmed my view that when it comes to the crunch, Jo will lay down to her Tory coalition masters – yet again! She has consistently supported Cameron and Clegg and voted for repressive measures that the Coalition has put in place. However this must rank as her greatest betrayal yet as this was a genuine chance to finish off this dreadful measure once and for all. Her path as a career politician is now secure in that she seems to place more loyalty to this neo- conservative led government than she does to the views of her constituents, many of whom are already affected by this attempt to make the most vulnerable make more sacrifice for the bankers’ crisis. Recent modifications to exclude certain categories of recipients do not address the fundamental regressive nature of the measures and Discretionary Housing Benefit will only assist a few for a very limited period of time.  

The imposition of the bedroom tax is just the latest regressive measure to be given her support in her meteoric rise up the greasy political pole to Cabinet level, and she will no doubt be well rewarded. She also supported hiking University tuition fees up to £9000, a part privatised NHS, the dreadful Welfare Bill, War with Syria the lowering of taxes for billionaires and millionaires and Nuclear Weapons. Does she consider that this record fairly reflects the views of her constituents or the general populace-I think not. Some of her Lib Dem colleagues did indeed keep true to their principles and voted to scrap the bedroom tax and their action should be welcomed. Other MPs including Labour, decided that they had better things to do than turn up for this important vote which is very disappointing as this was a vote which could have been won, although I do not doubt that it would have been close.

Let’s be under no illusion, the bedroom tax is not a ‘single issue’ although it may appear so if directly affected. Governments don’t think that way! It is just one part of a concerted ideological plan to radically scale back the Welfare State [which has no democratic mandate].  Unlike the Poll Tax of the late 80’s which was aimed at the whole populace, the bedroom tax is targeted solely at social tenants drawing benefits both unemployed and in work, and by implication, already on or near the ‘breadline’ who are deemed to have an ‘extra room’. It therefore hits the unemployed and those in poverty wages ‘disproportionately’ leaving them hardly anything left over to live on. So much for the ‘Mansion Tax’ which Jo Swinson and the Lib Dems used to push for! Now it’s OK to penalise those at the foot of society, and join in with the Tories and the ‘Cabinet of Millionaires’ in giving the most vulnerable a ‘good kicking’. Who will be next in line?

                                                             

 We all know there is a better and more equitable way to tackle the nation’s housing shortage and overcrowding problems. The bedroom tax will never be a solution but it will and is leading to misery for thousands of adults and children, including ill health and suicide.

At the next Westminster election I am sure that the constituents of East Dunbartonshire are no mugs and will not be taken in by the Governments ‘fostered illusions’ over this and other matters. They should also cast an eye over Jo Swinson’s voting record before casting their vote.

Tweet like Labour...

Sign the petition...

To Ed Miliband, leader of UK Labour Party:

Present Emergency Motion in Parliament to Abolish the Bedroom Tax - NOW, not after 2015!

Sign HERE via @change

Free School Meals: Universality when it suits them

by Campsie SSP member Neil Scott

Nice to see the Tories taking on a SSP policy we faught for for years. Free School meals, albeit only for infant children, is a decent start in making life better for our kids.  Its  pity they want to take other universal benefits away. Universality, as they seem to be admitting here, is the fairest, most effective way to deliver equality.

On the announcement, opportunist Nick Clegg was ironically shown on TV eating fruit with Glaswegian children.  What the news isn't saying is that coalition cuts led to free school meals & free fruit ending in Glasgow two years ago.  A few years ago, the LibDems  after taking control of free school meal pioneering Hull City Council, took away this benefit from families during "boom times". 

So why the change of heart?

Easy- the Tories and yellow Tories want to ensure their privatisation of the NHS and further destruction of workers rights and working class community, education and solidarity continues.

The Labour Party are reneging on a committment to universality- and it seems in doing so they have fallen in to a trap. A Labour Party casting off principle for power is empty, meaningless, useless. The coalition partners know this.

The Labour Party by accepting neo-liberalist/Thatcherite vicious economics have been wrong footed. This policy was off their national radar (even though some Labour councils have already enacted it). Their fear of the tory propaganda machine calling them looney lefties at any hint of support for universalism has paralized them. The right wing of the one time party of the working class have dragged them down a blind alley. 
The Labour Party should be replaced by the class they have let down.  The Scottish working class can do that with a Yes in next years independence referendum and then by voting for the SSP in 2016.

The Libdems and Tories, it is obvious, have a pact to help each other gain another term as a coalition. The Libdem media briefing paper to MPs during their conference blatently said 'talk down Labour, talk up the positivity of a Tory party that has been tamed by us...'  Tories and Libdems can cast aside 'principles' if those principles are sacrificeable for their selfish class interests. A wee concession to make people feel they have gained something, even though we have been robbed blind since 2010. Universality in this can be justified by Tories in order to hide their most vicious attacks on working class people. The cuddly LibDems can announce policies such as this to hide their support for selling off the NHS; charging students £9000 per year for an education Danny Alexander and Jo Swinson had free of charge and the impoverishing Welfare Bill, including the Bedroom Tax.

These free school meals are to be welcomed, but the robbery of the working poor and those without work to give tax breaks and bonuses to the well off, that drives them to despair, food banks, hunger and suicide need to be resisted. The disgusting bedroom tax and attacks on disability allowances, for example, will add worry beyond the benefit of a meal for their child.

Take up of free school meals in primary schools I have worked in has been as much as 100% when tried out in Glasgow schools. The benefits to learning were immediately tangible and the negative effects felt almost immediately when they were taken away again. Free School meals, free fruit and water fountains were casualties of the LibDem and Tory Westminster Government and  Glasgow Labour Council whose Scottish leaders are saying universality must be "rethought."

Free meals needs to be rolled out across all schools and ages.

Free school meals for all children is and always has been, the aim of the SSP- but as part of a raft of policies supporting universal health care, pensions, child benefts and other policies that will ensure no-one is driven from their homes or to starvation, Wonga or exploitative zero hour contracts.

SSP campaigning in Kirkintilloch against #bedroomtax today...

"Are you'se handing out fivers?"-the observation of a passer by to the amazing, sometimes six deep at the table, response to our #‎bedroomtax stall in Kirkintilloch today.

We filled 8 petition sheets and had to use a couple of blank sheets hastily hand made into petitions by a comrade!

Kirkintilloch is definately against this dreadful robbery of the most vulnerable of our society.

Tories/Labour and Libdems in the council please note...

A response to welfare reform - a poem

by SSP Campsie member "Socialist Anon"

Scotland 2013

We were forged in the fire of hardship,

Within which we are melted into one another

From which we emerge stronger, flexible, able to withstand

It is no longer clear where you begin and I end

We are forever linked arm in arm - a never ending chain

“We are responsible for one another”

That is why if you should be harmed,

though you are far from me,

though I do not know your name

or even see your face

I will stand up for you.

I am prepared to stand in front of you

For we are forever connected and I shall forever feel your pain.

Fight the tories... this Saturday.

Yes to independence =no to Westminster's further impoverishment of the poor. Anti-bedroom tax rally in George Square this Saturday. Gather George Square at 11am.

The Politics of Envy...

The Etonian millionaires tell us when we talk about the gap between the rich and poor, that these are the politics of envy. Yet their press- the press they, the rich, own and control, every day talks about "scroungers" " skivers" etc living off the state.

They have used this manipulation of public opinion through their media outlets to lower compassion and in turn justify the stripping of meagre funds that people rely on to feed families through unemployment thrust upon them by the monetarist policies of Governments from Thatcher through to Cameron and Clegg's.

Tell a lie often enough and it becomes truth, the Nazi propagandists taught them.

These policies have ensured those who own medical "providers" profit hugely. Some of these companies were formed before the English NHS was tore apart by the Tories and LibDems but who waited patiently until the legislation was thrust into law and now who are buying up the profitable parts of the NHS and are profiting by charging the tax payer exhorbitant amounts of money. Some were American Companies that in anticipation, many of those who you vote for, bought stock in. Insider dealing?

Your politicians have nothing on the Nick Leeson's of this world.

This Government has pushed millions of children below the poverty line while giving tax breaks - and actual tax money to billionaires.

Their politics of envy have led to despair and desperation - suicides and stress related deaths through their ATOS and bedroom tax programmes.

Research has shown that even during the so called boom years of Blair and Thatcher, there have never been enough jobs for everyone. Yet Cameron and his ministers talk about people languishing on benefit as if it were the fault of the unskilled, poor worker.

As if it were the fault of the poor immigrant asking for asylum from Governments who want them dead.

Or the poor immigrant who comes here to find safe, unionised, reasonably paid work away from the Primark, Walmart etc sweatshops in which they could die, chained to their sewing machine making cheap clothes that gives us the impression we have wealth?

Slave workers who die to clothe our poor or "throw away fashionable?"

So- the politics of envy... by stealing money from the poor- chipping away at the small funds needed to keep people above the breadline; impoverishing people and making this narrative of skivers and scroungers and thieving immigrants a prerequisite of political discourse, could someone explain to me what envy is?

Is it political voices saying the gap between the rich and poor is immoral?

Is it the voices who say no child should live in poverty regardless of how difficult their mother or father are finding it to get work?

Or is it the political voices saying that poor people have it too good? 

The bedroom tax march, Glasgow

Stop press! Unionist Labour MP Ian Davidson caught on camera lying about his role in the allowing of passing of legislation in Westminster that implimented this dreadful tax? Watch the short video HERE and read the Hansard record of him taking the Labour line of abstention (recorded as absence) which meant the supposed party of the working class ALLOWED THIS LEGISLATION PASS WITHOUT OPPOSITION.
(information via Wings Over Scotland)

5000 angry anti-bedroom tax demonstrators rallied against the Tory/Liberal democrat government attacks on the vulnerable on Saturday.

The rally- one of hundreds of such rallies throughout the UK, went unreported by the billionaire and millionaire owned and controlled media.

After the rally, the SSP held a meeting which was attended by nearly seventy people at which they heard first person accounts of the effects the dreadful welfare attacks will have on their health and well being. Glasgow City Council is at present rolling out an image overhaul as "Glasgow the Nurturing City," yet the New Labour controlled council has not said it will save tenants from being made homeless by this pre-victorian style tax. This is less than nurturing- it is outright murderous.

SSP spokes person, Richie Venton said, "People are already going without meals to ensure their children are fed and clothed. Pensioners are already suffering hypothermia trying to make their money balance with each new billionaire owned energy company hike in fuel prices. Winter mortality is climbing to new heights because of the murderers Iain Duncan Smith, Cameron, Clegg and Osborne and their greedy cronies and hangers on in Westminster.

What should also not be forgotten is that this tax was designed by Gordon Brown and his New Blue Labour mob.

The only way to rid us of future poll taxes, bedroom taxes or breath taxes (or whatever new scheme the billionaires come up with to bleed more and more money from the pockets of the poor and vulnerable) is to vote Yes in the Independence Referendum next year. Yes to a fair, democratic, socialist Scotland. Yes is a step closer to our socialist republic. Yes is a kicking out of the greed and nastiness of the Westminster corporation owned Tories, Liberal Democrats and New Blue Labour."

Watch "Bedroom tax protest, Glasgow 30th March 2013" on YouTube

Bedroom tax... From Twitter...

From SNP MP Angus Robertson via twitter last night:

RT @MorayMP:

Only four out of 59 Scottish MPs voted for bedroom tax:

@DavidMundellMP TORY
@MichaelMooreMP LIBDEM
@acarmichaelmp LIBDEM

**@joswinson** OUR MP, A LIBDEM. 

It's time for Jo to go.

The only way to stop the London based Tories from wreckng Scotland again is a YES vote next year.