Tuesday 9 November 2010

Labours dangerous political game

Just reading Sunny's piece on http://bit.ly/cKRp1c

Suddenly it struke me that labour to me are playing a dangerous game with politics at the moment. With Ed miliband and Douglas alexander saying we will support the coalition where we agree with them is a dangerous position to take i feel. This to me is letting the government and the right wing ideaology dictate the arguement. In sunny's piece he says we have lost the arguement on cuts and how to get down the deficit. I dont beleive we have. There is a growing movement against cuts and even the polls would suggest a growing anxiety amoungst the general public that cuts are being carried out far too fast and far too deep. People for the last 13 years have lived in a good world and have had things pretty good i'd say. Now with things being rolled back and f unding taken away it will take a while but when people finally start realising what is going on the governments populairty will plummit.

At the moment most ordinary people dont feel the cuts are affecting them. Alot of them have good jobs anda car and havent been badly affected. THis is the middle class of this country i'm talking ab out. people around where i live in Hertfordshire. This county i imagine will fair pretty well out of these spending cuts. This highlights to me even more that the cuts have been made on the lower income families and people who are worse off.

The danger of supporting the government on their welfare reforms as labour seem to be largely doing at the moment can be risky as it shows you are being lead in the arguement. You are limited to how you can change the direction of the arguement. I know the governemnt is the party/parties in power but if we are not offering proper fairer reform for the government to consider we will be led down a sticky path.

Do labour need to agree with george osbourne to sound credible on the economy ? i dont think we do. We need to be offering our own cuts as sunny wrongly points out the left is not opposed to every cut. We wouldnt be upset with loosing trident and saving money there. I do like sunny alot but just fear he has been taken by the idea we have to agree with the cuts that are going forward to look credible. I dont beleive we have to. We have been on the defensive for far too long, its time we started offering a real alternative to these massive cuts. Some real ideas how to boost growth and get people back into jobs rather than forcing them. Even otehr political figures including none other than Ken livingstone has publically said he doesnt think getting people back into work by encouraging them to work by picking litter and just getting them used to the idea of work is a bad thing. No its not ken but when your going about it and making unemployed people who may have not had much choice in the matter like criminals that is wrong and we must oppose this idea.

When people are being made unemployed from their jobs and are making every attempt to find work but are simply not getting the luck due to lack of new jobs being created you can hardly treat them like benifit scrounging criminals which David cameron and his governemnt seem to like to do.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Mark, You make a load of really good points, but surely it would be just wrong to attack policies for the sake of attacking. Where there is some consensus, we need to take back the initiative on welfare though, and stop the demonisation and forced labour of the millions of people unemployed. These people are unemployed for many reasons, but treating them like criminals is just wrong, and forcing people to do community service is doing just that!

    Great blog, really well written mate!

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  2. hi peter thanks for the kind words, much appreciated, i love political discussion and debate. really gets me going.
    Do you have a blog too ? that i could follow ? would love to read more of your views in greater detail

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