Video of Jeremy Corbyn Pledging to End Universal Credit

This was put up on the official Jeremy Corbyn Channel on YouTube three days ago, on the 29th of September, 2019. In it, Corbyn states that Labour will end Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship policy of Universal Credit. Corbyn says

Our social security system should support people back into work, not punish them and their families. The Tories’ flagship policy, Universal Credit, has caused an explosion of people going to food banks, pushed children into poverty, and even resulted in people dying at the hands of this cruel system. In government Labour will scrap Universal Credit. We’ll end the inhumane sanctions regime. We’ll do away with the ridiculous five-week wait for payments. And never again will any woman have to fill in a form to prove her child was born as a result of rape. Universal Credit is a heartless and cruel policy based on a lie. It wasn’t the sick, the disabled or the vulnerable who caused the financial crash of 2008. It was the bankers. But the architect of Universal Credit, Iain Duncan Smith and the Tory party, chose to give tax cuts to bankers as they dismantle our social security system. Things will change under Labour. We’ll build a society which is compassionate, where support is there for all of us when we need it. And where people come before privilege.

The video shows Corbyn filling boxes in a food bank, as well as the exterior of a jobcentre, snaps of the City of London, and, unfortunately, shots of Iain Duncan Smith in parliament. Viewer discretion is advised.

It’s the same message Corbyn gave at his speech this weekend in Chingford, IDS’ constituency, that provoked the vile little liar, whose policies have killed tens of thousands of disabled and other people, into a ranting reply on YouTube. He claimed that Corbyn’s policy of restoring Social Security would be unjust to taxpayers – this was his first priority – and that it ignored the fact that work is still the best way out of poverty. This is, simply, a lie. It’s based on discredited, bogus research produced by Unum’s pet scientist at their funded centre at Cardiff University. There is a mountain of proper scientific evidence very loudly refuting it. I’ve published some this on my blog, from material put up by Mike over at Vox Political and Kitty S. Jones and other great disability activists. IDS himself has no understanding of poverty whatsoever. He’s an Eton-educated Toff with a country mansion and acres of land in Scotland. Well, actually, it might be his wife’s, but it’s still his.

Despite the press claiming that the Labour party is behind the Tories in the polls, Corbyn’s policies evidently have the Tories rattled. Boris Johnson has started lying again about building 40 more hospitals – in fact only six, and at least one of those isn’t a hospital. Sajid Javid is claiming that he’s going to build up Britain’s infrastructure. All lies, or at least what Mike Yarwood famously called in one of his impressions ‘election promises’.

Don’t be taken in by Tory lies, and the murderous deceit of the right-wing press and Beeb. Universal Credit is a colossal failure and the cause of more grinding poverty. It is there not because it works, but because it keeps the poor down and so cements the wealthy elite, from whose ranks BoJob and IDS come, in their wealth, power and position. Get them out, and Corbyn in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May Makes Another Worthless Promise About NHS Funding

Tweezer was in the I yesterday, and she’s in it again today, trying to shore up her popularity by promising to do something about the NHS. This is ailing because she and her fellow Tories have done everything they can to cut funding, prior to the Health Service’s eventual privatisation. Which they’re also proceeding with at a rate of knots. Already, 70 per cent of NHS contracts go to private firms, and the Tories want them to run whole regions. With such piecemeal tactics do they indeed to destroy this greatest and most precious of all our national institutions.

But the latest crisis is clearly an embarrassment. So she’s promised to ring-fence NHS funding for the next ten years. This has given me a sense of Deja Vue. Now where have I heard that promise before from a Tory?

Ah yes, it was David Cameron before he was elected PM. This was when he and IDS were playing at being more left-wing than the Labour party. So he and the future mass-murderer of the poor and disabled posed as the champions of the NHS, running around protesting against hospital closures. And Cameron had posters put up everywhere promising that he would ring-fence NHS funding, and protect it from the cuts he intended to make as party of his austerity programme.

It sounded good. Too good, and when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. It was what Mike Yarwood once described in one of his impressions way back in the 1970s as ‘election promises’. In other words, a total lie. Once in power, Cameron did a volte face, carried on closing hospitals like his New Labour predecessors, and inflicted further cuts and privatisations on to the NHS.

This is just more of the same. Another empty promise, like all the others May has made and broken in her ignominious tenure of 10 Downing Street.

Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But we won’t be fooled again.

Don’t listen to her lies. Protect the NHS, and vote the Tories out in the May council elections!