Why Labour are Scum

[ska invita]

Working people feel "resentful" because some benefits claimants are "not pulling their weight" and are being "let off the hook", Harriet Harman has said in one of the clearest signals yet that Labour is prepared to tackle the benefits system.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...nefit-claimants-not-pulling-their-weight.html

Miss Harman said one of Labour's key policies is that people should take jobs offered to them after two years on unemployment benefits. She said there were three key principles being examined by the party.

"One is that work should pay, secondly, there should be an obligation to take work, and thirdly that there should be support through a contributory principle for people putting into the system as we all as taking out," she said.

Opinion polls suggest that 67 per cent of voters back the Coalition's efforts to reform the welfare system.

 

[butchersapron]

Look at the way it's framed -' prepared to tackle the beneift system.'

Hope you feel proud articul8. You twat.

 

[DotCommunist]

these cunts aren't even pretending to differ on policy anymore. Tories say something, labour agrees its an issue and follows.

 

[butchersapron]

This is what they've fed the guardian:

Deputy Labour leader's comments come in wake of Philpott case as party plans radical shift over welfare state payouts

This shows they think their poll lead is soft and can be got at via this issue. They are wrong. That's what they spend union members dosh on.

 

[frogwoman]

i could be wrong but could they not also be framing this as an attempt to tackle the "yah boo" culture of the house of commons (ie labour and tories insulting "the right honourable gentlemen" over minutiae) ie a "new era of consensus politics" - its not new but oh well

 

[butchersapron]

Odd reading fw!

 

[J Ed]

i could be wrong but could they not also be framing this as an attempt to tackle the "yah boo" culture of the house of commons (ie labour and tories insulting "the right honourable gentlemen" over minutiae) ie a "new era of consensus politics" - its not new but oh well

I don't think so, Labour rely on that superficial public school boy oppositional atmosphere to differentiate themselves from the other parties with identical policies.

 

[frogwoman]

Odd reading fw!

yer im not saying it's the reason why they're doing it, but i remember they tried to talk about this a few years back!

 

[butchersapron]

yer im not saying it's the reason why they're doing it, but i remember they tried to talk about this a few years back!

Consensus politics is just a phrase used to describe the post-war social-democratic deal up to the early 70s (i,e they both recognised what capital needed and were openly committed to helping it achieve those ends through the state playing a role in 'private' economics) - doesn't mean anything about how these twats talk to each other 'in the big house'. Thatcher was supposed to have ended this consensus politics. It's a nonsense basically.

 

[elbows]

Articles about this sort of thing are mostly disgraceful or unsatisfactory. This one isn't any better, although there is one paragraph that I find slightly more interesting than usual.

As one senior Labour figure puts it: "The welfare state has a legitimacy problem in Britain" because there are too few jobs and "too many crappy jobs" that pay too little and which have to be topped up by benefits. Labour has to go into the next election with a serious, costed and credible plan to boost and transform employment. It will mean spending money not just on getting people into any job, no matter how "crappy", but on training and delivering new skills, as well as regional banks that can funnel capital to new, local businesses.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/05/labour-draw-sting-welfare-or-lose-2015

The obvious problem with this is that impotent rhetoric about better jobs and skills has been worn out over precisely the same period that any 'welfare legitimacy' perception problem emerged. To seriously tackle this issue requires a different economic ideology, one that Labour are unlikely to embrace unless a different world is eventually born due to sustained failure and collapse of the existing system & ideologies. In some way we may have ended up better off if the financial crisis has featured larger implosions, for not enough of the dominant ideologies were destroyed by the acute crisis or the long decay that follows. And what fallout did occur has been channeled down a very narrow banker-hating route. Like nuclear waste it still sits there festering, and could be made use of politically at some point, but there are few signs of this really being made the most of at this point. Hopefully it will come back to haunt them one day, but dont ask me when that is.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Labour Partys dead to me,
Hang them from a fuckin' tree.

I'd rather not risk harming the tree.
I think I'll drill 'em through the knee.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I know the pickaxe works but it takes a lot more work to kill someone with one than it does to use a guillotine. It's also a lot less messy to use a guillotine, and more socially acceptable.

Not as educational as making them dance the lamp-post waltz or allowing them to repay their debt to society in the gulag, though.

 

[Callum91]

Labour's recent Tory agreement and brown nosing makes me glad I cancelled my membership. All their current focus on benefits is disgusting, all to win a few more votes. Scum, the lot of them.

 

[ViolentPanda]

That has all the logic of burning your own house down to get value for money from your insurance payments.

Byrne also (unsurprisingly) is more caught up in perception ("people feel...") than in reason. We know that for more than half the population, over the course of an average life, the various health and social welfare we receive costs more than we put in, and to be perfectly frank, he's merely displaying new Labour's neoliberalism by worrying more about how a minority of people (the couple of hundred thousand swing voters who hold the key to Labour getting back in) perceive that they're not getting enough back. Someone should make it clear to these people that while their contributions allow the govt to keep supplying the bread and the circuses, they're safe. Take away those things, and they won't be safe for long.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Labour's recent Tory agreement and brown nosing makes me glad I cancelled my membership. All their current focus on benefits is disgusting, all to win a few more votes. Scum, the lot of them.

Well quite. Policy formulation is nakedly fixed on appealing to and appeasing "swing voters", not the electorate as a whole. All they care about is power, and currently they believe they can best manouvre toward it by joining the pack of yelping right-wing curs whining about benefits spending.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Liam Byrne doesn't understand the concept of aging.

He doesn't understand or care about anything but power.

 

[Pickman's model]

Not as educational as making them dance the lamp-post waltz or allowing them to repay their debt to society in the gulag, though.

it's quite educational enough for anyone tempted to think like them to deduce that there is a link between the cause of their anti-social behaviour and the effect of their heads being severed from their bodies.

 

[treelover]

Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk said: “If you’re involved in politics and don’t know anyone who chooses to live on benefits instead of working, you need to get out more”.

A supporter of the Conservatives & ...gutter rag newspaper The Sun - he wrote: “The Left has to accept there are some people on the dole that don’t want to work, and we need to have a plan to get them into work.”

Labour MP Simon Danchuk, think he is in Progress

 

[treelover]

By SIMON DANCZUK, Labour MP

George Osborne says we need a welfare debate. I’ve got news for the Chancellor — it’s already happening.

The word on the street in my constituency is way ahead of Westminster — and the Left of my party.

There are plenty of people capable of working in Rochdale that have been parked on benefits for years.

There is nothing to be proud of watching people’s potential waste away, trapped on a life of benefits.

The Left has to accept there are some people on the dole that don’t want to work, and we need to have a plan to get them into work.

Those trapped in welfare dependency will never experience the satisfaction of a hard day’s work.

This is a criminal loss of human potential we should all fight against.]

Article in full from The Sun

 

[frogwoman]

[QUOTEBy SIMON DANCZUK, Labour MP

George Osborne says we need a welfare debate. I’ve got news for the Chancellor — it’s already happening.

The word on the street in my constituency is way ahead of Westminster — and the Left of my party.

There are plenty of people capable of working in Rochdale that have been parked on benefits for years.

There is nothing to be proud of watching people’s potential waste away, trapped on a life of benefits.

The Left has to accept there are some people on the dole that don’t want to work, and we need to have a plan to get them into work.

Those trapped in welfare dependency will never experience the satisfaction of a hard day’s work.

This is a criminal loss of human potential we should all fight against.]

Article in full from The Sun[/quote]

the punitive changes to the welfare system - reduction of in-work benefits, benefits being reduced once you're working a certain number of hours etc - those changes create the "welfare dependency" he's on about.

what a fucking prick

 

[treelover]

contact his office and complain, others have, but very nasty people there though...

 

[treelover]

btw, Progress is clearly a party within a party, like Militant was, so why haven't they been kicked out?

 

[sihhi]

btw, Progress is clearly a party within a party, like Militant was, so why haven't they been kicked out?

Militant was, large or small, a threat to profits of the 100 largest British firms or whatever it was.
Progress is not and will never be. Labour as a capitalist party responds to capitalist signals. My guess is you know all this.

 

[treelover]

"Tom Harris, a shadow environment minister who represents a Glasgow constituency, said welfare dependency was “killing the city”.

He told The Telegraph: “We sometimes allow ourselves to be seen as the party of welfare when clearly we should be trying to be seen as the party of work. We are the Labour Party and not the Benefits Party.”
...
Mr Harris said there a lot of people in his constituency who were “loath to work” because they were better off on benefits, adding that it was not possible to repair communities where large numbers of people were economically inactive.

Mr Harris said he backs Mr Byrne’s calls for a system that links benefits to how much people have contributed through work.

“We [the Labour Party] were not set up as a charity, or a social work organisation. We will always look after the most vulnerable in society, the homeless, the destitute, no other political party will do that,” he said. “But that is not why we are here. That is not our priority. Our priority is working people.”

In an online comment piece for The Telegraph, Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, wrote that the Left should not be “proud” of letting people “languish for years on benefits”.
"

Another Blairite speaks out, note the virulence of the language, nothing about unemployment, disgraceful...

 

[ska invita]

From the new Private Eye re job centres and their fuck you over quota - i typed this out properly once and accidentally deleted so cant be arsed to again, basically Labour are complaining that the Torys are introducing quotas to push people off benefits etc and demanding an investigation. Private Eye have done a freedom of Information request which found that the quotas were introduced in 2006 by Labour, and set at 6% of cases which should be sanctioned of which at least half must "result in decisions adverse to the customer". page 9 issue 1338. Incidentally the new Tory quota is 5%. Maybe the libdems will try and take credit for that reduction!

 

[ymu]

Cunts. Thanks for that ska.

 

[Pickman's model]

Another Blairite speaks out, note the virulence of the language, nothing about unemployment, disgraceful...

i don't see why, in the context of the labour party's history, you see it as disgraceful.

 

[coley]

Where are all these mythical jobs that these disgraceful scroungers are allegedly refusing?

 

[ska invita]

Well quite. Policy formulation is nakedly fixed on appealing to and appeasing "swing voters", not the electorate as a whole. All they care about is power, and currently they believe they can best manouvre toward it by joining the pack of yelping right-wing curs whining about benefits spending.

if this was all an election ploy that would be one thing, but labour have proved that even with a large majoirty in the house and no immediate pressure to act they still came up with these ideas and implemented them

 

[ska invita]

these cunts aren't even pretending to differ on policy anymore. Tories say something, labour agrees its an issue and follows.

With a lot of the stuff on this thread its a case of Labour think-tanking and implementing, Tories carrying on the policies to their logical conclusion and then Labour agreeing again.