By That Letter:
Next week, members of the House of Lords will
debate the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill.
The Bill will mean that for each of the next
three years, most financial support for families will increase by no more than
1 per cent, regardless of how much prices rise.
This is a change that will have a deeply
disproportionate impact on families with children, pushing 200,000 children
into poverty. A third of all households will be affected by the Bill, but
nearly nine out of 10 families with children will be hit.
These are children and families from all walks of
life. The Children’s Society calculates that a single parent with two children,
working on an average wage as a nurse would lose £424 a year by 2015. A couple
with three children and one earner, on an average wage as a corporal in the
British Army, would lose £552 a year by 2015.
However, the change will hit the poorest the
hardest. About 60 per cent of the savings from the uprating cap will come from
the poorest third of households. Only 3 per cent will come from the wealthiest
third.
If prices rise faster than expected, children and
families will no longer have any protection against this. This transfers the
risk of high inflation rates from the Treasury to children and families, which
is unacceptable.
Children and families are already being hit hard
by cuts to support, including those to tax credits, maternity benefits, and
help with housing costs. They cannot afford this further hardship penalty. We
are calling on the House of Lords to take action to protect children from the
impact of this Bill.
The bishops and their entourage in the Lords might let Cameron have the benefit cap (not wanted by the Lib Dems), or the redefinition of marriage (not wanted by much of his own party), but not both. Either way, he would be screwed. Ushering in a Miliband Government which, frankly, wouldn't do either.
The bishops and their entourage in the Lords might let Cameron have the benefit cap (not wanted by the Lib Dems), or the redefinition of marriage (not wanted by much of his own party), but not both. Either way, he would be screwed. Ushering in a Miliband Government which, frankly, wouldn't do either.
Miliband wouldn't introduce gay marriage?
ReplyDeleteWhat was he and his party doing voting for it then? Especially as it was a Government measure.
Cameron relied on Miliband to get it through the Commons.
Because it's there. They would never have put it there. They never did. They never will.
ReplyDeleteThe parliamentary blocking of it will be up the corridor by people who have just declared, "Vote Labour, so long as Labour is economically left-wing enough." The position of their Catholic counterparts since time immemorial.
Yes, the Bishops "up the corridor" seem to have turned into the unofficial Labour Press Office.
ReplyDeleteAs Peter Hitchens remarked, "the problem with the Bishops is that they appear to have confused the welfare state with the Kingdom of Heaven".
No, they just know the history and theology of these things. Whereas you, like some creature of the de facto schismatic Catholic New Right in the United States, do not.
ReplyDeleteWhen even the C of E is quite this opposed to the Tories, then might it, just conceivably, occur to them that, you know, they are the ones with the problem?
Add in the, not unconnected, hostility to them in the deep countryside these days, and among the upper middle classes over things like the withdrawal of Child Benefit. They no longer have any constituency. None.
That will almost be true in the technical sense come 2015, with a Labour majority of over 80, and with UKIP giving so many Tory seats to the Lib Dems that the two Con Dem parties will be given parity in parliamentary procedures.
That is utterly hilarious.
ReplyDeleteYou do realise the benefits cap has majority public support and was passed by a massive Commons majority, right?
A "history and theology" that supports the notion of increasing benefits, while the taxpayers funding them, see their wages stagnate?
Sounds like pretty dodgy "theology" to most people.
UKIP speaks.
ReplyDeleteLet the deeply disaffected upper and middle middle classes, the borderline insurrectionary countryside, and the heirs of the toast to "Church and King", take note. You are just Thatcherism in Exile. Nothing more.
But if not you as their means to removing Tory MPs (though not to electing any of yours), then who? I'll be posting on that later today.
Except the "deeply disaffected" working classes and middle classes support the benefit cap, Dave.
ReplyDeleteSo your on the wrong side of public opinion.
They are going to vote Labour in enormous numbers no matter what in 2015.
ReplyDeleteIt certainly won't be because of the benefit cap.
ReplyDeleteThats already passed the Commons by a big majority.
That one is almost comical.
ReplyDeleteGo to bed.
Could anybody imagine gay marriage being legalized in the era of Old Labour, or more generally, in the era before neoliberalism? No, of course not. Something changed decades ago, and the fault cannot be placed upon the shoulders of the old economic left.
ReplyDeleteWhen you reject the State's role in preserving the family from the ravages of the free market, the case for gay marriage becomes much easier to make.