Corbyn’s Labour refuses to treat voters like adults
YOU will doubtless have seen that Labour’s election bribe to students past and present has been well and truly exposed for the shameless piece of tosh it always was.
A week before polling day Jeremy Corbyn promised to “deal with” the £100billion debt built up from student loans.
Now that the election is over Labour has said it’s just an ambition. First Angela Rayner, the party’s education spokeswoman, said there were “no plans” to write off the money. Then on Wednesday shadow cabinet member Sarah Champion said it won’t be “possible” to find the money because the Treasury would never let the party carry out such an expensive pledge. Shameless, indeed.
But if you think that’s bad, well, you ain’t seen nothing. Because there is no better illustration of the utter shamelessness with which Labour conducts its affairs than the party’s response to Wednesday’s news that, in short, we are going to have to work longer before drawing a state pension.
Earlier this year the Government received a report it had commissioned from John Cridland, a former directorgeneral of the employers’ organisation the CBI. He had been asked to examine whether, when and how the state pension age should be raised.
The original schedule was for the Government to respond to Mr Cridland’s recommendations by May 7 but the election put paid to that deadline and instead the response was given on Wednesday. So it is bizarre of Labour’s pension spokeswoman Debbie Abrahams to claim that the announcement came out of the blue. Far from coming out of nowhere it was overdue by more than two months.
HER response to the substance of the statement by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions David Gauke was still more bizarre: Ms Abrahams described it as “astonishing”.
Mr Gauke confirmed that the rise in the pension age to 68 will be brought forward from the originally planned date of 2044 to one between 2037 and 2039.
Note my use of the word “confirmed” because all Mr Gauke was doing was simply