Campaign support forPaisley mum

Campaigners have been out in force to back the Scottish Socialist Party’s bid to have Paisley mum Sandra Webster elected at May’s council poll.

The party’s Renfrewshire branch has been busy campaigning in support of the 54-year-old, who is standing in Paisley South East ward.

Canvassers backing Sandra’s election bid say they have received positive feedback from residents as they hit the campaign trail, but warn the focus of their main campaign, fuel poverty, is just one of the problems ahead for many locals.

We told last week how Sandra - mum to poorly 21-year-old son Lucas who is facing a kidney transplant and Callum, who has Asperger’s and Cerebral Palsy - says increasing domestic energy costs are taking the UK’s standard of living “back to the 70s”.

Sandra, a pre-payment gas customer told how she fears she will not be able to heat her home enough to keep her sons warm because of the 54 per cent price hike leaving her family in a “dire” situation.

She also told how she has been forced to seek help from food banks to make ends meet.

But campaigning Sandra said: “In speaking to older people on the doorstep the prospect of rising prices across all areas is a real worry for those on fixed incomes.

“The elderly in particular are worried and younger family are increasingly limited in what they can do to reassure them that they will be sufficiently able to be supportive.’ Pensioner poverty is now a very real prospect for some and the difficult ‘heating or eating’ dilemma is very much on the horizon.”

Fellow canvasser John Miller added: “What we are seeing is a sustained attack on the elderly.

“The national measures of inflation skip over the fact that food and fuel, where the less affluent have to spend most of their income, are key drivers of inflation and in those areas it runs much higher than the whole basket of goods on which the national measures are based.

“The abandonment of the pensions triple lock which guarantees pensioner incomes has broken the promises of governments, and elderly people who were already in a precarious position are now in real fear of the future.

“That is no way for a caring society to treat those who gave given so much. Older people should not be living in fear.”