New Labour Began the Attacks on the Disabled and ‘Welfare Reform’ – the Tories and Clegg are Finishing Off

The story below has been covered, both in the Guardian and the Sunday Mirror, though not those disgusting tabloids which were cheer leaders for Hitler in the 1930’s – the Daily Hate Mail and the Daily Express – the latter owned appropriately by Britain’s biggest pornographer, Richard Desmond.

The story of people being repeatedly called back to medical tests when they win an appeal, although it is obvious that their condition has not improved, is a scandal to which the Coalition Government is turning a blind eye. This was what Clegg’s Orange revolution inside the Liberal Democrats meant. This is the free market at work. As the so-called left of the Lib. Dems. collapses, like the bunch of opportunists they always were, we have a situation where there is consensus between all 3 major establishment parties.

But we should not forget that New Labour has been wholeheartedly behind the government’s ‘welfare reform’. Not surprising given that ‘welfare reform’ was begun by New Labour. Shadow Minister for Welfare, Stephen Timms has made clear his support for the principle behind the Government’s savage attack on Welfare. As he says on his own website, ‘The Bill’s basic idea is good….. Disabled people are particularly worried. I support reform of Disability Living Allowance (DLA).’

Reform of course means the abolition of Disability Living Allowance, a lifeline to the disabled that the John Major Government introduced! New Labour proposed in its 2010 Green Paper on Care to abolish Attendance Allowance (DLA for the 65s and over and the Tory/Libs abolished it for those receiving the Mobility component of DLA who are in care.

Our first demand should be that Miliband lives up to his claim that Labour represents an opposition by sacking Timms. Timms is a Tory and he should join his true friends.

The same goes for all the other New Labour ‘advisers’ to the Tories on Welfare – Frank Field, John Hutton and Alan Milburn. If Ed Miliband is serious that Labour is an Opposition then he should sack these turncoats and traitors and appoint someone like John McDonnell as shadow Welfare Minister.

And at the same time we should be stepping up the campaign to oppose the attempt to make claimants and working class people pay for the bankers’ crisis.

Tony Greenstein