VAT

VAT is the most regressive tax we have. It damages middle and low income families and yet it is the first tax of choice, of this Lib/Con coalition government that is shamelessly using VAT as a precursor to their obsession to cutting public expenditure. The Labour Government passed legislation to cut the deficit by 50% in four years but only from 2011-2012 when the recovery to economic growth was secure and increasing VAT to 20% would not have happened under Labour.

Bus Pass

Cutting pensioners Bus Pass entitlement is cruel, punitive, uncaring and damaging to all rural bus travellers. Bus operators could …

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Reckless

Last Tuesday the House was sitting late after 3.a.m. dealing with the Second Reading of the Finance Bill. Yours truly was excused the late night sittings because I will Chair the Bill through its committee stages as the Coalitions’ Emergence Budget is put into law. Unfortunately the history of late night sittings is littered with examples of inebriated politicians who let themselves and their constituents down, with their lack of moderation and control of their drinking. Thankfully they are very small in number but the journalists who are prowling the bars on these occasions, some of whom  showing the same …

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Confidence Vote?

Osborne’s Emergency Budget is becoming more mind blowing by the day. The majority rightwing Conservatives in the coalition are cock-a –hoop at Clegg and his compliant Lib/Dems. Osborne and Cameron think of a number for public services cuts, then double it and smugly watch the accommodating Clegg and his Lib/Dems jump through Tory hoops, selling out the people who voted for him to oppose VAT rises; job losses and frontline public service cuts. 

Because of their Budget, unemployment is set to go up by 1.3 million; threatening a double dip recession. Clegg pathetically believes that now is the time to …

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Budget

Last week’s Tory budget takes our country back 30years. We are heading back to the dark years of the early 80’s when, for the Tories your unemployment was a price worth paying and when unemployment in this constituency was 30% in places.

When two of Mrs Thatcher’s favourite monetarist gurus, Lord Norman Tebbit and Sir Keith Joseph talked of the need for the unemployed to get on their bikes and leave their families to get jobs in Peter Pan’s never never land; when funding education was to be by Education vouchers (Pupil Premium), i.e. the money goes with the pupil resulting …

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Blame

Having watched the Cameron and Clegg road show unfold since the General Election, the central feature of their Con/Lib coalition economic policy has been to ignore the roots of the global Banking crisis, i.e. the American Banks and the subprime markets meltdown and say that it’s all the fault of Labour and Gordon Brown.

These Ant and Dec look alikes without the Geordie accent with their spurious rhetoric may have fooled the Tory tabloids but the people and certainly the millions of public servants who the Clegg and Cameron Con coalition have sought to demonise are not fooled by them. The …

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