Research released last week demonstrates that Labour’s plan to cut pensions would cost an estimated 16,000 Crawley pensioners £234 a year.
Now we know that when Labour say they would cut welfare, but refuse to back any of the Government’s welfare reforms, what they really mean is they would choose to cut the Basic State Pension over capping benefits.
Having opposed the housing benefit cap despite previous situations whereby families had been housed at the taxpayers’ expense in million pound mansions; having opposed the £26,000 benefits cap which ensures that no family can earn more from benefits than the average hardworking family does; and having opposed the welfare uprating cap which ensures that benefit increases, which had been due to rise by 2.2 percent, were capped at 1 percent in line with the average public sector worker – Labour are clear as to where the burden should fall to claw us out of the financial mess which they created.
Labour are not looking to cap spending on benefits – they want more spending on benefits, meaning more borrowing and more debt. Exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
As ever, therefore, the Labour emphasis is on pensioners who have worked hard all their lives and starting with an end to this Government’s triple lock which ensures the Basic State Pension always rises by whatever is the highest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent.
Abolishing this Government’s triple lock would take £234 a year away from about 16,000 Crawley pensioners – people who have worked hard all their lives and who depend on their Basic State Pension to pay their bills and put food on the table.
This is about a simple choice: the Conservatives want to support pensioners who have saved hard all their lives. Labour want to squeeze what they perceive as ‘untapped’ savings – in other words ‘easy money’.
Miliband’s latest review of the welfare system is just about more old Labour: empty rhetoric smattered with more spending, more borrowing and more debt. Hardworking people would pay the price as they always do under those ‘Big Spenders’.
Henry Smith MP