Tuesday July 1st 2025
Christine Grahame MSP
Christine Grahame MSP writes her monthly column for Midlothian View
I watch Sir Keir Starmer regularly U-turn so I think he’d do well on Strictly. Waltz? Tango? Quick Step? He U-turned on the Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners (which I welcome) and he has now U-turned (in part) with more than 120 of his own MPs set to wreck his proposals cutting benefits to the vulnerable and disabled.
Actually, he has in some respects made it worse so that new claimants will have their benefit entitlement slashed so two classes of disabled. The haves and the have nots.
Angela Rayner, allegedly working-class labour, defended this legislation, though she has been pretty quiet recently as she has more than egg on her face as some of these cruel cuts are ditched because she has already ditched her street cred as flag bearer for socialism. She always had only a walk-on part-a token role- following in the footsteps of her predecessor Two Jags Prescott ,remember him. She could be produced like a rabbit out of the hat to proclaim “look we are really labour”. Not any more. What has not been ditched of course is the the Two Child Benefit Cap which prevents claiming for any “additional” child.
There are some I know who will complain that these folk should only have two children. Well don’t punish the children and we actually we need, especially in Scotland, to increase our young population. We are top heavy with the elderly and as we grow older and live for longer, which is a good thing, we require additional help in the health and care sectors.
I know myself, now in my eighties, that I attend the GP, the pharmacy increasingly. Without enough young people then the workforce shrinks, tax take drops and we don’t have enough tax to pay for our NHS and the care sector let alone people to staff our hospitals.
So, we need children. Because it is right, because it helps children, the SNP government is getting rid of that “cap”. Now that is social democracy in action.
Another U-turn for labour would be for the UK government to reverse its ridiculously restrictive immigration and visa policies.
Sir Keir Starmer has refused to moderate these to plug gaps in Scotland’s workforce. Last but certainly not least there are those additional National Insurance levies on employers. I said these would impact on food costs as these charges would be passed down the food chain from the growers, the transporters, the packagers, to the supermarket shelf, to our trolleys.
I take no pleasure in saying “ah telt ye” but it’s a fact. What next from this hopeless so-called labour government which begins its reign with attacks on pensioners and disabled?
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