Ed Miliband's Happy New Year to the Hardest Hit

Now Ed Miliband gets tough with onslaught against "evil" of benefits scroungers

Happy New Year to the genuinely sick, disabled and hardest hit in society.

Labour joins ConDem's vicious rhetoric of recent months, tarring everyone genuinely unable to work, or unemployed through lack of jobs in the current economic cuts, with the same stigmatising brush as the 0.5% of claimants who aren't genuine.

Why don't they root out this tiny minority once and for all? So the genuine, struggling 99.5% of citizens can be freed from vitriol and opprobrium they have never deserved?

Either this article outlines a parroted-for-votes, tabloid-licking ignorant whine that shows no basic understanding of issues we expect from the politicians we all elect, or it is sinister in the extreme. This is not even an intelligent ploy to win Labour votes!

Evil or plain stupid? You can't have it both ways.

Many today are exasperated beyond measure, from every shade of the political spectrum. The "facts" here are hyped half-truths and downright lies. The real policies to move us forward are conspicuous by their absence.

What a cruel joke to remember how Kaliya Franklin (@Bendygirl) used all her strength, persistence and perspicacity to show Miliband the difference between "scroungers" and the genuinely disabled and chronically or fluctuatingly sick. Watch again, incredulous as you may be after today's U-Turn from Ed Miliband's moral compass here 

Kaliya Franklin, from her wheelchair at the 2011 Labour Party Conference last September, won the argument with Miliband so recently, he cannot possibly claim to have forgotten his pledges and promises in the wake of their meeting so soon. Shame on him.

Here he blithely regales us with his New Year Message for 2012:

"When politicians shrug their shoulders in the face of other people’s despair, they are not just abdicating responsibility, they are making clear choices. That is as true now as it was in the Great Depression during the 1930s." Politics can make a difference: Ed Miliband New Year Message

With the quote above, he surely writes his own political epitaph.

With no difference now discernible between the major parties' lines about the most vulnerable in society, we must look elsewhere for compassion to carry us through what we can be sure are desperate days. Days that put me in mind of words ex-Laureate Ted Hughes wrote in his poem 'November', still true about the trials faced by so many this January.

Only Hughes was just capturing the merciless weather. Animals caught by poachers or gamekeepers hung helpless but stoical on a fence. This is hate treatment meted out to vulnerable, ordinary human beings with no redress or resources to fight back, in many cases. But the tide has to turn one day.


In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape,
Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests,
Patient to outwait these worst days that beat
Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.