Dr Peter Daw asks whose side Nigel Huddleston is really on – and why his election leaflet says “Conservative” in such small letters.
Residents of Evesham and Droitwich constituency will have begun to receive our local MP’s election leaflet. It is comic to see the lengths to which he has gone to distance himself from his party. The front is a greenish hue, not Tory true blue, and the word ‘Conservative’ is buried in tiny type rather than blazoned with pride. This is, of course, understandable since the party’s record over the last 14 years is, quite literally, indefensible!
However, the idea of a Conservative Treasury minister projecting himself as working ‘for the people’ is equally laughable. His government has raised taxes to historically high levels; seen house prices and rents rise to unaffordable levels; failed to invest adequately in the NHS (millions on waiting lists), education (per pupil funding no higher than in 2010 and teacher shortages) or local authorities, on whose services ‘the people’ so obviously depend. The claim that the economy is now ‘turning a corner’ fails to mention the appalling skid and crash brought about by Liz Truss’ reckless budget or the wrong turn of a hard Brexit, both of which his government was responsible for and which have led to many of the current economic problems.
The last 14 years have seen a huge increase in already high levels of inequality, with the government allowing their friends and donors in hedge funds to enrich themselves through poorly regulated privatisation of social care provision, children’s homes, probation services and prisons, water companies and so much more. Meanwhile the quality of the service to ‘the people’ in all these areas has plummeted, sewage pollutes our rivers and seas and prisoners are released early because the gaols are full. Then, to cap it all, the leaflet boasts of a better child benefit system for higher earners while failing to mention the inadequate benefit system and the cruelties of universal credit deductions that have led to the normalisation of food banks and Victorian levels of child poverty.
‘Working for the people’? I don’t think so, Mr Huddleston!
Dr Peter Daw, Droitwich and Evesham Labour Party