Labour's Green Industrial Revolution

We need #RealChange to tackle the #ClimateEmergency.
Labour has a plan to do exactly that, our GREEN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
Read about it by CLICKING HERE.

Jeremy Corbyn's New Year Message

I think it’s fair to say, that 2016 is a year that will live long in all our memories.

It saw twelve months of enormous change not just in Britain but the world.

But the New Year gives all the opportunity to start afresh.

One of the best things about my job as Leader of the Labour Party is meeting some fantastic people all over the country. But every day I see the political system letting down the people of this country; how decisions made in Westminster are making people’s lives harder. Whether that’s elderly people not receiving the care at home they deserve, putting huge strain on them and their family, or whether it’s the people waiting longer in A&E or on trolleys because our National Health Service and social care system is at breaking point, despite the best efforts of the wonderful and dedicated staff.  Whether it’s the homeless families who are being priced out of a housing market that only works for the few. This Christmas, 120,000 children didn’t have a home to call their own. That’s scandalous. And it’s damaging those young people’s formative years. Our children also need a first class education for everyone, not just for a privileged few.

 As well as insecure housing there is massive insecurity at work too. Millions of people can’t plan their lives because whether on temporary or zero hours contracts they don’t know what job or what hours they’ll have from day to day, week to week or month to month. And for many, pay is so low that it doesn’t make ends meet.

2016 will be defined in history by the referendum on our EU membership. People didn’t trust politicians and they didn’t trust the European Union. I understand that. I’ve spent over 40 years in politics campaigning for a better way of doing things, standing up for people, taking on the establishment, and opposing decisions that would make us worse off.

We now have the chance to do things differently. To build an economy that invests and works for everyone across all our nations and regions.

Labour accepts and respects the result of the referendum. We won’t be blocking our leaving the European Union, but we won’t stand by. Those in charge today have put the jobs market, housing, the NHS and social care in crisis. We can’t let them mess this up. It’s about everyone’s future. A Brexit that protects the bankers in the City and continues to give corporate handouts to the biggest companies is not good enough.

Labour was founded to stand up for people, and we founded the institutions that do that day in, and day out, like our NHS. We are the party that listens to you and makes Britain better. Let’s do that, together, in 2017.

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to our South East Regional Conference (1) The Problem

"We meet after the global wake-up call of Tuesdays US presidential election...

      Whether in the US or the UK people feel left behind. Marginalised by an economic system that makes them work harder for less, while hoovering up ever greater rewards for a small elite.
People are right to be angry with our failed economic system, falling living standards and rising inequality.
     Young people today find it ever harder to get a home of their own. Harder to find good secure jobs. Landed in lifelong debt simply for trying to get an education.  Older people see their children and grandchildren struggling. Their libraries and community services cut. Their friends’ social care worsen. They’ve seen politicians privatise what once belonged to everybody and paid the higher bills and higher fares as a result.
     And if we don’t step forward and offer real solutions that meet the needs of our time then into the vacuum step the merchants of hate and blame. They see the problem, but instead of offering solutions to make people’s lives better, they offer someone to blame. Nigel Farage blames immigrants yet offers not a single practical proposal to put a penny more into the NHS. He actually wants to privatise our NHS, a service that now relies on hard-working migrants to keep going. The Tories bandied around terms like ‘scrounger’ and ‘skiver’, whipping up division against the unemployed and people with disabilities. And in the US we’ve had the shocking spectacle of Donald Trump’s election campaign, which found an unending list of people to blame: women, black people,
Mexicans, Muslims, military veterans. Everyone except the billionaire class of tax dodgers to which he himself belongs.
     However, we should remember that Donald Trump tapped into real problems: stagnating or falling wages, underfunded public services, insecure work and housing, years of being left behind and neglected, frustration that your children’s prospects look bleaker and anger at a political elite that doesn’t listen. But instead of offering real solutions, or the resources to make them work, he offered only someone to blame. Everyone, that is, apart from those actually responsible for a broken economy and a failed political system.
     The Tories do the same. They have opened the door to UKIP and fanned the flames of fear.
     Theresa May, as Home Secretary, fed the idea that immigration was the real problem; made promises she knew they couldn’t deliver about slashing numbers and whipped up hate with ‘Go Home’ vans. No wonder she didn’t even temper her welcome to Donald Trump. She has used the same strategy herself; if delivered with more refinement.
     We have no idea how Donald Trump proposes, as he has said, to “make America great again”, and Theresa May’s Tories offer slogans, but not solutions, for most people in Britain. We won’t tackle the damage done by elite globalisation just by leaving the EU. We won’t ‘take back control’ unless we take on the corporate vested interests that control our energy, our transport and have infiltrated our public services.
     One thing is for sure, neither billionaire Donald Trump nor the billionaire-backed Tories have any interest in giving people back control or reining in the predatory excess of a globalized free-for-all.

But Labour is in the business of real solutions to the problems and failures that Trump and the Tories are unable to address."

Labour's vision

Labour’s vision is one where everyone who works hard is rewarded and where broken markets are reformed so that vested interests serve the public and not the other way round. We want to ensure that the next generation does better than the last and that wages are protected and not undercut by immigration. 

Like every country round the world, Britain is susceptible to waves of change which create opportunities as well as challenges. The question is who is best to control these forces on behalf of everyday people. The answer is Labour. 

Labour pledge to reform zero-hour contracts

One of the ways the Coalition massage unemployment figures is by encouraging zero-hour contracts, which by definition offer no guarantee of work or income. 

There may be some advantages to these contracts - for example seasonal work or where it suits the worker - but the lack of regulation leaves the door wide open to abuse.

The next Labour Government will give new rights to people with zero-hour contracts:

• to demand a fixed hours contract when they have worked regular hours over six months with the same employer
• to receive a fixed hours contract automatically when they have worked regular hours over a year (unless they choose to opt out)
• to be protected from employers forcing them to be available at all hours, insisting they cannot work for anyone else, or cancelling shifts at short notice without compensation

This announcement underlines Labour's commitment to improve living standards and help businesses build a more productive, successful economy across the UK.

It really is this simple

The scandal of Government premium rate help lines

Valerie Vaz, Labour MP for Walsall South, has quietly been finding out how much the Government makes from premium rate lines.  Each Department has been asked in turn.  The one that is going to stir up a storm (according to today's Daily Telegraph, is dear old Work and Pensions.  Their appalling record is listed in full at Hansard here.

There are 180 premium lines (and no ordinary phone number alternatives), so unless you are a benefits expert you are very likely to have to ring more than one at up to 41p a minute.  150,000 rang the Bereavement Hotline (there are no bereavement benefits) and 4 million rang about the Social Fund, presumably to be told "How can you claim to have no money when you can afford to ring this number?"  Oh how Duncan Smith and the lads must have laughed!

It's the ultimate Tory dream - not only taking money from the poor but turning a profit on them at the same time!

Overall, Government departments receive 130 million premium rate calls a year.  Cable & Wireless, who operate the system, make a cool million per annum from the so-called service.  Have to say they missed a trick, though.  They should have set up a dedicated number for Bedroom Tax inquiries and halved the deficit overnight.