Thursday, March 18, 2010

Gordon Brown and the Labour Party's election bribe to buy the votes of the eldery is defeated in the House of Lords, spin loses over substance

















Dear All

Politicians will promise you the earth in the run up to an election.

It is the one time where the Labour and Tory Parties think your opinions are important to them as they try to get elected to Westminster.

Once in, they could care less; they wouldn’t speak to you or answer your questions unless it is for party political advantage after that.

As an electoral bribe, Gordon Brown and Labour were punting a plan to offer free care at home for the elderly in England.

The idea was ‘policy on the hoof’ with enough holes in it to drive a truck through it.

That policy gimmick has now run aground as a series of defeats in the House of Lords blew it out of the water.

Concerns range about cost, impact on council budgets and accusations of electioneering by Brown.

This has led peers to block the introduction of the Personal Care at Home Bill, it was envisaged that this would be up and running by October 2010.

Both the Tories and Liberal Democrat peers supported amendments to delay implementation and commissioned an independent review of the costs.

The Bill is really a response to how unpopular the Labour Party is which forced them to try and buy specific groups of the electorate.

After the defeats, Labour Ministers said last night that they would try to overturn the defeats in the Commons but Parliamentary time is fast running out as the election is set to officially kick off in the next few weeks.

Lord Best is a crossbench peer and president of the Local Government Association; he is the one who has thrown the spanner into the works with good reason.

Where is the £250 million going to come from by Councils who are stretched to the limit by tight budgets?

Even Labour backbenchers are not happy as Lord Lipsey said;

“I can’t recall in my lifetime an example of a piece of legislation that has so completely caused a British government to ignore the precepts of good government”.

In Gordon Brown’s attempt to buy the election he forgot that substance is more important than spin.

Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem health spokesman, said;

“This is a humiliating defeat for the Government on a shabby, shameless and short-term measure, which would do nothing to heal a social care system in crisis. This vote marks the death knell of a cynical attempt to buy the votes of older people.”

It is pretty much recognised by all, this measure is nothing more than electioneering, a cheap shabby stunt, totally unworthy.

Gordon Brown will promise anything except the one thing the people want.

Universally they want him to go.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

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