Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott calls out the anti Corbyn Labour faction:
“Malnourished children with grey skin filling their pockets with food from the school canteen. A mother using tissues because she can’t afford tampons as she needs to pay for heat for her home. A woman dying of a heart attack after waiting 35 hours in a hospital corridor. This isn’t Dickensian Britain. This is life today under the Conservatives.
It’s nearly eight years since Labour lost power to the Tories.
On May 12, 2010, Britain took a different course.
A course that would put ideology before reason, dogma before compassion and selfishness before solidarity.
Cameron and Osborne, with their useful lackey Nick Clegg, introduced an age of austerity.
Where the richest and broadest shoulders weren’t forced to carry the weight, but the “just about managing” were.
Where the wealthy and big businesses got tax cuts but the working poor saw their benefits slashed.
And where students faced record education debts.
They were obsessed with cutting the deficit, built up after Labour had to protect the banks from collapsing after the financial crash of 2008 and the devastating impact that would have had on the economy.
But the Tories’ “spending review” was all about slashing funding across the board.
Our nurses, teachers, police officers and fire crews saw their pay frozen for three years and then capped below inflation.
Valued public sector workers took a real-terms pay cut, with nurses seeing as much as 14 per cent stripped from their wages.
Our councils have seen their funding cut by nearly 50 per cent since 2010. These cutbacks, combined with an ageing population, have created the perfect storm of a social care crisis.
Sixty pence of every £1 you spend on council tax is having to pay for social care, and it’s nowhere near enough to fund the £4billion black hole needed to provide care for our elderly.
This is leading to councils like Tory-run Northamptonshire starting to go bankrupt, with central government funding to provide local services facing a near-£6billion shortfall by 2020.
Meanwhile our NHS is on its knees. Labour’s performance targets are being broken or axed and there’s a shortage of 100,000 staff. On top of that, the NHS faces a £20billion funding gap by the end of 2022. That means more cuts.
Then look to our education. More than 1,000 Sure Start Centres – giving our kids a great start in life and allowing mums to go back to work – have been closed, and 140,000 of our poorest kids will lose out on free school dinners.
And crime? 20,000 police officers lost. Now crime is on the up and 50 people have been murdered on the streets of London since January.
Tory cuts have consequences. And it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who are hit hardest. It pains me to see what this country has become under the Tories.
But it hurts me more that a small group of Labour MPs is hellbent on preventing the change of government we so desperately need.
From backing the Government’s line on the Salisbury attacks without conclusive evidence, to staying in the Single European Market, they rebel against Labour’s line time and time again.
Their actions publicly destabilise Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership and threaten the chances of Labour’s candidates in the local elections and beyond.
So do us a favour. Shut up and let those who want to fight for the people who need Labour in government to get on with it.
United we stand.
Divided we’ll fail.”
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