People who read my rant about The Labour Party last week will be surprised to know that yesterday I attended the Labour People’s Policy Forum in Birmingham and put questions to Labour MPs. I won’t be voting Labour any time soon but for all of the past actions and the betrayal of Labour, they are likely to be in power in 2015 and so I jumped at the chance to influence their next manifesto.
I put questions to Caroline Flint, Maria Eagle and Mary Creagh about income security and benefits. I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the answers but I was pleased when Maria Eagle told me that demonising disabled people was the worst thing that the government had done. I also asked them if they would ever consider basic income but the answer was politician-speak for “no”. (It took a few more words than that.)
In another forum Emma Round managed to get a round of applause for suggesting that Labour should apologise for ESA, the work capability assessment and Atos.
The main event of the day was a Q&A session with Ed Miliband. The audience was made up almost entirely of people who were not members of Labour, which I think was a brave decision especially since the first few questions were very angry. It opened with a demand that Labour challenge the Welfare Reform Act, calling it an insult to a developed country and an assault on its people. The second speaker gave a call to protect the NHS, saying “I work in the NHS, I believe in the NHS but next week I won’t BE in the NHS, I’ll work in public health. Come next week everything that we do and across the NHS is going to go out to tender.” These sentiments got applause and agreement from the audience. Questions followed about education, jobs, equality and much more.
Eventually I got to ask the question which had brought me there through the snow and despite the two hours of awful driving conditions and the resulting cost to my health. I asked Ed Miliband to scrap Personal Independence Payments and keep Disability Living Allowance. I’m afraid the answer was as vague and meaningless as I expected, but I am glad that I got to put the question to him in a public forum.
My question to Ed Miliband
Watch the whole Q&A session with Ed Miliband
The show starts about 44 minutes through the video.
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