Mhairi Black's Maiden Speech
Nice delivery, shame about the content!
Fawning journalists, still raving about this speech, might just wish to consider resurrecting their critical faculties and perhaps get around to asking Ms Black a few awkward questions.
For example:
Who are the job centre staff who terrify and trick people and who call them liars?
Who was the unemployed man who didn't eat or drink for five days and who was sanctioned for tardiness having fainted on a bus?
What had happened to the benefits money that should have been spent on food?
By how much was this man sanctioned?
Where is the evidence that "one in five children" in Ms Black's constituency "go to bed hungry"?
How does she explain the high levels of obesity, gambling, and alcohol consumption in some parts of her constituency?
Does she not know that benefits sanctions exist to pressure the uncooperative unemployed (a minority of the jobless) into work?
Has she ever met (as I have) people who are flat broke but covered in elaborate tattoos?
If food banks are "a symbol that the welfare state is failing", is this also true of charity shops, The Big Issue, refuges, shelters, and every other charitable organisation?
Does Ms Black only want her London housing costs subsidised by the taxpayer if "families earning over £40,000 in London" are having their rents paid by the rest of us?
When did it become the Chancellor's -- and the taxpayers' -- roll to arrange houses for twenty-year-olds?
If this government is so "uncaring", why are they lifting yet more low-paid workers out of tax, getting more of the unemployed off benefits and into work, introducing a National Living Wage, increasing childcare, protecting pensions, trying to raise educational standards, expanding healthcare at weekends, protecting the foreign aid budget, and so on?
Is Ms Black sure a nationalist landslide had "nothing to do with" nationalism?
Having cited Tony Benn as a "personal hero", she claims that the Labour Party "left" her -- and "not the other way about" (presumably a reference to the creation of New Labour) -- but when can this have happened? In 1997, when she was two? In 2003, when she was an eight-year-old? When?
Aren't "Thatcherite, neo-liberal policies" the ones that have given us cheap flights, digital televisions, discounted designer labels, and the internet in our pockets?
Wasn't Margaret Thatcher a "signpost"?
Has Ms Black never noticed that socialism has been a predictable disaster everywhere it has been tried?
Has she not seen that town centres have declined all over Britain (due to the popularity of out-of-town shopping malls and retail parks)?
How does she square her constituency's high unemployment rate with foreign workers coming over to do the jobs we don't want?
And has it never occurred to her that our benefits system has gone from safety net to hammock to straightjacket?
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