Save our grey belt!

While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also how little.

These days there are just nine teachers in the country who vote Conservative and they keep their heads down in case a colleague dobs them in for the hate crime of existing. However, the principle of helping only those who voted for you seems to have been continued by Labour down the years.

Why else would our new government decide to grab money from our pensioners to give to the odious ‘young doctors’? Pensioners are the last tranche still to vote Tory, so the government is planning to thin them out a little this winter by letting them freeze to death so that it can splaff enormous amounts of money on its client groups in the public sector.