The fight against poverty: why Labour must win the general election

By Sebastian Michnowicz

Apparently, the Conservative Party has changed; it is not the nasty party anymore. As it’s now much-lampooned advertising slogan says, it’ll “cut the deficit, not the NHS”. Even its leaders have gone from openly declaring war on trade unions to reading the Guardian…on a Jubilee Line train. Yet in this veneer of public relations smoothness – a veneer so thick that it has got a lot of voters fooled – there are cracks; cracks we need to pick apart and expose. One crack that got into the limelight was Dan Hannan MEP, who brought Tory thinking to the surface during his love-in with Sean Hannity on Fox News, when he made his infamous remark about the NHS being a “sixty year mistake”. Another crack, and perhaps an even more sinister one, is Christopher Chope MP.

On March 12th, a group of MPs, led by Andrew Gwynne, were attempting to pass the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill. The main aim of the Bill was to restrict the despicable and immoral operation of vulture funds in the UK. A brilliant article by Independent newspaper journalist Johann Hari explains in detail the operation of vulture funds, but essentially what happens is an individual or company legally purchases the debt of a third world country from its creditor. The creditor, usually another country often preparing to write-off the debt, is glad to recover some of its losses by selling the debt on, at a large discount. The company that purchases the debt then goes on to sue to third world country for the full amount of the debt, including any accrued interest.

In view that Parliament will soon be dissolved for the general election, the only way the Bill could be passed before the election was if there were no objections. Indeed, with the Bill having cross party support, it was expected to go through unabated until a lone “object!” piped up from the Tory benches. Labour MP Sally Keeble immediately demanded to know which of the three Tory MPs present killed the Bill, but they were not obliged to reveal their identity and it only later emerged that it was Christopher Chope.

Claiming that he has been made a scapegoat, Chope defended his decision, saying, “The objection was to do with the bill not being given enough time to be heard and debated properly,” a notion debatable in itself. He went on to say:

“if the government want this Bill then there is nothing to stop them giving more time to it and I would welcome that. The objection is not to the bill in principle”.

But why should we believe a single word he says?

As a councillor in the London Borough of Wandsworth in the 1970s and 80s, Chope was responsible for selling off vast quantities of council housing, helping to pioneer Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme and gentrifying the Borough to the extent the Tories have had overwhelming control of the Council ever since. Elected to Parliament in 1983, he was promoted by Thatcher in 1986 to under secretary of state at the department for the environment, where he oversaw the introduction of the poll tax. He is now an honorary vice chairman of the turbo-Thatcherite group, Conservative Way Forward.

If there was any doubt that this is a man who couldn’t care less about the poor, be it at home or abroad, then surely that doubt must vanish with Chope’s 2009 Employment Opportunities Bill, an innocuously named attempt at effectively scrapping the National Minimum Wage. Chope argued that if employees could “opt-out” of receiving the minimum wage (i.e. accept lower pay), then companies could afford to employ more people and thus keep unemployment down during the recession. Despite that argument having a certain amount of deeply twisted logic to it, Chope’s Bill went on to say that it was against a person’s human rights to make them work for a minimum wage: breathtaking, considering the Tory desire to abolish the Human Rights Act.

Thankfully, a campaign organised by John Prescott blew the Bill out of the water, after fierce opposition caused Chope to stop sponsoring it. We must remain wary, however, as there is nothing stopping future attempts by Tories, such as these, to destroy the things we fought hard to achieve, or still hope to achieve.

Going into the general election, we must impress upon voters that it is Labour that introduced the minimum wage, in the teeth of Tory opposition, that brought millions of people in this country out of poverty, two-thirds of them women. We must impress upon voters that Labour has more than doubled overseas aid that helps lift 3 million people out of poverty every year. We must impress upon voters that only Labour will maintain both of these things.

Hopefully it won’t be far into the next Parliament when we can stop enduring the shame of allowing vulture fund owners to extort money from the world’s poorest nations in our courts; not even Christopher “Chopper” Chope will be able to stop it then.

Picture: Left Foot Forward