Party Lines: November 11th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Welfare reform and tuition fees continued to dominate the news agenda today – and that’s reflected in the comments from Labour politicians.

Douglas Alexander defended Labour’s welfare record on BBC News, highlighting the minimum wage as a way of making “work pay”:

“We did manage to introduce the minimum wage to make work pay, we introduced the tax credit system to make sure that many millions of people across the country were better off. We managed to take measures that have kept the level of unemployment about half the level that it was after the last major recession in the 1980s and the 90s but in that sense we are supportive of reform in the welfare system.”

“Our real concern is this; without work these changes won’t work. If you’re going to move people from welfare into work there needs to be jobs for people to take up. Today we’ve got five claimants chasing every single vacancy in the British job market.”

Stephen Timms – appearing on the Daily Politics – warned that welfare reform could be an “expensive failure”:

“Where are the jobs coming from? The chancellor has accepted his cuts will costs half a million public sector jobs, there’ll be private sector jobs as well. Is the private sector really going to create the jobs that are needed to make that up? If not this could be an expensive failure.”

John Denham said that Labour would have to “pick up the pieces” of Tory policy on university tuition fees:

“The next Labour government will have to pick up the pieces from what this government is putting in place.”

“A new and damaging system is about to be imposed on our universities, we are going to have to bring forward policies that begin to put right the damage that is about to be done.”