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Labour stands for unity - the Tories for division

The contrast between the politics on show at the Labour and Tory conferences couldn’t be more stark, writes DIANE ABBOTT MP

AS I said in my speech to the recent Labour conference, in government we will address the ravages of austerity at every level.
As part of this approach, at our conference and beyond we have outlined a series of pledges to improve people’s lives as part of our vision to transform Britain for the many, not the few.

All of these clearly illustrate the different approaches of Labour and the Tories.

As John McDonnell said, Labour will lay the foundations of a new society though a three-pronged approach to transforming the economy.

These are expanding free universal public services, driving up wages and driving down living costs, and strengthening the social security system.

Whilst we stand for expanding universalism in free public services and improving the living standards of the overwhelming majority, the Tories stand for tax cuts for the super-rich and jeopardising the future of our public services, which they have already cut to the bone in nearly a decade of ideologically driven austerity.

When it comes to the NHS, Labour made two important pledges at our conference.

The first was that we will scrap prescription charges.

Currently, prescriptions are free for patients living in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but cost £9 per item in England. This is a particular burden on people with long-term conditions like asthma and chronic kidney disease who can fork out up to £104 a year on medication, or even if more if they do not opt in to the NHS pre-payment discount scheme.

Research has also shown that prescription charges put people off from collecting prescribed medicine.

Secondly, Jeremy Corbyn outlined in his speech how we will put public health before private profit by ensuring that pharmaceutical companies make vital drugs available at prices that the National Health Service can afford.

Our “Medicines for the Many” programme of reforms will make life-changing drugs available at affordable prices and create a health innovation system that will put public health before private profit.

This will take on the big pharmaceutical companies which deny life-saving and life-changing medicines to ill patients by charging extortionate prices, through securing generic versions of patented medicines at a price that is affordable for the NHS, making public funding for research conditional on the resulting drugs being priced affordably for all and create a new, publicly owned generic drugs manufacturer to supply cheaper medicines to our NHS.

This stands in stark contrast to the Tories, who are willing to offer up our NHS to Trump in a sweetheart free trade deal.

As the outsourcing and privatisation scandals of recent years have shown, you simply can’t trust the Tories with our NHS.

When it comes to living standards and the world of work, Labour announced we are committed to transforming lives and increasing fulfilment through a range of policies including reducing the average working week to 32 hours within a decade and eliminating in-work poverty in the first term of a Labour government.

Since our conference, Labour has continued to make announcements on how we will improve people’s living standards, including through the commitment to scrap universal credit, which in the words of Jeremy Corbyn has been both “inhumane” and an “unmitigated disaster.”

We will replace universal credit with a social security system that focuses on alleviating and ending poverty, not driving people into it, and immediately end the worst aspects of universal credit.

The latter includes ending the benefit cap and the two child limit, which alone will stop up to 300,000 children being pushed into poverty; immediately suspending the punitive sanctions regime, which has been ineffective at supporting people back to work and has instead pushed people into poverty; ending universal credit’s “digital only” requirement, which excludes people who cannot access the internet; and switching to split payments and fortnightly payments, including an automatic interim payment to end the five-week wait.

Iain Duncan Smith simply dismissed these pledges as “cynical,” yet again showing how out of touch the Tories are.

The Prime Minister and the Tories instead decided to use their conference this week to offer more tax cuts to the rich and corporations – in the same week that we heard that 726 homeless people died on our streets last year, and that there are four-and-a-half million children living in poverty.

In my speech at Labour conference, I also attacked the Tories’ election approach. They think that can win votes with dog-whistle racism – led by a man who described veiled Muslim women as looking like letter boxes or bank robbers.

Not only has Boris Johnson still not got round to apologising for this, since then we have also seen language from Johnson in Parliament which was both divisive and disgraceful.

This politics of division was accompanied in Johnson’s speech at this week’s Tory conference by Brexit proposals which John McDonnell rightly termed as “neither credible nor workable” and a “cynical attempt to force through a no-deal Brexit.”

The Tories have not only failed on Brexit. They have failed on the economy, failed on housing, failed on health, failed on schools and failed on policing.

It’s for these reasons that they are resorting to the politics of scapegoating.

In contrast to the Tories, Labour will always stand for unity, not division.

Diane Abbott is shadow home secretary.

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