Dennis Skinner
Main Page: Dennis Skinner (Labour - Bolsover)Department Debates - View all Dennis Skinner's debates with the HM Treasury
(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
Let me give my hon. Friend a specific example: disability living allowance. We were faced with a number of options, but we decided that we wanted to keep it as a universal benefit, and instead look at the criteria that allowed people to get on it and ensure that they were entitled to stay on it. We are particularly conscious of benefits on which people in vulnerable positions are dependent, but with each benefit, we are proceeding with caution, seeking as wide a consensus as possible. However, my hon. Friend has my commitment that we are doing everything that we can to protect the vulnerable during this process. I would also make a general observation: the thing that really hurts the most vulnerable in our society is when a country loses control of its public finances.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
Is the Chancellor really aware that as a result of these successive sadistic statements about cuts, war pensioners are ringing Members of Parliament and people who are severely disabled are frightened to death of losing their benefits? Is it not time that he had the gall to tell the truth: that this is all about using the deficit, which we had planned for, as an opportunity to carry out the Tory ideology of cutting the power of the state?
Mr Osborne
As the hon. Gentleman is now a Blairite, I thought that I would read out what his master said recently, which is relevant to what he has just said:
“I look at those policy papers now—the work on…the use of social security budgets…and I do think how different it would have been if we had done it. If we had…not wandered into a cul-de-sac of mixed messages and indecision… But there it is. It didn’t happen, and that’s it.”
We are trying to do the things that he once promised in his election manifesto.