Hannah Fyson

Socialist, trying to stay hopeful. Cats always help 😻😻. #ForTheMany #UBI #EnoughIsEnough

[TheBossRoss 🇪🇺 🧶 ❄ 📷 6x💉 @BettinaSRoss1]

So what happens when Reform take over your local council?

This.

#KentCountyCouncil

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@johnmcdonnellMP Time for Starmer to show true leadership in standing up to Trump and refusing to be part of his illegal war

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@przrj1958 @UtdForever7 @MikeKeegan_DM It was both factually inaccurate, and complete hypocritical!! And that’s even without mentioning the racist implications in the language he used 🙄
He moved to Monaco as an immigrant (where 68% of the country is “colonised” by immigrants) to avoid £4 billion in taxes!!!

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@centredevils @TelegraphDucker And we should never have let them have McTominay

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@johnmcdonnellMP The Labour Party are only damaging themselves by this sort of thing. Why they would do that is beyond belief

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

These videos have been shown to increase likelihood of viewers saying they would vote Reform.

They raise the salience of immigration & present it as a threat.

But worse, obviously, it sickens decent people, abandoning Labour in droves & still being driven further away by this.

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@johnmcdonnellMP It’s not fair! 😡

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

I'm struggling to think of a worse, more unnecessary hill for any government to choose to die on.

One million people have already signed a petition against ID cards. If we’re serious about rebuilding trust, this is the last place to start.

It's like deciding to become a pacifist and then walking into your roughest local pub and knocking everyone's pints out of their hands.

It's actually mind boggling.

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

'I have no idea': Farage refuses to rubbish Trump’s paracetamol claim but adds experts ‘got it wrong’ on thalidomide https://t.co/fW92TKQnlv

“When it comes to science, I don’t side with anybody” Farage refuses to believe scientific evidence over Trump fake claims 😡

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

Farage yet again exposing his hypocrisy and willingness to change his narrative to suit his own purposes. 😡
So depressing that anyone listens to anything this man says - he serves only his own interests!!!

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

Once, Nigel Farage had a very principled stance on defection. MPs who switched sides should seek voter approval, in a by-election.

Failure to do so epitomised elite disdain, he said. "You the voters are just useful to them every few years. It's all about them."

[Robert Peston @Peston]

The government says it wants to make significant savings on welfare payments to the disabled and help the disabled into work.

The point, say all ministers - led Sir Keir Starmer - is not to harm the disabled, but to free them from a life of dependency.

That, they claim, is why this is a truly “Labour” reform — and not just brutal cuts engineered by Rachel Reeves because she needs billions in savings so as not to breach arbitrary, self-imposed fiscal rules on the assessment date of 26 March.

Is any of this plausible?

The first thing to say is the point of fiscal rules should be to help focus minds in government about how best to share scarce resources between different important resources. They should not set hard deadlines for making decisions with potentially profound consequences for the lives of millions of people.

We’ve already seen an example of the political dangers of trying to rush through changes to personal independence payments (PIP) and the health related elements of universal credit - because one element that was particularly upsetting to Labour MPs has already been dropped, namely a one year freeze on PIP payments.

But as my colleague Anushka Asthana has been exclusively disclosing for the last ten days, this was only one part of the welfare reform package.

The other elements were to restrict entitlement to personal independence payments, while cutting the health-related universal credit payments and recycling those UC savings into an increase in the standard rate of UC.

You can see in this the simple story and perhaps simplistic story about welfare payments to the disabled that the government believes and is trying to tell.

First, that hundreds of thousands of people receive cash to help with their living and mobility costs, but don’t “deserve” it.

Second, that the structure of UC payments provides too great an incentive to disabled people to sign themselves off work to get the health-related benefits top up.

Starmer will doubtless take comfort from the fact that - according to polling by the Good Growth Foundation - 60% believe the system provides too much support to people who don’t want to work and 39% think that it’s too easy for people to get benefits who don’t need them.

But popular belief does not make it true.

And before going further into the nitty gritty, it is worth doing a quick economic reality check.

It is a fact that the proportion of British people in employment has fallen since Covid and, unlike many other rich economies, has not recovered to 2019 levels. But the proportion of British people who are working remains high by international standards.

According to the OECD, in the third quarter of 2023 the UK ranked fifth in the world, with an employment rate of 74.9%, well ahead of the US for example, and behind only Iceland, the Netherlands, Japan and Germany.

Even if it is a laudible ambition to encourage more people into work. The UK’s is not an economy whose failure is that too few people are working.

The grotesque failure of the British economy is hardly a mystery. It is that living standards for those in work have barely increased for more than 15 years and too many of those in work receive too little to pay even for food, energy and other essentials.

Pretty much every competitor country whose employment rate has recovered to pre-covid levels has higher productivity and higher wages than the UK. Which might tell you that Britain’s problem is not that its benefit system is skewiff but that it’s the labour market itself that is broken, that remunerated toil in Britain delivers inadequate incentives.

And by the way, we don’t have a benefit system in the UK that is remotely generous or lavish by international standards. 1/2

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@faizashaheen So have I. Sadly got to a point I feel ashamed to be a member of a Party that treats long-standing members so shamefully yet welcomes right wing Tories to defect to them with open arms.

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

Labour must go big, not back down, on public investment in climate action. £28bn must be the floor not the ceiling.

Agree? Read and share the case for £28bn and beyond by @labourlewis

https://t.co/OlPeKAM5iU

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@johnmcdonnellMP I think it might be the most out of touch speech by any prime minister I have ever heard. He has not the slightest concept of the real world most of us actually live in. Very scary for someone in charge of our country! 😩

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

@tonyturnertn My cats would turn their noses up in disgust even if starving! 🤮😾🤮

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

After dumping sewage in seas, chemically polluting rivers, failing to upgrade Victorian pipes & handing huge dividends to shareholders, all water firms have to offer is “sorry - oh by the way we’re putting your bills up”. What a shitshow. @Feargal_Sharkey

https://t.co/6YF97v6gI5

[Labour Outlook @LabourOutlook]

"This #mayday2023, we will stand by our MP, Jeremy Corbyn" ✊

@Islington4JC write, “In Islington North, we have an MP who has consistently stood with constituents & local Trades Unions. He has been on picket lines throughout the constituency & beyond.”

https://t.co/oDz50Ft7PU

[Hannah Fyson @HannahResists]

Shameful actions of the Labour Party leadership well articulated by @JessicaLBarnard
https://t.co/RVXvG4Jcyg

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

I have spent my life fighting for a fairer society on behalf of the people of Islington North, and I have no intention of stopping now.