Diane Abbott has slammed George Osborne’s Budget and its impact on Hackney.
Ms Abbott exclusively told Hackney Post: “The chancellor’s latest budget paints a rosy picture but this couldn’t be further from the truth for Hackney.”
Growing inequality
Ms. Abbott said that zero-hours contracts, the high costs of rent and public transport and the decline in social housing were hitting Hackney residents hard.
“Trumpeting the decline in unemployment masks the fact that these jobs are low-income and in London fall below the London living wage,” she said.
“As the people of Hackney know, most are on precarious contracts, including zero-hours contracts.
“The chancellor has made no comment on exorbitant costs of public transport, nor did he present any plans to address the exploitative cost of renting and ever declining social housing.”
The chancellor, she added, was concealing the realities of inequality in Britain and manipulating aid spending to promote British interests abroad.
“The most risible claim by the chancellor is that inequality has gone down on his watch, which not only goes against what the Office for National Statistics says but what we all can clearly see with our own eyes: the number of working people relying on food banks have proliferated, as have the number of billionaires.
“Osborne knows this but is trying to pull the wool over our eyes,” she said.
“The Tories signed Britain up to use 0.7 per cent of national income on aid but at the same time have repurposed the aid budget as a tool, not to help the poor, but simply to push Britain’s financial and security interests in poor countries.”
Like our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
