Labour takes its revenge on Glasgow with Austerity-Max budget

The Labour Party was quite explicit: "vote Yes and we will punish you". Well, never let it be said that Labour doesn't deliver on their promises. 

The brave citizens of Glasgow looked around us, at the poverty surrounding us, at our life expectancies lower in some districts than in Gaza, at our crumbling roads and our shrinking housing stock and voted for something better: for independence. 

Labour told us they'd punish us for any such "betrayal", and they have taken a revenge of such calculated brutality that it almost takes one's breath away. Sure, they've taken spiteful, petty little bits of revenge ever since September 19th: Govan had the highest Yes vote in all of Scotland - so they imposed a parking tax on some of Glasgow's poorest people. To punish us. The Buchanan Steps were the focal point of the heart-lifting, soaring final days of the Yes campaign  - so they earmark them for demolition. To punish us.

Those little bits of punishment weren't enough for Labour. We betrayed them. We made Glasgow Labour look stupid in the eyes of their bosses in London. We humiliated Glasgow Labour by snubbing their desperate appeals. And it got worse: we didn't learn our lesson, and it looks like we're going to let Labour down again by kicking them out of Glasgow in May. 

And thus yesterday's collective punishment of all the people of Glasgow in the most appalling display of scorched-earth tactics ever seen in Scottish politics. 

£29 million pounds of cuts (would it be churlish to bring up the fact that Labour chose to pay Labour peer, Labour donor and Labour member, Willie Haughey, knighted by Labour, £16 million for a piece of spare land to build a motorway whilst the same Labour party chose to send its thugs to batter their way into a house to throw Margaret Jaconelli out of the home they wanted to demolish?) imposed on Glasgow by "the people's party".

The collective punishment includes schoolchildren. Labour were furious that Scottish children in primaries one to three were given a hot, nutritious meal every day, free of charge. (They think feeding children in Glasgow is an unconscionable waste of precious resources which are much better directed towards killing children in Iraq). That's why Labour voted against free school meals for Scottish kids, but for nuclear weapons, and for austerity. 

And how Glasgow Labour councillors rubbed their hands in glee as they punished Glasgow's children for their parents' betrayal of Labour in September! Red-faced with rage at the thought of "something-for-nothing" for starving children, Labour took its revenge on schoolchildren - putting the cost of school dinners for primaries four and up by 27%. For a single mother with three children at school, that £0,40/day rise per child amounts to £2.280, assuming all three children stay on until the end of S6. That's not just a punishment like losing a set of city centre steps which looked nice, that's a tangible punishment.

And if sending kids home starving wasn't joyful enough for Labour, they've also chosen to send them home exhausted as well: they've spent years trying to rip the free bus passes away from pensioners, now they've hit on a softer (and non-voting) target: weans. 

At the moment, a five year old who lives 1,9km from school is expected to walk there. Labour have chosen to increase that distance by 60%, with five year olds who live 3,2km away from school now expected to walk. 

That's Labour's budget for Glasgow. That's what they've spent two years insisting that we're Better Together for. That a seven year old girl is expected to walk a 6,4km round trip every day to school, and then sit, hunger gnawing at her stomach because her mother can't afford to pay for meals now Labour has increased it - for a one-child family - to 17% of a young mother's weekly Job Seekers' Allowance. For a 23-year-old unemployed single parent with two children - hardly an alien demographic in Glasgow, Labour is now going to take over a third of their weekly benefit just to feed the children at school - before a bill's been paid, a washing done or a pencil case bought. 

The foreign travel budget for Labour councillors hasn't been affected by the austerity, as it happens.

For those kids, whom Labour have chosen to cast into starvation and penury as part of their perverted, obscene revenge against Glasgow's children for the sins of their parents in refusing to back the Labour line in September, there is no relief from the misery and poverty of a city Labour has governed for almost the entirety of living memory.

Gordon Matheson says he's proud of Labour's budget.

Well might he be. Because while he's starving weans and forcing seven-year-olds into a 6,4km walk to school in pitch-black, below-zero January days, not a single local authority in the whole of the United Kingdom spent more than Glasgow's £983.000 on chauffeuring around people like Matheson from glitzy dinner parties in the Central Hotel to his pad in the Merchant City. 

It's not just Gordon Matheson who should be proud of Labour's budget. Other Labour councillors have merrily raided our coffers to go on foreign jaunts to the likes of India, Dubai, New York; to the Uefa Cup Final, all at public expense. 

Austerity, it seems, is for the little people. 

And if you thought it was only children who're the target of Labour's vengeance, you'd be wrong. They also like to pick on people with additional support needs. Not satisfied with seizing the well-loved Accord Centre from its long-term users in order to build a car park for their Commonwealth Games vanity project, they've chosen to hammer the most vulnerable again, closing day care centres. I expect that Groper Gilbert particularly enjoyed that one, given his form for threatening to punish those who oppose Labour by getting their disabled child sacked. A classy man, and a fitting representative for a classy party. In the same vein, grants for voluntary organisations and charities (although not those run by Labour, who award their chums to run "charities" on their behalf payoffs of up to half a million pounds) have been cut by £2.000.000. 

None of the three luxury cars Glasgow City Council bought for its officers using Glaswegian taxpayers' cash is to fall victim to austerity, just in case you were wondering.

A further £2.000.000 is to be ripped away from educational services for children in hospital (well, I guess Labour aren't getting the benefit of them having to walk to school, PLUS the scrounging bastards get FREE FOOD in hospitals. What a disgusting something-for-nothing society.) although there's been no corresponding austerity reduction in the bonuses paid to Labour councillors who receive massive financial benefits (about £400.000 in extra salaries, all told) for sitting on the boards of arms-lengths companies.

The City Council has substantial cash reserves and even more substantial goods reserves. They could have avoided further austerity and pain to Scotland's most deprived families. Instead, they chose to hammer us. They chose to hammer us because they wanted to punish us. They put the "n" into "Tory cuts".