Issued by CEMO Center - Paris
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General election: Labour vows to take on 'bad bosses and tax dodgers

Saturday 23/November/2019 - 02:20 PM
The Reference
طباعة

The Green party’s co-leader Jonathan Bartley appeared on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Saturday this morning, where he warned that the climate emergency could kill more people than the second world war:

It’s an existential threat. 55m people died in the second world war, the threat of a climate emergency is much, much bigger than that. There is no real bigger threat except of course for nuclear weapons.

On Prince Andrew’s decision to withdraw from public life, he said:

I think there are still questions that are unanswered. I don’t think just Andrew withdrawing from public life is a solution. The point here is the victims who are at the centre of this, the survivors of abuse. No one should be above the questions and these questions need to be put and this is no substitute, no alternative.

Former prime minister Gordon Brown is to claim removing Boris Johnson from Number 10 is the first step in restoring “common decency” and moving the UK forward, the PA Media reports.

He’ll be speaking today at three Labour campaign events across Scotland - in Fife, South Lanarkshire and East Lothian.

He will highlight figures that show there are 121,925 children in working families north of the border living in poverty.

The UK is already torn apart by Brexit, divisive nationalisms, a north-south divide and the crude trolling of vulnerable people of all sides.

We are so disunited we have lost sight of a once-compassionate, state-guaranteed safety net and seem unable to work together - even to come to the aid of vulnerable children...

A caring nation would increase child benefit substantially, raise the child credit, end the withdrawal of benefits from three and four-child families and guarantee that there is always enough housing benefit in place to pay rent.

Jeremy Corbyn has been speaking outside an Amazon depot in Sheffield, launching the party’s “fair tax programme”.

Speaking to reporters, he insisted adopting a neutral stance in a second Brexit referendum was a sign of “strength” and “maturity”.

I think being an honest broker and listening to everyone is actually a sign of strength and a sign of maturity.

The party has pledged more than £1.6bn for research to find a cure for dementia over the next decade, which it says represents the largest boost to dementia research ever in the UK, doubling current funding levels.

They have also announced plans to launch an “innovative medicines fund” by extending the successful “cancer drugs fund” – which was due to end next year – to other diseases. It will have a £500m budget in the first year, compared with the £340m value of the cancer drugs fund.

There are currently 850,000 people suffering from dementia in the UK and that number is set to rise to more than a million by the middle of the next decade and to double in the next 30 years.

Johnson said dementia was “one of the great medical challenges of our time”. “This is our plan to tackle it: a record injection of cash that unleashes the brilliant British science community that brought the world penicillin, IVF and Proton Beam Therapy for cancer.”

Jeremy Corbyn and the shadow employment rights secretary, Laura Pidcock, are due to launch their “fair tax programme” outside an Amazon warehouse in Yorkshire today.

The party has pledged to tackle tax dodging by introducing unitary taxation of multinationals to stop tax avoiding profit shifting. The approach is outlined in this report by Public Services International. Labour says the measure will bring in £6.3bn in 2023-24.

Huge multinational companies often act as if the rules we all live by don’t apply to them. They use loopholes to claim they don’t owe tax and cynically push their workers to the limit. I don’t want to live in a country of a few billionaires and millions of stressed people, worried about making ends meet every month.

The Conservatives are announcing a £1.6bn fund to find a cure for dementia. Boris Johnson said the investment would double current funding levels and that it would set Britain’s finest scientists to work on a “dementia moonshot”.

Labour is launching its youth manifesto. The document called The Future is Ours will commit the party to giving 16-year-olds the right to vote, and to investing an additional £250m to build up to 500 new youth centres.

Jeremy Corbyn is visiting an Amazon depot in Yorkshire, where he will vow to tackle the “tax and wage cheat culture” of multinational companies who “rip off” workers.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, will be in west London focusing on creative and arts subjects in schools, which she said should have “the same footing as the rest of the curriculum”.

The Brexit party leader, Nigel Farage, will be on a walkabout in Hartlepool, where the party’s chairman, Richard Tice, is a candidate.

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, has responded to yesterday’s vote on GP home visits at the BMA conference yesterday.

The crisis in the family doctor service is just one more area where the Conservative government has let down patients and the NHS.

In 2015 they promised more GPs, which like their pledges on everything else, never happened. And now there is a serious threat that elderly and vulnerable patients who rely on home visits will have that vital support removed.

You can’t trust Boris Johnson with the NHS. Labour’s rescue plan will recruit and train the GPs needed so home visits can continue.

 

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