Tom Peck's Sketch: Groundhog Day for the bedroom tax debate
When the Government challenges the Court of Appeal decision in the Supreme Court, it will only be allowed to repeat the same arguments it has already made, but hope for a different outcome
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Your support makes all the difference.Last week, the Court of Appeal found the so-called “bedroom tax” to be discriminatory against disabled people and victims of domestic violence, and in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
When the Government challenges this decision in the Supreme Court, to fight for its right to discriminate against disabled people, it will only be allowed to repeat the same arguments it has already made to the Court of Appeal, but hope for a different outcome. This might seem like a futile exercise, but it was prepared to have a practice run at it on 1 February.
It was only on 28 January that Iain Duncan Smith sat silently at the side of his junior minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, a Mr Justin Tomlinson, as he fended off attacks from Labour’s Owen Smith and Andrew Gwynne over this “pernicious, vindictive and nasty tax”.
Clearly world-weary misogynist weatherman Bill Murray has not yet managed to get his TV producer colleague Andie MacDowell to fall in love with him, as on 1 February, Labour’s Owen Smith and Andrew Gwynne attacked the Government over the bedroom tax, and it fell to a Mr Justin Tomlinson to defend the now illegal policy, while Iain Duncan Smith stayed seated and silent beside him.
As a career politician who joined the Parliamentary Labour Party in 2005, never as yet rising higher than a junior shadow ministry, and now never likely to do so, it is unsurprising that Andrew Gwynne is angry. He has been permanently angry for several years now, to the point that the neural pathways to all other emotions have been scorched in the heat of social injustice.
Mr Gwynne also raised the plight of “waspy women”, and screamed from the back benches: “What has this government got against women from the 1950s!” You may need to know that waspy women are in fact Waspi Women, or “Women Against State Pension Inequality”, who are of the view that reforms to the pension systems will leave women born after April 1951 out of pocket.
So concerned by Mr Gwynne’s rage was pensions minister Shailesh Vara that he began his reply by stating: “The honourable gentleman has a problem understanding, so I shall say this very slowly.”
Loud, self-righteous shouting. Slow, patronising replies. No new information. Coming soon to a Supreme Court near you.
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