CLARE CLEARY HITS OUT AT BINGO BUDGET

At the last full Hyndburn Council meeting on 20th March, Rishton Councillor Clare Cleary spoke out about the Conservative budget and made a powerful speech attacking the Chancellor:

"One bit of this budget tells you all you need to know about this rotten Chancellor and this rotten government.

Look at the economic wasteland they have created. They preside over a country where bright, talented young people cannot find jobs, where people cannot afford to buy their own home, where families face a miserable struggle just to bring up their own children because wages have been driven so low or because people have been forced into insecure, short-term, part-time jobs or zero hours contracts.

This is now a country where mansion-dwelling millionaire ministers punish the disabled with bedroom tax because they need a small spare room in their home and where there are food banks in every town with long queues of people who cannot afford to eat.

So what does the Chancellor do?

He cuts tax on bingo! Who does he think he is fooling?

He is the Chancellor who says, "People can't afford to eat...let them play bingo!"

He is the Chancellor who gave us the pasty tax, the bedroom tax, the millionaire's tax cut and now the Bingo Budget.

The scandal and shame of a great nation of ours being reduced to this must be making even the great Conservatives of the past turn in their graves."