Letters: Labour are all things to all people in the worst kind of way
A reader bemoans the UK’s rudderless leadership
by: Letters
28 Jul 2025
Labour might be delivering change, but is it the change we want to see? Image: Number 10 / Flickr
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A Big Issue reader thinks that Labour need to decide who exactly they represent.
Hard Labour
Lots of ‘duality of man’ on the UK political scene today. A government who are simultaneously on the side of both ‘benefits cheats’ and brutal Scrooge-esque Victorian workhousemen who want to cull the disabled. Precisely why Labour are so fucked, they are all things to all people in the worst kind of way.
My husband and I don’t have any holiday days together so we can cover as much of the school holidays as possible. We just can’t afford holiday clubs, plus so many of them don’t even cover school hours. Some start at 9.30am or 10am which is no use when you need to work.
Kimberley Ludlow, Facebook
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I had the same problem 40 years ago when my children were little. The play scheme in the village was only run for two weeks every summer so we had four weeks to cover but were only allowed to take one week annual leave. A few friends with similar age children got together and took it in turns looking after each other’s children. It was the only way we could manage to cover the holidays.
Michelle Taylor, Facebook
I want to be able to afford to spend as much time with my children as possible. I don’t want to have to work all the hours god sends just to make ends meet. Spending an hour before bedtime with my children is not right – it’s not how family life is supposed to be. I don’t want to palm them off on strangers doing childcare.
Anjo Turkeyneck, Facebook
Here in Twickenham 40h/w childcare costs in excess of £2,000 a month. It makes me sick to think we work so hard, pay so much taxes and then see our contributions go towards the military at the expense of the NHS, education, childcare, infrastructures, etc. Why not invest billions into nationalised, free-of-charge nurseries and childcare.
Diego Baldazzi, Facebook
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Being human
I found it so positive and uplifting to read your latest column, Sam [Delaney]. I can fully sympathise with your feelings and have experienced similar myself.
You are right, being human IS a beautiful thing most of the time, but when it isn’t we can find ways to return to the beauty.
With effect from April 2025 Leicester City Council introduced a new system of calculating council tax. This involves adding PIP benefit as additional income. This, in my opinion, is so unjust because it directly challenges the government policy that resulted in disabled and long-term sick people being awarded PIP.
The government stated that PIP awards were to bridge the differences in the lives of able-bodied people to those of disabled people. This was after studies and investigations showed that disabled people and people with long-term conditions had extra expenses on special diet, travelling, energy bills, gardening and keeping our houses clean.
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It is not understandable that the same help awarded by the government is then taken back by the city council which decided to consider it as extra income so that it would take everyone on PIP onto a high council tax bracket.
My council tax rose from £255 a year to £1,600 a year after the calculation. I have appealed as I feel the council should consider my circumstances.
N Maplanka
The wrong track
In the latest railway feature, Ed Wise makes it sound very simple [to claim a refund] and it really is not.
If you have paper tickets, not an e-ticket it’s very difficult to claim Delay Repay. You have to post the original tickets (so if they get swallowed by the gate when you leave you’re stuffed) by recorded delivery, which will cost you about £4. They might just reject it out of hand as happened before to me with a train journey that was cancelled midway. They kept insisting it did reach the destination but it didn’t.
Or you might – as happened to me last week – end up entering into a protracted forensic description and multiple emails back and forth, to justify and explain why you were claiming, exactly what each step of your journey was, why your ticket was a split ticket, at what point the train guard came through to check tickets, and what you did to mitigate your journey being cancelled and getting kicked off the train at Crewe.
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It’s fine if you’ve bought an e-ticket online – e-ticket people on my train got their refunds confirmed before we were even booted off. Whereas I still haven’t found out if my paper tickets will be refunded or not. So it’s not as much of a breeze as he is making out. Which is penalising older people in particular who are more likely to use a paper ticket.
