Defend Our Juries welcomes ‘honesty’ from foreign secretary and says his remarks will help in its legal challenge
Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, restated her opposition to getting rid of the pensions triple lock (see 8.40am) in an interview on the Today programme this morning.
She said:
When we met with Andy [Burnham] this week, it certainly wasn’t mentioned.
But I do think that it’s important that Labour make sure that working-class people know that they’re on their side, and this would be a direction of travel that would say the opposite to that.
What I understood the national care service to be was a universal benefit: everybody paid in and everybody gets out, and that is what actually the principle of that is.
Going to a group of people who are getting around £12,500 a year in order to pay for it to take away their security is wrong.
I can’t believe in your heart of hearts that you really think proscribing Palestine Action with all those elderly people and vicars and grannies and so on as a terrorist organisation was a sensible political …
I don’t think anyone’s intent was to have those people criminalised. But obviously the supreme court has got to look at this issue and obviously it’s something we keep looking at as government.
We welcome the foreign secretary’s honesty on this matter. He has finally admitted that it wasn’t the government’s intention to criminalise people for peacefully protesting against the genocide and the proscription, let alone to treat them as terrorists.
Basically he’s acknowledged that the government didn’t properly think the proscription through and that it’s had a disproportionate impact on the right to free speech. You’d think that leaves the government in an impossible position for defending the proscription before the supreme court.
We gladly accept the offer Ed Miliband made in Pizza Express to have a conversation with us.
