LIBERAL leader Cable yesterday launched a vicious attack on the elderly stating that by voting Brexit they had ‘comprehensively shafted the young’. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Cable accused the over-65s of being ‘self-declared martyrs’ who claim leaving the EU is worth the cost.
He said: ‘The martyrdom of the old comes cheap, as fewer have jobs to lose and living standards are protected by the triple lock on pensions.’ He then compared the supporters of Brexit with terrorists declaring: ‘For the Brexit martyrs, paradise beckons.’
He claimed that the austerity measures that his Lib Dem coalition with the Tories had pushed through had largely affected the working population, with pensioners suffering ‘relatively little’ after the financial crisis. Young people, he said, have the added problems of ‘prohibitive housing costs, growing job insecurity and limited career progression’.
‘The old have comprehensively shafted the young,’ added Cable. He again witchhunted the elderly saying: ‘We haven’t yet heard about “Brexit jihadis” but there is an undercurrent of violence in the language which is troubling.’
In fact, millions of young people voted Labour at the last general election, leading to Tory claims that Corbyn had stolen the student vote with his pledge to abolish tuition fees and that some seats had been won by students enthusiastically voting more than once.
In fact, Labour stood on a platform of leaving the EU and also the Single Market and the Customs Union. Cable is a careerist carpetbagging humbug who at various times has been a member of three main parties. At university, he was a member of the Liberal Party but then joined the Labour Party. In 1970, he unsuccessfully contested Glasgow Hillhead for Labour, and later became a Glasgow Councillor. In 1979, he sought the Labour nomination for Hampstead.
In February 1982, he joined the just created Social Democratic Party (SDP) that split the Labour Party to allow Thatcher to win the 1983 general election. He was the SDP-Liberal Alliance parliamentary candidate for his home city of York in both the 1983 and 1987 general elections.
At the 2010 General Election Cable was again returned as MP for Twickenham. The Liberal Democrats entered a coalition agreement with the Conservative Party on 11th May 2010, and Cable was appointed Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills on 12th May.
Young people and students in particular will be interested to know that ‘their ally’ in the alleged struggle against the elderly was in the forefront of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s legislation in 2010 to raise tuition fees to £9,000. The policy was approved by 21 votes, with twenty-one Lib Dem MPs rebelling, along with six Conservatives.
The debate took place while thousands of students staged protests at Westminster. All Lib Dem MPs said before the election that they would oppose any rise in tuition fees. Former Lib Dem leaders Sir Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy were among those who opposed the government, whose Commons majority of 83 was cut to 21.
Coalition Business Secretary Vince Cable voted to raise fees. It is he that shafted the youth, not the pensioners. He said: ‘We are going to be resilient and go forward as a team. There will be no recriminations.’ He added: ‘I think the job now is to try and explain this policy to the country. It is nothing like as threatening to young people going to university as has been portrayed.’
Students are now being screwed, and robbed thanks to Cable and others of the same ilk. The latest figures show that tens of thousands of graduates have overpaid their student loans by a collective £45.4 million.
More than 78,800 graduates who took out what’s known as Income Contingent Repayment (ICR) loans between 1998 and 2011, overpaid by an average of £580 each during the 2013/14 financial year. The data also shows a year-on-year rise in the amount being overpaid by graduates! Cable is deadly silent about this situation which he helped to create. He is a declared enemy of the elderly and now we can see he is also an enemy of the masses of youth.
The response to this attempt to crush the student youth with debt must be the mobilisation of the whole trade union movement to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government. This must expropriate the bosses and bankers and abolish student fees and student debt to bring in socialism.
