The Cruelty of the Bedroom Tax

It is my understanding, that civilised society should be judged on how it looks after its most vulnerable, rather than how big a tax break it can offer its wealthiest. Apparently the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party take the opposite view. As the Bedroom Tax takes vitally needed money out of the pockets of 400,000 families with disabled children; our wondrous government will at the same time be handing a tax cut to 8,000 millionaires, giving them an average £107,000 more. This, alongside the Welfare Uprating Bill; essentially a huge cut to Jobseeker’s Allowance, Maternity Pay, Child Benefit and Income Support; all to pay for huge tax breaks for the wealthiest, means that whilst parents of disabled children will miss meals, and be unable to heat their homes; the millionaire Cabinet will be able to go shopping for new Yachts.

Where was the moral outrage from Tory supporters who now yell “Putting your kids in two separate rooms is an insult to the tax payer!!!” before the Tory Party actually mentioned it? Feigned outrage again.

Kicking people out of their homes seems like an easy solution, to rich men pacing the corridors of Whitehall, or maybe it isn’t even a thought whilst the millionaire Prime Minister spends £680,000 of taxpayers money making Downing Street look a bit nicer inside, including refurbishing the kitchen. But to the people who are settled, who are part of the community, whose children play on the street with their friends (i’m fully aware that children leading happy lives, is not something Liberal Democrats or Tories are really too concerned about, given the horrifically increasing rates of child poverty they have created). They are destroying homes, and applying unnecessary pressure to families already struggling to cope. The Bedroom Tax can be described as nothing more than heartless.

The IFS estimated that 3.5 million children in the UK live in poverty. The also estimate that this is set to rise steeply. 14% of children in poverty go without a warm coat during winter. 26% of parents whose children are in poverty, skip meals through lack of money even though 61% of parents of children in poverty, have at least one person in work. And now, if those people also claim housing benefit to help make life even a little more bearable, they will lose more money, or be forced to move home.

As we know, the ‘Bedroom Tax’ refers to the reduction in housing benefits for anyone who has a spare room in their council house. The idea is, people will downsize to a smaller house, or have their housing benefit cut by 14 per cent for people seen to have one spare room and 25 per cent for those with two or more. The cruelty is intense.

Whilst the most vulnerable, with very little money, and living every day wondering if they’ll eat stand to lose their home or even more money, the Chancellor will be reflecting on his “tough decisions” from his 215 acre estate, given to him to live in, free of charge, in Dorneywood….. here:

Then there is ‘Baron’ Freud (I know what you’re thinking, he’s sure to be in touch with common folk). He is Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Freud is in control of Welfare Reform. All of this, is his doing. Here is where ‘Baron Freud’ lives:

- I wonder how many rooms in this massive mansion are underused. Or, how much land accompanies it, on which homes, blocks of flats, shops, businesses could be built if ‘Baron’ (seriously, he’s a Baron) Freud downsized to a property that wasn’t too big for his needs.

These are the people who run your lives. Multi-millionaires, in mansions, unsurprisingly cutting taxes for multi-millionaires, in mansions. This is Versailles. The Court of King Louis XIV Cameron.

According to the Government’s figures, 660,000 households will be affected by the changes, and of that, 420,000 are households including someone with a disability. Low income households, who have faced a plethora of cuts since the start of this monstrous Coalition, now facing a huge cut to their welfare payments.

The point of this article is to get the Bedroom Tax down from numbers (Clegg justifies his support for this idea, with numbers), and back to individual cases. People.

ITV broadcast the story of Tony, Diann, their three year old daughter Shanice, and their 15 year old daughter Stephanie. Stephanie has 1p36 deletion syndrome, and a mental age of four. She struggles with words, and mobility. All three bedrooms in their house are currently occupied. Stephanie requires her own room, because she wakes up around 5am and can become loud and violent due to her illness. But under the rules of the ‘Bedroom Tax’, the two daughters will be required to share a bedroom, because they’re both under 16. That, or face a huge cut to their Housing benefit payment. They will be deemed to have a spare room. Tony and Diann say the cut would mean cutting down on meals.

Maria Brabiner has lived in her home since 1978. It is indescribably cruel of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to wish to see her kicked out of the security of the house she has made a home, all because of a spare room. Do you know why she now has a spare room? It is because her mother, whom lived in the room, died recently. Miss Brabiner said:

“I’m scared of what’s going to happen to me, I’m worried about whether my electric will be cut off, whether my gas will be cut off.

- This economic violence, by perhaps the two nastiest Parties we have seen in the UK, is being forced upon a woman whose mother has recently died, and whose house is more than just a house; it is a home. Worse still, it is being forced on her, by a Cabinet of multi-millionaires, with multiple houses that remain unoccupied and included acres of land that could be used to build new houses on.

Terry Avery is unable to use the left side of his body, after a severe stroke left him needing a wheelchair. He sleeps in a separate room from his wife, because of his situation. Under the ‘Bedroom Tax’, the room Terry sleeps in, is considered ‘spare’. Which means, he and his wife either move out, or not eat. Or a third choice; Karen, Terry’s wife would have to sleep on the floor, in absolutely no room. Karen says:

“With the hospital bed, lift, chest of drawers and turning space for his wheelchair there is no space for a wardrobe which is kept in my bedroom. There is not even room for me to sleep on the floor comfortably, which I would have to do as there is no room for a second bed or mattress.”

Julia Jones is 59, and has worked since she was 15. Her husband David contracted bowel cancer four years ago. Six months after having a irreversible colostomy he returned to work. Two years later, he contracted brain cancer and sadly passed away seven weeks later. Julia is now alone. During David’s illness, Julia rejected care allowance, and spent all of her time and money looking after him. They were given the home she now lives in, because it was easy for David to get around in. David’s ashes are buried in the garden, under a rose bush planted especially for his. Here is Julia’s plea to the millionaire Prime Minister:

“The most powerful men in the country imply we are scum so we must be scum.
Do you not consider that I would give everything for my husband to be alive, me to not have incapacitating pain and we could both be the hard workers we once were? I live in small 1 1/2 bed bungalow that was built for older people. It is supported elderly living so I feel safe. It could not house a family as under 55s are not allowed.
You now want to take my home from me. The home that literally made my fingers bleed cleaning as it had been neglected for 20 years when we moved here. You want me to leave my husband’s ashes, my neighbours who take me shopping and give me some form of social life? I have no family, we could not have children.
I am living without heating at present so how can I pay what I do not have to stay in my home?”

- This is the cost, when we bring it down to a human level, of the Tory and Lib Dem Bedroom Tax. The entire debate should be framed around the most vulnerable cases, those who stand to lose the most, not just in terms of money, but in living standard, and the brutality of stripping someone, a family, children away from the home that they call their own, and the community that they love.

In the Chancellor’s own Constituency, Tim Pinder, chief executive at Cheshire Peaks and Plains Housing Trust – a housing association said:

“Many of our customers are determined to stay in their homes despite the changes, but we fear this may lead to significant financial hardship. For some households this could mean having to choose between feeding their families and heating their homes.”

- It is just another ill thought out, nasty policy, from an incompetent and nasty government.

Over two thirds of those affected, have a household income of less than £150 a week. Apparently The Liberal Democrats feel that’s too much money. They should have less. 72% of those affected, have a member of the household with a disability of major health concern. 5% of those affected, have a spare bedroom for the carer who occasionally has to stay over. 9% use the spare room to store equipment for a disability. These people are all affected by the cruelty of the Bedroom Tax.

The human cost of cruel Conservative and Liberal Democrat policies, is heart breaking. It follows the narrative that has sprung to the front of political discourse since 2010; that the poor, the most vulnerable, the disabled must be stigmatised and demonised. It is a horrid tactic that takes the focus away from the people who caused the economic mess in the first place; very very wealthy individuals and friends of the Tory Party. We note this week, that Anthony Jenkins, the boss of Barclays, was paid more than 80 times the salary of the lowest paid. Whilst Jenkins makes £1,100,000 basic salary, alongside £4,400,000 share award, and £363,000 pension contribution, the lowest paid makes just £13,500 a year. Couple that, with the announcement that Barclays intends to cut 3700 jobs, and you start to see a bit of a problem.

This is what Tories do. We shouldn’t be surprised. They are a modern day nobility. The most vulnerable will always suffer under the nobility. When we elect a Conservative government, we must expect heartless policies, rising child poverty, a distinct lack of empathy, and a woefully underfunded NHS. That’s just what Conservatives do. So Progressives must focus their anger at the Liberal Democrats. It is shameful for a ‘progressive’ party to have so utterly abused the votes of those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 by supporting policies that I would take a confident bet that less than 1% of Lib Dem voters would ever have supported. They cannot be allowed to forget the scale of the betrayal they have inflicted. This week really does sum up exactly what the Liberal Democrat Party has become, the moment Nick Clegg showed vigorous support for the Bedroom Tax.

For a party that apparently bases itself on getting government out of the lives of the individual; in a few months we’ve had Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke wishing to tell Welfare claimants where they can spend their money (whilst himself, claiming tax payer funded expenses to pay for his licence fee, a bunch of Tory MPs telling you that you don’t deserve the same Rights as them if you happen to be gay and now a Tory coming into your home, checking who’s in the bedrooms, forcing your disabled partner with all his/her equipment to move back to one room with you, and telling you to pack up and move out if you dislike it. These people thrive on government interference. These are very wealthy, very privileged people and with that, has come the most cruel government the UK has seen in a very long time. When we speak of the nasty party, we must include the Liberal Democrats in that.

The Terrible Tory Week

“No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party.”
- Aneurin Bevan

It’s an odd feeling, to not be shocked when seeing the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the United Kingdom, bursting into fits of laughter over the fact that the Shadow Chancellor has a stammer. It doesn’t shock me. My initial reaction when watching, was one of “typical”. Their lack of compassion is not only repulsive when it appears on the surface, but it is even more so when reflected in their policies. I expect insensitivity, racism, sexism, homophobic, anti-disabled rhetoric and policy from them. They represent, in so many ways, the problem that – in the words of Glen from The Thick of It – the born-to-rule-pony-fuckers are to this country; evidenced further by today’s Autumn Statement.

Screams of joy reverberated throughout the Tory back benches today as the Chancellor announced that certain benefits would rise way below the rate of inflation over the next three years, amounting to a real terms cut. The idea of a single mum struggling to put food on the table is what keeps these bastards going, much like the idea of laughing at someone with a handicap. The cut pays for their tax breaks.

The Autumn Statement can be summed up quite simply; the rich don’t have enough money and should be given more…. the poor have too much money and should have it taken away. Actually, it can be summed up with even fewer words; the Tory extreme economic agenda has failed. Miserably.

Jobseeker’s Allowance,
Employment and support allowance,
Income support,
Maternity,
Paternity
Adoption pay,
Child Benefit….
Will all rise by just 1% over the next four years. That is effectively a massive cut. But that’s not all. The link to inflation will be broken with a new ‘Welfare Uprating Bill’ to be introduced shortly. The reason for this is that current legislation means certain benefits, by law, much rise in line with prices. By effectively abolishing this, using new legislation, it means that any future link between benefits and inflation, must be introduced through new legislation, four years from now, in 2016. I cannot imagine a future Tory government agreeing to that idea. The link between welfare and inflation may now be lost forever. A massive change to the welfare system. A system of protection for the most vulnerable, destroyed in one sentence of an Autumn Statement, by far-right economic agenda that did not gain a mandate in 2010.

Further, the link to inflation using the CPI instead of the far more generous RPI was reason enough for the Institute For Fiscal Studies to claim responsible for a projected rise in child poverty. Osborne has removed it entirely. For child poverty, the removal of the link to inflation at all, is a massive blow.

Osbourne used the predictably right winged example of scroungers, or “people in bed, whilst hard workers are out earning” to justify the cut. I’m not sure how that justifies a cut in maternity allowance. Child benefit affects ‘hard working’ people as well as the unemployed. And the unemployed is not simply another word for scrounger. They are unemployed, because the most incompetent government in living memory actively sought to plunge the country into a double dip recession, followed by a stagnant economy. They are the pawns in the Tory game. And they are being punished for it. Meanwhile, whilst Starbucks are in the news for both aggressively avoiding tax, and punishing their workers with contract changes…….. corporation tax is slashed by a further 1%. Welcome to Corporate England. Apparently having the lowest Corporate tax rate in the G7 was not enough. It needs to be lower. Much lower….. a quarter lower since they came to power, just two Make no mistake, the Autumn Statement was a huge hand out to the wealthiest, and a huge grab from the most vulnerable. By 2016, the annual loss per family with two children, will be £315.40 a year.

George Osborne stood up to the dispatch box to announce that his plan has not worked. But to fix the plan that has not worked, he announced more of the same failed policies. Austerity will now last until 2017-2018. A year longer than previously stated. In March the OBR predicted that the UK economy would grow by 0.8% this year. The Chancellor today announced that the OBR had revised that, and the economy will have infact shrunk by 0.1% this year.
In fact, the OBR is excellent at getting figures widely wrong. Here, OBR forecasts for 2012 over the past two years:

June 2010 – 2.8% growth for 2012.

November 2010 – 2.6% growth for 2012.

March 2011 – 2.5% growth for 2012.

November 2011 – 0.7% growth for 2012.

March 2012 – 0.8% growth in 2012.

December 2012 – -0.1% growth in 2012.
How are the OBR taken seriously? Why do the media insist on quoting them, they are simply adding to the horrendous incompetencies of perhaps the most delusional and incompetent Chancellor in history.

Further, GDP growth has now been downgraded every year until 2018.
Unemployment is set to rise alongside.
In fact, here are the Governments own stats on unemployment (downgraded, like every thing else Osborne has predicted).

What this shows is unemployment will not be down to 2011 levels until 2016. This cannot be blamed on Labour any more, nor is it natural. It is by design.
And here is the evidence that the highest burden, will be placed on the

We must also point out that whilst the Tory benches cheered with delight at the £5bn promised for infrastructure programs (an admittance that government investment CAN work), they appear to have ignored that two years ago, £22bn cut in investment projects, and has just announced a further 1% cut in departmental budgets.

Here is how the OBR predicts the changes through the Autumn Statement will fall.

- It shows a horribly regressive pattern, with the bottom 10th of Britain losing 1.75% of their net income. The bottom 3 deciles, getting just horrendously hit by Osborne’s destructive and failing policies. Whilst the middle income bracket also tend to lose out, they lose out far less…… those be the swing voters. The lowest 10th, have actually seen their net income fall over the entire past decade. Now, it will fall again. This, Osborne claims is Britain “on the right track”. According to Poverty UK the “income of the richest tenth is more than the income of all those on below-average incomes (i.e. the bottom five tenths) combined.”

When 2015 comes around, we can expect Tory supporters of economic neoliberalism to vote Tory regardless of the fact that their agenda has led to a rise in the National debt, a rise in borrowing, a rise in unemployment, and, well, no positives whatsoever. But those on the centre and centre-left politically should never forget that none of this would be possible without the Liberal Democrats. They should be destroyed at the next election.

Aidan Burley and the curse of the nasty Party

The Olympic opening ceremony was a spectacular representation of the progress from industrialism to, well, Dizzie Rascal apparently. I adored it. There cannot be many more years go by without Danny Boyle not becoming Sir Danny Boyle. Boyle’s opening ceremony expressed progression. He not-so-subtly directed the audience left ward. Though it seems to have angered the Right Wing. And rightly so. It was a kick in the teeth to everything they stand for. It was a display of the achievements of the Left in this country. Tory MP Aidan Burley tweeted during the opening ceremony with the following:

This is the same Aidan Burley who was sacked as Parliamentary Private Secretary after attending a Nazi themed stag party, in which he himself hired Third Reich outfits and toasted the groom with nazi salutes. Burley’s credibility as a political commentator to be taken seriously, is hardly rousing.
Unfortunately for Burley, the NHS (opposed by the Tories), Welfare (opposed by the Tories, at every level), and union advancements to fairer work conditions (opposed by the Tories), minimum wage(opposed by the Tories) and maternity pay(opposed by the Tories) is modern Britain for the majority of the people living here. It isn’t champagne, nazi themed stag do’s and taxpayer funded moat cleaning for the majority. It is multicultural, it is black, white, gay, straight, female, male and everything else. It is dole queues, and a lack of hope – largely the result of the policies of his Party. It isn’t just a golf course is Kent with wealthy businessmen and a group wank over their new yacht. I cannot imagine Burley is going to last much longer as an MP.

Boris Johnson has said there was nothing left winged about it, Cameron has called Burley an idiot for suggesting it. They are both wrong. Burley is right. It was left leaning in nature. That’s why I loved it. To suggest the glorification of the NHS, of union advancements and of the suffragettes were not left leaning, is to suggest that the Tory Party had either supported all of those things, or played a part in them. This would be disingenuous and they know it. It works to the Tory Party’s advantage if they show how much they just love the NHS, if they keep quiet and reluctantly support the show of union advancement. Why let them have that? They achieved none of it. They fought it at every opportunity. So yes, the Olympic Opening Ceremony declared what every decent Brit cherishes; and none of it came from the Conservative Party.

So everyone from the far left to the Prime Minister weighed in on this, attacking Burley for his tweet, and telling us all how wrong he was. That he should apologise. An embarrassment to the Tory Party. And I think that’s a mistake we on the Left make far too often.

Burley is a Tory that has contempt for anyone that isn’t like him. But he isn’t alone. He is a regular Tory. They all think like him, the rest of them just have the sense to stay quiet. Or, Burley just has the balls to say exactly what he thinks. This is troubling, because come election time (as in 2010) the Tories can present themselves as new, cuddly, loving, ‘compassionate conservatives’, that the NHS is safe in their hands, that their budget will deliver growth and help for ‘hard working families’, that the likes of Burley do not represent the whole Party; because any outward display of their true colours is quickly silenced, not just by their Party superiors, but by the left. We demand apologies. This is in fact the British Left shooting themselves square in the foot, because it allows the Tory Party to engage with mass thought and mould communication around it. If we did not complain so loudly, the Tory Party would doubtlessly show themselves for the awful bigoted bunch of over privileged toffs that they have always been, rendering them unelectable. We now know that the NHS was not safe in their hands. We now know that listening to the advice of Britain’s biggest businesses when they supported the Chancellors plans to cut, cut, cut, was a massive lapse of National judgement in collectively believing they wanted to actually help the country rather than line their own pockets…. we know this, because it has failed miserably. We now know that they had planned to raise VAT yet cut Corporation tax and other wealthy taxes. We now know that many of their associates working for them keep their money in offshore accounts whilst shamelessly attacking anyone on welfare. The attacks on welfare are easy. These people do not fund the Tory Party, so they are unneeded; the country hates benefit cheats, because the media completely over hypes the situation, whilst the biggest cons – the tax avoiders who fund, work for, and appear in the cabinet (see George Osborne) sit comfortably dividing and conquering. But…. let them speak, their one weakness, their regressive attitudes to absolutely everything, and they will fall.

Burley later attacked the decision to allow Dizzee Rascal to perform. He wasn’t sure why we allowed rap music to feature. A further attack on multiculturalism. Clearly Burley isn’t aware that Dizzee Rascal has four number 1 hits, a Mercury Music award, NME awards, BET awards, has worked to encourage youth voting, and is internationally known. This isn’t an obscure musician. This is a guy who epitomises a certain age group, a certain social and economic background, and has shot to the top. He is also from the East End, not far from the Olympic village. A global musical star, from that area. Seems like the right choice to me. Who would Burley choose instead?

The two fundamental belief that drive everything the Tory Party stand for, that I despise are:
1) The rich are ‘job creators’.
2) Unless you are white, heterosexual, English born, and have a mind for business, wearing a suit the moment you were born; you are different, and different = wrong.
Give them the opportunity, and they will express both of these dangerous ideas time and time again. They will play on prejudices to make sure their obvious bigotry is somewhat clouded – i.e- mention constantly how awful people on welfare are. Deflect the negativity onto those who have no real political representation. And it works, because a pessimistic population has no time to look into these claims, as everyone is working more, for less, thanks to Tory economic policy.

The Tories are rather good at covering their inherent prejudices. If we take the case of Chris Grayling, the Minister for Work and Pensions; this man is a compulsive liar. But he backtracks. Or his lies are just forgotten; glossed over by the Tory spin machine. Usually compulsive liars; those whose lies become a sort of way of life, are nothing to worry about. But when they hold incredibly important offices with the responsibilities of those of Grayling, we must all be concerned. I would go so far as to suggest he has one of the most profound records of fabrication in any government of the post war era.
As shadow minister for work and pensions, Grayling pushed the lie that £2.5bn was lost to benefit fraud in 2006 by stating:

…billions of pounds are still being lost to fraud.”

- Actually, less than a billion was lost to fraud in 2006. The National Audit Office who actually released these figures said that £690m was lost to fraud. Chris Grayling has never admitted his mistake here. It is also extremely odd that he seems to take offence at the morality of misspent taxpayers money, given that his Parliamentary expenses receipts show that he bought a flat in Central London, less than 17 miles from his constituency home, using tax payers money, and then renovated said flat, with tax payers money, claiming almost £2000 alone for refurbishing the bathroom. One wonders what taxpayers are getting out of the fact that he can have a more luxurious shit every morning? Or what taxpayers are getting out of his lovely new £1,341 kitchen And one wonders how this is any different to a single mother getting a few £ extra out of the system every week. In fact, it is worse, because Grayling is on a salary of £64,000 and has a house that was worth £600,000 in 2000, and two buy to let properties in London. Grayling spread the cost of the renovations on his flat over two years (one year would have gone over the maximum allowed by Parliament) claiming:

…..decorator has been very ill and didn’t invoice me until now.

Grayling, is a hypocritical, lying turd.
After saying that he supported the right for B&B owners to not allow gay couples to stay in their B&B, he backtracked, stating:

I am sorry if what I said gave the wrong impression, I certainly didn’t intend to offend anyone… I voted for gay rights.

- Humble apology. Though a complete fabrication. If we look at his voting record on gay rights we find that….
Civil Partnerships – Grayling voted against.
Fertility Treatment for Gay Couples – Grayling voted against.
The Repeal of Section 28 – Grayling did not show up to vote.
The Right for Gay Couples to Adopt – Grayling voted against.
- He couldn’t have lied more if he tried. There are more examples of Chris Grayling’s lies, blogged several times. The most prolific, and where I started my research is here.

We know where their hatred lies. Burley disliked the left wing attitude that the Olympic opening ceremony took on. That includes the trade unionism. Is it any surprise a Tory Party member – whose current cabinet is made up almost exclusively of millionaires – dislikes a movement that protects those who do not have a voice in Parliament? We are all playing the Corporate game. They want you to work longer, for less pay, whilst the guys at the top do less, for more. Here is a government that have led the country into the biggest double dip recession in decades. They have blamed the unions, Labour, the snow, the royal wedding. All whilst giving the wealthiest a huge tax cut. It is easy. There aren’t many public services – Sure Start, libraries, youth centres – that would ever likely benefit Conservatives, so swap them for a wealthy tax cut, and they’re all happy. It seems we have become a country that judges its success on how well we treat the wealthiest. The balance is tipped in the wrong direction and it has all but destroyed the economy.
In two short years the UK has gone from signs of growth and recovery (1.2% in the first quarter of 2010 – Labour’s last few months – staggering given the recession that we’d just come out of), to a shocking -0.7% drop in growth. There is no one left to blame. The economics of ‘businesses and rich people create jobs’ is a myth. Demand creates jobs, and by stripping the economy of demand as part of their unfortunately named “Budget for Growth” in 2010, the Tories have been given the harsh reality of making sure they only look after the people who fund them. Because let’s not forget that as part of Grayling’s flagship ‘back to work’ programme, the company Deloitte Ingeous was awarded 7 out of 40 contracts to get people back to work…… this comes after the same Deloitte Ingeous donated £28,000 to Grayling in 2009. The same back to work programme that found a certain Mr Stephen Hill fit for work.

Stephen Hill had been referred to a Fit For Work assessment by the private healthcare company Atos, after signing up for Disability Living Allowance whilst waiting for tests on his heart. Despite the fact that doctors had diagnosed him with heart failure, he was still found “fit for work”. He appealed, and won. But the Department sent him another letter demanding a second assessment, this time whilst he was waiting for heart surgery. The assessor commented:

“Significant disability due to cardiovascular problems seems unlikely.”

Stephen Hill died a couple of weeks later. Atos have just won £587mn worth of new contracts to carry out assessments.
Welcome to Corporate England, and the joys of private healthcare companies.

A country works best with a healthy national health service to ensure healthy members of an economic community. It works best with a safety net to catch those who fall, or who cannot help themselves. JK Rowling famously defended the welfare state with this rather beautiful summation of how it works:

I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

It works best when those who benefitted the most from a healthy public sector – roads, health, education – do not burn the ladder up which they climbed for future generations, as the Tory Party is doing now. It works best when we fight to protect the most vulnerable, not to force them to work in order for unemployment figures to look better on tomorrow’s newspaper. It works best when we focus on how our Nation treats our poorest, and not how many yachts our richest can now afford.

Back to Burley. He is not alone in his contempt. Along with Grayling’s apparent dislike of homosexuality (and the disabled, claiming 75% of those on disability, were “skiving”), and the entire policy of forcing those with quite blatant disabilities back into work just to improve employment figures, whilst using the new found revenue flow to fund tax cuts for wealthy donors, other Tory’s have been quick to show, and then hide their true colours these past few years.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, a noble post, stood up in Parliament, and referred to gay Labour MP Chris Bryant as a “Pantomime dame”, followed by a sickening smurk and a barrage of laughter from his pompous back benchers.

“There is a real danger that the abolition of section 28 will lead to the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle as morally equivalent to marriage.“

- Theresa May, the Equalities Minister. Seriously.

“if there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who do this sort of thing.”

- Tory MP Philip Davies, after an act of vandalism which was later proven to have not involved any Muslims at all.

“Feminists are now amongst the most obnoxious bigots.’

- Tory MP Dominic Raab.
This is the same Dominic Raab who complained about tax payers money should not be spent on Government staff who are working on union projects. And yet, doesn’t seem to have a problem with millions of £ in taxpayers money being given to previously mentioned companies like Atos. Raab appears to rabidly dislike Unions marching, but has no problem with a company like Care UK majorly benefiting from changes to the NHS at a time when they donated £21,000 to the private office of the health secretary. Raab seems to have no problem with his party choosing Philip Green to head the “efficiency of government spending review” despite himself keeping his multi-millions in offshore accounts, being accused of excessive pay by awarding himself a dividend of £1.2bn, whilst his company avoided £125mn in tax payable to the UK, whilst also being accused of treating workers poorly by using sweatshops. By the way, the money spent on union planning that Raab is so angry about, came to £6mn. That’s about 20 times less than Philip Green’s company alone avoided in taxes. We see where Raab’s priorities lie. Alongside the rest of the Tory Party; with Corporate England.

So you see, it is wrong of us to insist on silencing Tory prejudice. It is inherent to them. They are the party of big business and bigotry. The nasty party. They haven’t changed, nor will they. Shouting abuse at Aidan Burley will not make him change his views that multiculturalism is anti-British, or that the NHS, the suffragettes, and the union movement are all disastrous. He, and his wealthy colleagues are simply playing a Corporate game with the lives of ordinary people. We should leave them to spurt their occasional venom at anyone who isn’t like them. It does the right wing no favours, and can only turn voter after voter off ever voting for these putrid little scumbags ever again.

And maybe, just maybe…. the ‘left wing’ aspects of the Olympic opening ceremony were used, because they are the things the British are most proud of.

Panic Petrol: A Tory blunder

On Question Time this week, the frankly embarrassing Liberal Democrat Minister for Children and Families, Sarah Teather blamed the Unions for the panic buying of petrol that we’ve seen this week in the UK. In typical Tory fashion, she could think of no other reason why people might rush to the petrol pumps, than to blame the Unions for actually doing nothing of any significance. Unite has ruled out strike action over easter. The union seems more likely to focus on talks, than threats. All the fear, has come directly from Downing Street.

I take a different view, and I think, a view shared by those of us who aren’t living in Tory-land.

Today has been damning for the Tories in this whole dispute, because whilst on Question Time, Teather seemed disgusted by the suggestion that this was all political on the part of the government, a memo has been leaked from Downing Street stating:

“This is our Thatcher moment. In order to defeat the coming miners’ strike, she stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour Party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers’ strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed.”

- This is about as damning as it gets. A lady suffers 40% burns, because the Tories want to win political points over Labour? Playground politics turned tragic.

I think there are three reasons why the Government issued several warnings in the press this week regarding the possibility of a strike, and Teather played along with it on Question Time. When asked who is to blame for the panic buying, she said “The Unions are to blame, for calling this strike“. Now, the Union hasn’t called a strike. In fact, as we speak, there is very little chance of their actually being a strike. Sarah Teather played the typical Conservative line; blame unions at all costs. Which includes lying. Teather is in the cabinet, she knows the unions have not called a strike, so why say it? This is reason one. Conservatives are usually very good at making unions look bad. This was another opportunity. During the public sector pension strike, Conservatives issues statement after statement about how hard working families are struggling, how private sector pensions are much lower than public sector, how economic times are woeful, and how the unions are making it worse. All of which, have been absolutely caused by Tory/Lib Dem economic austerity failure. The message seems to be “We expect you to just sit back and take it“. For Liberal Democrats, this is utterly disgraceful. For Tories, we know this is what they do. We know that even if economically speaking, the Country was strong, Tories would do the same thing. Slash, burn, destroy, and immiserate.

So, point 1) Take another opportunity to make the unions look bad; link the Labour party to the unions.

On the second point, and I think the most significant. The OECD pointed out that in the last quarter of 2011, the economy shrank by 0.3%. The OECD then pointed out early this week, that they believe the first quarter of 2012 will see a drop of 0.1% in growth. This means the UK is in recession. This is a terrible indictment on the absolute failure of austerity. They cannot blame Labour for this anymore. They cannot blame the snow. They cannot blame unions. They cannot blame Europe. The Tories and the Lib Dems only have themselves to blame. The “budget for growth”. Remember that? What we have is stagnation and failure. What they have done, is risk an economic and social engineering program that has led the country to ruin. To avoid a recession, by propping up spending at the end of the first quarter of 2012….. induce panic buying. Tell the country that you are prepping the army to deliver oil in the event of strike. Needlessly tell the country you are having meetings of the crises response team “Cobra”. Tell the country to fill up cans of petrol and take them home. For what reason? IN CASE of a strike? Strikers must give seven days notice. Ben Fenton at the Financial Times tweeted something similar:

There is absolutely no way we will be in recession after all this #pasty #petrol buying, though. What a brilliant tactical ploy.

There is one problem with this theory. To buy back 0.2% of GDP growth, consumer spending would have to top £800mn over the past three days. This is quite a stretch. Be interesting to see 2nd quarter growth figures.

Point 2) Prevent double dip recession in the most cynical way possible.

Going back to the point about lack of growth here is what the Government’s “budget for growth” has achieved. You see the green bar? That represents government debt as a share of GDP as outlined by the Tories on how they thought the austerity measures would work. The blue line, is what has actually happened. No amount of spinning this can make it positive.

And lastly, Bad press attention over the past week. First, a budget that cut the top rate of tax for the highest earners, whilst continually hitting the most vulnerable, especially pensioners was announced. Secondly, cash for access promises to be the scandal of the year for the Conservatives. Every employee in the country might not be too pleased to know that the man who wrote the government report on the need to strip workers of their rights when it comes to unfair dismissal, Adrian Beecroft, donated over £500,000 to the Tory Party. I’m not sure it’s right that very wealthy Tory donors should be allowed to create government policy. As well as the Tories not having a mandate to do any of what they have so far done, the public certainly didn’t vote for an odious little turd like Beecroft to oversee certain policy making endeavours.

Ed Staite, a former media advisor for the Tories is accused of trying to sell policy to the highest bidder. He is filmed by undercover reporters that they can use their money and influence to affect government policy in a way that helps their business, by pushing for the sale of Royal Mail. How does Staite defend himself? Well, on his website he says:

I was suggesting a transparent approach to generate new ideas which may well never become Conservative Party policy. That is how the policy formulation process works.

- How this is a defence, is beyond me. Policy is generated, he is suggesting, by selling access to very wealthy individuals? How is that a defence? And these people have the nerve to attack the Labour Party for its ties to unions? Unions represent hundreds of thousands of people. The one or two that speak to despicable advisors like Staite, represent their own private business interests. It actually disgusts me that these people are allowed anywhere near power. It seems, even though they did not win a mandate, like vultures they are attempting very successfully to use government to enrich themselves and their friends. This is corruption on a horrendous scale.

Francis Maude made the entire media onslaught a thousands times worse by insisting that people stock up on fuel at home in jerry cans. It was made a million times worse when a woman in York suffered 40% burns after transferring fuel at home and setting herself alight. Maude should resign.

Party funding, should be public.

Point 3) An attempt to divert the horrendous press the Tories have received this week away from them, and onto the unions and the Labour party.

It is all political. If it isn’t political, then it is such vast incompetence, it is scary to think that these idiots are running the country. This wouldn’t surprise me, given the different messages coming out of Downing Street. Firstly, fill up your cars. Then, fill up your jerry cans at home. Then, only fill to three quarters. But don’t panic. There is no coherent message. When a government goes out of their way to tell the entire nation not to panic….then there is going to be panic.

And then there are those who blame the public.

“Well they should have used their common sense!”
What a ludicrous argument. What a weak defence of an indefensible and perpetually shambolic government.
People don’t have all the information.
People are told the government are in emergency meetings for this.
People are told to stock up on cans.
People are already struggling, so when they hear this, they react.
People are aware that governments are more informed than anyone else on the situation.
It just so happens, that the government weren’t more informed.
And it just so happens that they weren’t more informed….. on the week of a big cash for access scandal, and reports of double dip.

Here is a particularly favourite argument I have came across:

- I highlight this argument, because it seems to be quite common. And yet, it’s very contradictory. He is saying that people should think for themselves instead of listening to government. And then he’s saying (in regards to the riots), people don’t listen to government at all. I’m not sure what the overall point is.
‎”If the government advised people to chop their testicles off to reduce over population, do you think people would just blindly do it?“
The “if the government said chop your testicles off blah blah utter bollocks” argument is as painfully uninspired as any other. Just a silly comparison. We know chopping a testicle off is detrimental. It’s common sense. There is no weighing up of pro’s and cons. But when a government who are privy to information we aren’t, on the proceedings of 1) government 2) economic conditions and 3) the possibility of strike action because they’re constantly updated on the threat ….. then people, who lead busy lives, or businesses that are struggling to cope, cannot be expected to spend hours wading through all the information and coming to a rounded judgement, especially when they do not have all the information and cannot possibly get all the relevant information. Of course people rely on official sources for their information. If you think a top Cabinet Minister going on TV and saying “we’re holding emergency Cobra meetings” and “fill up your tanks, take petrol home” is going to make people take a day off work so they can sit and read through all relevant documentation and information available, I think you’re expecting a bit too much. The government have a responsibility. They purposely caused panic in this instance.

Also, the riot analogy is just as weak. The riots themselves were not the result of sudden desperation and a fear of a lack of essential supply. There was an obvious economic and social undertone to the riots, and always have been when it comes to violent disorder. How he managed to compare the two, actually hurts my head. As I noted in a previous blog written just after the London riots:

The motives are of course opportunistic. There appears to be no political motive. It has purely brought out the violent and senseless mob who are achieving nothing but the destruction of their communities. But the social and economic situation in relation to these riots cannot be ignored. We must accept that when one person commits a crime, it is an individual problem. When thousands commit the same crime, on the same day, there is a deep social problem. Certain tweeters have said they watched people looting supermarkets of nappies and milk. The underlying issues need addressing. Many of the Greek rioters last year, were opportunistic in nature. But the economic pressures created an atmosphere where rioting was essentially inevitable. A government who go out of their way to initiate a shock to the system that forces unemployment up deliberately, whilst living cost and rising inflation also rise purposely, is a government that is committing economic criminality. It is similar in the UK. A study by the business information group Experian found that inner city poorer areas are not equipped to deal with economic shocks like that of austerity, because they are still dealing with the after affects of the economic shocks of the 1980s. It found that Elmbridge in Surrey was the least likely to be affected by austerity, coincidentally, Elmbridge in Surrey was labelled as the town with the highest quality of life by a Halifax Estate Agency, and the “Beverly Hills of England” by the Daily Mail. The looting of the public services and economic violence from the Government, will absolutely always lead to social violence and criminality.

An entire generation has been told that we must own stuff. That the purpose of life is to consume. We are given easy credit to fuel the debt needed to sustain an economy and a prevailing social wisdom built around consuming. People who have very little, who are told they will always have very little, living in areas where the opportunities are bleak at best and non-existent at worst, are still encouraged to consume. The materialist mindset that has dominated all other thought processes for far too long, must not be ignored as a contributing factor to the unrest; this can be seen quite evidently with the looting of non-essential, luxury goods. We are what we buy. And that is a problem. A generation of young people have had luxuries dangled infront of their faces by incessant advertising, only to be told they would never be able to afford them; well that temptation exploded and now they can get those desirable consumer items for free.

- To add to this. We live in a greed fueled culture. Humanity has many different traits. Our economic system is based on one trait; greed. Which isn’t always a terrible thing. But it does mean that that particular trait is quite obviously amplified, because it is rewarded. This is how the trickle down affect actually works. Greed at the top, will trickle down to the very bottom. This is when unrest becomes inevitable. Wealth trickling upwards, results in unrest trickling downwards. It isn’t a conscious phenomena, it is a product of the system that we live.

The petrol crises is the fault of the government. No one else. It was a cynical political game that has backfired miserably. People are still panic buying, petrol stations are closing, fuel is running low….. and there isn’t even likely to be a strike. What a total mess. Typical of such an awful government.

Sun Shame

The Sun is on a moral crusade. The Sun…. on a moral crusade. THE SUN! The very idea baffles me. Whilst they’re currently being investigated for paying police for stories, they’re taking the moral high ground elsewhere.
Today The Sun has said it:

CALLS on all Brits to be patriotic and report any cheats you know by calling the National Benefit Fraud Hotline

- This is in reponse to their story that benefit fraud costs the UK £1.2bn a year. The figure sounds huge, especially when written in block capitals, as it is in the Sun article. The problem is, the figure is actually tiny.

The story comes from figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions called “fraud and error in the benefit system”. What it actually states is:

The estimate for the percentage of total benefit expenditure overpaid due to fraud in 2010/11 has remained the same when compared to the 2009/10 and preliminary 2010/11 estimates, at 0.8%

- £1.2bn is actually representative of just 0.8% of the total benefit expenditure. If the total benefit expenditure was a £1 coin, less than 1p would be lost to fraud.

In December 2010, the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee found that HMRC happily ignored Corporate tax avoidance worth up to £25bn. Vodafone was allowed to write off its tax bill of £6bn. Rather coincidentally, the head of tax policy at Vodafone is a man named John Connors. Connors used to work at HMRC and enjoys a close relationship with current head of HMRC, David Hartnett. They go for cosy lunches together, and then they casually wipe £6bn from the Nation’s second largest company on the Stock market’s tax bill. Perhaps the “scroungers” mentioned by the Sun should give Hartnett a ring and go out for lunch. All would be fine then.

According to the tax justice network’s report into tax abuse, the figure of £25bn, when added together with tax evasion (the likes of Labour candidate for Mayor; Ken Livingstone accused of using a tax loophole to save up to £50,000) costs us £69bn.

Corporations involved in widespread tax avoidance love Hartnett THAT much, he is the most ‘wined and dined’ civil servant in the Country, having been treated to wonderful Corporate hospitality a total of 107 over three years. I’m sure they do it just because he’s a nice guy. That must be it. I’m sure of it. How many times have you been asked “who would your ideal dinner guest be if you had a choice?” I always answer “Not Oscar Wilde, not John Lennon, not Christopher Hitchens, not Mohammad Ali… none of them…… give me David Hartnett any day of the week! What a guy.“

Another company that enjoyed the dining company of Hartnett, was Goldman Sachs. It will come as no surprise that Hartnett personally shook hands with Goldman Sachs officials on a deal that waived £10,000,000 interest on a tax avoidance program that went wrong. If you’re a single mum struggling to raise kids, and are taking a few quid more than you’re legally entitled to, the Sun want you dead. If you’re a multimillionaire company that believes it owes nothing to anybody and actively breaks the law; as long as you take the head of HMRC out to lunch, you’re perfectly fine.

Like everything The Sun says and does, hypocrisy is at the apex of this story. News International owns The Sun. When its CEO Rupert Murdoch is not defending allegations of hacking the voicemail of a dead school girl, or bribing police for stories, it used to spend its time losing legal battles over unpaid taxes. In 2009 the Australian capital territory won its battle to reclaim $77 million in taxes and penalties owed by News Corporation. When News Corp moved its headquarters to the US, through tax loopholes, it deprived Australia of millions of $ in unpaid capital gains taxes.

The Sun has decided to block use of its “beat the cheat” picture on its article. It can be found here.
But I thought I’d create my own.

The curse of Letwin

The Conservative Government REALLY need an Alastair Campbell. Desperately. They attempted to secure a Campbell figure to head their PR team, with the [sarcarm] brilliantly managed and executed appointment of Andy Coulson.[/sarcasm] It would take a top PR team most of the day, every day, to ensure Oliver Letwin, the Minister of State for Policy, keeps his grotesque mouth closed whenever someone from the press is around, because he betrays the idea that the Tories have change, or modernised, since, well, around the 19th Century. Letwin is a left over from a group of Etonians who clearly and misguidedly believe they have a right to rule by way of their heritage. It is an arrogance that the Cameron Government will never shake, because they are the living embodiment of that privileged arrogance. They have disastrously inter-breeded this mentality with a Thatcherite economic mentality that is as dangerous as it is out-dated. His disastrous face, screams contempt for anyone who isn’t Oliver Letwin. He is a PR disaster. It is one of the many reasons (another being massive incompetence and dishonesty – which we’ll come to later) that he was overlooked when the Tories were searching for a leader. Hell, they even chose Iain Duncan Smith, does anyone remember him?

With a face looking as if someone had created him out of the concept of pompous twat, Oliver Letwin has once more allowed the Conservative Party mask it currently shrouds itself in, to fall, revealing a Thatcherite brigade just as frightening and dangerous as their 1980s counterparts.

Letwin had told a consultancy firm, that his proposals for public sector reform should instill:

“some real discipline and some fear”

He said this, because he believes the productivity of the public sector has failed. It is a strange comment and angle to take, given that the private sector has spent the past four years creating sovereign debt crises’ everywhere it goes. Productivity is very difficult to measure in the public sector, because the public sector is not about creating anything. Investment in the public sector has seen waiting lists for operations down year on year since the last Tory administration. Teaching standards are also up. The public sector does not “make” things. So talk of productivity in comparison to the private sector, is futile and misleading. It strikes me as wholly patronising that a man such as Oliver Letwin has the balls to lecture public sector workers – teachers, doctors, nurses, firemen – on what “real discipline” is. They are not children. They also did not claim public money for ludicrous items like mortgage interest payments. Also, the public sector hasn’t spent twenty five years creating a system of easy credit to boost the excessive pay of CEOs and Managing Directors, whilst the average worker saw overall increase in wages? And then when the company or bank failed miserably, the “fear” was THAT pertinent that the CEOs are given massive pay offs and lovely big bonuses. All this, whilst the public sector is told constantly, and has been told constantly, from Thatcher, to Major, to Blair, to Brown and now to Cameron, that it is not good enough, that it must be modelled on a failing private sector built on squeezing productivity out through long hours, a mountain of stress, and all for less pay whilst the big boss is compensated for his little contribution to overall productivity with huge salary and bonuses; and that their jobs are always on the line. A private sector model should be as far away from inflicting misery on the public sector, as possible.

It isn’t the first time Letwin has revealed his hostility to those less fortunate. Earlier this year, he surprised and disgusted the most posh of Tories, Boris Johnson, by telling Johnson:

“We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays.”

- At least he recognises that the North suffered horrifically with the gutting of jobs and thus wealth during the Thatcher years. Though he seems to have suggested that it is perfectly okay for the wealthy Southerners to pay for expensive holidays and that holidaying abroad should be based on wealth. I expect he thought he was at home with Boris, and could reveal his true feelings, but sometimes posh Tory twats seriously misjudge the situation, and regret the fact that their well crafted public self has been set on fire by their real self. This seems to happen a lot with Letwin. And now on to why I referred to his as a hypocrite:

In 2005 Letwin used the phrase “Wealth Distribution” in a positive light! I know! I was shocked too when I first read it. A Tory, interested and supportive of wealth distribution? Surely not! Well, actually, not. 2005 was the year Cameron was trying to pose as being a “progressive conservative“, deeply contradictory term yet one he managed seemingly to work. Letwin clearly took on that contradictory term, by trying to fill out a left wing term with right winged substance in the hope that no one would scratch below the service. He said:

…….not by trying to do down those with most but by enabling those who have least to share an increasing part of an enlarging cake.

- In practice what this means is, a desire to scrap the top rate of tax for the richest, a desire to lower the Corporation tax rate to the lowest recorded level, a desire to allow companies like Vodaphone a get out of jail free card by writing off their tax debt, whilst at the same time cutting allowance for the disabled, the elderly, according to a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Letwin must be talking about the 16000 less police Britain will have after this Parliament; according to the leaks that the Guardian currently has; the Tory’s new director of policy Steve Hilton, suggesting abolishing maternity leave whilst also abolishing ALL consumer rights legislation. Just to reiterate….. this man, is the Nation’s DIRECTOR OF POLICY. Now i’m not saying these idiotic and deeply right winged ideas of Hilton’s are likely to become a reality. To suggest so would put me on the same wavelength as the manic Right Wingers who would constantly suggest that New Labour were about to ban England shirts and change the name of Christmas, or ban you from being white. Letwin must believe Hilton’s ideas will “enable” those with the least to a share of an increasingly large cake. Tories consider Hilton a genius…… not just because of his ideas (which aren’t in any sense a spark of genius) but also because he doesn’t wear shoes in Downing Street and they consider this “wacky”. In their defence, it is as wacky as most Tories are likely to see, given that they are born wearing business suits, slick back hair, and spend the next twenty years trying to hide the fact that their schooling experience is a plethora of homoeroticism cunningly disguised as a love of “Rugger“. It can’t have been too many years ago when gay and black people were described by most Tories as “wacky“. Hilton, like Letwin, is politically dangerous.

The reason why Letwin is hypocritical in his desire to do away with the idea that public money can actually do good, is because he used public money to claim over £80,000 for his Cottage in Somerset, in order to heat the place, empty the septic tank, £1000 in mortgage interest and most beautifully of all…… over £2000 to repair a leaking pipe underneath his tennis court. So much for “real discipline and fear“.

Either the Tory Party spend some time searching and investing in a decent PR figure, or they sew Oliver Letwin’s mouth closed, he is a liability to the Conservatives, and a liability to humanity.

The economics of crime

There was a posh turd, dressed in a business suit, aged about 12, speaking like a 17th Century elocution tutor, on Question Time this week. He suggested that there is “no money left” because of Labour. This was in response to the whole question of rape sentencing that has plagued the British media like a bad theatre production all week.

Firstly, he is of course wrong.
For many many ignorant, typically Tory reasons.
The money to keep the prison population, was adequately provided for in the budget. A little spotty, sweaty Tory twat spouting “omg no money!!!! The Cameron man told me so!!!” doesn’t change that.

I don’t want to keep dragging up these comparative graphs to prove a point, but in this case, it is justified. The scare mongering again by those on the Right is becoming ingrained in our national psyche that it seems almost natural to talk of cuts as if they are absolutely necessary. People start their questions with “I understand there needs to be cuts, but…..”. The discourse is entirely provided for, by the Right wing. It needs to change.

This first chart, is how the Coalition would like us to always view the public debt. Just in terms of how much it is. It looks huge. It isn’t huge.

The reason it isn’t huge, is because the above graph doesn’t place the debt against how well the economy is doing at the time. If I have a debt of £200, and i’m only earning £220 a week, then yes, it looks huge. If i’m earning £3000 a week, then it’s not so bad.

This next graph is the debt against GDP.

Debt as a percentage of GDP, in the 20th Century, has been far far higher than it is now. It is simply ideological on the part of the right wing (which includes the Labour Party) to speak of this, as a great catastrophe and dire cuts needed immediately.

If there was no money left, it would surely be incredibly poor economic management to state on the Tory Party Website that their plan is: “Tough but fair – ensuring the richest shoulder the greatest burden“, whilst at the same time offering to….

cut Corporation Tax from 28 per cent to 24 per cent over four years which is the lowest rate in the G7.

So, that effectively means a company like Diageo PLC, who earned over £2bn in 2009, yet paid just £43mn in taxes now only have to pay 24%, instead of……………2%. So, whilst Diageo continue to tax avoid, whilst the employees who make the money for the company use the publicly funded roads, and have used publicly funded schools when they were young and publicly funded healthcare when they’re sick, to get them fit to get back to work and make Diageo even richer, other companies will fill that gap in public revenue,………. by paying less. So where does the money the little Tory shit want, come from?

Ken Clarke has an idea! Though he insists this policy isn’t about saving money, it’s about saving the dignity of the victim. Tories love the most vulnerable, as we’re all well aware.
The Justice Secretary is considering offering discounted sentences of 50% off, to rapists who plead guilty straight the way. His defence is, “Well, Labour set it at 1/3 off!!!”. A typical party political logical fallacy of the worst kind. His argument is it encourage rapists to admit their guilt early on, saving the victim the ordeal of going to trial. The reality is, it’s a cost cutting measure. Less prisoners in the system, less money being spent on prisons. This cost saving exercise goes hand in hand with the scheme to build more private prisons to house the prison population out of the hands of the State. It is already failing. According to a Freedom of Information request by More4, four out of ten private prisons scored incredibly low on the Prison Performance Assessment Tool. Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust said:

The evidence doesn’t suggest that it [use of private prisons] has driven up standards by providing good models.

- So, privatising doesn’t improve anything. Just like privatisation of the gas and electric companies didn’t improve competition, didn’t bring down prices, and actually caused greater problems especially among the poorer, older sections of society who now can’t afford to heat their homes at night.

Privatisation of prisons has a more sinister product. For the private prisons, crime is good. Crime pays. Crime means profit.

Public institutions are not worthless to the people who need it. There is no moral hazard in public institutions, to the people who live it. They act to meet the interests of the public, whose interests certainly aren’t being met by a neoliberal doctrine that is working to increase homelessness, destroy the planet, and impose its own interests on our democracies. The public sphere should be a sphere for debate on morality away from the ethics of the private sector, without it we are in danger of rationalising and justifying the unjustifiable simply because we believe the system is natural, unchangable, and those who are on the outside (be them criminals, the homeless, the mentally ill, or anyone who doesn’t fit into the neoliberal scope of reward) are to be locked away and ignored, because they are of no use to McJobs. By using the motive of profit, as the one defining ethical value within all of societies institutions, we lose what it is that makes us human, because we transfer all energy away from our empathy, our morality, and our compassion and onto our economic interests. That, is a problem.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of “Liberty” (human rights pressure group) and quite hypocritically, on the board of directors of London School of Economics when it accepted a donation from the Gaddafi family, said:

It costs £40,000 to put someone in prison. Is it so wrong to ask questions about whether that is the best way to rehabilitate someone?

- Yes. It is wrong. For two reasons. Firstly, because that is not what the Justice Secretary is proposing. If Shami Chakrabarti thinks letting a rapist out of jail 50% earlier than his sentence demands, just because he said “yeah, it was me”, is a good attempt at rehabilitating a rapist, she’s a disaster. Secondly, she started the sentence on the premise of cost. Cost is the first issue she considered, when uttering that sentence. If there is plenty of money to offer £6.1mn signing on fees to bankers at partly tax payer owned UK banks, and if we have enough money to bail out Ireland and back the bail out of Portugal, if we have enough money to replace trident and allow Vodaphone to get away with its £6bn tax bill, whilst shrinking their tax obligations from 28% to 24% and the cutting of the 50p top rate of tax, if we have enough money to spend on a pointless Royal Wedding and a war in Libya, then it is futile, ignorant, and actually immoral to start to discuss the criminal justice system in terms of cost to the tax payer.

Fighting crime is impossible when you are a government that is committed to increasing inequality. Like mass migration, the main cause of crime, is economic inequality. It is the old battle against poverty and against hunger. We cannot see the country through privileged middle class tinted sun glasses. Economic violence will always breed crime. University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology in the 1930s and 40s found that criminal activity on average, came from all races, all religions, from ordinary backgrounds who were deeply affected by changing economic conditions, and who were left behind.

Robert Reiner, in his book “Law and Order: An honest citizen’s guide to law and order” argues that developed nations such as America and Britain, saw a crime boom matching almost identically to the onset of Neoliberalism. Wage disparity across the board, increased inequality, a huge increase in low paid, insecure jobs, a new “me me me” society, ethics being replaced by ruthlessness, and harsh public spending cuts, actually increased crime beyond recognition. Those left behind, will almost always turn to crime.

People aren’t born criminals. Lower classes do not have criminal behaviour hard wired into their minds at birth. And given that the vase majority of crime, is crime of acquisition, by those from lower socio economic areas, one has to raise the quite simply observation, that economics is a problem. Of course, Libertarians refuse to accept that their system could possibly be the cause of such problems. Their perverse logic and ability to turn their heads to Occam’s razor, is enshrined in some of their most prolific writers. Libertarian writer Charles Murray claimed that there is an underclass who are pathologically and genetically criminal. It is therefore, the fault of biology, and conveniently absolves neoliberal economics of all the blame. He further suggested that Britain should refrain from offering child benefit to our lower classes, to take the incentive away to breed. Rather than face the reality that neoliberalism breeds material deprivation whilst encouraging an incessant and ruthless chase and brawl for material wealth, and so crime is inevitably going to increase in such an atmosphere, Murray and others like him prefer to turn the other way, and blame everything but their failure of a system.

The politics and economics of division, is responsible for the increase in crime rates. To divide people up, into categories based on income, based on race, or gender, and then to say “why aren’t you conforming? The man in the Rolls Royce is happy to conform, why aren’t you? Go to prison!” is deeply irresponsible, and quite prehistoric in its thinking. Transferring the good of community, with the disinterest in community and strength of the individually is a great moral hazard in itself.

It is rather a paradox that the school system aims only at producing good little workers, for the private sector to suck up. We teach our kids the same things, in the same rooms, with the same books, on the very limited same few subjects. We are creating a mass of people who think the same, and they inevitably rebel because they don’t think the same. We are trying to standardise the mindset of a generation, into believing that true happiness is acquired through the process of acquiring. It is unsuprising that those left behind, find other means to fill that gap that doesn’t actually exist, but has been instilled into their minds for decades.

The pro-neoliberal lobby have always refused to accept the criticism thrown at it. Those of us who dislike the model, must be communists. Yet the critiques are essential to understanding. Neoliberalism cannot explain, it can only enrich a select few. It brings with it deep divisions and inherent flaws that may seem like a droplet on an entire ocean, but can create a tsunami if they aren’t understood properly.

This could be 1983

The Conservatives haven’t changed. It is true that they are the epitome of what it means to be wealthy, privileged, and have an in-built mechanism of contempt for anybody who isn’t wealthy and privileged. I find their politics to be vicious and nasty, and their economics to be self serving and hypocritical. They are typical of the type who wish to use a system to climb to the heights they have, and then burn the ladder up which they or their family before them, climbed.

They will always use the “deficit” (which isn’t that bad) to justify the unjustifiable, simply because no one except a tiny band of elite scumbags will ever accept their economic principles. Libertarianism is dangerous and unhealthy to a civilised society. It is built on the premise of judging a nation by how rich its most wealthy have become, how concentrated that wealth has become, rather than how society protects its most vulnerable.

Their language is arrogant, vicious, dirty, and out dated, to match their political stance. Here is a few examples of Tories being Tories.

Wandsworth Council today announced plans for the Autumn, to charge children £2.50 to use the local park. It is in response to the £55mn it needs to find in spending cuts. Instead of fighting the obvious manipulation of figures from the Treasury which suggest we’re on the verge of becoming Greece (which we aren’t), and instead of pointing out that the Treasury is in worse shape now than it was when Labour left office, and expected to get worse, with regard to inflation and unemployment……… the Council has just accepted the bullshit, and decided that along with the disabled and the unemployed, children should be the next to be hit. We now have more property millionaires than anywhere in Europe – creating an horrendous property apartheid especially in the South, we have a banking system that has managed to get away with causing chaos, and we have a mass of Corporate tax avoiders costing the system £25bn a year….. and yet Wandsworth Council think the way to go is to make children aware that from now on, any ounce of fun, is going to cost them money. The excuse? The same typical excuse Libertarians use all the time, the same tired, nasty excuse Tories have been using for decades:

“Why should Wandsworth taxpayers subsidise children from other boroughs?”

- Who thinks like that? It makes me squirm.
If that’s the case, why should the majority of left leaning voters (over 57% at the 2010 election) subsidise the jobs of a right wing government? I don’t want our family tax money to pay for our Tory MP to live so comfortably. I don’t want our tax money to go to paying a National debt whilst the very wealthy manage to pump their money into offshore accounts, and be allowed to claim expenses on running those offshore companies, against the UK tax they don’t pay. We are subsidising their ability to pay nothing. They couldn’t run a successful business in the UK, and offshore its profits, without functioning roads, a decent healthcare system, a property protection system like the police force, an education system to prepare their future workforce. And yet, their right to offshore, is supported by our Government who instead choose to attack children’s parks. Great.

The Tories main campaign poster in 2010 was this:
- So imagine our surprise when Mark Britnell, who made it into the Top Ten of the most influential people when it comes to healthcare in the country by the HSJ, former Director-General for Commissioning and System Management for the NHS and now “health policy expert” on David Cameron’s personal NHS advisory group said this to a group of Private Healthcare lobbies, organised by private equity firm Apax:

“In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer. The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

Minister for Health Andrew Lansley, who is worth an estimated £700,000, and spent the Labour years flipping his second home, claiming expenses for renovating a cottage designated his second home, before selling it for a tidy profit, before claiming for furniture for his flat in London now designated his second home, insists that he isn’t considering NHS privatisation. One wonders what his most charitable donor, John Nash, of Private Health company Care UK thinks about that. Nash donated £21,000 to Lansley’s private office, whilst they continue to make 96% of their profit from the NHS. Care UK stand to make a great deal more from increased involvement of the private sector in the NHS.

Cameron promised that front line jobs would not be cut from the NHS, before the election. Vowing to protect the NHS is a big vote winner in the UK. Cameron knew that. He then didn’t win the election, didn’t get a mandate, and so decided to rip the NHS to shreds. According to Unison, 500 jobs at St George’s Hospital in South London are to go, along with three wards and 100 beds. Similarly, Kingston Hospital in South West London announced that around 20% of its workforce will need to go, to meet the governments cost saving demands. The government repeatedly claims it is increasing spending on the NHS in real terms. Another lie. NHS spending is set to grow by less than under the Thatcher years, which is when the NHS was gutted almost to complete meltdown. Here’s how that “increase” looks on a graph:
Between 1997 and 2010, the number of doctors increased by 57% and nurses by 31%. Funding rose from around £1bn a year (less than Philip Green paid his family in dividends in 2009, which he financed by taking out a loan, which in turn reduced his Corporate tax rate as the interest on the loan could be offset against Corporate profits of his firm Arcadia) under the Tories, to £4.3bn under Labour, which increased the activity of the NHS by over 40%. It worked. We are healthier now than we were in the 1980s, we are living longer, and morale in the NHS was higher than the 1980s. Increases in spending this year, when adjusted for inflation, will be 0.024% from April 2011. Great. In fact, Sir David Nicholson, Chief executive of the NHS said this about the new spending plans for the NHS:

there has never been a time where we have had four years of flat real growth. It is unprecedented.

- There are many Tories that will argue consistently and poorly, that Osborne and the Tories are championing the NHS and funding it amazingly well beyond all recognition. Listening to them, is perilous.
Waiting lists are already sky rocketing. In Coventry, it was reported that there would be a 13 week waiting list for Hernia repair at Walsgrove University hospital. That has now increased to 26 weeks and should be considered “just a guideline” as lists are likely to increase again this year.
According to County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust:

Trust is undertaking a £60m cost cutting exercise to be delivered by 2014, including £20m in 2010/11. The trust is also cutting 300 beds. 300 nursing jobs will be lost through natural wastage Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust: equivalent cost savings of around 200 fewer jobs are required to meet financial targets. In cash terms, the trust is making cost efficiencies of £25m over 3 years. City Hospitals Sunderland: The Trust undertook a £22.5m cost cutting exercise for financial year just gone. NHS County Durham and Darlington : The NHS service providers in County Durham and Darlington are undertaking a £200m cost cutting exercise over the next 3 years. The trust is cutting 62 senior nurse posts and replacing them with 78 more junior posts. In addition, County Durham PCT has identified 110 management posts for redundancy.

The managerial posts are “in addition” to front line nursing.

Cameron told a female Labour MP in the House of Commons – the NATIONAL LEGISLATURE – to “calm down dear”. One wonders what Tory MP for Loughborough Nicky Morgan thought of this childish, sexist outburst from our Prime Minister, given that she was seen visibly laughing in the House of Commons at that pathetic remark, yet accused ME of being sexist when I simply asked if she had asked a planted question a few weeks back.
This comes a few weeks after Cameron took a swipe at ethnic minorities in his attack on multiculturalism, in which he mentioned Islam and Muslims 36 times in twenty minutes, and Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist not a single time. It was an attack on Islam, to the point where even Nick Griffin called the speech “provocative” and members of the EDL said that Cameron “understands us”.
That came about a week after Osborne referred to an openly Labour MP in the Commons as the “pantomime dame”. It isn’t surprising, their stance on homosexuality, given that whilst 100% of Lib Dems, and 99% of Labour MPs voted to repeal the nasty little Section 28 law that banned anything positive being said about homosexuality in schools, only 24% of Tories voted to repeal it. And whilst 100% of Lib Dems, and 95% of Labour MPs voted in favour of allowing gay adoption……. only 6% of Tories voted for it. So that’s homophobia, sexism, and racism all within a year. What else is left? Ah yes, class.
David Shakespeare, leaders of the Tory Councillor for Buckinghamshire Council said that poor northerners who are losing their jobs due to the cuts, should go down to London and pick the fruit of the land owners down south, instead of seeking job seekers allowance. He also said:

‘The North may replace the Romanians in the cherry orchards, that may be a good thing’

- Not even a necessary thing? Not even a regretful thing? A GOOD thing? He doesn’t mind kicking people out of their work and their jobs, he thinks it’s a great thing, because they’ll come to the south and work on his land for next to no money! He’s happy that the North is about to be gutted, again, of all funding whilst the south thrives, again, like the 1980s. Luckily I am from the Midlands, so I’m not sure i’d have to pick this overweight Tory prick’s fields, but i’m not sure if I have to bow as he drives past in his luxurious horse and cart.

Osborne announced this week that he was going to make it easier for companies to cut pay, cut pensions, dismiss people, and be allowed to get away with being discriminatory. In essence, he plans to make job security as unsafe as possible. It will be golden news to people like my boss. It is an attack on the workforce again. Presumably he will moan about Unions trying to hold the country to ransom whilst he attacks the rights of as many workers as possible, expecting us all to just bend over and take it. I hope the Unions unite and fight, I hope for a period of industrial action on a scale never seen before, and I hope a general strike is called as soon as possible If it is going to be a case of a very wealthy minority making life as miserable and difficult as possible for the many, then I hope the many fight back. Osborne claims employment rules are holding back job creation. He of course, is wrong. Job creation is held back significantly by a vast majority of big bosses plundering money into dodgy stocks or increasing their salaries beyond recognition. Why not cap private sector managerial wealth to a percentage of the lowest paid? Therefore when the lowest paid gets an increase, so does the highest paid. The extra-profit to be used to employ new people. Why attack the right of the workforce to a decent level of job security and working conditions? Why is that the only solution? Do you know what else creates job losses? It is happening on a smaller scale across the country, cuts are having affects on jobs and livelihoods. Cuts….

Derby’s Historic Industrial museum has had to close, 9 job losses.

Bishop Aukland College – 179 jobs losses.

South Tyneside College – 200 jobs to go.

Tyne Metropolitan College – 66 jobs to go.

Stockton Riverside College – 23 jobs to go.

City of sunderland College – 69 jobs to go.

Newcastle College – 171 jobs to go.

East durham college – 76 jobs to go.

New Cross library, Crofton Park library, Sydenham library, Grove Park library, Blackheath library all to close.

Oxford Brookes University – 400 support staff received “at risk” letters.

Diss weekly Youth Centre praised by police for helping troubled children, to close, and staff to lose their jobs.

Taunton Primary School – no more music teacher, no more music lessons.

A Big Society initiative – new volunteers to help out at museums in Hampshire – to replace 25 staff who have lost their jobs. Unpaid staff to replace paid staff. Great.

Five libraries in Lewisham to close.

Cuts to NHS disabled transport in Dumfries – jobs losses expected.

50% of pupil support assistants assigned to children with special needs, to be cut in Aberdeen.

21,000 job losses at Lloyds……..

….. former Lloyds boss Eric Daniels takes home a bonus of £1.45mn…..

….. new Lloyds boss António Horta-Osório takes a signing on fee of £6mn and a salary of £1.6mn.

In short, the poor need jobs to live. The rich need the poor to be as close to slaves as possible, reliant entirely on them to be able to eat, to be called lazy and scroungers and attacked as greedy if they unionise or refuse to work for a piss poor boss in piss poor conditions for piss poor pay. It is not a plan to increase job creation, it is a plan to enable the very wealthy, to get even more wealthy – to buy an extra yacht to fill the void in their soul – by asking more and more of their staff for as little as possible, and it’s always been the case. The project is designed to make people believe their tax money is wrongly being used, not just by people who claim to have a physical disability whilst they play tennis and golf 24 hours a day, but also by children playing on swings in the town next to yours, as opposed to the fact that your tax money is actually used to make sure that the wealthiest get massively insane tax cuts with Corporation tax expected to drop from 28% in 2010….. to 15% in 2020. That is what your tax money is funding. Make sure the man in the expensive house in Notting Hill thanks you for his lovely new Mercedes….. but don’t let your kids play on the park next to his house, you scrounging scumbag.

The progress the country has made since the hell of the 1980s, is about to be burnt to the ground. Do not be fooled into thinking this “has to be done”, it is Conservative party ideology, they have waited over a decade to have this chance.

They are attempting to replace compassion, with greed, and it’s working.

The demise of the Liberal Democrats

Whilst the World waits to find out who the new leader of Al Qaeda is (my money is on either the other bloke from Wham, or the Dragon’s Den presenter with the gammy eye. Failing that, a coalition with Hamas and the Lib Dems might be workable), our friends over at the Parliamentary Liberal Democrat party are having a bit of a tantrum.

Vince Cable, the Lib Dem number two, is apparently annoyed that the Tories allowed the No to AV campaign to attack Clegg. He said:

“Some of us never had many illusions about the Conservatives, but they have emerged [during the AV referendum campaign] as ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal.”

- He’s taking a moral high ground. One wonders if hypocrisy is something the Lib Dems understand, because in October last year, Vince Cable told a publicised meeting of the CBI that the Tories were wrong for thinking there was no crises prior to 2007, and that only people like himself had seen all of this coming. This attack on the Tories, came days after George Osborne announced his new plan for growth. Brilliant timing to attack your coalition partners.
During the AV campaign, Cable told us all we should vote yes to AV to keep the Tories out. He said:

“We need to make sure the progressive majority wins elections in this century and not the Conservatives as they did, by the back door, for two-thirds of the last century.”

- A pretty ironic statement in itself, given that the Lib Dems agreed to prop up a Tory regime in 2010. A hypocritical remark, in a catalogue of similarly hypocritical remarks by the Business Secretary in recent months.

David Cameron is not responsible for the No campaign. Nor is he responsible for who finances the No campaign, in the same way that the Yes campaign (which by the way, made more money than the No campaign) was not controlled or run by Clegg or Milliband, and to the point where the Yes supporters made the effort to make sure we all knew this wasn’t about Clegg. Yet again, their hypocrisy in telling us that the Yes campaign is not in anyway about Clegg, but the No campaign is all David Cameron’s fault, was overwhelming. I am glad Cameron has not apologised. If he does feel the need to apologise, then Clegg and Milliband should really apologise for the manipulative emotive language used by the Yes campaign.

Cable is like a kicking and screaming child in the supermarket who refuses to get up off the floor and blames his mum for everything. “I hate you!!!” he screams at his mum. I suspect the tantrum comes from the fact that the local election results epitomised the displeasure felt around the Country toward the Liberal Democrats.

Yesterday’s local council election results were as follows:
Percentage of the vote:
2010 General election – Conservatives 35%, Labour 27%, Lib Dems 26%
2011 Council election – Conservatives 35%, Labour 37%, Lib Dem 15%
Councils gained/lost:
Conservatives +4, Labour +27, Lib Dems -9
Councillors gained/lost:
Conservatives +81, Labour +800, Lib Dems -695
AV Referendum:
Yes to AV: 32.1%
No to AV: 67.9%

It was a terrible result for the (Neo)Liberal Democrats, though not surprising. For a party that has betrayed its base for a taste of power and moved economically as far to the right as is possible, it is unsurprising that the vast majority of those who voted Lib Dem in 2010, have gone back to Labour. The Tories rejoiced that they had managed to retain their share of the vote. It is a funny thing, to rejoice in retaining a share of a vote that didn’t give you a mandate last time. Essentially what it demonstrates is, if another general election was called, they still wouldn’t be able to achieve a Parliamentary majority, despite spending the past twelve months blaming every problem in the history of the Universe, on Labour.

The choice for my local council seat, was between three Tories, and three Lib Dems. I had a choice between the government. So I didn’t vote.

Labour picked up a fair few councils, though less than I think they would have liked. Leicester is now painted red. With a newly elected Labour mayor, a Labour victory in the Leicester South by-election and Labour holding onto the council seat in Leicester. Nick Cleggs home in Sheffield became a Labour council. Blackpool’s Conservatives lost their council to Labour. The Tories gained a number of councils (Northampton and Lewes for example) from the Lib Dems, as did Labour. As far as I can tell, the Tories only managed to take one council away from Labour, in North Lincolnshire, whilst Labour managed to take four councils from the Tories and three from the Lib Dems. So Labour affectively have taken seven councils out of the hands of the Government.

A Tory MP on Sky News at midday yesterday, insisted that the Liberal Democrats should now not be as involved in governmental decisions, and that we should view the Council results as the nation voting in favour of a Tory government. I am not entirely sure what planet he is on. The general election was 12 months ago, and despite a financial crises and the most disliked Prime Minister in a generation, the Tories still couldn’t gain a majority. They didn’t improve nor diminish in the council elections. They achieved nothing. They stayed the same. And the same is, not having a majority. On average, it was a pretty awful night for the Government overall. They still don’t have a mandate to do what they’re doing, in fact, less so now.

Very well done to the SNP. They now have an overall majority in Holyrood and will no doubt rightfully push for full independence.

As noted above, Vince Cable, the Business Secretary is a little bit pissed, that the No to AV campaign used Clegg as a punch bag, told lies, and was funded almost exclusively by the Tory donors. It is true that the No campaign played dirty, very dirty in fact. But it stinks a little bit of hypocrisy because the Yes to AV campaign hardly acted like the Virgin Mary. It endorsed lies (the end of tactical voting? 50%+1 of the vote guaranteed? the end of safe seats? A chance to “choose hope over fear”? – as if AV means all our political woes are fixed under an AV rainbow). My favourite of which was the ridiculous idea that if we don’t vote in favour of AV now, we will never get a chance at PR, we will be stuck with FPTP until the sun explodes. Why is that the case? Do we really believe that had AV returned a Yes, the Tories would have put PR on the table? Here is what David Cameron told the Guardian in 2009:

If we want parliament to be a real engine of accountability, we need to show it’s not just the creature of the executive. That’s why a Conservative government will seriously consider the option of fixed-term parliaments when there’s a majority government.

But it’s also why a Conservative government will not consider introducing proportional representation, as many participants in A New Politics have demanded. The principle underlying all the political reforms a Conservative government would make is the progressive principle of redistributing power and control from the powerful to the powerless. PR would actually move us in the opposite direction, which is why I’m so surprised it’s still on the wish-list of progressive reformers. Proportional representation takes power away from the man and woman in the street and hands it to the political elites. Instead of voters choosing their government on the basis of the manifestos put before them in an election, party managers would choose a government on the basis of secret backroom deals. How is that going to deliver transparency and trust?

- Whilst he is wrong, that PR takes power away from the man and woman in the street (I always find it comical when Tories speak so positively about giving power to the average person, whilst continuing to sell off public property to the hands of unelected, faceless, unaccountable businessmen), he is correct that PR would mean an end to manifesto pledges, though that’s hardly a bad thing. Time and time again we vote on the basis of manifesto pledges, only to see those pledges rust away. Blair promised a referendum on the EU Constitution in the 2001 manifesto. We never got a referendum. Clegg promised to vote against a rise in tuition fees in the Lib Dem referendum. He subsequently voted for a rise in tuition fees. Proportional Representation is exactly what this country needs. Cameron and the Tories will never offer it, even if the AV vote came back Yes.

Hell, here is what the director of the AV campaign, Neal Lawson (I like Lawson, by the way) said about AV in December 2009:

“I’m sorry but I’m not a big fan of AV. It can lead to even less fair outcomes than FPTP and that to me is the critical point.”

The only party who can put PR back on the table, is the Labour Party. It will take a manifesto pledge and considering the Labour leadership was in favour of AV and not in favour or PR, I don’t know why a Yes to AV vote would have pushed them to offer PR. (Though we can always count on the Labour Party to throw away their principles and ride the tide of public opinion). They would have been happy with AV, they wouldn’t have offered anything else. This is what Ed Milliband said in 2010:

I’m in favour of the AV voting system for the House of Commons and will campaign in favour of AV in the referendum. I believe that changing our electoral system so that every MP has the support of more than half of their constituents is one way in which we can begin to restore trust in politics. I am, however, concerned that the Coalition have bundled the AV vote with sweeping reforms to our constituencies that risk changing the size of constituencies when too many people are still excluded from the electoral register. I hope that we will be able to change these plans in Parliament. I’m not in favour of proportional representation for the House of Commons.

- He makes a mistake here. The AV we were offered, does not guarantee over half of the vote for one candidate. That is a Yes to AV lie. We would not have been required to rank all candidates. People could just put a “1″ and nothing else. This means that a lot of MPs (especially in safe seats) would have won with less than 50% of the vote. Secondly, he doesn’t want PR. He wants AV. If the AV referendum produced a Yes vote, David Cameron (also No to PR) would have been annoyed, Ed Milliband would have been happy and wouldn’t push for anything further, and Nick Clegg…….. well, he’s supremely irrelevant.

It is quite simply, the Parliamentary Liberal Democrats, and Vince Cable and Nick Clegg in particular are the reason that so many of their loyal and hardworking Progressive councillors are out of work this morning. It isn’t the fault of Cameron or Milliband or anyone else. It is their own fault. They had it coming. They are now just very sore losers. They should be apologising to the massive amount of Lib Dem councillors who now face the dole queue along with the millions of others that the Coalition has so far booted out of work, for the sake of chasing a Neoliberal dream.

Welcome to Corporate England…

It was an exceptionally busy day in British politics yesterday.
First, the dirtiest and most destructive years of the past half a century in Britain is being made into a film, staring Meryl Streep as Satan Baroness Thatcher……..

How scary is that?
To research the role, Meryl will be spitting on a few homeless people, and giving your money to her friends in the City.
I hope it explains the situation of the Thatcher years accurately. I hope they don’t presume to tell the World she created a wondrous property and share owning society. I hope they explain that her deregulation of the banking sector lead to the biggest financial mess we’ve ever had; that her selling off the council houses lead to numerous housing market crises and a lack of affordable homes for the next generation; that selling a few shares in British Gas (which hasn’t improved British Gas as a service) is not an adequate substitute for stagnating wages and the destruction of pensions; that passing power from the unions to finance capital has not been a great achievement leading to wondrous trickle down economics like her dirty ideology promised.
That would be nice.

Secondly, the BBC announced that the Banking sector was FURIOUS at the Treasury for the increase on the bank levy. They are apparently “livid”. It reminds me of the first episode of The Royle Family where Nana rings Barbara just to tell her that the post office wont accept her voucher because it’s a couple of days out of date. Barbara tells Jim. Jim doesn’t care. Barbara says “I’ve told Jim……… oooo he’s livid“. It is a similar situation. The increase on the bank levy of an extra £800mn more is minuscule. The bankers are not “livid”, they are simply saying so, to make it seem as if the Government is being tough of banks. It is a joint effort, and it probably wont work, because people aren’t stupid. The banks will then announce that they have come to an agreement to start lending again (even though that’s what they’re supposed to do anyway), they will presume we will all be grateful to them for doing what they’re supposed to do as opposed to just extravagantly rewarding themselves for breaking things, and the Chancellor will seem like a hero who tamed the banks. The reality, is quite the opposite.

The bank levy is still less, even with this extra £800mn, than it was under Labour. The banks are being asked to pay less than is required of them for destroying the entire system in the first place. Barclays Chief Bob Diamond will take home a bonus (not salary) of £8mn this year. Correct me if i’m wrong, but this is the exact same situation we were in before the crises. It will happen again and again. It is inherent to the excessive power of finance capital. The unions may have had too much power in the 1970s, but finance capital, backed by the forces of Conservatism has an even greater hold on power now.

Thirdly, as the bank levy was made public yesterday, the Tories knew it would take up much of the coverage in the Press. So this gave them a chance to spill the beans on a horrid little change to the Corporate tax laws. When I say “little change“, I mean, the biggest change to Corporate tax laws in decades. It is the greatest transfer of wealth from a gutted public sector, from services to children, to the elderly and to the disabled – to big business, I think I’ve ever known and it is massively unjustifiable.

The change is this;
The corporate tax rules used to say that if you paid 10% on your overseas profits, and the rate here is 28%, you’d have to pay 18% when you shift your profits back here, to make up the difference. Which is sane.
Now, under the new Tory rules; companies pay nothing on money made by their overseas branches.
When the money gets here, through tax havens, they will have paid nothing on it. But, this rule change only applies to “large and medium firms“. Small businesses still have to pay.
And here’s the icing on the feces cake…. the “large company” that now have even higher profits because it doesn’t have to pay tax on it, can still claim expenses for funding its overseas branches, against the tax it pays here. They don’t pay the tax on that overseas branch, but they can still claim expenses to run it.
Oh and by 2014, the 28% rate will be dropped to 24%.

The point of doing this, is obviously ideological. It is an ideology that says a lower corporate tax rate is better for us all, the extra money will trickle down to us from those philanthropists of the business World, and whilst the rest of us have to deal with mass unemployment, no police, cuts to any form of social service, privatised health care, child care cuts, fear of job and house loss, extra funding for school sports being abolished, the selling off of forests and our libraries closing; we should be thanking the Government for allowing our richest companies to get even richer. Because they will provide the jobs that will kick start the economy apparently. Like they definitely fucking didn’t did in Ireland.

Welcome to Corporate England. Welcome to Wednesday afternoon, brought to you by Starbucks. Enjoy the air you’re breathing, sponsored by Nike. Indulge in some conversation, promoted by Walmart (Disclaimer: At the end of every sentence, you must use the phrase: this sentence was brought to you by Walmart).

It is of course no surprise that the Tories are bending over the kitchen table and winking provocatively at the City. It was revealed in the Guardian yesterday, that over 50% of Tory funds come from the City. One of my favourites is Peter Hall, an Australian Fund Manager, who in 2008 told the Sydney Morning Herald that the oceans should be sold off as property. If privatising the sea wasn’t enough, David Rowland, the multimillionaire worth an estimate £700mn donated over £4mn to the Tory Party. Hedge Fund manager Stanley Fink donated £1.9mn. He was then made Tory Treasurer. The money is astounding. For all the talk of Labour being in the pockets of Unions, it is no better that that Tories are in the pockets of the richest and most powerful men on the planet. Actually, that’s a lie. It is worse than being in the pockets of Unions. Unions represented average men and women, thousands upon thousands of people. The City represents the most narrow of elites, whose main concern is increasing their own power and wealth.

It is no wonder that Corporate Tax cuts and a banking tax cut is being masked as a great coup against a greedy banking sector. Who do our public servants work for? What a funny, blinded little World we live in, when we claim we’re a liberal and free democracy. We are too cowardly to fight back. The Egyptians are showing us how it should be done. The public face of Finance Capital, is the Tory Party, and that is not a good thing.

I seem to remember there were Liberal Democrats in this Coalition at some point? Are they still calling themselves Progressives? Is that still what they insist on going with? Can a massive delusion really last this long?

On this day…

I am 25 today.
It’s rather old.
A quarter of a century.
I dropped Ash off at Gatwick this morning and have just got home.
She has now gone home.
I have to wait five and a half months to have her back.
I don’t like that at all.
Up until about an hour ago my day was particularly dull.
I bought a lovely Redbull at Watford Gap.
That was a little bit of an up point.
Can you imagine the up point of your day being a can of Redbull?
It’s been a pretty average January 21st.
Not the worse ever.
I think King Louis XVI off of France had the worst January 21st given that he had his head cut off.
George Orwell’s January 21st wasn’t too much fun either back in 1950, given that he died.
Emma Bunton, Baby Spice has to live with the fact that she was in the Spice Girls, her entire life.
It’s a cross I wouldn’t like to bear.
She was born on January 21st too.
I have managed to reach 25, in Leicester, without yet having at least three kids by three different women, and without having stabbed anyone or contracted a nasty drug habit.
I am impressed by my record.
But still, the day was starting off very boring indeed.

So imagine my joy when my entirely dull day turned to brightness when I turned on my TV screen to see that Tory Director of Communications and ex-News of the World editor/King of illegal Phone Hacking Andy Coulson has “resigned”. It’s certainly not a surprise. What is a surprise is that he still insists he knew nothing of phone hacking whilst he was editor of the News of the World. Which means one of two things…. 1) He’s lying (I suspect this is the case) or 2) He was an incredibly bad and out of touch editor. He resigned from the N.O.T.W because he claimed he knew nothing about any wrongdoing and insisted he’d done nothing wrong, and now he’s resigned from the Government….. because he claims he knew nothing about any wrongdoing and insisted he’d done no wrong. How odd. He also claimed he was not a despicable bully. He insisted it. And yet, in 2008 he was taken to an Employment Tribunal and the claim of bullying, against him, was upheld. The defendant was awarded £800,000 as a result. Which begs the question, if Coulson was involved in bullying, and was editor of a Paper in the middle of a phone hacking scandal, why would the Prime Minister employ him? Why is tax money (££140,000 a year as of May 2010) going to pay his wages whilst local council care budgets are being slashed?

Coulson’s resignation comes a day after Labour’s massively incompetent and useless leader Ed Miliband announced that Alan Johnson, the shadow Chancellor was to resign for family reasons. It was a little bit of a media blunder for Johnson to have resigned on January 20th, because the papers and the TV news were bound to run with it, rather than the story that was grabbing headlines on January 19th, suggesting that David Cameron’s latest target is set on severely disabled children. The media repainting the Tories as the Nasty Party is exactly the wake up call people need. The harsh and unnecessary cuts to services like those that support the families of severely disabled children, whilst Vodafone have a tax bill written off by the Treasury, of close to £6bn. It could have lingered in the media and put pressure on the Government.

The mainstream media reported that David Cameron, pre-election, promised to protect the rules for Councils providing care for disabled children. He made that promise to the parents of Holly Vincent, whom suffers from quadriplegia, has severe cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and is blind.

They applied for respite care to Gloucestershire County Council. They were denied. This is because the wondrous Big-Society, We’re all in this together brigade of selfish rich economic thugs have not ringfenced spending for respite care. They have provided £800mn over four years to the County Council but it isn’t ringfenced. They have lifted the rules. Councils now are not obliged, legally, to spend funds protecting the most vulnerable. Cameron, pre-election told the parents of Holly Vincent that he “would never do anything that would hurt disabled children”.

As a result of the lack of funds spent on Holly Vincent, her parents have signalled their intention to put her into a care home, because they simply cannot afford to look after her any more. They currently only get five to six hours respite a week.

Riven Vincent, Holly’s mum said:

“…..there’s nothing to stop cash-strapped local authorities from using the money elsewhere. I have no wish to put my daughter into a home. We want to look after her, all I am asking for is a little more support.
Without this, we simply cannot cope and nor can families up and down the country just like ours. We are crumbling

I don’t want her in a residential care home – it would destroy me. But without extra help, I find it hard to see how we can meet her needs at home.”

If a politician had promised to help my struggling family, if we had a child who was so severely disabled and getting worse as she gets older, and then he cut the funding to the local authority and didn’t ring fence the remaining funds…… I’d get all the publicity possible to make that politician out to be the absolute scum bag liar hellbent on destroying hard pressed families up and down the Country for the sake of tax cuts for the wealthiest. The Prime Minister is a disgrace. The Tory Party and all of their heartless supporters, are a disagrace.

Alan Johnson should have let this story linger for a while, so it has a chance to sink into the minds of the British Public that we have elected Thatcher-on-speed. Absolutely every promise they made, they appear to be backing down on. No one voted for backdoor privatisation of the NHS. No one voted for such a massive Tuition fee rise. No one voted for the releasing of rules surrounding respite care ringfencing. I can’t imagine many people would have voted for such a shit Party, had they expressed their desire to be the bringers of Neoliberal hell to Britain.

Although, the Tories were kind enough to give me the birthday present of Coulson’s resignation. Perhaps next year they will try and top it by sacking Cameron, Osborne and Clegg.
That would be amazing.

London’s burning

I’m all for violent direct action; but I draw the line when those damn students made the future King of England ejaculate out of his eye. That’s too far.

London is burning again. The protesters have spoken. I genuinely hope this is a sign of things to come. I hope the Unions get a backbone too. The middle classes certainly wont. They need to watch Coronation Street’s live episode and complain about students. I am a strong supporter of violent direct action, when Government’s quite clearly piss on the very people who elected them. It gets the message across. Always has. Shock Capitalism has been tried on Countries in the past, with shocking consequences. We should not allow it to happen here, we don’t want it here. We will not be peaceful about it either.

So the Tuition Fee debate lasted five hours. The biggest decision on higher education in decades, was decided in less time than it takes to drive from Manchester to Devon. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable didn’t stay for the debate.

The Government won by 323 votes to 302. Their majority of 86, swiftly cut to 21. A number of Lib Dems showed the had to courage to vote against the rise, and surprisingly, a few Tories voted against it too.

Still, here is the list of Lib Dem MPs who voted for the rise in tuition fees, despite pledging to vote against any such proposal.

Let’s make sure this is the last Parliament they ever sit through.

Danny Alexander (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Norman Baker (Lewes)
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed)
Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley)
Tom Brake (Carshalton & Wallington)
Jeremy Browne (Taunton Deane)
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon)
Paul Burstow (Sutton & Cheam)
Vince Cable (Twickenham)
Alistair Carmichael (Orkney & Shetland)
Nick Clegg (Sheffield Hallam)
Edward Davey (Kingston & Surbiton)
Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey & Wood Green)
Don Foster (Bath)
Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay)
Duncan Hames (Chippenham)
Nick Harvey (Devon North)
David Heath (Somerton & Frome)
John Hemming (Birmingham Yardley)
Norman Lamb (Norfolk North)
David Laws (Yeovil)
Michael Moore (Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk)
Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove)
Jo Swinson (Dunbartonshire East)
Sarah Teather (Brent Central)
David Ward (Bradford East)
Steve Webb (Thornbury and Yate).

If any of these are your MP, and you voted partly due to their stance on tuition fees; email them. Let them know that they are a disgrace. Let them know that they have absolutely forfeited their right to be known as Progressives. Let them know that they are Tories.

The sleight of hand

There is a bit of a sleight of hand employed by the Conservative/Liberal Coalition on the whole issue of Tuition Fees. It is a little untouched, and quiet, and isn’t really being spoken about, but it needs to be.

I went to a Question Time style event at University tonight. It included Labour MP for Leicester South Sir Peter Soulsby, Conservative MP for Loughborough Nicky Morgan, and our Student Union President. The Liberal Democrat dropped out, spinelessly. No Liberal Democrat contacted in the area would take up the spot. The rats are in hiding it seems.

I got a couple of questions in, and especially focused on the Tory’s claims that her Party do not dislike the public sector or funding higher education because her boss David Willetts, the Universities Minister often speaks highly of both. I pointed out to her that 9 months ago Willetts referred to students as a ‘burden on the taxpayer’, yet amusingly he claimed thousands of pounds in Parliamentary expenses to do up his home, public money that could have been used to fund any one of us students in that room, or not in the room who are likely to be put off going to university due to the Coalition’s horrific attack on higher education. So I asked her given that information, who does she consider to be the real burden on the taxpayer? The student, or the insufferable hypocrite David Willetts.
She didn’t answer. She went on a rant about how much the Tories love the NHS. I wanted to say to her “sshhh, you’re talking bollocks“. I refrained.

On the subject of Tuition Fees, Nicky Morgan, the Tory made the point to say:

“The important thing here, is that you don’t have to pay anything in upfront fees under our system.”

We don’t pay upfront fees now. Never have. Nor does anyone actually think that under this new Tory/Lib system, students are expected to turn up on their first day with £9,000,000 in a briefcase ready to hand to the University. That has never been the argument against the rise in tuition fees. It is purely a nice thing for Tories and Lib Dems to say, in order to sound like they’re doing us a favour. They aren’t.

And then there is the real sleight of hand.
There has been much praise amongst Lib Dems and Tories for them raising the amount you need to be earning before you start paying back your tuition fee loan, from £15,000 to £21,000. This is their flagship policy, because they claim it’s more progressive than the current system. I have a couple of issues that make this a sleight of hand. The idea is those earning less will not have to start paying back.
Firstly, raising the bar to £21,000 is great, if your loan amounts to what it does at the moment. If I leave University with a £20,000 debt, a £21,000 threshold is workable. But it is highly ineffective if i’m leaving with a debt of £40,000. That is a huge difference. Also, the interest rate is set to rise from 1.5% to anywhere up to 3% for those earning over £40,000 a year. So that’s more money we’re going to be paying back overall. Whilst at the same time the University budget is to be slashed beyond recognition. Yet they insist on calling it a fair deal and progressive. It is like a barman saying “Hey, why don’t you pay for a pint, and i’ll give you half a pint? That’s a fair deal for all of us!” Paying a lot more, for a lot less, has never in the history of the World been considered fair and progressive; unless you’re Nick Clegg living in a fantasy World.
And secondly, and most importantly; The plans are based on 2012 prices, which the Government has been quick to point out don’t matter because no one pays up front in 2012. So, the plans should be based on the first lot that leave under the new system; 2016. This means that adjusted for an expected 2.2% rise in inflation by 2016, the threshold is not £21,000 but is actually closer to £17,000. That represents a massive sleight of hand that will save the treasury a lot of money, and cost graduates a hell of a lot more in monthly repayments than the previous system, a hell of a lot more than the Government has lead the public and the Institute of Fiscal Studies to believe.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies pointed out that whilst 20% of graduates will indeed benefit from the plans; 8 out of 10 graduates will pay a lot more than they would do under the current system.

Vince Cable stated:

“Almost one in three graduates will pay less than they do at the moment under the scheme that the Labour Government introduced.”

Almost? Not quite one in three. So, that means more than two in three will pay more than they do at the moment. How is he still insisting that this is a fair and progressive system? It’s fucking awful. The plans by some Lib Dems to abstain, is absolutely useless. If they signed the pledge, they should vote no next week. If they abstain or vote yes, they do not deserve to call themselves elected representatives.

Labour’s new generation

BBC News: “Defence Secretary Liam Fox, what are your thoughts of the leak of this letter, today?”
Liam Fox: “As a result of the terrible legacy left to us by Labour”.

What the hell? This has to be some sort of record. Usually it takes a Tory or Lib Dem, on average, about 2 minutes before they try to defend their ridiculous ideological cuts to public services, with the words “terrible legacy left by Labour”, however the Defence Secretary today not only managed it in less than two seconds, but also managed to fit it into an answer to a question that wasn’t actually asked. That’s almost impressive. I am going to start every answer now, with “due to the terrible legacy left by Labour”, even if it isn’t warranted. “Jamie, where are the car keys?” …. “Due to the horrendous legacy left by the Labour Government, I have put the keys on next to the phone.“

It was inevitable that the Conservative Party and it’s Right Winged friends in the Media would immediately begin to paint Ed Milliband Red the moment he won the Labour Leadership race. It is true, that Ed is further to the Left than his brother, and runner up to the Leadership, David Milliband, but Ed is certainly not far left unionist old Labour. Not by a long shot. Both have claimed in interviews very recently that they consider themselves socialists, but then defined what they believed socialism to mean, and both pointed out that the job of contemporary socialists is to admit that Capitalism is a fact of life now, and try to fill in the caps that capitalism leaves open to injustice and inequality.

I am waiting to see substance in the form of policy, from the new Labour leader, if he is going to win my vote in five years time. I would rather throw myself in front of a train than vote Conservative, and after the Lib Dems gave my vote to the Tories this year, even though my vote was an anti-Tory vote……. I wont be voting Liberal Democrat every again. As I suspect, a hell of a lot of others wont be voting Lib Dem again. They are a dead party, being propped up by the Tories. But in order for Labour to win back my vote, they have to really present a progressive alternative. I do think Ed is a better choice than David. David to me, whilst more charismatic than Ed, is too much of an extension of the Blair years. He represents the centre ground far more, and whilst Ed is certainly not some sort of Leninist as the Sun seems to be suggesting; he is a little more to the Left.

Their father is the ex Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband. Having a Marxist father would drive Americans insane with rage. Luckily, we’re not mad Americans, and we think far more rationally. My own political stance is far more in tune with Miliband Snr than both of his sons. As a boy, Ralph had stood at the grave of Karl Marx, in London, with his clenched fist raised, and vowed to fight for the rights of those less fortunate. Clearly living in a Marxist household, would have had profound affects on both Milibands, whom have since developed their own opinions. I cannot imagine their dad would have voted for either of them at the leadership election.

Ed’s speech was intriguing. I quite liked this:

Every day out of power, another day when this coalition can wreak damage on our communities, another day when we cannot change our country for the better.
And let us resolve today that this will be a one-term government.

The Conservatives (as pointed out in my previous blog) are winning the propaganda war because they have shaped the political discourse away from the fact that it was the private sector that caused the economic mess, and have somehow managed to blame the entire thing, on the Labour Government. The root causes of the Financial sector meltdown, can actually be traced back in a perfectly straight line….. to the last Tory government, curiously. This new Labour party needs to provide a different understanding of the problems, and bring the discourse away from the Right.

The Tories spent the last election campaign blaming Labour for not closing the roof when the sun was shining; in other words, not saving money when times were good.

This was a nice little addition:

The old way of thinking said that public services would always be second-class. But we defied the conventional wisdom.
I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.

I had to disagree with Ed when he said:

This new generation that leads our party is humble about our past and idealistic about our future.

Firstly, both Miliband brothers had been in the previous Labour cabinet, and spent months sticking up for the way the Party was being run. Gordon Brown was the best man for the job, they both chanted constantly. My issue is, I consider myself an idealist. I was a Party of the left, to be run by thinkers and intellectuals, not the same old politicians we all despise. I don’t want a leader to simply be pandering to the popular opinion and conventional wisdom of the time. On immigration, I was a truly progressive politician who does not give in to the “I was born here don’t you know!!! Bloody pakis taking over!!” bigoted idiots, and then claim they aren’t bigots, just ordinary people worried about jobs. They are bigots. They are also only capable of responding to the conventional wisdom. The reality of migration, as I have said previously in blogs, is that it cannot be solved by closing Britain. The only way you fight immigration is firstly accepting that Britain’s colonial history has sent shockwaves through the centuries, that are still felt today throughout the Middle East and Africa. And secondly, accepting that Nation States and Capitalism are massively incompatible. And thirdly, you have to have a genuine commitment, internationally, to fight global poverty and inequality. Mexicans try for a better life by illegally crossing the border into America, because the balance of equality has tipped far away from them. Since the opening up of trade in Mexico, the Mexican class of poor has expanded, the Middle Class has contracted, and American business interests are flourishing. There are no health benefits, and no educational or societal benefits, and so the poor in Mexico are suffering. And then Americans wonder why they want to leave. They weren’t given any choice. It wasn’t a case of being freed. They have become trapped. And it is a similar story across the World. It is the root cause of mass migration. This is what needs to be conveyed to the public, if Labour want to be truly idealists and progressives.

I also liked this line, of Ed’s speech:

This generation wants to change our society so that it values community and family, not just work, because we understand there is more to life than the bottom line.

I have been waiting for a politician to point out that life is not just about what you do for work, for a very long time.

He then took a well deserved swipe at the Coalition’s debt reduction plans, with:

You see, it’s obvious really, when you cancel thousands of new school buildings at a stroke, it isn’t just bad for our kids, it’s bad for construction companies at a time when their order books are empty.
It’s not responsible, it’s irresponsible.
We must protect those on middle and low incomes. They did nothing to cause the crisis but are suffering the consequences.
I say the people who caused the crisis and can afford to do more should do more: with a higher bank levy allowing us to do more to protect the services and entitlements on which families depend.

He made a point, that struck a chord for me. Recently, my grandparents have become far less mobile. They are in the mid-80s, and they are in and out of hospital almost on a weekly basis. They cannot walk to the shop, and it’s a struggle for them to even wash their clothes. They have a new care worker, who spends most of the day washing for them, making sure they keep as mobile as they can, going to the supermarket for them, cleaning the house, cooking the food, she does absolutely everything, she’s on call at night. A real credit. People like her, are heroes in my estimation, and society should reward them. She is paid next to nothing. Miliband said:

What does it say about the values of our society, what have we become, that a banker can earn in a day what the care worker earns in a year? It is wrong.

If you’re a free market fundamentalist, it is perfectly fine that a banker or a businessman who spends most of the week playing golf, can earn in a day what a person who is actually providing a real social good, earns in a year. It is the height of human freedom apparently. If you are like me, you see something massively wrong and skewed in a system that allows that. And that is why you, like me, are not in the Conservative Party.

The Tories pointed out that Ed is only the leader now, because he received the backing from the Unions, and just how dangerous this is. They claim Ed Miliband must now be in the pockets of the Unions which apparently is a disaster. The media tends to agree. I wonder, why is it a disaster to have won the votes of the Unions, yet no one in the media bats an eyelid, at the fact that when David Cameron tried to argue the case for sudden and quick cuts, he presented a letter signed by a bunch of business leaders; one of whom was a man named Paul Walsh, owner of Diageo PLC, who according to a Guardian Report, have actively avoided tax for years. And a huge number of signitures on the list, including J Sainsbury, Philip Harris and Simon Wolfson, are all members of the Conservative Party! Why is that any different, or any better? why is a Country run in the interests of big business, based on long stressful soul destroying hours for fuck all pay, consider the height of a wondrous free society? Sir Peter Bonfield CBE, FREng, C.U.N.T of BT saw BT share price go from £14, to £5, under his control. He then left BT with over £6,000,000 whilst thousands of workers lost their jobs. Why are we listening to these people? The are the old, grey haired generation that has left my generation with no affordable homes, and a fucked climate. Thanks for that. I for one, am not going to pay attention to the old generation, for another second.

Finally, my favourite part of Ed Miliband’s speech, said like a true progressive:

Here is our generation’s paradox: the biggest ever consumers of goods and services, but a generation that yearns for the things that business cannot provide.
Strong families.
Time with your children.
Green spaces.
Community life
Love and compassion.

Overall, I have quite high hopes for this new generation of Labour. Although something tells me they aren’t going to be all that different to the last lot.

Election ’10: The aftermath

“The Country has spoken!!!………. We just don’t know what they’ve said.”

- Lord Ashcroft

So whilst Britain still has no Government, and talks remain underway between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the possibility of a coalition, there is at least one happy moment we can all share in.
Nick Griffin, the leader of the British Nazi Party has spent the past month campaigning relentlessly in the constituency where he was standing; Barking. They expected their first BNP seat in the commons. The result?
Labour’s Margaret Hodge: 53.4% of the Vote
Conservative’s Simon Marcus: 17.8% of the vote
BNP’s Nick Griffin: 14.6% of the vote.
They came third. Not only that, but 1.6% of the BNP vote from 2005, swung to Labour.
The BNP contested 326 seats at this election. 207 more than 2005, and yet, their share of the overall vote only increased by less than 2% overall. That’s horrendous.

Margaret Hodge, and Labour, absolutely destroyed the BNP in Barking. But, that’s not the end of the smug look on my evil liberal pro-multicultural face this morning…..
The BNP, on Friday, lost all twelve of their seats previously held on Barking and Dagenham Council. It would seem that the big push the BNP were going to make, failed miserably. Good. We don’t want Fascists.

Anyway, back in the realm of reality (reality tends to have a liberal bias), I stayed up all night on election night hoping to see a few big named casualties. There was no Portillo ’97 moment as such. Although seeing Jacqui Smith lose Redditch, was quite pleasing. As was watching Lembit Opik, who seems far too in love with being a celebrity than a politician, lose miserably. Opik then appeared on the Election addition of Have I got News For You, which was actually a brilliant episode, and said:

“Can we hurry this along? I have an appointment at the job centre in an hour”

Which made me laugh. I actually like him.

However, the Hung Parliament result has meant that the Liberal Democrats are currently in talks with the Conservatives over the possibility of a ConDem (puns are the future!) coalition. David Cameron, in his statement yesterday, said:

“and to remind you how proud you can be of the result: a bigger increase in seats even than Mrs Thatcher achieved in 1979″

- That’s a little misleading. Purely because since 1979, and especially since 1997, the Tories have been absolutely despised. An increase in seats during an election in which the Country has hated Gordon Brown for well over a year, you’ve had millions more to spend on your campaign than any other party, and yet you’re still not able to gain a majority, is a massive, massive failure, and suggests people still don’t trust you. A year ago, the Conservatives were 19 points ahead. They were going to win massively. On May 5th, the polls had them at 5 points ahead. Also, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, didn’t have the bulk of the Nation’s Media behind her. This has not by any means been a successful election campaign for the Tories. All it means is, the Tories over the past five years have managed to hide their inherent disdain for gays, foreigners, Europe, and the poor behind more creative and moderate language. Congrats.

“So I want to make a big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats. I want us to work together in tackling our country’s big and urgent problems — the debt crisis, our deep social problems and our broken political system …

“On the basis of the election result we achieved, it is reasonable to expect that the bulk of the policies in our manifesto should be implemented.”

Here at least, he is right; in that the Liberal Democrats cannot expect too much from a coalition. They lost seats. The Tories, as much as I may dislike it, won the most seats, they should have the bulk of the power. If the Liberal Democrats and the Tories were to form a partnership, I think the Liberals would have to back down on much of their manifesto pledges. Trident will be maintained incase those evil Commies come back, Europe will remain at arms length because we’re British, we once had an Empire you know!, the cuts will still be pretty sharp risking a double-dip recession, and I cannot imagine David Cameron is going to agree to electoral reform. On the subject of electoral reform, the Lib Dems key policy initiative, Cameron said:

“I believe we will need an all-party committee of inquiry on political and electoral reform.”

That, isn’t worth anything. It is a terrible offer. An electoral reform inquiry has already happened, back in 2009. The Liberal Democrats surely know how meaningless this offer by Cameron is. The Conservatives will never be open to key electoral reform.

I would quite like to see a Labour, Liberal Democrat, Plaid Cymru and SNP alliance, maybe even throw Caroline Lucas of the Greens into that too. A real alliance of UK Progressives. Real change. They have to be committed to Electoral reform, it is a must. Whilst the Conservatives may very well have won most of the seats, more people in the UK voted for left, and centre-left politicians, and so a centre-left coalition would be my ideal. If the Tories are allowed to implement the cuts they clearly want, they wont last more than one term in office, and they’ll be unelectable for another generation. I quite like that idea too.

The next few days will be mightily interesting.