DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

Not unless they've had a wax shortage and have started filling them full of shit instead.

is this where we're discussing that big hoohah about benefit claimant Heather Frost and her 11 kids, a mansion and a horse?

I got a bit fed up of bickering about it on Facebook, so I did a rare opinion-based blog about it - http://charlieframe.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/about-the-lady-with-the-11-kids-a-horse-and-a-mansion/ Never sure how these turn out, it's probably pretty obvious stuff to most people here anyway.

how would you fix the system so that it both helped ppl and prevented widespread abuse or 'scrounging', that's the thing.

For all you say 'fix the system', i've worked for years in 'the system' over here and if even a majority of those able to work were actually willing to do so or to engage honestly with services, then the 'system' would function much better. That hasnt been my experience tho, and i'm not talking about only since the crash.

It's as overly simplistic to blame the apparatus as it is to focus on a single claimant, but i mean idk would i be tsk-tsking ppl if they're annoyed reading about individual cases like the one in question. Sure, it's cliched mailbait and all that but dismissing anyone it pisses off as not being highminded or politically pious enough is writing off a large % of yr fellow man tbh, wherefore macgregor theory x then eh?

benefit claimant

I believe you mean DOLE QUEEN.

It's fine to be annoyed about people playing the system so transparently but the objective here is clearly not to merely limit abuse but to reduce sympathy for all benefit claimants. At the same time, the government is actually keeping families in B&Bs and temporary accommodation for longer than the law allows.

So, we have this policy where people waiting for council housing are being told to leave private let flats that cost over £250/week in London, but they are moved on to B&B or temporary accommodation which can cost at least twice as much as that (they have housing need as judged by the council, so if your council isn't trying to transport them away from their families/schools/etc, this is where some wind up). Statutorily homeless people in hostels often have ridiculous 'service charges' added to the cost of rent - I mean, I don't know if places that provide 'breakfast' really need to charge another £100 a week to the claimant/the council for low-quality breakfast food, but it must be a nice scam on top of all the other private-sector money-shifters going on in this sector in Britain.

As to this particular family, there are only 109 families this size receiving out-of work benefits in the UK. Child benefit costs are a non-issue here. We complain that councils aren't building enough housing, but many councils (like Camden, where I am) are actually selling off the larger properties in their portfolios instead of putting large families into them. Most London boroughs have around 20,000 claimants each on their council-flat waiting lists, yet the only house-building happening is HAs building 'affordable' housing.

They should feed her horse to her children. In a box marked "lasagne or something".

(I won't read DM comments but I'd bet money there's one like that with up arrows galore)

Heh i'll assume that stands for daily mail

LOL

DM, saying what we're all thinking

So much for that AAA rating by which we were to judge Osborne

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21554311
fucking fucking fuck...

one of us, oooonnnneee offff usssssssss

disturbed that the tories are already attempting to have this parsed as, 'the aaa rating isn't important, but we're losing it because we're not shifting debt quick enough' rather than 'the aaa rating isn't important, but osborne's policies will guarantee that the economy doesn't grow'. the issue shouldn't be osborne's humiliation, delicious though that is, but the fact that austerity isn't working and should be discontinued forthwith.

reading these articles makes me realise i don't know what "credit ratings" or "bond yields" or indeed "growth" actually mean

The Bank has so far pumped £375bn into the financial system, creating money to buy-back government bonds.

this is just gibberish to me

i can't actually back up a single one of my left-wing beliefs with economic arguments, which probably proves what every RWer thinks about lefties

Relax, most RW types use the totally spurious housewife-o-meter to 'splain economics to the public, so...

yeah but i can't even counter THOSE arguments

tbh i still don't get why a household's economy isn't analogous to a country's economy, conceptualising it like that is the only way it begins to make the tiniest amount of sense to me

Don't worry - nobody gets it, politics usually takes over. If people's pockets are empty for long enough then maybe violence might be on the cards.

This has been in the cards since xmas even if not before, no surprises.

disturbed that the tories are already attempting to have this parsed as, 'the aaa rating isn't important, but we're losing it because we're not shifting debt quick enough' rather than 'the aaa rating isn't important, but osborne's policies will guarantee that the economy doesn't grow'.

Don't be disturbed, its par for the course.

I think it'll be even further humiliation if Osborne were to make a U-turn. There'll be a carrot or two dangled that might signal an A- plan in the budget next month, otherwise can't see the cuts not continuing till the next election. He can make the case that unemployment is coming down and so is the debt but mainly they don't have any other ideas.

In fact no one has very many ideas on how to deal with the debt...

so much of the complexities of economics are tied into explaining or defending the foibles of the existing economic system that i think you can safely not worry too much about it. it's a science for debating the best arrangement of deckchairs on the Titanic. your left wing beliefs don't really hang on whether endless economic growth is a good or viable way for humanity to organise itself.

(not advocating total ignorance, just saying that the struggle to save ourselves as a species and to create a world where genuine equality of opportunity and maximisation of human potential exists has got fuck all to do with the world of credit ratings)

Losing their AAA rating hasn't affected France or the US too badly, although both are in better positions economically than the UK. So Osborne is probably right when he's saying it's not the end of the world. But preserving the UK's AAA rating has been the government's reason for all this austerity in the first place. And if the credit rating isn't that important than hmmm maybe he had some other goal in mind?

I thought when we lost our AAA rating we'd as well to start eating horsemeat and talking Greek, wasn't the scenario painted by Cameron + Osborne to win them the last election, which they didn't win? Still, they can always count on the staunch support of their Liberal Democrat colleagues when it comes to fucking us over.

Also yeah insert some stuff about the ratings agencies failing the world economy in the build up to the crash in the first place.

My guess is that this combined with a defeat in Eastleigh combined with Osborne being forced to get up and admit that the deficit has actually widened in the last year will be disastrous for the coalition. People will only really accept austerity if it's seen to be working, especially given that the effects of austerity are only just becoming visible.

Overestimating the windfall from 4G spectrum by like a billion probably hasn't helped either.

I thought when we lost our AAA rating we'd as well to start eating horsemeat and talking Greek

Hey we've got the first bit sorted.

I'm somehow reminded of Gordon Brown's "End to boom and bust" howler

Rating dip seems more symbolic, but citing the lack of debt reduction as a reason for it means Osbourne at least feels he should do more austerity. The practical downside is that a lot of pension funds/401ks etc will have to get out of the British Government bond game, right?

the only cause i've seen cited for the rating dip has been lack of growth in the UK economy which if anything is a result of the austerity measures i thought

obv the Gov will lie like crazy about this but

the only cause i've seen cited for the rating dip has been lack of growth in the UK economy which if anything is a result of the austerity measures i thought

You and I might think that, but Moody's geniuses say one of the factors that might make them cut the rating further is "reduced political commitment to fiscal consolidation".

Also yeah insert some stuff about the ratings agencies failing the world economy in the build up to the crash in the first place.

^this

What does "fiscal consolidation" mean though? If it means "just cutting more shit" then yeah that will embolden Osborne, if it means "actually reducing the deficit" then it won't. What we're seeing play out is that cutting in itself doesn't actually reduce the deficit.

Keynesianism 101 innit.

you just said a swear

I think the word "commitment" suggests it's the former, Matt.

There's also the inherent... childishness of allowing markets to dictate policy. I mean it's not like they're going to stop lending the British government money, government bonds are still a safer investment than pretty much anything else.

I'm thinking about Labour here really, it's not like appeasing bond market investors is the Tories' core reason for slashing public spending.

government bonds are still a safer investment than pretty much anything else

They become worth (a lot?) less at a lower credit rating don't they?

they become more expensive for governments to sell, because interest rates go up when they are deemed more risky to buy.

that was it, thanks Neil.

what ARE govt bonds?

basically they're a loan sold by the government on a market, and the interest rate (and hence expense of paying them back) is determined by the risk as monitored by credit rating agencies.

so governments will say "we need to raise £1bn for short to medium term spending, what rate will you lend us that money?" The problem for Italy and Spain recently was the cost of borrowing this money started to creep up until defaulting on the loan became a possibility, which would be economically disastrous as no lender would then stump up cash,

my mind just runs into a brick wall when i try to understand the concept of selling a loan

problem is as mentioned upthread, credit rating agencies are tools of the corporate man and wedded to neoliberal ideological norms that meant they were blind to the causes of the crisis. So why "the market" should give them credibility is an open question, I suppose it's because if everyone stopped believing in this stuff then certain people would stop making large amounts of money. Gramsci-ite neoliberal hegemony therefore rules.

Hm, I'm not sure I agree with everyone saying "it's okay, nobody understands economics". I'm not an economics expert by any stretch, but it is kind of important to have a handle on what's going on and why.

However, that's a general principle, and if in a particular case it is beyond you, that doesn't necessarily condemn you to a life of political dilettantism - there are many many other reasons to despise the right-wing in the UK. For one thing, you can see the effects of economic policy very clearly. I've never been a believer in the trope of "if you can't suggest something better then don't criticise" -> even if you are not a highly-trained policy-maker, you can still stand up and be counted re: institutional ableism, racism, sexism, class warfare, removal of basic services, etc...

None of this is going to be news to anyone itt, obviously. tl;dr: economics is important, but not essential to the layperson.

He can make the case that unemployment is coming down and so is the debt but mainly they don't have any other ideas.

The debt certainly isn't coming down, the deficit might be (but probably isn't)

for a good explanation of a lot of this stuff, I'd recommend John Lanchester's Whoops!, which also has the virtue of being well written. His articles in the LRB are also very readable.

probably an important hurdle wrt understanding economics is realising that it's basically a self-perpetuating sham doing a reasonable job of masquerading as a science. full communism now.