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

I think a mate of mine's mum is one of the people that got that campaign going (nb not an swp twat)

http://ericjoyce.co.uk/2013/03/a-few-thoughts-re-events/

I have spent the past 12 months making a concerted effort to address the causes of that incident. I do not go into bars, nor drink in my office. Nor do I inject alcohol right into my eyeballs while crying.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/16/activist-shocked-conviction-cameron-protest

Just checked this was in England not Bahrain, yes fuck this government.

Carrying on the good work of the last Labour government there I see

Sad but true yes. This lot still make my blood boil on a daily basis all the same.

This is.. beautiful:

http://i.imgur.com/AaLZ7pk.jpg

and the full story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/17/gavin-barwell-date-arab-girls-twitter

The people who hate benefit claimants that much aren't going to vote labour anyway.

You may be interested in this:

Who takes the harshest anti-welfare line? Those on state benefits

whilst i'm inclined to believe it, it'd be more interesting if it wasn't totally anecdotal

Well there's a feelgood story to start monday morning with. No mention of voting intentions there tbf, but who knows, maybe I'm just the king of wishful thinking here, and y'all are right. If that's the case, I don't understand why Labour would have opposed the benefit cap, yet supposedly be supporting this evasive action bill.

My entirely uninformed guess is that maybe there's some sort of informal Westminster agreement to avoid massive retroactive legal payments wherever possible.

Most plausible explanation I've yet seen.

Each placement gains the private company or charity who takes a workfare participant £400-£600. The workfare provider company (eg. A4e) gets a similar slice, too. Why not claw back the placement awards and reimburse the unemployed using this money?

xp

to partly answer your question, you ought to consider the possible disconnects between the Parliamentary Labour Party, the Party at local level, and the diverse constituencies that make up its (potential) electorate. and then consider where the power lies within these disparate groups and how much room there is for democratic direction from the ground up.

or let's say, in simplistic but broadly accurate terms, that the PLP runs the Party now and the aspirations and goals of the PLP are very different from those of the majority of its voter base. and let's ponder whether this is possible because most people don't vote as the result of a long logical enquiry into the policies that best represent their own best interests, and that possibly they are not really conscious of where their own best interests lie.

I dunno, that's all a bit high-concept for me.

the PLP represents a set of middle class technocratic interests that broadly support the economic beliefs of the other large parties, with some nods to "fairness" out of historical nostalgia. the Party isn't particularly democratic - policy doesn't derive from the wishes of all the members.

most people vote on 1 or 2 issues, on sentiment, or out of habit. parliamentary democracy as the best possible means for gauging the will and needs of the majority of the population is a massive lie/joke.

simpler?

hang on, i'm wandering a little.

so to tie it back to why "Labour" wd support or condemn a particular policy - it's based on a cold calculation of the appeal to a tiny sliver of the electorate - a few hundred thousand voters in swing constituencies - plus a reluctance to fully antagonise the broader Labour electorate, but tempered with the knowledge that most of them would elect a chimp if it was wearing a red rosette. and the MPs and their advisors and gurus who run the party are basically in agreement with the consensus across all parties about the economy and how it shd be run. they are all Thatcherites now.

sorry if this seems bleak. i guess on a positive note if people think this is wrong they shd join the party and try and influence it to change direction and let me know how that works out.

lol

Of course I understand all that, you're absolutely right. I just don't quite understand how their cold calculations come up with this answer. But whatever.

most of them would elect a chimp if it was wearing a red rosette.

Hope this isn't a Eric Joyce joke, the guy has a problem.

i think it wd be interesting, if it was possible, to see how often concerns about spending taxpayers money were brought up in public discourse pre-1979. i have an unjustified feeling that people haven't always been encouraged and felt qualified to consider themselves experts on the micromanagement of public spending. nowadays everybody can tell you exactly what the exchequer shd be spent on - it's usually themselves and their families and nobody else.

lol and thinking about it focus groups and market research and radio phone-ins and the internet encourage this idea that opinions are increasingly important and democratically valid whereas the outcome is generally just a championing of ignorant opinion over expertise. which, y'know, fuck expertise in maintaining the machinery of control but good work on this whole new layer of mystification whereby the subjects are encouraged to mystify themselves.

"do you have an opinion on how the day to day management of a medium-sized NHS trust should be carried out? phone up and tell the nation now"

sorry i have to ramble, i'm pretty depressed

you think you're depressed? i'm at the end of the phone most days.

yeah tbf at least i don't have to referee this shit

"Yeah, I'll set up an independant care trust, couldn't do much worse, could I, hurr hurrrup?"

people haven't always been encouraged and felt qualified to consider themselves experts on the micromanagement of public spending. nowadays everybody can tell you exactly what the exchequer shd be spent on- it's usually themselves and their families and nobody else

Abso-bloomin-lutely. Also, everyone's a total fucking expert in the operation of the benefits system, and can tell you exactly how much the Lithuanian family who lives upstairs from their cousin's best friend gets in handouts, and the woman with learning difficulties who they occasionally see doing lottery scratchcards in Morrisons.

The Thatcher line was 'any housewife who can manage a family budget can manage a national economy' or a variation on that theme, iirc.

Give that genius of a woman a state funeral

Tomorrow seems to amount to "We need state spending to restart the economy, so we are going to cut state spending and use the money to increase state spending". Huh.

are we going to see George Osborne eating his own tail or what

"if you run a business we will throw bags of money at you"

"if you could use some of it to create minimum wage jobs for recently unemployed local government staff that'd be great ta"

"We need state spending to restart the economy, so we are going to cut state spending and use the money to increase state spending"

theoretically it does help more to spend it in some areas/ways rather than others, so this isn't in itself impossible. devil in the details obv.

Xzibit meme to follow, yo dawg I heard you like to cut state spending so we put spending in your state so you can cut state spending while you spend

Oh hai @george_osborne

I pity the hapless Treasury intern who has to trawl through that over the coming hours.

Best Osborne zing is still Denis Healey's from a couple of years back: "I feel sorry for George Osborne, despite his politics [pregnant pause] – and his personality."

"Aspiration Nation"

#downgradedchancellor is trending on Osborne's first day on Twitter

Thought that was an awful line but i guess it worked.

govt offering 20% loans to help buy £600k houses, good to know that bedroom tax is going somewhere useful

Yay, more taxpayer money to prop up the housing market and lumber young people with shitloads of debt.

It's all new houses too, so the money goes straight into the pockets of large house-building companies/Tory donors. Whee!

cut the price of beer by 1p a pint

Uh so how's that going to work? Does that mean pubs are going to have to order in a shitload of pennies to give out as change when the price drops from £3.50 to £3.49 (or whatever, LOL London eh?)

No, as far as pubs are concerned it's a little boost to the businesses rather than consumers. You likely won't see prices drop, just as you likely won't have seen the prices go up a penny or two last year. Most pubs seem to swallow duty increases until their gross profits get bad enough to stick the prices up by 5p or whatever.

The duty is not calculated on pints of beer sold to customers, fwiw, it's levied at the point the barrel is sold to the pub.

Well whoop-de-do, George, thanks a bunch

Yeah it's a headline grabber more than anything else. Although whether the press will care or not depends on how much they decide to punish the government for press regulation (my guess = a lot).

You mean the optional regulation they don't have to sign up for?

I'm just relieved that we finally have the crippling corporation tax down to historic lows. Poor corporations.

Not sure the small businesses that the government constantly bangs on about will be too happy to hear they're paying the same tax rate as massive corporations.