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

Flashback to the headmaster in "If..." lecturing the prefects

Britain today is a power-house of ideas, experiments, imagination, on everything from pop music to pig breeding; from atom power stations to mini-skirts, and that's the challenge we've got to meet

Britain quashed the Mau Mau uprising in the firm but tender way one might put down a beloved family pet.

i'm welling up here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lvL4Bzyumg

Tomlinson even has the same haircut as Cameron there.

Similar waist size too

Britain today is a power-house of ideas, experiments, imagination, on everything from pop music to pig breeding; from atom power stations to mini-skirts, and that's the challenge we've got to meet

Love that scene.

ffs

One million of Britain's lowest paid employees will be classed as "not working enough" and could find themselves pushed with the threat of sanctions to find more income under radical changes to welfare, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has said.

DWP internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal that people earning between £330 to around £1,050 a month – just under the rate of the national minimum wage for a 35-hour week – could be mandated to attend job centre meetings where their working habits will be examined as part of the universal credit (UC) programme.

Some of those deemed to be "not working enough" could also be instructed to take on extra training – and if they fail to complete tasks they could be stripped of their UC benefits in a move which departmental insiders conceded is "controversial".

How much will they get away with before people see through this shit? Unfortunately it seems to be working so far. I moved away from my home town when I went to uni, so I have no claim on being in anyway connected to what ilx0rs might call "Real England" but I met a load of people from my family at a funeral a few months ago, who are the more ostensibly working class side of my family, and some conversations went round to politics and fuck the Sun-reading working class tory is spreading like fucking rats right now, this is mostly union people as well, some of whom marched against Thatcher in the 80s, Miliband breaking ties with the unions seems like political suicide.

xp well this is the real purpose behind UC, to put everyone on benefits in the same category as the unemployed, and put them under the same (increasing) pressure, so they can be forced into being free/cheap labour.

Big hearted Britain at its best

(btw where is that from, it doesn't ring true to me)

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/06/uk-lowest-paid-classed-not-working-enough

The UK economy is turning a corner

into a dark alley

Just gonna post "The UK economy is turning a corner" ever 2 months, and everyone hast to pretend that it means anything or is of any value whatsoever. It was head story on BBC.co.uk for a while! Still a main story. smdh.

THe UK economy is turning the sort of corner that happens when a cartoon character's foot is nailed to the floor... with hilarious results!

http://www.jasonhawkes.com/blog/news/DSC_1538.jpg

corners are definitely being turned.

British Social Attitudes Report finds softening attitudes to benefits. Though I wouldn't be surprised to see it's hardened quite considerably again in the last year due to ongoing media propaganda war.

perhaps its softening as people are beginning to realise that even they who aren't caricatures of benefits claimants require benefits to make ends meet

would be nice if labour party could somehow help verbalise this fact better

it wd probably be nicer if the Labour party had found a different route than the Byzantine tax credit system to lift people out of low pay, tbf

Tories/Lib Dems vs. the UN

firmly on the side of the sinister world government guys in this case

rejecting these complaints because they're based on anecdotal stories which are not something the coalition wd ever use to make a case

Grant Shapps to write to the Secretary General demanding an apology.

Filed right in the fucking wastepaper basket.

Getting mightily sick of DWP spokespeople, who are supposed to be impartial civil servants, clearly being on-message Tory SPAD types.

i know this'll sound like i'm trying to be some 'macho man' or something but i'd really like to pummel grant schapps' legs repeatedly with a baseball bat, and then watch him fail an atos test.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/sep/10/mary-portas-contract-channel-4

Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said the policy should be dropped and said what was "shocking" was that the Conservatives were pushing ahead with "hated" changes which he said were primarily hitting disabled people.

Labour has not committed to scrapping the policy

your opposition right there

When I think of what even a semi-competent Labour party could have done against this barefaced shower of fucktards we call "The Coalition" I have to fight the urge to kick a wall then I just cry a bit.

Just sack everyone now and start a-fucking-gain. Yvette Cooper to lead, some non-arseholes given a chance, make a break, SOMEBODY

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nick-clegg-is-worse-than-michael-foot-says-key-lib-dem-peer-lord-oakeshott-8812916.html

well Michael Foot was a principled, cultured, intelligent man with a strong sense of decency and a great deal of respect for his fellow party members so yes, obv

i used to work in a bookshop that he used to come into regularly - you'd heard him coming before you saw him because by this stage there'd be a sort of staggered step, a loud clomp of his gnarled mage-like stick and a sort of high pitched throat-clearing noise of effort. he used to come in and see whether I had the edition of Gulliver's Travels he'd written an introduction for - if I didn't he'd always say this was excellent as it meant it had sold out, and if I did, he'd usually get a copy as he was always giving the one he had away to friends. This was nice of him as it was usually my inept ordering that dictated whether there was a copy or not. Hero, obviously.

As you say, Nick Clegg doesn't have an ounce of anything approaching Michael Foot's qualities.

can you imagine any member of the current Cabinet (or indeed Shadow Cabinet) writing serious, well-respected biographies of literary figures? Hague has written political biography I suppose...

i own a copy of the Gulliver's Travels Foot wrote the intro for.

but Neil has hit on my wider point - Foot lived a life well worth living, but all he registers as in the reptilian mind of career pols like Oakeshott is somebody who lost an election and who cares why?

^ ^

Being monstered in The Sun for wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph, longest suicide note in history etc. Without Falklands he probably would have run Maggie close in '83, and he was in a pretty difficult position having to deal with the show-boating Tony Benn and militant friends on the one side and the SDP on the other. Given all that his political career was pretty admirable IMO.

"but Neil has hit on my wider point - Foot lived a life well worth living, but all he registers as in the reptilian mind of career pols like Oakeshott is somebody who lost an election and who cares why?"

Michael Foot is a real hero of mine, and fuck a lord Oakeshott obv, but losing an election is surely relevant when you're judging someone on the basis of how good a leader of a political party they were?

I always think about that bit of the 'Labour's Old Romantic' documentary where he's asked if he really wanted to be PM, and he pauses for a long time and says that he never really believed that he would be. Which probably makes him a better human being than any other major party leader in recent history, but maybe not a good candidate for the leadership.

only up to a point. the most obvious thing about the 83 election was whether anybody cd've beaten the Tories riding high on the back of the Falklands War. i suspect not. then there's the question of whether the purpose of a political party - and Foot's leadership was perhaps the last time that the Labour party (RIP) was in decent democratic shape and not the hierarchical shithouse that its corpse is now - is to win elections at any cost. i can understand why a Lib Dem peer thinks that's exactly what political parties are for, but that doesn't make it true. for all the internecine brutality happening within Labour in the early 80s there was, i think, a genuine debate about whether it was more important to try and win over the electorate to a set of principles that your party stood for or whether you just chased the apparent mood of the electorate.

campaigning for a set of policies that you've agreed on principle as a party is a long game, not measured over single parliamentary terms. the fact that it's a game that nobody wants to play in 2013 says more about the stinking corpse of democracy than it says about what Foot was trying to achieve as a politician.

so if you're saying that being thoughtful, long-termist, believing in a core set of values, are not good traits in a politician, i might agree, except you're then saying "fuck politics" afaic

the realistic non-Foot choice was Healey, who could probably have given Thatcher a tougher battle, but the fact that he abandoned Labour to form the SDP in a fit of pique, thereby scuttling Labour's chances, should not be forgotten.

Eh? Healey wasn't in the SDP.

Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams were the, ahem, big hitters from Labour that formed the SDP.

"so if you're saying that being thoughtful, long-termist, believing in a core set of values, are not good traits in a politician, i might agree, except you're then saying "fuck politics" afaic"

I think this is pretty much it, yes.

that's how right wing the SDP was, even Healey wdn't join

Don't forget Bill Rodgers

bends yeah that's fair enough, again i guess my point was that Oakeshott's conception of what politics is is nihilist thru and thru

hah sorry, I stand corrected, getting my early 80s Labour grandees confused!