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

:)

Stonehenge Visitor Centre: £25m - fair enough, not like it's going to cause a massive drop in visitors or anything.

Unsurprisingly - with my skewed sense of priorities - I was pretty pissed off about this (not least because I've donated to a campaign to get it). It's a relatively small amount for something that has been needed for about 30 years and looked like it was finally about to happen. Stonehenge has been treated shabbily by various authorities for as long as I can remember (probably longer) and deserves better. Matt is right - it's not going to lead to a drop in visitors, it's a 'must see' on every coach tour ever, but I don't think that's the issue. It's one of Britain's (as opposed to London's) few internationally recognised landmarks and at the moment it's being overshadowed by a couple of roads and a car park.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/96/208030408_3b523caa94.jpg

Yeah, drove past it recently and I do remember that going along that road has always been a bit "oh - there's Stonehenge. huh" but now it is "oh - there's Stonehenge, look, behind the thing that looks like a small industrial estate" - does seem that there should be something a bit better to do with it, but whether a £25m visitor centre is that thing I do not know

(wondering if the Giant's Causeway visitor centre will be scrapped or if that is down to Stormont? they only just got funding to have more than an empty grey atrium and a tea shop 5+ minutes' walk away from the thing itself recently)

Disturbing number of people arguing that "we can't spend £25m on stones/films/art while I'm on the waiting list for a new hip". That way lays madness.

those people

um

those people otmfm.

i mean for all-time otmfm.

Well, it's good to have some flexibility on an issue.

Socialism is the language of priorities.

Also, you Londoners don't know hoe good you've got it.

Well, it's good to have some flexibility on an issue.

Not if you're waiting for a new hip, obv

Just waiting for the government to sell off the public art collections because obviously we shouldn't be paying for their upkeep while Mrs. Jones of Chelmsford needs a cataract operation.

people need eyeballs more.

(I thangyew)

mos tof that public art is easily viewable on the internet

new hips, cataract surgery: not so much.

Since they actually come from different sections of the budget, why are we conflating these things?

The FT says the constituency least affected by the cuts is... George Osbourne's

The biggest reductions come in areas with the lowest household incomes. When, for illustrative purposes, the FT envisaged a 10 per cent cut in social security payments, the result was a 3.6 per cent fall in household disposable income in Labour-dominated Merseyside, but only 2.1 per cent in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.

In an alternative scenario, under which almost 20 per cent is cut from spending in sectors dominated by the public services – public administration, education and defence – almost the same pattern is evident. The size of the local economy in west Wales would fall by 3.3 per cent, while the same cut would only knock 1.5 per cent off the economy of prosperous Cheshire, where George Osborne’s Tatton constituency is located.

What a fucking surprise!

i can't believe that this is how politics works. honest to goodness.

Well, we knew that Charles Kennedy had abstained on the original vote on the coalition.

But it sounds like he's even less enamoured of the whole idea than we thought.

I'm told that when David Cameron offered his hand to the ex Lib Dem leader in the Commons recently, Kennedy did not rise from his seat.

Instead, he hissed: "Don't expect me to fucking support you."

As if anyone had failed to get the message, Kennedy also approached a Labour MP in the hope of trying to form a 'pair' for some votes.

"I don't want to vote for these bastards," he explained to the rather surprised Labour backbencher.

Unfortunately for Kennedy, the Labour MP said that he felt it was his duty to turn up to vote against the coalition.

Nice one Charlie.

^ good to hear

wd really like to have some dramatic exits tomorrow

Britian not broekn after all:http://imgur.com/eptEV.png

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/key%20issues/Full%20doc.pdf

no surpises here but worth posting
http://i46.tinypic.com/24yzknp.jpg

no probs with mps being more educated than average population tbf

also the ethnic minority % is not too bad, it has nearly doubled since the last election. so sex and fee-paying the only two really o_O things there.

no probs with mps being more educated than average population tbf

― barack psychosis (ledge), 24 June 2010 09:20 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i swing wildly on this tbh, depending on how i'm defining 'representation' on any given day.

a quota rule about what kinds of people can serve in parliament would be kinda maoist

You mean like all-women selection lists?

Anyone see the Cleggeron in action on Beeb 2 last night? Stomach churning stuff.

yeah, a little bit. they're not an unequivocally good thing, and plainly used by party leaderships to impose their will.

xpost

On a lighter note, the Ant and Dec comparisons were really hard to avoid

If I thought attending university was automatically linked to being more educated then I would agree it's good to have plenty of graduates indahouse

OK, if all-female selection lists are bad, how instead would you propose to remedy the occurrence of institutional sexism in all branches of government? I agree that in any local selection the party would probably have someone they wanted putting in a safe seat because they need them to satisfy nefarious Commons plots, but HEY politics, that's an entirely logical position for a party to take, even if the rank-and-file have other ideas.

i said "not unequivocally good"

to "the occurrence of institutional sexism in all branches of government" i can only respond HEY politics tho

I'm surprised that there are any MPs who aren't university educated, really. Who are these BUFFOONS and how did they get where they are?

to "the occurrence of institutional sexism in all branches of government" i can only respond HEY politics tho

history mayne, not dogging on you here, but can you imagine that your response might be different if you weren't the sex/race/class that traditionally profits from institutional sexism/racism/classism, and that your cynicism here isn't massively helpful?

like, if you had a dog in the race wrt to changing the institution, you might not be so glib?

This, HM. Which would imply that you have reservations, which I don't, and I won't have them until the average female wage is level with the average male one (in the same job). Currently we're at 78 per cent and we all live in a world where male rhetoric about efforts to bring parity to/with women is played as 'women want to be more than equal'. So when any man is all u_u I dunno about a method of balancing stuff out that appears to be at least *helping*, I bristle a bit.

also the ethnic minority % is not too bad

0% in the Liberal Democrats is not too great. But, hey, what can you expect from those arseholes.

i don't know if the major parties/all branches of government are institutionally sexist. but we should be nearer 50-50.

think class is the fundamental issue in play, in itself, and wrt race, but completely reject the identity-politics concept of 'classism'. state and society are both unequally structured to favour the ruling class; to turn this into the language of prejudice and quotas is the wrong way to go about it.

same goes for personalization: within my field, i don't profit from institutional sexism. i do benefit from the class system and my place in it. but not classism.

Whilst agreeing that some kind of affirmative action is probably necessary to improve inequalities in the Parliamentary demographic, it's pretty obvious that unscrupulous party leaders have used things like all-women shortlists to impose a certain kind of MP onto irritated constituencies. Mind you, they also did it with that Tory tosser with the butler who defected to NuLab so god knows tbh

most capable women are probably too smart to go into politics.

though that stands for both genders, maybe.

oh boy

but yeah tbh fuck quotas for reals. short term solutions to a long term problem

think class is the fundamental issue in play

So quotas to get working class people into politics?

i'm going to try and stay away from this but i hear this sort of thing a lot - "but (x) is just a band-aid - we need a cultural shift to solve this problem" - well, cultural shifts can take decades. centuries, if no one actually does anything but wait around for it to happen. in the meantime entire lives are lived.

quotas can help with that cultural shift, though. a 50-50 parliament would quickly be seen by most ppl as normal, regardless of how it came about.

i dunno, i think you'd find a pretty sustained attack on the affirmative action mps from certain quarters.

So quotas to get working class people into politics?

― I am utterly and abjectly pissed off with this little lot (Tom D.), Thursday, June 24, 2010 11:12 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is exactly what im not saying. don't think upping the number of working-class people in parliament would lead to a big ideological shift, which is what's needed. it wouldn't hurt, necessarily, but look at the people who would be implementing the quotas, and how they would operate them. all of this sort of thing is a step away from politics as such. and up to a point im not sure that there is such a thing as a "working-class MP" any more than there is a "working-class lawyer".

xp to tracer

yeah, it's obvious that change in the end result is necessary, and it would be better if it was a swift process, and, also obviously, any contribution to the debate from the hairy side is gonna be dismissed along the lines of 'as a gender-group net beneficiary, you should't get a say', as above.

and i can see, definitely and unambiguously, where that is coming from too- left to the group in power, change in distribution of power is not a natural process.

but i still don't think determining the end result in advance is the desirable or best way to lead this kind of change.