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

This will end well for the BBC.

anyone in the bbc on a permanent contract who thinks they have it hard can fuck off and die imo

eg anyone i know is on rolling or 6 month contracts max, and doesn't complain if they are asked to do something or the paperclips are changed or their chair allowance is revoked or whatever the hell...

anyone in the bbc on a permanent contract who thinks they have it hard can fuck off and die imo

― I see what this is (Local Garda), Monday, 13 September 2010 23:09 (14 minutes ago)

this a precursor to the coalition's eventual policy in which everyone at the bbc will be asked to fuck off and die

they should just do a logans run style cull, pretty much guarantee anyone who supports this strike is a lifer/the typical whingebag anyone in the beeb who actually wants to do their job has to suffer on a daily basis.

R, that actually sounds a little bit Thatcherbaby.

"a little"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEeCh4d9wIw

... and people wonder why I left.

I think that fellow first got involved with local politics when he was disallowed from putting a flagpole in the tiny front garden of his little Sidmouth guest house ("Fawlty Towers", honestly), and he responded by painting the whole front of the place in the colours of the union flag.

He initially stood for the Monster Raving Loony party, I think. Certainly he stayed involved with various Loony splinter groups for some time. He's a Tory now, I see. There's a shock.

OK, I'm confused.

Is it that the BBC is institutionally left wing, or is it the unions?

The way the Daily Mail is reporting it, is that the unions are saying "We Strike" and the management are going "Splendid! Why not pick two days when the conservatives are outlining their brave new world to the masses? Then NO ONE WILL KNOW!!!

BBC burying their strike on a bad news day vs Tories burying their bad news on a strike day.

Disagree with the timing, the Tory Party conference needs to be covered in full. They were under-scrutinized when they were in opposition, much of the rest of the media will give them a free pass, the BBC needs to be there and at the top of its game if people are going to stand a chance of making up their own mind. Overshadowing it with a strike plays into their hands somewhat.

Well, exactly.

One reason I don't buy it.

It's more depressing it's taken hardly any time to become the govt of Hit the Unions, and "They're trying to PREVENT our VOICE because they know we're RIGHT"

^^^The only rational disagreement to striking that I have read thus far. xpost

And actually walking out on the day the spending cuts are outlined in detail is even more wrong, and totally counterproductive. Get the message out there, people are going to hate it.

A Liberal Democrat speaks...

Bob Russell MP, House of Commons, 13/9/2010

"If the Chancellor wished to give a full statement to the House, he could have done so last week rather than giving a cursory one to the BBC and having to be dragged here today. I acknowledge that 75% of the cuts are Labour's cuts, but we have not as yet had the spending review. Clearly, none of the cuts will affect the quality of life of Members of Parliament, but they will certainly affect the disadvantaged in society. We know that there will be higher food costs in the coming year, and other costs will rise. I have no time for the welfare cheats, but to try to blame this country's financial ills on that small category of the population is unethical. It would be more ethical to act with equal determination towards those who cheat on tax, whether it be income tax, value added tax or corporation tax. There is now a whole industry of financial experts advising people on tax avoidance.

The turf war between the Chancellor's office and that of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is somewhat immature. Children living below the poverty line and people on low incomes, the disadvantaged in society, do not want this fun and games, they want fairness."

Best thing I've read this morning is the PDF of Grant Shapps' "new approach to producing rough sleeping counts and estimates". The Big Society approach amounts to "don't bother counting, just guess".

anyone in the bbc on a permanent contract who thinks they have it hard can fuck off and die imo

― I see what this is (Local Garda), Monday, 13 September 2010 22:09 (Yesterday) Permalink

eg anyone i know is on rolling or 6 month contracts max, and doesn't complain if they are asked to do something or the paperclips are changed or their chair allowance is revoked or whatever the hell...

― I see what this is (Local Garda), Monday, 13 September 2010 22:10 (Yesterday)

Industrial action to defend pensions and working conditions Vs Boasting about how far ahead you are in the race to the bottom

eg anyone i know is on rolling or 6 month contracts max,

Uh... good for you... uh, I think?

Won't somebody please think of the badgers?

unprincipled fucks. all for state intervention when it suits them -- ie killing hundreds of badgers. psychos.

badger radge repository

Brock-en Britain

The cullolition (ok, needs work...)

"The government has set out plans.." OH HO MY SIDES

Apparently, "to gain a license farmers must cull over at least 150 square km to prevent badgers simply fleeing the cull area". That's a huge area and is likely to represent tens of badgers in each instance. This government was always likely to be in cahoots with the NFU though, considering Caroline Spelman's close ties with them.

it's not thatcherbaby to point out that a huge amount of the people affected by the pension issue are not good at their jobs and sustaining them is a waste of public money, you should all work a few weeks in the english regions. it's just how it is.

i support the bbc hugely in terms of what it does editorially but i'm sorry, if these people leave due to this pension issue then all the better, the beeb has way too much deadwood on staff contracts, they have endless unused downtimers who are replacing younger people who actually want to be in programme x, y, z. it's a total mess.

i'm not supporting license fee cuts and god knows the top level of the beeb could save endless money to support the rank and file too but there are v few people in the younger gen in the bbc who can even relate to the strikers. and it's not a matter of just supporting them because it's a strike for working conditions, the sense of entitlement is alien to anyone who is used to modern bbc already...it'd be nice to go back to a system where they doled out permanent contracts endlessly but it wouldn't be right.

Big hearted Nick

Gotta love that phrase "compensate the poor for their predicament"

That's because they're not embracing social mobility tho. As Nick Clegg said in a previous speech everyone agrees social mobility is a good thing. (spits).

Social mobility itself is a great thing. Using "encouraging social mobility" as a smokescreen for dismantling the structures that are there to help the poor, not such a great thing. The idea that every poor person will be able to climb up the economic ladder at once is patently bollocks.

As is the idea that the way to encourage them to do so is to make them even poorer and to make their lives ever more wretched. I feel like Charles Dickens.

And of course you're far more likely to ensure social mobility by making sure that the services and infrastructure available to the poorer are as good as possible.

Yeah, I was taking issue with the social mobility as a social duty, a requirement, (and also the tacit suggestion that working class pride was somehow a dirty concept, Clegg even used the phrase 'not repeating the sins of our fathers', the sin of getting laid off presumably.

"A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central state from one group to another," he wrote in an article for the Times (paywall).

Good luck reading that, poor people!

A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central state from one group to another,

RBS... Lloyds...

As is the idea that the way to encourage them to do so is to make them even poorer and to make their lives ever more wretched. I feel like Charles Dickens.

― Tom A. (Tom B.) (Tom C.) (Tom D.), Thursday, 16 September 2010 10:35 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

nick cohen, back when he was good in the 90s, used to sum up this attitude as "the poor are poor because they're stealing all our money".

"Instead of turning the system from a 'safety net' into a 'trampoline', as Labour promised, people have been stuck on benefits, year in, year out."

safety nets haven't worked, trampolines haven't worked, so let's fire the poor out of a cannon.

... as far away as possible to we don't have to look at them and our children don't have to go to school with them

I am still unsure of the details of this proposed Big Society where there'll be full employment, no low-paid jobs and no working class. Is there a Lib Dem document that can flesh the plans out for me?

"Instead of turning the system from a 'safety net' into a 'trampoline', as Labour promised, people have been stuck on benefits, year in, year out."

But they haven't! Long-term unemployment fell to 1% of the labour force!
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=tsisc070

Doesn't fit into the narrative

There was this brilliant speech that Ken Clarke made when he was chancellor a million years ago, where he derided his colleagues and backbenchers for somehow suggesting that the unemployed were unemployed because they didn't want to work, rather than because of the level of demand in the economy. Stuck with me for some reason.

Short Description: Long-term unemployed (12 months and more) persons are those aged at least 15 years not living in collective households who are without work within the next two weeks, are available to start work within the next two weeks and who are seeking work (have actively sought employment at some time during the previous four weeks or are not seeking a job because they have already found a job to start later).

Basically excludes everyone not on job-seeker's allowance in the UK and therefore is nothing like the actual long-term unemployment level.

"Out-of-work" is the new "unemployed"

This benefits drive isn't to get job-seekers into non-existent jobs, but to get people on other allowances (e.g. incapacity, disability) onto job-seekers, because it's cheaper.

In the same way that 'local authority' replaced 'council'?

But they haven't! Long-term unemployment fell to 1% of the labour force!

sounds extremely unlikely -- depends how you calculate 'labour force' really

Basically excludes everyone not on job-seeker's allowance in the UK and therefore is nothing like the actual long-term unemployment level.

Yeah come on, they've been fiddling the "unemployment" figures for years, before 1997 even.

Thatcher invented the "fiddle". Not much point in doing it before then.

The labour force is a standard definition comparable across countries set by the International Labour Organisation, with the data collected on a comparable basis, I think, since 1973. It's the non-fiddleable bit.

And Onimo, it doesn't exclude people not on jobseekers' allowance. That definition includes students looking for part-time work, people whose savings are too high etc

And Onimo, it doesn't exclude people not on jobseekers' allowance. That definition includes students looking for part-time work, people whose savings are too high etc

OK let's just say it excludes every single person I know who's been unemployed for more than a year, and that's a lot of people.