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

Mr Miliband accused Mr Cameron of being "out of touch" and warned that thousands of people would be forced out of their homes as a result of the changes.

He told the prime minister: "You are about to make 500,000 people redundant. Your policy on housing benefit is a complete shambles. In London councils are saying 82,000 people will lose their homes. How many people do you think will lose their homes as a result of this policy?"

This is better from Labour, hammer hammer hammer has to be the way to go for now.

this isn't :(

I wonder who leaked that?

Everyone does this of course, and has done for years. PMQs are a waste of time.

Also, where are all these politicians getting their poppies? I haven't even seen any for sale yet.

all the background on the vodafone thing:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=in_the_back&issue=1273

big issue guy is a bit of a cunt isn't he

Eh?

I'm jealous of his slimline, lightweight laptop:

Prime Minister David Cameron sent his own message of farewell to Anthony Steen during the former MP's goodbye bash at Dartington.

The message was read out during a three-hour lunch at Dartington's Great Hall, revealed former constituency chairman and president Justine Holmes.

She said: "A message was also read out from the Prime Minister, particularly commending Anthony's current work on trafficking." Tory heavyweight Kenneth Clarke joined local Conservative figures to say thank-you and goodbye to the former MP and his wife Carolyn.

The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice joined the buffet lunch along with 250 other guests at the historic Great Hall venue on the Dartington Estate.

During the lunch, organised by the constituency business club, Mr Steen was presented with a slimline, lightweight laptop as a goodbye gift.

His wife Carolyn was presented with a Kindle electronic book reader.

She went on: "After a welcome from Vaughan Lindsay, chief executive of Dartington, the Mayor of Torbay Nick Bye, Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, Lord Michael Spicer and the Rt Hon. Kenneth Clarke, the Lord Chancellor, all spoke warmly of Anthony Steen's many contributions, locally and in Parliament."

Michael Gove's education department failed to invite bids for a £500,000 grant to assist parents setting up free schools, before awarding it to his former adviser.

The New Schools Network, a charity and company run by the education secretary's former colleague, Rachel Wolf, 25, was awarded the grant by the Department for Education in June. No other organisation was asked to tender for the contract, which was not publicly advertised.

what the fuck

No other organisation was asked to tender for the contract, which was not publicly advertised.

Big Society in action there.

Saving a lot of money on placing needless advertising for Government non-jobs.

hiyo http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/27/oxford-university-education-funding

Yesterday evening OUSU Council, the sovereign representative body of the Student Union, mandated me to inform you of the protest taking place this afternoon against the proposals set out in the Browne review and the Comprehensive Spending Review, and timed to coincide with the planned visit of Business Secretary Vince Cable.

Mr Cable has now cancelled his visit to Oxford, with his spokesperson citing "advice from Thames Valley Police about threats of a protest and his concern about the level of disruption this could cause to the people of Oxford plus the possible cost of policing". Thames Valley Police have since confirmed that they did report to Mr Cable that there would be a protest but did not advise him against coming on safety grounds. The decision not to come was entirely Mr Cable's.

The protest will go ahead as planned. The Government may not be willing to listen to the students of Oxford peacefully and respectfully making their opinions heard, but this afternoon the national media will be. This is our chance to come together and show what we think about a 40% cut in the teaching budget for Humanities and the Social Sciences and the possibility of an open market in University fees.

Each College will meet at its own Lodge at 3pm. All students will then meet at the bottom of Cornmarket St (outside Boswells) at 3.30pm. At 3.45pm, we will march down Cornmarket turning left onto the High Street and on to Exam Schools. We will arrive at Exam Schools between 4pm and 4.30pm, and will then demonstrate peacefully outside Exam Schools until 5.30pm.

what a fucken pussy

i would call that the 'top' of cornmarket

george st surely the arse end

Cameron was due to meet Nicolas Sarkozy on HMS Ark Royal in Portsmouth next week. Until someone realised it was cut in the Defence Review and it might not look good for the PM to toddle along for a visit, so they moved the meeting to Downing Street.

http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/10/28/child-benefit-cut-unenforceable-treasury-in-a-flap/?mod=wsj

"At root is a problem that should have been apparent to those designing the policy, if detailed advice had been sought from civil servants before it was announced at Conservative party conference."

Not policy made on the hoof, then.

The savings are negligible and I suspect the whole idea was cooked up in order to give people the impression that higher earners were taking their share of the pain. That mission has been somewhat accomplished so it'll be alright to ditch it in a few months. They might even try to take credit for having a compassionate change of heart!

oh man, lolz

Child benefit is generally paid to the mother. She is under no legal obligation to tell the father that she receives it. The Treasury confirms this. It is her benefit. The father’s tax status is irrelevant. If a mother claims it there is nothing forcing her to flag up to the taxman that her husband earns above the level that Osborne stipulates should mean no child benefit.

generally being the operative word. single parent men are entitled to it. but the basic point, that the mechanism in place attaches a particular CB to one adult, not of the home, and there's no way of knowing the income of both guardians is true.

£1bn per year is 25% of trident renewal (via lib dems) or more like 50% of trident (via lab/con). it's not negligible.

Is it that much? Huh. So it's a sixth of Vodafone's unpaid tax bill. But yes I see your point. Of course once you subtract the cost of designing, engineering, implementing and monitoring a brand-new nationwide database of every household in the UK...

ha, yes

the easy alternative not mentioned in the wsj piece is to deny child benefit to any individual above the threshold. it's not "paid to the mother", so if you do that, a couple with one parent above and one below the threshold could claim (via the low-earning parent), but a couple with two parents above could not.

that's slightly different from their dream policy of "no CB for families with an earner above the 40% threshold", in that families like ned's where one is below the threshold no longer lose it. so the savings are not quite so big (dunno by how much), but the implementation seems simple.

if they do it like that, single parents on 50k lose out, which seems unfair when couples on 40k each don't, but that was true of their dream policy too.

I am in favour of your solution.

Boris Johnson criticised for 'Kosovo' benefits remark expands a little on chris bryant's use of "cleansing"

Love how Boris makes the usual get-out-clause claim of "my remarks were taken out of context", and then you read them three paragraphs down with the added context and nothing about what he said changes at all.

ed davey, human shield

well, almost human

In an election tomorrow Nick Clegg would hold onto his Sheffield Hallam seat by the skin of his teeth, with 33% to Labour’s 31%, and the Conservatives on 28% – a swing of 17.5% to Labour. And in Eastleigh, according to a poll I conducted in August, Chris Huhne would be comfortably trounced by the Conservatives, 43% to 31%, with Labour doubling their vote share to 20% – a swing of 10% to the Tories and 13% to Labour.

forgetting about closing tax loopholes used solely by millionaires with expensive accountants and shit for a moment the government says it will impose fines on anyone claiming child benefit without disclosing their partner's income and all the related shit that supposes and implies

even labour did absolutely nothing -- the opposite of nothing -- about millionaire tax avoiders for 13 years so yeah pretty sure that's a non-starter with the tories

yeah don't actually expect any action on that stuff just clumsy and transparent as fuck to go OK guys this is the new child benefit rule oh shit there's an obvious loophole stick a fine on it then I guess

Small detail in the Telegraph's report on ministerial gifts:

Ratan Tata, the Indian billionaire, is the only person from outside the Government to have been granted two private meetings with the Prime Minister.

Is "absolutely nothing" the opposite of nothing? I think it probably is.

Might stick a load of cash on Clegg losing his seat at the next election right now. Combination of a collapse in student vote + Sheffield Forgemasters + everyone fucking off to vote either Labour or Tory will surely do for him. It's not like he can fall back on being a good constituency MP. And the government isn't even that unpopular.

There'll be a legal challenge to that child benefit fine, I'm sure.

opposite of nothing = indulging the avoiders

cf the mittal bros

xp

Guardian front page says the ConDems' housing plans will actually create higher benefits bills. I don't know if that's true but together with the Child Benefit cockup it looks as though the veneer of supposed competency might be getting scraped off this govt.

So by raising the cost of social housing to 80% of the market rate they'll actually be increasing the number of people who'll need housing benefit to pay for it? Fucking A+++ work there lads.

Also the ticking time bomb is that ministers across all departments don't yet have the slightest clue how they're going to actually implement these cuts. Some of them are inevitably going to look like crap bunglers in the process.

It would be a good idea to preclude purchasers of BTL property in council blocks etc from charging more than double what the council itself does for those properties, instead of say £300/week for the flat my neighbour pays about £95/week for as a renter with the council. Would also encourage people who bought ex-local places to be owner-occupiers.

Might stick a load of cash on Clegg losing his seat at the next election right now. Combination of a collapse in student vote + Sheffield Forgemasters + everyone fucking off to vote either Labour or Tory will surely do for him. It's not like he can fall back on being a good constituency MP. And the government isn't even that unpopular.

think we've done this before, but forgemasters and the labour party are _completely_ irrelevant in hallam. the student vote isn't that big. public sector job losses and university funding might lose him a few votes (to the third place labour party) but nowhere near enough. would be surprised if conservatives field a strong candidate there too. they've considered it unwinnable since 97.

events could intervene, but i think you'd be wasting your money.

According to my research at the beginning of this month, in an election tomorrow Nick Clegg would hold onto his Sheffield Hallam seat by the skin of his teeth,

wtf does "according to my research" mean? was that a poll? a swing calculation? or back of the envelope stuff?

So by raising the cost of social housing to 80% of the market rate they'll actually be increasing the number of people who'll need housing benefit to pay for it?

That's the gist. It's like none of these guys realised how unaffordable "market rates" really are.

"Difficulties on fairness"

"Difficulties on competence"

I think this one could run and run

fucking ridiculous. it's outrageous and, i think, massively dysfunctional (i.e. against even the interests of capital) the state the housing market is in, and the state it has got us into. don't think that pumping billions of pounds into the private sector via housing benefits is a healthy situation, and the state could save/invest that money by increasing social housing. cutting it and raising the fucking rent (which they basically end up paying) there is dumm.

It would be a good idea to preclude purchasers of BTL property in council blocks etc from charging more than double what the council itself does for those properties, instead of say £300/week for the flat my neighbour pays about £95/week for as a renter with the council. Would also encourage people who bought ex-local places to be owner-occupiers.

This is it, no political party has seems prepared to say, "Fuck these thieving, grasping landlords where they breathe". There should be a rent cap, not a housing benefit cap.

Working in East London at present, and was just idly looking in the window of an estate agents, rents are ridiculous, basically you would have to be on housing benefit to afford them

Notable difference is that hardly any estate agents in North London will accept DSS tenants while here 99% of all the properties I accepted DSS

This is it, no political party has seems prepared to say, "Fuck these thieving, grasping landlords where they breathe". There should be a rent cap, not a housing benefit cap.

Because capping rent would kill or at least subdue the buy-to-let market and thus stop recovery in the housing market whose sustained boom brought economic growth for so long and prosperity to so many.

Has anyone read this, by the way? Looks like a good summation of the problem at any rate. Housing really was New Labour's biggest failure, wasn't it?

oh god that book makes me so angry and upset - i got it a year ago and am still halfway through it because i keep having to stop as i am on the verge of tears/murderous rage.