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

oh lol royal wedding. watch the conservatives get the av vote to happen around the same time.

nah lib dems would walk it in that case as all tory mps would be sleeping on the mall in anticipation

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11773574

programme of two-tierification continues

Nothing like creating a market where one is completely unnecessary.

"Hey, how can we fuck over the BBC a bit more?"

Minister for equality scraps equality law

FUCK THESE FUCKING CUNTS

FUCK THESE FUCKING CUTS

Language, please.

The government's emphasis would be on ensuring "equality of opportunity" rather than "equality of outcome", May said.

I'm cool with this. Are they gonna start by making sure all newborns belong to wealthy families or all of them belong to poor families?

Presumably they'll ensure that all children have equal access to equally good education, healthcare and recreation facilities too. This is more than any Labour government's ever promised.

The government's emphasis would be on ensuring "equality of opportunity" rather than "equality of outcome", May said.

This is pretty much exactly the same weasel trick the most right-wing of NuLab types used.

"Equality of opportunity" will be awesome tho! Presumably genetic engineering will take out most congenital disabilities and inequalities of temperament and intelligence, and alongside the new open access public schools and everybody living in cheery little garden villages we're gonna have us a new race of superpeeps.

May's speech set a very different tone for the government's approach to tackling inequalities, moving away from regulation and towards encouraging organisations to choose to improve their record.

Perhaps encouraging organisations to choose to improve their record might include, say, requiring them to

assess whether they were addressing inequalities caused by class factors, encouraging them to improve, for example, health and education outcomes in more deprived areas.

Ah I see the difference. The former government would have "required" these efforts. The current government will simply hope for them.

The government's emphasis would be on ensuring "equality of opportunity" rather than "equality of outcome", May said. "Even as we increase equality of opportunity, some people will always do better than others," the home secretary said. "I do not believe in a world where everybody gets the same out of life, regardless of what they put in. That is why no government should try to ensure equal outcomes for everyone."

No government has, you fucking nutter. The last government tried to do something concrete about reducing inequality in aggregate. And yes to do this effectively you have to look at outcomes! You have to measure things! Once you dispense with outcomes as a basis for policy then you have no way to measure what progress you're making. This is in such bad faith. She's binning the tools she needs to do her job and she knows it!

tbf, anybody who's had a job involving outcomes knows how hard they can be used to suck

"Some companies will always do better than others," said the new CEO of DynCorp. "That's why we won't be publishing our annual report. What we believe in is our opportunity to make money, and we think we have a great opportunity. Outcomes are so last year."

I don't wanna derail my excitement about Brave New World 2.0, but I have seen the drive to achieve outcomes trample all kinds of good and useful work in education and related sectors. Business ought to be a separate thing, obv.

This is kind of Tories 101 really, by "equality of opportunity" they mean "pie in the sky American Dream bullshit we can refer to if need be" and by "encouraging organisations to choose to improve their record" they mean "we don't really give a shit if they don't". It's one of the least surprising things they've done in office.

Well it wasn't a well-made point but with inequality in particular, there has been a huge tension - particularly in legal arguments - about outcomes vs other ways of determining inequality and IMO it was a hugely positive and progressive step the last government took to make outcomes so central to their strategy.

If I was being charitable towards the last government I'd say they were passionate about reducing inequality except when they weren't, and they weren't an increasing amount of the time - Blair openly not minding about people becoming very rich, banging on about the "choice" agenda, etc. The Tories just flat out don't care obviously.

One day somebody brighter and more patient than me will write a major examination that explodes the whole alternate-Panopticon-universe that is outcomes and evidence-based policy. Of course I agree that trying to measure inequality is a useful step on the road to reducing it, but a lot of NuLab's methods were straight technocrat garbage.

Part of it is that if there's a legal requirement to reduce inequality then you have to come up with a system of actually measuring it, and then of measuring what effect various initiatives have made. Which in itself is like, really important!

Theresa May is just a stupid, stupid cow who shouldn't be within shouting distance of a WI meeting, much less Cabinet.

she is mental

-looking

ed vaizey is an anus

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11773574

programme of two-tierification continues

FYI, Sky is the biggest ISP in the country after BT, TalkTalk and Virgin.

Must be a coincidence.

lol, what a fucking cunt:

Name of donor: British Sky Broadcasting Group plc
Address of donor: Grant Way, Isleworth, Middlesex TW7 5QD
Amount of donation or nature and value if donation in kind: networking event to enable the Conservative frontbench team (Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt) to meet sector leaders from the arts and creative industries. Value: £3,800. I share this with another Conservative MP.
Date of receipt: 7 October 2009
Date of acceptance: 7 October 2009

Email me whenever Edward Vaizey speaks (no more than once per day)

if only

think it might have 1000000x more to do with the fact that the u.s. is doing the same thing.

weren't labour in favour of an end to net neutrality too?

in fact i think the lib dems are the only party that want to keep it.

they can be relied on

no need to panic then xpost

just saying that if you actually care about this issue (and you should) and are not just looking for things to ascribe to conspiracies or lol tory scum, it's worth considering that labour would be doing the same thing, and they'd be doing it with the support of ofcom and the dti.

the tories are talking about doing it

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11773574

um... yes? that's the joke.

it's the tories caek the tories

wasn't this part of the ever-so-popular digital economy bill?

exactly.

I used to live in Ed Vaizey country. What a twat.

Thought Labour had been in 3rd place in that constituency all the time I was there but in 1997 and 2001 apparently Labour were in second (by a very slim margin in 2001). Will be interested to see if it happens again next time round.

At least for the 3 months before his predecessor Robert Jackson's retirement we enjoyed the wholly unlikely scenario of Wantage constituency being nominally Labour, as RJ had crossed the boards. (lolwikipedia lists him as a Labour MP! 22 years as a Tory MP and 4 months as a Labour MP)

Well, at least our non-coalition, non-Labour alternative stood their ground.

(In Scotland that is)

i hear we're about to present ye with the bill for 5 boats of butter/bacon/gold a day during the famine

Believe Francis Maude originally planned to call them "Gieves & Hawkes-style cooperatives".

In new-to-me non-news (I'd never stopped to think how many would be in this category, but the ratio was pretty surprising to me when spelt out), the number of registered voters who did not vote outnumbered those voting for the winning party in 431 out of 650 constituencies in the 2010 general election:
http://sluggerotoole.com/2010/11/17/mr-no-vote-wins-17-out-of-18/comment-page-1/#comment-736270

For Westminster election in May 2010, No Vote wins...
17/18 Northern Ireland constituencies
37/40 Wales
48/59 Scotland
329/533 England.

...that means we'd have had a House of Commons with 219 seats filled (204 of them English MPs). There would have been 173 Conservative MPs, 27 Liberal Democrat, 18 Labour and 1 Sinn Fein.

that's nonsense.

The Lord Young episode is just lolworthy, but I get the feeling he's only saying what they're all thinking. Heartening to see that the opposition does actually have an attack machine after all.

Do they? I thought it was all the media, and Tories going "Shuttup about that you!" to him.

that's nonsense.

If you mean "that's not true", I'm getting much the same results from the Electoral Commission spreadsheets linked to (actually I get 438 out of 650 instead of 431).

If you mean "that's not interesting to anyone else", well, apparently so, so I'll shut up now. So, Lord Young, then...

xp, well his is praising labour's economic record so

sorry spacecadet, i totally misread the conclusion of that and, although i think i think it's a bit daft to think about it that way, it's interesting nonetheless.