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

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.

(i mean to think bout the minority vote seats as "empty" seats)

It's not nonsense, but the results you'd get if you introduced that system wld likely be completely different.

Insert your own 'Phuket' joke here:

British Prime Minister David Cameron has cancelled plans to spend a Christmas holiday in Phuket, following complaints from campaigners about the Thai government's human-rights record, the UK press reported on Sunday.

Mr Cameron had faced claims that the trip would be viewed as "showing support" for a "brutal" regime after the May 19 violence, and red shirt attempts to take the government to the International Criminal Court.

The PM's office would not comment on the Camerons' plans, but it is understood that the family had booked flights some time ago and now felt it was better to enjoy the festive season in England. It had been reported that Mr Cameron chose Thailand because the Thai Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, is a fellow graduate of Eton, something that his office denied. (Agencies)

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Business/Business_competitions/pictures/2010/11/22/1290418283555/George-Osborne-006.jpg
Good news that we're out of the "danger zone", what?

George Osborne set to shelve plans on banking pay transparency

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/22/labour-pulls-ahead-guardian-icm-poll

While 91% of the 2010 Conservative voters would vote that way again, and 93% of 2010 Labour voters, only 47% of 2010 Lib Dem voters plan to do the same.

The impact of the party's U-turn on tuition fees is clear. Lib Dem support is now lower among voters aged 18-24 than among any other age group. By contrast, in the final election Guardian/ICM poll Lib Dem support was highest among young voters.

The third party, which has traditionally scored more highly in ICM polls than in others from companies such as YouGov, has now seen its ICM rating sink from a high of 31% during the general election to 21% after it and 14% now.

Big announcement due in my department tomorrow. Some bright spark has come up with the idea to privatise about 60% of our functions, if the rumours are to be believed. I'm sure he's due a big bonus... And the eternal gratitude of IDS.

By the time anyone works out that it was a hugely bad idea, I expect the Tories will be out of government and happily blaming resulting fuckup on the incumbents...

brian coleman having a massive tantrum on lbc right now

What's the topic? I'm guessing it's parking tickets.

firemen, he's saying there will be cuts despite boris saying there won't, also a lot of whining about being defamed

this guy is beyond the fucking pale

completely fucking moronic and then twist the knife by exempting 'intra-company transfers'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/23/theresa-may-migration-cap-plans

http://physicsworld.com/blog/2010/11/are_you_a_highly-skilled_worke.html

entitled attitude running through that post, but the point is solid

It is. Wd be nice if one or two of the complainers spoke up for the lowly serfs who have nothing to offer this country but their cheap labour tho.

It's true that tier-1 visas are now impossible to get for postdocs, but they can still get tier-2 visas. The difference (I think) is that tier-2s are tied to a specific job, and your employer has to demonstrate that no EU candidate is qualified (this is actually easier to do in academia than in most other areas).

let us imagine a hypothetical world that is not too far from the truth. Imagine that I am spending milllions of dollars on building a factory in the US; our product is so big and bulky and the raw materials so ubiquitous that Prof Krugman (through he work he got his Nobel for not the newspaper columns) says I should have regionally located manufacturing plants. Deciding that i need one in Europe and that automation makes labour cost a small part of the equation. I then start shopping around, I want to bring my crack team of 10 people who've started up one plant and have the experience to do it again, knowing full well that over time these ten people will expand the workforce and replace themselves with local people.

I take a long hard look at the visa regime and might well decide that the risk of not getting just one of those people a visa is so high that I write the UK off the list out of hand.

i don't really know the numbers involved (i know they're not massive, but they're probably bigger than i think), and perhaps this is spectacularly naive, but it seems like it would be a good idea economically to say: "if you have a PhD in a science and, say, three years of postdoctoral or technical experience, you can move here, whether or not you have a job waiting for you or not."

ed, is this ^^^ idiotic?

do any other eu countries offer anything like that?