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

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“Ministers have not asked for any advice on alternative approaches because we are very clear that our approach for the economy is the right one.”

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“Ministers have not asked for any advice on alternative approaches because we are very clear that our approach for the economy is the right one.”

idk why i still f/w the guardian when the ft is (on this kind of thing, ie real news) so much better

paywall : /

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/dec/14/tuition-fees-market

Also sad little lol at the very idea of this.

I really don't know where else to put this but disgruntled employees are getting very creative:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldgyh0scYK1qbwflao1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1292527345&Signature=Q4K7uTZIzpH0rfeKMbIqqQxjbqA%3D

woah. is that real, suzy??

doh just checked the url

Thank you for closing my local library, sorry, not closing at all, merely stopping their funding to encourage good old Big Society to step in and volunteer

because a volunteer will be able to find a new location rent-free, acquire and maintain an up-to-date selection of books all catalogued and barcoded and run the stock database, and act as a one-stop community hub for information, cheap web access, scanning, photocopying

it's going to be lovely

I think the point of the Big Society will ultimately be that where The Community falls short in its delivery of essential services then private enterprise will take up the slack. Libraries, of course, won't come under "essential services".

^ exactly

just the rather smarmy justification of closing these places by our Tory council leader in the linked news article - He said he was "confident" Big Society initiatives in towns and villages would save some but not all of the threatened libraries and youth centres

like, everyone knows the Big Society is just to sneak-privatise anything which might possibly be coopted into making some profit, and that libraries aren't going to do that, but Mr Mitchell wants us to think he isn't closing anything, just letting some kind-hearted people do it for fun instead

I think the point of the Big Society will ultimately be that where The Community falls short in its delivery of essential services then private enterprise will take up the slack. Libraries, of course, won't come under "essential services".

i forget exactly which tory said this, but at their conference this year, the argument was that if the community and private companies didn't pick up where public funding left off, that would be proof that those services weren't wanted or important in the first place

I KNOW RIGHT

all my life ive had this belief that progress of time = progress. that as time passes things like public services get better, more efficient, better for everyone. this 'big society' thing has completely destroyed that idea, it feels like a real turning point where we once had it good and now this is it, good times are over. demolishing the library system is one of the most genuinely upsetting things, they meant *so* much to me growing up. heartbreaking that it would come to this

lol death of a Whig Historian

"We didn't close the library, on the contrary we left them open after sacking all the staff, so that the local community could look after it. BUT THEY ONLY NICKED ALL THE BOOKS!!! and squatted."

Councils have been closing down libraries (and swimming pools as well for that matter) for as long as I can remember. What we'll probably end up with is a situation where every borough/town has one massive library and the local ones disappear.

Not in my city they haven't. Ok, one swimming pool - but within a five or six mile radius of me there are three new pools and and several refurbished libraries. I'd be interested to see some figures for the country as a whole though..

Harrods thing is a shop imo

thought that was obv yes

all my life ive had this belief that progress of time = progress. that as time passes things like public services get better, more efficient, better for everyone. this 'big society' thing has completely destroyed that idea, it feels like a real turning point where we once had it good and now this is it, good times are over. demolishing the library system is one of the most genuinely upsetting things, they meant *so* much to me growing up. heartbreaking that it would come to this

I'm guessing this may be common for people born in the 1980s (no idea whether this actually applies to you). While we were growing up, things went from grim to getting better to boom economy in rapid succession and this is the first time that sliding back down to the beginning looks like a serious probability.

yeah man those halcyon days of Nu Labour's socialist utopia are gonna be a fading ember to cling onto

The dream is over.

Rolling cuts thread:
http://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/uk-coastguard-stations-under-threat-of-closure
The ones left are pretty far apart, what are the chances of being rescued in time if you're halfway between two of them?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-11985929
Privatised? "I'm sorry sir, but if you can't pay, you'll have to drown. By the way, last month everyone we rescued opted to drown and so this month we've had to double our fees, so remember, it's in everyone's best interests for you to pay."

Front page of City AM today puts the City of London's tax contribution as £53bn or just over a tenth of the govt's total tax receipts. Regardless of whether you think that number should be higher or lower, 1/10th of all tax is just o_0 - it hardly reflects a well-balanced economy.

Rolling cuts thread:
http://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/uk-coastguard-stations-under-threat-of-closure
The ones left are pretty far apart, what are the chances of being rescued in time if you're halfway between two of them?

Big society at work RNLI will fill in the gaps although they don't do anything against smugglers, polluters and the like.

Front page of City AM today puts the City of London's tax contribution as £53bn or just over a tenth of the govt's total tax receipts. Regardless of whether you think that number should be higher or lower, 1/10th of all tax is just o_0 - it hardly reflects a well-balanced economy.

― Matt DC, Thursday, December 16, 2010 4:06 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

christ. that's bad news. it's gambling, for the most part.

hmm!

In the coming days, The Daily Telegraph will expose further concerns among Lib Dem ministers about Coalition policy and senior Conservative figures.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/liberaldemocrats/8215462/Vince-Cable-I-could-bring-down-the-Government.html

Either Cable's got an inflated sense of self-esteem or he's got hard numbers as to how many Lib Dem MPs wd follow him.

Yes, and he's quite prepared to tell the ladies all about the powers at his disposal...

i guess it happened to that tory guy, but this seems like very unusual reporting practice. lobby hacks must hear things like this and worse every day, and from both sides, but the code of honour means they say nowt. not sure whose axe is being ground here.

Torygraph wants to undermine the LibDems in government basically. If it's running a series of Inside The Coalition type reports then it's got more, and possibly bigger, revelations to come.

Odds on a general election plummeted from 20/1 to 4/1 recently - might the Tories be trying to engineer one with a Coalition implosion?

Also the rest of the media have cottoned onto the fact that every time the Tories want to announce a really unpopular policy they send a LibDem out to do it.

Any sentient being has cottoned onto that fact by now; well done, media!

They'll be sending the LibDems out with the redundancy notices next.

Odds on a general election plummeted from 20/1 to 4/1 recently

4/1 is crazy. It's not really in any LibDem interests to break the coalition at this point, they'll want to hang onto those seats as long as possible and they won't at this point. So the Tories will have to break it themselves in the hope of securing a majority - can see why they'd want to do this as it'd involve stealing a march on a Labour party that is clearly not ready to fight another election. But I seriously doubt the Tories are sure they're in a strong enough position either.

stealing a march on a Labour party that is clearly not ready to fight another election

Yeah, but it'd take them ten minutes to get tooled up...

also the nation is p angry atm. why not wait till like the week of the wedding or something?

Because the voting populace would feel manipulated, and vote anti bigtime.

(Same goes for all those "Govt is way ahead in poll, let's call a snap election" situations, like when Gord was well ahead after taking over from TBlair. If he'd called it, you watch how that lead would have evaporated)

Brown would have won that election I think, albeit narrowly.

^^^ exactly, not least because the Tories wd have had to commit more fully to a positive manifesto without having had Brown's glorious tenure as PM to beat him with.

there's plenty of sense in the Tories going for a full majority in the next 6 months, not least because a Nu Old Labour manifesto wd have to be cobbled together before the policy review had taken place, making it that much easier for bitter Blair/Brownites to knock the shit out of each other thru-out the campaign.

NB don't think it'll happen, but it does make strategic sense for the non-Cameronista sections of the Party.

Yeah the thing that'll be putting off Cameron (and probably put off Brown) is that if you call a snap election after only a few months in government and then lose then you'll go down in history as one of the biggest numpties ever to have inhabited Number 10.

Quite. While tory support has held up pretty well so far, Labour's actually quite impressive Brown's-fucked-off Bounce means the polls don't look anywhere near good enough for the Cameron brains trust to risk a new election. I wouldn't have thought. Think this is largely wishful thinking for the hard right at present.

(xp) ^ That's right, and while there's more chance Brown would have won than lost, there was still a significant chance he would have lost outright or ended up with a hung parliament. Even if he'd won, it might well have been with a majority reduced from its already low position, which wouldn't have made him look that great.

The ideal thing would be for this government to collapse late next year. This should give Labour enough time to get its act together, and hopefully allow just enough of the Tory cuts to have gone through to *really* piss people off, but not enough to have irreversibly fucked things up.

Thing is, I really don't think the coalition will collapse unless the Tories (by which I mean the ones that matter) actively want it to, and they're not going to do so under your ideal scenario.

Gay Labour MP Chris Bryant has accused Chancellor George Osborne of homophobia for calling him a “pantomime dame”.

The pair clashed over cuts today during an exchange in the House of Commons.

According to PoliticsHome editor Paul Waugh, Mr Bryant said that the chancellor should play “Prince Charming” over the spending cuts.

Mr Osborne is said to have retorted: “At least I’m not a pantomime dame.”

Mr Bryant then demanded that the remark was withdrawn and said that “homophobia” should not be allowed in the chamber but was apparently ignored by the chancellor.

The Labour MP tweeted: “So George Osborne clearly doesn’t know how to be charming with his jibe at me as ‘pantomime dame’. Homophobic or just nasty?”

Honestly can't believe Osborne started a retort with "at least I'm not..."

Bryant should have just responded with "your mum".

looking forward to his shop getting trashed in the near future

Gonna be photoshopped onto a turnip before the end of the year