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

Just waiting until Mubarak was ready to go obviously.

Ministers halt some forest sales after public outcry

I'm surprised at this actually, because DEFRA's website (relevant pages now taken down) seemed to say that no matter what the outcome of the public consultation on the bulk of forestry lands this first sell-off was a done deal.

Just waiting until Mubarak was ready to go obviously.

Open goal that

Just found out Hull City Council have done their bit for the deficit by eliminating all childrens and youth services. Kudos.

Ken promising to squeeze 'em till the pips squeak

Just found out Hull City Council have done their bit for the deficit by eliminating all childrens and youth services. Kudos.

― Y Kant Torres Red (Noodle Vague), Friday, February 11, 2011 5:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

bring em all to pearson park saturday 10-12 for some shared service provision

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/12/david-cameron-big-society-good

And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.

this one's going to end well!

shit that reads like an onion article.

'take a trip with me to a birmingham estate' is pitched entirely at people who might consider going on a fact-finding eye-opener of a daytrip to a birmingham estate, before returning home.

also 'i was into social justice before cuts got all famous'.

yeah it reads exactly like a particularly uninspired major label press release

Take a trip with me to Balsall Heath in Birmingham and I'll show you a place once depressingly known as a sink estate but now a genuinely desirable place to live. Why the transformation? Because even in a tough neighbourhood, the seeds of a stronger society were there and residents boldly decided they'd had enough and drove out the crime.

And what the fuck's that got to do with you, Dave?

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/work/article.html?in_article_id=522795&in_page_id=53928

that's genuinely obscene - even just the basic fact that internships can be auctioned off at all

Story's been buried of course

Take a trip with me to Balsall Heath in Birmingham and I'll show you a place once depressingly known as a sink estate but now a genuinely desirable place to live. Why the transformation? Because even in a tough neighbourhood, the seeds of a stronger society were there and residents boldly decided they'd had enough and drove out the crime.

thing is, while the balsall heath forum has dozens of volunteers, it also has about 20 paid staff, and is described as permanently in a funding crisis. when it does get money, it's from the council and the police. so the big society looks an awful lot like bad old state intervention.

and it's worth remembering what really happened when residents boldly decided to drive out crime:

A woman's home was firebombed on one occasion, and had bricks, crossbow darts and fireworks arrive through her letterbox and windows at other times. Notes delivered to real or suspected prostitutes gave a flavour of a menacing atmosphere in which anonymous denunciation was encouraged:

"Hello bitch, so you think your clever running a brothell. Well lets see what we can stop you! Now we could smash the windows We could smash your face. Best of all we could burn you out, it only takes one match and a spot off parafin." Or: "The fat cow at no 10 says your a fancy bitch. If was you I would sell up quickly."

Cameron with some ostensibly left-wing collectivist views, smothered in PR-friendly corporatist rhetoric, not buying a word of it

houses

12 February 2011 9:51PM

Rather, it combines three clear methods to bring people together to improve their lives and the lives of others: devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny.

Police your own streets, clean your own streets, bring out your own dead etc

opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve

Don't expect any kind of service from privatised health or social services, despite continuing to pay taxes, all of which will go to pay banker style salaries to privatised utility bosses.

and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community.

Sack hundreds of thousands of public sector workers and then force them to do the same jobs in return for their benefits.

It's a sort of cross between 1890's Britain and Mussolini's corporate kleptocracy, all informed and inspired by the example of the sickest and most unequal society on the planet - the USA.

I really don't know what to say - it's a vision of hell.

get this person on ilx imo

Cameron with some ostensibly left-wing collectivist views, smothered in PR-friendly corporatist rhetoric, not buying a word of it

― acoleuthic, Sunday, 13 February 2011 12:35 (15 minutes ago)

got this the wrong way around. ditch 'ostensibly' and it's the inverse of this. guy's a fraud and a cunt

Not sure that he's a fraud so much as just plain wrong

kind of feel that when people say "the big society's just a fig leaf for cuts" they're missing the point - i think cameron really does sincerely believe in the big society (which makes it worse, prob) precisely because it's the SAME THING as a small state, just looked at/sold from the opposite angle.

i do wonder whether they could've got away with selling it like that in economically stronger times (or, y'know, not in the PR-speak way they've tried to sell it either - just whether the basic concept would've gained more/any traction)

And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.

In my experience as a playgroup treasurer and helper and in Mrs Trifle's experience as a guide leader we've heard many reasons - no time, doing two jobs already, "helping out" somewhere else, bad back, plain can't be bothered, but never once has anyone mentioned criminal record checks and health and safety laws (what laws exactly?).

There's a real lack of thinking before opening mouth going on with the government at the moment. You've got to wonder what Cameron's people were thinking when the OK'ed that line.

canvassing the prisoner vote

Hahahahaha

Cleggeron turns the Commons into an episode of Oprah where all the MPs find a sparkly iPad under their chair

0_0

we're all in this etc

"It is so environmentally friendly," said a committee source. "I would imagine it will pay for itself in three or four months because we wouldn't be printing out great wodges of paper."

...

A new information and communications technology strategy, recently agreed by officials on Parliament's Management Board, included the following imaginary scenario entitled "a possible MP's story in 2015": "As I travel down on the train all the information relating to the parliamentary day arrives on my iPad, I have a quick look through, make some notes and request, by a simple tap on the screen, a printed copy of a report.”

Cameron relaunching Big Society again! He's like a friggin' dog with a bone. Default reply for ConDem ministers when pressed on the effects of cuts on local services: "We're doing our bit we've set up the Big Society Bank it's up to local councils how they spend their money we're able to make savings purely on efficiency and so should they and by the way have you seen how much they pay their chief exectuives and what about that guy over there do they need to pay that guy and what about that money they spent on a piece of sculpture load of rubbish too doesn't even look like a real person..."

Can someone point to an article where Cameron has said that central government has cut the budget by 10% just on efficiency, so councils should be able to as well?

Slight exaggeration, shall we say "without compromising frontline services my making more efficient use of the funds available, including major efficiency savings" instead?

Another U-turn

John Lanchester brings the funny in the LRB, on Ed Balls's appointment:

Another aspect to this is that Balls, like all the other senior politicians of this generation, is a product of the inside track in his party’s apparat, with next to no knowledge of life outside politics. He is also yet another humanities graduate from Oxford in his forties. That means that out of the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, the leader of the opposition and the shadow chancellor, the only one of them who is not a white man in his forties with a humanities degree from Oxford is George Osborne. That’s not because he is secretly black, or transgender, or went to a provincial university, or studied chemistry: it’s because he doesn’t turn forty until May. Speaking for myself, I find the homogeneity grotesque – and I say that as a white man in his forties with an Oxford degree in the humanities.

(although he's wrong about Nick Clegg btw, Clegg went to Cambridge, which is virtually redbrick in Westminster terms. Still, lol.)

well, he's good enough to mention that the lrb isn't not dominated by oxbridge types...

i don't rly know much about the forest thing

but it's sort of amazing how shit the govt gets at being, not in terms of policy, i mean, though that is something too, just at the level of competence

labour were pretty stupid and undisciplined a lot of the time, but i think this is somehow even more cackhanded, if only because it's mostly tories who are upset by whatever the new forest policy was

This feels pretty OTM: http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/02/forestry_fiasco

what are 'forests' anyway, just those gd conifer plantations?

Quite probably a privatisation was still the right way forward

classic economist

idk, so were they trying to sell ye olde woods or just the commercial stuff?

When Mrs Spelman took office, she discovered that her sprawling department of the environment, food and rural affairs funded 92 arms-length bodies.

realy dislike the economist's nonaligned 'reasonableness' shtick, as if that information wouldn't have been available to them before taking office

92 arms-length bodies

Foot Heads Arms Body

idk, so were they trying to sell ye olde woods or just the commercial stuff?

All of it afaik

brap brap

Lease ye olde woods for 150 yr terms, sell the commercial stuff outright, afaik. Conifer plantations suck but idk, seerms like turning them into forest that doesn't suck wld be the right thing, rather than flogging them off for short short term gain.

It was a mess because it was on its way to being seen as a rushed and bungled privatisation. And even the flintiest free-marketeer knows to beware botched sell-offs of state assets: few things are as deadly to public acceptance of an economy based on competition.

ah yes, that long list of successful uk privatizations, in which the state received a reasonable market value for its assets.

on its way to being seen as

VERY LOCAL NEWS: David Cameron made a visit to The People's Supermarket on Monday, only to be met by a shitload of very angry pensioners and various other people who don't like him. His forehead would look perfect with a rotten tomato garnish...

Anyone considered what happens when the AV Referendum is lost, because it will be.

Privatisations are often unpopular in Britain at first; they prove their worth later, when (with luck) it can be shown they have left the country better off.

from another piece on the same thing

what a lying scumbag

who thinks this about the airports, or british rail? does the gas burn hotter now? fuck em.

telling employment of passive voice

it can be shown to those....who want to be shown

Privatisations are often unpopular in Britain at first; they prove their worth later, when (with luck) it can be shown they have left the country better off. for the Cayman Islands.

Talking of which, Cameron has announced today that he wants the privitisation of all public services except for the security services and the judiciary:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/8337237/David-Cameron-promises-public-sector-revolution.html

"Instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition in individual public services – as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS – the state will have to justify why it should ever operate a monopoly."