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

nrq what did you do? english?

― caek, Wednesday, June 29, 2011 10:28 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

im not called english mayne

Oops, tag malfunction:

Duncan Smith urges firms to hire unemployed Britons

David Frost, CUNT, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce:

"After 11 years of formal education, employers say they get kids coming to them who can't read, who can't write, who can't communicate, and don't have that work ethic."

Mr Frost added that the UK's benefits system "did not incentivise" some young people to seek employment.

He also called for reform of the benefits system, saying that able-bodied young people in areas of the UK where jobs are available should not be eligible for any benefits.

How does cutting benefits improve reading and writing skills etc? But obviously being really poor and desperate more than makes up for any other shortcomings, so that's good :)

£326,000 of private schooling might be a counterargument?

― sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of continental indiepop (tomofthenest), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 10:59 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

i seriously doubt the parents of privately educated ppe graduate ed balls had that kind of wonga, but it's a bit of an overstatement anyway:

A recent report from the Halifax bank claimed that if you are about to embark on paying for a private education now for your child from the age of three to 18, then you can expect to fork out £326,000, assuming fees continue to rise at about 6% a year and including extras such as uniform and books.

mine cost about £25k all in, i think. not including books, which, apparently, no state school kid need buy. the schools do seem to be more pricey now and have many more rich chinese kids.

but being real, yes, elite universities tend to be packed with the children of the educated middle classes, wherever they were schooled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverclyde_by-election,_2011

Candidate Sophie Bridger
Party Liberal Democrat
Popular vote 627
Percentage 2.2%

down from 13.3% in the 2010 GE.

Tory candidate's share down 0.1 percent less than the "Labour" candidate.

Thinking of doing a tribute/nostalgia thread for the Labour Party now it's dead.

good idea do it on facebook

I think lots of trad Labour votes went to SNP while lots of LDs went to Labour making it look like a swing from LD to SNP with everyone else fairly static. Really low turn-out too. I don't think the LD candidate being about 12 years old helped her already difficult task.

The Tory guy's been on the council for years and is fairly well known and liked in the area, for a Tory. He was visiting my sister-in-law's neighbour the other day and gave me a wee "well done" for being out in the pissing rain helping a woman (my s-i-l) with a flat tyre - didn't roll his fucking sleeves up to give me a hand though. All in this together my arse.

He left his car's lights on when he nipped into the neighbour's for a cuppa. We didn't tell him.

not sure what thread this should go on, here?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/04/milly-dowler-voicemail-hacked-news-of-world

Holy shit. Seriously?

Seriously???

The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly's disappearance so as to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive. Police feared evidence may have been destroyed.

what the FUCK

Really, the News of the World, of 'hang all paedophiles' fame, should rightly see its circulation completely collapse for deleting evidence in a well-publicised child murder case but I bet you any money people keep buying it.

Shameful.

whoa

Really the baying mob that the NOTW has encouraged for 10yrs should be turning up at NewsInt with flaming torches right now.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/Denied2.gif

I meant karmically, not that they actually should, btw.

Haha my gif was intended for NotW, not you.

incredible

I'm assuming that Murdoch could come out as the murderer without it affecting the BSkyB deal but, really, this should affect it.

In defence of dignity
Justice for victims vilified in courtroom

Exclusive by David Wooding
July 3, 2011

RUTHLESS lawyers will be banned from berating murder victims' families in court in the wake of the Milly Dowler trial.

Tough new rules to be unveiled this week will protect their privacy and dignity - with judges forced to halt intimidating, humiliating or distressing questioning.

The safeguards come in a revamped courtroom code aimed at ending the nightmare ordeal faced by thousands of witnesses and innocent victims of crime.

It follows the shameful treatment of Bob and Sally Dowler by lawyers defending their 13-year-old daughter's killer Levi Bellfield.

The distraught couple endured cruel questions about their sex life, Bob's porn collection and letters which showed Milly was unhappy.

vs

The Dowler family then granted an exclusive interview to the News of the World in which they talked about their hope, quite unaware that it had been falsely kindled by the newspaper's own intervention.

whenever dignity needs defending, there's the news of the world

wtf

Harry Cole is currently doing some mad Cap'n-Save-A-Murdoch on Twitter, especially re: the Sky deal. More "they're on our side so it doesn't matter" obviously.

so the police knew that the notw had hacked her phone and ignored it?! wtffff.

no:

"Detectives from Scotland Yard's new inquiry into the phone hacking, Operation Weeting, are believed to have found evidence of the targeting of the Dowlers in a collection of 11,000 pages of notes kept by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed for phone hacking on behalf of the News of the World."

yes:

After it had hacked the message from the recruitment agency on Milly's phone, the paper informed police about it. It was Surrey detectives who established that the call was not intended for Milly Dowler. At the time, Surrey police suspected that phones belonging to detectives and to Milly's parents also were being targeted.

One of those who was involved in the original inquiry said: "We'd arrange landline calls. We didn't trust our mobiles."

However, they took no action against the News of the World, partly because their main focus was to find the missing schoolgirl and partly because this was only one example of tabloid misbehaviour. As one source close to the inquiry put it: "There was a hell of a lot of dirty stuff going on."

ah right. tbf that doesn't sound like they happily chose to do nothing about it. this concrete evidence appears to be new.

Bloody hell, I knew they were conniving unprincipled bastards but this is really shocking. I hope these fuckers end up in jail.

That Harry Cole - he's a right wag.

http://twitter.com/#!/MrHarryCole/status/87922477283549184

"wag" is one word you might use, yes.

he seems to be back-pedalling quite hard now. Wade was editor in 2002, right? Wonder if she'll survive this one.

can we have harry cole's twitter background as the background of all ilx pages

This was mentioned in an article in the NS back in April by..er..Hugh Grant. It's an illuminating read.
http://www.newstatesman.com/newspapers/2011/04/phone-yeah-cameron-murdoch

Me Do you think Murdoch knew about phone-hacking?

Him Errr, possibly not. He's a funny bloke given that he owns the Sun and the Screws . . . quite puritanical. Sorry to talk about Divine Brown, but when that came out . . . Murdoch was furious: "What are you putting that on our front page for? You're bringing down the tone of our papers." [Indicating himself] That's what we do over here.

Me Well, it's also because it was his film I was about to come out in.

Him Oh. I see.

Me Yeah. It was a Fox film.

Bloody hell, I knew they were conniving unprincipled bastards but this is really shocking. I hope these fuckers end up in jail.

― The multi-talented F.R. David (Billy Dods), Monday, July 4, 2011 6:17 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i feel pretty burned out on the whole but this is really fucking bad

jeremy hunt is a cunt

Is this story plastered over the front pages of todays papers?

I haven't seen any papers yet myself, but apparently not according to Paxman on last night's Newsnight.

It's on the front of the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and Times.

Train maker Bombardier is cutting more than 1,400 jobs at its plant in Derby after the Government decided to award the Thameslink contract to German manufacturer Siemens because its bid offered "better value for money for the taxpayer".

Why do the Mail and the Mirror not go in more aggressively here? Surely the Mail must be pretty clean in this regard, you don't need phone hacking to run thunderous front pages about bin-collecting and discrimination lawsuits.

Be amazed if Brooks survived this, she must have been right on the edge as it was. Can only see Murdoch pulling a night of the long knives here.

It is apparently pathetically easy to hack into a voicemail if you know the number and PIN (most ppl just use their birthdays) but you can't do it without someone from the police helping you out in the first place.

the sun's coverage of this story:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/images/media/sun_millydowler.jpg

it's in a fairly prominent position on the mail's website (and has been moved up since it was first put up last night), don't know what the print edition looks like though. (and obviously it's nowhere near as prominent as william & kate fluff or - good god - "Nigerian mother who cost NHS £200k after having quintuplets is working illegally as an Avon Lady")

Cameron sounded a bit shaken just now on the top-of-hour news of R4.

Now, the rumour is that Brooks was shakily hanging on to her job as it was, but a few months back Cameron intervened with Murdoch to keep her.

I still think the phone hacking scandal may blow over, which is a disgrace. When I was working in recruitment in the late 90s/00s I believe that clients answer messages were being hacked in this way to gain confidential information. The default PIN for retrieving messages was generally '0000' and most people didn't bother to change it. A relatively well known 'trick'.

I reckon it was going to blow over before but, y'know, people care about murdered children in the way they don't about the privacy of Andy Gray/Sienna Miller/John Prescott.

Bet this isn't the only time something like this has happened as well. Depends how much more is left to be shaken down.

They seem on point of Going There about Soham - and if they do find evidence of a hack there, I predict chaos and angry, angry Little Englanders.

amazed how little labour exploited coulson-gate

and here is another open goal

(i still care about u, sienna)

A Downing Street source played down the significance of the social engagement and pointed out that Brooks is one of the prime minister's constituents. The source said: "To suggest some kind of impropriety is laughable. The prime minister regularly meets newspaper executives from lots of different companies."

Cameron visited Brooks and her husband, the racehorse trainer and writer Charlie Brooks, at their Oxfordshire home over the Christmas period.

To suggest some kind of impropriety is laughable. To suggest some kind of impropriety is laughable. To suggest some kind of impropriety is laughable.

It probably will blow over. The relative lack of interest on the part of other tabloids could be explained several ways - the Sun’s got stuff on them, journalistic code of honour, back-scratching – but the most likely one is that the papers don’t think, probably correctly, that the public are that bothered. Because Dowler’s killer has been identified and sentenced, the whole thing then becomes a bit of an abstract with the public and so with news like this they go “grrr!” for a few seconds and “typical” for a few more then shrug their shoulders and carry on reading the paper which they only buy for Page 3 and the sport anyway.

Perversions of justice? Immoral behaviour? Who cares* #itsagoodstory

*slightly surprised if NoTW don’t hit back with CONFESSED PERVERT DAD-type headlines next Sunday but even they might think that would be a bit much.

Even with Soham dirt - if proven - I suspect the public will howl "NEVER AGAIN" like they did with Diana for about a week and a half and then go back to normal because #itsagoodstory

Me: So they all knew? Wade probably knew all about it all?

Him: [...] Cameron must have known - that's the bigger scandal. He had to jump into bed with Murdoch as everyone had, starting with Thatcher in the Seventies . . . Tony Blair . . . [tape is hard to hear here] Maggie openly courted Murdoch, saying, you know, "Please support me." So when Cameron, when it came his turn to go to Murdoch via Rebekah Wade . . . Cameron went horse riding regularly with Rebekah. I know, because as well as doorstepping celebrities, I've also doorstepped my ex-boss by hiding in the bushes, waiting for her to come past with Cameron on a horse . . . before the election to show that - you know - Murdoch was backing Cameron.

Me: What happened to that story?

Him: The Guardian paid for me to do it and I stepped in it and missed them, basically. They'd gone past - not as good as having a picture.