one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

it's worth noting all the ways in which this woman was treated terribly

"At the time there were no red flags with how she was behaving."

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/i-just-cant-find-way-15331347

"austerity is over"

yeah sure, how sickening, the poor woman. And I'd like to add my experience of actually getting some LA respite was so substandard and not fit for purpose that it just added a whole extra dimension of stress to all parties involved. And this is definitely related to how badly funded it is.

The respite centre used to be a huge Victorian mansion left by some rich Victorian industrialist for disabled kids for perpetuity. The cash strapped LA flogged it off to housing developers and built a little bungalow behind the new posh housing site, where these props are going for something 750k each.

The little bungalow is supposed to house up 8 disabled kids at once and the staff are poorly paid, poorly trained.

The "austerity is over" show is something that needs seriously challenging. It was good to see McDonnell pledging extra billions the other day, but while this lot are in power people are literally dying.

apols for rambling chainposts..

Councils who flog off property left to them in perpetuity for a specific reason are THE WORST.

the sight of people walking kids with noise sensitive autism issues through a badly segregated building site, struck me as an image of the times.

could do with a hilarious May dancing gif rn, lol what a tonic!

andy burnham has realised he doesn't have the power to fix manchester's exciting transport crisis. I live by a road with an 'illegal' level of pollution, I hope to see the police arresting everyone who drives along it.

I thought someone who looks like a legoland piece would have some preternatural ability to fix infrastructure problems.

Lol @ manchester trains, picadilly-oxford road stretch is the eye of the needle the camel has to pass through

Dominic Grieve just nearly had a heart attack talking about Hain's flagrant disregard for Phillip Green the judicial process.

ugh, that Manchester Evening News article. grim as hell

reminds me of this which made me angry earlier in the week:
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/stephanie-bincliffe-died-because-she-was-imprisoned-for-being-disabled/

or this thing from a few months ago about landlords not accepting renters on benefits, which led to a disabled person sleeping in his car for months after he was evicted and couldn't find anywhere wheelchair-accessible to live:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/welfare/2018/08/no-women-no-disabilities-no-dss-grim-renaissance-private-rental

sorry for being all "oh! news articles! I was surprised!" about this govt's horrible treatment of people with disabilities, a topic which is not a surprise to some people here :(

Love how Phillip Green has denied racism and sexual harassment. So he’s paid for a load of bullying, then?

He has denied it "to the extent that it has been suggested"

lol, he has specifically denied ‘unlawful racial behaviour’ - so he has been precisely as racist as the law allows.

Funny, just been discussing in the pub the extent of scumbaggery that can still be legitimately NDA'd

imagine getting really upset about judicial process not being followed correctly, because the rich and powerful really need someone getting their back at times like this. What a moribund ghoul Grieve is.

Worth noting in light of the Presidents Club and Philip Green that the 2013 “bonfire of regulations” by the Conservatives made tackling workplace sexual harassment more difficult. Employers are no longer liable unless they know an employee was harassed on two previous occasions

— Matt Zarb-Cousin (@mattzarb) October 26, 2018

Grieve is basically correct, unfortunately.

Had The Telegraph taken this to a full trial or appealed to the House Of Lords we might have had a useful clarification on the limits of privacy law - that seems unlikely now. I haven’t followed the details that closely but it sounds like the Court Of Appeal acknowledged there were a bunch of important things left to be decided and extended the injunction in the interim. As things stand, unless the papers can find an amenable Lord to shoot his mouth off in Parliament, the press is in the same position it was when Green got the initial decision in his favour.

well that is an interesting perspective, but I'd wager Grieve's motivations were completely from a different angle.

His job is to uphold the processes of the law so idk what else he is going to say when Hain’s showboating circumvents it, tbh. He’s correct in saying that Parliament passed the law and it’s up to the courts to interpret it, irrespective of the motives.

It would have been great for Green to have lost as it looks like a fairly cynical abuse of privacy laws (albeit one actively backed by two of the people he harassed) but I am far more sceptical of why the Telegraph wants to trash those privacy laws than i am of Grieve coming out with criticism.

Yeah, the side issues don't seem pertinent to how the law works here. Hain's "motivation" is easily as self-serving as any of the other parties, maybe more pathetic if anything.

I have no truck with his showboating in this case, but was thinking of this in terms of the NDAs rather than privacy laws.

but PG is such a villainous creep, it's hard not to get carried away.

As I understand it an NDA that isn't attempting to cover actually criminal activity is legit, for better or worse.

as long as it is covering sexual harassment + bullying within the parameters of legality, sounds like what is in effect.

didn't the financial times publish something that violated an NDA this year, with a 'come at us' sort of challenge?

I think the hair Green is splitting is that he was probably in breach of employment law but not criminal law. The unfortunate position is that the challenges involved in brining employment cases and winning substantial damages probably means victims are perfectly rational in accepting money in return for not talking about it.

I think you probably can NDA for crimes, but perhaps only crimes against that individual. You obviously shouldn’t be able to pay witnesses not to report things they otherwise might have, etc.

The legal myth there is that both parties freely sign the contract when, as you say, the power is all one way. People sign NDAs because it's the least personally painful way to get some money and get away.

Look we’re all gonna die (and pictures of Liam Fox looking gormless will be our new currency)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-trade-deal-wto-liam-fox-no-deal-international-trade-a8603811.html

Haha autocorrect adding a Blairish air of ‘the realistic’!

the bad doctor looks a bit out of his depth in this rest-of-world negging role. Might need a few decades to stamp his authority on the job!

glad to see some "shock" Gideon is amoral scumbag stories doing the rounds today. He has been a bit too modest about his true legacy in recent years.

Do I read right that Gordon Brown selling the family gold off ten years ago is the direct consequence of Hammond's budget ten years later?

some good stuff from Corbz rn

To be fair to Hammond if I was in his shoes I wouldn't have made any effort with the Budget either given the whole thing could be redundant or voted down within a matter of weeks.

I've hit hit the S Bush paywall, but the gist of his take seemed "it is a Budget for the top 15%, with some faux "austerity over" gruel tacked on".

BY
STEPHEN BUSH

Philip Hammond delivered a Budget that was long on spending announcements but low on actual cash. The Chancellor sprayed around spending commitments that sounded impressive – £200m there, £400m there – until you remember that, as far as government spending goes, these are tiny amounts.

Although the Chancellor held out the promise of more money at the next spending review, this was well short of Theresa May’s promise that austerity will end – a pledge that Hammond himself notably did not repeat.

There were, however, some big ticket spending items: the pre-announced expansion of cash into the NHS, and the injection of an extra £2.7bn into the troubled Universal Credit programme, with £1bn of that targeted on transitional protections for people moving from the old benefits system to the new, and the remainder spent on reversing the cuts planned by George Osborne.

Other than the £700m in spending announcements for Northern Ireland – not much in government spending terms, but a lot for a place the size of Northern Ireland – which were done with one eye on the ten DUP MPs the Conservatives must keep on side to remain in office, the big winners, and Hammond’s main target, were the United Kingdom’s top earners, with the promised cut in the higher rate tax for people earning £45,000 or over being brought forward. The 40p rate will now kick in at £50,000 and higher rate taxpayers will also benefit from the further increase in the taxable threshold. (This means that the higher rate won’t kick in until incomes exceed a little more than £60,000.)

The winners from these tax cuts are overwhelmingly concentrated in the top 15 per cent of the pay distribution. But this group – professionals, school headteachers and department heads, lawyers, doctors and senior academics – were also the group that swung decisively away from the Conservative party in 2017. To the extent that this budget had a political focus it was on winning over people who are troubled by, but not directly affected by, deprivation, with the small spending increases announced across government largely targeted on eliminating visible signs of wear and tear on the public realm. Not least among these was potholes, a huge and noticeable consequence of the cuts to public spending for the vast majority of higher earners, who outside London largely commute and travel by car.

These spending decisions give you a good idea of what the focus of Budgets future will be, provided Brexit doesn’t trigger an economic crisis: with largesse targeted on the well-paid, and small-bore amounts of money directed to dampen down the most gaping and obvious problems in the public realm.

cheers for that, Jed.

(fwiw. i find with the NS that if you hit the X while the page is loadingit loads the article but you don't get the paywall)

Budget on a Monday is confusing tbh

Michael Moore wants to win the war against Trump
BY PAUL MASON

god bless that NS paywall tbf!

if I was in his shoes I wouldn't have made any effort with the Budget either

imagine if this one is based on his best case scenario

#PoliticsLive

Andrew Neil: So Liz. Austerity is over?

Liz Truss: Yes.

Andrew Neil: So why are there more Welfare Cuts to come?

Liz Truss: Er...Universal Credit?

— duncanpoundcake (@duncanpoundcake) October 29, 2018

provided Brexit doesn’t trigger an economic crisis is a hell of a proviso

If you want to look at the bad NS on safari, the reading view option bypasses the paywall.

To be fair to Hammond if I was in his shoes I wouldn't have made any effort with the Budget either given the whole thing could be redundant or voted down within a matter of weeks.

You’d think he’d at least have that drink he’s entitled to...

Brexit IS an economic crisis.

As someone who might actually benefit from that tax cut, fuck you Box-Sized Office Phil.