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

Thought that was an awful line but i guess it worked.

govt offering 20% loans to help buy £600k houses, good to know that bedroom tax is going somewhere useful

Yay, more taxpayer money to prop up the housing market and lumber young people with shitloads of debt.

It's all new houses too, so the money goes straight into the pockets of large house-building companies/Tory donors. Whee!

cut the price of beer by 1p a pint

Uh so how's that going to work? Does that mean pubs are going to have to order in a shitload of pennies to give out as change when the price drops from £3.50 to £3.49 (or whatever, LOL London eh?)

No, as far as pubs are concerned it's a little boost to the businesses rather than consumers. You likely won't see prices drop, just as you likely won't have seen the prices go up a penny or two last year. Most pubs seem to swallow duty increases until their gross profits get bad enough to stick the prices up by 5p or whatever.

The duty is not calculated on pints of beer sold to customers, fwiw, it's levied at the point the barrel is sold to the pub.

Well whoop-de-do, George, thanks a bunch

Yeah it's a headline grabber more than anything else. Although whether the press will care or not depends on how much they decide to punish the government for press regulation (my guess = a lot).

You mean the optional regulation they don't have to sign up for?

I'm just relieved that we finally have the crippling corporation tax down to historic lows. Poor corporations.

Not sure the small businesses that the government constantly bangs on about will be too happy to hear they're paying the same tax rate as massive corporations.

http://labourlist.org/2013/03/the-welfare-sanctions-vote-was-labours-own-omnishambles/

TWO-THIRDS of Labour MPs opposed the workfare abstention they ended up going along with anyway. Spineless idiots.

democracy is about doing what your party leader tells you

http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/shoot%20in%20foot.jpg

'spare homes subsidy'

That is piss weak stuff really.

to offer some relief from the usual grim horror of this thread and give us instead um another kind of grim horror, luke bozier now writes erotic fiction: http://lukebozier.co.uk/introducing-damian-gold-erotic-fiction-with-a-leading-man/#.UVDx_hyeOSo

Don't you just love this country of ours

Well, I am not a toy. It doesn’t say ‘pull here
for ego boost’ anywhere near my manhood. I was a
booty-call for enough women in my twenties to have
thoroughly gotten over that most potent drug: being
desired. I’ve seen the ‘god I’m so horny’, semidesperate,
hidden-by-the-female-ego, ‘please,
Damian take me home and make me come’ look as
many times as any man could wish for. Been there,
done that, bought the souvenir stick of rock.

No worse than fifty shades tbf

the faintest whiff of praise

Who is Luke Bozier?

just read the "About" bit on his blog. it's not pretty.

I’m a hip-hop fanatic.

Figures

Fuck it, I've wasted enough precious seconds on the twat

um...

Bozier said he wanted to highlight the "hypocrisy" of society's attitude to paedophilia, which, he claimed, has led to men being falsely criminalised for viewing suggestive pictures of women over the age of 16. The definition of a child was raised from 16 to 18 by the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

I didn't know that. So if you get married at 16 and your husband takes photos of you in your bikini he has broken the law?

He accused Mensch of "covering her back" by publicly distancing herself from him after the allegations and reporting him to police. "It was pretty devastating because I considered her a close friend. She was intimately aware of mental health issues I'd had recently and she pushed me over the edge of a cliff. She phoned the police before I even had the chance to get on a plane [from New York to London]," he said.

that's torytown for ya, jake

cliff obv not near high enough

George Osbourne lambasting critics of welfare reform as being "out of touch" with what the people want, and then talking about cutting the top rate of tax as "unpopular, but necessary". Also rolling out "job creators".

Think most opponents of welfare reform would agree that getting Osborne to defend welfare reform is a really good idea

Makes no fucking difference though does it? You could have the ghost of Jimmy Savile defending welfare reform on tv and the public would still stiffen their lips and nod along in agreement.

How many signatures on that petition to get IDS living on £53/week now? 150,000?

Not that petitions do any good whatsoever...

not that another wealthy MP role-playing poverty for a fortnight does any good whatsoever

£53 p/w petition is on over 200,000 now.

yeah, I'm a bit bothered by the petition for that reason, NV - even if IDS does for some reason decide to show the scum how it's done for a few weeks, and I'm sure he'd find it doable, there wouldn't for him any of the psychological pressure that makes living on that amount of money in the long term the really horrible thing it is - the endlessness of the poverty cycle, the looming threat of one minor incident putting you deep in the shit and such.

Hopefully the petition will just further highlight the hypocrisy of a man who expects people to live off an amount per week that wouldn't cover his breakfast for two mornings running, whether IDS fakes poverty for a fortnight or not.

i mean he's not going to do it, but if he did, and made it work, which i've no doubt he would, i think it would be the exception that proves the rule (in the proper sense) for a lot of people

Just been having a discussion about this at lunch at work and perhaps unsurprisingly one of the more conservative members of the team thought that JSA was EXTRA to "unemployment benefit" instead of actually being unemployment benefit. Unfortunately there was a lot of "well I work for a living and I don't get xyz".

"First they came for the JSA, but I said nothing, because I did not claim JSA..."

Could it be that most of the animosity felt towards the benefits system stems from the system being too darned complex for ordinary people to understand, such that they blank out and it all becomes "benefit" and therefore something for nothing, and other popular misconceptions?

IDS did Tower Block of Commons (the one where Nadine Dorries got busted for hiding extra money in her bra) but dropped out a day into it when he got news his wife either a) had a dodgy mammogram or b) was diagnosed with some kind of breast cancer.

Obviously the politicians who bray loudest about making work pay etc. are the ones who are inevitably found to be the nation's biggest freeloaders and this fucker is no exception.

didn't IDS claim a £39 breakfast on expenses once?

the petition is useless unless he's made to do it for at LEAST a year (or preferably for an unspecified length of time), otherwise it'd just turn into a PR stunt for him

there wouldn't for him any of the psychological pressure that makes living on that amount of money in the long term the really horrible thing it is - the endlessness of the poverty cycle, the looming threat of one minor incident putting you deep in the shit and such.

otm

any fucker can live on £53 for ONE week knowing that it's gonna come to an end in a few days

The petition is for a year, but it still doesn't take into account his cultural capital, associations, stuff he can get for free by dint of who he his, location and the resources that are in reach because of that, etc etc etc.

Quite.

the thing that makes me despair most isn't even the apparently endless things This Fucking Government dreams up to fuck the most vulnerable people in the country over, it's the unshakeable suspicion that they're going to get away with it because the central arguments have been won among the general public. if most people actually believe the various myths about welfare that have become entrenched in the political discourse then of course what This Fucking Government is doing will seem logical and sensible

I just keep thinking, at some point the reality of this all will bite and "the people" as a mass will reject it, on some level, Murdoch propaganda be damned. But then I think about the Iraq war and how many people marched against it and how it all happened anyway and how a certain bleak fatefulness infects even the discussion on ILX and it does begin to seem a bit pointless. I said to my partner yesterday, the only way any of this could be "worth" the pain its going to cause is if as a result such right-wing bullshit becomes unelectable (even under the guise of a nu-nu-"Labour") for decades.

I don't know. My dad was kept alive for as long as he lived by the NHS, we were fed, housed and clothed as a family by disability benefits, I was educated for free and was even able to gain a grant for my Higher Education. Much of this stuff doesn't exist any more, and the future of the rest of it seems highly questionable. I feel really hugely lucky to have been born when I was, and really acutely sorry for all those now growing up under similar circumstances to mine, who won't have any of the opportunities to escape, opportunities that were real life-lines to me. It's sickening to me, to see it all destroyed, and under the vestiges of making good on the debts incurred by those at the top.

Call me naive but I have detected a slight softening in attitude amongst the public... or am I sad deluded fool?

Softening towards the gov or those being steam-rollered by them?