Supporting a cut in our defence budget
post by regular commenter pagar
An IPPR report on defence procurement, published last week, questioned spending on resources used to fight wars against conventional armed forces and suggests a defence strategy concentrating on combating unconventional, terrorist and economic threats.
It questioned spending £10 billion on new aircraft carriers and £20 billion on Trident and says that the UK should stop trying to “punch above it’s weight” in international affairs.
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Vote for a Change launches 9th
Vote for Change is a new organisation that’s pulling together a coalition of organisations to campaign for a change in the way we elect our politicians.
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The toothless PCC strikes again
To get an idea of just how useless the Press Complaints Commission is, you only have to look at its non-investigation into the Alfie Patten disaster.
You would have thought that they might just have something to say about how the Sun, the People and the Sunday Mail had almost certainly paid his family for personal interviews which led to some of the most invasive and potentially damaging intrusion into the private lives of children for some years, only for it to subsequently turn out that, oops, Alfie wasn’t the father after all.
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Developing a new economic common sense
I’ve recently written quite a lot on my own blog about the need to develop a new economic policy narrative, and soon.
I’ve also written about how the now dominant narrative of neoliberalism and money supply control became so dominant; despite the fact that the fundamental assumption of a finite world money supply is flawed, the ‘good housekeeping’ / ‘you cannot spend what you have not got’ narrative has continued to hold sway over public opinion for a generation and more.
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Red Toryism – ignorant and incomprehensible
Philip Blond, the so-called ‘Red Tory’, has just written an article setting out his new Big Idea for reducing poverty, which is about ‘recapitalising the poor’.
These Big Ideas come along quite frequently, and there is quite an easy and quick way to test them out. Simply pick one policy area that you know about and see if the author’s suggestions and analysis suggest they know what they are talking about. If so, read on, if not, bin the rest.
So here is Blond’s ‘Red Tory’ approach to social housing:
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Sarah Palin resigns! (video)
Part 1 (part 2 below)
Weirdest political resignation speech ever? We know that Sarah Palin is intensely ambitious but I can’t see how resigning as governor half-way through the term is a good political move for a future presidency bid. More likely, it feels like Palin knows something in her closet will kill off her leadership bid and rather than put her family through more (evilll librul) media speculation she resigned. The amusing implication from what is a long, rambling, dis-jointed speech, is that her resignation will help the people of Alaska save millions of dollars. This is a sad day for the Democrat re-election cause.
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Tory machine making excuses for second jobs
Second jobs, so we are told, help MPs to stay in touch with the real world and the needs of constituents.
David Cameron was quick to claim he is “relaxed” about more details of his shadow Cabinet’s outside earnings being made public this week under new transparency rules: “I do not think that a chamber full of professional politicians with no outside experience is a good thing,” he said.
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Does your MP really want to end deception in politics ?
a guest article by The Professor
There’s an easy way to find out – ask them if they support a law which enforces it. A cross party coalition of MPs are petitioning the House of Commons to introduce the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill for debate.
Our film “The Ministry of Truth” charted the birth of the Bill for the BBC in 2007 – it proved to be an incredibly revealing (and very entertaining) exercise.
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Our criminal justice system is in crisis
The Commission on English Prisons Today- presided over by Cherie Booth QC- launched its final report yesterday – with a demand to cut prison numbers and reinvest money in communities.
It is unequivocal. Our criminal justice system is in crisis. A decade and a half of penal excess means that we lock up too many people with too little impact and consequently we are failing make communities safer.
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Can liberalism be illiberal?
Phillip Blond, in response to Sunder Katwala, says:
My main point is a philosophical and historical one that liberty (which I believe in) is not produced from liberalism. Indeed my intellectual argument is that that pure liberalism or liberalism as first philosophy cannot produce liberty – indeed it produces an anarchic individualism that requires a surveillance state.
Thus liberalism produces the very thing it seeks to avoid: an authoritarian individual and an absolutist state. This is a serious point and to have it charactured as anti-liberal is either an inane misreading or an outright misrepresentation. In fact liberalism is not liberal at all.
Phillip Blond is the driver of the ‘Red Toryism’ project and recently left the think-tank Demos to found his own Progressive Conservatism project. So how would you respond to this view?
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