The depressing thing about Tory welfare proposals

by Rowan Davies    
October 10, 2009 at 8:44 am

I was depressed by the announcement at this week’s Tory conference of plans to remove incapacity benefit (now known as ESA – Employment and Support Allowance) from around 500,000 claimants. Michael Gove puckishly characterised the move as being part of the Tories’ ‘crusade to help the poor’. So far, so Tory.

So I dug around a bit, and I discovered that this isn’t actually the depressing bit.

The Tories propose to subject all ESA claimants to an enhanced medical assessment, which is being touted as a ‘tough back-to-work test’. Those who are adjudged to be capable of work will be taken off ESA and be placed on Jobseeker’s Allowance instead – a cut of £25 per week. As ever, the unspoken assumption is that half a million (at least) of those who currently draw ESA are workshy fraudsters.

But that’s still not the depressing bit.

Two crucial issues – whether those who assess ESA claimants will be required to meet targets, and what training or professional background the assessors will have – are not addressed in the Conservatives’ document ‘Get Britain Working’. The Telegraph’s report of the Tories’ proposals, chillingly, mentions bringing in private firms to carry out the assessments; one can imagine the damage that could result from an army of poorly-trained assessors with punitive targets to meet. Will there be a right of appeal?

But brace yourself, because that’s not the depressing bit.
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Revealed: TPA’s director doesn’t pay UK tax

by Newswire    
October 10, 2009 at 1:05 am

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a campaign group that calls for tax and spending cuts and claims to represent the interests of taxpayers, has admitted one of its directors does not pay British tax.

The Guardian has learned that Alexander Heath, a director of the increasingly influential free market, rightwing lobby group, lives in a farmhouse in the Loire and has not paid British tax for years.

The admission, made by Matthew Elliott, the TPA’s chief executive and founder, is potentially embarrassing for the Conservative party, which has close links to the group that claims to be “the guardian of taxpayers’ money, the voice of taxpayers in the media and their representative at Westminster”.
…
The campaign group refuses to publish details of its income or a list of donors, but when pressed, Elliott said the biggest single donation was no higher than £100,000 and its annual income from donations was about £1m. It is a rapid rise for a group which filed accounts for 2005 that showed donations of just £67,547.

…more at the Guardian

At the Other TaxpPayers’ Alliance, Clifford Singer said:

The Guardian has done an excellent job in its lead story and background feature, but there are still gaps in our knowledge of TPA funding. Some of the revelations are based on the TPA’s own statements but the alliance refuses to publish its accounts.

In particular, we suspect the millionaire members of the Midlands Industrial Council have given more funding, either through the MIC or directly – not least because three MIC millionaires are on the governing council of the West Midlands TPA.

There is a simple way for the TaxPayers’ Alliance to end this speculation: come clean about its funding. Or does it still have something to hide?

At Go Fourth blog – John Prescott says he has written to BBC News calling for the TPA to be clearly identified as “having close links to the Conservative party”.

Watch: reaction, controversy on Nobel

by Newswire    
October 9, 2009 at 9:04 pm

Obama’s acceptance speech

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Media Matters published this video illustrating Republican hypocrisy

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Radio presenter Rush Limbaugh said:

The Nobel gang just suicide bombed themselves. Gore, Carter, Obama, soon Bill Clinton. See a pattern here? They are all leftist sell-outs. George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims in Iraq, Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans and saves parts of Latin America. Any awards?” Limbaugh says “Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and for that gets a prize, which is now worth as much as whatever prizes they are putting in Cracker Jacks these days.

Conservative commentators also attacked Republicans for criticising Obama

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But Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com is not happy about it. Neither is Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman.

Sunder Katwala at Next Left thinks the Nobel and the complaining about Obama is both overblown.

At the popular blog FiveThirtyEight, Renard Sexton came out in support:

The justification for the prize, while certainly unexpected and a bit tenuous, is indeed rooted in fact. Obama has long been a booster for non-proliferation, and his speech and lobbying at the UN General Assembly and Security Council proved to be quite successful.

On climate change, the Obama administration has taken the toughest line against carbon emissions of any White House so far in terms of concrete regulations by Federal agencies. The September announcement by the EPA that the agency would begin to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, verified by the Supreme Court in 2007, was a major step towards US action on the climate change issue. Though cap-and-trade or other large scale programmes are clearly the purvue of Congress, the executive branch’s efforts in the realm are likely to be a major portion of the US effort.

Exclusive: Second celebrity ‘terror threat’ story is fake

by Unity    
October 9, 2009 at 4:19 pm

On January 7^th 2009, The Sun newspaper published a now notorious front page article, which alleged that Islamic extremists were using an online forum at Ummah.com to compile a ‘hit list’ of prominent British Jews. Less than 48 hours later, Tim Ireland exposed Glen Jenvey, the self-styled ‘anti-terror expert’ behind The Sun’s story as a fraud who’d deliberately fabricated the evidence on which the entire story was based.

Four days later, The People newspaper ran its own ‘exclusive’ celebrity terror threat story, claiming that Madonna had been targeted by ‘Muslim fanatics seeking revenge for Israel’s attacks on Gaza’ on two British-run internet forums.

Today, after a detailed investigation, the results of which are published in full over at the Ministry of Truth, we can reveal that this story was also fabricated in a near identical fashion to that used in The Sun’s ‘Jewish hit list’ story and:
continue reading… »

Why Obama deserves the Nobel Peace prize

by Sunny Hundal    
October 9, 2009 at 12:12 pm

Someone on Twitter actually said to me Obama won because he was the first black US president. Enough of the race-card playing, it’s getting boring.

I’ll concede that there are two reasons against Obama’s win for the Nobel Peace Prize. First that he’s merely reversed some of what Bush did and therefore does not deserve to be rewarded for shit he was expected to do anyway (as Kashaan said on Twitter). Second that he was awarded too early. His efforts to bring peace to the world have yet to fully bear fruit. In fact, as Mike Forster pointed out to me, the closing date for nominees was eleven days into his presidency.

But there will be plenty of lefties (and right-wingers of course) pouring scorn on the decision.

I won’t be, partly because I worked on the campaign and am obviously biased, but partly because I think a broader defence needs to be made about how lefties react when left-wing leaders get into power.
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The global spread of Christianity

by Claude Carpentieri    
October 9, 2009 at 11:25 am

The Muslim-obsessed Daily Mail is currently making a big deal out of a recent report claiming that “almost one in four people in the world are Muslim”.

“The project”, the article continues, “presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For example, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon”.

Accompanying the “revelation”, Paul Dacre’s paper is also sporting a picture of a group of ladies wearing black niqabs, the equivalent of sticking a picture of an Orthodox monk onto an article about “Christianity”.
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Iraq was not Rwanda: how difficult is that to grasp?

by Conor Foley    
October 9, 2009 at 1:14 am

Norm is usually quite sharp and succinct in comments, but his post here is on the wordy side.

Norm said in his first post that he used the terms ‘liberal intervention’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ interchangeably. I pointed out they are quite obviously not the same thing, but those who had set out to confuse them (unintentionally or not) had damaged the cause of humanitarianism.

In his latest post Norm argues that the two terms ‘overlap’ which I agree with; but that was not his original statement. Oranges and apples are not interchangeable things and nor are cats and dogs – although both can be categorised together under different and more general terms. There is a certain ‘overlap’ between the actions involved in stroking a child and the actions involved in slapping one, but there are also good reasons why we distinguish between them as well.
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Cameron’s speech: hollow and hypocritical

by Rowenna Davis    
October 8, 2009 at 6:03 pm

Cameron, you started your speech today saying you were a rather “uncomplicated” man. Your personal simplicity is perhaps the one part of your speech that I agreed with.

Never have I been so proud of being on the left as when I was listening to you just now. Here are just a few reasons why your simplistic agenda fails to come up to scratch:

1) Life is more complicated than “Small Government Good, Big Government Bad.” The world has moved on from such dogmatic ideology. As Obama said, it’s not the size of the state that matters – it’s what works. If you’ve ever met anyone who’s just come out of prison, been long term unemployed or a young single mum you’ll know that simply withdrawing state support doesn’t work.

To get people back into work, people need confidence, skills and training. These things are expensive. You can’t just stop investing in people and expect them to give something back. And in a recession, the state may need to pay to create jobs for people to go in to whilst the private sector gets itself back on its feet. Shrinking government now is bad economics.
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LC Briefing: Cameron’s Council-tax Pledge will only impact 1-in-5

by Unity    
October 8, 2009 at 3:30 pm

David Cameron’s Council Tax pledge, unveiled in the Sun Newspaper this week, has not received the necessary scrutiny it deserves.

To make everyone’s job slightly easier, I’ve pulled together a briefing that takes apart Cameron’s claims and subjects it to some number-crunching.

This is meant to be a time-saver for journalists and activists and interested parties. It is also meant to point out that Cameron’s pledges don’t stand up in the way they are framed.

Key findings
1. A two year Council Tax freeze will cost Local Authorities in England between £2.48 billion and £2.53 billion in lost revenues. The Conservatives have yet to indicate how they will fund their proposed Council Tax freeze, through cuts in local public services or by increasing the level of central government grants paid to local councils.

2. At present, 3.7 million households in England would not benefit at all from a Council Tax freeze because they receive full Council Tax benefit, including 1.7 million pensioner households who currently receive pension credit/minimum income guarantee. The number of households who will not benefit from a Council Tax freeze will increase over the next 12-18 months, as unemployment increases.

3. To save ‘over £200’ in Council Tax over the course of a two year freeze, the ‘typical family’ referred by David Cameron in his pledge would, in at least 300 of England’s 315 Local Authorities, need to living in a Band E property and paying more than £1644.74 a year in Council Tax. But only 9.5% of properties in England are Council Tax Band E, placing these properties amongst the 20% most valuable in the country.

4. We estimate that a typical family living in a Band B/C property (a typical family home) will save, on average, only between £136 and £158 during a two year Council Tax freeze, not ‘over £200’ as David Cameron has pledged.

Download the briefing (pdf) here.

Tory support down 5% in 11 minutes

by Paul Cotterill    
October 8, 2009 at 2:51 pm

Eleven minutes can be a long time in politics.

The BBC online, 12.54pm today:

The first opinion poll – the daily YouGov tracker for Sky News – since the measures were announced suggested that voters had not taken fright at the plans.

The poll suggests the Conservatives had increased their lead over Labour to 14 points. The survey of about 1,000 people was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Sky News, 1.05pm today:

The Tories’ lead over Labour has dropped from 13 points to nine on the day David Cameron addresses the party conference.

Yesterday’s ‘Osborne bounce’ appears to be wiped out in today’s Sky News/YouGov daily voting intentions poll which puts the Conservatives on 40%, down three points.

At this rate, Labour’s on for quite a landslide victory

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