Watch: Caroline Lucas takes on TPA
Both Caroline Lucas from the Green Party and Matthew Elliott from the radical-right organisation TaxPayers’ Alliance were on the Daily Politics show recently.
Elliott keeps repeating the economically ludicrous position that spending and putting people out of jobs now would somehow bolster the economy and lead to more growth.
He also kept repeating the right-wing talking point that somehow investment in clean energy would double energy prices, without offering any evidence to support the claim.
He also rubbished the IFS report on how the cuts were impacting the poorest.
Watch the video
Welfare cuts – a perspective from the ground
contribution by Richard Shrubb
The Chancellor imagines a picture of two people. The man early in the morning walking down the street, past a neighbour on benefits with their curtains closed because they have no work to go to.
If that neighbour was psychotic and in terror from his delusion his curtains would certainly be closed for fear of the outside world due to psychosis induced agoraphobia.
Yet, this man, as honest and hard working when fit as the guy outside his window, is being penalised by a government that believes you can shake off your worries and go to work.
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Police chief fights the cuts…by threatening protesters
As Osborne’s Axe begins to fall, pleas for exemption are coming thick and fast. Yesterday police Chief Superintendent Derek Barnett supplied his own eye-catching declaration:
In an environment of cuts across the wider public sector, we face a period where disaffection, social and industrial tensions may well rise… We will require a strong, confident, properly trained and equipped police service, one in which morale is high and one that believes it is valued by the government and public.
Or as the Guardian headlined it: “Police: We can’t take care of cuts protests if you cut us”.
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The Labour party should expel Phil Woolas
Labour MP Phil Woolas is currently on trial in response to accusations that he made and published false statements of fact in relation to the personal character or conduct of his Liberal Democrat opponent at the last election.
I would be quite surprised, based on the evidence provided so far, if Woolas were found guilty in strict legal terms.
But even if he manages to escape prosecution, the campaign which he chose to run and the leaflets that he put out were vile and disgusting racist filth.
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More details emerge over Woolas’ campaign
The legal tussle over Phil Woolas’ election campaign has unearthed more information on how the Labour MP fought for his seat.
The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that Woolas’ campaign team put out leaflets titled: ‘Lib Dem pact with the devil’ and ‘Targeted: militant extremists go for Phil Woolas’.
Other ‘stories’ in a newspaper-style leaflet were titled: ‘Lib Dems in mosque planning permission stitch-up’ and ‘Straight talking Woolas too fair for militant Muslims’.
It says Mr Woolas’s team “allegedly hatched a plan cynically to exploit racial tension in Oldham”.
Some of the attacks on Mr Watkins were simply puerile, such as an article about his supposedly fake Lancastrian credentials, headlined: “Eh up – nowt nicer than Lancashire tripe tha nos”, while others were allegedly downright underhand, including a doctored picture of the Lib Dem alongside two policemen allegedly to make him appear “corrupt”.
But when it was thought that such an approach was not working, a different tack was adopted.
Mr [Joseph] Fitzpatrick [election agent] emailed Steven Green, the MP’s campaign adviser, to say: “Things are not going as well as I had hoped … we need to think about our first attack leaflet.”
He proposed publishing a newspaper-style mailshot, called The Saddleworth and Oldham Examiner, with the alleged main aim of persuading Tory voters, many of whom disliked the fact that the Conservative candidate was Muslim, to vote Labour rather than switching to the Lib Dems.
“Tory voters are talking of voting Lib Dem,” wrote Mr Fitzpatrick in an email to Mr Green on April 25. “If we can convince them that they are being used by the Moslems it may save [Woolas] and the more we can damage Elwyn the easier it will be to stop the Tories from voting for him.”
The emails show that the Woolas campaign team then started to focus heavily on the Muslim angle.
A twin-track approach was allegedly adopted: Mr Watkins would be portrayed as a friend of Islamic extremists, while Mr Woolas would be painted as a fearless opponent of militants. Mr Fitzpatrick suggested to Mr Green: “We need to go strong on the militant Moslem angle,” and suggested the headline: “Militant Moslems target Woolas.” This would send out a message, he suggested, that Muslim extremists wanted to “take down” Mr Woolas for standing up to them.
“Like it!” replied Mr Green in another email. “It’s going to be hard to write to minimise offence to some though.”
A reply by Joseph Green said, “We need … to explain to the white community how the Asians will take him out … If we don’t get the white vote angry he’s gone.”
Another leaflet published the day before the election suggested the Libdem candidate was being backed by groups that had issued death threats against Mr Woolas, according to Mr Watkins’ legal team.
The leaflet said it was the, ‘Lib Dem pact with the devil’.
Has public sector really added jobs? Not exactly
Editor of the Spectator and News of the World columnist Fraser Nelson says:
For the public sector, there has been NO recession. Unpublished figures, seen by yours truly, show it has added 194,000 more jobs since the crash. Meanwhile, the rest of the economy has lost 884,000 jobs.
It’s convenient that Nelson has seen figures no one else has, to help make the case that, “government spending has become a menace in Britain, a ravenous machine weighing us all down.”
But where do these figures come from?
The fact-checking site FullFact.org yesterday looked through some published figures, and found a point of agreement. The number of public sector workers had indeed increased.
BUT… the figures:
…make use of figures which include those most unlikely of public servants; bankers.
As the Government bought up the banks to save them from oblivion, staff from Northern Rock, then Bradford & Bingley, and finally the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds were included in the public sector employment totals.
So could Fraser Nelson confirm whether he is stripping out bankers or not?
Otherwise he would be making the case for ‘trimming the fat’ by using a wholly misleading way of measuring how public sector employment has ‘risen’.
FullFact add:
In the third quarter of 2008 there were 10,700 public sector workers employed in banking. By the end of the fourth quarter this number had hit 238,800.
In other words, take Fraser Nelson with a huge bucket of salt.
Which wouldn’t be the first time either.
Legal action on phone-hacking launched
A former senior Metropolitan Police officer has issued judicial review proceedings against the force over newspaper phone-hacking claims.
Ex-deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick says it failed to warn him his privacy may have been compromised.
Mr Paddick, MP Chris Bryant, and writer Brendan Montague want the courts to rule on how the case was handled.
The News of the World’s ex-royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed in 2007 for accessing public figures’ voicemails.
Tamsin Allen, a lawyer representing the three claimants, said: “Our clients have still not been told the whole story about how their names came to be in the papers seized during the phone hacking investigation in 2006 and why they were not warned that their privacy might have been compromised.
Three-quarters think the Cuts are too deep and too fast
Too soon, too deep, say majority of voters as coalition loses cuts debate is not a Times headline that will raise spirits in Downing Street.
The newspaper reports [£] three pieces of bad news for the government in a Populus poll.
* the government’s deficit reduction strategy is rejected by three out of four voters.
* the public is more gloomy about the economy than at any point since the summer of 2009 – with those expecting things to get worse up 8 points since June, to 33%.
* most people reject the idea that the Labour government is most to blame for the deficit.
continue reading… »
Evidence shows that privatising welfare actually wastes money
An absolutely devastating report from the Public Accounts committee should make all political parties rethink their approach to reforming welfare.
The ‘Pathways to Work’ programme was launched nationally between 2005 and 2008 to help reduce the number of incapacity benefit claimants ‘through targeted support and an earlier medical assessment’.
It is delivered by contractors in 60% of districts, with Jobcentre Plus providing the service in the remainder.
continue reading… »
Burnham now attacks unions role in Labour
Channel 4 News today reports that Andy Burnham wants Labour party rules changed to take away power from the unions.
His comments come in advance of the final Labour leadership hustings at the TUC conference this month.
He said he thinks unions have too much sway by funding campaigns, and therefore giving some candidates an ‘unfair advantage’.
He also said he wanted to include making the MP ballot secret, so their MPs’ votes are not made public. He says this would prevent MPs from voting for the people they thought would win, rather then the person they want to win.
But Andy Burnham opens himself up for criticism, given his earlier comments on the role of unions within Labour.
At the beginning of the Labour leadership race, he said:
Trade unions, like the Labour party, have a proud past and a bright future. They are at the heart of the labour movement and under my leadership I want them to be at the heart of the Labour party too….
That means closer ties to the trade union movement, not just at the top of the Party, but from constituencies up.
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