So London’s Fire Chief *does* want to cut jobs
All during the recent dispute with London’s Firefighters, which led to a proposed strike on Bonfire night, Fire Authority chief Brian Coleman said it was merely about changing shift times.
But it seems his agenda is is about cutting jobs and capacity at London’s fire services too.
Adam Bienkov at Tory Troll reports that in a last minute amendment to a Fire Authority budget committe, Coleman suggested yesterday:
officers [should] explore, as part of the budget process, and report back to the Committee… on whether the Brigade needs all 27 of the fire appliances removed from stations during the current industrial action to be returned or whether there is an over-supply of appliances
In other words he wants to cut the number of fire engines by 27 – a 16% cut across the capital. Shocking.
Libdem Assembly Member Mike Tuffrey sharply criticised the proposal yesterday:
In the very same week that the fire union and management are finally sitting down and talking it is truly extraordinary that Brian Coleman should produce this ‘rabbit out of the hat’ proposal. His badly timed proposal will only fuel the worst fears of the workforce.
The fire authority has already produced a draft budget for next year which fully complies with the Mayor’s financial guidelines. There is simply no need for such cuts despite some tough financial constraints.
The Mayor must overrule Brian Coleman and make it crystal clear to Londoners that next year’s budget will not see any ill thought out cuts to front line fire services.
Last week the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said they wanted the 27 engines back from private company AssetCo, which had them during the strike.
It also shows they were right all along to worry about deep cuts to their profession. Wonder what Boris will say now.
Update: James O’Brien from LBC picks up the story and makes the same point. Well done.
Why the left cannot, and should not, oppose all government cuts
A lot of people have been setting up campaigns and websites to oppose government cuts. I welcome this – we need to build the infrastructure and a long-term campaign to fight the Coalition’s agenda.
But the movement also needs to be coherent and broad based. Which is why the cry to ‘oppose all cuts’ is unsustainable for three reasons: tactically, economically and politically. I’ll take each in turn.
Keep in mind this key point: we can only win this long war by winning over people in the centre-ground. If we just preach to the converted then the Coalition won’t feel threatened. This doesn’t mean we junk our aims and plans, but we craft them carefully.
continue reading… »
Now *that* is a serious comeback
On Sunday evening Jackie Ashley wrote an article for the Guardian titled ‘On workfare, maybe the coalition really wants to help the jobless‘.
Let’s just say the article did not get an entirely positive reception.
But one comment by user ‘RedMiner’ stood out, receiving over 1000 recommends. Here it is in full:
So this is what we have come to?
The dreams of the last century, that increased mechanisation and automation would lead to increased leisure time for the masses, relieved of the drudgery and sheer mindlessness of much unskilled work. Instead, compounded by the outsourcing of jobs and the influx of cheap immigrant workers, the best the 21st century can come up is forced labour at slave wage levels, extended working hours, and the age of retirement heading for 70. So with the stroke of IDS’s pen, we go from an economic strategy that deliberately creates mass unemployment to one that deliberately creates cheap labour. Brilliant. There’s an honour in this for you, Ian, rehabilitation, glory, a statue.
My God, my ancestors will be turning in their graves. The Tories are finally realising what they have long dreamed of – throughout the years of the post-war settlement, they moodily incubated a determination to reverse the social and economic gains fought for and won by people of unparalleled toughness and determination, people who took on the might of privilege and wealth and defeated it. This is the New Tory moment; this when they come out from behind their cosmetic masks of reasonableness and fairness and social concern and display their true dark hearts before the world.
But I reserve my greatest contempt for those of us on the left; this is all happening on our watch. We betray those people I mentioned above, who vanquished the landowners and the factory and coal owners. And what are WE up against? a couple of Bullingdon hooray-henries and a leadership reject with the political acumen of petrified bird droppings . But the neoliberal apologists and careerist politicians that have infested the Labour Movement see only the votes of bigoted Middle Englanders and the ignorant Sun reading dross that posts here waiting to be harvested. The latter busy calling for their own enslavement, too ignorant or misinformed to notice the turkey staring back at them in the mirror of a Christmas Morning. And in the new Dark Age heralded in by IDS, every morning will be Christmas Morning for the beneficiaries, the businesses who will exploit this measure to access free labour, the talk of charities being a transparent smoke screen to hide the fundamental dismantling of the human right for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
Make no mistake, this is just the beginning. Anyone who thinks that once the principle of unpaid labour has breached the social repugnance it generates that it will stop at a month’s work for ‘idlers’ is the kind of fool the Tories are relying on get this through. These are the descendants of people who built vast fortunes and empires on the sweat and death of their factories and workhouses; they are past masters at dressing up inequality and evil in Protestant work ethics and biblical rhetoric denouncing the peril of idleness – except where it’s practised in its purest forms of course, by digital fortune shufflers and land owning parasites drawing their subsidies while they indulge Mediterranean waves with their oversized cock-yachts.
Shame, shame on us all. Tolstoy said everyone was innocent. I say everyone is guilty. And our children will never forgive us for allowing this to happen. The Tories talk of not saddling future generations with our debt; I think only of future generations facing the return of evils greater than any debt, that we had long thought banished from the lexicon of social intercourse and post war economics, all presented as some kind of economic panacea. Who is really ‘taking the piss’ here?
No doublethink, no prevarication, no quarter.
Either fight now or fuck off.
I might not agree with it entirely but the conviction and anger in that post is to be admired.
[hat-tip Gayle O'Donovan]
How even a protest against library closures brings out heavy security
On Saturday, I went to the Shepherd’s Bush library on the Westfield shopping site to help out at a small protest that a group of Hammersmith and Fulham librarians had organised.
The librarians’ salaries (library assistants earn about £21,000) are due to be cut as part of Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council’s gleeful pursuit of ‘savings’. The home library service is to be dismantled and word is that some local libraries will shut.
Three or four librarians – all middle aged women – stood outside the library for about an hour in their own free time and handed leaflets about their worries to members of the public.
continue reading… »
Do abortion services really make a ‘vast amount of money’?
You may well have noticed that, amongst other things, Nadine Dorries has chosen to climb back on her favourite abortion hobby horse by giving a truly risible speech to parliament during an adjournment debate.
In the very first paragraph of Dorries’ speech she says:
Abortion in this country is an industry from which a small number of organisations and individuals make vast amounts of money.
Really? Vast amounts of money? Well let’s have a look, shall we.
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Labour blames immigration but working class betrayal is the real issue
When talking about Phil Woolas, immigration or “white working class racism”, it’s easy to lose sight of some important points.
Especially when populist demagogues blame immigration for all our ills, with more success than anyone in their right mind would like.
1) For sheer economic reasons, which can only be avoided by sacrificing the massive economic gains associated with them, the unskilled working class have been screwed over since the 1970s.
continue reading… »
Woolas: Judical Review Rejected
In the last half and hour or so, BBC News have reported that Phil Woolas has failed in first attempt to overturn the ruling of the election court, which bars hims from holding any elected public office for the next three years.
Woolas went to the High Court, this morning, to ask for a judicial review of the election court’s decision, a move rejected by the court, which told him to take his case to appeal.
It’s not entirely clear, as yet, why and on what precise grounds Woolas sought a judicial review at this point in time.
Update 1 – 2:47pm:
While the application was rejected on technical grounds. various people on Twitter are saying that Woolas is seeking an oral hearing to renew his Judicial Review application. We’ll keep updating as we hear more.
Update 2 – 3:10pm There will be no new election until after judicial review application by Woolas is considered, says Speaker John Bercow.
Update 3 – 3:15pm Polly Curtis at the Guardian says it’s likely to go to the Court of Appeal.
BNP membership dives to below 10,000
The BNP’s membership has dived to below 10,000, says Eddy Butler – one of Nick Griffin’s most ferocious challengers to the leadership of the party.
In a blogpost yesterday he said:
At the Advisory Council meeting held a couple of weeks ago it was announced that the BNP now has only 10,000 members. This means that in the space of a few short months, we have lost 4,000 members. This is easily the highest rate of decline in the party’s history.
Do you remember when they announced the figure had gone up to over 14,000? They had a special ticker counting the memberships going up one by one. Since then that ticker has been spinning rapidly in reverse. We have haemorrhaged members. It is shocking.
Note that Eddy Butler really hates Nick Griffin and wanted him ousted as leader. The figures have not been confirmed anywhere else.
Butler later adds:
It is interesting to note that Jim Dowson and Nick Griffin used to wax lyrical about how the party needed 20,000 members in order to become self sustaining and that we would reach that goal this Christmas. I reckon by Christmas we will be down to 8,000.
I had a chat with a senior and experienced ex-Regional Organiser this week. He reckons that if Nick Griffin remains in charge, this time next year the party will be down to 4,000 members. I was a little more hopeful and put the figure at 5,000. Frankly, in view of the decline we have seen since May, I think we were both drastically over optimistic.
This is the legacy that Nick Griffin is bequeathing to us. He is a wrecker and has become a total disaster area for our party and for the cause.
Long may the demise of the BNP continue.
Do we always need ‘balance’ in our news?
contribution by Adam Wilcox
MSNBC anchorman Keith Olbermann was suspended indefinitely on Friday for donating to Democrats during the midterm elections.
This was held to be in breach of MSNBC rules on impartiality and Olbermann was suspended from presenting ‘Countdown’.
But this raises a broader issue – is balance always necessary, even in the UK?
continue reading… »
How the Coalition has split the electorate
Looking at the Sunday Times / YouGov polls yesterday, what struck me was how divided opinion was on all sides.
Do you approve of disapprove of the government’s record to date
There is complete polarisation less than six months in. This suggests it’s unlikely the Coalition’s approval ratings (again at -10) will rise by much.
Looking at the personal ratings for each leader (below), it seems only Ed Miliband isn’t as polarising (he’s been in the media much less).
This suggests he has more potential to reach out to Libdem and Tory voters early on and push Labour polling higher than the others.
In other polling, the publicly overwhelmingly supported keeping Control Orders (73%-15%), using information obtained via torture (50%-31%) and denying prisoners the vote (76%-17%).
50% wanted a lower cap on tuition fees or to abolish them entirely, only 11% wanted no cap to tuition fees and 26% were satisfied with the cap at £9,000. Looks like an issue Labour could go big on.
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
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