Govt plans to scrap green, & equalities acts
The government has launched a new website called ‘Red Tape Challenge’, inviting people to comment on different regulations which could be scrapped.
Amongst the regulations up for discussion are the Climate Change and Equalities Acts. This raises some interesting questions:
1. Are there any circumstances under which the Tories and Lib Dems would really consider scrapping these acts?
2. If not, why are they consulting about it?
3. What kind of demented wingnuts would spend time and money on a consultation exercise to find out whether tackling discrimination and climate change are examples of ‘red tape’?
You can find out more at www.redtapechallenge.cabinet office.gov.uk
A ‘mansion tax’ is needed now more than ever
contribution by NTDSMK
An unnamed private individual swept into London and left with a flat for £136 million, reported the Oberver yesterday. Suddenly, my shopping looks incredibly cheap.
I don’t just feel sheer incredulity that there are people who can cough up this much money for, presumably, another home – I’m irked that we might not getting anything at all if they don’t pay tax.
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Why I became a left-libertarian
contribution by Martin
As Libertarians across the US flock to cinemas to watch the film version of Atlas Shrugged (the film has a limited release and harsh criticism from everyone outside those who are already fully bought into Ayn Rand’s philosophy of corporate apologism and advocacy of selfishness as a way of life), the UK’s own Libertarian Party is caught in a minor controversy over its leader.
So it’s not a brilliant week to be a reader of Nozick, Rand, Friedman or Mises. But then, it’s never a good time to declare yourself associated with any philosophy that holds lassez faire capitalism to be a virtue.
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New Labour and ignoring racism of the past
As regular readers will know, I partly didn’t vote Labour at the General Election last year because of their pathetic and muddled policies towards asylum seekers and the occasional immigration dog-whistling via Phil Woolas.
So I’m not an apologist for the party on the issue in any stretch of the imagination. But it does annoy me however when people say Labour must speak out to defend immigration otherwise things will get worse for everyone.
I have three points to make on this.
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A good week for employment… if women are ignored
contribution by Scarlett Harris
This week’s unemployment figures came as a welcome surprise to many people as Richard Exell points out at Left Foot Forward.
As Richard explains, the rise in employment and the drop in unemployment seem to be genuinely good news and not masking a boom in “atypical” work such as temporary or self-employed jobs. So, good news all round then? Alas, not for women.
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Homophobic Catholic charity awarded teenage counselling contract
The National Secular Society sent out a press release yesterday blasting the decision by the London Borough of Richmond to award a huge contract worth £89,000 to the Catholic Children’s Society to “help and support students in the borough’s schools.”
As PoliticsHome points out today, CCS recently withdrew from adoption services due to opposition to the Government’s sexual orientations regulations.
Councillor Stephen Knight, leader of Richmond’s Liberal Democrat group, said at a meeting on Tuesday that pupils who want advice on issues such as homosexuality or sexual health may be reluctant to ask a group that “requires counsellors to uphold the Catholic ethos”.
This decision beggars belief. Counselling services for young people have to address issues such as contraception, unwanted pregnancy and homophobic bullying and the appointment of a religious group to provide these services on behalf of the Council is totally inappropriate.
And who lost out? A local charity Off The Record (link fixed), which also had the backing of national counselling charity Relate, and has been providing counselling to teenagers for over 20 years.
Terry Sanderson of the NSS said:
What on earth was the council thinking about in appointing such a partisan and dogmatic organisation to provide counselling and support services? The Catholic Children’s Society went so far as to dump its adoption service because of the Government’s insistence that they consider gay couples as adopters. So what kind of reception would a gay child get if it came to one of their counsellors for advice?
What sort of advice would a specifically Catholic agency with an instruction to uphold Catholic teaching tell a girl who came to them for contraceptive advice? Surely the council could have found a non-sectarian service that wouldn’t pose these sorts of problems?
Indeed.
This decision comes in the same week that a well-regarded project working with trafficked women – The Poppy Project – had to cut services after the Ministry of Justice allocated £6 million of funding to support victims of trafficking to the Salvation Army.
Poppy Project was run by the housing charity Eaves.
Why it was probably best that just AV is offered in the referendum
contribution by David Wearing
Nick Clegg famously described AV as a “miserable little compromise”. And I suspect if you were to pin even the most vocal advocates of AV up against a wall and ask them what they really thought of it, they’d say that while it’s an improvement on FPTP, it’s still not the voting system they’d want to end up with.
Lack of enthusiasm for AV amongst those who favour proportional representation has been seen as a potential handicap for the Yes campaign. It needn’t be. In fact, it could work in the campaign’s favour.
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Clubs can’t stop offensive football chants
I had never before today bothered to ponder the religious affiliations of PSV Eindhoven supporters. But I gather that, if anything, the Dutch football club has a solidly protestant tradition.
So why fans of Ranger thought it apt to launch into sectarian songs at both legs of the recent Europa Cup tie between the two sides, I am not quite sure.
Top Libdem Lord attacks Coalition council cuts
Lord Rennard was the Lib Dem Chief Executive for six years, one of their top campaign strategists for more than twenty years, and is now Chair of the Big Society Commission.
In an interview with Civil Society magazine, he was asked about the impact of cuts by local authorities:
“There’s a clear problem here, and at the very least, it’s to do with phasing. By making the economies very quickly, a number of local authorities will feel that they have to cope with almost all the redundancy costs which they face in the short-term, rather than being able to capitalise them over a much longer term. And they have their statutory obligations, clearly they feel more pressured to cut from voluntary sector support than they do from some of their core services.
Now some people will argue that we need to try and change the way in which local authorities prioritise so they don’t cut back on the voluntary sector disproportionately. But the best way, in my view, that government nationally could help local authorities in that direction would be to allow for things like more generous capitalisation of redundancies and for the more generous phasing of economies, recognising that economies must be made. If the economies have to be made at a very rapid rate, then it gets very hard to do this.
A number of local authorities would argue very sensibly, that if they had a bit more time, they could work with the voluntary sector, to make sure that some of these key services which nobody wants to lose are actually saved and preserved by the voluntary sector, helped by voluntary sector involvement in the long-run. But if these economies are made too quickly, that simply can’t happen, and there is a danger that things are lost that can’t then be replaced. A very clear danger of that.”
Tory Eric Pickles and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg have been peddling the rather silly conspiracy theory that these sorts of cuts to local community groups are a deliberate, politically motivated decision by Labour-run councils. But as Rennard clearly explains, the problem is caused by central government’s decisions to cut too fast.
I wonder how many Lib Dem candidates standing for elections to the council this year agree with their former Chief Executive and top campaign strategist that their Tory allies got this one wrong and caused unnnecessary suffering, and how many agree instead with Nick Clegg and Eric Pickles?
There’s no point blaming migrants or welfare for unemployment
There’s one element of Cameron’s speech on immigration I want to quibble with. (Actually, there are loads, but I'll keep it brief.) It’s this:
Migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left wide open by a welfare system that for years has paid British people not to work. That's where the blame lies – at the door of our woeful welfare system
I have four problems with this.
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