Politics

[manc-mag 1]

Aye, best wishes CT.

[Renton 21599]

Don't worry too much about getting your arse kicked on an internet board at this important time CT.

 

Best of luck, goes without saying.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

Don't worry too much about getting your arse kicked on an internet board at this important time CT.

 

Best of luck, goes without saying.

 

 

[Christmas Tree 4725]

Pud, I'm talking more about the vast majority of the public who are not in the public sector and were expecting all sorts of things that just didn't materialise. They now have more certainty.

 

I think it's also worth noting that this is 19% over 4 years, just under 5% a year.

 

There will also be areas where positions are not replaced rather than redundancies.

 

Naturally. Any job losses are very sad for the families involved but a big proportion will have sighed with relief and started getting on with their lives again yesterday.

 

Just one other word on the job cuts. They have said it's just under 500,000 over 4 years which is 125,000 a year. The private sector created 170,000 jobs in the last three months alone backing up the independent forecasts of overall employment growing over the 4 years.

 

Right then, being kicked out of the delivery room so she can have a nap so lets get started...

 

We're talking net jobs loss here CT. The job market is in constant fluctuation, but we know there will be at least an extra million people put on the dole by the cuts, I don't think anyone is doubting this, not even the coalition (it was there in black and white after all). You seem to have some amazing faith that the private sector will come in and magic up an extra million jobs, despite huge cut backs in government support for regional development agencies. However, most the private sector jobs we have - including yours - are in the service sector as it is, so exactly how is this going to happen?

 

Its not a case of faith, Im just going on the independant figures. The same people who are predicting just under a million job losses as a result of the cuts are the same people who predict that even with these losses, the overall year on year result will be growth in employment resulting in net increases in jobs. As you say its in black and white.

 

Its also worth remembering that after the recessions of the 80's and 90's, the private sector led the growth in jobs. (under a conservative government)

 

 

One of my underlying fears is that the Conservatives just do not seem to understand - or do not care - what a devastating personal and social effect mass unemployment has. I expect someone like Gideon is about as far removed from the reality of the normal working person as is possible - the same applies to Nick and Dave too. Even you don't seem to understand yourself actually given your many flippant comments even about board member's concerns on here. Is it some inbred tory trait to lack empathy?

 

Silly stuff really Renton. I have said many times that nobody including me wants job losses.

 

You have to remember than the one thing politicians care about more than anything is their own job. They all want to be re-elected in 4 years time and if nothing else surely an educated person such as yourself understand that they all want this to work.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

Anyone remember when Piers Merchant (Tory MP for Mewcastle Central) spent a week on the dole in the 80s? Even allowing for the fact he knew it was only a week and so negated the despair of not knowing when it would end it completely sobered him up, visibly affecting him.

 

Might be a good idea to make the cabinet millionaires do the same (Tory and Labour).

 

Yeah, I remember that well, I admired him for doing it at the time.

 

In some ways things seem even worse now as the whole concept of being on benefits has become more stigmatised and you are made to feel like a worthless scrounger.

 

I dont agree one bit. Most reasonable people have know problem with benefits going to people who need them, genuinely need them. But there is an large body of people who play the system cos thats what the norm is around them. This is the group that all parties have WANTED to weed out for years but have being unable to do. Just last night, Blairs right hand man, Jonathan powell and Alastiar Darling were discussin this on This Week. They both acknowledged that they wanted to do what the Tories are now doing on welfare but were unable to agree a policy because of the infighting between Blair and Brown. Blair knew it needed to be done but Brown blocked it, instead wanting to just throw more money at it.

 

Welfare grew massively under Labour and while some of the moves were good, a lot were bad. The tax credit system is one of the most abused benefits there is. I remember when it came in lots of families I knew couldnt believe they were suddenly getting a 2 or 3 grand a year for nowt. The problem now is that these families have now absorbed this extra dosh and got used to it so scaling it back will be painful.

 

You should have a watch of this week on I player.

[Gemmill 44837]

Get a grip you freak. Your lass is about to drop and you are arguing politics (like a spastic) on here.

[NJS 4378]

I dont agree one bit. Most reasonable people have know problem with benefits going to people who need them, genuinely need them. But there is an large body of people who play the system cos thats what the norm is around them.

 

1% fraud which includes genuine errors

 

Worth the vitriol that they all get?

[Christmas Tree 4725]

One of the worst facets of the election campaign was the notion that Labour had "invented" benefits culture when for the majority of their term unemployment wasn't that high and of course forgetting the vast increases in the 80s - trying to argue that the fact there are generations of people who haven't worked does suggest more than 13 years was like pissing in the wind. (The same applies to "broken Britain").

 

I think people though that as unemployement had gone down it had somehow been confined to history and so a return to it, even though for "real" reasons, can somehow be stigmatised for political reasons.

 

Both sides will drag up lots of figures on this but I think its hard to dispute to some degree when you simply look at the vast increase in welfare during a boom economic period.

 

I can remember in the 80's and early 90's people were on benefits because of a lack of work, geuine disability or single mums etc. These people could travel through time and look at their counterparts today and would not believe the difference. Nobody can doubt todays equivalents leave a much richer lifestyle.

 

That is what Labour, armed with excellent economic times (left by the tories) chose to do......and..... I agree with a lot of it.

 

But just as their is unfairness when benefits are cut, there is the opposite effect when you choose to increase welfare, without reform. (The main gripe Darling and Powell were talking about).

 

This did lead to not only a benefit culture, but benefits for people who didnt really need them.

 

Hopefully the reforms by IDS will be the right ones which will allow parties of all colours to better get the right money to the right people.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

My guess is this has already been posted several times. Either way I think it's a cracking article.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...in-2112069.html

 

Margaret Thatcher is lying sick in a private hospital bed in Belgravia but her political children have just pushed her agenda further and harder and deeper than she ever dreamed of. When was the last time Britain's public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother's lifetime. Not even in my grandmother's lifetime. No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country's debts. The result? Unemployment soared from 6 per cent to 19 per cent, and the country's economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills and the debt actually rose from 114 per cent to 180 per cent. "History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain said, "but it does rhyme."

 

George Osborne has just gambled your future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That's why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers – by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first.

 

David Cameron and George Osborne have ignored all this. They have ignored the warnings of the Financial Times, the newspaper most critical of their strategy. They have dismissed the warnings of Nobel economics laureates like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who have consistently been proved right in this crisis. They have refused to learn from the fact that the country they held up as a model for how to deal with a recession – "Look and learn from across the Irish Sea," Osborne said – has suffered the worst collapse in the developed world. They have instead blindly obeyed the ideological precepts they learned as baby Thatcherites: slash the state, and make the poor pay most.

 

Osborne galloped through his Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) speech, failing to name almost any of the services that will be slashed or shut down. It's revealing that he doesn't want to name them while the nation is watching.

 

But beneath the statistics, there was a swathe of human tragedies that will now unnecessarily unfold across Britain. PriceWaterhouseCooper – nobody's idea of a Trotskyite cell – says that a million people will now lose their jobs as a direct result. My father lost his job at the height of the last Tory recession, and had to leave the country to get another one. I remember how that felt. I remember what that did to my family.

 

Now it's going to happen to a million more families and probably more. For the private sector to get all these people into work, as Osborne claims, there would have to be the most rapid business growth in my lifetime. Does anyone think that will happen? Osborne has chosen the weakest people to take the worst cuts. The poorest 16-year-olds were given £30 a week to stay on in education, so they could afford to study – until Osborne's team dismissed it as a "bribe" and shut it down. The frailest old people depend on council services to wash them and feed them – yet Osborne just slashed their budget by 30 per cent, which service providers say will mean more pensioners being left to die in their own filth. Every family living on benefits is set to lose an average of £1,000 a year – which, as I've seen from living in the East End of London, will mean many poor kids across Britain never getting a birthday party, or a trip to the seaside, or a bed of their own, or a winter coat. This isn't just On Yer Bike, it's On Yer Own.

 

The irrationality of this approach is perhaps plainest when you look at housing. We badly need more affordable housing in Britain. Some 4.5 million people are stuck on waiting lists, and the average age of a homebuyer is now 37. It's a cause of constant stress to the real middle class and despair for the poor. By a happy coincidence, house-building is one of the best stimulators of the economy: it employs a lot of people on average wages, who then spend their money quickly in a "multiplier" effect.

 

Yet Osborne has chosen the opposite. There will be on average one new home built per week in the whole of London and the south-east. That's one. Indeed, instead of building homes, he's driving people out of them. By slashing housing benefit, London councils alone say 83,000 people here are going to be forced to leave their homes, with 1.3 million ending up in more debt. Cameron has revealed that his baby daughter sleeps in a cardboard box decorated for her by her big sister. Thanks to him, a lot more people are going to be sleeping in cardboard boxes soon.

 

It can't be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people. Remember, Cameron said before the election: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school." Osborne is a beneficiary of a £4m trust fund he did nothing whatsoever to earn and which is stashed offshore to avoid tax. Clegg actually thought the state pension was £30 a week, a level that would kill pensioners.

 

These attitudes have real consequences. We're not in this together. Who isn't in it with us? Them, their friends, and their families. They were asked to pay nothing more in this CSR. On the contrary: they are being let off left, right and centre. To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6bn – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain. You try refusing to pay your taxes next time, and see if George Osborne shows the same generosity to you as he does to the super-rich.

 

There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That's the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about "fairness."

 

Britain just became a colder and crueller country. And for what? To pantingly follow a disproven ideology over a cliff. On the eve of the general election, Cameron told us: "There'll be no cuts to frontline services," "we're not talking about swingeing cuts," and "all cuts will be fair". Is it possible to call him anything but a liar and an ideologue today?

 

You can enjoy a long rest, Baroness Thatcher – your successors have embarked on a mephedrone-charged imitation that exceeds your most fantastical dreams.

 

 

30 Year old far left scottish shock jock attacks tories....... and in other news.......

 

This such a shabby article that is so flawed it is the sort of stuff I would expect Adrian Durham to come out with on talk sport. Its too late to take it apart and quite frankly its so poor that Im sure most learned political followers on any party can see it for what it is.

 

No its not. Thats the view of Krugman and Stiglitz, as the journalist points out, Adrian Durham is not remotely close to being an analogy and make you look like a fucking idiot. Its an excellent article but could be improved by citing the Eggertson's (2009) neo-keynesian model which predicts a multiplier effect 3 to 4 times that under normal circumstance when the interest rate is at the zero bound, or an in depth look at the two huge 'keynesian' stimulation packages provided by the Chinese governement since 2008. Apart from that its historically and factually correct.

 

 

The problem is Chez that any elements of truth within it are lost in the sea of bile and non truths.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

A less inflammatory article but just as interesting for me.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/eu...iht-letter.html

 

If there is one quality that unites France and Britain, it is a shared history of mutual divergence, verging on derision.

 

And so it was instructive this past week to observe the responses on both sides of the Channel to Europe’s economic malaise spreading like a dark fog occluding the future.

 

Faced with the prospect of a longer working life until a minimum retirement age of 62 (up from the current 60), a million French citizens took to the streets, as strikers closed refineries and blockaded fuel depots, leaving motorists to fume in line for gasoline and diesel.

 

But, confronting government measures promising not only a longer working life but 19 percent cuts in public spending, the loss of almost half a million public-sector jobs, steep reductions in welfare payments and five bleak years of austerity, the British barely seemed to blink.

 

That, of course, may change, as it did in the late 1970s when a previous generation of Britons struggled through the so-called winter of discontent. Strikes then were so widespread that garbage piled up outside homes, cemetery operators considered mass burials at sea (the gravediggers had downed shovels) and dark thoughts gathered in British hearts.

 

But since those days, a legacy of labor unions weakened by the Conservative Margaret Thatcher has dampened the appetite for the collective struggle still cherished in France.

 

“French people tend to like to demonstrate,” the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, said when asked to compare French and British national reflexes.

 

Taking to the streets, some argue, is a rite of passage for the young and, for the older, a right at the heart of the French way of democracy since the toppling of the aristocracy in 1789.

 

“What’s at stake here is not the retirement age, or jobs for students, but the very nature of power in this country,” said Lucy Wadham, a British novelist and blogger living in France.

 

But that is not to say that the latest unrest is hewn from the same political flagstones as the revolutionary barricades of 1968 that defined an era: It is a cents-and-euros struggle to avert the inevitable moment when decades of cumulative benefits — from short work weeks to long vacations, from state health care to early retirement — begin to unravel.

 

As la retraite — retirement — so the nation.

 

“France’s problem is that, for too long, the economy has been run as a kind of job club for French workers,” said an editorial in The Spectator, a conservative British magazine. “Britain and France believe in liberty, but have different definitions of it.”

 

While the British believe in “liberty from government,” the editorial said, the French “still like the big state and squeal at the prospect of being removed from its teat.”

 

The French also pay higher club dues and expect commensurate rewards. French pensions can reach three-quarters of a working wage, compared with just over two-fifths in Britain. So, if French workers and teenagers strike over their pensions, there’s plenty to protest about.

 

The British do, of course, demonstrate. Protests spilling to violence changed the national course most notably in riots against Mrs. Thatcher’s poll tax in 1990. In 2000, truckers’ protests starved the entire country of fuel.

 

People turned out in huge numbers — and in vain — to protest the war in Iraq in 2003, when Tony Blair dispatched more than 40,000 Britons to fight alongside the Americans. Demonstrators confronted the police to rail against globalization at the Group of 20 summit meeting in London in 2009.

 

But the legacy is defined more by the weakening of protest than its vindication.

 

“There is growing bitterness and anger in England,” said Tariq Ali, once a firebrand on the barricades, in a posting on the Web site of The Guardian, a British newspaper. “The French epidemic could spread, but nothing will happen from above. Young and old fought Thatcher and lost. Her New Labour successors made sure that the defeats she inflicted were institutionalized.”

 

There may be a sense, too, that, as old Labourites like to insist, the Conservatives are up to old tricks to benefit the rich and trample the poor, to divide and rule.

 

Those imposing the cuts are largely from the private schools and top universities that have traditionally been the wellspring of the elite, cushioned by privately funded health care, schools, stock portfolios and pensions. Those feeling the pain, many economists argue, are those with the least access to privilege.

 

“We have seen people cheering the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory,” Alan Johnson, the opposition Labour finance spokesman, declared across the floor of Parliament. “For some members opposite, this is their ideological objective. Not all of them, but for many of them, this is what they came into politics for.”

 

If Britain falls prey to protest, there will be sharper overtones of class struggle than solidarity. Britain is a more divided society than France. Wealth is more ostentatious, poverty more visible. People in Britain have learned to have sharper elbows in pursuit of individual gain, while France prides itself on a broader concordat.

 

“Social confrontation is part of our democracy,” said Prime Minister François Fillon, “but social consensus is, as well.”

 

Of course, there is an inherent stoicism in Britain, woven into the Second World War spirit of bulldog resolve in the face of hardship. When suicide bombers attacked London in July 2005, killing 52 people, the response was not rage but quiet resolve.

 

“The British no longer do strikes, and certainly do not take to the streets in the same way as our confreres on the Continent. Or is that about to change?” the columnist Mehdi Hasan wrote in the leftist New Statesman. “We are now a nation divided. The ax has fallen. The bloodletting has begun.”

 

And, of course, a winter is approaching — if not of discontent, then certainly of cold comfort and complaint.

 

 

Its notable how much coverage the french action is getting over here You can tell the media is praying for it to kick off.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

Get a grip you freak. Your lass is about to drop and you are arguing politics (like a spastic) on here.

 

 

You havent being down the inducement road I guess.

 

They asked her to come in last night for 9pm. As its number 4 she assumed they would get things going and be home by lunch time today. As it turns out its a process that may or may not produce a result for upto 48 hours!!!

 

Enough to say that after 20 odd years of marriage there is only so much pleasantries that can occur in a small room. Suffice to say she wants to sleep for a bit with me out the way!

 

And anyway......It takes "I cant come to bed someones wrong on the internet", to a whole new level.

[NJS 4378]

Both sides will drag up lots of figures on this but I think its hard to dispute to some degree when you simply look at the vast increase in welfare during a boom economic period.

 

I think its a function of the total time since real mass unemployment (to be fair probably in the 70s under Labour) first came - in pockets like areas of the NE it wouldn't have mattered if unemployment had been 1% or 10% over the period - its the year on year depression in these places that promotes the culture.

 

As I've said before I don't think there are any easy answers to breaking the cycle - and there's no way the Tories will.

[NJS 4378]

The problem is Chez that any elements of truth within it are lost in the sea of bile and non truths.

 

Pointing out the non-truths wouild be a start.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

I dont agree one bit. Most reasonable people have know problem with benefits going to people who need them, genuinely need them. But there is an large body of people who play the system cos thats what the norm is around them.

 

1% fraud which includes genuine errors

 

Worth the vitriol that they all get?

 

Its not even them, its the large group that dont work, have the big TV's, are always out on the town etc etc.

 

Now while you will call this conservative conservative crap, I do see it everyday.

 

Dont get me wrong, there not holidaying in Florida but they have a very comfortable existance without the need to work.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

The problem is Chez that any elements of truth within it are lost in the sea of bile and non truths.

 

Pointing out the non-truths wouild be a start.

 

 

Its tempting but its like listening to talk sport when the Keegan crisis was going on. Sometimes its just not worth it. Like Polly Toynbee or the Mail its just preaching to the converted.

 

(I might if Im bored during the night in )

[Guest alex]

Christ on a bike

[manc-mag 1]

Christ on a bike

 

Giving Mohammed a 'backie' no less.

[Guest Tuco Ramirez]

I can't me head round someone posting on here when their bairns gonna be born in 2 hours pmsl no offence CT.

[Ketsbaia 0]

Christ on a bike

 

Giving Mohammed a 'backie' no less.

 

Backies were for puffs who didn't have stunt pegs.

[manc-mag 1]

Christ on a bike

 

Giving Mohammed a 'backie' no less.

 

Backies were for puffs who didn't have stunt pegs.

 

Calling Mohammed a puff?

[Christmas Tree 4725]

I can't me head round someone posting on here when their bairns gonna be born in 2 hours pmsl no offence CT.

 

 

None taken but 24 - 48 hours is nearer the timescale!!!

 

I also dont know if your married but after 25 years and 17 or 18 hours sitting in a room with each other, waiting for a sign, conversation runs dry now and again. Shes got a pile of magazines to get through and loose women etc on the box, I've got internet arguments to win

 

Seriously its not like normal were waters break, labour starts and its all hands on deck.

 

Induction is we'll give you something to take and if nothing happens in 24 hours we'll try something else....

[Christmas Tree 4725]

Britain's borrowing costs fall to their lowest level in a generation

 

Britain's borrowing costs have fallen to their lowest level in a generation in a sign the Chancellor's deep cuts have won over investors' confidence

 

The yield on five-year gilts - taken as the benchmark interest rate for Government borrowing - has slipped to around 1.44%, the lowest level since at least the 1980s.

 

The yield is around 0.2% lower than the equivalent bond in Germany, Europe's strongest economy and traditionally a beneficiary of much lower interest rates.

 

It suggests that Government bonds are regarded as a relatively safe bet and implies confidence in the coalition's plans to slash the deficit.

 

Sky News business correspondent Dharshini David said: "Questions may have been raised about how fair the Government's spending cuts are but their scale has got the thumbs-up from the City.

 

"The yield on a five-year gilt has almost halved from 2.8% at the start of the year - meaning the rate is even lower than Germany's."

 

David Buik, of City brokerage BGC Partners, told Sky News it was "good news for us all" if Britain's debt interest repayments - which currently stand at £43bn a year - are reduced.

 

"The gilt market has performed better than any other bond market in Europe for the first time in 10 years so it's a real tribute to George Osborne and also to the Treasury team," he said.

 

"Despite the fact that (the cuts) are unpalatable in many areas, it looks like the Government wants to get its act together, get its balance sheet sorted out and will find borrowing in the bond market much easier and significantly cheaper."

 

It is welcome good news for the Government, which has faced criticism over the impact of their plans on jobs, pensions and benefits.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I can't me head round someone posting on here when their bairns gonna be born in 2 hours pmsl no offence CT.

 

 

None taken but 24 - 48 hours is nearer the timescale!!!

 

I also dont know if your married but after 25 years and 17 or 18 hours sitting in a room with each other, waiting for a sign, conversation runs dry now and again.

 

[Christmas Tree 4725]

My guess is this has already been posted several times. Either way I think it's a cracking article.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...in-2112069.html

 

Margaret Thatcher is lying sick in a private hospital bed in Belgravia but her political children have just pushed her agenda further and harder and deeper than she ever dreamed of. When was the last time Britain's public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother's lifetime. Not even in my grandmother's lifetime. No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country's debts. The result? Unemployment soared from 6 per cent to 19 per cent, and the country's economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills and the debt actually rose from 114 per cent to 180 per cent. "History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain said, "but it does rhyme."

 

No mention of the 70's under Labour...

Massive overspending

Income tax at 83%

inflation in the 20's

All leading to massive cuts that actually effected people a lot more tha these do.

 

 

Lots of scaremongering but what are the facts.

 

It is forecast that these cuts will return public spending to levels seen in 2007

The current unemployment rate is 8% it is forecast to drop to 5.9% by 2015

Unemployment stands at 2.5 mill. It is forecast to drop to 1.9 mill by 2015

 

 

George Osborne has just gambled your future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people – perfectly sensibly – cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand, and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That's why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 – caused entirely by deregulated bankers – by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first.

 

So apart from this young Scott, who else in Britain is predicting a freefall.. The ifs? NO The Markets? NO Big Business? NO Even Labour? NO

 

 

David Cameron and George Osborne have ignored all this. They have ignored the warnings of the Financial Times, the newspaper most critical of their strategy. They have dismissed the warnings of Nobel economics laureates like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who have consistently been proved right in this crisis. They have refused to learn from the fact that the country they held up as a model for how to deal with a recession – "Look and learn from across the Irish Sea," Osborne said – has suffered the worst collapse in the developed world. They have instead blindly obeyed the ideological precepts they learned as baby Thatcherites: slash the state, and make the poor pay most.

 

See Above

 

Osborne galloped through his Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) speech, failing to name almost any of the services that will be slashed or shut down. It's revealing that he doesn't want to name them while the nation is watching.

 

The tory party is the only party that has been honest about cuts, from pre-election all the way through. Osbourne annouced the % cut in budget for every service as he promised he would

 

 

But beneath the statistics, there was a swathe of human tragedies that will now unnecessarily unfold across Britain. PriceWaterhouseCooper – nobody's idea of a Trotskyite cell – says that a million people will now lose their jobs as a direct result. My father lost his job at the height of the last Tory recession, and had to leave the country to get another one. I remember how that felt. I remember what that did to my family.Now it's going to happen to a million more families and probably more. For the private sector to get all these people into work, as Osborne claims, there would have to be the most rapid business growth in my lifetime. Does anyone think that will happen?

 

Yes, Price waterhouse Cooper, the Office for Budgetary responsibility, The Markets, Big Business, The ifs

 

Osborne has chosen the weakest people to take the worst cuts. The poorest 16-year-olds were given £30 a week to stay on in education, so they could afford to study – until Osborne's team dismissed it as a "bribe" and shut it down. The frailest old people depend on council services to wash them and feed them – yet Osborne just slashed their budget by 30 per cent, which service providers say will mean more pensioners being left to die in their own filth. Every family living on benefits is set to lose an average of £1,000 a year – which, as I've seen from living in the East End of London, will mean many poor kids across Britain never getting a birthday party, or a trip to the seaside, or a bed of their own, or a winter coat. This isn't just On Yer Bike, it's On Yer Own.

 

I mean fucking hell

 

 

The irrationality of this approach is perhaps plainest when you look at housing. We badly need more affordable housing in Britain. Some 4.5 million people are stuck on waiting lists, and the average age of a homebuyer is now 37. It's a cause of constant stress to the real middle class and despair for the poor. By a happy coincidence, house-building is one of the best stimulators of the economy: it employs a lot of people on average wages, who then spend their money quickly in a "multiplier" effect.

 

All following 13 years of Labour

 

Does this young chap realise that after 13 years of Labour this country only has a net gain of 14,000 council houses.

 

 

Yet Osborne has chosen the opposite. There will be on average one new home built per week in the whole of London and the south-east. That's one. Indeed, instead of building homes, he's driving people out of them. By slashing housing benefit, London councils alone say 83,000 people here are going to be forced to leave their homes, with 1.3 million ending up in more debt. Cameron has revealed that his baby daughter sleeps in a cardboard box decorated for her by her big sister. Thanks to him, a lot more people are going to be sleeping in cardboard boxes soon.

 

Thats right, he announced plans to build 155,000

 

 

It can't be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people. Remember, Cameron said before the election: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school." Osborne is a beneficiary of a £4m trust fund he did nothing whatsoever to earn and which is stashed offshore to avoid tax. Clegg actually thought the state pension was £30 a week, a level that would kill pensioners.

 

Dont let rich people into politics shocker

 

Enough I think

 

These attitudes have real consequences. We're not in this together. Who isn't in it with us? Them, their friends, and their families. They were asked to pay nothing more in this CSR. On the contrary: they are being let off left, right and centre. To pluck a random example, one of the richest corporations in Britain, Vodafone, had an outstanding tax bill of £6bn – but Osborne simply cancelled it this year. If he had made them pay, he could have prevented nearly all the cuts to all the welfare recipients in Britain. You try refusing to pay your taxes next time, and see if George Osborne shows the same generosity to you as he does to the super-rich.

 

 

 

There is one stark symbol of how unjust the response to this economic disaster caused by bankers is. They have just paid themselves £7bn in bonuses – much of it our money – to reward themselves for failure. That's the same sum Osborne took from the benefits of the British poor yesterday, who did nothing to cause this crash. And he has the chutzpah to brag about "fairness."

 

Britain just became a colder and crueller country. And for what? To pantingly follow a disproven ideology over a cliff. On the eve of the general election, Cameron told us: "There'll be no cuts to frontline services," "we're not talking about swingeing cuts," and "all cuts will be fair". Is it possible to call him anything but a liar and an ideologue today?

 

You can enjoy a long rest, Baroness Thatcher – your successors have embarked on a mephedrone-charged imitation that exceeds your most fantastical dreams.

[TheMoog 0]

I get the feeling Labour overspend trying to keep the masses happy and don't think of the long term effects every time they get in then when people have had enough of their bullshit the Conservatives get in and subsequently end up being portrayed as the bad bastards for having to make big cuts due to Labour's recklessness. This country would be a richer place if it wasn't for all the doley scounger types and immigrants who haven't contributed to the upkeep of the country's coffers but are being given freebies, imo they're the ones who should be hit first - there's no such thing as a free lunch. Personally I think all these politicians are very much of a muchness, put me in charge and I'd rule with an iron fist, muhuhahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!

 

... I hate politics.