Politics

[Papa Lazaru 0]

 

Shocking.

 

What a bell end, but not a surprise from a tory boy who was chairman of the young conservatives at his uni or something like that, just showing himself up for what he is.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

I really don't have a problem with it tbh. He lost his temper because someone was infringing on his broadcast, hardly the crime of the century. There's a clip where some bloke is running round behind him mid-broadcast and he remains entirely calm, impressive.

 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/38055b2c-dd45-11...144feabdc0.html

 

Osborne’s levy is not all that taxing

 

So this is a tax to make banks pay for the support they receive and the risks they impose on others. In that perspective it looks decidedly timid. Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England estimates the subsidy to British banks at an average £59bn over the last three years. The proposed levy will raise one-twentieth of that.

 

Banks’ predictable cry of despair will really be a sigh of relief.

[Christmas Tree 4679]

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.

[Christmas Tree 4679]

Good article that 2J.

 

Of course you wont get the contrary CT agreeing with it.

 

 

Dear me Post some of your views and we might be able to judge you.

[Christmas Tree 4679]

Todays YOUGOV poll, the first since the cuts were announced results in .....

 

58% agreeing that the cuts were unavoidable

29% who though they were avoidable

and 13% who have a fence stuck up their arse or are just too thick to form an opinion.

 

Nice to see common sense prevailing.

[peasepud 59]

Having listened to lots of economists over the last 24 hours on the box, its all going to boil down to whether growth continues as predicted or not. My gut feeling is that a lot of people in Britain, like yourself, will feel that it wasnt as bad as expected (which it wasnt) and we will now see the purse strings loosened pre christmas.

 

Of course they rely on that selfish attitude - I'm not supposed to care about mates who are civil servants or the schools or council facilities I don't use. Shoot me for being brought up correctly but I do.

 

??? The point is that for a lot the fear of yesterday didnt materialise and they will start spending, thus boosting growth, thus getting out of this mess as soon as possible and one big final thus, then having the choice to spend money not on deficts but on the real needs of the day be that schools, councils or civil servant mates.

NOtg sure where you get this logic from? the fear is still here, yes HMRC was predicted to cut by 25% and its now 19% however every single member of staff is still worrying about their job, Im not now thinking Ive got a 6% better chance of staying in work so lets get out there and spend, spend, spend!

 

The reality is, these departments now know how much they have to cut, where its going to come from is now being worked out and will take a couple of months to finalise.

[Christmas Tree 4679]

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.

[Renton 21223]

Todays YOUGOV poll, the first since the cuts were announced results in .....

 

58% agreeing that the cuts were unavoidable

29% who though they were avoidable

and 13% who have a fence stuck up their arse or are just too thick to form an opinion.

 

Nice to see common sense prevailing.

 

I think the 13% are being quite sensible in not having an opinion given the uncertainty of this unprecedented economic gamble.

[Renton 21223]

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.

 

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?

 

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?

[Ketsbaia 0]

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.

 

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?

 

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?

 

Of course they don't care, they're Thatcher's kids. The Miners Strike was probably a televised blood sport to Gideon, CMD & co. Now fox hunting is banned God knows they need something to fill the void.

[NJS 4365]

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).

[Renton 21223]

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.

[Ketsbaia 0]

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).

 

I'd love to see Gideon get his £4 million offshore trust fund taken away from him.

[Ketsbaia 0]

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.

 

The Sun are running a campaign at the moment where they're rallying against so called 'scroungers' and quite frankly the hypocrisy of it all makes me sick. Benefit cheats I have no time for but apparently people who are just claiming the money they are eligible for, whether they really need it or not, is somehow morally wrong while Tory MPs avoiding tax through various shady but entirely legal means barely gets a mention.

[NJS 4365]

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.

[Guest alex]

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).

Funnily enough I was talking about this with someone recently. He died of cancer not too long ago.

[Ketsbaia 0]

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).

Funnily enough I was talking about this with someone recently. He died of cancer not too long ago.

 

The person you were speaking to? It probably sent him over the edge

[Guest alex]

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).

Funnily enough I was talking about this with someone recently. He died of cancer not too long ago.

 

The person you were speaking to?

No.

[ChezGiven 0]

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.

[Guest alex]

[ChezGiven 0]

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.

[Christmas Tree 4679]

In the delivery room all day waiting for the Tory stork to turn up with little Margeret or David so as much as I'm gagging to reply to all today's nonsense, it will have to wait.

Edited October 22, 2010 by Christmas Tree

[peasepud 59]

In the delivery room all day waiting for the Tory stork to turn up with little Margeret or David so as much as I'm gagging to reply to all today's nonsense, it will have to wait.

 

You're lucky theres still a delivery room.

 

 

 

 

good luck btw

[Ketsbaia 0]

Todays YOUGOV poll, the first since the cuts were announced results in .....

 

58% agreeing that the cuts were unavoidable

29% who though they were avoidable

and 13% who have a fence stuck up their arse or are just too thick to form an opinion.

 

Nice to see common sense prevailing.

 

Nice to see you and The Sun missing out key facts.

 

[Christmas Tree 4679]

In the delivery room all day waiting for the Tory stork to turn up with little Margeret or David so as much as I'm gagging to reply to all today's nonsense, it will have to wait.

 

You're lucky theres still a delivery room.

 

 

 

 

good luck btw

 

 

Ring fenced under the Tories

 

And thanks.