Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[bossy]

Loving the way Stronts has turned in to Spock

[melons]

Loving the way Stronts has turned in to Spock

 

To deny the facts would be illogical.

[bossy]

Btw if you don't think that the trillions of dollars given to wall St firms has any bearing on the situation we now find ourselves in you're deluded.

[Whollier]

That's called Quantitative Easing, otherwise known as the accomplishment of a desired objective by the application of the correct amount of lubrication in the right place at the right time.

 

The lubrication in this instance being US dollars.

[bossy]

No it wasn't called that and in fact it wasn't that. It was bailing out fuck ups. The easing came afterwards.

[taliesin08]

Funny how the Liberals are now more right wing than the Eton rifles.

[Vincent Vega]

Like the "global crisis" mantra, this is one of those canards that has scant relation to the facts. The amount added to our national debt because of the bank bailout is a fraction of the total national debt. It's an extremely convenient scapegoat, but most of the debt is due to other things.

 

£80bn is approximately half of the current deficit. It's an utter disgrace that the banks are getting away with the mess they have helped create as pointed out by Peter McKay in today's Mail:

 

Which Bob does Cameron fear the most?

 

With his slaphead appearance, Commie past and hostile demeanour, rail union leader Bob Crow isn't everyone's cup of lapsang souchong. Perhaps you prefer Barclays' new chief exec, smoothie-chops Bob Diamond, who is expected to enjoy a £11.5 million annual reward.

 

But isn't £80,000-a-year Crow right to ask why public-sector costs have to be slashed when those who brought about our impoverishment - the banking fraternity - have resumed their greedy practices?

 

And isn't Diamond wrong to defend sky-high remuneration and bonus culture, and to brand critics of 'casino' banking as having 'no basis in reality'?

 

Why are banks allowed to borrow money at 0.5 per cent from the Government and charge customers with overdrafts 19 per cent? Wouldn't it be reassuring to see some indication from the coalition, not just from its token Lib Dem Leftie, Vince Cable, that they're taking on the bankers as well as the public service workers?

 

Although there has been soothing talk about reining in bank bonuses, lending more to cash-strapped businesses and obliging them to hold more capital in reserve in case of a crisis, the impression is that the Government is frightened of the banks.

 

They've set up a commission, a signal to bankers that they can be talked out of anything drastic.

 

Talking about bonuses, Diamond said in an interview yesterday: 'We have to be very sensitive to the timing and the public mood. And sensitive to the fact that we have to balance what is right for the shareholders, what is right for our clients, what's right for the regulators, what's right for the communities and what's right for our people.'

 

So many sensitivities, so many competing rights! Is Bob telling us nothing can be done to curb bonuses? It sounds like it.

 

But if the Government continues to act as if the spoon-fed, delinquent banks are less of a problem than the bloated public services - and Bob Crow more of a public enemy than Bob Diamond - they'll fail to persuade decent people with sensible views about their sincerity of purpose.

 

It was also good to see one Lib Dem holding Gideon to account too:

 

Osborne rejects charges of 'immature turf war' between departments | Politics | The Guardian

 

Osborne rejects charges of 'immature turf war' between departments

 

Chancellor says Treasury works very well with DWP and that he and Iain Duncan Smith have a good relationship

 

George Osborne was today forced to defend himself from claims by a coalition colleague that he was indulging in an "immature turf war" with the Department for Work and Pensions over plans to cut at least extra £4bn from the welfare benefit bill.

 

The £4bn annual cut emerged from Treasury briefings last week, but was not accepted by senior figures at the DWP. The £4bn figure focuses on out of work-related benefits and is separate from plans to limit the age threshold for access to child benefit, or the winter fuel allowance.

 

Ministers have been looking at reducing the age at which child benefit is available to 16, as well as to raise the age threshold for the winter fuel allowance from 60 to 70. Such reforms could save billions.

 

In the Commons, Bob Russell, the Liberal Democrat backbencher, attacked Osborne for indicating he planned to make an extra £4bn in cuts during a BBC interview last week. Russell said: "While I have no time for the welfare cheats, to try and blame this country's financial ills on this small category of the population is unethical".

 

He added: "It would be ethical to show an equal determination to tackle the cheats who avoid and evade tax.

 

"I find it somewhat immature this turf war between your office and the secretary of state for work and pensions".

 

The Speaker, John Bercow, had granted a request from Russell that Osborne be forced to make a Commons statement on his welfare cuts plans. Osborne denied he was involved in any dispute with the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, describing some of his welfare reform plans as inspirational.

 

But Osborne insisted he had always suggested he would be looking for extra cuts in the welfare budget, and added "staggering figures" are expected to be published later this week by the Office of National Statistics on the scale of "the tax gap" that Gordon Brown allowed to develop. The tax gap is the difference between what is forecast to be collected and what is collected.

 

Osborne promised "the government will be taking steps to reduce tax avoidance including tax avoidance by some of the richest people in society". He said the overall aim is to cut £61bn from the departmental budgets – £17bn more than planned by Labour in its pre-election deficit reduction programme.

 

But Osborne implied that the treasury wanted to retain some of the extra DWP savings to reduce the overall deficit, and not allow the savings to be ploughed back entirely into potentially expensive DWP plans to reform the benefits system to increase work incentives.

 

Duncan Smith believes better work incentives will in the medium term reduce the overall size of the welfare bill. He also believes changes in the way that the government can calculate an individual's income in real time through better computer software will make it easier to introduce welfare reform, and reduce fraud and error.

 

The government in the emergency budget in June announced plans to save £11bn from welfare, and at the time Osborne indicated he was looking for further savings from the welfare budget if at all possible.

 

The chancellor said yesterday: "The failure of welfare reform of the past decade had been one of the worst failures of the last government."

 

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Yvette Cooper, highlighted leaked letters suggesting reforms to the employment support allowance, the chief benefit for the sick, have been agreed within government delivering an extra net savings of £2.5bn by 2014-5. She claimed these savings can only be achieved by creating an additional 800,000 jobs, or by targeting those that are genuinely too sick to work.

 

I heard Francis Maude trying to claim on the radio this morning that they had a mandate for these cuts due to coalition having 65% of the vote at the election, at least Nicky Campbell held him to account pointing out that none of these proposals were in any of either parties manifestos and that the Lib Dem manifesto actually argued against such severe cuts. Is it really worth being a crutch for the Tories and their dirty work just for a few ministerial seats and privileges? I hope to see a few more Lib Dems grow some balls like Bob Russell has there.

[taliesin08]

What are they doing about their mates in the city who are responsible for tax evasion of up to £42billion a year.

[cochcaer]

What are they doing about their mates in the city who are responsible for tax evasion of up to £42billion a year.

 

Read a report today that banker bonuses were now back to previous levels.

[dennis tooth]

They'll all be dead if they carry on. The people will rise up and tear them all limb from limb same for their banker friends. Carry on lads. (Turns back to sharpening knife in the dark.)

 

Revolution before dawn. Then breakfast.

[Elmyn Noos]

£80bn is approximately half of the current deficit. It's an utter disgrace that the banks are getting away with the mess they have helped create as pointed out by Peter McKay in today's Mail:

 

 

 

It was also good to see one Lib Dem holding Gideon to account too:

 

Osborne rejects charges of 'immature turf war' between departments | Politics | The Guardian

 

 

 

I heard Francis Maude trying to claim on the radio this morning that they had a mandate for these cuts due to coalition having 65% of the vote at the election, at least Nicky Campbell held him to account pointing out that none of these proposals were in any of either parties manifestos and that the Lib Dem manifesto actually argued against such severe cuts. Is it really worth being a crutch for the Tories and their dirty work just for a few ministerial seats and privileges? I hope to see a few more Lib Dems grow some balls like Bob Russell has there.

 

I've heard this line trotted out a few times by the duplicitous bunch of twats in this coalition.

 

They have no such fucking mandate because NOBODY voted for this coalition. A good percentage of the people who voted LibDem were, like me, disaffected Labourites, who won't make the same mistake again. Let us not forget that the LibDems, despite Labour's unpopularity, actually lost seats, and the tories, again despite Labour's unpopularity, failed to gain the majority required to form a government.

 

To describe this as a mandate from the people is nothing short of an outrageous fucking lie.

 

Whilst were on this, what happened to all the bullshit about "not affecting front-line services" we were told during the election campaign.

 

It strikes me that the tories are doing what they always have done - fucking us over, and doing it with some relish. They see themselves as head boy, and the rest of us are their fags.

 

Cameron: Hmm...we did say frontline service were going to be unaffected, but we're spending a fortune educating the poor and underprivileged oiks. Cutting back on frontline education services though is going to piss people off. get me OFSTED on the phone.

 

OFSTED: Hello OFSTED speaking - the impartial apolitical education monitor.

 

Cameron: I need people to think there wasteage and shit in the state school system so I can fuck over the plebs and their grubby working class offspring.

 

OFSTED: No problemo Cammy. BBC News - Ofsted says schools using special needs too widely

 

Anyone fancy a bit of civil disobedience? I know I do.

[WaltonRed]

The Police warning if they get cut too much when the riots come they'll not be able to cope

[L19red]

I'd be quite happy if they cut the £12m its going to cost us for a few thousand catlicks to go and watch popeye say mass this weekend.

[Kevin D]

They'll all be dead if they carry on. The people will rise up and tear them all limb from limb same for their banker friends. Carry on lads. (Turns back to sharpening knife in the dark.)

 

Revolution before dawn. Then breakfast.

 

[YOUTUBE]V1BwQIj7xeY[/YOUTUBE] - 1:40

[Cardie]

The Police warning if they get cut too much when the riots come they'll not be able to cope

 

On the plus side the number of innocent people dying or being injured might also decrease.

 

Joke, before the rozzers get me

[King Emlyn]

Funny how the Liberals are now more right wing than the Eton rifles.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[Elmyn Noos]

Funny how the Liberals are now more right wing than the Eton rifles.

 

They're a bunch of fucking niknaks to Cameron's Scaramanga.

 

Watch out for the campaign for AV, coming to a TV near you soon.

 

AV - making sure everyone's second choice gets into power via the back door. That way, just as with a coalition, nobody gets who they want in power. Not on my watch Cleggnut, you fucking winnet.

[RedinSweden]

You have to feel sorry for any new member when Red Mist takes them under his wing.

[Strontium]

Thought-provoking piece from Julian Glover in the Guardian the other day:

 

Yes, the coalition wants to smash the state. That's good | Julian Glover | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

Yes, the coalition wants to smash the state. That's good

The misery of cuts will grind the government down unless it boldly declares the ideology behind its spending plans

 

Julian Glover guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 September 2010 20.00 BST

 

Why be spooked by social democrat squawking? The coalition should shrug its shoulders and confess: the charge its enemies lay at its door is broadly correct. This is an ideological government with a plan for a smaller, less centralised and more liberal state. The left dreads the obvious fact that spending cuts are central to this plan – and they are. The left senses that the government is staging a cultural revolution against social democracy – and it is. The coalition does not want to make mild adjustments to the old order. It intends to smash it.

 

There is an element of mad Maoism to it all: the re-creation of a country fired by a spending review that will feel like a fetishistic exercise in the application of extreme pain. To say that cuts are being forced by necessity and nothing more, is to imply that when fatter times return ministers will reverse them. Nobody who knows the leaderships of this coalition believes that. Much of what the government must do to balance the books it would have wanted to do even if they were in balance.

 

Yet ministers, by and large, hesitate before admitting this. Liberal Democrats worry about scaring their voters. Conservatives aren't sure the country will understand their big idea. It's easier to take refuge in the alternative truth that cuts are happening because they are needed. Even Ed Miliband issued a press release last week agreeing.

 

From this follows the lazy line that all this government is doing is responding robotically to its circumstances. But blaming the last government for the horror already sounds weak.

 

Every day now brings a state-funded special interest group pleading for indulgence. David Hockney and Damien Hirst want money for the arts – multimillionaires for welfare, just like the bankers. The Foreign Office is holding the BBC Burma service hostage. Boris Johnson demands cash for the tube. This stuff is relentless and in some cases compelling, and the weight of it will grind the government down if it fails to explain why individual hard luck stories aren't the whole picture. If it fights each battle case by case it can't win. The coalition's long-term health depends on getting across the impression that it has a positive plan for a different kind of state, one whose effectiveness will not be measured solely by the amount of money it spends.

 

New Labour spinners used to call this sort of thing a narrative, but Blair-Brown talk of public service reform largely turned out to be fiction. The coalition's comforting story has the merit of truth. There is a narrative, at least among that minority of ministers intellectually committed to the coalition: a reimagining of the balance between the state and society in favour of the latter.

 

You can either pretend, as Labour does, that the government should go on as before, and hope no one notices the illogicality of promising to spend far less on much more; or you can recognise that the crisis of over-spending is really a crisis of over-government and do something about it: progressive austerity, as George Osborne once defined it.

 

This is no Hayekian nightmare. Indeed, the further the government can get from measuring everything in terms of pure economics the better. That isn't only because the numbers are going to be grim. It is because the government is liberal, not Thatcherite, in its thinking.

 

The point of reducing spending is to change the state, not just spend less. Success can't be measured in terms of the ratio of government expenditure to GDP, as someone on the Tory right – say, John Redwood – would like.

 

This point was there in Nick Clegg's description on the Today programme of state dependency in the north-east as not only unaffordable but unhealthy. It is there in a book published this week by the Tory MP and Cameron ally Nick Boles. He describes "genuine horror at the overweening power of central government and its treatment of citizens either as supplicants ... or lab rats in some vast social experiment, designed to improve mankind".

 

Which Way's Up?, Boles asks in the title of his book: the point is the gravitational pull of politics has changed. He argues for the decentralisation of money, power and policy far beyond anything the government currently has plans for, and it isn't fair to say he is only calling for this because of cuts. Cameron's friends were decentralisers long before the deficit became an issue.

 

Dismiss this as politics for wonks if you like. A patient, waiting on an operating table for a surgeon to begin amputation, is not comforted by being told the doctor is going back to first principles in some theoretical and untried plan. But what is the alternative? A government slashing at the state with no expectation of improving it? Offering a view of reform is not the same as guaranteeing success – but it is more effective than offering no opinion at all.

 

There's a kamikaze spirit in this government's soul. Ministers seem strangely pacified by the prospect of their possible political doom. New Labour feared unpopularity so much it became timid. This government has written unpopularity into the script. This has freed it to do things it would never have risked in fiscal peacetime. It is why change seems reckless and fast. The coalition feels a revolutionary duty to be brave. It should be proud of that.

 

 

Can't say I agree with all of it :whistle: but I think he's right that the government largely doesn't care who it pisses off. Which is why all these imminent union strikes will achieve sweet FA.

[dennis tooth]

Hatchet job by the Guardian there. Divide, misinform. 'Vote for Lib Dem's'.

 

Ask the slaves, the suffragettes, the Iraqi's, Chomsky (Whom they smeared and censored.).

 

 

Fuck the Guardian too, I'll be beating their journo's, editors, advertising depts staff to death with Cameron's severed arms. Polly Toynbee is going to get raped by Clegg's corpse in some macabre re-enactment of the Home Alone scene where Mac Culk is pretending his family is all home and having a party.

 

Fucking MI-6/CIA Payroll, balls deep in this shit.

 

"You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. It's my time"

[Section_31]

Laughable article, I stopped reading at this bit:

 

This is an ideological government

 

Cameron, unlike Thatcher, has nothing underpinning his philosophy save for some vague shite about big society. Even if you pointed a gun at his head, he would not be able to tell you what he believes much beyond some cobbled-together PR shite. The idea that this lot are on a 'Mad Maoist' ideological crusade to reconstruct the country is laughable, and would have the hard-core politicians in both coalition parties in absolute stitches.

 

 

For all the gloss these parties try and put on things, this is the simple reality of our situation:

 

(1) Thatcher handed the country over to big business and global finance

 

(2) globalisation renders large swathes of the British workforce useless. On some level these people know this, this gives rise to social breakdown, health and family problems.

 

(3) Labour knew but didn't care enough to arrest the situation, and so began to 'plug the holes' created by the tsunami of global business not giving a fuck about people by creating state apparatus that would try and pick up the pieces - trying to swamp the country with laws, civie police, ASBOs, drink and drug treatment programmes etc and trying to expand state employment to pick up the pieces of people who no longer had jobs, but all the time not tackling the fundamental truth that the country is now home to millions of people who are no longer needed.

 

(4) The Tories also know what New Labour knew - but - CRUCIALLY - they simply do, not, care.

While New Labour were content to fund a state band-aid, the Tories are quite simply happy to them slide into the sea, and then it will blame them for it.

[Section_31]

Thing on the BBC before about how Liverpool may fair with the cuts.

 

Betweem 1998-2008 employment increased by 1.8% a year.

 

40% of the jobs in the city are public sector.

 

But there was a 40% decline in private sector manufacturing jobs (the hold grail these days, apparently) in that 10 year period.

 

Surely the public sector jobs were helping to fill a void? The Tories seem to think that those public sector jobs somehow strangled the private manufcaturing jobs and that they disapeared for that reason. Anyone, with any brains however, knows that those jobs are all now in Kowloon.

[RoboRiise]

I realise that this thread can't possibly have hit 38 pages without the "Cunts will change our way of life" gag having made at least one appearance but I have nothing else to add about them at the moment.

 

Were it not for my job, that would be a very different situation.

[dennis tooth]

PMQ's was a mixture of backslapping and the odd quiver about signing up to some EU thing, the 2nd since the buggers got in charge, the next one is some time away as well.

 

Meanwhile they have a licence to continue smacking at the spine of the economy like a delinquent kid with a metal pole and too much time on his hands. How dare the unions not fold as well.

[WaltonRed]

I hope it hits the fan come the spending review I really do.

 

Theresa May also saying the less numbers of Police doesnt affect the job they can do.

 

Well sack them all then and have one super bizzie if thats the case you stupid twat.