Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Red Phoenix]

Labour 'could cut £5bn' from welfare budgets after 2016

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24553894

 

It's just more evidence that they're as corrupt as the conservatives. Things just get worse and worse under each one of them. All three main parties are led by corrupt, bought and paid for idiots. If "Red" Ed really was someone who could change things there's no way he'd be backing shite like that, and his main aims would probably be to make the corporations pay the taxes they're supposed to, and sort out the corrupt banking system. None of those parties are fit to represent the majority of the country, they should all be fucked off.

 

Oh and the Fabian Society? They're not socialists, they serve the elite and used to promote eugenics.

[Section_31]

We should get everyone on the dole, round them up, and get Ravenwood to gun them down - that's the Neo Liberal way.

[Jose Jones]

The thing is Britain still spends a fair proportion of it's GDP on government expenditure.

The figures are from 2011 so might have been cut dramatically since (as per the thread title), but:

 

Aus: 34.3%

Canada: 39.7%

France: 52.8%

Germany: 43.7%

Greece: 46.8%

Ireland: 42%

Norway: 40.2%

Sweden: 52.5%

UK: 47.3%

US: 38.9%

 

Obviously the UK spend per percentage of GDP is not quite as high as France or Sweden, but still pretty high, and comparable to other developed economies.  Where is it all going?  

Obviously as well the benefit and welfare demonisation is not about saving money, but more about victimisation politics.

 

Interestingly Australia has the lowest government spend out of the economies I picked, which might make you think it is right wing glory hole.

However the minimum wage here is £10 an hour and dole is £150 a week.

Compared to £6.31 an hour and £71 a week in the UK.

 

Perhaps making people work for as little as possible is not the best way to run things?

[Red Phoenix]

Was going to say I can't believe that these corporation puppets are trying to privatize the NHS, but I can. It's not really surprising is it? There's a stack of cash for their buddies, or should I say controllers, in the corporations. I hope a load of them get exposed for some type of corruption that they can't back out of anyway. What other hope does anyone have?

 

The whole system needs changing, these idiots can't be trusted with this type of power for years on end. They shouldn't even be elected, the country as a whole should regularly vote on issues. I saw someone not far back talking about how we should be doing this as it's easily possible with the technology we have now, and it is really. We have to move on at some point, this system is utterly broken and wide open for groups of corrupt idiots to trash the country even more for years on end each time they're voted in.

 

I honestly dread to think what the Tories will have done by the time May 2015 rolls around. Again, does anyone know of any method that would get this government out of office? What could Labour and other parties do if the Tories were called out for clearly abusing their power? (which they already are doing.) Under what circumstances could another election be called? I'm just interested, I don't think it'll happen at all, just wanted to know how it could happen.

 

Nevermind, might have found it. I was asking because snap elections were apparently abolished in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. Why the fuck would they do that? And is that another reason why the Tories are going so mental? Because they don't really see a good chance of any real challenge being put at them? Anyway, can only find this so far :

 

 

There are also two ways in which Parliament can be dissolved before the end of the five-year fixed term. First, the House of Commons, by a two-thirds majority, may pass a motion “That there should be an early parliamentary election” (section 2(1) and 2(2)). Second the House of Commons, acting by a simple majority, may pass a motion “That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government” which is not followed, within 14 days, by the passing of a second motion, again by simple majority, “That this House has confidence in her Majesty’s Government” (Sections 2(3), 2(4) and 2(5)). In both of these instances, the date for the general election is determined by a proclamation of Her Majesty, on advice from the Prime Minister (Section 2 (7)), Parliament dissolving 17 working days before the date set (section 3(1)).

 

 

http://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2011/09/24/alison-l-young-fixed-term-parliaments-and-neurath%E2%80%99s-ship/

 

So maybe there's some hope for Red Ed after all.

[Red Phoenix]

This is why we can't have nice things. The City of London Corporation.

 

 

 

What is this thing? Ostensibly it's the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, "among local authorities the City of London is unique". You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.

 

There are four layers of elected representatives in the Corporation: common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs and the Lord Mayor. To qualify for any of these offices, you must be a freeman of the City of London. To become a freeman you must be approved by the aldermen. You're most likely to qualify if you belong to one of the City livery companies: medieval guilds such as the worshipful company of costermongers, cutpurses and safecrackers. To become a sheriff, you must be elected from among the aldermen by the Livery. How do you join a livery company? Don't even ask.

 

To become Lord Mayor you must first have served as an alderman and sheriff, and you "must command the support of, and have the endorsement of, the Court of Aldermen and the Livery". You should also be stinking rich, as the Lord Mayor is expected to make a "contribution from his/her private resources towards the costs of the mayoral year." This is, in other words, an official old boys' network. Think of all that Tory huffing and puffing about democratic failings within the trade unions. Then think of their resounding silence about democracy within the City of London.

 

The current Lord Mayor, Michael Bear, came to prominence within the City as chief executive of the Spitalfields development group, which oversaw a controversial business venture in which the Corporation had a major stake, even though the project lies outside the boundaries of its authority. This illustrates another of the Corporation's unique features. It possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks.

 

The Lord Mayor's role, the Corporation's website tells us, is to "open doors at the highest levels" for business, in the course of which he "expounds the values of liberalisation". Liberalisation is what bankers call deregulation: the process that caused the financial crash. The Corporation boasts that it "handle issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City", such as banking reform and financial services regulation. It also conducts "extensive partnership work with think tanks … vigorously promoting the views and needs of financial services." But this isn't the half of it.

 

As Nicholas Shaxson explains in his fascinating book Treasure Islands, the Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London's mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.

 

Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, "over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster." The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it "has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate". It deprives the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.

 

It has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed American banks to evade the rules set by their own government. AIG's wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn't get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead. No wonder priests are resigning over the plans to evict the campers. The Church of England is not just working with Mammon; it's colluding with Babylon.

 

If you've ever dithered over the question of whether the UK needs a written constitution, dither no longer. Imagine the clauses required to preserve the status of the Corporation. "The City of London will remain outside the authority of parliament. Domestic and foreign banks will be permitted to vote as if they were human beings, and their votes will outnumber those cast by real people. Its elected officials will be chosen from people deemed acceptable by a group of medieval guilds …".

 

The Corporation's privileges could not withstand such public scrutiny. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons why a written constitution in the United Kingdom remains a distant dream. Its power also helps to explain why regulation of the banks is scarcely better than it was before the crash, why there are no effective curbs on executive pay and bonuses and why successive governments fail to act against the UK's dependent tax havens.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval

 

As if any of our "leaders" are going to take that on. We're fucked unless someone exposes the whole thing from the inside. So yeah, maybe we're simply fucked.

 

There's stuff I'm going to write about in the book I'm doing, but to really dig into that lot is something that could probably get dangerous. That's maybe why the book is best as an intro into certain areas instead of really digging as far as possible. For starters a lot of people would maybe think it was insane and just outright conspiracy theory, and secondly I really do want to just move on to fiction after this is done, it's already making me feel sick.

 

This country is a mess, and it's probably going to take a lot more than a few suits in government to sort it out.

 

 

[Scooby Dudek]

Well here's a surprise;

 

British Gas fuel prices to go up

Energy giant British Gas says electricity and gas prices will rise by 10.4% and 8.4% respectively from 23 November

 

More to follow.

 

From the BBC.

 

Should be a fun day on here.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Well here's a surprise;

 

British Gas fuel prices to go up

Energy giant British Gas says electricity and gas prices will rise by 10.4% and 8.4% respectively from 23 November

 

More to follow.

 

From the BBC.

 

Should be a fun day on here.

 

It's all Ed Miliband's fault. 

[Jairzinho]

We're all in this together.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/16/immoral-food-banks-one-of-richest-countries

 

Things have only got better. If you don't feel that, then you are probably some kind of communist who hates this country and turns up at one of the booming enterprises known as "food banks" for fun. Because it is a damn sight easier than trekking to the deli. I called 2012 "the year of the food bank". This week the Trussell Trust said that three times as many people are now using them, with reports that the choice between heating and eating is even more bleak.

 

Nonetheless, everything is working out fine, with rising numbers in employment, according to David Cameron. George Osborne said that the use of food banks has increased simply because more people have found out about them from jobcentres. So this is a strange model: supply creates demand. The demand must have magicked itself into being and not arisen, as those who run the food banks suggest, from benefit problems or the three-day emergency food vouchers that doctors and social workers now issue. Do hungry children exist? Teachers say so. Parents say so, though they may go without to give kids toast for tea.

 

 

In the bizarre exchanges that constitute our politics, it is clear that the focus on "standards of living" has traction, largely because of the cognitive dissonance between what we are told we are experiencing and how it feels. Maybe I am being overly romantic, but there was a time when those in government at least affected to know how "ordinary people" lived. Now they don't even pretend to know the price of milk, never mind the financial knife-edge that many live on, where the lateness of one overdue payment can drive people into despair.

 

If the recovery is underway – the new mantra – how come people have less money in their pockets? How come youth employment is refusing to budge, and a generation moves seamlessly into "the long-term unemployed"? Pay has stagnated, prices have gone up. To have avoided a fall in standards, one has to be either wealthy or asset-rich. This means owning property in London, as do most of the media/political class, me included.

 

Nonetheless, my standard of living is certainly affected by the distress all around: by the numbers of mentally ill people wandering the streets; by what happens in my child's school; by seeing friends and family pushed out of hospital long before they are able to care for themselves. Austerity meant we quickly forgot the happiness index, but we must still comprehend that a decent standard of living comes from understanding rather than undermining mutual dependencies.

 

This is what underlies the ongoing argument over care for the elderly: cash versus care does not compute because care as a commodity has a different kind of value. Its value links the public to the private, stubbornly resisting easy marketisation; thus it is undersold. But having undersold the Royal Mail, it appears that the coalitions fail to understand markets at all. Earlier this week in this paper, shadow cabinet minister Stewart Wood correctly identified the "complete intellectual confusion" at the heart of the Cameron-Osborne project concerning the relationship between government and the market. Even the most pro-market folk realise reforms are necessary and in the public interest.

 

 

Globally, the pulling away of a super-rich class is deeply disturbing. Still, we are invited to celebrate the fact that Angela Ahrendts was able to "de-chav" Burberry and sell the brand in China and so can go to Apple on probably double her current £17m package. To exist with this ludicrous inequality, a twisted logic comes into play: a logic that makes those at the bottom accountable in ways those at the top never are. No one should be surprised at the thesis on education and genetics written by Dominic Cummings (Gove's former special adviser). If those born to rule feel themselves to be born cleverer and richer than average, then those at the bottom are not just materially poorer but start off with poor genetic material. If this is so, what can government do about it and why should it even try?

 

 

Nonetheless, the endless rhetoric about getting people back to work where there is none keeps reproducing itself. So the jobless, the poor and uncared for must account every day for the awful reality of their own worklessness, or bad parenting, or general inadequacy. The entrepreneurial fantasy plays out on talent shows but becomes ever more impossible in a housing bubble. That even the middle classes don't have a spare quarter of a million pounds to house their offspring is reported as a news story.

 

Politicians snipe over graphs of disposable income. Economic doublethink befuddles all parties. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith described doublethink as the ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory opinions, but a key aspect is also being able to repudiate morality while laying claim to it. This surely is where the debate about standards of living must start: the immorality of food banks in one of the world's richest countries. Our standards of everything – mine and yours – are lowered by their existence. A society that tolerates this, a governnment that refuses to acknowledge why, is neither "big" nor clever. For, actually, the chancers or whoever these genetically poor folk are who use their services, are returning some food because they cannot afford to heat it up. This is no standard. This is not living.

[Gnasher]

 

Where's the fucking rioting? A la poll tax? It's the only language these bastards understand. They don't give two fucks about pensioners dying through the cold. What type of fucked up society is this?

 

The end game can't come quick enough.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Seen that the US's debt level has risen to nearly $17 trillion before close of play yesterday. Then has risen by $3.3 again by 10 past 7 this morning.

What the fuck?

[Pureblood]

17 fucking trillion. Does that even fit on a calculator?

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Not on mine.

[Jairzinho]

55378008

[Rotpeter]

55378008

937088145

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

90210

[Bobby Hundreds]

17 trillion debt. At what point do they think this is getting out of hand. They don't because the people who make the decision benefit individually they get richer on the back of making the debt even greater and when the countries are beyond help and a mess they will take their huge wealth and old money and move onto the next financial gold mine. It feels like Britain is being slowly sold off and the vultures are squeezing every little bit of blood that's left before they all fuck off and focus on doing the same to china. We will be the new workforce that travels from country to country 10 in a house so we can send money back home. I fucking detest the Tories I don't like labour either and the fact there's pretty much no choice is depressing. I'll be dictator first thing I do is go to the House of Lords with the wrestlers from the WWE and have a royal rumble.

[Stickman]

3-2-1

[Stickman]

17 trillion debt. At what point do they think this is getting out of hand. They don't because the people who make the decision benefit individually they get richer on the back of making the debt even greater and when the countries are beyond help and a mess they will take their huge wealth and old money and move onto the next financial gold mine. It feels like Britain is being slowly sold off and the vultures are squeezing every little bit of blood that's left before they all fuck off and focus on doing the same to china. We will be the new workforce that travels from country to country 10 in a house so we can send money back home. I fucking detest the Tories I don't like labour either and the fact there's pretty much no choice is depressing. I'll be dictator first thing I do is go to the House of Lords with the wrestlers from the WWE and have a royal rumble.

Isn't Capitalism great...and we keep getting told that Socialism is so bad and will put the country in debt???

[dennis tooth]

Am on ignore so al just leave this here shall I?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24566994

[dennis tooth]

Isn't Capitalism great...and we keep getting told that Socialism is so bad and will put the country in debt???

 

Its not capitalism

[dennis tooth]

The thing is Britain still spends a fair proportion of it's GDP on government expenditure.

The figures are from 2011 so might have been cut dramatically since (as per the thread title), but:

 

Aus: 34.3%

Canada: 39.7%

France: 52.8%

Germany: 43.7%

Greece: 46.8%

Ireland: 42%

Norway: 40.2%

Sweden: 52.5%

UK: 47.3%

US: 38.9%

 

Obviously the UK spend per percentage of GDP is not quite as high as France or Sweden, but still pretty high, and comparable to other developed economies.  Where is it all going?  

Obviously as well the benefit and welfare demonisation is not about saving money, but more about victimisation politics.

 

Interestingly Australia has the lowest government spend out of the economies I picked, which might make you think it is right wing glory hole.

However the minimum wage here is £10 an hour and dole is £150 a week.

Compared to £6.31 an hour and £71 a week in the UK.

 

Perhaps making people work for as little as possible is not the best way to run things?

 

Well we have a lower welfare bill than those countries, so lets see, off the top of my head, the military, the subsidising of the city of the london financial system, the subsidisation of private entities, corporate tax dodging offshoring wealth etc, the privatisation of services that take money out, subsidisation of energy companies, plus a shitload more I cant even begin to think about, in fact Im surprised its that low.

[Gnasher]

Its not capitalism

What would you call it then Dennis?

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

What would you call it then Dennis?

Doesn't doesn't understand the difference between Capitalism and Socialism, Gnasher. Actually, he's not really interested in the differences between things, because he is unable to understand them. He's not one for nuances, details, or even major differences. All lines are blurred to a maverick genius like Toof.

[dennis tooth]

What would you call it then Dennis?

Ignore Nueve, hes a first class idiot, the type who thinks he knows everything in 1 dimension.

For example, when the coalition came to power and said they would cut police numbers/budgets he said crime would go up, I explained it wouldnt, indeed the very measurement of 'crime' as an entity is unable to withstand any serious scrutiny on any meaningful level, when you cut police number, crime as it is measured is very likely to go down, since theres less people and less inclination to measure it for a start. I went into a lot more depth but he didnt want to discuss it. He dismissed that. When crime went down as it has since they've come to power, I pointed this out to him, he then said to me something along the lines of what I said above, with a straight face, man's an idiot.

 

Its plutocratic corporitism.

 

In other words socialism for the rich, free market capitalism for the poor. Socialism is bail outs for the banks for example, thats not capitalism.

When big business dont have to pay you a living wage, and tax payers money pays half so they dont have to, thats socialising their profits.

When they dodge their taxes, that's another form of it, when the government pays subsidies out the arse to big business, thats not capitalism, when they promote the people who funded their political campaigns, via government contracts, thats akin to something closer to historical 'communistic' societies.

When you have concentrated power in the corporation of london, thats a similar thing, when you have people fixing libor rates and getting away with it because tackling that would endanger the financial system which has been bankrupt about 300 times since the 70's whenever capitalism infinged upon it thats not capitalism. The corporations, by their very definition are anti capitalism and do everything they can, with the help of the government to resist the forces of capitalism.

Ive already explained it a few times on this thread but it doesnt get any attention paid to it and I just repeat myself many times over.

Is the queen capitalist? Or socialist?

When the government takes a contract for NHS services to a 3rd party to deliver them, then pays the 3rd party out of tax payers funds, thats not capitalism, thats socialism for the private entity that gets the contract. Its all very simple when you think about it. 

 

A capitalist society would last a few days before it crumbled. Textbook capitalism has never existed anywhere ever. It would not survive.

Closest thing to it would be somewhere like Somalia or Yemen or somewhere.