Owen Smith calls 18,000-strong group an “alien parasite”
This is the tinfoil hat moment of the Labour right, as it realises half a million people cannot be bought by the money of a supermarket millionaire.
So get out the popcorn. You’re about to see what happens to the neo-liberal wing of Labour — and its propaganda arm — when the workers, the poor and the young get a say in politics.
In the heated debate sparked by the new government’s decision to re-introduce the 11-plus exam, there has been little attention paid to Lord Baker’s proposal for a “14-plus” division between academic and vocational courses. Age 11 has always been too early for such decisions. Children’s abilities are not yet clearly defined and, even more seriously, they are …
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?
massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world
British voters on June 23 may also decide the future of globalisation/ financialisation. If Britain votes to leave the EU, globalisation may be over, and with it an era in history.
A new industrial society will be created and services will cease to be the backbone of the economy
To do it right, the world would have to go after one notorious bastion of tax secrecy: the United States of America.
Nearly 100 countries around the world have agreed to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) framework for an automatic exchange of information on financial accounts. But the United States is thus far the only country to explicitly refuse to join.
Tom Pride has a stronger stomach than This Writer, if he can stick out ConservativeHome for any length of time. Still, it seems the effort is worth it, to pick out sordid skulduggery like the follo…
Troublingly, two articles written recently by Conservative Home’s influential assistant editor Henry Hill, have proposed getting rid of retirement:
“The entire concept of ‘a retirement’ is, after all, an artefact of the welfare system.”
scrapping pensions:
“As medical advances help us stay active longer, the expectation in the future must surely be that whilst you can work, you work – unless you can save enough to pay for a period of idleness yourself.”
and replacing GPs and other doctors with untrained volunteers:
“85 per cent of a typical doctor’s work can be done perfectly well by a ‘physician’s assistant’ with a fraction of the training or wages. Volunteers would receive pay, training, and legal rights to take time out of their ‘civilian’ life to work for so many weeks of the year in the NHS.”
We are bamboozled into letting go of our rights as an act of "we are all in it together" solidarity to help the nation recover from the banking crisis. But we will not easily recover those rights when the recovery comes. Even then we will be left with less salary, less pension rights, less workers' protections, less health and less education. All so that those with the most can take more. To be fair to the Tories this is not new - it's been happening for years.
“What that shows is that for the poorest people they have received the same share of government services and the richest people have paid more in tax. I think that is a fair approach to fiscal consolidation.” LIAR. What it shows is that a disproportionate amount of the national income goes to the wealthiest few who control the money and want to keep as much of it as they can get their hands on.
Given that there would be no RBS without government intervention, you might very well think that the taxpayer should have first call on any capital distribution from RBS until the state’s capital distribution to RBS has been paid back, and with interest. Had a commercial partner been found to rescue RBS, we wouldn’t be even having this debate. However, because it was the government that had to step up with taxpayers’ funds – a government wary of nationalising RBS – the bank got very preferential terms. Its shareholders at the time of the bailout, who had been facing obliteration, got to keep a piece of the pie, albeit a small one.
The EU is a highly undemocratic organisation ratcheting more and more power with every passing day. It is impervious to public opinion. The people who matter in the law-making process are unelected and therefore unaccountable...
The European Council - sometimes called The Council - is the meeting of the Member States. It is called the European Council when the leaders of each Member State are in attendance, and The Council when it's the ministers for the policy area being discussed attending. This is the final hurdle any European proposal has to pass in order to become law. Decision-making at this stage is done almost entirely by Qualified Majority Voting. This means the UK Government can vote against a proposal and as long as it receives enough votes from the other Member States it becomes law in the UK anyway. The UK only has a veto to prevent EU laws impacting the UK in a very minor number of areas. If the European Council/Council approves proposals, they become EU law. They will be in the form of EU regulations or directives. If they are regulations the new EU law applies to all Member States without any of those states having to pass legislation in their own home Parliaments. If they are directives, the national Parliaments are forced to change their national laws within a specific time limit to comply with EU law - whether they want to or not.
“I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self-imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest,”
Iain Duncan Smith, former UK Welfare Secretary
Iain Duncan Smith has resigned from the British government after the annual budget included a £1.3bn attack on disability benefits. Here’s what it means in five bullet points:
Austerity has hit the buffers. Its aim, according to Conservative economic theory, is to kickstart growth. But it hasn’t so they need more austerity. At some point the austerity vs humanity problem was going to trigger the conscience of a Tory minister and this is it.
The background is the vicious Tory infighting over Europe. Given the Cameron faction is using the whole bag of dirty tricks against the Johnson/Duncan Smith faction over Brexit, IDS has clearly had enough. There will now be a strong challenge to Cameron after 23 June, whether Britain votes to stay or leave.
Osborne’s budget is unravelling. The education secretary Nicky Morgan last night suggested billions of pounds worth of cuts were “suggestions”. She had to cut short a TV interview today. My long engagement with Westminster leads me to see this as circumstatial evidence of a wider civil war inside the Conservative government over the scale of pointless austerity Osborne is imposing to reach his — clearly unreachable and stupid — fiscal targets.
This is Jeremy Corbyn’s victory. In one speech he’s blown apart the Tory front bench, made likely two substantial revolts, destroyed the cabinet and made the Tories look like incompetent fools. And the weekend is young: it’s probably not over. IDS’ letter to Cameron draws the logic clearly.
It’s a disaster for Blairites. They’d prepared their cabbage patches of opposition to Labour’s own new fiscal rule, and spent weeks revving up to diss Corbyn over his expected mishandling of the Budget. Instead Labour is ahead in one poll, tied in another, and its radical left leadership looks not just vindicated politically, but — and this matters in the Commons — tactically: Corbyn and McDonnell executed a near perfect hit on the government by announcing their own fiscal rule; denouncing the benefit cuts; and now splitting the cabinet.
It is no longer “put up or shut up” time for the Progress wing of Labour. Just the latter.
As for the Cameron government: its disarray tonight is of a different order to, for example, the Heseltine resignation of 1986. That happened while Thatcherism was in its ascendant. This happens while Cameronism — whatever that actually is — has descended into ideological and governmental disarray.
And — the bottom line — because of IDS’ position as a Brexiteer: the whole episode, on top of today’s disgusting EU deal over Turkey — gives momentum to Brexit. Watch my twitter feed @paulmasonnews as it all unfolds.
Valéry Giscard D’Estaing was the first to say it frankly in 2002: Turkey must never be a member of the European Union. It was not a matter of time, of Turkey’s adjusting to the political culture of Europe, of economic or legal harmonisation. For Giscard, never meant never, because Turkey is not a European country. To admit this huge Muslim, non-European state, he said, would mean the end of the EU.
How can there be a common sense of citizenship and allegiance among the citizens of the EU where (unlike in the US) there is no common language
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