George Osborne

I’ve got an interview with the state at 11.45 tomorrow (Saturday)

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Well there we go, an interview with the state

I’m surprised that it’s on a Saturday

I’ll be there in the Floral Road  ~ then ~

later: it’s a floral hill or a wount

flower’s hill?

anyway I’ll be there to do something or other

I’ll be okay

Shall we go to the pub?

Race you there

Go on, I haven’t been there for ages. It’s a little astroligal (about stars)

See you there about 1?

Never mind about that

OK see you there, introduce yourself

Might be 1.30 or 2 actually

Please try to insult the spooks better more than me

Fit I have a good time

Is that F It ?

Actually, wasn’t it Netanyahu that wrote these books that started this whole war on terrorism bullshit ? Who did that serve?

edit: spooks are for me quite an entertainment but also a pain

obvious spooks are really good fun and entrertainment

and then ….

spooks are fun and then as soon as they stop being fun … then they’re spooks

If you’re far more popular than usual … what’s that about?

spooks: two of them

 

I’ve had it me and my mate out. Sat at a table. Two gorgeous (unknown to us at that time spooks) can we sit here? Then another 2 male spooks sit down. F m or us. That’s how they do it. Let’s talk about revo;

 

Beautiful woman comes to the house: I want to monitor your water quality (and plant a bug). I know that’s how it works in Bristol area

Met Pol as well as others have some very nasty (killing) equipment. C’mon wake up. There is no easy way to say this – catch up.

 

Continue ReadingI’ve got an interview with the state at 11.45 tomorrow (Saturday)

Commentary and analysis of recent political events

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That Conservative, illiberal Nick Clegg is keen to do the Tories’ work

Clegg leaves the door open to further welfare cuts

George Osborne has made it clear that he plans to introduce “billions” more in welfare cuts if the Tories win the next election, including a possible reduction in the £26,000 household benefit cap and new limits on child benefit, but where does Nick Clegg stand? At the Deputy PM’s final monthly press conference of the year, I asked him whether he was prepared to consider a reduction in the benefit cap in the next parliament. He told me:

It’s not something that I’m advocating at the moment because we’ve only just set this new level and it’s £26,000, which is equivalent to earning £35,000 before tax…I think we need to keep that approach, look and see how it works, see what the effects are, but not rush to start changing the goalposts before the policy has properly settled down.

The key words here are “at the moment”. While Clegg again declared that he believed the priority should be to remove universal pensioner benefits from the well-off (“you start from the top and you work down”), he was careful not rule out a cut in the level of the cap.

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Spiked has a good article on modern slavery being make-believe and Theresa May’s Modern Slavery bill addressing a non-existant problem. This blog has addressed slavery not existing. Spiked are on the Want to make a worthwhile donation this Solstice? page.

Firefighters to strike on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Tony Blair intervened directly in a firefighters’ strike while the FBU was headed by a Labourite idiot. Strange to see Blair referring to the “real world” since he was a total stranger to it.

Image of GCHQ donught buildingHome Secretary Theresa May fails to provide any evidence that the Guardian’s publishing the Edward Snowden leaks have damaged national security as claimed by boss of MI5, Andrew Parker. Keith Vaz, chair of the home affairs committee told May “What you have given us today, and what we have heard so far, is only second-hand information. Mr Parker and Sir John are making statements in open session and nobody knows what the follow-up is.” and “Everyone is appointed by the prime minister … They are asking questions of each other, and giving answers to each other … That is exactly why we need to see them [the agency heads]. But you don’t want us to see them at all.”

Why Cameron is wrong to declare ‘mission accomplished’ in Afghanistan

What the welfare cuts mean for us: ‘The feeling of dread never goes away’

Hungry Christmas: Food Bank Use Soars

2013 in Review: Unions Are the Only Defence Ordinary People Have Left

Poorer than your parents – post-war pensions boom ‘is coming to an end’

Federal judge holds NSA telephone surveillance unconstitutional

Lord Hanningfield says of allowance claims: ‘I have to live, don’t I?’

For the Sake of Humanity Society Must Unleash War on the Tories

SILENT TO THE GRAVE (The Waterhouse Report)

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Commentary and analysis of recent UK politics events

Image of GCHQ donught buildingFollowing Home Secretary Theresa May’s refusal to allow MI5 boss Andrew Parker to appear before the parliamentary home affairs select committee the committee has said that it will question Theresa May more thoroughly.

The issue is about oversight of the security services: the home affairs select committee consider that intelligence agencies should be answerable to parliament and ordinary MPs, the government and the Home Secretary do not. Tim Farron, President of the ‘Liberal-Democrats’ is to propose measures to improve scrutiny of the intelligence services at the ‘Liberal-Democrats’ spring conference. The ‘Liberal-Democrat’ leadership has previously ignored directions from their ‘liberal-democratic’ party e.g. student tuition fees.

The public accounts committee has commented on Chancellor George Osborne use of misleading statistics on Britain’s budget deficit.

PAC chair Margaret Hodge said it was “hard to understand why the government debt and deficit highlighted in the whole government accounts differ from those reported in the ONS’s national accounts.”

“According to the former document, compiled on the basis of well-understood accounting standards, the UK’s in-year deficit for 2011-12 was £185bn. The national accounts used by the chancellor put the figure at £90bn.”

George Osborne has said that he wants “billions” more cut from the welfare budget. George Eaton at the New Statesman speculates where the axe might fall:

…

What cuts could he have in mind? It’s worth looking back at the speech David Cameron made on the subject in June 2012 when he outlined a series of possible measures, including:

  • The restriction of child-related benefits for families with more than two children.
  • A lower rate of benefits for the under-21s.
  • Preventing school leavers from claiming benefits.
  • Paying benefits in kind (like free school meals), rather than in cash.
  • Reducing benefit levels for the long-term unemployed. Cameron said: “Instead of US-style time-limits – which remove entitlements altogether – we could perhaps revise the levels of benefits people receive if they are out of work for literally years on end”.
  • A lower housing benefit cap. Cameron said that the current limit of £20,000 was still too high.
  • The abolition of the “non-dependent deduction”. Those who have an adult child living with them would lose up to £74 a week in housing benefit.

Osborne would also likely reduce the household benefit cap of £26,000 (he said today that “future governments could change the level” and Tory MPs have been pushing for one of £20,000) and maintain the 1% cap on benefit increases (a real-terms cut).

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G4S and Serco are to have their criminals’ electronic tagging contracts transferred to Crapita.

New Statesman has a guide to fast-track processing of asylum-seekers.

 

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Links today – reach your own conclusions. I spared you from a photo of Alastair Campbell.

Secret memo shows key role for Blairites in Labour’s election team (Alan Milburn started the privatization of the NHS under Blair)

conflicts with David and Ed Miliband turn leadership race into verdict on New Labour

Iain Duncan Smith’s catalogue of waste and poverty

Mandela: never forget how the free world’s leaders learned to change their tune

MPs’ salaries to rise to £74,000 a year despite opposition

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Commentary and analysis on recent UK political events.

Following George Osborne’s Autumn statement there are warnings that the poor will be dead before they are able to retire.

Britain’s poor ‘will die before they retire’

…

Plans to raise the basic state pension age to 70 for people currently in their twenties were laid out in the George Osborne’s Autumn Statement this week. But with male life expectancy at birth as low as 66 in some of the most deprived parts of the country, public health experts have warned that a “one size fits all” pension age risks condemning many to a life without retirement.

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The Mirror has an article on hypocritical Tories praising Mandela when years ago they opposed him, called him a terrorist and for him to be killed.

The ANC started bombing campaigns following the Sharpeville massacre which is regarded as a turning point in South African history.

[8/12/13 Mandela’s Paradoxes Made His Journey Even Greater

… [O]ur celebrity-focused culture virtually ignores the work of the rest of his colleagues during Mandela’s 27 years in prison (1963-1990) that ended Apartheid. The official media picture is as if a man went to jail and solely by example toppled an entrenched system of mandatory racial segregation. That’s not at all how it happened. The organizing – and, in particular, the evolution of it – by so many others remains one of the epic collective heroic stories of the twentieth century.

… Mandela’s absolutely unique evolution on questions of violence and nonviolence and their efficacy in struggle. Mandela began, by his own words, as an expressly Gandhian leader. “I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could,” he later reflected, “but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone.” He then helped lead the military wing of the movement, received training in guerrilla warfare and sabotage in Algeria, and was arrested when back in his own country for that activity. He was kept in prison longer than his original five-year sentence precisely because he refused to renounce armed struggle, right up through his release in 1990.]

Nelson Mandela dead: Conservative ”hypocrites” heap praise on man they branded a terrorist

1990: ANC’s Heritage–Nonviolence to Guerrilla Attacks : Tactics: The anti-apartheid group is under pressure to negotiate. But many young members are impatient. 

 

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