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Category: IDS Iain Duncan Smith

Some light Christmas reading
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A few politics articles for light Christmas reading …
Why are taxpayers spending £60m on a bridge for Joanna Lumley?
The bridge has been sold as a new public right of way by Johnson. In reality it is anything but. TfL’s business case suggests that just 0.03% of all those using the bridge will be people making new trips. The rest will be either tourists or others already on the Southbank.
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So who will benefit from this bridge? Well according to the business plan, the biggest benefit of the bridge will be to “residential property values”. Incredibly, they estimate that the bridge will raise local property values by an estimated £84 million.
So excellent news for the tiny number of wealthy property owners in central London. Not so good news for the millions of people struggling to afford the cost of their monthly travelcard to work.
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TfL bury Boris bike fare hike under the Christmas tree
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The cycle hire scheme, perhaps Boris Johnson’s most notable achievement as mayor, has so far been serially underused, with a complex hiring mechanism turning potential users away.
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Promised “at no cost to taxpayers” it remains substantially subsidised to the tune of millions of pounds a year.
A poor value-for-money sponsorship deal with Barclays and a complex hiring mechanism, means that it has so far failed to generate anything like enough revenue to cover its costs.
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Iain Duncan Smith to meet Universal Credit target in 700 years’ time
Ian Duncan Smith promised that more than a million people would be signed up to his universal credit scheme by April 2014, with twelve million signed up by 2017.
However, new figures released today reveal the DWP currently have just 17,850 people on their caseload.
This means that at the current rate of progress, it will take them almost 700 more years to meet their original target of twelve million.
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Christmas cannot be captured in fairytale endings, Archbishop warns
[T]he true spirit of Christmas cannot be captured in fairytale endings, the Archbishop of Canterbury will tell the faithful.
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Life-size cardboard Ed Miliband cutout ‘held HOSTAGE’ after being ‘stolen’ from County Hall
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A statement from Worcestershire County Council read: “We are aware that a life-sized picture has gone missing out of the Labour room within County Hall.
“Staff and elected members are working closely to ensure that it is returned and this situation is concluded.”
The cut-out is the same height as the Labour leader – at 5ft 9in.
It is alleged that prior to its disappearance, some staff members turned the cardboard Ed around so people walking past could only see his backside in the window.
25 December 2014
Conservative and Lib-Dem-Conservative attacks on disabled people
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We’re NOT all in this together: the story of the closure of the Independent Living Fund from Moore Lavan Films on Vimeo.
26 November 2014
Appeal against the bedroom tax!
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There’s a judgement that says a bedroom is a room furnished as a bedroom or used to sleep in. All bedroom tax decisions can be appealed. Time is running out to appeal.
The Bedroom Tax is Dead here’s why | SPeye Joe (Welfarewrites)
Bedroom Tax – Finally Killed by Plain Old Common-Sense?
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The effect of this outbreak of common-sense is that, potentially, any or all of the original Bedroom Tax decisions taking effect last April are wrong – as councils cannot have known the actual situation and were making decisions based on an assumption that the rooms concerned were bedrooms. What’s more, despite the time elapsed since then, these decisions are still appealable – appeals can be accepted up to thirteen months after the date of the original decision. This clearly makes it important to act quickly. Anyone in any doubt about the correctness of their Bedroom Tax decision should write to the local authority decision-maker and seek an appeal in their own individual case. But this must be done soon – it will probably be too late by April.
The implications of this legal development may even go so far as to invalidate all of the decisions. If a room isn’t habitually used as a bedroom, it may fall outwith the normal everyday definition of the word – and therefore beyond the scope of the legislation as it stands. Technically, in order to assess whether a particular room qualifies as a “bedroom”, the local authority would have to go out and inspect it. In practice, this would be a task on a scale made impossible by limitations on resources. But unless a property has been thus assessed, then no decision can properly be made.
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11 February 2014
UK politics news
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Recent UK politics news articles
4 February 2014
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 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.
Home 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)
17 December 2013

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