Wow, this post’s been up for half an hour and not a single person has made any of the typical abusive comments that oyu’d expect to see an anything vaguely positive mentioning a Lib Dem.

Is there some national event goign on I’ve not noticed?

But yeah-cuts as bad as they were on welfare were too much for many of us, any further is completely unacceptable.

I’m gad to see the Liberals standing up for the poor. The Tories clearly have a Mitt Romney attitude to them, and Labour don’t appear to be far behind.

The housing benefit cuts in England are already bound to put many people on to the streets. Inflation may notionally be at 2.5% but we know that at the poorer end of the spectrum is is much hight with flue rising by 9% and food bills rising by more than 10%.

Poor people spend a vast amount of their money on these two things.

Life just gets more hellish for the poor in Britain. The Tories need to remember that even Brits can only be pushed so far.

They don’t have any legitimate apolitical reason for opposing further cuts. If they were able to support the Welfare Reform Act and the welfare policies enacted prior to and alongside it, in spite of the obvious consequences, then it would be utterly contradictory for them to pretend they have found a molecule of ethics or reason in regards to what might happen in the future.

Either they care or they don’t- their enabling of what has already come to pass is not in line with the former however.

I very much doubt there are any real plans to freeze benefits. It looks to me like a standard political tactic: leak that you’re going to do something really horrible then when you announce you’re going to do something slightly less vile people say that’s actually not so bad.

As for firmness, I’ve seen firmer jellies

A two-year freeze in benefits, which would freeze the incomes of the poorest people in this country, is not a place we should be looking at.

Actually a two year freeze is likely to be better than what they are going to get. Which is shrinking incomes. Along with the rest of us. If something is not done to encourage people to invest and lend, the economy will continue to slide into depression. Incomes will go down all around. The government will try to do something about this through inflation. Which means even if benefits were frozen people will get poorer. They will also try to lower the exchange rate further. Which also means people will get poorer.

There really is no alternative to this. There is no question we are all going to be poorer and people on low incomes are going to get poorer quicker than the rest of us. The question is really only how much damage we want to do to the productive economy while making that happen.

Cutting welfare benefits further would not only hurt the most vulnerable, as George Osborne himself admitted, but it would further depress demand in the economy and sink us further into recession.

Demand is not the issue. More pop Keynesianism is not going to help. We need to look at encouraging people to invest and to lend. That means the promise of lower taxes in the future, if not now. Not higher ones.

But again it does not really matter. We have run out of options and cash. We can’t afford present levels of spending and they will have to come down. It doesn’t matter who is in power or what they want to do. They will have to lower welfare spending. They can do this openly, the Tory way, or they can do this grudgingly the Labour Way, or they can create a complete bollocks of the whole thing, the Radical Left way, but it all comes down to the same thing in the end.

The damage has already been done.

The answer to the question posed is No.

@5 SMFS

“We need to look at encouraging people to invest and to lend. That means the promise of lower taxes in the future, if not now.”

Do you actually know anybody who runs a business and what motivates investment?

@8

and what motivates investment?

Apparently it’s lower taxes rather than customers buying stuff and creating a demand…

It’s not the amount of benefits paid that will be the major cause of grief for claimants in the future, it’s the way they will be paid: when Universal Credit comes in it will be paid to the head of the household, making the rest of the family financially dependant on that person.

Since that ‘head of the family’ will almost certainly be the husband/father universal credit is bringing back an explicitly patriarchal system that feminists pretty much seem to be ignoring.

I’m trying to imagine the conversation.

“I’m setting up a factory to make widgets.”

“Got any orders?”

“No … but taxes are going down next year.”

The counterpart is:

“I’m setting up a factory to make widgets.”

“Got any orders?”

“Loads. Taxes might go up next year, but I’ll be making twice as much profit.”

Be nice if the MP’s had a few cuts, my self the throat would be a good cut.

Dealing with infestation by the eton cockroaches will require high calibre pesticidal responses.

No one trusts them, what have they got to lose if they U-turn, everyone thinks they’re going to anyway.
A tenner says they roll over and show the Tories their bellies again before Christmas.