Incompetence will destroy this government, not the cuts
contribution by Sue Marsh
It seems astonishing to me that a Conservative Party that spent 13 years in opposition have such poorly thought through policies.
Here’s a quick list of recent developments that should surely leave even the most loyal Cameron-flag-waver feeling a little discombobulated?
» We saw Michael Gove scrap the Building Schools for the Future fund, finding that, in fact he was breaking contracts left right and centre. This led to a high court Judge ruling that, “Gove’s actions over the scrapping of the (BSF) initiative last year had been ‘so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power’”
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How Labour can win on welfare
Jonathan Todd on the Progress website argues that:
Iain Duncan Smith did not so much enter the welfare debate at the DWP with his chin exposed as with a baseball bat in his hand. Labour had become so synonymous with unfair welfare payments that we were ripe for further kicking on the issue. Alexander began to recover Labour’s position as shadow DWP secretary. Liam Byrne seeks to complete this journey. But we began it so far behind that the best we can now possibly achieve is a draw.
Hmm. I went in search to try and find evidence for this claim.
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Enterprise Zones: a waste of money and destructive to communities
contribution by Gary Dunion
In a display of loyalty to the memory of Margaret Thatcher, George Osborne yesterday announced he’s bringing back Enterprise Zones.
There will be 21 in total. Ten locations have been chosen by Osborne, so we will see EZs in Birmingham and Solihull; Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Greater Manchester, the West of England, the Tees Valley, “North Eastern” (whatever that means), the Black Country, and Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire. continue reading… »
Growth down, borrowing up: Osborne blames “Wrong kind of inflation”
Big news on the public finances in today’s FT. It would seem that the Chancellor’s Office has had their first look at the OBR forecasts and they don’t like what they see.
In an attempt to get their excuses in first, we have a front page story in the FT. A story which doesn’t seem to entirely stack up.
Ignore the ephemera about a ‘Learjet levy’ on private planes and the entirely expected news that the OBR is going to downgrade growth – the big news is that borrowing forecasts are being revised up.
Apparently this is because of the ‘wrong kind of inflation’. continue reading… »
Govt plans council tax rises for poorest
It’s popcorn time for fans of joined up government as Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith’s departments go to war over council tax benefit. Duncan Smith is attempting to simplify the benefits system, while Pickles is planning to let every local council set its own rules on who gets council tax benefit, thus making the system more complicated and increasing the risk that people are better off on benefits than working. As usual, if Pickles wins, the losers are likely to be people on low incomes. continue reading… »
Tory claims on pension and benefits spending don’t add up
Earlier this week Tory HQ, under the direction of George Osborne, put together a briefing about “Ballsonomics”, which claimed to set out £12 billion of unfunded spending pledges which Labour had made.
I had a quick look, and the first, and largest, claim was that Labour were planning to spend an extra £5.8 billion on pensions and benefits in 2014/15.
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Could the BMA seriously disrupt Lansley’s plans for the NHS?
This morning the FT reports that Andrew Lansley has opened the door to further concessions on the NHS bill, as Libdem members “rejected his sweeping reform plans”.
Already a bad day for the UK health minister. Then at around 11.45am, 15 March, the British Medical Association (BMA) “voted to call upon Andrew Lansley to withdraw the bill” adding that “any willing provider will hurt the provision of healthcare in the NHS in favour of private industry“.
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Why time-limiting disability benefits will hurt working families like mine
contribution by Sue Marsh
Today, I’m launching my new campaign.
During the CSR, George Osborne announced that he would be time-limiting ESA (Employment Support Allowance, previously Incapacity Benefit) to one year. This means, that anyone with a working partner found capable of doing any kind of work at all will only receive state support for one year.
Once that year is up they will receive no help at all, a loss of £4661. This is three times as much as higher rate taxpayers will lose in child benefit.
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Do Conservatives really think they can take on doctors… and win?
contribution by Neil Foster
The Conservative-led government is determined to improve support for its health proposals, amid fears it has failed to convince the public of the need for such drastic changes.
It is not a coincidence that more and more doctors are speaking out against their plans at the same time. The Government faces the steepest of uphill battles because it mistakenly thinks this is about ‘the message’. It’s not. It’s about motives and in particular the trust of the messengers.
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Rejoice! Cameron is planning to take over the No2AV campaign
David Cameron is seriously worried about losing the AV referendum. You don’t have to believe me on that, just listen to the whispers across the media landscape.
The upside looks to be that the Conservative party will effectively take over the No2AV operation and Cameron will front it. I am more than happy for this to happen. The downside is that they are planning to pour more of their City-backed money into the campaign.
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How exactly will IDS pay for his flat pension scheme?
There are powerful arguments in favour of a simpler flat-rate pension of the kind outlined by Iain Duncan Smith yesterday.
The question is who is going to pay for it. Who will win? Who will lose? We do not know the answers to these questions yet. Simplification is always a good thing in principle, but in practice is almost always much controversial.
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How the upcoming welfare cuts will hit blind and disabled people
contribution by Andrew Kaye
Apparently there are 400,000 benefits cheats in Britain, which shows what a workshy country we have become. Shockingly 75% of individuals on sickness benefits are faking. Furthermore, it is nothing short of a scandal that there are 86,000 people under the age of 24 on sickness benefits.
Well, I might think that if I got all my information from certain newspapers that deliberately distort the figures. With the Government’s flagship Welfare Reform Bill scheduled for its Second Reading this week, it is incumbent on all those who participate in the debate to temper passion with reason.
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Cameron unveils plans to privatise… nearly everything
David Cameron has written an article for the Daily Telegraph today, which the paper has promoted as a news story.
The paper reports that Cameron “promises public sector revolution” by ending the “state’s monopoly” over public sector work. It looks to me like, on paper at least, the privatisation of pretty much every public service except national defence. Even policing and the fire service!
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Why Cameron’s funding for the NHS will be worse than Thatcher’s
contribution by Richard blogger
The Conservative party went into the 2010 election with the slogan “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”.
Labour knew that it was not possible to do the former without doing the latter, and because they didn’t give a straight answer about how they would change NHS funding, they lost their traditional NHS electoral advantage.
But how do the spending committments, only now coming to light, match up?
continue reading… »
Why human rights for prisoners and even paedos matter
First they came for the prisoners.
A few weeks ago, MPs voted to ignore the European Court of Human Rights to keep a full ban on prisoners. Our Prime Minister put blatant populism above politics, declaring that “giving prisoners the vote makes me sick” (even if that means paying £143 million in compensation from the barren public purse).
Then they came for the paedophiles.
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Tory MP Nadine Dorries’ aide quits; blames blogger for “smears”
Only a little over a week ago, blogger Tim Ireland published two blog posts raising legitimate questions about Dorries’ financial relationship with Lynn Elson and her company, Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd.
Both articles did little more than aggregate information from public sources. Now Elson has started putting out allegations of harassment against Tim and calling it “spiteful and fabricated tittle-tattle”, while saying nothing of the issues involved.
continue reading… »
How Cameron’s new modernising advisor sees the Conservative party
Andrew Cooper is to become Downing Street director of strategy, having been head of the pollster Populus.
There was a nervous reaction from Tim Montgomerie, the influential editor of ConservativeHome, who quickly tweeted:
Andrew Cooper once described the Tory grassroots as “vile” to me. And now he’s head of strategy for David Cameron.
There is good evidence that they have substantive reasons to be nervous.
The new director of strategy certainly takes a pretty much diametrically opposed view of why the Tories fell short at the last election to that offered in the ConservativeHome post-election inquest.
Cooper strongly supports the thesis that the Conservatives fell short because voters did not feel that they had changed enough – which does indeed cast the Tory party as much more the problem than the solution.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the evidence that Cameron is no longer seen as more centrist than his party by the public. But Cooper will probably fear the truth in Ed Miliband’s observation that “we are seeing the recontamination of the Tory brand“.
This was how I reported Andrew Cooper’s critique of the Tory election campaign for the New Statesman.
He said last night that the strategic weakness of the Tory campaign was always to respond with an “unremittingly negative” attack on Gordon Brown, which failed to take on board how far the decisive electoral question remained voters’ doubts about the Conservatives. This meant that they failed to secure enough support – most notably in Scotland, in London (particularly among non-white voters), and among public-sector workers and the less well-off, where those who agreed it was time for a change remained repelled by the risk of the “same old Tories”.
As the Tory leadership realised this, they began to make “much more detailed preparations for a hung parliament than anybody realised”, Cooper said.
Cooper was, in effect, voicing a significant criticism of George Osborne’s approach to electoral and campaign strategy. Osborne was the voice of the “relentlessly negative” messaging which, on Cooper’s analysis, simply poured energy and resources into an argument the Tories had already won.
After the 2005 election, Cooper produced a presentation which emphasised that 79% of Tory voters felt the party was “on the right track to get into power before too long” but only 28% of non-Tories agreed.
Cooper and Michael Gove offered a route-map, according to Tim Bale’s book, for the Cameroons.
1. Always try to see ourselves through the voters’ eyes.
2. Talk about the issues that matter most to voters (not the issues that we’re most at home with).
3. Use the language of people, not the language of politicians.
4. “Tell people what we stand for – not (just) what is wrong with Labour. Unless we give voters new reasons to support us they won’t.
5. Remember Tim Bell’s rule: ‘if they haven’t heard it, you haven’t said it’ – so repetition is vital.
6. Respect modern Britain. If we seem not to like Britain today, the feeling will surely be reciprocated.
7. Don’t be shrill or strident – that’s not how normal civilised people behave.
8. Remember that whatever we are talking about, the most important message is what we are saying about ourselves.
9. Face the fact that we lost people’s trust because of how we behave (and sound) as well as what we say”.
10. Focus on the voters we have to win, don’t preach to the converted.
11. Be disciplined and consistent.
The focus on turning the Tories into ‘normal civilised people’ does suggest a particular view of the party as mainly containing idiosyncratic, swivel-eyed ideologues.
What is also striking now is just how strongly the emphasis is on etiquette and behaviour, and just how little there is on political content.
Perhaps one of the lessons of David Cameron’s incomplete and shallow modernisation of his party is that good manners are important, but not a substitute for a political strategy.
—
A longer version of this article is at Next Left
How many disabled people are fit for work? Not as much as ministers claim
How many disabled people on benefits are really fit for work? It’s an important question, prompted by a leak to the BBC of the results of a pilot programme published today.
Ministers are claiming that these results show that two thirds of people who get Incapacity Benefit or Income Support on the grounds of incapacity are “able to work.”. But that is entirely the wrong way of looking at it.
continue reading… »
Most Libdems have also started to shift against the cuts
The Independent on Sunday/Sunday Mirror ComRes polling yesterday brought bad news for the Coalition, as John Rentoul sets out, with opinion shifting against the government on every front.
The long lost “fair cuts” argument haemhorrages further. Trailing by 28-57% on whether the government is cutting too severely and too fast suggests the these ‘cuts are necessary’ case is in increasing trouble too.
continue reading… »
Why Libdems should welcome the revolt by local councillors
contribution by Sue Marsh
The news yesterday that 17 council leaders and 71 local party heads spoke out against the devastating 28% local authority cuts should be celebrated, not opposed by the Liberal Democrats.
I firmly believe that if indeed the public did vote for a coalition, then this is what they expected. When something seemed wrong, I think they wanted one or the other party to oppose it. Not destructively but passionately. Not to harm the government, but to strengthen it.
continue reading… »
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» The government wants to control what you see online
» Is it legal for us to supply arms to Libyan rebels?
» Government prepares to compromise over watered-down banking reforms
» Cuts to back-office jobs will still affect frontline police officers
» Incompetence will destroy this government, not the cuts
» The fall-out from Saturday illustrates the limits of left pluralism
» It’s Osborne who is maxing out the nation’s credit card
» Sayeeda Warsi plays the race card to campaign against electoral reform
» The EMA is to be replaced by Victorian style charity
» Evaluating the #March26 protests
» Adam Ramsay: in defence of posh lefties
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