Politics

[Rob W 0]

Cameron came out of the program very well.......and yes I would say that.....but he did

 

Don't think he came out particularly well for lying to his own party that Labour would give the Lib Dems voting reforms.

 

It's questionable that he did lie. He said that he believed that was going to be the case at the time (yes, I know he would say that but then these meetings were all so secretive that it's not surprising there was Chinese whispers).

 

You only had to look at ashdown and Simon weird bloke ? To realise they were making all sorts of claims during the negotiations to get a better deal.

 

Clegg even smirked when asked about it.

 

 

hell they were selling -you always over claim when your in that position

[Tooj 17]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/618...ependency.thtml

 

There’s been plenty political drama in these past few weeks, but the most crucial agenda – and by some margin – is Iain Duncan Smith’s proposed overhaul of welfare. It doesn’t deserve to be categorised as just another political tussle. As I say in the News of the World today, it is easily the most important issue in Britain, and it is overlooked because of an affliction which most of our political class suffers: that of moral long-sightedness. No one wears wristbands for the British poor, Prime Ministers pledge to “eradicate illiteracy” in Africa yet are strangely indifferent to the illiteracy on our own doorstep. The plight and lives of people on benefits, and the one-in-six children who live in workless households is somehow a deeply unfashionable one. For too long, the Tories thought that poverty was somehow Labour’s territory. Labour had its own blindness: pouring money in the welfare ghettoes, as if this would solve the problem. Both overlooked the essential Beveridge insight: that idleness (as opposed to claimant unemployment) is a “giant evil”. This is the key insight behind the “broken society” agenda that David Cameron has adopted.

 

The IDS agenda, as developed by the Centre for Social Justice, is the most thought-through solution to this problem. When he was sent to the DWP, it created perhaps the best chance we will have to sort this. Welfare reform is exhausting, but in IDS we have someone who wants to stay the course of resign. His discussion paper came out on Friday with four options. The first is the Universal Benefit, an idea which – when it was first born – became a cover story for The Spectator. There are three lesser options, which reflect varying degrees of cop-out. The winner will be decided in a White Paper in November, and it will be a test of this government’s commitment to fixing that ‘broken society’.

 

The IDS case is simple, and was made clear by an excellent Taxpayers Alliance video (see below). If welfare pays more than work, why work? The Centre for Policy Studies recently calculated a scenario where a woman who does extra work get to keep just 4.5p in the pound of what she earns (pdf here). This should cause outrage, and would if our political class were more interested in policy. (The ‘let them eat tax credits’ approach of Labour left reflects an interest in ideology, not policy or people.) IDS says this should be at least 40p in the pound. Simples. You just replace this overlapping web of benefits with a single clear structure which will sweep away every welfare trap.

 

This basic equation lies behind so many social problems we have today. Why do we have so many immigrants? Because welfare makes it not worth the while of millions of British people to work. Why did Britain never have fewer than a scandalous five million on the dole in the Labour years? Same reason. What’s the common thread running through our social horror stories like Karen Matthews and most instances of knife-crime? The key players tend to live in welfare ghettoes, walking the road to dependency paved by the welfare system. Beveridge chose the words “giant evil” advisedly. To fight this evil, ensure that work actually pays – for everyone. What IDS is proposing is amazingly simple, and has transformative potential.

 

The Treasury is opposing it, partly because it say it can’t afford to cut tax for the low-paid. IDS argues, basically, that if a woman is getting up at 4am to clean offices then she is entitled to keep every penny of what she earns. That’s a moral argument. But, economically, if we don’t make it worth her while to earn then she’ll choose dole instead – which will be much more expensive in the long run. The Treasury is institutionally blind to such maths and, crucially, blind to the immigration problem. It doesn’t care who takes jobs, as long as it gets NI and PAYE revenues. It hasn’t worked out that mass immigration has broken the link between UK dole and UK jobs. Failure to understand this means failure to understand the UK labour market. Morally and economically, the Treasury officials have it wrong.

 

But, more broadly, opposing change is what the Treasury does. Cameron has inherited raging Whitehall wars: the Treasury was always shafted by the Department for Education under Balls (who’d always go straight to Brown) and so it wants to wreak revenge on the DfE. Next, under Brown, the Treasury decided welfare policy and the DWP just doled out the claimants. The Treasury, institutionally, is upset that the DWP is now setting policy, and wants these upstarts put in their place. I don’t blame Osborne for this: he was an advocate of putting IDS into welfare. And Cameron is dismayed at all these ongoing Balkan-style wars between the government he has inherited. His thinking is that he’ll give the civil servants a few weeks to calm down, and realise that they are now working for a government of “functioning adults” (as Patrick Wintour described the coalition, contrasting it with Labour). If they’re still misbehaving in October, it will be time to bang some heads together. And, whisper it, sack civil servants whose freelancing frustrates the progress of government.

 

To uproot the poisoned tree of Brownism and to support the reforming agenda that this coalition government has so boldly adopted – one needs to do some plumbing. Brown had his power by being the Gollum of Whitehall, living in its back passages. The superficial Blair could never be bothered going down to such detail, which is why Brown always beat him. Cameron needs to find someone who is willing to do three things. 1) Work out where all the civil service antagonism is coming from, 2) Work out what nature it takes, and 3) Enact remedies.

 

The antagonism is old turf wars. This can be remedied by moving people around into new departments (DfID has been so deeply politicised for so long that it may need an 80 percent staff turnaround to make it a normal government department). The nature of the opposition is dodgy assumptions – or what I call policy-based evidence-making. The Treasury, for example, claimed the 50 percent tax raises money by using a false assumption for elasticity rates of high-income taxpayers. The Stern Review managed to fake climate change economics by using an almost fraudulently low discounting rate (as Tim Worstall spotted it – Fleet St didn’t). The civil servants think, correctly, that the ministers never cotton on to this. The only defence ministers have against this is special advisers who are genuine experts, and can spot a trick pulled by the civil service. Cameron’s lack of special advisers makes his government especially vulnerable to being misled by government departments.

 

The civil service’s instant reaction is to stop reform. The Treasury was taught, under Brown, to crush any ideas that it did not originate. This is how it still thinks. This is what IDS, Michael Gove, Nick Herbert and even Andrew Lansley must overcome if they are to reform. They will achieve nothing without covering fire from David Cameron in No10.

 

As CoffeeHousers know, I have huge respect for the Blair reformers. John Hutton, Alan Milburn, John Reid, James Purnell, Andrew Adonis and Jim Murphy were serious, well-intentioned ministers who gave their all it’s not as if reform has never been tried before. Cameron should ask: why did they fail? They had Blair’s No10 behind them. The answer is not, simply, because Brown was there and now he’s not. There is institutional inertia. It’s a shame, in a way, that British government (unlike the American one) has lawmaking powers – because that puts too much focus on legislation. You change Britain by how you handle and reform the Leviathan which is the government machine. Cameron will be judged on this.

 

One final point. Obama is in trouble because he has presided over a jobless recovery. If Cameron’s economic recovery simply serves to suck in more immigrants – because British people have no incentive to take jobs for 4.5p in the pound – then he will have failed as Prime Minister and be punished for it. We have 5.9 million people claiming out-of-work benefits right now – more than the entire populations of Denmark, Finland, Singapore, Ireland or New Zealand. A quarter of Liverpool, Glasgow, Blackpool are on the dole (full list here). Look at the chart below: a quarter of our great cities, on the dole.

 

When a quarter of people were on the dole in the 1930s, we called it a Great Depression. Now, we just shrug and say that life is tough. Somehow, sometime, we became inured to this giant evil of idleness. And didn’t think it strange how immigrants flocked to these cities to find the jobs that we’re paying locals not to take.

 

In failing to fix welfare, Labour oversaw a situation where – as CoffeeHouse revealed – 99 per cent of the new jobs were accounted for by immigration. Welfare reform takes years. A Universal Benefit would require new monthly employers' reports – it’s the cornerstone to the whole system. But even if that goes ahead, it probably wouldn’t start until April 2012. If Cameron wants any results in 2015, he needs to start now. The question is simple: how serious is he about fixing this broken society? In the next few months, we’ll see.

[AgentAxeman 82]

And the same to you, Jackboots!

 

By Richard Littlejohn

 

 

Parliament rose for the summer last week.

 

Not that you’d notice. No one seems to have told the politicians. They continue to behave as if they’re starring in their own soap opera.

 

It had been my intention not to write another word about politics until at least the party conference season in September.

 

Frankly, I’m sick of the sight of the lot of them — and I suspect the same goes for most of you, too.

 

We’ve had politicians in our faces for an eternity. A period of radio silence would be welcome.

 

For the month of August, the Westminster village should be a ghost town, like Paris during les grandes vacances.

 

I don’t want to read another word about the tensions in the coalition; spending cuts; the dismal Labour leadership contest; or what Vince Cable thinks about anything.

 

There was even an opinion poll at the weekend showing how many seats the parties could expect to win if an election were to be held tomorrow.

 

What a pointlessly fatuous exercise.

 

There isn’t going to be an election any time soon. Who cares?

 

We’ve had an election and most people seem content with the result. now shut up, go away and get on with it.

 

Even though I’ve been offering a reward for sightings of Gordon Brown, his vanishing act should be the template for all MPs.

 

Gordon was pictured at the weekend on the water with his two sons.

 

He was wearing a suit jacket under his life jacket. Someone should tell him it’s OK to relax for five minutes.

 

Apparently, he’s spent the past couple of months writing a book about how to get us out of the economic mess he created — which is a bit like Osama Bin Laden submitting a planning application for rebuilding the Twin Towers. He needn’t have bothered. We’re not interested.

 

Despite my plan to declare this column a politics-free zone for the duration of the holidays, I’d reckoned without the resurrection of disgraced former home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

 

With a stunning lack of self-awareness, Jackboots has applied for a £77,000-a-year, part-time post as vice-chairman of the BBC Trust.

 

Quite why the BBC thinks a two-and-a-half-days-a-week sinecure is worth 77 grand is one thing.

 

Where Jackboots gets the idea that she’s just the woman for the job is another.

 

Having being resoundingly rejected by the voters of Redditch, what gives her the right to expect to be reattached immediately to the taxpayers’ teat?

 

If General Sir Richard Dannatt is prevented from becoming a Tory defence minister, because it’s less than a year since he left the Army, why should a Labour ex-minister be allowed to work in a top public sector job just a couple of months after being kicked out of her seat?

 

She used to be a teacher. If she’s short of a shilling, she could always apply to open one of Michael Gove’s new academies.

 

It would be a novelty to see a politician putting something back into society instead of permanently shoving her snout in the public spending trough.

 

Jackboots, you may recall, was forced to resign from the Cabinet after it was revealed she had deceitfully claimed over £100,000 in expenses by pretending that her sister’s spare room was her ‘main residence’.

 

She also submitted a bill for pornographic movies and a patio heater.

 

The real mystery is how she managed to avoid prosecution. The courts have just ruled that four MPs cannot hide behind Parliamentary privilege to escape fraud charges.

 

For the life of me, I can’t understand the material difference between their alleged crimes and the bent expenses submitted by Smith.

 

Although these human sacrifices have a case to answer, they are naturally aggrieved at having been singled out while so many others walked away scot-free. There should be dozens of MPs in the dock, as a basis for negotiation.

 

But rather than show contrition, self-styled ‘honourable members’ have reverted to type and spent the first few weeks of this Parliament trying to subvert the new, stricter, expenses regime.

 

Their misplaced sense of grievance is matched only by their inflated sense of entitlement. They still seem to believe the usual standards do not apply to them.

 

Jackboots spoke eloquently for most MPs when she told a reporter who challenged her, quite legitimately, about her BBC job application to ‘f*** off’.

 

No, pet, that’s what we want you to do. And take the rest of the political class with you.

[Guest alex]

By Richard Littlejohn

Stopped reading there.

[AgentAxeman 82]

By Richard Littlejohn

Stopped reading there.

 

 

more fool you then. self censorship is stupidity

[Meenzer 14083]

Frankly, I'm sick of the sight of the lot of them — and I suspect the same goes for most of you, too.

 

We've had politicians in our faces for an eternity. A period of radio silence would be welcome.

 

For the month of August, the Westminster village should be a ghost town, like Paris during les grandes vacances.

 

Except when you're complaining about their expenses and salaries, when they're supposed to work 16-hour days while flogging themselves with nettles. Make up your fucking mind.

 

Jackboots

 

(in the absence of a :journalismwept: smiley)

[Happy Face 29]

By Richard Littlejohn

Stopped reading there.

 

 

more fool you then. self censorship is stupidity

 

Count me in as a fool too then.

[AgentAxeman 82]

By Richard Littlejohn

Stopped reading there.

 

 

more fool you then. self censorship is stupidity

 

Count me in as a fool too then.

 

 

i already do Happy. i already do.

[Guest alex]

By Richard Littlejohn

Stopped reading there.

 

 

more fool you then. self censorship is stupidity

It was a joke. I stopped reading when I saw who'd made the post if you must know

[Happy Face 29]

By Richard Littlejohn

Stopped reading there.

 

 

more fool you then. self censorship is stupidity

 

Count me in as a fool too then.

 

 

i already do Happy. i already do.

 

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."

[Guest alex]

It's bollocks anyway. Like I'm somehow stupid for not reading every inch of the Socialist Worker or for bypassing Jackie Collins whilst looking in the book shop. I think half AA's posts are song lyrics tbh.

[Meenzer 14083]

It's bollocks anyway. Like I'm somehow stupid for not reading every inch of the Socialist Worker or for bypassing Jackie Collins whilst looking in the book shop. I think half AA's posts are song lyrics tbh.

 

You should slip inside the eye of your mind, Alex. Don't you know you might find a better place to play?

[Guest alex]

It's bollocks anyway. Like I'm somehow stupid for not reading every inch of the Socialist Worker or for bypassing Jackie Collins whilst looking in the book shop. I think half AA's posts are song lyrics tbh.

 

You should slip inside the eye of your mind, Alex. Don't you know you might find a better place to play?

Fuck you! I won't do what you tell me!

[Ayatollah Hermione 12769]

Wherever you go, you always take the weather with you

[Meenzer 14083]

Wherever you go, you always take the weather with you

 

Unless you're an Arab immigrant. Selfish cunts.

[Christmas Tree 3997]

Charles Kennedy reportedly already held talks with Labour about defecting to them.

 

Seems a bit weak to me that you ditch 30 odd years of a political leaning simply because you disagree with some current decisions. Surely the strong thing to do would be to fight your corner within your own party.

 

Current polls seem to indicate that the majority of people are so far happy with the coalition and with Cameron.

 

I appreciate the Libs are doing badly in the polls but surely thats no reason to jump ship.

[NJS 3986]

My simplistic definition of politics has always been that decent people are socialists (which in the past meant Labour but obviously not now) and cunts were Tories. That's why I always had a problem defining Liberals - people like David Steel and Charles Kennedy always struck me as decent blokes so I could never understand why they needed to follow a third way.

 

On this basis Clegg has found his natural home.

 

On people being happy, I think they've fallen for the tough talk on cuts - it might change when they actually affect people they know or services they use.

[AgentAxeman 82]

My simplistic definition of politics has always been that decent people are socialists (which in the past meant Labour but obviously not now) and cunts were Tories. That's why I always had a problem defining Liberals - people like David Steel and Charles Kennedy always struck me as decent blokes so I could never understand why they needed to follow a third way.

 

On this basis Clegg has found his natural home.

 

On people being happy, I think they've fallen for the tough talk on cuts - it might change when they actually affect people they know or services they use.

 

 

I'll have to agree with you here NJS. it takes a simple person to define politics in such a way.

[NJS 3986]

My simplistic definition of politics has always been that decent people are socialists (which in the past meant Labour but obviously not now) and cunts were Tories. That's why I always had a problem defining Liberals - people like David Steel and Charles Kennedy always struck me as decent blokes so I could never understand why they needed to follow a third way.

 

On this basis Clegg has found his natural home.

 

On people being happy, I think they've fallen for the tough talk on cuts - it might change when they actually affect people they know or services they use.

 

 

I'll have to agree with you here NJS. it takes a simple person to define politics in such a way.

 

Obviously there are exceptions but comparing Bevan, Atlee, Benn, Smith and Foot against Thatcher, Tebbit, Joseph, Ridley, Osborne and Cameron seems pretty simple to me.

 

Anyway it sometimes takes sophistication to see though complexity.

[DanTheMan 0]

My simplistic definition of politics has always been that decent people are socialists (which in the past meant Labour but obviously not now) and cunts were Tories. That's why I always had a problem defining Liberals - people like David Steel and Charles Kennedy always struck me as decent blokes so I could never understand why they needed to follow a third way.

 

On this basis Clegg has found his natural home.

 

On people being happy, I think they've fallen for the tough talk on cuts - it might change when they actually affect people they know or services they use.

 

 

I'll have to agree with you here NJS. it takes a simple person to define politics in such a way.

 

Obviously there are exceptions but comparing Bevan, Atlee, Benn, Smith and Foot against Thatcher, Tebbit, Joseph, Ridley, Osborne and Cameron seems pretty simple to me.

 

Anyway it sometimes takes sophistication to see though complexity.

 

Benn, Smith and Foot never had to serve in government though to be fair. How about Galloway, Derek Hatton and Blunkett (80s)?

[NJS 3986]

My simplistic definition of politics has always been that decent people are socialists (which in the past meant Labour but obviously not now) and cunts were Tories. That's why I always had a problem defining Liberals - people like David Steel and Charles Kennedy always struck me as decent blokes so I could never understand why they needed to follow a third way.

 

On this basis Clegg has found his natural home.

 

On people being happy, I think they've fallen for the tough talk on cuts - it might change when they actually affect people they know or services they use.

 

 

I'll have to agree with you here NJS. it takes a simple person to define politics in such a way.

 

Obviously there are exceptions but comparing Bevan, Atlee, Benn, Smith and Foot against Thatcher, Tebbit, Joseph, Ridley, Osborne and Cameron seems pretty simple to me.

 

Anyway it sometimes takes sophistication to see though complexity.

 

Benn, Smith and Foot never had to serve in government though to be fair. How about Galloway, Derek Hatton and Blunkett (80s)?

 

 

Benn and Foot served in Labour governments under Wilson.

 

Hatton was a wanker but his love for Islam aside, I don't think Galloway is that bad.

[DanTheMan 0]

Wasn't Benn minister for the post office or something? What I meant was they didn't have enough power to do anything to make people dislike them.

[Papa Lazaru 0]

Wasn't Benn minister for the post office or something? What I meant was they didn't have enough power to do anything to make people dislike them.

 

Cameron had no power whatsoever when he was in opposition and he still made me realise he's a cunt!

[DanTheMan 0]

Wasn't Benn minister for the post office or something? What I meant was they didn't have enough power to do anything to make people dislike them.

 

Cameron had no power whatsoever when he was in opposition and he still made me realise he's a cunt!

 

Fair point, I'm defending the indefensible here, not sure why. There are some right twats across politics I think, part of the job description I guess.

[TheGreatNUFCSwindle 0]

Smith served in the Callaghan government (Labour)