Brookes on Corbyn & the Privy Council

Don't like to run cartoons back-to-back too much, and often ideologically disagree with The Times, but the choice of 'reading-material' sells me here on this genius from Brookes.

Let It Be

Corbyn

He may never be prime minister...and nor would I particularly want him to be.  But if Corbyn's victory helps reorient the overall spectrum of British politics (back) leftwards, that's something I celebrate unequivocally.  Labour has a leader again.

Tony, Tony, Tony

Wait, Tony Blair actually admitted to being wrong about something ?  That can't be right, surely ?  That Tone ?  Our Tone ?  That lying corrupt egotistical pile of human excrement ?  Never.

Tony Blair has admitted his government made a "mistake" by failing to do enough to ensure that devolution of powers to Scotland did not undermine the United Kingdom's national identity.

The former Prime Minister insisted that he still believes he was right to create national assemblies in Edinburgh and Cardiff in 1999, arguing that resisting demands for the devolution of power would have stoked up demand for outright independence.

Bullshit !  There was more no urgency for devolution specifically in your time than there was for reform of the Lords, and your response to the one was as cack-handed as the other.  As always, you were looking more to your own legacy as the great reformer, seeking to re-make British 'democracy' in your own image than you were thinking through the long-term consequences of your actions.  In the case of the Lords, you could have left things as they were, could have engaged in a long-term review of the options available, could have respected the consistent will of the electorate for an elected House.  But no...Tony knew best as always, and so the great overcrowded House of Political Cronies was born.

If you wanted to a) deflate the movement for independence in Scotland*, and b) address the broader concern of lack of representation across the UK** (including in England) by the ever Home County-centred government in Westminster, you could have come up with a plan for more regional and citywide devolution.  Instead of which, you completely ignored the English question, which has led us today to this EVEL nonsense, whilst you established 'national' assemblies in Scotland and Wales based upon largely arbitrary borders dating back to Norman times.  And then what ?  At best, perhaps you could buy the unionists some time whilst you re-thought a broader strategy...

But, in a new book entitled British Labour Leaders, he acknowledged that he did not understand at the time the importance of maintaining cultural unity between the different parts of the UK.

You didn't have any strategy, whatsover, did you ?  You created 'national' assemblies, and what, you thought they would tire of power after a few years and beg Westminster to re-absorb their responsibilities ?  That the Scots & Welsh seeing functioning assemblies governing over their respective 'nations' wouldn't beg the obvious question, why not more powers ?  Why draw the line here and not there ?  Why be governed by an unresponsive body tucked away in the furthest regions of Southeastern England at all ?

His admission came after a new poll, published almost a year after the referendum, showed for the first time a majority of Scots would support independence if another vote was staged now.

Don't fuckin' blame 'em !  Especially after how they were treated not just by the increasingly fascistic 'Conservative' party, but also by members of yer so-called 'Labour' party in the last election.

...Mr Blair admitted in his 2010 memoirs that he was “never a passionate believer” in devolution and he always thought creating a Scottish Parliament was a dangerous path.

Yes, yes it was.  Arsehole.

...Mr Blair said: "I did feel that we made a mistake on devolution. We should have understood that, when you change the system of government so that more power is devolved, you need to have ways of culturally keeping England, Scotland and Wales very much in sync with each other.

“We needed to work even stronger for a sense of UK national identity. But I don't accept the idea that we should never have done devolution. If we had not devolved power, then there would have been a massive demand for separation – as there was back in the 60s and 70s."

Funnily enough, people who are part of the same country, with the same basic culture, speaking the same language, and with a strong shared history, including shared sacrifice in war, tend to develop a pretty decent shared identity...until nationalist radicals seek to divide them, and find their efforts enabled by incompetent overconfident ego-mad politicians.  Politicians have many ways of dividing people, but building up cultural identity artificially from your spindoctors' offices in London...not so easily done.

Aw, feck it !  I wish the eventual independent Republic of Scotland well.  And Wales too, if they go that way.  Blair, Brown, Cameron, and their ilk, on the other hand can go fuck themselves.


* Not that I believe for one moment you respected the absolute right of the Scots to independence if that be their choice.

** Nor that you ever gave a damn about that issue either, given your consistent anti-democratic decisions.

Steve Bell's If on Harriet Harman's Voter Purge

Rowson's illustration for this column on the real extremists in British politics is also brilliant, as usual, but I just love Bell's PC Harman.

George Monbiot on Corbyn and the Labour Leadership Race

Really liked especially this bit from George Monbiot in the Guardian, and intended posting it with the title 'QOTD'.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

But re-reading the piece again, there's too much that needs repeating.  So...

On one point I agree with his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn has little chance of winning the 2020 general election. But the same applies to the other three candidates. Either Labour must win back the seats it once held in Scotland (surely impossible without veering to the left) or it must beat the Conservatives by 12 points in England and Wales to form an overall majority. The impending boundary changes could mean that it has to win back 106 seats. If you think that is likely, I respectfully suggest that you are living in a dreamworld.

In fact, in this contest of improbabilities, Corbyn might stand the better chance. Only a disruptive political movement, that can ignite, mesmerise and mobilise, that can raise an army of volunteers – as the SNP did in Scotland – could smash the political concrete.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

As the social philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out towards the end of the second world war, when politics offers little choice and little prospect of solving their problems, people seek extreme solutions. Labour’s inability to provide a loud and proud alternative to Conservative policies explains why so much of its base switched to Ukip at the last election. Corbyn’s political clarity explains why the same people are flocking back to him.

...

Nothing was more politically inept than Labour’s attempt before the election to win back Ukip supporters by hardening its stance on immigration. Why vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout? What is attractive about a party prepared to abandon its core values for the prospect of electoral gain? What is inspiring about a party that grovels, offering itself as a political doormat for any powerful interest or passing fad to wipe its feet on?

In an openDemocracy article, Ian Sinclair compares Labour’s attempts to stop Corbyn with those by the Tories in 1974-75 to stop Margaret Thatcher. Divisive, hated by the press, seen by her own party as an extremist, she was widely dismissed as unelectable. The Tory establishment, convinced that the party could win only from the centre, did everything it could to stop her.

Across three decades New Labour strategists have overlooked a crucial reality: politicians reinforce the values they espouse. The harder you try to win by adopting your opponents’ values, the more you legitimise and promote them, making your task – and that of your successors – more difficult. Tony Blair won three elections, but in doing so he made future Labour victories less likely. By adopting conservative values, conservative framing and conservative language, he shifted the nation to the right, even when he pursued leftwing policies such as the minimum wage, tax credits and freedom of information. You can sustain policies without values for a while but then, like plants without soil, the movement wilts and dies.

...

Rebuilding a political movement means espousing what is desirable, then finding ways to make it feasible. The hopeless realists propose the opposite. They assemble a threadbare list of policies they consider feasible, then seek to persuade us that this package is desirable. If they retain core values, they’ve become so muddled by tacking and triangulation as to be almost indecipherable.

So great has the damage been to a party lost for 21 years in Blair’s Bermuda triangulation that it might take many years until it becomes electable again. That is a frightening prospect, but the longer Labour keeps repeating the same mistakes – reinforcing the values it should be contesting – the further to the right it will push the nation, and the more remote its chances of election will become. The task is to rebuild the party’s values, reclaim the democratic debate, pull the centre back towards the left and change – as Clement Attlee and Thatcher did in different ways – the soul of the nation.

Because Labour’s immediate prospects are so remote, regardless of who wins this contest, the successful candidate is likely to be a caretaker, a curator of the future. His or her task must be to breathe life back into politics, to recharge democracy with choice, to ignite the hope that will make Labour electable again. Only one candidate proposes to do that.*

One might also note that by trying to take the more centre-right (at best) ground formerly held by the Tories, that Tony Blair helped force the 'Conservative' Party further to the right as well, such that, as has already happened with the Republican party in the US, it is become increasingly a radical party, an extremist entity.  In fact, I'd suggest that Tony Blair had almost as much to do with the Tories' disgusting transformation as Keith Joseph.  And that arseholes like Liz Kendall & her supporter David Miliband also deserve much of the blame in their complicity for what England has now become.

Was watching part of an LBC interview with Liz Kendall earlier, till I got to the point that I wanted to vomit.  She said something about not being able to bear seeing 'fifteen years in total of a Tory government.'  Strange.  If we're talking about right-wing rule generally**, and New Labour are arguably to the right of what the 'Conservatives' once represented even in my lifetime, then I'd say the number would be more like forty-six.***


* As a non-partisan, I find it interesting that Monbiot seems to be only talking about Labour regaining power in the context of an outright victory, rather than considering the possibilities of a broader progressive coalition, but then this is an article in the context of the party's leadership-election after all.

** And frankly, who gives a shit more about the names of the parties or their members than actual policy ?

*** ie May 1979 to May 2025

Morten Morland on the Labour Leadership Election

Rowson & Adcock had great 'toons on Labour's leadership-election also, but...that Ed...  Still a couple I can't quite place.

Performance Art ?

This...is kinda brilliant.  And also likely to drive me insane.  Blame (and/or credit) Wings Over Scotland...and Gordon Brown...not me.

Religious Certitudes

Rowson is frankly a fuckin' god in terms of his visual skills...but he can't be everywhere at once.  And with Bell struggling with that obsession with a certain condom, there may be room for a new number two...somewhere

Just Do It Already

Go right ahead, then:

Days of Miracle and Wonder

Mr Burnham says that a Labour government led by him would "lift the millstone of debt" from students and replace fees with a graduate tax.

Fellow leadership contender Yvette Cooper also backs a graduate tax while Jeremy Corbyn wants to scrap tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants. 

...

The graduate tax plan is among the shadow health secretary's five manifesto pledges, which are:

• Replacing tuition fees with a new graduate tax, and creating new university-style support for young people seeking apprenticeships 

• Freeing councils to build new homes and introducing regulation of the private rented sector

• Abolishing the youth rate National Minimum Wage, establishing a true living wage for all ages, banning forced zero-hours contracts and unpaid internships

• Renationalisation of railways and reregulation of buses

• Good care throughout people's lifetimes, through a National Health and Care Service, bringing social care into the NHS and meaning no-one is forced to sell their home to afford care.

Bloody hell, watching Labour's leadership-candidates flail in Corbyn's wake* is almost becoming as entertaining as watching the clowns in the GOP in Trump's.  Re-nationalising the railways, and now scrapping tuition-fees** -- What next ?  Endorse Natalie Bennett's calls to turn RBS into a People's Bank ?  Abolition of the monarchy ?

Should be entertaining regardless.  And meanwhile, the ever-brilliant Martin Rowson returns to the Guardian: Rays of light amidst so much darkness.


Now, if only Bernie Sanders' campaign could have the same effect on Hillary Clinton in the US...Ha !  Sorry, drifted off into la-la land there.


* What would they be talking about at this point in the campaign if it weren't for Corbyn ?  Raising the retirement-age to ninety ?  A 2p top tax-rate ?  Burning the homeless for fuel ?

** Not that a graduate-tax is quite the same thing as free universal higher education of course.

For the Record

Had a whole blog-post on this subject, which I may revisit, but for now, I'll just note that the chart on the left below, which they really should update with the numbers from 2015 (to the right) tells a pretty clear story about what has happened to parties in the UK over the last several decades, a pattern that is also seen in the United States and other countries.  And that my politics are largely a response to that steady shift towards more authoritarian/right policies by the mainstream parties.

A Tale of Two Tours

Here's the Indy's latest daily cartoon online:

And the day before:

I don't know if this was a editorial choice or a coincidence, but it is somewhat unfortunate, and doesn't exactly put the more recent publication in a great light.  Both 'toons are themed almost identically, even to the degree of Corbyn turning to his left.  But the earlier work spares us the labels for 'Left' and 'Right', spares us the actual labelling of the bicycle as 'Labour Party', and spares us the cliché of riding off a cliff.  Instead we get the socks up over the trousers & the old-fashioned bike with the basket, versus the Blairites in their spandex.  And yes, we also get a labelled Das Kapital, not that that really hurts the piece overall.  And I'm assuming that's Prescott rooting Jezza on besides an apoplectic Blair.

To juxtapose two such similarly themed, but unequally executed works side-by-side is just cruel really.  Oh right, I just did that myself, didn't I ?  Whoops.

Tone' the Tempter Needs More Souls

Did Tony Blair actually say these words (my reading of the video) ?

I've known Jeremy going back many over many, many years.  I think we both came into Parliament at the same time together.  And it's not about...And it's not about an individual, it's about a platform, that, in the end, wouldn't work for the country.  And I want to stress that.

It's not that it wouldn't win power.  I personally think it's unlikely that we would win power.  But, even if you did, it wouldn't be right.  Because it wouldn't take the country forward, it would take it backwards.  So, that's why it's not the right thing to do.  It's not the right thing to do, because, you know... this is why, when people say, y'know, well my heart says I should really be with that politics...well, get a transplant, because that's just done.

Because that sure as fuck sounds to me like an argument to vote Tory.  Oh, and one thing for all politicians to remember, whether they identify as 'progressive' or not, is that 'forward' movement need have no correlation with actual betterment of one's circumstances whatsoever.  Moving 'forward' is just carrying on in your existing established direction, even if you just accidentally stepped off a cliff.  Or, for that matter, on a landmine.

And as for this question of whether the other contenders for the leadership would serve in the shadow cabinet under Corbyn, well, for myself, not that you probably care, I'd say that right here Liz Kendall just invalidated her case for the leadership bid altogether.  Cooper may have equivocated, but I don't entirely blame her, and Burnham comes across, to me, as the only one perhaps* genuinely concerned with something more than his own political career.

Jeremy and I so fundamentally disagree, with Jeremy's approach, that...And I think it would be disastrous for the party, it would be disastrous for the country, we would be out of power for a generation.  I don't want to be a party of protest.  And I wouldn't be able to stop myself from making that case.

Do you even think about how this sounds, when you say these words as a career politician ?...  I personally do care what happens to the UK, but I'm not that greatly invested in Labour, and I don't give a shit about Liz Kendall, or any of these assholes' personal political careers.

There is, I suppose, an argument to be made, that had New Labour not been in power when it was, that the Tories would have done even more damage even earlier, but there's also the counter-argument to that, that we might be now seeing the reaction against 'Conservative' radicalism, were there an actual mainstream opposition for voters to support, and had Tony Blair not completely sold out generations of non-right-wing-extremists.

One other thing, I don't at all understand is the acquiescence with the stupid Fixed-term Parliaments Act, let alone the idea that the party is somehow married to a particular leader for five years.  Deciding your leadership in the 2015 elections in 2010 and your leadership for the 2020 elections in 2015 is just frankly insane.  By rights, Ed should still be Labour's leader, and they wouldn't have to be worrying about who would take them into the next elections till 2018 at the earliest, were it not for the idiocy of fixed-term parliaments.  At what point did the choice for leadership become some sort of suicide-pact ?


* The eyebrows bewitched me, sorry.

And So Labour Pushes Itself Ever Deeper into Irrelevance

Welfare vote will 'haunt' Labour says SNP

The SNP has said Scottish Labour will pay a heavy price for not voting in greater numbers against planned welfare cuts by the UK government.

The prediction comes after plans to cut £12bn pounds from the welfare budget passed their first hurdle in the Commons on Monday night.

Forty-eight Labour's 232 MPs voted against the package.

SNP MP Hannah Bardell said Labour's position was a ''shambles'' which would "haunt" them at the Holyrood election.

The Commons backed the Welfare Reform and Work Bill by 308 to 124 votes.

The SNP voted firmly against the UK government's controversial proposals in the Welfare Reform Bill.

There were 48 Labour rebels but most, including Scotland's sole Labour MP Ian Murray, abstained on the orders of acting leader Harriet Harman.

Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham said his party made "a mess" of its approach and was "crying out for leadership".

He said he had agreed to abstain on the key vote because he was "not prepared to split the party".

...

"Labour have completely abandoned any pretence of being a party of social justice and progress - just as they did when they so shamefully voted to support George Osborne's £30bn more austerity cuts."

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was "sadly not" surprised by the party's decision to abstain.

The SNP leader added: "Labour seem to have lost any sense of purpose or any sense of direction."

"It really does beg a fundamental question, if Labour is not about opposing a Tory government that is waging an ideological assault not on skivers who don't want to work, but on people who are working hard on low incomes, if Labour is not about opposing that, what is Labour for?

"Last night just proves that Labour has lost any sense of purpose and it will be the SNP who increasingly will form the real opposition in the House of Commons."

The SNP really aren't doing themselves any favours in terms of public support or sympathy south of the border, when they partake in childish stunts like this, but they do have something of a point about being the 'real opposition' when the Labour party continually stakes its flag just slightly to the left of wherever the Tories are at any given point in time, and when they keep declining opportunities to actually oppose the Conservatives, begging time and again, what the hell are they for ?  There are other actual leftist parties in the UK, and the Lib Dems can claim to be the party of civil liberties, but Labour ?

Short of a personality to dominate the party, someone with the magician-like qualities to successfully convince the public that they are a centre-left party whilst pushing time-and-again centre-right (at best) policies, there is no future in 'New Labour.'  'New Labour' was Tony Blair, and worked solely because of Tony Blair.  There may or may not be much of a future in a principled 'Old Labour', but 'New Labour' is done, and it is the likes of Harman, Cooper, and Kendall that are clinging to the past, not the new intake of MP's who voted their conscience.

Which leaves us with 'friend of Hamas' Corbyn (who did vote against) and Brave Sir Andy, who really really wanted to oppose the Conservatives, but didn't want 'to split the party and make the job of opposition even harder' and so boldly abstained from voting Aye or No.

He added: "It was a mess, wasn't it? The run-up to this vote was a bit of a mess. It is quite clear that this is a party now that is crying out for leadership and that is what I have shown in recent days."

Um, yes it was.  Yes it does.  And no, you haven't.  Actually, I suspect that this could have been a crucial breakout moment for Burnham had he taken the lead on strongly opposing the Conservatives' plans.  As is, voters in the leadership-contest for Labour, have their Blairite candidates already, have their Old Labour candidate, and then have poor Andy Burnham, who like the party as a whole, stands for what exactly ?, and, whose bold efforts to not split the party will merely undermine his own appeal, whilst doing nothing to prevent the split of the party.

I find myself wondering, what if there were no Labour party ?  What if it were left to the Liberals and the likes of the SNP and the Greens to define the opposition to the Tories, and to provide alternative votes at the ballot-box ?  Would the UK be any worse off if Labour simply ceased to exist ?  But then the hypotheticals of how we might have come to a world without Labour lead me to 'A Wonderful Life'*-style musings about what the world might look like had it never had a Tony Blair.  And so tempting as that line of thought is, I'm not sure I want to go there at the moment.

* à la Fry & Laurie obviously.

£3

That's the price the idiots in Labour came up with for random shits to vote in their leadership-election.  And every Tory-leaning publication online or off has been encouraging the faithful to interfere with Labour's choices for the cost of a cup of coffee.

Were the future of non-fascist humanity not arguably hanging on their choices, I'd laugh in their faces.  As is, I'd like to think that the next generation or two could enjoy a habitable planet for the seven-ish decades G-d or fate might grant them.

I Hate the Guardian

It’s safe to say that Hillary Clinton is no luddite. But the 2016 US presidential hopeful acknowledged this week that new technology is transforming the world of work and warned that we need to wake up to the consequences. She was right to do so.

In a major speech on the economy, Clinton talked about the threat to middle-class jobs posed by the so-called “gig economy”. The internet has enabled millions of people to make money by renting out a room or using their own cars to become part-time minicab drivers. That, said Hillary, is “creating exciting opportunities and unleashing innovation but it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future”.

 The digital and technological revolution that created companies like Amazon and Facebook is making life easier, more entertaining and cheaper for many of us. But it also places secure jobs at risk and threatens to lay entire industries to waste. A Labour party whose founding mission was to make sure work pays needs to find its own answers to some of the hard questions Clinton identified.

Ask any taxi driver, self-employed accountant or small hotelier and they will tell you the disruptive force of new technology is turning their world upside down. The arrival of Uber in the UK has reduced the cost of taxi fares for consumers, for example. But cabbies who are more heavily regulated in our cities see their incomes plummet as a result.

Tourists and travellers pay less for accommodation by using websites like Airbnb; but hotels suffer – along with their employees – because they have to pay business taxes that Airbnb is exempt from. New accountancy software makes it easier for people to do their own finances (and enriches its inventors) but threatens the employment prospects of accountants – a white-collar profession traditionally regarded as one of the most secure.

As someone who loves new technical innovation – whether it’s a new game, a new phone or new music service – I think we should do more to celebrate technical innovation in Britain. But we also need to ensure the wealth created by the digital revolution doesn’t produce a “winner takes all” economy in which a tiny number of dotcom billionaires displace millions of workers in formerly secure jobs. We need to protect the interests of professionals and blue-collar workers even as we seek to reap the rewards generated by the new digital economy.

It is a difficult balance to strike. I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that technology will become as potent a force as globalisation in the coming decades. In fact, most economists already agree that it is technological change, rather than globalisation, that does most to explain wage stagnation and rising inequality in advanced democracies.

It took Labour too long to acknowledge that many voters felt immigration, one of the defining features of globalisation, was the most important issue facing the country. It would be wrong to make the same mistake twice by underestimating the impact the digital revolution will have on wages and jobs.

I am a huge enthusiast for new technology. I served as the country’s first digital minister under Gordon Brown. I even review video games for the New Statesman. Over time, technology could mean we all spend less on everything from the weekly shop to cars, clothing end energy. It will give millions of people the chance to do more creative and fulfilling work.

BULLSHIT !!!

But the effect the digital revolution could have on middle-class jobs could be as dramatic as that experienced by the working classes in the industrial age, as machines began to take on the jobs they’d done for centuries.

Could be ?  Could Have ?  What fucking reality are you living in Mister Watson ?  Try the fucking reality in which those jobs have already been decimated in the name of right-wing economic extremism.

Reforming socialists have always believed change can be harnessed so that it produces better outcomes for everyone. So it is absolutely crucial that we continue to close the digital divide, so that all our workforce has the skills and training it needs so to claim a share of the enormous wealth the digital age is creating. It is too easy to pretend everyone has superfast broadband or a laptop. They don’t. We need to ensure everyone benefits – whether they’re from a country estate, or a council estate.

Umm, the middle-class jobs are already being destroyed, in case you weren't paying attention, and, even were the renumeration for working for Uber as a neo-feudal serf anything remotely resembling that necessary to live a bare-minimum civilised life in the West (hint: it isn't), the company and its competitors are all putting every asset they have into automating the lower classes out of employment altogether.  And there is no class of employment, outside of the board that it is, that isn't up for or eligible for replacement, by robots or computational algorithms.

This is a fundamental existential conversation that we should have started four decades ago.  Instead of which, after decades of delay and derailment by Randian fantasists and out-and-out greedheads, we find ourselves here at the point of no return for the human species with no Plan B.

Thanks in No Small Part to the Cowardice of Labour's Leadership*...

The biggest crackdown on trade union rights for 30 years will be unveiled on Wednesday, including new plans to criminalise picketing, permit employers to hire strike-breaking agency staff and choke off the flow of union funds to the Labour party.

The scale of the reforms goes far wider than the previously trailed plan for strikes to be made unlawful unless 50% of those being asked to strike vote in the ballot.

In a set of proposals on a par with those introduced by Norman Tebbit in 1985, Sajid Javid, the business secretary, is also to require that at least 40% of those asked to vote support the strike in most key public services. In the case of 100 teachers asked to strike, the action would only be lawful if at least 50 teachers voted and 40 of them backed the strike.

The double threshold would have to be met in any strike called in health, education, fire, transport, border security and energy sectors – including the Border Force and nuclear decommissioning.

In further changes, Javid will:

• Require all unions, not just those affiliated to Labour, to ask each existing union member whether they wish to pay the political levy and then repeat the question every five years. The £25m annual political fund income from 4.5 million political levy payers funds a wide range of political campaigning including being a chief source of funding for Labour.

• Propose that unlawful or intimidatory picketing should become a criminal as opposed to civil offence and new protections should be available for those workers unwilling to strike. A named official will be required to be available at all times to the police to oversee the picket including the numbers on the line, currently set at six, in an existing code of conduct.

• Compel unions to renew any strike mandate with a fresh ballot within four months of the first ballot and give employers the right to hire strike-breaking agency staff as well as require a union to give the employer at least a fortnight’s notice before the industrial action starts.

• Empower the government to set a limit on the proportion of working time any public sector worker can spend on trade union duties.

• Give the government certification officer powers to fine trade unions as much as £20,000 for breaches of reporting rules including an annual audit on its protests and pickets. The certification officer will also have power to initiate investigations and will in future be funded by a joint levy of unions and employers

• Require a clear description of the trade dispute and the planned industrial action on the ballot paper, so that all union members are clear what they are voting for.

The number of working days lost due to strikes was 704,000 in the 12 months to April 2015, but this is a far cry from the near 13m days lost through strike action on average in the 70s, the heyday of union militancy.

The government says it feels forced to act due to the number of strikes called on the London underground, railways or in schools based on small turnouts or two-year-old ballot mandates.

The leader of the train drivers’ union Aslef, Mick Whelan, has already likened the attack on union rights as resonant of fascist Germany.

Guess yer gonna need to distance yerselves even further from the unions.  Perhaps there's a few votes to be had in championing tax-relief for the children of foreign billionaire elitists.


* And to Ed's nose.  Sorry, but I just had to say it at some point.  Nativist perceptions about what a British leader should look like and sound like had a hell of a part to play in the man's perception, even to the degree of actual racism.

Well Played Gideon, Well Played

Hopes that people will fall for it, rather.  And no doubt...they will.

George Osborne sought to outflank Labour and soften the blow from a £12bn cut to Britain’s welfare bill when he made a big rise in the minimum wage the centrepiece of the first Conservative budget in almost two decades.

In a move that went further than Labour was planning at the general election, the chancellor said employers would be forced to pay staff a minimum of £7.20 an hour from next April and raise wages by 6% a year on average to around £9 an hour by the end of the parliament.

And oh how the right-wing press would have savaged Labour for going through with even a £8 minimum'living wage' as anti-business radical extremists.

Relishing the freedom to deliver his latest budget unfettered by coalition, the chancellor eased up on the pace of deficit reduction and reduced the size of the cuts that Whitehall departments will face in the coming years.

What, suddenly, reducing the deficit isn't so critical any more ?  But still going to do your damnedest to defund and destroy the BBC, aren't you ?

On the assumption that the economy grows steadily at around 2.5% a year, the Treasury is now expecting a £10bn surplus in the final year of the parliament – a sizeable war chest for the 2020 election. The improvement in public finances will come partly through a tougher tax regime for buy-to-let landlords, restricting non-dom tax status and by increased dividend taxation.

'Non-dom', 'non-dom'...Sounds familiar.  Wasn't there some politician banging on about that in the last election ?

Declaring “Britain needs a pay rise” – once the campaign slogan of the TUC – Osborne said he was directly boosting the national minimum wage of 2.7 million workers aged over 25. The increase, accompanied by substantial welfare cuts over three years, was designed to engineer a rebalancing between the individual and the state – a political intervention to shift responsibility for low incomes from the state to employers.

...

The announcement was greeted by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, punching the air in triumph, but the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, said: “This minimum wage increase is just a rebrand of the minimum wage – trying to call it something different. It doesn’t actually compensate in any way for this massive take away from tax credits. The changes amount to a work penalty that he has introduced into the tax credit system. It hit very, very hard.”

The whole thing was brilliantly well-played, really*.  Theresa and Boris will no doubt be standing beside him in the wings with knives out come 2020-ish, but underestimate this man at your peril.  As a ruthless politician that is.  As an economist or as a human, he's shit.


* Well, other than Iain Duncan Smith's buffoonery.

Because the Finances of Government(s) are totes like a Kitchen Table Budget

I just...No, not even gonna.  I don't trust myself.  No.  Are you still speaking, Liz ?