4218 days ago
George Osborne is once again the hero of the Tory press. But the press has got it wrong. The man is a fraud and not a very nice one at that. The acclaim comes from his promise to slash welfare spending by £10 billion as part of his work to tackle the deficit. But there are just so many holes in this thesis that it is hard t know where to start.
Instinctively I winced as he heard the plans. Osborne is targeting groups that are unpopular.
4247 days ago
I have a bit of a sense of déjà vu as I read that new Tory Minister Michael Fallon is wants to scrap 3,000 bits of red tape to “help businesses grow”. I am sure that the man means well but does he really believe it? The problem is that I have heard it so many times before.
Michael Heseltine famously promised a bonfire to red tape to “help businesses grow.” No business minister actually promises more red tape. But
4253 days ago
As the true financial cost of the great circus starts to sink in, you will hear more and more about the “legacy” benefits of the games. These gains will be intangible so impossible to actually quantify but do not ask awkward questions, Big Brother says there are great legacies and so pay attention and agree. One of those legacies was meant to be that our kids would become so enthused by the top notch sport that they would all take up regular exercise and so become a lot faster, fitter, etc, etc, etc.
Oh dear. According to a report in today’s Daily Mail
4253 days ago
As we all know the wicked Tories are bashing the public sector with savage cuts in spending and a pay freeze for all staff. Well actually public spending is increasing in real and absolute terms but let us pretend for a second that the Government does actually want to control the deficit and that the Labour party/Trades Unions are not bare faced liars. I digress.
Back to the pay freeze. Well it appears that what has been frozen is not pay itself but the scales of pay that are used. And so a 5 a day co-ordinator working as an outreach worker for disabled lesbians
4259 days ago
Nick Clegg, the leader of the Lib Dems and Deputy PM yesterday called for a new “Wealth Tax” so that wicked rich people could “make an extra contribution” during the economic downturn. In an interview with the Guardian, he links his call with the word “fair.” Hmmm. Mad, innumerate or just desperate?
I note that Clegg has not actually put forward a concrete proposal just a general idea. As such it can be dismissed as pre-conference grandstanding and the chances of anything actually happening are pretty much zero. But hypothetically let us humour the guy and assume that it did. Would it a) assist the economy, b) strengthen Government finances or c) be fair? The answer is no on all three counts. As such Clegg is at best economically illiterate and at worst just plain mad. Or perhaps this is a desperate gambit to win back lost voters?
To the economy first. Folks acquire wealth by various means.
4260 days ago
How many British troops have now been killed or maimed in Afghanistan? In case you have lost count the score is now (at August 17) 425 dead and (at July 31) well over 6,000 personnel have had to be evacuated from the country as a result of injury or illness. Source MOD. These are terrible numbers and grow every day. And to what end?
Over the weekend we learned that the Taliban had beheaded 17 young people (15 men, two women) for having a party where they danced together. This happened in a “Taliban controlled” part of Afghanistan. The fact is that large swathes of the country are controlled by these Islamofascist creeps whose stone-age ideas of justice are abhorrent. In other places the regime of President Karzai is propped up by Western military force. But is “our guy” such a great guy?
4282 days ago
Louise Mensch, the thickest MP in Westminster (see here, here, and here) and also the author of a series of novels which are an insult to basic human intelligence has announced that she is standing down as an MP and moving to New York. Our gain, America’s loss. But she cannot leave without talking more rubbish.
She told her local newspaper that she is quitting to spend more time with her family because she cannot juggle the various demands, bla, blah, blah. Like remind me just how many weeks holiday a year MPs get? It makes you wonder how the rest of us get by. But then the paper, in a clearly spoon fed release notes:
The author recently launched her own social networking site menschn.com, as a rival to twitter where she has 100,000 followers. She is now expected to concentrate on building the popularity of the site.
We shall leave aside the fact that most of Mensch’s twitter followers are by her own admission ‘bots since even by the low standards of twitter her own thoughts are too inane to attract real followers. Louise appears to want to have her cake ( and fear not Louise I am not using the word in the rap sense, we know that you have moved on since then) and eat ( not snort) it.
