Be Excellent To Each Other

Is it Rizzo?

Exchange the ice bucket for a paddling pool and you'll have it just right.

I feel sad for clegg all over again.

I hope Cameron at least makes him a lord.

Why feel sad for him? The Lib Dems jumped into bed with the Tories on his watch, which given their performance at this election, was regarded as a major betrayal by many who voted for them at the last election.

I know they like to argue that they 'de-nastied' the Tories a bit and toned down some of their more psychopathic brutal tendencies, but that's rather like saying they got a serial killer to clean his knives after he's finished slaughtering someone.

Doesn't really matter, some motherfucker's still dead.

I'd see what happens in the next 5 years and then reassess how well they did.

Either way, they're fucked now!

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The battering the Lib Dems got was just plain unfair, and vilifying them for 'getting into bed with the Tories' is just propagandist shite. Had they not gone into a coalition in 2010 there would have been no stable government and a lot of uncertainty at a time when the country needed anything but that. It was brave and necessary and despite people whining about tuition fees ad nauseum they got a lot of stuff done. About as much as could be expected in respect to the number of seats they controlled. Nobody could have reasonbly expected more, and they shouldn't have been punished so badly for it.

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All three of these are supremely depressing to me. The HRA is largely a smokescreen, and part of an even more concerning rift between the legislature and the judiciary (Grayling has lost more court cases than any other Justice Secretary ever.) Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative Attorney General, has written repeatedly that leaving the HRA is disastrous for our international standing and the international rule of law.

Welfare cuts - £12bn is a lot. To put it in context, over the last five years the Tories made cuts that ostensibly saved £18bn, although many of these proved to be far less effective than planned and the amount of money actually saved is disputed. For example, the legal aid cuts may have cost the country money because they have had knock-on effects that hugely decrease the efficiency of the court system. So we're looking at further cuts not far off the scale of those we've seen, but with any low hanging fruit now gone.

The Guardian:

That gives you an idea of what £12bn looks like, and what it could hit. My suspicion is that people think £12bn, apply their prejudice about welfare fraud and "scroungers", and think "good." But welfare fraud has only ever been a tiny amount of money. You don't save £12bn by tackling it. You save £12bn by stripping away things normal folk rely on, like housing benefit and child benefit.

And fox hunting is simply barbaric. You could choose no more potent a symbol of the Tories being upper class no-empathy twits than a repeal of the ban.

they should impose a huge tax on fox hunting, brass tack and horses. Anyone who closes a road for some crappy horses and toffs to fuck around on should be charged 100£/person/hour pro rata, and all people who are involved in the hunt should be fined for animal cruelty. Should get some money in as these dicks seem to want barbarity so desperately.

That aside, is he talking about a parliamentary vote, not a referendum?

I don't think the HRA issue is a smokescreen. I think that fundamentally they don't like the idea of individuals being able to challenge the state - just look at the restrictions on the right to judicial review. Any replacement "UK Bill of Rights" will of course be of considerably less use in protecting the citizen from the state. It also, as you suggest, sends a terrible message to the rest of the world about our commitment to human rights.

I suspect it will also, coincidentally, make it a lot easier for them to implement other somewhat unpopular policies...



On the legal aid cuts, someone, maybe you, pointed us to the fact that the Ministry of Justice could not say how much they've saved - either because they genuinely don't know (which is worrying enough) or because, as is more likely, they haven't actually saved anything.

A recent survey of judges showed a large number were going to retire early as they couldn't cope with the additional strains on the system from having all these litigants in person, and some were doing so out of principle over the basic restrictions on access to justice that result from it.



According to this admittedly slightly old Guardian article, when you strip out pensioners (who will of course be protected, as they vote tory need extra looking after), there are 11.6 million families receiving some sort of benefit. Even if the £12bn is spread evenly across them all that's £1034 a year from every single family on benefits. That's a lot of money to lose.

All these bloody idiots voting Tory are turkeys voting for Christmas. They've somehow not realised that when Tories say "welfare cuts" they don't mean taking money from other people on welfare.



+1

Or give him some job in Brussels.

Aye, it was me. I've been beating this drum for a while now.

Oh, that's a better job of putting it in context than I managed. And of course, as the goal is to save £12bn, that has to be money out of people's pockets. It can't be balanced by tax cuts.

This is my concern. That people have so eagerly swallowed the narrative that our country is overrun by largely mythical scroungers that they haven't realised the cuts must affect them directly. I keep coming back to this:

People's understanding of how we spend our money is hopelessly out of touch with reality. Number 4, in particular, is staggering.

One interesting idea I've seen floating around: that the £12bn of cuts were never intended to be real. They were a policy bargaining chip supposed to be used in coalition negotiations, talked down to some more achievable figure... but having won an unexpected majority, the government is now stuck with the full amount as a manifesto redline.

Edit -- I also see a strong whiff of hypocrisy about a government that talks so tough about austerity but hasn't dared to touch the state pension payouts, increased the pension age, or made even the slightest adjustment to benefits for the elderly -- despite that being over half of our entire welfare bill. We still pay winter fuel subsidies to wealthy retirees living in Spain, which beggars belief. I can see no reasons for this beyond self-serving politicking because old people vote Conservative. Can anyone suggest a good economic reason why a retiree deserves better treatment than a family of four supported by one parent working for minimum wage?

I might write to my MP (who is a Tory minister) and demand that if we're going to cut £12bn, then we must cut pensions. Just to see what she says.

Golly! Correlation is not causation, but that's quite striking.

Hurr hurr, striking, coal miners, DYSWIDT?

Oh! Good idea!

Why the shy Tories are shy

Worth a read, at least.

That is very good. And nice work on the joke.

They closed those inner London mines quietly

Aww, bless. His choice of government is in power and the media pretty much all echoes his views but it's not fair because people at university disagree with him. Meanwhile back in the real world most of Facebook is a cess pit of right wing bile.

Q.E.D?

Didn't Harold Wilson close most of the mines?

Or is that CHEAP LIES that I heard somewhere?

[edit]It appears to be true. In less time, too.
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk ... story.html
[edit][edit]Ah but there were more jobs lost when Thatcher closed the mines.
[edit][edit][edit]But that's because all the miners from the mines that were closed went to the ones that were left.

So, in conclusion, turns out the mines needed to be closed, so they got closed.

[fucking edit again]Wait, maybe the second edit wasn't correct. Thatcher got rid of 80% of the jobs, and Wilson 43%. But 80% of the remaining 57% is 45.6% - so there's not really much in it. So it's maybe not the actual closures people dislike, but the manner in which they were closed.

"The north remembers"

Winter is coming.

An interesting piece for sure, although I'm not sure I'm convinced that amidst all the chaos that the electorate were played like a fiddle in quite the manner described.

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Just been reading about some riots in Whitehall over the election result. They were so noisy I failed to notice them from the Strand yesterday.

No problem with people protesting or campaigning for things they believe in, but I don't remember anyone on the right taking to streets after 1997. Hate the Tories? Good. Organise and get them out at the next election.

And daubing on the women of WW2 memorial was just pathetic.

Well, my take on it is this; I don't doubt that generations of people in these areas will forever and a day blame the Tories for the loss of their mines - a perpetual motion generator of grievance, much like the whole of Scotland IMO.

For more fair-minded, discerning and dispassionate observers, though, whilst many would agree that Thatcher ruthlessly cut too deep and too hard, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, we equally well remember that those same miners held the entire country and everyone's livelihoods to ransom on a near annual basis (remembering the 35% pay rise and blackouts during Heath's time), and that their unions were nothing less than defacto political organisations operating well outwith their member's mandate, whose express and clear aim was nothing less than the destruction of the entire political order, a socialist revolution. Given that was undeniably the case, the political imperative to smash them, and their hugely damaging stranglehold on the whole (bankrupt) country, can hardly be denied. A sledgehammer was required to crack that nut; shame we used a 4000t forge press...

Another thing I might say is this: why does everyone get so fucking misty-eyed and romantic about coal mines anyway? They were terrible back breaking places to work, people were dying of awful respiratory diseases or were at least stone deaf. All of us to a man and woman would fucking shudder at the thought of our kids working there, or indeed in any of the factories such as the one I started out in when I was 16. I lost my job in that factory in '85 too and I was devastated; I loved it, the camaraderie and the work. But, am I glad now, 30 years later, that actually this was the impetus for me to retrain, and now I'm running an engineering consultancy, not operating a 5 tonne manual fly-press in a freezing cold, damp, tobacco smoke and cellulose air drying paint solvent filled hell hole? Millions of people have retrained, our economy has become dominated by service sector jobs with none of the awful occupational risks and diseases that my father had to endure, and more people are working now than ever before.

As I always say, also, it must be borne in mind that more industrial jobs as a function of %GDP were lost as under 13 years of Labour than there were under 18 years of Thatcher, and unlike the latter these were GOOD industrial jobs, not irretrievable union dross who undeniably brought about their own destruction for the reasons stated above.

Grievance is a strong, negative force in politics just as in any other human sphere, but people never seem to be honest enough with themselves to ask the question, did I/we contribute to our collective downfall, and actually, is what we've ended up with better in some/all respects than that which we lament so much? With the benefit of hindsight and direct, first hand experience, I know which side of the fence I'm at. Rose tinted spectacles, eh, usually nay invariably on the part of those who've neither set foot in so much as one fucking mine or factory in their entire lives.

It's the easiest thing in the world to lament the supposed terrible loss of deep pit coal mining jobs from the comfort of a cushy Local Authority office chair, in a nice air conditioned building!

I am gay for Cavey.

In other news, whilst nursing a very sore head, I spent much of yesterday catching up with the overnight election coverage on iPlayer, which was fascinating (at least to me), as well as various post mortem analyses.

The message for Labour appears to be thus: Miliband's 'we hate the rich, we hate business, we hate wealth creation' 1970s them-and-us message went down about as well as per Messrs. Foot and Kinnock's in their respective eras of political failure - people of all social classes in 2015 want aspiration, they have ambition. Even Blair, for all his painfully obvious failings, knew this - which is why he won three elections on the bounce for "New" Labour. Miliband's message was right back to the old school; 'we need to get away from New Labour' (i.e. the very thing that transformed the Labour Party into an election winning machine), 'we did not overspend' etc. It is, I think, supremely ironic that Ed Miliband won out as party leader against the express wishes of both the parliamentary Labour Party and its grass roots membership precisely because of that antidemocratic 1970s anachronism: the Union Block Vote?? Well, you reap what you sow.

Equally ironically, Ed Miliband's left wing offer to the British people was *still* not left wing enough for the Scots, en masse, to such an extent they were utterly annihilated there in unprecedented terms - swings of 30-40% to the SNP...? Incredible. Scotland is now a dead loss for them (and everyone else) and in political terms, in any event, it's a circle that can never be squared anyway. England knows such policies don't work and will never vote for them.

Labour, once again then, needs to reinvent itself but actually much more than that - they need to reconsider what they're there to achieve in the context of 2015, not 1977; they need a coherent, electable ideology, a political soul? Miliband, in his short tenure, has put them back 20 years in my view.

Caveat: Wait till you see me first mate...

This is from the proposed British Bill of Human Rights. Doesn't sound at all sinister.

Edit - it also seems that the European HRA is baked into the Scotland Act 1998, and cannot be removed by Westminister. When the UK exits the HRA, we'll have fragmented definitions of human rights across the Union. Bit messy.

Must admit, "opting out" of the European HRA makes me feel very queasy to say the least, but I'll be honest and state I don't know anywhere near enough about it, or the supposed drivers and imperatives for departing from it.

I've only heard posturing about evil Tories from the left and posturing about European interference from the right. I don't like it.

That clause is a really powerful double dip. It lets ARE BOYS kick the shit out of captives without fear of reproach, and it lets us run an overseas torture camp for British citizens we don't like a la Guantanamo Bay. Great ROI.

Reminder that this isn't some passing fancy, it's a core manifesto promise.

Sounds like a really, really bad idea to me also...

I'm pretty sure there was a recent Supreme Court or Court of Appeal case that, if interpreted in a particular way, suggested that the protections on right to life etc in the Act could extend to a soldier on the battlefield or something like that, with the risk that those in command would worry about conducting operations in a particular ways..

Wouldn't torture still be prohibited by other rules of war?

The same rules of war that stop the Americans from "torturing some folks"?

I'm also rather concerned that Nicky Morgan, who voted against gay marriage, remains Equalities Minister. How terribly ironic.

Morgan, Gove, Grayling, and May are all terrible people. It's like Cameron keeps them around to look cuddly by comparison.

On that basis, perhaps he should make a "big tent of talents" offer to the recently departed Ed Balls?

Don't forget that she's 'Equalities minister except for that gay marriage thing, that's someone else', for that very reason. Utterly bizarre.

The only thing I can say in explanation of that policy is probably that these are older, senior people with influence who expect their dues with prominent positions. Servicing their ambitions helps keep the rest of the party in check, which is all the more important given the wafer thin majority.

A really interesting test would be to see how different things would be with a really thumping majority where keeping certain people on side was less of an issue. Say what you will about Thatcher but she'd override or cut someone if she didn't agree with them, and to hell with the consequences. It was that attitude that ultimately brought her down.

OK, a bit of a black-and-white statement from me (shurely not eh), but frankly, anyone who is "anti" gay marriage is an irrational bigot in my view and unfit for any kind of public office. End of.

I doubt there's anyone that isn't a purist religious type that would say otherwise, really. The objections seem to be 'moral' on a quasi-religious basis, so anyone that isn't terribly devout probably doesn't care? I wonder what the gantt chart looks like, bigotry vs. religiousness.

Well, I don't mean to suggest I think this is a good thing. I was merely struck by the correlation.



Several things about coal mining, from someone who grew up a few miles from colliery towns:

It's true that British coal was hopelessly uneconomical and most likely had to go. A minor diversion: I don't believe "cost" is the only metric to apply when choosing an energy source. If you do, you end up over reliant on the cheapest, and then you do silly things like expose yourself to the oil crisis of the 70s or forget how to build nuclear plants in the 90s. But still, a balance must be struck, and it seems to me British coal might have been on the wrong side of it.

However, what I think you've overlooked in your post is just how devastating this was to these communities. Coal was all they had -- coal, and steel, and service industry to support coal workers, and so on. Coal all the way down, for hundreds of thousands of people. Wilson's pit closures happened over many years, and were (I believe) generally smaller mines so the shockwave effects were much more gentle. But Thatcher wound the whole lot up in a matter of years, and -- crucially -- she did it without doing anything at all to support the people it destroyed. All those people, out of work, with no prospects, and no money. There was no retraining. There was no work to be had. So mismanaged was this that these towns today, fifty years later, still have some of the highest unemployment in Europe. I occasionally have to drive through them. They are bleak, awful places.

Perhaps people should have moved, moved away from places their families have lived for generations. But these were different times when people were less mobile and felt their family ties to the land much more keenly; and in any event, with British heavy industry on the decline everywhere, did the entire UK even have that many open jobs for unskilled manual labourers?

Could Thatcher have done more? I don't know. Did she do anything meaningful to soften this terrible blow? No. Am I surprised people are still angry? Not really. People aren't misty eyed and romantic about coal mining per se. They're misty eyed and romantic for a time when the area for miles around them didn't have 25-50% unemployment rates,.

I don't disagree with any of that Gaywood. A Tory theme seems to be the right basis for the idea, wrong implementation. Thatcher seemed to approach it like ripping off a plaster. Needed to be done, so do it fast.

The bedroom tax also has the right kind of idea, imho. Limited housing stock, so a policy to try to at least getting those waiting into the right size housing by financially disincentivising those with spare rooms that don't want to move. On the face of it, it sounds perfectly logical. The real fuck-up is in charging people who are in the 'wrong' size house when you can't actually offer them the right size.

To be fair, Doc, I've said many, many times, including here just now, that I personally believe Thatcher went too far, too fast, and I am very critical of the fact that there was bugger all provided by way mitigation - shit man, it happened to me personally at the time, remember!

So basically, we agree that it had to be done but that the execution left much to be desired, and the human cost could've been (and bloody well SHOULD have been) very much less. It was utterly heartless, but equally, this doesn't detract from anything I also said about the almost farcical levels of blame for it all that should equally be leveled at the unions and individuals too, sorry to say, with their extreme, confrontational, quasi-political (and wholly undemocratic) agenda that precipitated the whole extreme reaction in the first place.

You can blame the policy departments for that sort of shit. The ministers come up with the broad strokes, the policy departments do whatever crazy shit they do to fill in the blanks and put them into practice.
These guys and gals are all civil servants, and don't change with the election, it's the same people regardless. The ministers could take a firmer hand, but it is all so fucked up and obfuscated that they never actually see the details of the implementations until it is too late, if at all.

This is why The Thick Of It was so good. It's not hard to believe that everything is made up on the back of a fag packet.