CIPD says pressing on with austerity measures would depress economy and lead to real-term wage cuts.
Eeeer. No shit Sherlock.
Unemployment forecast brings warning for George Osborne | Business | The Guardian
It's like I'm a half-demented taxi driver and you sit in the back - being polite but also appalled by my opinionated rantings and ravings.
CIPD says pressing on with austerity measures would depress economy and lead to real-term wage cuts.
Let’s take social science first. What is the most prestigious social science? Put it another way – which social science has a Nobel Prize all of its own? OK. The Nobel Prize for Media Studies? … No. It’s the Nobel Prize for economics. Economics is the top predator – economists are the physicists of social science. And who determines the content of economics and related research in accountancy and business studies? The financial sector. As the financier-turned-reformer Philip Augar has pointed out over the last thirty years ‘finance wrapped its tentacles around the relevant parts of the academic world … under these circumstances it is little wonder that so much academic research was supportive of the financial system’.
So academics supported the financial system and the consequences were disastrous – for the discipline, but, more importantly, for the wider society. Most academic economists had no idea that there was trouble ahead. In the words of Joseph Stiglitz – Nobel Prize-winner in, anyone? – in economics, that’s right –
‘If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern’.
Given the performance of the economists it is not clear that the discipline qualifies as a science at all. It is as though physicists spent ages pushing an elephant up the stairs of the physics department and then expressed surprise at what happened when they heaved it off the roof.
"'There is a kind of Maoist revolution happening in a lot of areas like the health service, local government, reform, all this kind of stuff, which is in danger of getting out of control. We are trying to do too many things, actually,' he said.
'Some of them are Lib Dem inspired, but a lot of it is Tory inspired. The problem is not that they are Tory-inspired, but that they haven't thought them through. We should be putting a brake on it.'"
Vince Cable: I could end coalition | Politics | The Guardian
"Unlike, say, America and France, we use a single vote to determine both who we want to represent us in parliament and who we want to govern us. Unlike most European countries, we also have highly centralised government that (bar Scotland, Wales and, to a lesser extent, London) leaves the country with no alternative sources of political authority to Westminster and Whitehall. That one vote is more or less the sum total of the ordinary citizen's influence over how the country and its public services, from health to education, are run. And as we have seen, coalition largely destroys even that slither of influence."
"Even if George Osborne is doing unambiguously the right thing, he has not got the mandate to act in a variety of areas where his axe has fallen. I spent most of the election campaign following the minutiae of his policy announcements, and not one jot about housing benefit or train fares, for example, which have seen huge moves.
The mandate for cuts like this can not be assumed from the election result. It needs to be won. And more clarity, transparency, and honesty than we got yesterday, would help."
"We've been staring at the wrong list. In an effort to guess what will hit us tomorrow, we've been trying to understand the first phase of the British government's assault on the public sector: its bonfire of the quangos. Almost all the public bodies charged with protecting the environment, animal welfare and consumers have been either hobbled or killed. But that's only half the story. Look again, and this time make a list of the quangos which survived."
"I believe that the proposed cuts to housing benefit are spiteful, vindictive, increase poverty, reduce freedom and social mobility and pander to the worse aspects of Tories and the Tory Press."
It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.
So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
"Police: we can't take care of cuts protests if you cut us
Leading officer to tell home secretary that a confident police force will be required to tackle any disorder professionally."
‘For many households the potential consequences of this are losing jobs to which they will not be able to commute, having to change their children’s schools and being cut off from their local social networks that are essential to successful communities.
‘The end result could be further polarisation between high and low income households in inner London and growing pressure on housing in outer London.’
"Almost six million people across the UK are about to be told they've paid the wrong amount of tax because employers were sent the wrong tax codes by Revenue and Customs. The first letters will go through letterboxes on Tuesday telling those affected that they will either get a refund, or pay more tax next year to make up the shortfall.So with various tax credits being cut and various benefits either being frozen or cut - and VAT to go up to 20% in a few months time - those that will have to make up their underpayment over the next year rather than getting a refund will be feeling the pinch even more... A underpayment that has not their fault...
Around £2bn has been underpaid through the Pay as You Earn tax system and the errors have been identified by a new computer system. The average underpayment is £1,400 - which will be a painful amount to lose next year for those families. There is not much you can do - other than check to make sure the tax calculation is correct. Obviously it only affects employees paid through the PAYE system and not those people who are self-employed."
The dark side of gay liberation
Officially no one cares about a politician's sexuality. The William Hague case shows that isn't true
I always get annoyed when I hear people talk of the mess Blair/Brown got the economy into - because it blatantly flies in the face of the facts that New Labour were only continuing down the path set out by Thatcher and Major before them, one of privatisation, and various part-state part-privation schemes- of the ever increasing deregulation of the banks & financial sector, the encouragement of unfettered globalisation, allowing uncontrolled immigration of European workers and introducing pointless 'competition' into the public sector (hospital against hospital, school against school etc.) We're now reaping the results of all these misguided ideas - and yet the only way forward seems to be to make the poorest of our society suffer even more deprivations - so we can eventually, hopefully crawl back up onto the very same path that caused so much trouble in the first place...
We're suffering from a severe lack of real political vision and ideas in this country (actually there only seems to ever be one idea – 'what are the Americans doing? Oh – let's do that then.') But then we've now governed by a PM whose only real job was in PR (and to think how New Labour was lambasted over it's over-reliance on spin-doctors. Now we have a spin doctor for PM) a Chancellor who knows more about English literature than he does about economics and a whole Lib-Dem party that are acting like deer-in-headlights – still so incredulous at their luck that they're on the other side of the house for the first time in decades that all they can currently do is mouth apologises for the Tory cuts - having totally abandoned absolutely everything they were supposed to stand for in their election manifesto.
The risk of a double-dip recession remains, he acknowledges, very real – perhaps a little more so in his mind than the Treasury's. "As I recall," he says, "the government's own forecasting risk puts it at something like one in four, one in five." But asked for his own estimate, he says, "Well, you know, certainly well below 50-50," which sounds somewhat higher than one in five.
"Declan McCullagh of CNET reports that “The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.”
"The level of intimate detail captured by the scanners prompted the passage in the House last year of an amendment brought by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) to ban “strip-search” imaging at airports, a proposal he has reiterated his support for since the failed bombing attempt.
“You don’t have to look at my wife and 8-year-old daughter naked to secure an airplane,” Chaffetz said at the time."
I warn you.
I warn you that you will have pain–when healing and relief depend upon payment.
I warn you that you will have ignorance–when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty–when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.
I warn you that you will be cold–when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work–when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you that you will be quiet–when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you that you will have defence of a sort–with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound–when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less–when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
---- --- ---
- I warn you not to be ordinary
- I warn you not to be young
- I warn you not to fall ill
- I warn you not to get old.
"...With the exception of people who seem able to haul their six kids along to a benefits office and emerge with the keys to a four bedroom detatched worth a half million..."
"I'm referring to the idle, the feckless, the selfish and to anyone who stands with his hand out and a sullen expression.
Your money should be taken away and you should be given food coupons. Why should you be able to get Sky, cars, plasma TVs, cigarettes, alcohol etc on MY taxes? You may feel aggrieved and let down, but frankly, your feelings are nothing to the levels of resentment and contempt that million of us taxpayers hold you.
YOU are the problem."
"The new government has unveiled plans to cut housing benefit by 10% for people claiming jobseeker's allowance for 12 months or more from April 2013. The cuts would hit Britain's 200,000 single, childless claimants hardest. Someone in London with a weekly rent of £350 would see their benefit cut by £35. The NHF said tenants would be forced to make up the shortfall from their £65.45 weekly allowance, leaving just £30.45 for food, clothing and energy."
The European court of human rights has rejected an attempt by the UK government to appeal a jugdment over its stop-and-search powers.
The decision means that a January 2010 court judgement which found section 44 of the Terrorism Act to be illegal is final.
Our research shows that bad jobs do not provide a sustainable route out of poverty and that it is not only benefit levels that put people below an acceptable standard of living.
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: "We are committed to reforming the welfare system to make work pay.
"We know that work itself is the best way out of poverty."
The collapse of Greece's economy, and its domino effect on Spain, Portugal, and other countries in the euro currency zone, is in many ways a replay of an earlier financial crisis--the break-up of the continent's Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Then, as now, Europe's policymakers showed little patience with--or understanding of--markets. Then, as now, Germany often seemed contemptuous of the less competitive economies on the periphery of Europe.
The 1992 crisis came to a head on Friday September 9, when currency speculators forced the devaluation of the Italian lira. By the following Tuesday, Britain was facing the same fate.