The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[LondonLax]

35 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

'Entirely' is too strong; in a system as complex as a national, or even international, economy, few things have monocausal explanations. However, I personally think it is beyond serious dispute that a] austerity was a political choice, not one dictated by economics, b] that demand has been depressed as a result, and c] that countries which opted for economic stimulus in the wake of the GFC have outperformed those that opted for austerity. It's true that no developed countries are growing at post-war speeds, and their wages aren't either, but real terms wage growth of 1% would certainly be better than real-terms wage contractions. 

As a side note, I see that Republicans in America have given their typical short shrift to deficit hawkishness that they always manage when they take the White House, and while I would personally find more deserving recipients of economic stimulus than military hardware contractors and the richest 10% of Americans, the economic effects of all this stimulus spending seem to be about what you'd expect. 

Happy to agree with you there. 

[HanoiVillan]

Sajid Javid's new immigration bill is a yet another act of national self-harm from this government. 

The plan is to make it so that anyone earning less than ~125% of the national average wage cannot settle in the country permanently. This will inevitably exclude junior doctors and nurses, teachers, social care workers and countless hospitality workers. The government openly admits their plan will harm the economy. 

Edited December 16, 2018 by HanoiVillan

[Chindie]

Shameless vote pandering for a leadership bid coming down the line.

[StefanAVFC]

What a bellend.

[peterms]

22 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

Sajid Javid's new immigration bill is a yet another act of national self-harm from this government.  

His proposal would have removed his own father.

It seems he is attempting to erase his own existence.

Well, I'm prepared to support him in that.  If it can be backdated.

[Xann]

Philip Alston's report on extreme poverty in the UK.

Quote

Conclusion
The experience of the United Kingdom, especially since 2010, underscores the conclusion that poverty is a political choice. Austerity could easily have spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so. Resources were available to the Treasury at the last budget that could have transformed the situation of millions of people living in poverty, but the political choice was made to fund tax cuts for the wealthy instead.

Office Of the High Commissioner - UNHR

Ugly reading.

What absolute f***ing scum the Tories are.

[HanoiVillan]

Further to the last post, this is Stephen Bush saying what needs to be said on homelessness:

Quote

The United Kingdom’s homelessness crisis is a predictable consequence of government policy

'Since 2010 the government has made two choices: to cut public spending and to make sure that those cuts don’t touch people who vote Conservative. 

For the second time this year, one of the people sleeping rough outside the entrance to the Tube station by the Houses of Parliament has died. Both were men: which is what we’d expect as men are more likely to end up sleeping rough and 84 per cent of the estimated 597 homeless people who died in 2017 were men.

Gyula Remes was close to the statistical average of a dead homeless person: 43 years old, living in a city centre, and working. His death is surprising only because it underlines the extent of the government’s political failure over rough sleeping: that the Conservative government can’t even get to grips with the problem when it happens under a Tory-run local authority in a location where it causes maximum political embarrassment.

James Brokenshire, the Secretary of State for Communities, Local Government and Housing, tried to claim this week that the rise in rough sleeping since 2010 – the homelessness charity Crisis estimates that it has increased by 98 per cent since the Conservatives took office – was down not to government policy but to problems of drug addiction, family breakdown and LGBT teenagers and young people being kicked out by homophobic relatives.

These are all undoubtedly issues that help exacerbate homelessness – both in terms of people who end up sleeping rough in cars, on the streets or in tents and in terms of the “hidden homeless”, that is to say, people sleeping on sofas and otherwise moving between the kindness of friends and co-workers.

It’s true that many of the hidden homeless tend to be one half of a separating couple, where one half of the relationship, usually but not always the man, moves out of the shared home, starts sleeping at friends or on the sofa. Sometimes, these people then move from sofa-surfing to rough sleeping, due to falling out with the people they stay with, embarrassment at taking so long to get back on their feet, or for other reasons. Sometimes, family breakdown can lead to a new partner falling out with, or actively forcing out, the teenage children of their new partner, who end up on the streets.

It is true, too, to say that issues of addiction are part of why people move from sofa-surfing to rough sleeping, though it is also true to say that many people become drug addicts – largely to legal highs like cut-price beer rather than illegal highs – on the streets.

And it is also true that when young people come out to their parents they risk violence, eviction or other threats that may lead to those young people ending up on the streets.

But it strains credulity to beyond breaking point to claim that a LGBT teenager became more likely to be evicted from their parents’ home just as our government’s hue changed from red to blue. Family breakdown has in fact continued its long-term decline under the Tories as it did under the last Labour government: it has not become more likely. While relationships do end, drug addiction does happen, and homophobic attitudes remain rife in society, you cannot support the claim that there has been a coincidental rise in homophobia-driven evictions and domestic splits that exactly coincides with cuts to housing benefit and rising rents while having no detectable statistical presence elsewhere.

The truth – which we can clearly see in the tangible measures the government is now finally taking to belatedly fix the mess it has made – is that the rise in rough sleeping is the entirely predictable consequence not only of the decision taken to try to balance the books in a single parliamentary term but the decisions taken about how to do that: which was, particularly from 2010 to 2016, to cut public spending in ways that largely fell on people who did not vote Conservative or because they have chaotic lives, do not vote at all.

That involved what Polly Toynbee called “devolving the axe”: cutting local government funding, and local governments have largely concentrated on fulfilling their legal obligations and avoiding the most politically painful cuts. This once again meant that the hardest hit were people with very acute needs – because if your need is more acute, government may need to spend more money on you, but you still ultimately have only one vote. That, too, exacerbated the homelessness crisis. We can see that this has had a direct effect because, surprise surprise, the extra money announced by Brokenshire is ring-fenced to prevent it being used elsewhere. 

Deaths among rough sleepers, like Remes’s, are more likely to happen in extreme weather, something the government cannot control. But ultimately, the conditions that lead to people sleeping rough are not like the weather: they are within the control of the government.'

3

New Statesman

[peterms]

 

[bickster]

You'd expect nothing less from Liz Truss... It's not even astounding from her, its typical

”using dogs that bark... to deter drones”

She's a living breathing dimwitopedia

 

[Xann]

Quote

4,600 disabled people were wrongly stripped of their benefits, the Tories admitted today in a fresh humiliation for their welfare regime.

The victims were punished for failing to attend meetings about Personal Independence Payment (PIP) - but were later found to have a "good reason" for not turning up.

They will now be paid back from the new year after a tribunal ruled against the Tory government last month.

The confession - buried at the bottom of a written statement hours before MPs leave for Christmas - is yet another legal defeat for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

DWP chiefs are already reviewing all 1.6million PIP cases and paying back 220,000 people following a separate defeat in the High Court.

But the backlogged department has taken five months to plough through fewer than 10% of the cases in that review.

Mirror

[HanoiVillan]

 

[Xann]

Times

[Davkaus]

I don't really see the problem. It was already a criminal act, in at least a couple of ways. Why would more legislation have helped? Would the criminals have obeyed the newer laws?

[bickster]

2 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

I don't really see the problem. It was already a criminal act, in at least a couple of ways. Why would more legislation have helped? Would the criminals have obeyed the newer laws?

C'mon, it would have forced airports to employ dogs that bark at drones to deter them

[Davkaus]

With a minister that thinks that robots are scared of dogs, and another one that thinks that doesn't know the difference between hashes and hashtags, you have to wonder just how technologically illiterate the backbenchers are.

[Xann]

2 hours ago, Davkaus said:

I don't really see the problem. It was already a criminal act, in at least a couple of ways. Why would more legislation have helped? Would the criminals have obeyed the newer laws?

Read paragraph 4 again.

[blandy]

4 hours ago, Davkaus said:

I don't really see the problem. It was already a criminal act, in at least a couple of ways. Why would more legislation have helped? Would the criminals have obeyed the newer laws?

You’re right that additional laws probably might not have deterred the numpties, the more serious failing is the lack of effective measures to stop the things.

[Davkaus]

2 hours ago, Xann said:

Read paragraph 4 again.

I've read it a few times. Which bit are you interested in?

There's already legislation to prevent there use in airports, as well as technology to try to limit their use. Heathrow, for example,apparently has tools in use to try to prevent this kind of attack.

I suppose there may be extra capabilities they need that aren't currently legal, but that seems like speculation. Given that Gatwick hasn't even invested in the defences Heathrow have, I can't imagine the parked legislation being enacted would have done a damn thing.

 

[Xann]

3 hours ago, Davkaus said:

I've read it a few times. Which bit are you interested in?

Quote

This year the Department For Transport quietly ditched plans for a draft bill aimed at controlling the use of drones and pioneering technology to prevent them from being used near airports.

You'd have thought working out how to stop drones being used over restricted airspace would be an absolute priority.

We were looking at drones that could fly 5 kg for 60 miles a few years ago. They're better and quieter now.  That's a nasty bomb or an assault rifle delivered on a foggy night.

There's extremists locked up in a prison system that's struggling to stop the flow of Spice, much dropped by air.

The Govt look recklessly off the ball. The Army did nothing to dispel worries expressed by recently retired senior officers.

Quote

Defence cuts have left the British Army 20 years out of date 

Telegraph

This wake up call was a massive inconvenience rather than a massive tragedy.

Probably just the start though.

[OutByEaster?]

Ah, the media machine as ever pushing increased defence spending as the answer to whatever problem they can link it to.