I have added my views – have your say, it is a good feeling.
Grassroots Gauge is a Labour Left initiative to ascertain the views of the public on current affairs. A new question is posed every week, and this week’s question is about education, academies and free schools, so please click the link and let them know what you think.
Front line services, presumably not often used by those who axed the funding.
After all, if you need legal advice, hire a solicitor and if you need financial advice, ask a banker, the one you play golf with.
Oh, nearly forgot – if you want to know the time, ask a policeman.
If you can find one.
“Oops!”
This year, the deficit is £44.9bn – up from £35.6bn in the first four months of 2011. This figure excludes one off payments made by the transfer of royal mail pension assets into the public sector – so when you see some people saying the deficit is lower now than last year, don’t fall for it – they can only say this by including this single payment, which disguises the economic reality we are facing.
The deficit is increasing because tax receipts are falling and benefit payments are rising. This is exactly in line with what anti-austerity…
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The Lib-Dem’s shameful, woeful attempts to excuse the inexcusable are here analysed and debunked. The operative word here is ‘shit’ and uninspired shit, at that.
(This isn’t satire – it’s the Lib Dems!)
The single most common argument Liberal Democrat supporters use to defend themselves on the tripling of tuition fees whenever I try to debate the subject with them is that Labour were the first to introduce them.
They’re right of course about Labour being the first to introduce tuition fees, but what a bizarre argument.
What they’re basically saying is that because Labour were really shit and introduced some really shit ideas when they were in power, it means they have the right to continue with the same shit ideas too and in fact make them even more shit. In the case of tuition fees, three times more shit to be exact.
The second argument they use is that they’re in a coalition and sometimes have to accept what the Tories want, even if they think it’s a shit idea and don’t agree…
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Continuing in the theme of the Coalition’s unmandated give-away of public assets may I recommend the following:
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/michael-gove-playing-fields.html?m=1
I shall be adding this resource to my growing reading list. Additionally, it is about time I put some effort into adding content to my Blogspot stream.
“Sounds like a step in the right direction. So glad we now have a ‘can-do’ council in Birmingham.”
(tweet from @gogwit to @politicsinbrum, 8 August 2012CE at 1809)
I’ll stand by that. It has been fashionable for those in power, particularly over the past quarter-century, to wring their hands, shrug their shoulders and pass unemployment off as inevitable and dismiss the ideal of full employment as a naïve pipe dream. It gives me inordinate pleasure to hear our elected representatives talk again of “eradication” of long-term unemployment as a worthy and worthwhile aspiration. For socialists it must always be an aim, for it is a cornerstone of the *real* big society, the one wherein all contribute according to their means, be it by hand, or by brain, or both, for the benefit of all.
Birmingham has real issues with youth unemployment, with over 2,500 young people long term unemployed in the city, with inner-city wards reporting as much as 40% rates of long term unemployment amongst young people (long term unemployment is defined as more than 6 months out of work).
Nationally, there are over 1 million young unemployed people, a figure that has risen sharply in the past few years, as school leavers face the worse economic conditions since the great depression, and extreme competition for jobs – earlier this year, when Jaguar expanded their Solihull operations, they had 20,000 applications for…
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The following recommended read from Michael Rosen‘s blog continues and augments a theme covered before in Gogwit’s Blog – that of The Great Public Asset Vanishing Trick.
(If I were better with words I’d have tried to give this a title which would have SCAM as an acronym – perhaps ‘Scandalous Con – Asset Misappropriation’ or some such?)
http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/gove-giver-schools-given-away.html?spref=tw
Please do read and consider following Mr Rosen’s blog, guaranteed thought-provoking.
Gogwit.
I present for readers a link received as feedback from a recent piece reblogged from Disabled People Against Cuts via Birmingham Against the Cuts (http://href.li/?http://birminghamagainstthecuts.wordpress.com)
http://atosvictimsgroup.co.uk/2012/08/13/disabled-woman-took-on-welfare-system-and-won/
Please do read and support: disseminate, donate to DPAC, or both!
gogwit
Join The Atos Games!From Monday 27th to Friday 31st of August, join Disabled People Against Cuts for The Atos Games – five days of action against a company that’s sponsoring the Paralympics but wrecking disabled people’s lives.
We are calling on disabled people, disabled activists, families, colleagues, friends and supporters to come together and fight back against Atos’s attacks. Atos represents as dangerous an opponent as any government, law or barrier the disability movement has faced in its long history. It’s not just welfare, but our very identity and our place within society that is under attack.
And we are asking the whole of the anti-cuts movement to join us in our opposition to the company most responsible for driving through the government’s brutal cuts agenda. Let’s make it Games over for Atos!
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