How the cuts in the grants central government provides local councils will be divided over London. It’s the poorest countries (deep red and mainly in the centre on the map above) who get the biggest cuts, the richer outer boroughs being hit relatively lightly. From the Londonist, which also has the raw data for the stat geeks amongst youse.
Lenny calls it the biggest student rebellion since 1968:
Several fires burn on the tarmac, someone gives an impromptu speech from atop a concrete wall, and a chant goes up: “Let us out! Let us out! Let us out!”. I am in the middle of Britain’s student revolt, and I am amazed by the high spirits of thousands of kettled children and teenagers. For my part, I can only think how cold it is. Things keep “kicking off” on the frontlines between police and protesters. Further up Whitehall, a huge crowd of kids has gathered outside the kettle. I’m told the younger kids are walking around telling the police to go fuck themselves. They’re so angry, more than I can explain, about being kettled in. When asked, the sheer righteous fury they express is impressive. The slogans that occasionally start up resonate throughout the wide avenue – “they say cutback, we say fightback!”, “Tory Tory Tory, out out out!”, and, yes, “one solution, revolution!”. The police apparently claim they’ve made toilets available to us. They have not. There are two cubicles outside the kettle, which may be toilets but we can’t access them. We have no water or food, and we are kept warm only by the fires. But still, people sing, dance, do the hokey kokey (yeah), and chant. This resilience is fuelled by white hot anger.
According to the Dutch news, which lead with it in the eight o’clock bulletin, the students were actually trying to storm parliament. But much more happened today, as the demo list at the Anticuts website and the rolling coverage from the Socialist Worker make clear. Protest went on throughout the UK, including in Scotland, which is not affected by the proposed cuts itself. The students are angry, as are their younger brothers and sisters still in secondary schools, not to mention their parents, to be faced by massive fee increases needed to pay for the bankers’ crisis. and a lot of that anger is aimed at the LibDems, who had promised not to do so before the election. As Roobin puts it:
Election promises aren’t binding? I guess legally they’re not, but if politicians don’t have to honour what they say during the 6-4 week period every 4-5 years when they are obliged to seek popular approval why should the public respect the results of general elections, or any elections? What is left of any democratic notion in government?
In general, public disappointment with the LibDems is high, as is also seen in the results of a few recent local elections that saw their vote be hammered. The end result of the ConDem government just might be the complete destruction of the LibDems as a valid political party — public anger is high already even though most of the government’s plans so far have just been plans, not yet reality.
Good to see some militancy getting going finally. Hopefully that will be a nice little bill for the Tory scumbags, though it’s more likely they’ll find a way to let the taxpaper foot the bill. But this is what you can expect if you fuck with people’s lives, some fightback. If you want to saddle entire generations with unpayable debts for the dubious pleasure of receiving any eduction that would give them a slim chance of getting a job, did you think these people would just meekly swallow this? Of course not.
Lots of tutting in the establishment press of course and outrage by people who seem to expect they should never suffer the consequences of their own actions, whether jacking up student fees or, to pluck just one random example out of the air, lying about your opponents in an election campaign. (Did you see all the Labour piggies standing up for Phil “racist thug” Woolas yesterday?) Lots of reflexive distancing from some of the organisers and spokespeople of the students protests as well, because of course it’s not done to actually like a bit of property damage when done to the right people. But Arthur Baker is right to say that this wasn’t a minority stirring up trouble, but widely supported amongst students and bystanders alike:
I made a point to talk to as many people as possible, and whilst nobody wanted to see people hurt, they were perfectly happy to cheer as Tory HQ was vandalised; I didn’t find a single person objected to the vandalism, not even a police officer and a BBC journalist who both told me (off the record of course) that if they had been students, they would be doing the same – and who can blame them, when they face cuts and job losses too.
[…]
All of them should face justice, but for the record, putting a placard or an effigy of David Cameron on a bonfire is not violence, writing on walls is not violence, smashing windows is not violence and dancing on roves is not violence. Even throwing bits of cardboard placard at police clad in bullet proof jackets and helmets, armed with sheilds and battons hardly seems “thugishâ€.
To which I would add that the “perpetrators” should only face justice after e.g. the people who brought us the War on Iraq, or who killed Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson have been brought to justice. Priorities people.
Arthur also examines the question of whether this spontaneous action helped or hindered the students’ cause:
Finally the question of whether the incident at Milbank furthered our cause or damaged it. One thing missing from the news coverage was footage of the building being stormed by protesters in the first place, why? Surely protesters forcing the doors and surging in would make incredible footage? The answer is that the press simply weren’t there. In fact, the cameras only arrived half an hour after the protesters. On a march of 50,000, until the vandalism started, the only cameras I saw were from LSTV (Leeds student television).
In October thousands of students and trade unionists marched peacefully on downing street, and they did not make the news. Peaceful protests make boring news, without causing a bit of trouble we wouldn’t have been as big news, never mind having almost uninterrupted coverage on every TV news channel and dominating every front page.
What’s more, what cause did protesters ‘damage?’ protesters don’t want public sympathy, they want to create a feeling of unrest, and show that the Coalition are unpopular with the eventual aim of taking their votes, and this protest can only have furthered this aim.
Peaceful protest doesn’t work, unless there is the threat of more aggressive action as well. Strikes, civil disobedience and even a bit of violence has always been necessary in the fight to win and defend our collective rights. The best example of this, the antiwar protests in 2002/2003, including the largest demonstration ever held in the UK and which ultimately failed to move the government.
House of Lords sessions are not normally exciting nor strange, as all sorts of old men and women drone at each other with even less consequences than in late night House of Commons sessions. But sometimes they get strange, as Charlie Stross found out today:
So when an eminent member of the House of Lords stands up six hours into a debate and blows the gaff on a shadowy foreign Foundation making a bid to buy the British state, and this is recorded in Hansard, one tends to sit up and take notice. And one takes even more notice when His Lordship tip-toes around actually naming the Foundation in question, especially after the throw-away about money-laundering for the IRA on behalf of the Bank of England. Parliamentary privilege only stretches so far, it seems, and Foundation X is beyond its reach.
Quoting from the Hansard text, which can also be heard in the video above, starting from 2 hours 34 minutes in:
Lord James of Blackheath: At this point, I am going to have to make a very big apology to my noble friend Lord Sassoon [Treasury Minister], because I am about to raise a subject that I should not raise and which is going to be one which I think is now time to put on a higher awareness, and to explain to the House as a whole, as I do not think your Lordships have any knowledge of it. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde [Leader of the House] is not with us at the moment, because this deeply concerns him also.
For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, “We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate”. I had the biggest put-down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, “Why you? You’re not important enough to have the answer to a question like that”. He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, “You haven’t got the experience for it”. Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham [Labour]: Where did it go to?
Lord James of Blackheath: Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.
The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
[…]
My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came up with a very different argument. He said that this cannot be right because these people said at the meeting with him that they were still effectively on the gold standard from back in the 1920s and that their entire currency holdings throughout the world, which were very large, were backed by bullion. My noble friend Lord Strathclyde came back and said to me that he had an analyst working on it and that this had to be stuff and nonsense. He said that they had come up with a figure for the amount of bullion that would be needed to cover their currency reserves, as claimed, which would be more than the entire value of bullion that had ever been mined in the history of the world. I am sorry but my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is wrong; his analysts are wrong. He had tapped into the sources that are available and there is only one definitive source for the amount of bullion that has ever been taken from the earth’s crust. That was a National Geographic magazine article 12 years ago. Whatever figure it was that was quoted was then quoted again on six other sites on the internet—on Google. Everyone is quoting one original source; there is no other confirming authority. But if you tap into the Vatican accounts—of the Vatican bank–— come up with a claim of total bullion—
Lord De Mauley [Government Whip]: The noble Lord is into his fifteenth minute. I wonder whether he can draw his remarks to a conclusion.
Lord James of Blackheath: The total value of the Vatican bank reserves would claim to be more than the entire value of gold ever mined in the history of the world. My point on all of this is that we have not proven any of this. Foundation X is saying at this moment that it is prepared to put up the entire £5 billion for the funding of the three Is recreation; the British Government can have the entire independent management and control of it—foundation X does not want anything to do with it; there will be no interest charged; and, by the way, if the British Government would like it as well, if it will help, the foundation will be prepared to put up money for funding hospitals, schools, the building of Crossrail immediately with £17 billion transfer by Christmas, if requested, and all these other things. These things can be done, if wished, but a senior member of the Government has to accept the invitation to a phone call to the chairman of foundation X—and then we can get into business. This is too big an issue. I am just an ageing, obsessive old Peer and I am easily dispensable, but getting to the truth is not. We need to know what really is happening here. We must find out the truth of this situation.
My guess is that somebody somewhere has just tried to 419 scam the UK government. Either that, or we’re living in a Dan Brown *ugh* novel.
How the cap in housing benefits will work out, courtesy of Comment is Free commenter Texaspete82 (original here:
There are four parts to the HB reforms which will all be implemented by October 2011. The key reform – which affects 750,000 people and raises half a billion pounds per year – is the first of these.
1. Local Housing Allowance capped at the 30th percentile rent in every local housing market area (i.e. the level which allows – in theory – 30% of houses in the area to be afforded)…
2. …except in London, where the cap has been set significantly below this level (£250/week for 1 beds, £400/week for 4 beds)
3. A further 10% cut will be applied to those who have been unemployed for 1 year or more, to punish them for the crime of living during a recession
4. Housing Benefit capped at the 4-bed house rate to punish large families
To look at the full impact of this, you need to consult the VOA – the Government Agency responsible for setting Local Housing Allowance rates.
They’ve helpfully provided a table looking at the median rental rates (the current caps) and the 30 percentile rental rates (the future caps) in each local housing market area http://www.voa.gov.uk/lhadirect/Documents/LHA_percentile_rates_Oct_2010.html
Do have a look.
In Central London, the 30th percentile rent for a 4-bed is £850/week. There is no chance of anyone being able to afford to live in central London on housing benefit – the cap is set at less than half of the 30th percentile level. You could consider the poor to be “cleansed” from the area perhaps.
After moving out, they will not be eligible for the £400/week payment – this is only valid in central London remember. Elsewhere the 30th percentile cap applies. Let’s say they move to Outer South London, where their rent would be capped at £299/week. This is not an outragous rent for a 4-bed house – I challenge you to find a 4-bed house at this rate in this area. I live in this area, and I pay £210/week for a very small 2-bed flat in a down-at-heel area (and even then because I got a great deal from moving in when building work was still going on around me, and the landlord had to abandon plans to sell during the recession). Even my flat is £26/week beyond the 2-bed allowance for the area – and I don’t understand where all the 2-bed flats for £800/month are around me. I’m lucky – I have a decently-paid job (for now at least) and don’t claim HB, but it must be a worrying time for families who work in minimum wage jobs and rely on Housing Benefit to make ends meet.
If they lose their job, they have the further challenge of finding a 4-bed property for £270/week (or a 2-bed for £730/month). Not a chance.
And many, many people lose out beyond London too. Let’s imagine a family live in a 5-bed house in Tyneside and both parents lost their jobs in the recession in 2008. They are currently able to claim £207/week housing allowance. After the cap is applied, they are now only able to claim £140/week (£155 minus the £15 penalty for being unemployed). The Government will take £67/week from them. £3,500 taken from the poorest in society, in addition to spending cuts and VAT rises etc etc. This is not sharing the pain fairly is it?
Can you see what the fuss is about now?
The Tories have done a great PR job on getting the focus on the £400/week cap (despite the fact next to no-one will claim this, as it only applies in central London and there are no 4-beds to rent at half the 30th percentile rent) . Maybe a journalist may like to, say, scrutinise the plans and challenge the lies.
As Pete shows that much reported maximum of 400 pounds per week people can recieve in housing benefits is a red herring. There were rents are high enough that you might get it, they’re too high to be of much use, while elsewhere you would recieve a much lower rate still not enough to cover your rent.