UK politics

Crooked MP? You’ll only find out after his re-election

Sleaze, UK elections
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So it turned out that Denis MacShane was already under investigation over alleged misuse of parliamentary expense claims before his relection in May this year, yet the Parliamentary Standards Office did not see fit to release this information before the general election. Richard Wilson is right to be annoyed by this:

The Parliamentary Standards Office made a deliberate decision to withhold crucial information from UK voters ahead of the 2010 General Election. The voters of Rotherham – and for all we know many other constituencies around the country – were thus prevented from making an informed choice about the candidates seeking their votes. It’s only now, five months after the election has taken place, that the full picture is beginning to emerge. It may be another four years before Rotherham voters can express their judgement on this at the ballot box.

Knowing that your local MP is a crook –allegedly– seems to me to be pretty basic in deciding whether or not you’d re-elect them. Keeping that information from the public is not helpful.

As pilot schemes go, this one has kamikaze written all over it

Tories, UK politics
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So says one witty commenter about the news that Barnet council spent 1.5 million pounds getting 1.4 million in savings:

The Conservative-controlled north London council has committed to spending £1.5m this financial year on a much-hyped reform programme to help close a yawning budget gap, but it is on course to recoup just £1.4m in savings in the year.

The council’s funding shortfall is set to hit £15m next year, and the borough has tried to innovate through its “One Barnet” programme. This includes paying to develop a system of “life coaches” to persuade residents to reduce dependence on the state, appointing business consultants to help town hall officials and even opening a library in a branch of Starbucks in a pilot which could result in the closure of some library buildings.

The programme is budgeted to deliver savings of £13m a year by 2014, about a third of the total cuts planned by the council. It had been projected to save £3m by the end of the financial year, but Lynne Hillan, council leader, has now admitted the savings will be less than half of that.

Typical faux cost cutting scheme, which all seem to go a little bit like this:

  1. We must cut costs!
  2. Hire overpaid consultants
  3. ????
  4. Profit!

I mustn’t be too outraged; if it weren’t for dubious governmental cost cutting campaigns like this, think how tight the job market for IT consultants would be… One interesting detail, as Jamie noticed the guy most responsible for this scheme also managed to invest quite a lot of council money in Icelandic banks — aren’t you glad the party of business is in government now?

Birmingham council wants to axe 26,000 jobs

Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics
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Birmingham council wants people to take pay cuts or get fired:

The council wants to abolish allowances—additional payments workers receive for working unsociable hours and difficult shifts, including weekend working.

Allowances can make up a third of an employee’s take home pay.

A worker who currently earns £15,233 a year could see their wages slashed to £11,794—a loss of £3,439 or 23 percent.

Someone who now earns £19,027 could drop to £13,125—a loss of £5,902 or 31 percent.

There is of course no intention of allowing workers to refuse working on difficult shifts… This is a direct assault on the council’s workers and hits those workers who are already doing what are often difficult jobs for low wages. For many of them those allowances are needed to pay the bills; they can’t survive on just the base salary. And Birmingham isn’t the only council to play this game, just the first. According to Socialist Worker the following councils have also issued letters:

  • 8,500 in Sheffield
  • All 11,000 council workers in Barnsley
  • 8,500 in Sheffield
  • 8,000 in Walsall
  • 4,000 in Croydon
  • 800 in Oldham
  • 500 in Havering

This is the way in which the Tories want to solve Britain’s “debt crisis”.

Your Happening World (18)

Media, Tories, UK politics
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Nadine Dorrie, vicious cow. Should a member of parliament really spent her time harassing a disabled woman for being active on Twitter?

Andrew Marr, silly ass. “BBC presenter tells Cheltenham Literary Festival that citizen journalists will never replace real news” — perhaps not, but sycophantic power worshipers like yourself should worry. How much do we really need a muppet like Marr to stand outside Downing Street and tell us everything the nice news lady already said in her introduction? And shouldn’t we be more worried about “anonymous sources in the coalition government” or “an anonymous high ranking Labour insider” whispering in Marr’s shell likes than in what some anonymous (or rather, pseudonymous) blogger puts on their site?

The truth about the UK’s national debt. Take a look at that last chart, showing interest payments in percentage of GDP were actually higher in the eighties and nineties under the Tories than they are now, when they’re supposedly unsustainable…

More news as updates warrant.

That buslane on the M4

Tories, UK politics
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If you’ve ever watched Top Gear yopu know that buslane on the M4 is one of their bugbears, prime evidence of Labour’s war on the motorist and like Boris did with the bendy buses, the new ConDem(ned) government listens Top Gear and now wants to remove the lane. Stable and Principled shows why this is a bad idea. The money quote:

What was the result of the bus lane’s introduction? Well, the TRL report [PDF] on the scheme showed precisely what you’d expect – off peak journey times (unconstrained by the capacity problems of the elevated section) increased as a result of the speed limit, while peak journey times decreased by an average three minutes due to the removal of the merge – at peak times the traffic rarely gets near 60mph, so the reduced speed limit has no effect. At weekends the lower traffic volumes result in the speed limit becoming the limiting factor again, resulting in slower journey times. Overall, the peak hour reliability improvement more than cancels this out, however.

What, then, is the effect of removal? Well, unless they increase the speed limit, weekend and offpeak journeys will be the same as at present, while with the merge restored to the Piccadilly Line bridge, the peak journey times will extend and become less reliable as the road won’t be able to cope as well with perturbations due to the loss of capacity at this point. This, in fact, is precisely what you’d do if you wanted to declare war on the motorist and make my life more miserable.

Ideology trumps reality once again. Because The Sun and Top Gear hate the M4 buslane as a piece of motorist hating nannystate-ism, the Tories treat it as such, evidence be damned. So much for any hope that this new government would not be ruled by the tabloids.