Imagine a door-to-door salesman comes to your house one day to try and sell you a burglar alarm by telling you about the terribly high crime rate is in your area. You’re not convinced, so you tell him you don’t want one. A little while later that same salesman breaks into your house, nicks the [...]
This is a guest post by Natty As we all struggle to grasp what David Cameron’s veto in Brussels last Friday actually means, one theme continues to re-emerge. Indeed it’s a theme that has emerged time and time again in the history of British politics. When asking ourselves why the PM decided to ostracise the [...]
Well, my friends, the suspension of Greek democracy appears to be complete. When Papanderou was forced out, to be replaced by a government of national unity. I remarked: Greece’s multi-party democracy has in effect been supplanted by one party – The Austerity Party. The political elites have, in effect, formed a cartel. Greece’s major parties [...]
There are serious tensions building up within the Conservative Party ahead of tomorrow, as MPs prepare on whether Britain should have an in/out referendum on the EU. Cameron has whipped has MPs to vote against it, and the possibility of a minor rebellion has generated numerous column inches. However most commentators have failed to grasp [...]
On reading George Osborne’s oh-so-convincing CiF piece setting out exactly how tough he’s going to get with tax dodgers (they’re “like benefit cheats” apparently – can you imagine the depths of their perfidy?), one sentence in particular jumped out at me: Tax evaders also make use of tax loopholes, and the truth is that over [...]
Last night, the American House of Representatives passed legislation to raise the debt ceiling and heavily cut public spending – a historic move if you take into account the first has never been conditional on the latter. Today, the Senate unsurprisingly passed it. This trimming of the budget was inevitable considering the normalisation of neoliberal policies. [...]
Two prospective building sites in London are, I think, totemic of our current economic climate. The Heygate Estate and the Broadgate Estate, though very different, show two sides of the same coin. The Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South East London, was completed just over 30 years ago. Now, however, it has been completely [...]
This is a guest post by Samuel Wilson. As you may have heard, the government is planning to bring a ‘Military Covenant’ into law. This would give soldiers and their families particular rights and privileges – including (quoting from the Guardian, 16th May) ‘priority NHS treatment for forces personnel and their families; council tax rebates [...]
Your starter for 10: Which voice of Britain’s embattled public sector workers said this yesterday? We acknowledge that some cuts are necessary due to the parlous state of the country’s finances, but we feel greatly let down that we are not considered to be a protected priority area by the government. They have and will [...]
“There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading…To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it [...]
