Tory peer claims welfare changes encourage poor to 'breed'

A new Conservative peer has claimed that Coalition changes to the welfare system will encourage “breeding” among those on benefits.

Howard Flight, a former Tory MP, made the comments just days after being given a peerage by David Cameron. (Must be part of the Big Society and the happiness measure.)

Mr Flight, who has yet to be ennobled, was asked in an interview about changes to the child benefit system which will see top rate taxpayers no longer receiving the state-hand-out.

The father of three told the Evening Standard: “We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive.

"But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible."

His comments come a week after David Cameron was infuriated by comments from Lord Young. The peer was forced to resign as a Downing Street adviser after referring to the “so-called recession” and people never having it “so good.”

Now tories, or then tories? Still the same old t***s!

"Look and learn from across the Irish Sea"...

...the 'Boy' George said, "The new global economy poses real long-term challenges to Britain, but also real opportunities for us to prosper and succeed," he wrote. "In Ireland they understand this. They have freed their markets, developed the skills of their workforce, encouraged enterprise and innovation and created a dynamic economy. They have much to teach us, if only we are willing to learn."

OK George. We have now been educated by that dynamic financial miracle that was Ireland. So why exactly are you loaning them more than our own cuts in social welfare? Why are you propping up this lame duck economy (which you once lauded and actually are emulating in your UK fiscal measures) to the scale of £7 billion (£9 billion if they default)? Why claim that the Irish defecit is around 80 billion euros when it is actually more like 200 to 300 billions? And if you know that, which you do, why offer up £9 billion our money to burn when the Irish economy is actually doomed to default?

Blackpool Town Hall Protest

Hundreds of trade unionists from across the public sector in Blackpool and the Fylde joined together in protest at the councils proposed spending cuts last night.

Veterans Agency National Branch was represented by branch officers and ordinary members who showed solidarity with Unison members from the councils many thousands of staff facing redundancy in the coming months. Emily Kelly of the PCS NEC spoke alongside Cllr Simon Blackburn on the town hall steps.

After the rally, 65 council staff were allowed to enter the council chamber to listen to the spending cuts debate, as reported here.

The UK's Odious Debts

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd November 2010

You’ve been told that nothing is sacred; that no state spending is safe from being cut or eroded through inflation. You’ve been misled. As the new public spending data released by the government show, a £267bn bill has been both ring-fenced and index-linked. This sum, spread over 50 years or so, guarantees the welfare not of state pensioners or children or the unemployed, but of a different class of customer. To make way, everything else must be cut, further and faster than it would otherwise have been.

This is the money the state now owes to private corporations: the banks, construction and service companies which built infrastructure under the private finance initiative. In September 1997 the Labour government gave companies a legal guarantee that their payments would never be cut. Whenever there was a conflict between the needs of patients or pupils and PFI payments, it would thenceforth be resolved in favour of the consortia. The NHS now owes private companies £50bn for infrastructure that cost only £11bn to build, plus £15bn for maintenance charges.
PFI contracts typically last for 25 or 30 years; in one case (Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals) for 60 years. In 1997 the British Medical Association warned that “the NHS could find itself with a facility which is obsolete in 10 or 20 years’ time, but for which it will still have to pay for 30 years or more.” No one’s celebrating being proved right.

This summer Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, thanks to the extortionate terms of its PFI contract, found itself with a shortfall of £70m. Under other circumstances it would suspend maintenance work and cut ancillary services until the crisis had passed. But its contract demands that it does the opposite: it must protect non-clinical services by cutting doctors, nurses and beds.
If a hospital no longer requires the services it contracted to buy, tough. If clinical needs or local demographics change, tough. Where hospitals can’t pay the massive penalty clauses said to lurk in the agreements, the NHS must be re-shaped around contractual, not clinical, needs.

The cost and inflexibility of PFI is an outrage, a racket, the legacy of 13 years of New Labour appeasement, triangulation and false accounting. At first sight, it looks as if nothing can be done: contracts are contracts. What I’m about to propose is a wild shot, but I hope it deserves, at least, to be discussed. I contend that the money we owe to the PFI consortia should be considered odious debt.

Odious debt is a legal term usually applied to the endowments of dictators in the developing world. It means debt incurred without the consent of the people and against the national interest. While the concept is not accepted by all legal scholars, it has some traction. In 2008 Ecuador refused to pay debts which, it argued, had been illegitimately acquired by previous governments. I believe it applies to at least some of our PFI liabilities.

PFI was a Tory invention but became a Labour doctrine. The 1997 Labour manifesto announced that the party would “reinvigorate the Private Finance Initiative”. But it was vague about the detail. Labour front-benchers had announced that some areas of public provision were off-limits. For example, John Prescott pledged that “Labour will take back private prisons into public ownership”. Jack Straw promised to “bring these prisons into proper public control and run them directly as public services.” But within two months of taking office, Straw had renewed one private prison contract and announced two new ones. There was no democratic mandate for this policy, which appears to have arisen from secret talks with companies.

Secrecy surrounded the whole scheme. To this day, PFI contracts remain commercially confidential. You can’t read them; MPs can’t read them. We don’t know what we are being stung for or whether the costs are justified. But there are some powerful clues.

Blair’s administration gave public bodies no choice: if they wanted new projects, they had to use the private finance initiative. In some cases private companies weren’t interested, so the schemes had to be reverse-engineered to attract them. In Coventry, for example, NHS bosses originally sought £30m of public money to refurbish the city’s two hospitals. When the government told them it was “PFI or bust”, the refurbishment plan was dropped in favour of a scheme to knock down both hospitals and build a new one – with fewer beds and doctors and nurses – at an eventual, corporate-friendly cost of £410m. A report commissioned by the local health authority found that the scheme had been “progressively tailored to fit the needs of private investors”(15).To get their new buildings or services, public bodies had to show that PFI was cheaper than public procurement. The system was rigged to make this easy. They could choose their own value for “optimism bias” in public procurement, which means the amount by which they guessed that a public project might overrun its budget. But, by official decree, optimism bias was deemed not to exist in private procurement.

They could also attach whatever price they wanted to the risk ostensibly being transferred to the private sector. A paper published in the British Medical Journal shows that, before risk transfer was costed, the hospital schemes it studied would have been built more cheaply with public money. After the risk was estimated, they all tipped the other way; in some cases by less than 0.1%.

These valuation exercises were notional anyway, because as soon as a preferred bidder for the contract had been chosen, the agreed prices were junked. The winning consortium had the public authority over a barrel, and could renegotiate at leisure. Desperate public bodies were gulled and outmanoeuvred with the blessing of central government, which sought only to keep the corporations off its back and the liabilities off its balance sheets. Was this a legitimate means of loading our schools and hospitals with debt? I don’t think so.

I know that the chances of getting any of this debt recognised as odious, especially by the current government, are small to say the least. But where else do we go with this? I’ve been writing about inflexible PFI contracts since 1998. I’ve wasted months on this mission, trying to understand and explain the most complex issue in public life. For all the good it’s done, I might as well have gone fishing.

Now I see corporations squatting like great cuckoos on our public services, while officials pour the money which should have been spent on nurses and teachers into their widening bills. Yes, I’m bitter. Yes, I’m clutching at straws. But have you got a better idea?

www.monbiot.com

The civil service is not full of fat cats

At last Gus O'Donnell speaks up for us!

The caricature of the feather-bedded civil servant bears no relation to the modern reality

Tomorrow the Civil Service Awards will take place in Buckingham Palace, rightly recognising some of those civil servants who – in Britain and overseas – have gone beyond the everyday and done something truly extraordinary to make people's lives better.

Nominees for awards include inspirational civil servants who have, through their energy and creativity, helped to change people's lives – whether through driving down drug use in prison, improving the use of helicopters in combat, or helping parents to access the free school meals to which their children are entitled.

While entertaining, the tired old caricatures of the civil service stand in stark contrast to the modern reality, epitomised by the recipients of these awards. But perceptions remain stubbornly resistant to change. Regrettably, misrepresentation of civil service roles and their pay and conditions is not unusual. The hackneyed stories of civil servants on Premiership footballer-style salaries, living and working in luxurious conditions in Whitehall, enjoying a job for life, and retiring on fat cat pensions, are becoming increasingly absurd.

It is hard not to grow weary of the repeated references to featherbedded pen-pushing bureaucrats in Whitehall. The reality is that more than 84% of all civil servants are outside London, working across the whole country, and overseas, delivering and supporting frontline services.

And let us be absolutely clear. It is not the lure of pay and pensions that draws most people to the civil service. The median salary of a civil servant is £22,850 a year – lower than the wider public sector, and lower than the private sector. Indeed, 60% of civil servants earn less than the private sector median of £25,000. The average pension is £7,000. Nor has the number of civil servants grown over recent years – in fact, quite the reverse. We will soon have the smallest civil service since the beginning of the second world war.

As head of the Home Civil Service, I am acutely conscious of the impact of this misrepresentation on men and women working extremely hard for their communities, especially at a time when many face a renewed uncertainty about the future.

Civil servants are fully aware of the challenges the British economy faces. They are, after all, working tirelessly and professionally to support the coalition government through the current challenges, every day, and in every part of Britain. I also know – as they do – that civil servants must play their part in sharing the pain of the difficult times ahead. Most government departments face administrative cuts of about a third over the coming years, with a pay freeze, reforms to pensions – and, of course, inevitable job losses.

These are not easy times for the civil service. But, as it has done through so many challenging periods in the past, the civil service will continue to draw on the dedication and quality for which it is internationally renowned. I am proud of the way the civil service rose once again in 2010 to the challenge of handling the transition from one government to another without missing a beat, and has quickly got into its stride in helping the coalition government to implement an ambitious policy programme.

And this week, with support from all political parties, we enact legislation to set in statute the abiding principles of the civil service: honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity. There are too many countries where the values we take for granted in our civil servants simply do not exist. Seeing these values in action, applied with dedication by hardworking individuals, makes me proud to lead a service that is making life better for millions across Britain.

The Irish verdict George Osborne would like to forget

RIP Ireland's economic miracle. A combination of tax cuts and increased public spending -- coupled with the credit crunch -- has left Ireland with a budget deficit of 32 per cent of its GDP this year. The credit-inflated bubble has now well and truly popped, the draconian austerity measures have failed -- as many predicted they would -- and the Irish government appears close to being bailed out by the EU.

Along with Greece, the Irish experience from the nineties into the noughties seems to be a perfect example of how not to do things. But in 2006 -- at the very apex of the Irish bubble -- one economic sage decided that Ireland was actually a fine example of how to run an econmy. His name?

George Osborne.

Writing in the Times (pre-paywall, folks), the then shadow chancellor declared:
Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.

Long-term, eh, George?

There was little "long-term" about the artificial housing and banking boom that Ireland underwent in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Despite Osborne's claims, Ireland did not surge ahead because of its highly regarded education system or increased research and development at universities.
Ireland boomed instead on a toxic mix of cheap credit, lax banking regulation and by becoming a borderline tax haven.

Slashing corporation tax -- a move continually hailed by Osborne as the way forward -- simply weakened Ireland's tax base even further, making the recovery that bit more difficult.
We should learn from Ireland's mistakes. Unfortunately, however, Osborne wants to copy them -- at least judging by Osborne's cuts to universities, the 3.4 per cent reduction in the education budget and his continued obsession with reducing corporation tax -- to the point where companies could end up paying less tax than their cleaners.

The case of Ireland is a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
UPDATE: Alphaville over at the FT points out another cautionary tale from the Irish experiment.
"Sovereign bailouts involve a certain quid pro quo.
For a start, there's been talk that Germany is pushing for the country's low, low 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate to be hiked.
...
Awkward. And perhaps not least for a certain tax-avoiding search engine."

Which tax-avoiding search engine could that be? Why, the one that George Osborne bragged about speaking to in his Times op-ed: "I will be asking Google executives today why they set up in Dublin, not London." Alphaville explains exactly why Google set up in Dublin:
"Google Ireland sends the earnings on a tax-lite journey to the Netherlands, whence a shell subsidiary passes it on practically untouched to a Bermudan holding, basically. They call it a 'Double Irish'.

Jammy stuff. Until your tax haven files for a bailout from some very angry Germans, that is. And 26 per cent of your earnings is a lot to put at risk..."

from The new Statesman, Duncan Robinson

Happiness

First the cuts.

Pay.

Pensions.

Benefits.

Services.

Jobs.

Trains, planes and automobiles (well, nearly).

And now the ConDems propose to measure our... Happiness?

If this is not a joke, it should be.

All in this together? Do us a favour.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11756049

Call Me Dave and The Boy George risk our ruin...

The ConDem policy of following the Irish model for economic recovery looks to be as forecast

a disaster waiting to happen.

Ireland is currently facing economic collapse as its recovery plans fall apart. The EU is attempting to to gather a rescue package of some £77 billion... of which the UK is expected to provide £7 billion! (The same amount the ConDems plan to recover from the paye tax system and other adjustments to HMRC.)

Meanwhile, Ireland has been driven to the brink of an international rescue deal because its economy, which grew sharply on the back of a booming property market and a burgeoning financial services sector, has suffered the deepest recession of any developed economy. (Sound familiar?)

Despite following a policy of slash and burn of the public sector (the plan the ConDems are intent on following) Ireland has experienced the worst recession of any major economy and has amassed government debts of more than €100 billion (£85billion). It has an unemployment rate almost twice as high as Britain at 13.2 per cent and currently has a record deficit equivalent to 32 per cent of its gross domestic product.

Where they have gone, the ConDems are intent on taking the UK. It is not just this branch saying this... the worlds foremost economic experts agree with us! The evidence that the ConDEms policy cannot, and will not work, is there in Ireland for all to see. The facts are known and it is now more than clear that the governments cuts agenda is entirely ideolgically driven.

Tax justice - alternative to public sector cuts

Tax on earned income should be drastically cut to maybe 10 to 20%. This would stimulate the economy and prompt growth. But how to pay for it?

The richest 0.3% of the population owns two thirds of UK land and 90% of the UK population are in debt to the other 10% who now own almost all of the UK's unencumbered wealth.

Adam Smith through JS Mill to subversives like Winston Churchill and Lloyd George – all argued that we should tax unearned income and gains from privileged property rights, rather earned income.

The net effect for 90% of the population of such levies - eg a land value tax; a levy on non-renewable resources; a levy on intellectual property; a levy on GROSS corporate revenues in respect of the privilege of limited liability - would be positive. The wealthiest 10% would pay more - in some cases a lot more - than they do now that the greater part of their wealth goes untaxed. Moreover, they could be taxed in a way that would be impossible to escape. They may be mobile, and could leave the UK, but the land they own stays where it is. Other levies on gross revenues arising in the UK could be simply collected through the clearing system.

The savings in the public and private sector administration, and the increases in collection due to the impossibility of avoidance and evasion, would be phenomenal.

Of course, the privileged turkeys who own, manage and milk the country would never enact Christmas, but that does not make the excessive taxation of earned income any more acceptable. It just exposes the neo-liberals currently in power - and the equally culpable neo-liberal New Labour contingent in power for the last 13 years - for the hypocrites they are.

Grounded

In a letter to the Times, a group of former Royal Navy admirals have called for the reversal of the decision to scrap the Ark Royal and the fleet of Harrier jets. The admirals argue that the decision leaves the "newly valuable" Falklands Islands vulnerable to attack, and that "Argentina is practically invited to attempt to inflict on us a national humiliation on the scale of the loss of Singapore." The letter is said to reflect the deep anger felt in the navy over the cuts, where there is widespread agreement that Britain will face national humiliation.

In light of the coalition government's spending review, the letter concluded that the Prime Minister was ill-advised, as the Tornado fleet will, over a period of ten years, cost over seven times more than the Harrier fleet.

In response, the government's Armed Forces Minister, Nick Harvey, told the BBC's Today Programme that the Falklands could still be protected without an aircraft carrier. Mr Harvey also insisted that the Tornado was the correct aircraft for the Afghan conflict, and that the decision was taken in light of a detailed investigation that took on board a balance of advice from military leadership.

A further consequence of the cuts is that no planes will be able to fly from British carriers until at least 2019, which means that the Britain will require warning to respond to any military attack. On this capability gap, the admirals commented that "The government has, in effect, declared a new '10-year rule' that assumes Britain will have warning time to rebuild to face a threat."

Out of the mouths of babes and 'boys'

The Boy George Osborne interviewed by Andrew Marr:


Osborne: "Well, both the spirit of the tax law, as well as the letter of the tax law. That is what we are asking. Of course we've got a sanction, which is … "
Marr: "What's the sanction?"
Osborne: "Well the sanction is an Inland Revenue which is going to have enhanced capability to make sure that people pay what is due. And that's not just true of banks. That is also true of rich people who avoid tax because they are just like the benefit cheats at a time like this. Both … "
Marr: "Does that include people like some of your colleagues who have shifted money into companies with their wives … "
Osborne: "I'm talking about tax evasion. Tax evasion is totally unacceptable at a time like this."
Marr: "But what about the rich people who avoid tax?"
Osborne: "It's unacceptable at the best of times. It is immoral at a time like this. We are actually, in a period when we are cutting quite a lot of budgets, we are increasing the budget here of the inspectors who go after the tax accounts of the richest people and the richest companies to make sure that they are paying their fair due too."

It strikes us that there are two confusions here and if we were a Tory-voting bankers we'd be worried about them.

One is that tax evasion isn't just immoral and unacceptable (Osborne made the same mistake in his party conference speech), it's illegal. People occasionally go to jail for it."

And in appearing to confuse evasion with (perfectly legal) tax avoidance – what you or we might do if we upped our pension contributions, which are tax deductible – he may be muddying the waters on purpose, but we suspect not.

Hacker attacks Royal Navy website

The Royal Navy Website has been taken offline after it was "compromised" by a hacker, the Ministry of Defence said today.

A Navy spokesman said no "malicious damage" had been caused by the cyber attack, which was now being investigated by security teams.

A hacker operating under the name TinKode claimed to have compromised the site on Friday. He was also reported to have posted user names and website data on the internet.

Visitors to the Navy website this morning were greeted with the message: "Unfortunately the Royal Navy website is currently undergoing essential maintenance. Please visit again shortly." A Royal Navy spokesman said: "We can confirm that there was a compromise of the RN web over the weekend.
"There has been no malicious damage, but as a precaution the RN website has been temporarily suspended. Security teams are investigating."

Call Me Dave broke civil service rules by not advertising PR jobs

"Call Me Dave" Cameron breached Civil Service rules to get his growing "vanity staff" on the taxpayer-funded payroll.

Senior Tory sources have claimed the Prime Minister's personal photographer, stylist and videomaker are allowed to be employed without any competition because they are on short-term contracts.

But the rules show other people should have had the chance to do the high-profile No10 jobs. A document from Civil Service chiefs says short-term jobs, designed to help the unemployed, do not have to be advertised in national or local newspapers. Yet it states they must be publicly advertised on noticeboards or the internet to give people without personal or family connections a fair chance to get the jobs.

Former Civil Service minister Tom Watson believes the breach of the employment rules is serious. He said: "This strikes me as a clear abuse of Civil Service principles of impartiality and open competition. If they want to make political appointments they should be honest about it."


The row centres on the jobs of photographer Andy Parsons, video camera expert Nicky Woodhouse and Anna-Maren Ashford - the branding consultant who devised the Tories' tree logo. It also emerged yesterday former Conservative candidate Rishi Saha, 30, has become another one of the growing number of members of the Camerons' inner circle to get plum No10 jobs after being appointed head of new media. Mr Saha - who once promoted hip-hop nights at clubs - is a protege of Mr Cameron's image guru Steve Hilton.

The Civil Service rules on short-term jobs states: "Openness means that vacancies must be advertised publicly. They are not prescriptive as to the media to be used, specifying only that the advertising strategy must be suitable for attracting a diverse field of strong potential candidates.
"It is for departments and agencies to decide how this should be applied in practice, but it does mean that vacancies may be advertised only on relevant internet sites in appropriate circumstances." The PM was warned by a senior Downing Street mandarin he should not employ a highly paid vanity snapper at public expense at a time half a million other civil servants were being fired.

The ever-expanding Cameron clique at No 10 and the Cabinet Office, paid for by taxpayers, has led to mounting criticism from some Tory MPs who say the PM is falling into the same trap as the image-fixated Blairs. He was openly mocked over the vanity appointments by Labour leader Ed Miliband last week. Jokes are also being made at his special advisers - whose appointments are not governed by the same Civil Service rules. They include Isabel Spearman, whose role involves choosing outfits for Samantha Cameron and organising Downing Street functions.

It's just the same old, same old. Power corrupts, and with the human shield of LibDems, power will corrupt absoloutely.

Thousands in Scotland rally to defend RAF base

Thousands of people marched yesterday to oppose the possible closure of the RAF Tornado base at Lossiemouth in Scotland, as Nato's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, described the scale of Britain's defence cuts as a "matter of concern".

An estimated 6,000 people marched through the town in Moray before attending a rally, following reports that the fleet of fighter jets could be moved to a base in Norfolk as part of the ongoing defence review.

Among those taking part was Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister and SNP leader; the leaders of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in Scotland, Iain Gray, Annabel Goldie and Tavish Scott; and Colin McGregor, the brother of actor Ewan and a former Tornado pilot at Lossiemouth.

Read more here

The party game is over. Stand and fight

The lesson of the French anti-government protests is that “normal” politics exists only to promote corporate interests. Britain must prepare for a rebirth of the only thing that works — direct action.

John Pilger - New Statesman, 04 Nov 2010

"Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:Ye are many - they are few."

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spreadsheet.

Born of the "never again" spirit of 1945, social democracy has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1trn of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described "financiers" as the nation's "great example" and his personal "inspiration".

This is not to say parliamentary politics is meaningless. It has one meaning now: the replacement of democracy with a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born.

No rationale
The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang built the foundation of the present "coalition". This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-shielded fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballintaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.

Today, they are claiming 21st-century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a "deficit crisis". A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the Second World War, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the arts edifices of London's South Bank.

There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a "public spending review". The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that's beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a "shock doctrine" as applied to Pinochet's Chile and Yeltsin's Russia.

In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; and asylum-seekers can be "restrained" to death on commercial flights.

Athol Fugard is right. With Harold Pinter gone, no acclaimed writer or artist dare depart from their well-remunerated vanity. With so much in need of saying, they have nothing to say. Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction's compliance with the dismantling of much of British postwar society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who "cheat" the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner.

The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary. Mark how the firefighters' action is "covered". On Channel 4 News, following an item that portrayed modest, courageous people as basically reckless, Jon Snow demanded that the leaders of the London Fire Authority and the Fire Brigades Union go straight from the studio and "mediate" now, this minute. "I'll get the taxis!" he declared. Forget the thousands of jobs that are to be eliminated from the fire service and the public danger beyond Bonfire Night; knock their jolly heads together. "Good stuff!" said the presenter.

To the barricades
Ken Loach's 1983 documentary series Questions of Leadership opens with a sequence of earnest young trade unionists on platforms, exhorting the masses. They are then shown older, florid, self-satisfied and finally adorned in the ermine of the House of Lords. Once, at a Durham Miners' Gala, I asked Tony Woodley, now joint general secretary of Unite, "Isn't the problem the clockwork collaboration of the union leadership?" He almost agreed, implying that the rise of bloods like himself would change that. The British Airways cabin crew strike, over which Woodley presides, is said to have made gains. Has it? And why haven't the unions risen against totalitarian laws that place free trade unionism in a vice?

The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; listen to the public's support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.

Maintenant Cameron, notre très propre singe de reddition

Entente frugale as Cameron surrenders our defence into the hands of the French for the next 50 years!

Now that's what we call an offshoring too far.

What next? Army pay adminstered in Toulouse? Navy pensions paid from Marseille? It is the logical next step.

Read more here.

Exaggerating benefit fraud points the finger of blame at the poor

Last week three British churches (the Methodist, Baptist, and United Reformed) issued an important joint press release which has been completely ignored by the mainstream press. It is time that we woke up and paid attention to it.
Perhaps the language they used was too polite. However their allegation is significant and demands a response from the Treasury: the churches are saying that Chancellor George Osborne grossly exaggerated the scale of benefit fraud in his spending review two weeks ago.

George Osborne told MPs: ‘Nor will fraud in the welfare system be tolerated any more. We estimate that £5 billion a year is being lost in this way – £5 billion that others have to work long hours to pay in their taxes.’

However that figure is not true. I have now been onto the Treasury and it is clear that the real figure for fraud in the benefits system is £1.5 billion a year, or less than one third of the sum which Osborne claimed in his spending statement. (Says Peter Oborne of the Telegraph)

Read in full here

A letter to Ursula Brennan PUS MoD

A Civilian Covenant?

First, may we welcome you to your new role. The SDSR and CSR announcements last month have certainly made this a challenge!

We are writing to you to suggest a measure we believe you should take to assist in managing the very difficult situation you have inherited. In his independent review, Civilians in Defence, Gerry Grimstone has suggested that there is a need to strengthen the corporate identity of civil servants – industrial and non-industrial - working in the MOD. This would include recognition as a Civilian Force, or as he put it, the 4th Force or 4th Service.

The 2009 staff engagement survey (Your Say) suggested two common characteristics of MOD civil servants: while they are strongly committed to Defence (if not to the MOD) and extremely loyal to the armed forces, they believe leadership and change management to be poor. Nevertheless, overall staff engagement in MOD was the second highest of large government departments. We fear that recent events are likely to put this score at risk in the current survey.

In the MOD’s Civilian Workforce Strategy (2009), one of the three focuses for delivery is to “drive business performance, by establishing a new two way commitment between Defence and our civilian workforce, based on individual performance and accountability, in an inclusive and supportive work environment with access to good quality, business focused training and development”.

MOD civil servants face numerous pressures created by the intensity of military operations and pressures on the defence budget plus the irrational, intensely political, drive to cut civilian numbers. They have been reviewed and restructured to the point of exhaustion and the SDSR and further Treasury-inspired cuts now confront them with a pay freeze, attacks on their terms and conditions and the real threat to one in three jobs – coupled with the spectre of compulsory redundancies at a time when the CSCS is being reviewed and legislation brought forward to reduce redundancy payments to a level of parsimony when compared against the terms used over the last 40 years.

Against this background, ministers and the armed forces apparently expect these staff to deliver improved support to the Services while transforming that support to make it more efficient and effective. How is that loyalty and commitment to be preserved?

The Military Covenant is a relatively recent concept and is being recast as part of the SDSR.
The unions believe that there should be a Civilian Covenant on similar lines to the Military Covenant. This would be an important component in recognising MOD civilians as the 4th Service. It would cement the psychological contract that MOD civilians already have to Defence and to the armed forces and, thus, assist enormously in managing the difficult period ahead.

We attach a proposal for a Civilian Covenant. It is deliberately framed as a set of principles and a declaration of intent. We see little in there that could be deemed contentious. The MOD has long claimed to be a good employer. We call on you to agree to adopt this Covenant and we would be happy to meet with you to discuss how it can be put into practice.

Yours sincerely


pp

Sharon Holder
National Officer
GMB

Bob Rollings
National Officer
PCS

Steve Jary
National Secretary
Prospect

Kevin Coyne
National Officer
Unite

The MOD Civilian Covenant: Valuing the 4th Service


Loyalty and commitment: MOD civil servants shall remain totally committed to the Defence Aim; they undertake to strive for excellence in all of their roles but, in particular, in the support they give to the armed forces.

Valuing the 4th Service: the MOD shall enhance public understanding of the role of its civil service through inter alia a defined programme of public awareness briefings, and shall defend quickly, robustly and publicly its civil servants against ill-informed and unjustified attack from the media and politicians.

Job Security: the MOD shall make decisions on the basis of a clear understanding of what the department does and who it needs to do it. It shall plan its requirements on the basis of a proper assessment of the correct balance between contractors and its own staff and between military and civilian personnel. Staffing levels shall be managed in a sensitive manner with due regard to the dignity of employees.

Skills and careers: the MOD shall invest in the training and development of its staff, so as to improve the efficacy of its business and to enhance the productivity and job satisfaction of its staff through the maintenance of rewarding careers. Training and development activity should recognise the need to retain the MOD’s ‘intelligent customer’ capability through the maintenance of specialist skills and effective succession planning.

Recognition and reward: the MOD shall develop and maintain civilian pay and conditions which are fair and enable it to recruit and retain high quality staff. Specifically the MOD shall identify and provide additional reward to the specialists in its workforce who deliver an essential contribution to military capability.

Fair and effective management: the MOD shall establish and maintain a skilled and supportive line management chain, supported by logical and fair personnel management processes. The MOD shall encourage flexible working among its workforce, so as to enhance business efficiency and the achievement of work-life balance for staff.

Occupational health and welfare: the MOD shall ensure that its workplaces and its working practices comply with best practice when it comes to occupational health and safety; it shall invest in its business and thus ensure that staff have the facilities and equipment necessary to do an effective job. The MOD shall provide world class occupational health and welfare support for its civilian staff.

Change without trauma: the MOD commits to rational and transparent decision-making and meaningful consultation with a view to reaching agreement in change programmes, including the use of properly constructed Value for Money Benchmarks. It undertakes to do everything in its power to avoid enforced redundancies or relocations; and it aims to provide staff with the maximum choice about their future when work is privatised or contracted-out.

Dignity and respect: the MOD shall treat all of its employees with dignity, without bullying or harassment (or the fear of these) and with equality of opportunity. The MOD recognises the role of its union representatives in enabling staff to maximise their contribution to Defence.

"Call Me Dave's" latest wheeze

After promising a cut to the EU budget, which didn't materialize, and then promising a freeze to the same, which melted and cost us a further £500 million pounds or so... the Dave'ster is at it again in Europe.

This time, his latest scam (sorry) 'brilliant idea' is to deploy a joint British / French brigade in future conflicts.
Read more here

We can see possible problems with this plan.

However, it does, like his stance on the EU budget, allow for an aggressive assault whilst at the same time engaging in an immediate retreat! Should save both time and money (but not for us, of course).

CoDS invokes Martin Luther King

That is correct. General Sir David Richards
KCB CBE DSO ADC Gen Chief of the Defence Staff in his Order of the day to all those in the Armed Forces and for the information of all MOD civil servants today, actually invoked the famous civil rights and peace campaigner when he wrote:

"Martin Luther King once famously said "I have a dream"*. Well I have the military version of that – I have a vision. A vision based on delivering the Government’s long-term strategic Intent on the one hand and on achieving strategically vital success in Afghanistan, under General Petraeus and with our allies, on the other. Both these aims are clearly inextricably linked. I would ask you all now selflessly to work out how you can best help deliver this vision. Much innovative and radical thinking, a preparedness to shed outmoded or now irrelevant attitudes and structures, will surely be needed. "

* You can read the full text of MLK's speech at the following link. You decide of its invocation in the context of the Afghanistan conflict is justified, or just stupified.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

You could make this up, but no one would believe it!

Its magic. But not a lot.

69% of policies announced in spending review will affect working households

Almost two-thirds of the £15.9bn welfare and benefit cuts announced in the emergency budget and spending review will hit working families

The TUC analysis of welfare changes showed working households will suffer a loss of about £9.4bn, nearly twice the level of losses for non-working households.

About 69% of the policies announced in the spending review will hit working households.

The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, said: "Ministers say their welfare and benefit cuts are fair and justified because they will make work pay.

"Polls show that they have already lost the fairness argument. It is working families – both the poor and the squeezed middle – who are the big losers from welfare cuts, not the alleged workshy scroungers that the government claims to target.

"These deep rapid cuts concentrated on families with children weren't in any election manifestos. The speed and scale of the cuts are not an economic necessity, but a political choice."

He added: "No one voted for these cuts to their living standards, more child poverty, mass job losses and a 'get out of tax free' card for the banks. The government needs to reconsider its spending plans before it causes any more economic damage and pain to working families."

We say that the benefit cuts are in reality tax increases for the majority of ordinary working people. Meanwhile tax relief is extended to the richest, and avoiders and evaders are rewarded with government advisory posts. Now that's magic.