Bolitics The New Condem Government

[StefanAVFC]

Michael Gove is a word removed

 

That is all.

[peterms]

Duncan Smith told off for lying about people moving off benefits.

 

This comes as no surprise.  The man's an inveterate liar.  He wouldn't know the truth if it crawled up his trouser leg and bit him in the arse.

[coda]

Recession is a good time to exploit cheap labour, says Cameron aide

 

 

[peterms]

Michael Gove is a word removed

 

That is all.

 

This may have already been posted, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if I've posted it myself.  It deserves a wide audience, unlike wee Pinocchio.

 

[snowychap]

In response to the penultimate post: Well it is, if that's how your crumble cookies.

I think the tenor of his comments is more important.

Edited May 12, 2013 by snowychap

[peterms]

In response to the penultimate post: Well it is, if that's how your crumble cookies.

I think the tenor of his comments is more important.

 

Yes, the tenor is the point - the avaricious grasping of an opportunity to exploit.  It's to be expected: "Young, who has already been forced to resign from his position once before for downplaying the impact of the recession on people,..."

 

The content is uncontentious.  He's only saying what Marx explained more comprehensively and less clumsily.

[chrisp65]

Recession is a good time to exploit cheap labour, says Cameron aide

 

 

current tory aid to PM who was also a  signficant tory during Thatcher era states that other people's businesses failing and people losing their jobs or job security is an excellent opportunity for those with capital to make a profit

 

 

nothing to see here

[villaajax]

Michael Gove says he would vote for an EU exit. I would vote for a Michael Gove exit.

[bickster]

Michael Gove says he would vote for an EU exit. I would vote for a Michael Gove exit.

Isn't that against current govt policy, naughty Michael

[Risso]

"Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater."

 

What is there to disagree with there?

[dont_do_it_doug.]

"Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater."

What is there to disagree with there?

How long you got?

[chrisp65]

"Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater."

 

What is there to disagree with there?

 

who's disagreed with it?

[peterms]

Good piece here on that lying shit IDS.

 

When you see rottenness in a system you must ask: does it come from one bad apple or does the whole barrel stink?

 

The rank smell emanating from the coalition is impossible to miss. At first sniff, it appears to come from the blazered figure of Iain Duncan Smith. It has taken me some time to identify its source, because appearances deceive. From his clipped hair to his polished shoes, Duncan Smith seems to be a man who has retained the values of the officer corps of the Scots Guards he once served. Conservative commentators emphasise his honour and decency. They speak in reverential tones of his Easterhouse epiphany: the moment in 2002 when he saw the poverty on a Glasgow estate, brushed a manly tear from his eye and vowed to end the "dependency culture" that kept the poor jobless.

 

Duncan Smith's belief that the welfare state holds down the very people it is meant to serve is pleasing to Conservative ears. To maintain his supporters' illusions, he has to lie. Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service. The work and pensions secretary had claimed that his department's cap on benefits was turning scroungers into strivers – even before it had come into force. "Already we have seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs." How sweet those words must have sounded to Conservative ears. The government was forcing the feckless to stop sponging off hard-working taxpayers. (Taxpayers are always "hard working" in British politics, in case you haven't noticed. We never try to get by doing the bare minimum.)

 

The figures did not show that, the statistics authority said. More to the point, they could not possibly have shown that. Duncan Smith's claims were "unsupported" by the very statistics his department had collected.

 

If this were a one-off, I would say Duncan Smith "misspoke" or "lacked judgment" or, in plain English, that he was an idiot. If every politician who spun statistics were damned, after all, parliament would be empty. I would use stronger language; indeed, Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the statistics authority, is thinking about sending his inspectors into the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) because Duncan Smith is a habitual manipulator.

 

As journalists know, Duncan Smith's modus operandi is well established. His "people" – all of them scroungers, not strivers, who sponge off the taxpayer from their Whitehall offices – brief reporters with unpublished figures. The Tory press uses them, and, as the Financial Times explained, when his spin doctors meet an honest journalist, who asks hard questions, they end the call and never ring back. By the time the true figures appear on the DWP website , and informed commentators can see the falsity, the spin, the old saying applies: "A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

 

Before the benefit cap, it was the work programme, which is meant to provide training for the unemployed. The statistics authority criticised the "coherence" of Duncan Smith's statistics and, once again, the manner in which his department presented them to the public. Far from being a success, the programme found work for a mere 8.6% of the desperate people who went on it. Meanwhile, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and a former chief economist at the Cabinet Office, has convincingly demonstrated that the Tory claim that "more than a third of people who were on incapacity benefit dropped their claims rather than complete a medical assessment" is false and demonstrably false.

 

Numbers are stronger than words. When the powerful lie with statistics, they do so in the cynical knowledge that the public is more likely to believe them. But the manipulation does not just tell us how sly operators view the credulous masses, but how they see themselves.

 

The UK Statistics Authority has a fine phrase that guides its mathematicians: "Numbers should be a light, not a crutch". Duncan Smith does not wish to shine light on his policies, for he fears what he may see. He uses his twisted figures as a crutch instead, to help his dogmas hobble along. Francis Wheen once said that the one fact everyone believes they know about a public figure is always wrong. Whatever they think about his policies, the public assumes that Duncan Smith is a gentleman. He is anything but.

 

Portes thinks there is no wider decay in British government beyond Duncan Smith's department. I am not so sure. The British right is riding off with the loons. Like the Republicans with the Tea Party, the supposedly mainstream Conservatives have decided to woo Ukip rather than fight it. To show that they are "listening", they must pursue policies that make little sense and invent the evidence to support them.

 

Welfare is already at the centre of the deceit. Duncan Smith's duff data always suggests that the unemployed are on the dole because they are workshy, not because there are no jobs for them to find. If he were to admit for a moment that the distinction between strivers and scroungers was meaningless and all of us could be in a job one day and out of it the next, the rightwing argument on welfare would collapse and then where would the Tories appeal to angry, old white men be?

 

It is not just Duncan Smith. The health secretary says he will stop foreign "health tourists" costing the NHS hundreds of millions. He has no reputable evidence to support that figure. David Cameron says he wants tax breaks for married couples, when there is no evidence whatsoever that they encourage lovers to marry.

 

The policies may not work, the ills they seek to combat and the benefits they hope to reap may be illusory. But fear holds Conservatives in its grip and the general election is drawing closer. When pressed, they say that they want to "flag up" their support of marriage, "signal" their dislike of scroungers or "send a message" to illegal immigrants.

 

Our language has been so corrupted by the euphemisms of advertising and public relations that we no longer realise that what they mean is that they intend to lie.

 

Edited May 12, 2013 by peterms

[peterms]

Meanwhile, one of the victims of the loathsome and despicable Smith has killed herself over the bedroom tax.  Here.

[peterms]

In a far more desirable suicide attempt, the tory party start a rerun of the infighting which brought about their last collapse.  The usual signs are there.  Manoeuvering and positioning themselves personally, undermining their own leadership while protesting undying loyalty, briefing against their own leader through "friends", testing the water for a leadership bid while their own actions render their own party unelectable.

 

Michael Gove was right.  People are leaving school having learnt little about history.  In this case, the school is Eton.

[villaajax]

Well it looks like the Tory PCC for our area is already fiddling his expenses, didn't take him long did it?

[peterms]

I'm shocked.

 

No sooner have I accepted Michael Gove's claim that schoolchildren are ignorant of history, than an FOI request shows that his claim of underpinning evidence is false.  Here.

 

[tonyh29]

 

Michael Gove says he would vote for an EU exit. I would vote for a Michael Gove exit.

Isn't that against current govt policy, naughty Michael

 

 

 

yeah thought Cabinet members had to toe the line on policy or resign ?

[coda]

I'm shocked.

 

No sooner have I accepted Michael Gove's claim that schoolchildren are ignorant of history, than an FOI request shows that his claim of underpinning evidence is false.  Here.

 

Thank you for your reply giving me details of the "survey's" (sic) 

[peterms]

yeah thought Cabinet members had to toe the line on policy or resign ?

 

He is toeing the line, technically.  His position is that he fully, loyally, and unquestioningly supports Cameron's policy of seeking to renegotiate parts of the treaty and then hold a referendum.  He's simply saying that if those damn foreigners refuse to listen to reason and treaty changes are not possible, then his personal view would be to vote to leave.  Since the renegotiation hasn't taken place, there is no policy position on a hypothetical future, and he's not contravening it.

 

In reality, he's simply signalling to the right wing of his party that when they ditch the pathetic Cameron, he's the chap to rescue the party from the limpwristed sellouts.

 

But because his intervention is so transparently disloyal and self-serving, Michael Forsyth has given him a slap:

 

"This amendment isn't going to get carried. So all those supporting it will have achieved is they will have split their own party; they will, as you have seen, cast questions over the prime minister's authority and indirectly, unintentionally, they will be helping the Labour party's prospects at the next election. That is not just foolish, it is quite contrary to all the political instincts of a responsible political party that wants to hold and retain power after the next general election."

 

 

And so, emboldened by this, Cameron has criticised the impatient would-be inheritors of his crown of thorns.

 

David Cameron has rebuked Michael Gove and Philip Hammond after they indicated that they would vote to leave the EU if a referendum on British membership were held now.

 

In a sign of his irritation with the two ministers, who pushed a Tory cabinet consensus on Europe to its limits, the prime minister said the question of an immediate referendum was "hypothetical".

 

Cameron also highlighted his frustration when he said Tory ministers agreed with his plan to renegotiate Britain's EU membership, adding that ministers should spend their time improving the EU before a referendum in 2017.

 

Speaking during a flight to Washington, where he will meet Barack Obama at the White House, he said: "There isn't going to be a referendum tomorrow so it is a hypothetical question."

 

The prime minister also showed impatience with Lord Lawson and Michael Portillo, who called for Britain to leave the EU, saying it was "extraordinary" to abandon hope before he had started to renegotiate Britain's membership terms...

 

 

It's like the opening passage of The Golden Bough, where a pagan king stalks a grove, watching out for the assassins who must kill him in order to assume the kingship in his place.  All very primitive, but gripping.  Gove's attempts to cloak his age-old power-lust are laughably obvious, but perhaps he thinks he's being subtle and sophisticated.  Prick.