Put on Your Flat Cap and Grab Your Whippet, We’re Off Home.

Oh, those pesky Tory ministers. Just when you thought they couldn’t alienate anymore social groupings, they go and pick a fight with northerners. Oliver Letwin – son of an LSE professor, alumni of Eton, and graduate of Cambridge University – has got himself into all sorts of bother by suggesting, in a discussion about airport expansion, that “we [...]

Running With Scissors: April Fools!

Ohh, wait… Cuts to council-run services will bring dramatic reductions in children‘s services, libraries and youth clubs and a new wave of privatisation for frontline services, the most comprehensive survey so far of town halls will reveal today. It shows the cuts, which will begin to really bite today as budgets for the 2011-2 financial year kick [...]

An Inconvenient Truth

Toby Young, the author of of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and the Sound of No Hands Clapping (how perfectly apt), has suggested in his blog on the Daily Telegraph website that the peaceful UK-Uncut ‘pay-day’ protests outside Topshop and Vodafone stores today are somehow hitting the poorest hardest. For Young, the monumental tax avoidance of [...]

And For My Next Act, I Will Pull The Wool Over Your Eyes

George Osbourne and his blue and yellow pals have been doing a sterling job of convincing ordinary people that they must swallow rather unpalatable attacks on their living standards in recent months. It’s the deficit, stupid! I’m very sorry kids, but the British state (you know, the one that spends around £1,400 per second ‘liberating’ Afghans) simply can’t [...]

Running With Scissors Round Up

So, today is the day. Having had since May to sharpen his knife, George Osborne has announced his cut program to the House of Commons, the media, and the country at large. I’ve been unable to take in much of the news and analysis so far, having just got back from a local protest, so [...]

Salma Yaqoob At Conservative Conference

Coalition Takes Children’s Ball And Goes Home

Tony Benn famously devised a waterproof method of establishing the intentions of anyone who wields power on behalf of the public. Ask them five questions; 1. What power have you got? 2. Where did you get it from? 3. In whose interests do you exercise it? 4. To whom are you accountable? 5. How can [...]

Tax Cuts and The Small Print

Danny Alexander, Liberal Democrat MP and Chief Secretary to the Treasury, certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons yesterday when he suggested in an interview with The Observer that the next 5 years would see no notable tax cuts. Although the press have focussed largely on the consternation that this has caused amongst backbench Conservatives, [...]

Fighting the Cuts in Kirklees

BBC‘s ‘Facing the Cuts’ survey showed that Kirklees and Leeds Councils had amongst the highest proposed job cuts in England. And with proposed ‘free schools’ around the corner and the selling of large sections of Kirklees PCT to private companies or ‘social enterprises’, it really does feel like Kirklees Council is on the frontline in [...]

The Threat to the National Health Service

A chap by the name of richardblogger has produced an excellent video which breaks down the threat posed to the NHS by the recent government white-paper, and the backdoor privatisation proposed in the form of nicy, cuddly ‘social enterprises’. Social enterprises, however they are portrayed, represent handing huge chunks of our NHS over to private, unaccountable [...]