The previous post was about chancers, among other people. Here’s another post about chancers. What’s interesting in this one is the multiple levels of chancership. You have the two blogger/staffer/whatever types, classic chancers, who would love to hire on with UKIP, but mostly because they could sell that experience to someone with more money. You…
Read More UKIP as cashpointWhat to make of this story? Camila Batmanghelidjh has been basically forced out of Kids’ Company after the Cabinet Office wanted to know what it’s been doing with the money. Much detail is available in a Buzzfeed piece of the sort you’re meant to think Buzzfeed doesn’t do. She, of course, blames austerity, cuts, etc.…
Read More Chancers, respectability politics, and IDS: A4e, Kids Co, and TrussellCircling back on this post and also this one, I think the EVEL fiasco has been a really important political event, because it has decided a really important issue. Coming out of the elections, there was a possibility at least that the SNP and the Government would come to an arrangement. The Government would give…
Read More Another Labour-SNP post.So Labour are voting against the relevant clauses in the Finance Bill tomorrow and the Welfare bill is up to the new leader. The SNP will be voting against fox hunting on Wednesday. These facts are connected. The Westminster SNP is apparently pissed off enough about the attempt to pass EVEL earlier in the week…
Read More The SNP is in. Let’s find out which Tories are really up for it.Everyone’s waiting for something to happen about Greece. If you think the suspense is bad, imagine what it’s like if you have a pan-European politics column to fill and you have undertaken a public commitment not to fill it with speculation, gossip, or bullshit that you can’t substantiate with data. At the moment, there is…
Read More All politics is eventually about the whipsSo I was having a long talk with Declan Gaffney on Twitter about incapacity benefit and the Department for Work and Pensions. The Gaffer mentioned that when he’d been working for the Greater London Authority with John Hutton’s DWP in 2006, nobody seemed to have been aware that the IB caseload was rapidly ageing-out, and…
Read More IDS and the Great Skip of InitiativesSomething I left out of this piece, because it doesn’t really fit my self-imposed terms of reference for the Pol, is my own two cents on what the Labour party should do. (Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?) The problem, according to me, was defining a political statement that addressed about four…
Read More I am the party of no.Why won’t Ed Miliband commit to a deal with the SNP in advance? The explanation is incredibly simple. Here are the last three Scottish polls – Survation for the Daily Record, TNS Global, and Ipsos MORI. As expected they both show a monster LAB>SNP swing. But the interesting bit is this: there are a lot…
Read More why Ed Miliband won’t commit in advance to the SNPRemember that time Mitt Romney bought his campaign a massive IT system that completely broke down and failed utterly, because they gave all the money to their mates’ outsourcing company and did everything on the cheap, and nobody would take any responsibility for it? Now consider the possibilities of getting Grant Shapps to procure a…
Read More After the latest update the problems will be solved…Hark at Liberal Democrat Steve Webb. Where once he suggested you might take your pension pot and buy a Lamborghini, now he is having to do the rounds of the media saying “When it’s gone, it’s gone”, as my mum says. But the interesting bit is this quote: The three government-backed “guidance” services that are…
Read More Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, you had a whole year.