Green Leader on Tory Spending Lies

The Tories and both their Coalition partners the Lib Dems and now the opposition Labour Party claim massive cuts in spending on social services, welfare to the vulnerable and education are needed to cut the national deficit. But as Green Party leader Caroline Lucas told the party conference in Liverpool this weekend, this is very much a matter of choice driven by perspective rather than financial necessity. It seems there is plenty of money left for some pretty unpleasant choices the Con Dems are happy to splurge out on...

Lib Dem Activist's Resignation - The Destruction of the Progressive Soul

Lib Dems - The Walking Dead of British Politics? (Article here)

The former Liberal Democrat councillor and Camden Eco Champion, Alexis Rowell, will be the Green Party candidate for the Highgate by-election on Thursday 15th September. He was a councillor until 2010 and left the Lib Dems following the recent volte face by their Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, in support of nuclear power. 

Lib Dem policy, and Huhne himself, had previously been in favour of closing down the UK's nuclear power stations and not replacing them - highlighting both the dangers from accidents and waste and the ludicrous cost of the sector, which draws billions of pounds in subsidies from the taxpayer to keep afloat. Huhne now disingenuously claims that a new generation of nuclear power stations should be counted into the lists in the struggle against global warming, ignoring the evidence that, aside from all the other drawbacks, their manufacture requires massive carbon emissions.

Alexis Rowell also attacked the Lib Dems' record in the Coalition, warning of the dangers to the social fabric of the country and the damage to public services. His defection to the Greens comes only days after the London riots, seen by many as at least in part fuelled by the social exclusion of large swathes of the populace. It also comes during a reactionary backlash led by the Tories and Lib Dem leader Clegg, with barely whispered reservations and perfunctory handwringing from a handful of Lib Dem MPs.

The evidence, last Thursday, in an Edinburgh by-election though is that, while Tory voters are relatively content with the easy-ride being given to their policies by their Coalition partners, the Lib Dems are being deserted in droves - in what had been a rather incredulous five-way marginal, their vote share collapsed from just under 20% and third place to 7% and sixth (and bottom) place (they had come first in the ward in 2007). There may have been a few votes affected (both ways) by some local factors, but this is pretty much in line with the decline in their national poll ratings since the General Election. By contrast, it was the Greens' best ever local by-election performance in Scotland.

So eyes turn now to see how well Alexis Rowell can do in Camden for the Greens, increasingly seen as the genuine progressive alternative voice to the three managerialist mainstream parties, not just on the environment but on social and economic values too. As he left, he delivered a parting broadside to Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrat leadership warning they are destroying the progressive soul of his (and my own) former party - you can read his letter on the "Another Green World" site by clicking HERE.

Fear and Loathing of Oliver Letwin

Old Etonian, Oliver Letwin, MP, the Cabinet Minister in charge of the Coalition Government's reforms of the beleaguered public sector yesterday went along to the head office of KPMG, a consultancy  firm that has ripped tens of millions of pounds out of state coffers providing "advice" on efficiency over the last two decades. With his hosts eyeing more cash as the quintessential Public Schoolboy of British politics gassed his way through a speech on how they have more work to do charging for yet more advice, Letwin declared that the public sector needs "some real discipline and some fear" among its staff to get them to work harder.

Britain's hardest worker busy instilling some fear

Oliver, a man who seems never to have held a real job in his entire life (although he does have at least one lucrative consultancy "arrangement" doubtlessly entirely in his spare time), went on to warn that without this, innovation and change in schools and hospitals just won't happen. Of course, he starts from an entirely impartial point of view, having stated in 2003 that he would rather "go out on the streets and beg" than ever have his children go to a state school.

This callous statement, made at a time when the public sector is already reeling from service cuts and job losses following the slashing of budgets to pay for the massive bailout of supposedly efficient private sector banks, misses a few obvious points.

First, given the massive amount of public services already tendered out to private providers or totally denationalised, like the railways and bus services, where are the supposed efficiencies and improvements the private sector ethos supposedly brings? Public subsidies to the rail industry, for example, have more than doubled since privatisation, leaving the much-derided state company British Rail as a paragon of good service and value for money by comparison. And with social care effectively privatised, we have in the last few weeks seen the Southern Cross care company go bust, although its clearly useless directors have walked away with millions of pounds each in their greedy, grasping pockets having capitalised its property for rent-back a few years ago - the source of their financial crisis.

Likewise, KPMG and its ilk have enjoyed literally thousands of contracts for providing consultancy advice and even running contracted out services over the last two and a half decades (since Ollie was working in Mrs Thatcher's Policy Unit) - how come they have evidently made so little progress in spite of all the invoices? Any ideas? Because Oliver Letwin's certainly don't hold up at all.

BUT Oliver does know all about public money himself - he made jolly good use of the £2,145 he claimed from our taxes to fix a leaking water pipe under his private tennis court. Of course, the poor chap had to pay it all back...when he was found out. He did keep the cash for cleaning out the septic tank - how appropriate.

Morning Star Online reports: Disabled Face Welfare Chaos

The Government's "reforms" of disability support continue apace, ill-informed and liable to cause serious damage to the lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. Part of this is a ham-fisted attempt to cut disability living allowance costs by 20% in the ignorant belief, now incorrectly parroted by several government Ministers as well as the gutter press, that DLA is paid exclusively to people who are out of work. In fact, it is a payment recognising that disability adds to people's costs, for example in travelling to work, and is therefore a vital means of ensuring that many disabled people are able to continue in employment. If it is cut or withdrawn, many will face significant financial hardship and some will be forced out of employment, leading to increased social security costs. Neither ethical, nor financially efficient.

Britain's only genuinely left wing national daily newspaper, The Morning Star, covers this issue in its online edition today:

Scottish disability campaigners voiced fears today that the assessment criteria for those forced to switch from disability living allowance to a lower benefit scheme will be too "rigid and restrictive."

Inclusion Scotland and the Independent Living in Scotland project met the Department of Work and Pensions in Edinburgh to raise concerns over British government plans to force disabled people out of disability living allowance and to assess them instead for a "personal independence payment (PIP)."

Read the full article: click HERE

Support the J30 strike. Today, across Britain.

As Britain faces its biggest day of industrial action for many years, with around three quarters of a million public sector staff striking over cuts to their pensions, the mass media have unsurprisingly rallied to support the Government (and the treacherous Labour Party Opposition) in condemning the action and repeating the long used lie about "gold plated" pensions.

The Daily Telegraph leads with a luridly dreadful piece of disinformation - 

Public sector strike: £500,000 pension pot of striking teachers revealed

The Telegraph claims that a teacher on £32,000 p.a. will retire with a pot of this size; which if they have worked and paid into the scheme for 40 years is perhaps not surprising. But what the article doesn't clarify is that the £500k is the pot that they might have to pay their pension out off for the rest of their lives, not the actual pension they receive. On £32,000, the maximum permissible annual pension payable (not the pot it is paid from) is 1/2 the final salary, i.e., a somewhat less impressive £16,000 p.a., well below the UK average salary of around £23,200 p.a. (although the state pension will plug some of this gap). It is hardly "gold-plated", nor is it typical - the average yield from state pensions for retired teachers is around £10,000 and for all public sector workers is under £6,000 pa.

"This is 20 times higher than the average private sector scheme, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics." Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph frets that public sector workers are somehow treated unjustifiably well compared to private sector workers. They don't stop to consider, perhaps, that if their figures were actually true and £6,000, or even £16,000 p.a. really is 20 times more than private sector pensions pay, then this is not a comment on bad practice in the public sector. Rather, it would be yet another example of how the private sector's owners comprehensively shaft their employees, pauperising them while guzzling plentifully out of the trough for themselves.

Unfair comment? Not at all. The audit of public sector pensions shows them to be sustainable and actually to be set to decline as a cost in real terms over the next decades, contrary to Government assertions that they have become unaffordable. Moreover, as public sector workers are lectured (in the Telegraph again) by Treasury Secretary Danny Alexander (Lib Dem, Cairngorms National Park) on the need for austerity, it emerges unsurprisingly that private sector bosses have not just gold, but titanium armour-plated pensions awaiting them as they spin out their final days on God's golf courses.

Millions set aside for fat-cat pensions

The "Morning Star", Britain's only genuinely left-wing national newspaper, reports an Income Data Services survey that shows the Directors of the top private companies in the UK enjoy pensions averaging £140,000 per annum - that's their pensions, not their pots. These people are raking in something of the order of seven times the supposedly fat-cat teacher, and a massive 24 times the average public sector pensioner.

Green leader Caroline Lucas - the only party leader to support the action

So there we have it - Tory paper tells fibs about strikers. Not news at all, but yet another piece of propaganda to try to steamroller through the destruction of our public services by a process of divide and rule.

But the risk for the Telegraph and its allies is that while they may try to cleverly misconstrue what the real picture is via misleading comparisons (something the Star is also a tad guilty of at one point in its article), the anger of the mass public with the people who run our society, its workplaces and media is rising. Just as this week in Greece, protests turned violent, so the days of impunity on the part of the established order in the UK may be drawing to a close.

Today (June 30th), join the protests, join the strikers around the country - show your support for fair pay for pensioners and for the beleaguered public sector. Join the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, MP, on the picket lines or in marches and rallies, even if you don't work in the sector. Its fate concerns us all - the public services are about all of us, our communities and well-being.

Don't listen to the lies - JOIN THE J30 TODAY! 

 

Coalition of Resistance

The Joy of Cuts

"I say Tristan, fancy going up to Town on Saturday?"
"Gosh, why not? What's on? Something good at the Opera?"
"Hmm, maybe later on, after we've been to the...rally..."
"Rally? Rally what?"
"No, the Rally. The Rally for the Cuts."
"Rally for the Cuts? What's that then Boris? Better cuts of prime sirloin from Ashbys? Haw haw!"
"No you silly...The Cuts, the Government cuts. I mean, we had all these students last year rallying against the tuition fees - can't see the problem, I mean Daddy paid far more than 9k for my degree. Then we had these union oiks back in March setting fire to Trafalgar Square. Poor Nelson must have thought it was the froggies back. Then just the other day some bunch of pseudo-disabled carping about not getting their wheelchairs oiled for free by the DSS. So we thought... if they can do it, why can't we?"
"Why can't we what?"
"Why can't we protest too?"
"Ah, I see...I..see..."
"Do you Tristan?"
"Er...no...What..what are we protesting against Boris?"
"Oh, you don't have to worry. It's not that sort of protest. We're protesting in favour of the cuts. We're going up to Town to give David C and George a jolly good thumbs up for getting these malingerers off disability whatsit and ending gold plated pensions for council cleaners. I mean...it's ridiculous isn't it? Why does a cleaner need a pension? As if they're ever going to retire? I mean, ours is 84 and she still works a 7 day week for Cynthia and me. She's a bit wheezy some days, but like I say when we give her her Christmas sherry, it's all jolly appreciated. I mean, she doesn't even take holiday, so why would she need a pension? These council wallahs could learn a thing or two from our Gladys. Salt of the earth, she is. Hard work never hurt anyone."
"Hear! Hear! So who's on your rally?"
"We've got that splendid Farage fellow from the UKippers...Did I tell you he was Head Boy in my cousin's Form Class in Upper Sixth? And, in fact, he still is! And he'll be joined by Norris Mcwhatshisface...you know...Guinness chappie...It'll be a blast."
"I hope there won't be any trashing the War Memorial again?"
"Absolutely not...Who knows, we might trash a restaurant after, but we can pay for the damage..just like the old Bullingdon days, eh?"
"Well, it all sounds jolly good fun. But I was looking at the Telegraph earlier..."
"Was it supportive?"
"Not really I'm afraid...It said it might rain."
"Ah, well, if that's the case Tristan...let's send our Men to march for us! If they shout loud enough I might throw in a little overtime even. Don't say I'm not fair to the staff!"
"Yes, that'll show these bolshies. Now, Boris, fancy another round? My tax rebate just came through..."
"Tax rebate?"
 "Yes, bloody bureaucrats! HMRC cocked up again. My accountant had a rather long argument with them before he managed to get my Tuscan villa set aside as business premises, so I got a £15k rebate on the business taxes..."
"My God! You mean...you actually pay some tax?"
"Well, er..touch embarrassing I know, but just a little. Not much...My gardener still pays more."
 "I...I'm sorry Tristan...Concierge! I think this...this Guest is leaving the Club now. Can you get his coat...He's going to need it. I hear it might rain..."

The "Great and the Good" won't take it any more...!

nb - while many regional and smaller theatres and arts groups face closure owing to cuts in public support, the 2011-12 settlement for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, preserved intact the £26 millions of taxpayers money that subsidises an institution largely patronised by the wealthier components of British society. Let's hope the Pro-cuts demonstrators take their banners to the steps of the Opera House itself. No, I'm not holding my breath either.

From Tahrir to Trafalgar

The "Battle of Trafalgar Square" screams the lead story in the Mail on Sunday today, complete with dramatic pictures of allegedly violent anti-capitalist protesters silhouetted against flames. And on some leftwing internet forums and liberal papers, parallels are drawn between yesterday's anti-cuts demonstration and the Egyptian protests that toppled the Mubarak regime from their centre in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

There is more than a little hyperbole on both sides here - anyone watching the live broadcast on late night BBC TV last night could see that there was no violence and only a handful of people "kettled" by a much larger contingent of police (by then on super-overtime rates I should think). There was a fire - of placards stacked against a wall where people denied the right to leave were trying to keep warm in the chilly night. In spite of the best efforts of the BBC anchorwoman to make out that bloody violence had come to London's streets, both the rather calm footage and a phone interview with a Guardian journalist with the protesters in the Square itself belied the attempted drama.

Needless to say, the BBC and the rightwing press have seized on a handful of incidents, such as smashing the windows of a branch of corporate-tax-dodging Topshop, as typifying the demonstration and calling into question Labour leader Ed Miliband's judgement in addressing the quarter of a million people who attended, nearly all of them peacefully. With fewer than 200 arrests, it was in fact one of the most peaceful mass events ever in London, not that you'd know from a lot of the coverage.

Yet of course, Trafalgar is no Tahrir - to suggest so is to deny both the bravery and success of the Egyptians. It is true the Cameron Government is determined not to listen to the protests of those at the sharp end of their cuts programme - Vince Cable was adamant on the TV this morning that there would be no change, while Michael Gove yesterday derided the protest as meaningless. But at least we will have an opportunity to show our feelings about their policies at the local elections on 5 May, a right previously denied to the Egyptians.

The question for 5 May of course is who to vote for to make the anti-cuts voice come over as loudly as possible. On the face of it yesterday, the trade union movement continues to view Labour as the best vehicle for this, but you might question why.

Labour went into the last General Election pledged to cut even deeper - about 25 %  of public spending than the 21% target of the current Con Dem Government. The only difference was that they would have taken a bit longer to do it, so year on year the impact may have been not just quite as harsh as it is going to be. And throughout their 13 years in power, New Labour did nothing to address the fundamental issues in our society of inequality and poverty - indeed, they eased tax regulations to the benefit of the rich and their lax approach to the excesses of the City and the financial sector led directly to the banking crisis which the Tories now want the public to pay for. As yet at any rate, new leader Ed Miliband has not signalled any significant change to this approach.

So is voting Labour a real option for those opposed to the massive cuts in public spending, most of them targeted at support for the most vulnerable in our country - the elderly, the disabled, the young and the sick? It seems not and the trade unions are fools to themselves for continuing to see Labour as offering new wine in their old and chipped bottle.

There are genuine options - the Greens for example oppose the whole cuts package. Greens argued at the election for tackling the deficit by a combination of sustainable economic initiatives such as a national energy efficiency programme that would have created jobs and skills; a fundamental shift to better public transport and a massive attack on tax avoidance which costs tens of billions to the Treasury each year. They also called for a maximum wage of £150,000 p.a. and a progressive tax regime to redistribute the skewed wealth in British society.

And yet yesterday, in spite of repeated requests, the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas MP, was denied the right to speak by the trade union organisers of the anti-cuts demonstration. The only national leader actually opposed to cuts in public spending was not allowed to put her views across to crowds opposed to the cuts: instead, the pro-cuts Labour leadership were given the platform.

Labour have a lot to answer for still: Miliband does seem mildly refreshing as being genuinely to the left-of-centre after years of essentially rightwing Blairite pragmatism, but he has given no clarion call for real reform. And rather than a root-and-branch purge of the decidedly non-socialist platform of New Labour in favour of genuinely social democratic views, he has blandly called for a rewrite of policy starting with a blank sheet - how inspiring! Indeed, how Blairite.

The opinion polls look good for Labour, mediocre for the Tories and deservedly frightening for the craven Liberal Democrats. But for genuine change, people need to be able to hear the real alternatives offered by groups like the Greens and what is left of the Respect Party and others on the socialist left. The media might be expected to be hostile to these groups, but the trade unions are making a strategic mistake by denying them a voice and continuing to hitch their wagon to the tired old nag that Labour now is, shorn of its soul and in dire need of new direction.

Denial - a necessary delusion or betraying the future?

I listened to a speech by the leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, MP, in nearby Huddersfield this evening. Talking to a public meeting organised by Kirklees Green Party ahead of the local elections in May, she covered a wide agenda, but it was, maybe unsurprisingly, on the environment and the prospect of runaway global warming that she was at her most passionate.

The Greens' Caroline Lucas (left) - no denying

She talked about how many scientists are warning that the "best estimates" used by Government planners and by negotiators in international climate change conferences are exceedingly conservative, several years out of date and fail to take account of "feedback", where the release of greenhouse gasses increases at an exponential rate.

She warned that the next ten years are utterly critical - there is no time to wait. The failure to act keeps her awake at night, she explained, citing the film "The Age of Stupid" and the question posed by the Custodian, played by the late, great Pete Postlethwaite. "Why," he asks in the film, where he plays the last man on Earth looking back at current times, "why when we knew what was wrong, did we not do anything to save ourselves?"

Perhaps one of the crassest statements I have ever heard was from the otherwise normally excellent broadcaster Eddie Mair a few years ago on BBC Radio 4. Climate change negotiators at the Cancun conference were, he said, struggling to reach agreement because the USA continued to refuse to take part in a formal agreement: if they could not reach agreement, they might as well give up and go home and forget about it. 

I don't think it was what he intended, but his comment somehow captured the lack of urgency on climate change, the way that, even now, many senior policymakers and politicians continue to see it as optional - a sort of good thing to do when their is money in the kitty and nothing better to do. A charitable option to "help the planet", as if somehow the planet is something apart from us.

Except of course that it isn't. We can't go home and forget about it, because the planet is home and home is the planet. We might try to ignore it, we may not want to think about it. But in the end we can't escape from it. If we poison the planet, we poison ourselves.

Yet, oddly, we don't look at it this way - we talk piously of "saving the planet" alongside efforts to raise money for charity causes and sick puppies. It's a Sunday sort of thing - something to get round to when there is time. And if we do a little bit, our bit, we can stand aside from the disaster when it comes - it won't affect us, will it?

Denial is perhaps one of the most human of things. We deny that which is too difficult, too awful or overwhelming to contemplate.

So it is with the crisis we face. Who wants to think that, in the next few years, in our lifetimes, we may fail to act and as a result condemn not just "the planet" but possibly ourselves and certainly the next generation to degradation and destruction? Isn't carrying on the party, closing our eyes to tomorrow, so much more appealing?

It is nothing new. History is littered with whole societies that denied the obvious, and in some cases perished as a result.

In 1453, with Constantinople surrounded by 80,000 Turkish troops and their allies, many of the Byzantines inside the great walls of the City refused to believe there was a real threat, convincing themselves of Divine Protection which absolved them of any need to act.  When the Turkish Sultan demanded substantial tribute to call off the siege, the destitute Byzantine Emperor pleaded for assistance from his nobles, but they denied their huge wealth, insisting they could afford nothing. Yet when the city finally fell, they were found to be hiding huge hordes of riches they would now no longer have the chance to use.The victorious Sultan was so moved to anger by this selfishness that he had a large number of the captive Byzantine elite executed on the spot.

History is littered with such examples - where the awful reality can be so troubling to normality that somehow the need and opportunities to challenge and change it are set aside. And yet, were we to acknowledge the potential disasters facing us, isn't denial a wholly understandable response?

Perhaps. But it is not to excuse this; it may be very human but it is not acceptable. The threats facing us are too great, too total and long lasting to permit avoidance. Greens need to show an alternative that is positive and progressive, but equally which does not soft-pedal what has to be done - a new, more equal society; massive changes to personal habits; different, less personal forms of transport; different energy sources; a very different attitude towards  consumption; a vision for a very different world to now.

But one where Pete does not need to remember us.

Never glad confident morning again: Oldham East & The Liberal Zombies

Just after 2 a.m. on Friday, 14th January, returning officer Charlie Parker announced the result of the parliamentary by-election for Oldham East & Saddleworth constituency. Labour's Debbie Abrahams was declared elected, her majority over her Liberal Democrat opponent increased by a factor of over 35 times since the General Election last May and in percentage terms up from less than a quarter of one per cent to a far more comfortable 10.2% - the largest majority in the constituency for any party since its creation.

The Lib Dem vote increased very slightly in per centage terms - by 0.3%, while the big shift of the night was a substantial decline in the Conservative vote - down by over 13% to just 12.8% The right wing UK Independence Party was slightly up while the more extreme right BNP slid to lose its deposit. The Green Party, standing for the first time and with just two weeks of campaigning, but also with an impressive candidate, picked up 530 votes - while four others drew rather fewer between them.

The by-election is worthy of note for a couple of reasons - for one, it was called because the Labour MP who won the seat in May 2010 was ejected by an election court for lying about his Lib Dem opponent, the first instance of this in over a century. Secondly, it was the first significant vote on the Con-Lib Dem Coalition since the general election. It was also, untypically, a three-way marginal in 2010 - Labour were barely a hundred votes ahead of the Lib Dems, with the Conservatives just over two thousand behind. All three had something to play for.

But of course, the story was always going to be what happened to the Lib Dems - it was their complaint that triggered the election; and as it had been a target seat for them, after going into coalition with the Conservatives, backtracking on many of their election pledges and seeing their national opinion poll support slide from 24% to just 7% in some surveys, the big question was whether or not they stood a chance here. Would they win, or could they even be relegated to third place?

In the end, neither happened - their vote share stayed steady and they began and ended in second place. And, of course, their leader and his apparatchiks hastened to hail this as a "strong result" proving they remain a viable force, the third place Tories being the ones with something to worry about. This was a perfectly predictable response - somewhat less so has been the adoption of this rose-tinted analysis those Lib Dems who had previously expressed doubts about the Coalition. From former leader Menzies Campbell and former Party President Simon Hughes, to current President Tim Farron and Lib Dem activists and bloggers, the outcome has been portrayed not as a relief, but nearly as a triumph in these tough times. Full steam ahead for the Coalition these former, alleged doubters and dissidents now appear to be saying.

A 2 horse race, will one nag be off to the glue factory soon?

If sustained, this is a rush of incredibly bad judgement on their part - because, in line with the Lib Dems' desperate efforts to win over Conservative voters with their "it's a two horse race" literature (complete with standard LD misleading bar chart), a tactic nudged gently along by the Conservative leadership to help their flailing Coalition partners, several thousand Conservatives clearly defected to the Lib Dem candidate in a tactical vote. That was enough to shore up the Lib Dem vote share, but in absolute terms their vote total was down by three thousand, while Labour's vote share rose by 10% and smaller parties by 3%. Take away the very substantial but essentially tactical Tory vote, which the Lib Dems worked so hard for -  getting volunteers from all over the UK to phone voters in the constituency and laying on free travel from as far away as Edinburgh to lure activists to the seat - and the real story is the huge collapse of the real Lib Dem vote.

This is no surprise to most people - and frankly, who cares about the fate of the Lib Dems anyway? But for the country, the Lib-Dems-in-denial factor is worrying in that it removes what tiny chance there was that some of them just might constrain the worst of their leadership's toadying up to the right wing Conservative regime that, paradoxically, needs their support to survive.

Not that you would know the Tories need the Lib Dems to stay in Office - there is no distinctive Lib Dem narrative running through the Government. It is in effect a Conservative Government with Lib Dem support, not a Coalition. The Lib Dems of course insist they did not win the General Election - surely, but neither did the Conservatives. Yet what we see being implemented is pretty unalloyed Toryism. The tragedy of Oldham East is that Clegg seems now to be being given the green light from his party to push through yet more of the neoliberalism that has marked their first months in power - on spending cuts in education, health and social welfare, all wrapped up in rank monetarism. Vulnerable people will suffer badly under these essentially ideological initiatives, some of them greatly and terribly.

May Hell mend these wil o' the wisps. They truly are fair weather progressives - puffing up their alleged dissident principles when the polls look bad; delighted to feverishly shed them and hail their glorious leader at every faint glimmer of hope, however transient or delusional. If these last few gasps of opposition to untrammelled Conservative rule give up, it will mean the final extinction of the tattered remnants of a century and a half of social liberalism. They may hope that, if somehow the economic situation improves and people have short enough memories, their fortunes will rise again. Yet logic dictates otherwise - a recovery will benefit the Conservatives alone; a prolonged recession will benefit the progressive opposition. For the Lib Dems, bizarrely neutered by finally being in power, it will be more a long wait for the omnibus to oblivion, a zombie-like existence as their electoral base and local support shrivels and dies around their beleaguered parliamentary party.

Just as Hitler grasped at every last straw as his Bunker was surrounded, imagining ghost armies into existence, so Oldham represents for this party of chancers not so much light at the end of the tunnel as the dawn of the politically dead.

Liberal Zombies - Dying Here!

No Money Left, unless....

After the General Election, an unfortunate private joke by Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was to provide the incoming Con Dem Coalition with all too easy a weapon. On the desk of his successor, the short-lived appointee from the Lib Dems, David Laws, he left a note saying starkly, "Dear Chief Secretary, I am afraid to tell you there's no money left."

In the weeks and months that followed, first Laws and then his own successor Danny Alexander as well as a host of other Ministers repeatedly used this to justify the cuts they proposed to everything from welfare to education funding, jobs creation and transport. The Lib Dems especially cited this as they pleaded not guilty to reneging on their promises to avoid cuts this year and protect services beyond it.

As with much of their project, this was not true. The deficit is lower now than predicted at the start of the year. But the Con Dem propaganda continues apace. Much of the public seems convinced, with a poll taken yesterday showing 49% supporting the cuts to some degree.

But today perhaps changes that and blows away for good the claim that Britain is nearly bankrupt.

Because today, with the Irish economy in turmoil, Eire finally accepted a loan from the EU totalling nearly £80 billion Euros. As a member of the EU, Britain is making a contribution. But then on top, we are making a further bilateral loan, bringing out total commitment to Eire to £7 billions.

Now, there is a lot of sense in this - although at the same time the terms of the loans unnecessarily rob Ireland of its financial and economic independence and seem likely to affect public services rather than the banks. But Britain depends heavily on exports to its smaller neighbour - the average Irish citizen spends £3,500 p.a. on British goods and far outranks anywhere else in the world for purchasing imports from the UK. On top of this, British banks, including state-owned  RBS, are heavily extended in loans to the collapsed Irish construction industry and others - to the tune of £140 billion. So needless to say the total collapse of the Irish economy would damage them further. It is also a loan as opposed to expenditure - one day, it should come back to British coffers.

But how can the Government square this with their claims that we are ourselves pretty much bankrupt? During the election, Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, apparently underwent a secret conversion to massive expenditure cuts when he saw Greece in turmoil and feared that in a few weeks we would be in the same condition. The Tories characterised the closing days of the Brown Government as akin to "bankrupt banana republic" all but out of cash and credit. George Osborne supposedly was ashen faced when as the new Chancellor he went through the books in late May and realised things were far worse than anyone had feared.

The truth of course is that, although our deficit has risen substantially because of having to bail out the banks and pay for the Afghan war, it is far smaller in proportion to Greece's and Portugal's. Moreover, our national debt is barely a third of what it was for the bulk of the post-war period, when Britain's economy expanded and great public services like the NHS were born.

National debt as a share of GDP since its inception in 1692 

The veracity of Mr Osborne's claims has been under strain for several weeks. Now Dublin has blown it apart. Cuts are a political decision driven by Tory ideology for a smaller state. They are not an economic necessity - an investment led recovery along the lines of the Green New Deal could have preserved jobs and developed a sustainable future for our country without such dreadful austerity and the impact it will have on the most vulnerable in society.

Not that that the lie being exposed will change things - nor is it likely that, as we bail Ireland out, the Government might reflect that the Republic has got into this recessionary mess at least in part as a result of following precisely the slash and burn, tight money plans the Con Dems are now merrily enforcing on Britain.

But there again, we're not bankers. We just live here.

"Why don't they start with the bankers?"

The British Government has announced its programme of cuts in public spending today. Carefully crafting a wide range of substantial reductions in spending so that the average cuts per Government department come in at 19% over four years rather than Labour's planned 20%, the Con Dems betray the essential unity of the three main parties around a monetarist, free market agenda. Their little school boyish prank may make waves in the Westminster Village, a bit like waving condoms about in a Prefects' Room, but the impact on a wide range of poor and vulnerable citizens will be even worse than feared, with £7 billions more than expected off disability payments - £50 per week taken from people on Incapacity Benefit for more than 12 months - and a 50% reduction in the social housing budget. At the same time, precisely nothing is done to tackle the massive tax evasion and corporate tax exemptions that plague Britain.

So amidst the gloom, it was good to see this video (below) of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP railing passionately against the cuts as socially damaging and economically illiterate - worsening the crisis of the deficit rather than tackling it. Clearly angered by the Chancellor's approach, she calls for action on investment in sustainable jobs and action against tax evasion. Government led spending on a range of activities such as improving public transport and developing renewable energy would pay dividends in a multiplicity of ways - generating jobs and tax revenue, cutting the deficit, reducing our dependence on foreign energy and cutting our carbon emissions.

This type of Keynesian economic theory,on which the "Green New Deal" is based, used to be the economic orthodoxy that worked for a coherent society. By contrast, Monetarist theory adopted by right wingers in the 1970s onwards changed that - placing economic objectives above social ones and seeking to reduce government involvement in the economy and socirty as a whole. As Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's Chancellor, explained on BBC Radio 4 last night, "I wasn't much bothered about damaging solidarity and social cohesion." All he was bothered about was creating space for tax cuts for the wealthy and a chance to flog off the national assets.

As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats contemplate the biggest sale of public assets ever, as well as cutting deep into the welfare state, the Con Dem regime is emerging as one of the most avowedly ideological governments in British history, rolling back the shrinking public sector further than Mrs Thatcher ever dared imagine.

At least, hearing Caroline Lucas' speech, there is clearly a voice in Parliament showing that there IS an alternative to an agenda that turns citizens into numbers and shuts its eyes to real human suffering. Let's hope it keeps getting louder. And heard.