Might as well post this here as this whole issue regarding the latest EU treaty of sorts and Cemeron's veto looks set to be the main issue in UK politics for a while.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financi...

Britain has vetoed an EU treaty change on measures to resolve the eurozone debt crisis. Hungary also said it would not take part and Sweden and the Czech Republic said they would have to go back to their own governmentts before making a decision.

However the 17 eurozone nations, plus six countries who hope to join the single currency, have agreed to sign up to a new treaty, outside the EU treaty, that will introduce stronger controls over individual countries' finances.

"Oliver Letwin does some of his parliamentary and constituency correspondence in the park before going to work and sometimes disposes of copies of letters there They are not documents of a sensitive nature," the spokesman said.

Silly question, but what on earth is wrong with doing such work in something called an office?

And hasn't Oliver Letwin ever heard of a wonderful little invention called the paper shredder?

You'd hope the security cheifs will have been tearing Oliver Letwin a new arsehole over this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...

Now the parties have abandoned the old seaside conference venues like Blackpool with their cheap B&Bs, troublesome activists from the provinces find that four days of networking costs the same as a high-end foreign holiday, and conveniently stay away.

By way of reinforcements, a strange breed of pasty-looking young men in dark suits – aspiring political insiders, who actually look borderline unemployable – has affixed itself to all three parties. Some fringe meetings offer a break from the tedium, but even in the case of the admirably democratic Lib Dems, the spectacle in the main hall is often deathly. With the absence of natural light, the whole hurly-burly engenders a feeling of latent unease: after a few days, you feel as if you are going mad.

I watched as Cameron did his best to cut through to the public. He managed to alchemise populist thwack and patriotic optimism out of a desperate set of circumstances. But the vast crack in his rhetoric was self-evident: in effect, he was approximating the nothing-to-fear approach of Roosevelt, while extolling the fiscal stupidities of Herbert Hoover. "So many of our communities are thriving – let's make the rest like them," he implored, as if mere derring-do could turn South Shields into Cambridge, and Nottingham into Notting Hill. His pop at "can't-do sogginess" surely amounted to the grim spectacle of silver-spooned millionaire telling the rest of us to awaken an optimism completely contradicted by events. That's what millions of people feel like, and they have every right to.

Even in the hands of its more deft practitioners, politics is failing, at speed. The corrosion of trust that took root under New Labour and the catastrophic effects of the expenses crisis are obvious; perhaps even more crucially, the economic articles of faith that have so dominated the past 30 years are broken. The result is a vacuum that could be filled by one of three things: a reinvented one-nation Conservatism that amounts to more than the inexplicable credo of the "big society" bolted on to unreconstructed Thatcherism; a bold, modernised kind of social democracy; or a nasty, pinched populism that will reach for achingly predictable remedies. We all know the drill: raise the flag, pull up the drawbridge, send home the Poles, turn the screw on the poor.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15010279

Paying off the "NHS mortgage" is putting so much pressure on the system in England that the future of some hospitals is at risk, ministers say.

The government said 22 trusts - running 60 units - are facing difficulties because of the cost of paying for privately-funded building projects. The group represents nearly a fifth of the 100-plus PFI schemes in the NHS.

Problems are being encountered because, for some trusts, repayments account for up to a fifth of their budget.

PFI is a way of funding building projects using private money. It was originally introduced by the Tories under John Major, but the use of the scheme was largely expanded into the NHS by Labour.

On the one hand you get American DUer's who are very distant from the events and trying to tie the riots into some half baked political theory which they really don't fit.

On the other hand you get the likes of David Starkey just spouting bigotry with no consideration of who the people doing the looting actually are and just trying to blame any minority group they happen to dislike anyway.

BBM's are apparently also being used quite a lot by looters and I would expect that some are using Facebook as well.

However, one thing I have noticed with Twitter is that the riots have turned it from being a liberal safehaven into a Daily Mail-esque stream of calls for water cannons, corporal punishment, marshall law and deportations as people are very pissed off about the rioters and the ongoing situation. Any attempts to justify in anyway what's going on appear to have ceased, although some partisans are making a point of criticizing Boris Johnson & David Cameron for being on holiday when this kicked off.

Hundreds of innocent workers lose their jobs becuase of gross misconduct by the people at the top. It is abhorrent that Rebekah Brooks is still in her job and people who had nowt to do with the wrongdoing are the ones who are losing their livlihoods.

http://www.liberal-vision.org/2011/05/08/t... /

The scale of incompetence by the YES campaign simply cannot be overstated. It is so vast and so staggering that it won’t merely fill column inches for days, if not weeks to come, it will be the subject of PhD theses for decades to come. It is unlikely that a wilful infiltration of the YES campaign by the NO side – at the most senior levels – could have resulted in a more calamitous result. The enormity of this professional political campaigning disaster is without parallel in modern British history.

The YES campaign was eminently winnable. But it ended up being run by readers of the Guardian for readers of the Guardian. Readers of this newspaper are about 1% of the voting electorate – and are also a statistically extreme group. Their views do not chime remotely with mainstream British opinion. There is no purist Guardian editorial proposition that could ever come close to winning a referendum in the UK.

From the outset, the YES campaign was all about the tiny coterie of people who feel strongly about electoral reform. The emphasis was on these people “having fun” and being invited to comedy evenings. In email after email from the YES campaign, the quirky behaviour of this “producer set” was celebrated and the “consumer set” ignored. So, some bunch of local activists who had written the letters Y, E and S in big letters on a beach were hailed as creative geniuses. Others were highlighted for running a particularly successful street stall. From the point of view of any observer, it was all about “them”(the micro-percentage of constitutional reform obsessives) never about “us” (the people). None of this self-indulgent madness won a single vote for the YES side, but it probably lost thousands.

Matthew Elliott’s NO2AV campaign took a totally different path. They realised who their base was and utilised them, but – quite brilliantly – reached out immediately to their key target electorate (essentially traditional Labour voters and supporters.) If Elliott had spent his first weeks in post writing to hard-core Tories about how marvellous and clever they were, he may have lost. He didn’t. He made it his number one aim to build a coalition with Labour and deployed his left-wing allies superbly. Ed Miliband was left looking like a weakened man who couldn’t control the more charismatic and compelling beasts in his party like John Reid. This ability to build a wider coalition from the outset, rather than retreat into the comfort zone of centre-right, free market politics was central to the NO campaign’s success.

It's that time of year for the obligatory thread about the upcoming elections. This year we have local government elections, Scottish Parliament elections, Welsh Assembly elections and the AV referendum. (The AV referendum is probably worth a thread in it's own right IMHO)

http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/default.aspx

Please feel free to comment on the elections where you are and the possible outcome over in your neck of the woods.

I've got town council elections and I would expect the Tories to win in my own ward. However, over the border in Sheffield it's more a matter of whether or not Labour will take control of the council off the Lib Dems.

Haven't seen any campaigning though, other then Yes2AV leafleting outside Sheffield Town Hall. (Every weekend there's somebody holding a rally outside Sheffield Town Hall and to be honest it's getting rather tiresome)

http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/2011/01/25/ma... /

I've said before that I think many columnists are just pro-trolls, or prolls, whose only function in life is to be contrarian, to provoke, to stir up anger and outrage - though in Melanie Phillips's case I think she really believes what she's saying; it's just that it happens to dovetail in with a particularly provocative viewpoint.

In getting annoyed by what someone like Phillips says, are we all just playing into the hands of the Mail, by giving them web traffic, by raising their profile, by constantly chattering about them? Well, partly, perhaps; but I don't think that means that we should just sit idly by and ignore people making terrifically unpleasant and provocative statements, even if we know they're only doing it to try and stir up a reaction. By using Istyosty, for example, people can link to the Mail and read it without giving them the traffic they love so much.

But not all chatter is good chatter. The Mail might superficially think it's doing a great job if it's attracting a mob with flaming torches over to something nasty said by Melanie Phillips, or whoever, but it's pretty corrosive to their brand. People will associate the Mail not with anything incisive or intelligent, or any of the good journalism they do; but with a rather nasty kind of columnist.

Sure, it might get you a few thousand clicks in the short term, but in the long term, your brand is going to be seriously compromised; if people are just going to remember the Mail as the likes of Littlejohn, Moir, Phillips and Jones, they're not going to want to buy the paper, or visit the website for anything other than masochism. The Mail don't 'win' by scoring loads of website hits from people who despise what they publish; that doesn't do them any good at all. It's advertising the brand as something low, cheap and unpleasant.

Then it must be considered false until proven otherwise.

...is how much the Lib Dem vote collapses by. The result of a collapse in the Lib Dem vote would be that both parties become more entrenched, with Lib Dem/Tory bunfights becoming Tory and Lib Dem/Labour bunfights becoming Labour. Unless Labour can snaffle some votes off the Conservatives this would result in the Tories sneaking in an overall majority, although where I live it would increase Labour's majority.

An 8% defence cut gets all the attention but a 50+% cut in social housing barely a whimper. We have a big problem with lack of council housing and increasingly unafforable housing that the government is making much, much worse.

That affects people much more then a sodding aircraft carrier.

Tory MP in useless twat shocker!

Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher & Walton is threatening 38 Degrees that if we don’t take his email address off our “contact your MP system” he’ll report us to the Information Commissioner.

We’ve been in touch with the Information Commissioner and they’ve reassured us that because he is an MP and his e-mail address is in the public domain, he has no grounds to report us.

We let Mr Raab know this and he responded by having the House of Commons remove his e-mail address from their website. We spoke to the Information Commisioner’s office and again they reassured us that because he is an MP and because his email address is in the public domain we’re in the right by letting his constituents get in touch with him.

We want to be totally transparent about this, so we’re publishing a copy of all the e-mails between 38 Degrees and Mr Raab below.

http://blog.38degrees.org.uk/2010/08/09/do...

Plus a lot of people are still happy about Labour being booted out. The government is still in it's honeymoon period if truth be told, although it's not as bad as it was in 1997 with all the fawning over Tony Blair you had back then.

The most anger I've seen (probably cos I work in Sheffield) has been over the government cancelling the Forgemasters loan.