More Cameron Skullduggery Which Will Ire the Tory Right!

Prime Minister, David Cameron, knows very well that his failure to secure an overall parliamentary majority for the Conservatives at the last election when he had everything going for him (including most of the press) and given the Tories position in the polls and in people's minds now, makes it even more unlikely that the Tories will win a general election outright in 2015. (If this current ensemble last that long of course!) The Conservatives need to make a polling deficit of around 10% and then add a further 7% to win and it's not looking good. One of things that could help hand the Tories another hung parliament is their planned boundary changes.


When Cameron first assumed power with the help of Nick Clegg the Liberal Democrat leader, one of the first things they did was to announce 5 year fixed term parliaments at the same time they said they intended to change the boundaries and reduce the number of constituencies and MPs. This Cameron is doing to his own and the Tories overall advantage. However, this is being met with stiff opposition even from Tory MPs as it means in the boundary changes some will lose their seats, this also applies to Liberal Democrats, but by far the biggest losers will be Labour MPs.


Things have been seriously tricky for the so-called "coalition" government this past few months, making it even more likely that Cameron will do everything in his power to stay joined to the Liberal Democrats, he knows he is more than likely going to need to "buy" their seats again.

On all fronts Cameron is making overtures to the Liberals, he even risks making himself look farcical over Europe in order to try and appease himself to the Tory right and the Liberal Democrats at the same time.

However, there is still much standing in the way of Cameron's desire to be relected, despite the fact that he and his chancellor and Deputy PM, Nick Clegg have proven to be one of the most incompetent and wholly inept government's this country has ever seen in its entire history!

One of the reasons is the Tory right are threatening not to vote for the Boundary changes if Cameron goes ahead with the Liberal Democrats Lords reform. Just before parliamentary recess we saw the government go down to its first major defeat over this issue. As a result, and to appease Nick Clegg, Cameron has promised to give Nick Clegg another shot at getting the Lords reform through parliament, Cameron has said this will be last chance, however, Cameron lies about everything so believing anything he says is foolhardy and also the Liberal Democrats are adamant the Tories must stick to their promise of Lords reform, which was written in the Coalition Agreement - so stalemate! Odd how both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives can break all other pledges they don't particularly like in the agreement, like there being nothing in it about carrying out the biggest reforms in the entire history of the NHS etc; etc; and that doesn't seem to bother them, but can get their wigs off and get their proverbial knickers in a twist about the issue of Lords reform!

Cameron knows he may need the Lib Dems to form another coalition at the next election, so he is putting in the groundwork now.

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg and leader of the Lib Dems has his constituency in Sheffield Hallam and is facing a tough battle to hang on to his seat, 3 major issues are conspiring against him retaining his seat: 1) Sheffield Forgemasters...2) Tuition Fees...3) NHS reforms.

Clegg hopes that his constituents will forgive him from reneging on an £80 million loan promised by the former Labour government to Sheffield Forgemasters in order for them to buy necessary machinery etc; to secure orders and jobs for the future and replacing it with a £36 million loan from the Tories failing Regional Growth Fund. Clegg has been the target of intense criticism in Sheffield over the loan and the loss of jobs that have resulted.
Sheffield Hallam is also a university town and students are extremely angry at the way Nick Clegg blatantly lied to them and then broke his pledge over tuition fees and there is strong anti-Clegg vote.
There is also extreme public anger at the way the Lib Dems again reneged on saying they were not going to support the Tories NHS reforms bill, to turning completely about face and helping the Tories ram it through parliament and this resentment, far from going away is intensifying.

So the news today that Cameron is planning to shut their Tory HQ in Sheffield is revealing! This will probably mean that they do not intend to field a Conservative candidate against Nick Clegg at the next general election and will probably urge all their Tory voters to turn out and vote for Nick Clegg in an effort to keep Labour from winning the seat.
By trying to save Clegg's job in this fashion, this act by the PM will be seen by Tory right wing MPs as yet more kowtowing to the Liberal Democrats in favour of keeping Clegg in a job and him and the Lib Dems onside. It is also widely believed that if Clegg does lose his seat and Cameron is still in place after the next election that he will offer a job of Britain's European Commissioner to him, in yet another bribe to keep the Lib Dems onside. As Clegg is an ardent pro European, this will again anger the right of the Tory party, who want to pull out of Europe altogether!

However leaving all the internal factions and squabbling going on inside the Coalition government, there could  be more going on here than first meets the eye!

Keep an eye out for the Tories or Lib Dems starting to pull out of constituencies where either of them are the  are the third party, if this starts happening across the country we will know that a secret deal has been struck and this will be an open attempt to manipulate the electorate into returning another Tory led coalition government.

There actually could be more traction to the supposed rumour that Cameron, Clegg and the so called "master political strategist" Tory chancellor, Gidiot Osborne have struck a deal to either combine the two parties after the next election (if successful), or there is an agreement in place that a "Coalition candidate" could suddenly start appearing on ballot papers.

Make no mistake, Cameron loves power, it's all he wants, it doesn't matter to him that he is a useless, over privileged, out of his depth incompetent and narcissistic pm, in fact it is because he is a narcissist that he will do anything and anyone to cling onto power that he sees as his divine right. He knows if this cat gets let out of the bag now he will be in serious trouble with the Tory right, but preparations must be made and this is a way of doing them in secret and when people realise it will be too late.

Only one thing could scupper Cameron's plans and that is a generalised and catastrophic implosion of the Liberal Democrat vote at the next election, rendering their number of MPs to be totally irrelevant and unable to be of much use to Cameron in a numbers battle.

Even though Labour are ahead in the polls now, they can take absolutely nothing for granted and must work hard to get as many Lib Dems votes as possible as well as the swing voters.

Have The Tories and Private Security Firm G4S Got Some Kind Of Understanding?

The government may think that they have got away with their shocking failures over security for the Olympic Games - they haven't.


They may have played down the comments of crass US presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, even though he did not actually say anything that wasn't entirely true, which must have been all the more jarring as the Tories and American Republicans are all supposed to be on the same side. Whatever else Mitt Romney is or isn't, he is a man with a hugely successful managerial profile. The man just saw the same total incompetence in David Cameron's Tories as the rest of us have seen and spoke out!


I still haven't heard a dissenting word from the government complaining about how G4S  let the country down so badly and caused us major  embarrassment when the eyes of the world were upon us! Also we still haven't heard a dissenting word  from G4S to describe how the Tory government left it to the very last minute to order thousands more security guards! They did not inform G4S until last December that they needed thousands of extra security staff and the Tory government also left it until then to give G4S their official contract with the finite number of  people they required. IMO, I believe G4S probably put hiring on hold until the government and LOCOG officially confirmed the numbers they wanted, they were hardly going to employ a further 10,000 people and pay for their training etc; if they were not needed, why would they? It would have cost them millions. The Tories cannot complain as this is privatisation in all of its corporate glory, this is what the Conservatives want for this country. This is what will happen in the NHS, police, defence and fire services, in fact it already is! Lookout for the future major life threatening cock-ups ahead!


In an act of  lunatic bizarre behaviour, the Conservative government *FAILED* to put any one person in overall charge of security at the Olympic Games!!! I would find that a staggering admission even in more genteel days and a certain recipe for disaster, but to do this in these days of heightened terror threats is sheer off the wall utter lunatic and reckless wanton incompetence!


Other reasons why the Tories left it so shockingly late to secure proper staffing levels with G4S is because they were hoping to do security on the cheap with thousands of unpaid volunteers and also no doubt the thousands of people sent to work for nothing on workfare programme (helping to skew the unemployment figures, the largest drop in unemployment being in London), when these did not materialise in sufficient numbers they panicked and went to G4S. 


It's odd that there is still not a peep out of G4S or the government, no mudslinging and knowing that mudslinging is the Tories default position to get themselves out of trouble is making me seriously wonder why? Could it be because each side is holding secrets about each other that they do not want the public to know? I'd request a  freedom of information request but suspect the reply would contain the excuse that as this is a security issue they will not divulge that information.


 G4S are probably scared of not winning future lucrative government contracts and this I suspect could be behind the Tories reluctance to blame them for this fiasco. I would not be surprised if the Tories bribed them to keep quiet with promises of future work. I have heard that the government have already or are about to award G4S with a huge national contract to oversee and round up school pupil truants. This could have the effect of many Educational Welfare Officers (EWOs) who work with such children and their families losing their jobs. Many EWOs have already lost their jobs due to government cuts in funding to local authorities and as a result, inevitably truanting and unauthorised absences is beginning to creep up again!


If this is the case and G4S are keeping quiet in order to secure more government contracts, we will in time get to know but yet again we are seeing exactly how this corrupt and sleazy Tory government works!


At the height of the  G4S debacle over this government leaving security of the Games until 2 weeks before they were due to start, Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson was praising G4S to the hilt and telling us how wonderful they were.


If that wasn't enough we had Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt the liar who deliberately misled parliament over the BSkyB failed takeover bid also saying how wonderful G4S was and how they were now watching them closely and how much they had improved and it wasn't necessary to bring in the extra thousands of troops on standby blah blah blah, only to announce one week later the government were going to bring in these troops after all! Again how are we supposed to have confidence in this government when none of them appear to know what they are doing? What is more Hunt announced this news at exactly the same time the Metropolitan police announced that they would be charging Tory PM David Cameron's two close friends with several charges related to phone hacking.


This government is mired in corruption and sleaze and gross incompetence right up to their grubby necks and
there is something seriously sinister about the Tories and the company G4S and no doubt other private companies muscling on lucrative government contracts and siphoning taxpayers money away from critical areas where it is so vitally needed and paying it into their shareholders bank accounts.


I understand when parliament sits again in September this subject will be revisited, I hope so, because this shockingly incompetent Tory led government needs exposing and as I have pointed out on many previous occasions, the Tory coalition partners the Liberal Democrats have the power to end this corrupt sleazy Tory government and the Liberal Democrats need to seriously think about walking away - now, while there is still something to salvage.


If they fail us now, just as they have failed us on the trebling of tuition fees, EMA, welfare reform and NHS privatisation reforms, then they will be even more unpopular than they currently are.

Platitudes Are Not Enough Mr Cameron!

Proving Once and For All That Two Knobs are Definitely NOT Better than One!

The recent bad news on the economy will probably be smothered by the Olympics, or at least that's what their 'smugnesses' Chancellor George Osborne, and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, will be hoping. I'm waiting for the inevitable, every last scrap of good Olympic news will be claimed by Cameron, Osborne and the Tories and if there is any negative news, say if Cameron fails to secure orders for this country or something major goes wrong he will blame it all on Labour, it's a foregone conclusion.

David Cameron, talks the talk but consequently fails to walk the walk each and every time. If there was a gold medal awarded for guff and gaffes Cameron would win it everytime, he's a disastrous PM. He couldn't even get it right with Mitt Romney and they are supposedly on his side! Romney was right of course, the Tories terrible organising of Olympic security has been utterly atrocious, and Romney was only saying what the rest of the world is saying behind our backs and it is the government's fault too. Cameron refused to meet the left wing French President Francois Hollande, when he came to London to campaign, preferring instead to endorse former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, I bet yesterday Cameron wished he had refused to meet right wing presidential candidate Mitt Romney as well!  It's unbelievable that the government did not appoint any one person in overall charge of Olympic security. Leaving the security of Londoners, athletes and spectators to just two weeks before the start of the Games is mind blowing and monumentally stupid, unfortunately however, no less than people have come to expect from the Tories, especially this prime minister and Theresa May the Home Secretary who's job it actually was to ensure that security for the Games was being properly addressed. I am still waiting for them to try and blame Labour for the mess the Tories have created, why not? They blame Labour for everything else, despite being in power for over two years now.

Theresa May is another Tory cabinet minster who makes calamitous mistakes and then blames her staff. (Remember Culture Media and Sport Secretary, Jeremy Hunt sacking his aide?) May has blamed her staff at the UK Border Agency for everything that goes wrong after forcing millions of pounds worth of cuts on them which led to serious staff shortages, which have now resulted in inexperienced staff allowing eight terror suspects into the UK just prior to the Olympics and no one knows where they are. This is truly alarming and I just hope and pray that everything goes off well, the alternative is just too much to even think about. She also blamed and forced the "resignation" of Brodie Clark, according to Theresa May nothing was her fault then, and apparently nothing ever is her fault now. We have an inept government made up of ministers who find it impossible to believe that they are at fault and who cannot take responsibility for their own actions.

David Cameron is no better, in fact, he has been away with the fairies in cloud cuckoo land for months! While his chancellor, George Osborne, has been residing with Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and Vince Cable in "La La Land", where life is beautiful all the time and they "haven't" been instrumental in trashing the UK's economy, it wasn't them, it was Gordon Brown's fault, despite the fact they inherited an economy in recovery, with growth and falling unemployment from Labour and Brown, now over two years later the economy isn't in recovery any longer it is mired in the worse and longest double dip recession for over 50 years! The Conservative cabinet have all been closing their eyes to the gathering storm which they have created in the British economy, in the hope that it will all just go away.

I can't make up my mind if the three men at the top and their lacklustre Lib Dem apologists complete with ready made Tory wets, are just stubborn, belligerent or wholly reckless! These three men who appear to be residing on planet loony most of the time, who have had the best of everything and attended the best private schools in the country and have never wanted for a thing in their lives, really do believe their own hype. They believe that they are so safe in their own jobs, that they can sack over 750,000 public sector workers, while placing the livelihoods of millions of others in peril, that they just do not care and feel it is their right to treat the people of this country with shocking contempt.

There has been no end to the complete disregard in which this contemptuous Conservative led government have treated the British people. All the evidence over the past two years has pointed to Osborne getting everything continually wrong, yet he has ploughed on regardless and without a thought for the people whose lives he is blighting. Ordinary families worried about buying their shopping, paying the mortgage/rent and struggling to clothe their children, fill the car up and pay for the ever soaring cost of gas and electric, don't want mealy mouthed platitudes from Cameron, Osborne and Clegg and they don't want to listen to them trying to pass the blame onto others, they want practical help and they want it now, but neither Cameron, Osborne or Clegg has the ability or the intellect needed to deliver that help, so these people are left to struggle on their own and have been abandoned by the government that created the mess and who have no solution to getting us out of it. 


When he is actually in this country (which isn't very often) David Cameron enjoys posing as some sort of benevolent Father of the Nation, who can don his mask of concern at the drop of  a hat, twist his thin upper lip in that fake look of contriteness to try and show us that he "gets it," really, he does, except that he doesn't, it is all an act, all for show and all just completely false. Cameron is taken us all for granted and has become dangerously complacent, after all it wont be him or his family, or his ilk that will suffer as a result of his and his government's appalling and shocking incompetence, it will be us and the poor and the vulnerable, those least able to cope with it, what a truly shocking indictment of him and his government.


Yet all of this will not stop him from taking every photo opportunity the Olympic Games will give him over this next few weeks, you can bet your wages (if you still have a job) that his face will pop up with GB athletes whose hard work, dedication and training have helped them win a gold medal, lapping up every last bit of good publicity like the fatcat he is that got the cream. Just like he popped up out of nowhere last weekend when champion cyclist Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France. News had only just come through of Wiggins victory when Cameron popped up in a TV news interview cashing in on Wiggins well deserved glory, it was truly nauseating, previously to this the whole economy was entering meltdown and Cameron was nowhere to be seen!!! Probably too busy "chillaxing" or bozzing down the pub, or playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja to bother about us and the economy.

Hostility towards the Conservatives (and the Liberal Democrats) is growing as Cameron and Osborne's insane and unnecessary austerity measures take hold, soon all but the very rich elite (who Osborne just helped with a tax cut) will be affected by the vice like grip this government have imposed on workers and their families.

Cameron and Osborne are pushing the economy into an abyss and it is us, not them, who are paying the price.
The Tory doning Bankers, the Tory doning hedge funders, the Tory doning City financiers who caused the Global economy to falter under the weight their immense greed for obscene amounts of money - are allowed to carry on much the same as they have always done, no wonder they support the Conservatives for government!

Deepest Double Dip Recession for 50 years & Unemployment Falling? Pull The Other One George!

Dolt

Last Saturday on this blog I wrote about the weird unemployment statistics in relation to a contracting economy, yesterday's 0.7% contraction serves only to underscore my points about the strangeness of those unemployment statistics. Quite honestly the downturn in Britain's output is not only a frightening disaster for the British economy, it sits diametrically with the recent modest fall in unemployment. How can unemployment be going down when the economy is so flat? The answer lays in five possible areas:

1. The government's manipulation of the unemployment figures
2. Companies hiring part time workers instead of full time workers
3. Self employed people across all industries are not signing on
4. Self employed sub contractors in the construction industry are not signing on.
5. Temporary posts created by the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

For the second quarter we have seen construction output plummet. It shrank by a huge 5.2 percent in Q2 (second quarter of this year) and this backs up why unemployment figures are falling and yet the country is slipping further into the worse double dip recession for over 50 years. Brickies, sparks, plumbers, chippies, plasterers etc are usually self employed, if they do not have work the majority of them do not bother to sign on. Contrary to popular belief of Tory government ministers and Secretary to the Treasury, David Gauke in particular, who believe it is morally wrong for these people to be paid in cash, most of them do have accountants, and even cash is put through their books. For this kind of worker, not only have this government made it a humiliating experience for them to sign on but because of the nature of their work and them never knowing when they will work from one day to the next, the government has made it virtually impossible for them to claim the benefits they are entitled to and have subscribed to. By forcing these construction workers to turn up for bogus and costly welfare to work programmes (which government hired scandal hit companies like A4e offer in return for being paid billions of taxpayers money) makes these workers unlikely to claim as their work can disappear and reappear often at a day's notice. They may simply and genuinely be unable to keep appointments to sign on, or be available to work for nothing, if they are forced to do this they could miss vital proper paid work, so they don't sign on, it's "Hobson's Choice". In the construction industry approximately one third of workers are self employed and it is a large proportion of these workers who are not being recorded in the official unemployment figures, it 's much the same for self employed people across all industries; further adding to the skewing of unemployment data. Proof of this is seen in consumer confidence which is at all time low, people may not be signing on while waiting for more work to come in, but because they are not earning they are short of cash  so they are not spending and this is depressing the economy. If this keeps happening growth will not return and at best we will bump along the bottom and at worse our economy will contract further, pushing us ever nearer a depression.


The government manipulates unemployment data by forcing people onto work programmes for which they do not get paid; Thus reducing the number hours the company requires its permanent workers to work. This is why there is a sharp increase in the number of part time positions advertised. If companies are in receipt of workers sent by workfare programmes who are not on their payrolls, then of course they will be able to reduce the number of hours worked by their permanent staff  and if they do advertise for extra staff the chances are it will be for part time workers. The government should be forced to publish the number of part time positions which are included in their overall figure of jobs being made in the private sector. It's all very well for them to boast that this quarter 80,000 jobs were created in the private sector, but if most of them are part time or low waged, this not only skews the unemployment figures it also harms growth in the economy. Yet another key reason why we are seeing the disparity between gross domestic product (GDP) and the unemployment figures.


It's galling to listen to Tory MPs and other government apologists use the Construction industry as an excuse for for falling output, inferring that if it wasn't for the construction industry then everything would be fine and the economy would be growing, it's not only galling its completely stupid.
The British construction industry employs around 2.4 million people in over 700 different types of job and there must be just on the law of averages enough people out of work and not claiming unemployment benefit at any one time to markedly skew the employment statistics


The construction industry is the UK's largest industry responsible for more than £80bn worth of output every single year and around a huge 8% of the UK's GDP.


There are approximately 175,000 construction firms in the UK responsible for the employment of over over 2.4 million people and to tick over it will require around 100,000 number of workers to be qualified to NVQ 2 standard each year. Thinking about this and adding together the Tory government cancelling the former Labour government's BFS programme (Building Schools for the Future) and their cuts to higher education and the future jobs programme as well as cutting Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) are all affecting employment. The government trebling tuition fees will have a major effect on skills in the coming years. A band of English universities charging higher tuition fees have suffered steep drops in applications for study this September, according to official figures.

The total number of applicants to all British universities has fallen by 7.7%, with a 10% drop in the number of English applicants, according to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas).

This alone is going to have a huge detrimental effect on the construction industry and will impede future economic growth. Professional trades such as architecture, mechanical and civil engineering could also lose 20% of their manpower to retirement over the next ten years, so the need for new recruitment and training in these areas is pressing. Where is new blood going to come from if university entrants are dropping off due to young people being unwilling to saddle themselves with massive debts between £40,000 and £70,000? This will also hit the medical profession too, where are our future doctors, surgeons, consultants and professors going to come from? The private sector will not pay to train them, the private health industry is only interesting in making a profit for their shareholders, not in investing in the future health of the country.


You don't have to be a brain surgeon to understand why this government have reduced this country to the economic mess they have, the evidence is all around.


To add to Osborne and Cameron's gross mismanagement of the British economy, Government borrowing is now set to rise an extra £20bn making the total of extra borrowing around £170bn more than the former Labour government would have had to borrow. Borrowing money to pay rising benefits bill as opposed to borrowing money to invest in the country's future speaks for itself. Osborne is wasting billions of pounds.


Quite frankly is it surprising that economists and now big and small business leaders alike are viewing the Tory government's handling and in particular George Osborne's handling of the UK economy as an utter disaster?


The latest dire news that the economy shrank by 0.7% is not only a disaster for public finances and businesses, it is having a catastrophic effect on household up and down the land.


To hear the excuses from Osborne and the Tories and their apologists is not only galling, it is an insult to our intelligence. To be told that it's not Osborne and the government's fault, that it is all the fault of the previous Labour government (especially when the former Labour government handed the economy over in recovery with 3.1% overall growth and unemployment falling in real terms) and it's also the fault of the unseasonable snowy weather (in winter); unseasonably wet weather; unseasonably hot weather (in summer); Gordon Brown (the Tories default blame position); mega rich paying too much tax, the EU and the Eurozone crisis; Greece, Italy and now Spain; the Global economy; The royal wedding; the Diamond Jubilee (despite government telling us at one point they would be great for the economy); the "bloated" public sector (even though the private sector is more bloated and costing us much more G4S for example); public sector strikes (which had fallen drastically in recent years and only started again since this government insists on antagonising people and robbing their pensions) welfare fraud (which only accounts for £1.1bn as opposed to a loss in tax revenue from Tory doning companies at around £120bn); welfare dependency (despite there being NO jobs); pensioners for growing old and not dying quickly enough (even though many have provided for their own age and actually pay tax and are now being forced to fund Osborne's tax breaks for millionaires).


The excuses go on and on and at the moment in order to buffer their appalling handling of the eocnomy, Cameron, Osborne their Tories apologists are telling us that the Olympics will be fantastic for the country and that next quarter GDP will rise as a result. I hope so, but realistically looking beneath the surface I ask; "will it"? For one thing I have absolutely no faith in this government handling anything correctly and I am not basing this on my personal opinions of them, or simply on conjecture, I am basing it on the very real fact that since assuming power this government have not handled anything correctly, in fact they have been grossly inept and horrendously incompetent, everything and every policy has ended up in a total car crash, from causing panicking at fuel pumps to privatising the NHS, so excuse me if I doubt very much they will handle the Olympics legacy with any kind of competence. Quite honestly in all my life of seeing governments of both colours come and go, I have never, ever seen one quite as arrogant, deceitful and incompetent as this Tory led so-called coalition.


The private sector has struggled to fill the gap made by public sector cuts and when the Olympics draws to an end the majority of posts created by it will also end. Naturally with work on major projects such as The Shard and the Olympics drawing to a close, the construction sector looks even more bleak.


This government's appalling myopic view over education and training is also going to have a major effect on the construction industry


The time for Downing Street's lame excuses is well and truly over, the public is finally running out of patience and not that I am any great believer in the markets, with bankers etc having caused the whole global economy to almost go over the edge of a cliff, but they are running out of patience too. All the excuses put forward by Osborne, Cameron and Clegg this past 18 months do not amount to anything, when they took over the economy it was growing and in recovery, it isn't now it is in recession and that is nobody else's fault except the clowns in Downing Street, who have never held down a proper job, have no experience in business and have no experience of being in power and running this country yet are so arrogant that they think they know it all and refuse to listen to anyone else. It is they and they alone with their insane austerity measures and massive VAT hike that has sent this economy plunging by 0.7% in Q2 -  or an annualised rate of 3%, they were warned repeatedly not just by Ed Balls, who incidentally like it or loathe it, has been proved exactly right, but they were warned by the world's leading economists too. Other countries have just been sitting back aghast watching the "Osborne experiment" and just waiting for it to fail - and now it has! you cannot treat a country's economy the same way you would treat your domestic household economy they are two completely different beasts, it's like trying to say a cat could be a dog, it can't and it never can be.

The hope that monetary policy alone, in the shape of low interest rates and £375billon of quantitative easing (QE - printing money) would steer the economy off the rocks has proved wrong.

It may have saved the financial sector from collapse but that is about all.

Perhaps George Osborne has forgotten what he said about QE when he was in opposition and the banks were collapsing around the world? I haven't so I'll remind him, he said: 

"Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed."

This was George Osborne's damning indictment of quantitative easing in 2009, when he was in opposition, now over two years on and several rounds of QE later, it appears he has changed his mind. He may like to ponder on the fact that at least the QE undertaken by the Labour government had a specific goal in mind and served a purpose and was in response to the Global financial crash. Osborne hasn't any such excuse, all his rounds of QE has been in response to his own failed policies, it is just heaping failure upon failure and chucking good printed money after bad in blind panic. What will happen when George finally runs out of non existent printed money and his £500 billion maximum has been reached and we are even further in the more than we are now?

The government keep on about growth and strategy, what strategy? They haven't got one, the lot of them are running around like headless chickens and if Vince Cable thinks this government have got their "strategy" correct, then I question his judgement too. In fact, what judgement? Cable has backed the chancellor in every single one of his proposals, he is just as deceitful and incompetent as this chancellor!


Margaret Thatcher created this mess when she was in government by decimating British industry in the form of mining, steelworks, shipbuilding etc deregulating the City and forcing the country to become over reliant on the financial sector. We now import much of which we used to make (including coal) and by selling off our gas, water and electricity the Tories have given householders and even bigger burden to bear in the form of soaring utility bills.


The subsequent implosion of the financial sector and the behaviour of greedy irresponsible bankers means this country has an enormous hill to climb and we will not get anywhere even near the foot of that hill to even start the ascent, as long as George Osborne and David Cameron are there perpetually pushing us back and impeding us with their insane unworkable incompetent policies.

Putting aside a few million for filling in potholes is not going to get the economy moving again (and local authorities are not even doing this), so by all means getting infrastructure spending under way is one solution and the Government, in the last few weeks, has given guarantees worth an estimated £51billion. But all these major projects take years in the planning, if not decades to get under way and are not even due to start until 2014/15, how is that going to help now? There are plenty of ways to get the economy moving again and the Labour party has given a good account of how we could start this *now*, however, it is unlikely the arrogant  Cameron and Osborne will take this up because if they do, it means admitting they got every single thing wrong.

When Tory supporting business leaders are saying Osborne has got it wrong he has something to worry about. However, it was ordinary people like me who were pointing out that the chancellor had got it wrong and that business had got it all wrong , pity in their arrogance they never listen, they know too much and it literally blinds them and they become unable to see the woods for the trees! Osborne is s now coming under intense pressure from business, the City and the Labour opposition to rethink his hardline austerity approach after news of a deepening double-dip recession dealt a severe blow to the government's deficit reduction strategy.  Even the IMF has now come out and said he is wrong, pity they again kept previously backing him, giving him a ready made excuse to carry on with his insanity though, but they did. None more so that Christine Lagarde and her tailor made sound bite of the infamous shudder!

Every single major issue facing this country including the economy, Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and this mongrel coalition government full of Tory and Lib Dem incompetents has been called unequivocally wrong.

The very best thing that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats could now do for this country is to call a general election and allow the people to decide if we want to carry on letting a bunch of over privileged, under talented, inexperienced, out of their depth profoundly incompetent lying buffoons run the country into the ground.  One thing is clear we cannot keep lurching from one disaster to another with this government and their alarming incompetence, something has to give somewhere and very, very soon.

The Bloated PRIVATE Sector!

Much has been said about he the so-called "bloated public sector" and how the "bloated public sector is draining taxpayers and bleeding the country dry and this is apparently how we got into so much debt. But what about the private sector? Isn't that bloated too? Whose money is it bloated on? For example who is paying for companies like A4e and security firm G4S?  I have given just a few examples below of how the bloated private sector is taking money from the British taxpayer and failing to pump any of it back into the British economy and companies like A4e are just taking money hand over fist from the Government under seemingly false pretences.


A4e
Scandal-plagued welfare-to-work provider, A4E has managed to get just 3.5 per cent of its jobseekers into long-term roles.

Fewer than four out of 100 unemployed people who have gone through the firm have secured jobs that last more than 13 weeks.

Almost 115,000 jobseekers were referred to A4e in the ten months to May 2012 under the government's work programme.

The contract awarded to A4e by the Government is worth a staggering £45 million! And despite the company and its founder Emma Harrison being investigated by the serious fraud office, the Tory led government still continued until very recently to award A4e further lucrative public funded contracts.

Atos

The private healthcare company that performs controversial sickness benefit assessments has confirmed that it makes all its medical staff sign the Official Secrets Act.

Atos Healthcare admitted that doctors and nurses are asked to sign a document which sets out the basic terms of the Official Secrets Act even though much of the company's taxpayer-funded work is not bound by the terms of the Act.

Two doctors who work for Atos raised their concerns with the Guardian and online political blog Liberal Conspiracy after the company asked them to sign a document pointing out their obligations under the OSA.

This is a scurrilous attempt to keep people quiet and prevent them from informing the public what disabled and sick people are put through at the hands of this publicly funded company.

It is public money that funds this French company and our government gives it contracts which must run into the billions, yet the Department of Work and Pensions maintains they do not know how much it costs the public purse to run and they do not keep records - why? How can they say they are saving money when they do not keep records? How would they actually know? Surely the public has a right to know, especially when Atos does not appear to be doing its job correctly because of the high number of appeals (70%)  that are granted after the original Atos assessment has classed people as fit to work and stopped their benefits, causing people harm and distress, to the point where some people have actually taken their own lives?

Could Atos be costing the taxpayer more to run than it is currently saving. Who can give the answer to this question and why aren't they? This is our money. Time for the government to come clean!

Close Protection UK

Despite the criminal past of the managing director, Molly Prince of Security outsourcing company CPUK that forced stewards to work for nothing and sleep rough under a bridge for the Diamond Jubilee, the Tory government has awarded them a further £850,000 contract to supply stewards for the Olympic Games. Molly Prince has previously had five companies struck off by regulators after failing to submit company accounts. It seems that the only qualification that is needed for the Tories to award the private sector a contract is that they are a private company and treat their staff badly and charge the public purse as much as they can get away with. And people accuse the public sector of being bloated? 

Tomorrows People

The welfare to work ‘charity’ is another security company responsible for sending unemployed workers to sleep under a bridge during the Queen’s Jubilee have strong links with the Tory Party and have long operated as a charitable front for the political aims of the business sector.

Siemens


The Tory led government awarded German company Siemens a £1.4 billion contract which should have been awarded to British Company Bombardier, this decision will result in 1,400 redundancies at the Bombardier plant in Derby.
No German or French government would be so foolish as to award such a vital contract to an overseas manufacturer, threatening thousands of domestic jobs. The former Tory Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, managed to keep a straight face without blushing when he tried to blame the previous government for his own government's decision to award the contract to a foreign company.


UK Government Allows friend in oil Industry To Award Contracts Overseas


The chairman of Tyneside’s OGN group, which makes frames for offshore oil and gas platforms, has said job losses are unavoidable because the likes of Shell and BP are not fulfilling “a moral duty” to link UK drilling licences to UK jobs on contracts worth more than £500m.

NHS pays £1,600 a day for nurses as agency use soars 

NHS hospitals are hiring agency nurses at rates of up to £1,600 a day in a bid to cope with rising staff shortages. The number of shifts filled by the temporary workers has risen by more than 50 per cent in a year-with private agencies receiving more than seven times the rate paid to nurses on the pay roll. Experts said the disclosures show how hospitals' attempts to improve their efficiency have backfired, with jobs being cut, onlyfor temporary staff to be hired at vastly inflated rates.The scale of job losses is fiercely disputed, with unions claiming thousands of frontline posts have gone since 2009 while ministers say less than 500 posts lost involve nurses.

UK BOrder Agency:


The UK Border Agency (UKBA) has cut too many staff too quickly and is now having to hire extra people, Whitehall's spending watchdog has said.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said instead of slowing down staff cuts when it emerged an automated system designed to save money was both a year late and tens of millions of pounds over budget, the UKBA increased the speed of its planned changes.

More than 1,000 jobs over and above the planned reductions were cut last year, performance dropped.....

G4S

The private security company which ran into trouble by failing to provide the promised number of security guards for the London Olympics. Theresa may the Tory Home Secretary refuses to accept any blame for the millions of pounds contract failure of G4S, despite her lying to parliament when reassuring MPs that the Olympic security was all going to plan. G4S has said that the LOCOG the Games organisers had pressurised them into keep staff wages low and this is why they had trouble recruiting and retaining staff. The truth is of course that both the company and the Tory government were at fault and this should have been dealt with promptly and not left until just 2 weeks before the games were due to start. as a result 3.500 troops have had to have their leave cancelled to step in to provide security at the last minute causing heartache and distress to their families. Many troops have just returned home after completing a tour of Afghanistan and had holidays with their families booked.

Yet another example of a private firm taking money from the taxpayer and providing a shoddy substandard service, if security of the Games was left to the army, police and PCOs and specials etc; instead of the government sacking all our public sector workers, then the job of providing a secure and safe Olympic Games for athletes, spectators and Londoners would have been completed efficiently and without this embarrassing debacle and well under the budget it has cost to hire G4S. In fact the head of G4S, Nick Buckles has said he regrets ever taking on the Olympic Security contract and admits it is a complete shambles. 

It doesn't seem to occur to people who believe this that the public sector pay taxes too, they also buy things, make things and move house helping to keep the economy ticking over.


Ever since "call me Dave"Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg assumed power in 2010, they have declared war on the public sector and public sector workers. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 20,000 more public sector workers will lose their jobs by 2016-17, taking the total jobs cull to 730,000 over the next four years. I wonder if this 20,000 is taking into consideration the 20,000 serving military personnel. Recently the government announced that they would be making 20,000 troops redundant, reducing our army's capacity to approximately 82,000. If our police numbers had already been cut to accommodate Tory cuts to police funding and our military capability had already been reduced to the  shadow the Tories are currently reducing it to  and we had a G4S style debacle, where would the troops and the police have come from to get the Games security back on track? And what confidence for the future does this fiasco instill should we need to urgently call on our troops and police again? For example; how we would have coped with last years riots without the extra thousands of police that had to be drafted in at a minutes notice?


Magnify just these few examples I have given you over education, welfare the newly privatised NHS, police, fire, ambulance etc;etc; and you  begin to see just how lucrative private sector contracts are from the government and why the Tories mates in the financial sector and multinational companies and outsourcing companies all donate millions to the Tory party in hope of winning these contracts. For every contract that is outsourced to the private sector that is more jobs lost in the public sector. It is not cost effective as the examples I have given have demonstrated, how much is this outsourcing costing us in terms of lost tax receipts, lost revenue, consumer confidence and unemployment etc?


Suddenly as with everything we see with this government we realise that it is the it's the private sector that is bloated and not the public sector and the public sector is looking better value for money with each passing day.

Myths of Conservatism and Calamitous Cameron!

Cameron's NHS Privatisation Time Bomb

When Labour came to power in 1997, they not only had to tackle a terminal NHS, education in turmoil and a non existent transport infrastructure they also had to tackle high unemployment and the more thorny problem of long term welfare dependency that Thatcher and successive Conservative governments had caused.  In 1997 there were some households that had three generations of people who were not working. It was a huge problem that had become ingrained into the psyche and one that can take further generations to sort out and a problem that should never have been allowed to take a hold the way it did. Good decent people just tossed aside on the slag heap of Thatcher and Major's Tory governments and the forgotten about. Somehow or another Cameron and the Tories have managed to turn the failings of their 19 years in office into the former Labour government's fault. Labour probably could have done more, but lest we forget under the sea of Tory Black propaganda that 13 years of Labour governments tried very hard to reach people, to give them decent places to live in their inner city regeneration programmes and their regeneration of the coalfields the Tories cruelly closed down, the 100 new hospitals, the thousands of new or refurbished schools, hundreds of thousands more nurses, midwives, doctors, teachers police, Sure Start Centres, Nursery place for every 4 year old, to name but a few, so yes Labour could have done more but they also did an immense amount of good  and it is this good that Cameron wants *YOU* to forget about it is this good that is now being deliberately unravelled very quickly by an incompetent right wing narcissistic Conservative led government.

As a direct result of what "that woman" Margaret Thatcher did as well as John Major, this country was forced through 19 years of hell on earth for ordinary people, where the rich got obscenely richer and the poorer got poorer.  Unopposed by the wets in her cabinet who were too afraid of her to say anything, Thatcher marauded unchecked through the steelworks, ship-works, the car industry and mining industry she trashed British manufacturing and forced the entire country to become reliant upon her mates the "banksters" in the City who she obliged by deregulating the financial sector. By the time that Labour came to power the colossal damage was already done and the banks wielded a huge power over the prosperity of the country, there was very little, barring regulate the banks a little more that could be done, the crash  through the banksters greed had to happen in order to strip them of their power.Thanks entirely to Margaret Thatcher who had let the gilded beast out of the cage it could not be put back in and it went on to create the havoc and financial catastrophe we all saw in 2008/9. "That woman" should be prosecuted for political and financial crimes against a nation! If the Tories want someone to blame then they should look to themselves and to the woman that so many of them still revere.


I get fed up of reading how "nice" John Major was. No he wasn't nice, he is a particularly unpleasant, weak incompetent Tory that allowed himself to be dictated to by the right of his party over Europe (and just about everything else) and the right wing press. He made policy on the hoof and policy based on that day's newspaper reports. He allowed this country and its people to stagnate with a decaying health as people died waiting on waiting lists, to get on waiting lists for treatment and the education service was in deep chaos.  Major was more interested in pleasing the right of his party and staying in power than worrying about the voters that put him in power.  He became the Tories unelected PM not because he was an able man that possessed a vision of where the country needed to go and what needed to be done to get it there for the greater good, but he won simply because he wasn't Margaret Thatcher and the Tories wanted rid of her as soon as possible because she had became an electoral liability so they dumped her and installed John Major because they could not bear the thought of losing power! (David Cameron should watch out, I hear the "long knives" are being sharpened and the "stalking horse" is stomping his hooves straining to be let out of the stable). 
It was then the incompetent John Major, along with his incompetent chancellor Lord Norman Lamont, (another Tory Hedge funder) who created the ERM fiasco that cost this country billions and was the cause of interest rates running at 15.9% for over a year, causing many people to lose their homes to repossession, their jobs, their businesses, there were record bankruptcies and record suicides etc; and Major did absolutely nothing about the problems he and his chancellor had a caused, maintaining there wasn't anything he could do. Strange how history seems to be repeating itself with Cameron, Osborne and their tea boy and honorary Tory, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg. Yet  the Tories have the cheek to accuse Labour and Gordon Brown of profligacy because they spent on schools, hospitals, nurses, doctors, midwives, teachers, police roads, transport etc (all the things the Tories deliberately run down when they were in power as a means to control the masses, whom they see as the "great unwashed" (us)?!


Now the Tories are back and they haven't changed, they are no more compassionate than out of control American pit bull terrier! They want to rip every single person who they class as the "undeserving poor" to shreds. The Tories make all their decisions from the lofty great heights of over privilege and Conservatives not only believe they are the "natural party of government", they also think they have been born to rule. They are the sort of right wing "ruleocrats" the sort who spur uprisings and ultimately start wars (the British Empire was crammed full of them) because they believe they have the right to do so. Most of them believe this because it is what they have been taught within their families and because of the inbreeding that goes on within the aristocracy their hereditary lines are usually connected with monarchy in some way (as is David Cameron's). It causes a wry raise of the eyebrows when I read of the Conservatives and the Conservative government attacking people whom they infer are somehow inferior to them. Yet they do not see it, but it has to be said, neither do many ordinary people who vote for the Tories, who have fallen for the pre election flattery that as they are now all "buying" so they must now be a Tory. Now there is a strange phenomena if ever I saw one.  What is it that makes people believe they are better than others because they live in their own house? Yet ordinary folk do vote for people like Cameron and his so called "caring compassionate Conservatives" (who do not really exist) and who cannot wait to take every right from them and reduce their standard of living to the point where they are kept poor and downtrodden!

It's not so much a "small state" that the over privileged Cameron, Osborne and Clegg want, but the freedom to restore what they see as their rights; to pay little or no taxes, to treat their workforce like little more than serfs and to deny their workers any rights  they may have been given that will enable them to challenge their employers in the courts. Slowly they are reducing wages without actually reducing the minimum wage, they are making more and more people part time workers so they can keep people poor and dependent upon them so they will not fight back. Privatisation is the small end of the wedge but as the privatisation wedge thickens, so will the excesses of privatisation, and the only people to benefit will be people with money who have purchased shares in private companies and outsourcing companies like SERCO and Atos. By denying people their rights emoving legal aid and employees rights and providing only the very basic of healthcare and welfare assistance, suppresses people, this then frees Conservatives to spend less on the state that we all pay for though our taxes etc and to make ever increasing amounts of money at the expense of taxpayers and it is the majority of ordinary folk who pay their taxes, while Tories like Cameron and George Osborne actually avoid paying it and who hire teams of accountants to ensure they don't pay it. The Conservtives then carry on unabated in their rich lives which they see as their birth rights; it is a continuation of "Thatcherism", she too used the "divide and rule tactic" to great effect and David Cameron is doing it too! Slowly he is dividing and ruling society and not only is he doing that but he is now actually trying to divide and rule in sub divisions like those he wants us to see as worthy of Disability Living Allowance (soldiers) to those he wants us to believe are unworthy of the benefit (disabled civilians). We have witnessed this abhorrence and blight on our caring society in all aspects, but none more so than the government now trying to threaten people into not producing children and stigmatizing whole families, where the children from those families will also grow to feel stigmatised and marginalised. How will this bring about real sustainable change in society? The answer to this is it won't, all it does is to push us into subservience by keeping us suppressed so they (Successive Conservative Governments) can carry on unchallenged and unabated in their over privileged existences! It is like one huge Conservative merry go round, where ordinary folk are allowed to hop on at election times and are then cruelly pushed off into the dirt afterwards!


Yesterday came the announcement from Louise Casey, David Cameron's so called Head of Troubled Families Unit on the so-called 120,000 "troubled families". Ms Casey, after meeting only 16 of these supposed 120,000 families believes the government should "interfere"  and has the right to tell women it is irresponsible to keep on having children and that they should stop. Without quoting any statistics or proof of her findings, or informing us how much time she had actually spent with these families etc; etc; she told the Daily Telegraph that the Government must not be a “soft touch” but instead be prepared to “get stuck in”, challenge taboos and change lives. From that we are to deduce that the government  believes it has a right to tell people how many children they can or cannot have. 

It is the thin end of the wedge, already we have had Cameron and his government telling us how much we can drink at home, treating us as if we are all immature irresponsible binge drinkers by raising the price of alcohol to make it unaffordable, although apparently it's OK for Cameron to drink four glasses of wine over Sunday lunch because he is from privilege and he can afford it. It's also OK for Cameron to go down the pub spend more on one single lunch than many of us have to manage on for a week, get pissed, and leave his little 8 year old daughter in the pub toilets where she was allowed to wander alone and where anything could have happened to her, especially considering she is the daughter of a serving prime minister! Him with all his security managed to leave her down the pub on her own and they all went home without her, but apparently we are told that it was just an accident which could happen to anyone? Is it really? Could it have happened to a single parent, or someone living on benefits, or happens to be unemployed without attracting a storm of unfavourable criticism?  I suspect if it happened to one of  Louise Casey's "mothers", she would be labelled a an "antisocial binge drinking drunken slag" who sleeps with undesirable violent men and produces children and leaves them unattended down the pub and therefore should lose all her benefits and rights and God knows what else! 

Louise Casey makes so many assumptions, she assumes that poor people have more children than they can manage, that they do not love them or provide adequately for them, she assumes also that they are all on benefits, (which they are not), many work but only command a low wage and need state assistance to manage. Is that the fault of the or person or the fault of the company boss who is deliberately paying a low wage so they can keep more in profits, while forcing the state to subsidise their payroll? Casey also assumes that these families have never worked and that some ( one fifth) have large families while on the benefits, when actually some families have landed in this situation as a direct result of this Conservative government's austerity measures which has forced them on low pay, or to take low paid jobs, or has forced them out of well paid jobs. She also assumes they are of lesser intelligence than her and need telling what to do and when  and how to do it, there are other countries that do this and one of them is China.

In China, baby boys are often viewed as more precious than girls, as many families can have only one child as part of the nation's population policy and desire a male heir. In China it is not unusual to find newborn baby girls thrown away like garbage in garbage dumps (BBC News) and sometimes in the gutter by the sides of roads. By interfering with the birth rate, the Chinese government have destabilised China and if the British government interfere in the UK, where will it all end? Today they are just telling people to stop having babies, tomorrow they may pass a law, the next time they may start telling people how many children they may have and others they may prevent having more than one according to their means, where will all this end? It is extremely dangerous territory. It is not far fetched either, look at the history of this government, look at what they are doing, look at their attacks on ordinary people, open your eyes and start questioning what this government is actually trying to do. An example of this dogmatic Tory government's attitude is their NHS diktat, it was clear that this was not wanted by the majority of people, and over 98% of medical professionals, yet they still rammed it through parliament, we are now on the beginning of a the very slippery road leading to full-scale privatisation of the NHS against the wishes of the vast majority of people. 

This is the way privilege in power works, this is the way those born to privilege think; don't harbour under any  misapprehensions they look down on the majority of us, they think they are born to rule us, they just use us at election times for our votes then cast us aside. Please don't take my word for it take a look at the current crop of Tories in government, all of them inherited millionaire status, all of them are multi millionaires, all of them born into aristocracy, or power, or the landed gentry, all of them went to of the very best top 9 private schools. David Cameron - Eton. Boris Johnson - Eton. George Osborne - St Paul's School - Nick Clegg (honourary Tory)- Westminster School etc; etc. What have they done for the ordinary person since assuming power? Nothing but deliver u-turn after u-turn and two incompetent, overbearing, dogmatic arrogant sets of rules. One set for them and their over privileged followers which delivers them huge tax breaks, and another set for the rest of us to follow which include making pensioners pay for the over privileged tax breaks they awarded themselves.

We are now ordered by decree of this Tory led government - Don't smoke; Don't drink; Told when to get up; Told what to eat; Forced to work for nothing; told what to wear to the Olympic Games and the latest is the Tories are now telling people how many children they can have; This is getting out of hand and there is a clear message in all of this, the government are trying to divide us, turn us against each other and then will rule us. *But Only IF We Let Them*. We are by far the largest group in society and it's about time we wised up to the Tories and to Cameron and his ilk and just calmly vote them out at the next election putting a stop to this impoverished austerity insanity they are imposing upon us, which incidentally, has been proven by leading economists and now even the IMF, to be totally unworkable!

One day we have the Louise Casey announcement which I have spoken about, which I believe was sent as some kind of softener to make the electorate pliable to the Tories next announcement which came hot on its heels which is that "Child Support Changes Will Affect Over 100,000 Families" is *YOUR* family among that 100,000? Why attack families who are struggling to cope under this government's insane austerity measures and yet give the richest 1% who already have more money than they could ever spend in several lifetimes a huge tax cut - paid for by us? Why? Is this what you voted Tory for?

If we don't wise up and pretty damned quick, we will deserve the manipulation of the masses that is now occurring under our very noses and as Cameron has freely admitted (although he seems to be suffering from amnesia now), these changes and these cuts are not just here for the sake of austerity, they are here for good, and they will stay, which means that you, I and more importantly our children's lives and futures will be blighted for the foreseeable future. *But ONLY IF we Allow It!* We are far more powerful than the Tory ruling elite *NEVER* forget that! We will only lose that power if we allow the Conservatives to take it away from us!