As Brown and Cameron clash on how to slash the deficit, a new blueprint spells out how tax reform could curb it fairly The leaders were still shadow-boxing at the Confederation for British Industry conference yesterday. In the red corner Gordon Brown thumped out his warning that " Choking off recovery too soon would be fatal ". In the blue corner David Cameron hit back, warning again of...
Over the last year we have watched as a bank-induced credit crunch morphed into debate on public services cuts. While the public have bailed out the bankers, whose flawed system led us into this mess, it is those least able to afford it who are facing the reality of having their pay and benefits frozen, and vital services cut. We simply cannot allow this to happen. As Polly Toynbee says ( Comment...
Polly Toynbee writes an article I strongly agree with . The current clamour for public expenditure cuts seems to me rather foolish - and ignores the alternative way of balancing the budget when the economic situation improves - tax increases. The higher top tax rate of 50% is a step in the right direction. Additionally, the government could lift the upper earnings limit on National Insurance, thus...
If Labour cannot win the coming election with Gordon Brown, it certainly can't win it without him ( Here's the last hard choice for Labour: leader or country , 14 November). Imagine the bickering and infighting among his potential successors, none of whom has shown any flair or national leadership potential. What that would do to an electorate, already thoroughly disillusioned by politics and politicians,...
The problem whe n you become a poster girl for a political party is realising that instead of being a random groupie on twitter, when you get the endorsement of party elders, party slaves and party cheerleaders, when you are photographed with the PM, you deserve a little more scrutiny. LabourList proudly state young Ellie Gellard is their most influential communicator online. It takes a pretty sick...
The wild escalation of top salaries goes across both sectors – and so must the solution: a high pay commission If ever there were a need for a high pay commission to put some rationality into out-of-control top pay scales, this is it. The Equality and Human Rights Commission is looking for a new chief executive. Its chairman, Trevor Phillips, called in Hayes Consulting to establish what the...
The Queen's speech might have been just seven minutes long, but we devote a whole 21 minutes of this week's show to it. And not just what was in it but also what wasn't in it. David Cameron criticised Gordon Brown for not incorporating Christopher Kelly's reforms on MPs' expenses. Michael White thinks is was at least politically naïve of Brown. Polly Toynbee gives her reaction to the speech....
I sense growing detachment, alienation and indifference where the monarchy is concerned The Westminster neighbourhood should be back to normal this morning after the Queen's golden coach and all those metal railings have been put back into storage. "The captains and the kings depart," as Kipling put it in Recessional, his prophetically melancholy poem of 1897. Three melancholy exchanges...
EU leaders meet in Brussels tonight, where they'll decide who'll be the first President of the European Council. Former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga - unlike most candidates - has formally declared an interest in standing. She says the selection process is male-dominated and undemocratic. A report from Human Rights Watch finds repression as bad under President Raúl Castro as it was...
On Hopi`s blog today he was gushing about the latest Labour PPB “ Fighters and Believers”. If you bother with it , and avoid spontaneous combustion ,you will be struck by the clammy religiosity . Timmy Worstall meanwhile was pouring scorn on the notion that Jesus was a socialist . A presumably sanctimonious leftie feels that in an eventful life Jesus found time to register support for progressive...
Regrets hung in the air, but don't dismiss the Queen's speech as a packet of fag-end gestures. Many of these bills could pass Not dead yet. Alive, alive-O was Labour's message heralded by trumpets. Though delivered in deathly regal deadpan, here was a programme with substance flashing out a lighthouse reminder of what Labour stands for. Electioneering? Of course, and why not? The Westminster village...
The first of BBC Four's "Women We Loved" season was excellent - all the unspoken tensions and gaping emotional holes of so many middle- and upper-class homes of the 1930s and 1940s, only in this case occupied by the woman whose legacy still shores up a romantic vision of those times in which that sort of thing simply didn't happen, all the right expressions, every silence in just the right...
Over the whole summer, we kept hearing about how rebels are gong to challenge Tony Lloyd for the chairmanship of the PLP. It was about the ninth different planned revolt we heard about and got a lot of play. Lots and lots of stories about it, there were, right up to this Polly Toynbee article on [...]
Polly Toynbee discusses the bills for reducing the budget deficit and increasing equality and examines how the Conservatives will respond Polly Toynbee
Via Iain Dale , I see that Quaequam Blog! has found an upside to the idea that the Press Complaints Commission should regulate blogs. But wait: a thought occurs. If bloggers are to be brought under the PCC, surely we should have seats on the PCC board? And, given the fact that our combined readership is somewhat larger than the newspapers’, shouldn’t we actually have a majority of seats...
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