The United Kingdom is No Longer a Market Economy

'Short-selling of financial stocks is to be banned in the United Kingdom from midnight on Thursday night under rules drawn up by the Financial Services Authority.

The ban, which has been approved by the watchdog’s board of directors, will prevent investors from creating or adding to short positions in all publicly quoted financial companies. The ban will remain in force until January 16, 2009, when the FSA plans to publish a comprehensive review of short-selling rules.'

In a market you can't stop forward deals. Markets include exchange of assets over time, even if the assets are not yet there to sell. London will no longer have a market from midnight. (And the only way to close a market is to shut it instantly, otherwise havoc could be unleashed unnecessarily for three hours.)

After thought

This is corporatism pure and simple. Corporatism of a nazi/fascist brand. Private property but state guaranteeing and monstrous bullying. Be very afraid.

If Only

'Exaggerating the extent of Mr Brown's role in the HBOS deal also carries risks.' remarks the Telegraph.

As one Treasury official noted: "There's a long way to go yet."

'The HBOS deal could still fall apart, possibly dooming HBOS and leaving Mr Brown's fingerprints on the biggest financial disaster in British history.'

What if the real deal was to induce the Governor of the Bank of England to continue buying in toxic mortgage waste in the interests of the entire banking sector, until after Christmas? With the added bonus of cooking Brown's goose.

The State We Are In

Cold, hungry, poor, jobless, homeless, bankrupt, and stuck. New Labour offers them all and insists on their take-up. The most vulnerable have got the lot, plus a poor education and slow, backward health care.

Electricity and gas bills are up by more than a quarter on last year. The cold hasn't really started yet but when it does it will be most of us wincing at the cost of keeping it at bay, some of us shivering at dropping the central heating thermostat, and the elderly dying from cold-related conditions. Nothing has been done to revitalise the power distribution system, which may not matter at the moment as nothing has been done to build greater generating capacity by whatever means; but as the old generating plants, particularly the nuclear power stations, close down one after the other from sheer old age, a more systemic source of cold that has nothing to do with Russian oil and gas control, creeps up on us all.

Fresh food is disappearing from the diets of the many not the few. Not just high-quality fresh food but any fresh food: fish, game, prime cuts of lamb and beef, even offals are replaced by minced everything and frozen nameless protein, and frozen tasteless greenery. Cheese? Processed and conveniently sliced to place on never-ending toast. Food bills are a form of taxation, not payment for desired goods but for standardised supplied goods. We haven't got the ration books yet but their return can be seen easily in the supply of a basket of basic groceries for 'hard-working families and pensioners' to assist during the global down-turn, on registration at the supermarket and presentation of ID. Poor food is better than no food, but food poverty and food inaccessibility will take its toll on health and well being.

Living without work has not been a life-style choice for many, more a life-style imposition for those living at the wrong time in the wrong place in a deindustrialising economy. But at least those who practice it are readier for its privations than the millions who will be thrown out of work in the coming months.
New Labour's new unemployed are about to be cast into the cauldron of inadequate public services their taxes have been ostensibly paying for (although in reality they have been mulcted to fund New Labour's client base of quango-employed jobsworths and infinite varieties of envoys and advisors). The standard of living of the new New Labour unemployed will fall like a stone. No car, no transport. No tutor, no grammar school. No money, no holidays, not even a day out. Above all, no credit. And innumerable wasted hours filling in forms, queueing, hanging onto call centre calls, and dropping into crisis if even the smallest detail on payments in or out goes wrong.

The small print on 'your home may be at risk' is now written in letters of fire for millions as new legislation that requires mere activation by a junior minister, not parliamentary discussion where it would surely be impeded, comes into force. Unsecured debts could be secured upon a debtor's house before, but now the forced sale to pay them has been yielded into the control of the creditor. The sound of credit cards swooshing through must be replaced by the sound of scissors. The time before help can be obtained with mortgage payments by New Labour's new unemployed has been reduced, but that is a sop in comparison with the threat from unsecured loans. The council accommodation offered will not be the council housing so carefully saved for and bought under other government, that is lost.

There must be a general election. These New Labour purblind, corrupt, incompetent, betraying, destroyers - destroyers of a once functioning and growing economy and society at considerable ease with itself in all its diversity, are like a cork in a bottle of fermenting rage. A general election is the civilised, democratic way.

Who could want the cork to blow?

Another Day, Another Run

The photographs of people waiting outside the Halifax to withdraw their money says it all. For the second time a retail run is starting on a UK bank; the virtual run has been going on for days but now the queues are forming.

The announcements in the press of the 'saving' of HBOS by a Lloyds TSB take-over are both premature and too late. 'On Wednesday night' reports the FT, 'some investors in HBOS voiced concern at the speed of the deal. Richard Buxton, head of UK equities at Schroders, which has a 2 per cent stake in HBOS, said: “Why does this [deal] need to happen? The Bank of England’s Special Liquidity Scheme buys HBOS time. How does the deal benefit shareholders in HBOS and what if the short-sellers turn next on Lloyds and then to other banks?” (The Bank of England's Special Liquidity Scheme has been extended to the end of January so that even more toxic debt can be exchanged for government paper, presumably to facilitate this merger.)

Apart from shareholder resistance from small share-holders as well, the deal will bring tens of thousands of job losses, some 40,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs. The trade unions led by Unite are already flexing their muscle for the fight for no compulsory redundancies; workers must be paid enough to leave voluntarily. Who will pay for that? We all will.

We will all pay in lower savings rates, higher mortgage costs, inflationary rises in government spending, but we will all pay too in the flouting and over-riding of rules and laws set in place to prevent our exploitation by collusion between the financial sector and authoritarian government.

All the reports stress the key role played by Gordon Brown in enabling this deal. All experience underlines the key role played by Gordon Brown in causing this financial and social disaster in the first place.

European Union Competition Regulation and Merging Banks

A merged Lloyds and HBOS would have 28pc of the UK mortgage market and home loans worth £335bn, according to data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders.

Competition rules applying to undertakings in the Treaty establishing the European Union would be worth a quick going-over. It's hard to think such a merger will pass muster.

The Leader of New Labour must think he wasn't signing anything important when he turned up so late in Lisbon.

Update

Robert Peston has stated that: 'The government will announce that in the interests of financial stability it will legislate to over-ride the powers of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission to block the deal.'

How is the government going to pass any legislation that over-rides the European Union authority here? Is the United Kingdom re-neging on Maastricht (and even earlier treaties).

Trotskyoid Dreams Come True

Nationalisation without compensation or go bankrupt. And the choice is not for the banks to make but decided by the state.

Gordon must be gibbering with joy. After all those years of stakhanovite labour in the political salt mines and then in government, he's driven the economy to the brink of the realisation of his dream.

Is Your Money Deposited in a Safe Place?

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme covers the first £35,000 of savings per person, in each institution.

Anyone with savings of more than £35,000 must be considering withdrawing the excess and spreading it across different banks; which means they are also considering which banks are vulnerable and moving out of them completely - you would wouldn't you? Who wants the hassle of claiming and waiting to retrieve their own money. Move anything and you would move the lot and spread it around safer havens. It only takes a few with higher deposits to start moving their money and those with less will do so too, on the hassle-avoidance argument.

Guaranteeing deposits in their entirety would have been a more sensible move than throwing all those billions at Northern Rock. Another run on a UK bank will be the last straw.

Afterthought:

And while considering the safety of your cash perhaps it's worth looking at your insurances and who they are with.

Now We See Him For What He Is

Junior colleagues dismissed (and discovering it from interviewing journalists) for querying the ruling Party's response to economic crisis while the Chancellor of the Exchequer talks down the UK economy; members of the Labour Party's ruling council intimidated into not attending crucial meetings; refusal to send out nomination papers for the Party leadership before the Annual Conference; the inadvertent revelation that the Prime Minister had a salaried envoy for trees! (So that's how he avoided facing an election for the leadership).

As the financial world goes down in flames, thousands of workers are leaving their jobs in fears and tears and, for shame, photographed and derided in their misery, future lives and pensions are wrecked by his almost unbelievable incompetence and destruction wrought over eleven years in which his sole aim was to obtain a high office for which he is wholly untrained and totally incompetent. Where is he?

Fixing a Labour party meeting.

De-Coupling From Global Disaster

Looking at the news this morning anyone would be reviewing their actions to protect their living standards and their wealth. So far Angels have sold off United Kingdom property (not at the height of the boom, peaks and troughs are for professionals to hit, the upward slope is what to aim for), invested in agricultural land, exported most of our money into the eurozone, maximised eligibility for regional and national euro-funding in bringing marginal land back into production, developed an eco-house with solar fired heating and electricity, and captured and used its own water supply, set up a cash crop, and a garden for self sufficiency in most of what we eat. (The basis for these actions, the abandoned property left to fall down as marginal if not worthless in the brave new world of global development was fortunately still there).

All this is marked by a single characteristic: disengagement, decoupling from large and faceless service providers, and from financial systems that are out of any control. Which leaves also a huge area of our well being outside of our control. Have our pensions been compromised, all that foregone consumption so that we would be reasonably comfortable when we are old lost for good? Almost certainly yes. At best, what is paid will be devastated by inflation already established and accelerating to lira-like levels. Work till we drop is now the requirement.

Austerity is more bearable when cold and hunger can be diminished by personal hard work, but social disorder is more difficult to face. Not marauding bands but the social disorder of failing provision in essentially social areas: - public health, personal health care, (all of a sudden teeth, eyes, hearing, every kind of physical self-care takes on far greater importance);- transport suddenly slower and costing much more, requiring higher levels of organisation and planning (no more setting off for relatively close destinations for brief sojourns and ephemeral amusements, never mind 'holidaymaking' in distant and relatively undeveloped places without the means to get home in any sudden change of circumstances. No more unthinking reliance on someone else rectifying self-exposure to unnecessary and real danger by leaving home to all intents and purposes penniless and without survival skills). And there is, above all, the imperative provision for education and research to sustain a knowledge environment pleasant to live in and central to economic advancement and problem-solving. That cannot be provided individually.

Building personal exchange networks is now crucial. No more re-inventing of the self, the shedding of past failures and past shames by departure from neighbourhood or record in everyday life. Good standing within family, community, and in the world of work is indispensable: not the respect that is self-ascribed by the narrow rituals of childhood carried too far into the adulthood of gangs and criminality, but the other-ascribed status of being a person who can be trusted in every aspect of socioeconomic life. It is not for nothing that the most powerless among us, in our lifestyles deprived of self-determination, are the children and young adults knifing away in their self-assertion and attempts to control their surroundings, reinventing the wheel and missing the point (but they haven't been taught much in their prison-house schools).

Even if social identity and personal responsibility are restored to their cultural importance, what are we to do about the threat of war? Not war on someone else's territory which millions found they are powerless to prevent in the face of governance immune and wholly unresponsive to democratic will, but war on our own terrain. Few of us were awed but most of us were shocked, no horrified and outraged, by the unspeakable assault on the people of Iraq. And by the subsequent installation across the world of torture and false imprisonment as accepted usage by our own governments.

Extensions of that dreadful assault and all its consequences are threatened, in the struggle to continue impossible-to-sustain life styles by controlling planetary primary resources, in Russia's domain. In this we are in the hands of our national governments and at least Germany, France and Italy seem to have their heads on straight. We must not allow a strand of American policy to even risk precipitating a war on us. We have seen enough of that in the last century. And if it means that desert cities, personal yachts, private jets, as well as client voters and Ninja loans must be given up, then so be it.

It is from the United States, and from 'common' defence policies, and the European Union, that the great, global propaganda lie has come - the global warming, the need for global governance, the requirement to strengthen global institutions, the imposition of global 'democratic' values. Essentially this ideology removes our control from what happens to us.

The commonality of culture and the locality of sustaining economic and social relationships embodied in nation states is where our best interests lie. It could well be that some nation states need to have their borders redefined (the 19th and 20th -even 18th -century settlements are not set in stone), and more local independence asserted. At the same time, inter-relations between nation states will be made open to democratic discussion and agreement. This is as true of the United States of America as it is of Europe, which offers some explanation for the constant search for an external threat by the federal US government to solidify federal feeling, and the permanent underplaying of State individuality and interest in greater local determination. Notably, discussions of inter State relationships and a weaker US federation are few.

As the 'global' financial system comes down it shows up just how little democratic or personal control we have over our own resources (speaking as someone who has spent since 1997 trying to assert just that). Either people take local control over their local circumstance or we face being allocated what can be spared from the rich and the powerful, and it will not be enough.

Brown Must Be Defeated in Parliament Not By Labour Party Acts of Disloyalty

The end of the New Labour regime should not be decided by causing the downfall of Gordon Brown. That leaves the choice of the United Kingdom's next prime minister in the hands of the Labour Party - hardly the first choice for democratic practice. It is unpleasant also to watch the petty acts of aggression and the faint-hearted disloyalties of 'colleagues' and government appointees whose voting records for 11 years are a badge of shame.

The way to depose a government is by defeat on a major government policy in the House of Commons, followed by defeat in the subsequent vote of confidence. Clearly there are enough Labour dissidents to achieve this and enough major policy votes of highly dubious moral and political worth coming up well before Christmas - deferred in attempts to avoid just this kind of challenge by the current sickly Prime Minister. Shenanigans in the Labour party and at their tightly controlled and therefore infinitely dull conference in Manchester are of no interest to most of us.

We want a general election after the fall of the current government in Parliament. Not the replacement of Gordon brown by Jack Straw. And if Labour tries to manoeuvre the country into accepting a 'safe' pair of hands while remaining in power for another 18 months, shovelling all the blame for their abject failure onto their current sick man, they will let down the Party as well as the country (again).

Each to His Own

Redistributive capitalism seems to be faring as badly as redistributive socialism. The Governor of the Bank of Italy notes that subprime has already swallowed half a trillion dollars and that there are at least another $350 billion to come.

Ironic that the collapsed socialist states had to turn to capitalist practice to recover, while collapsing capitalist states are nationalising, state guaranteeing, intervening at every level of governance, in the hope of preventing total melt down.

One lot were redistributing to the rich, the other lot to the poor, but redistribution clearly should not be on anyone's wish list.

Juvenile Adventurism Led to the First World War

"... there are times when image is nothing and action is everything." said President Medvedev of Russia.

So that's another lesson for the Brown regime: one for the Foreign Secretary, and one for Labour's Leader. Labour's part time Defence Minister is probably next up - the Russian government is discussing military requirements and equipment with its armed forces.

Georgia's political incompetent of a Head of Government has done incalculable damage to the United States' foreign policy and status, and to NATO and the European Union's credibility as military and politico-economic powers too.

.

A Russian Teddy Bear

Sergei Lavrov is the kind of foreign minister a country needs. As the Telegraph reports, 'Mr Lavrov has been highly critical of the way that the Russian move into Georgia has been portrayed by the West. He has criticised what he described as a "truly David and Goliath interpretation" of the conflict in which "the plucky republic of Georgia, with just a few million citizens, was attacked by its giant eastern neighbour".

On any balanced reading, the Georgian conflict was a piece of unauthorised silly behaviour by a politically incompetent leader covered up for later by a very cross US administration.

But it is asking Miliband who he is and then telling him in terms that makes Mr Lavrov positively endearing.

Conspiracy Theorist, Me?

It becomes more and more irritating travelling in and out of the United Kingdom. Airports are choc-a-bloc with security lines, and no liquids and pushy people who make you take off all your outer clothes. It takes hours as well. The trains, to which any reasonable European travellor had switched, are now being queued up with engine failures or fires in the Tunnel. There are tunnels and other choke points just as vulnerable all over Europe. But access through the UK tunnel is regularly causing blockages.

If I want to go anywhere in Schengen, I can fly, or get on a train, and be there in the appropriate number of hours, like getting on the bus. This is not true of England. Any journey there has a built-in delay and doubt factor. Why?

Brown's Generalissimo Moment

'Whitehall sources moved swiftly last night to deny that Gordon Brown was ditching New Labour after the Prime Minister declared that it was "time to adapt and rethink New Labour policy". (Herald).

As Franco said on his deathbed, listening to the crowds chanting 'Farewell Franco',

'Where are they all going?'. Just so Brown denies that he is ditching New Labour.

They are ditching him.

Choosing Who You Like

Alison Richard, vice chancellor of Cambridge University speaks with admirable sense,as might be expected from the head of an institution committed to education, learning and research:

"We try to reach out to the best students, whatever their background. One outcome of that is that we can help to promote social mobility. But promoting social mobility is not our core mission. Our core mission is to provide an outstanding education within a research setting.
As institutions charged with education, research and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice."

Cambridge gives the opportunity to enjoy any education the heart could desire. Its teachers at all levels are adept at recognising raw brain power, and unimpressed by coached achievement. They are concerned, too, that the colleges enjoy the abilities and characteristics needed to provide a civil environment. Wall to wall pure mathematicians or poets, or sportsmen (for example) are not that, and the social skills of generalists and affability of Etonians are as much part of the mix as any other characteristic.

Examination results are a poor measure of clubability, as is well known, and often an inadequate measure of any kind of ability. What a pity the Cambridge view is not more widespread in our society, rather than the Balls-up the country's education system has been made under New Labour.

Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us

"The yearning for fairness, the unremitting quest for it, and the delivery of it in everything we do, is fundamental to our Party.

Our policies today and everything we have done since 1997 are driven by our belief in fairness.

I know there are people who feel that modern Britain has been unfair to them. Some of them are right. But there is nothing that is bad about Britain that cannot be overcome by what is good about Britain, as long as we keep faith with our belief in fairness.

Throughout our history, this nation has repeatedly demonstrated a proud spirit of cautious and practical optimism and we call on that spirit once again.

Fair rules, fair chances, and a fair say for everyone: that is the new deal for this new world." Gordon Brown in his version of the Scottish play.

Fair is foul and foul is fair....

The Nastiest Man on Earth

Bald, fat, ugly, with a defective heart (in every sense of the term), spiteful, sly, crude in intellect and analysis, Richard Cheney must be the real bogey man. In the frustration of declining power, both for the administration he has guided and the country he has so let down over the last eight years, he has mouthed off in Europe in the most unforgivably arrogant fashion.

There are well-founded and increasingly sharp differences between the member-states of the European Union and the United States of America over the oil and gas resources of the Caucasus, Russia's hegemony over their delivery to the rest of us, and Russia's relations with its former satellites and, consequently, with the European Union to which some of those satellites now subscribe.

The notion that because Poland and the Czech Republic have agreed to provide American missile sites this will lead to the installation of American missiles on Russia's borders is on a par with Kruschev's belief that Cuba's agreement to Soviet missile sites would lead to the installation of Soviet missiles on United States' borders. Any attempt to deliver those missiles will result in the same stand-off and the same turning back. Not in mid-ocean perhaps, more likely in mid-air, for it is hard to imagine their transport across the central European plains of Germany.

Bluntly there is not a global strategy for a single super-power to pursue; there never was, but the Cheney-led strand of American ideology wanted it to be so. There are international relations, as there always were, governed mostly by brute force but with all those of morality and good will attempting to install and observe some level of international law - law that in his years of power Cheney and his ilk have undermined, and ignored, and flouted with illegal wars, torture, and the setting aside of the Geneva Conventions.

Cheney may turn up in person to brief his puppet in Georgia, who he misled into an act of provocation that has resulted in the dismemberment of the country, he may wring his hands in the Ukraine where his weasel words have split the government and released the Crimea into near, self-declared autonomy and Russian protection, but he cannot turn up in Italy and spit the venom of his frustration at us as if we do not understand what and who he is. All he can do is send an American Mediterranean Fleet battleship into a Georgian port in defiance of international accords on who might enter the Black Sea, and look foolish as the Russians ignore benignly this childish display of unusable force.

Mr Barroso, diminishing the role of the US in resolving the conflict in Georgia, told the Financial Times: “The hope for peace is the EU....I’ve not seen any proposals coming from any parts of the world apart from the peace proposal put forward by president Sarkozy on behalf of the EU...We are interested in having constructive relations with Russia. It is important to note what we need. We need cool heads, not a cold war and this is the basic message.” Responding to Russia’s unilateral recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Mr Barroso noted that article six of the plan provided for diplomatic discussions over their status.

Go away Mr Cheney; your policies are as unwelcome and wrong here as they are on your own continent.

Post-Imperial Blues

A comment on earlier Angels' posts on Russia, that the shock of the collapse of the Soviet Union could be compared to the loss of the British Empire and its continued effects on United Kindom politics 60 years on, and that it must be taken into account fully when considering Russian policies now, was met by Mr HG with the seriously expressed view that Italy still has not got over the loss of the Roman Empire, and Italy's politics have been reflecting the impact of the barbarians ever since.

2000 years! The United States is getting so dangerously edgy already, and they have only just begun to adjust.

What Will You Put On Your Census Form?

Caroline Lucas, (Green Party) "has reacted angrily to the news that Lockheed Martin has been awarded the contract to run the 2011 Census, saying that the decision puts public privacy and public service planning at risk.

The announcement was made by the Office for National Statistics today - eight months later than planned. The delay was prompted by the Green Party's 'Census Alert' campaign, which raised concerns about links between the arms company and the US government, and fears that the US Patriot Act would mean personal data on everyone in the UK would be made available to American intelligence services."

[Taken from a comment on Craig Murray's blog]

The Third Sector is a Labour Front

With a minister, and working out of the Cabinet Office, the Third Sector is used to distribute tax-raised money to Labour soft-power networks throughout the country, with a particularly marked presence in Labour's heartlands and target areas. Presented as working in charitable and voluntary sectors it often takes over funding and regulatory facilitating that should be passing through local councils, democratically elected and answerable to local people. It also extends regime tendrils into areas that are not the concern of any reasonable governance, which is why originally provision was voluntary and charitable.

The Independent reports that a children's charity providing breakfast and after-school clubs for children whose parents need assistance with child care had donated £15,000 to Labour, half directly to political funds and half to enjoy a Party sports dinner at Wembley where opportunities for 'networking' within Labour were available (and lots of troughing too). The 'charity', benefiting from local authority funds, lottery funding and charity regulation, is exemplary of Third Sector thinking and acting.

Greg Clark, the Tories' spokesman on charities, said: "It beggars belief that Labour should accept money from a lottery-funded charity that surely needs all the money it can get to fund its clubs for disadvantaged schoolchildren. Labour should have known that it was wrong to accept this donation... It is well known that Labour have staggering levels of debt and are scrabbling round for money to stay afloat. But after the cash-for-honours investigation, Peter Hain's resignation and the David Abrahams scandal, taking money from children's charities strikes a new low in Labour's donations history.

A Labour Party spokesman said: "The Electoral Commission has confirmed that the Labour Party did nothing wrong in accepting this donation, which is allowed under party funding rules... We accepted this donation in good faith, but once Catz Club were told that they had inadvertently breached Charity Commission rules, we were asked to return the donation, something we were happy to do."

A spokeswoman for the charity, which receives funding from some local authorities for its work, said: "It was an administrative error that has now been corrected and the Labour Party have now repaid all the money. The situation is resolved and has been closed."

So taking money from a children's breakfast and after school club can be done 'in good faith', after all the Labour regime gave it some of the money in the first place, just taking their tithe. And 'an administrative error', handing over £7,000 for dinner, and another such sum to a political party fund, has been corrected, resolved, closed.

Has anybody been required to pay for their own dinner, demoted, dismissed?

So Where Do You Stand On Heath, Powell and UDI?

Philip Lardner is the Conservatives' Westminster candidate for North Ayrshire and Arran. David Cameron suspended Mr L as a Tory candidate last June after the 41-year-old primary school teacher from Renfrewshire gave his view on Ian Smith, Enoch Powell, and Edward Heath.
Mr Lardner referred to Smith as a "British hero who came from the Empire and fought for his country", said Powell's fears on immigration had "in a small way come true" and to Heath as a "rat", who "lied about the EEC in terms of its effect on sovereignty".

The BNP invited Mr Lardner to join them, but Tory HQ has just announced: "His suspension has been removed. His candidacy has been reinstated. He has expressed regret for any offence caused. The matter is now closed." The candidate had been "hauled over the coals".

Labour found Mr Lardner's words "utterly disgraceful", and the reinstatement "outrageous."
[All this is reported in the Herald Political Blogs this morning].

While it is clear that Mr Lardner would not find a home in the Labour party, with its received political stances and authoritarian thought control to a cheap, ill-considered correctness, what had Mr Lardner said that required coal hauling? We may not like Iain Smith's actions in Southern Rhodesia, but Zimbabwe is precisely what Smith feared; we may or may not accept large-scale immigration into the United Kingdom as beneficial, but Mr Powell certainly pinned a few problems out for consideration; and as for Edward Heath - what Mr Lardner said.

Who is Running the Shop?

We have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who talks down the economy, a Home Secretary who declares that our increasing poverty will unleash a wave of property crime, a Foreign Secretary whose prime area of interest and only area on which he has made a detailed statement is the future of the Labour party, the head of the Metropolitan Police on the verge of resignation, the population, particularly the poorer population, indebted on housing and credit cards for the rest of their lives although their houses are sliding in value faster than ever before, and where is the Prime Minister who is in denial on every aspect of every one of his failing policies?

In another country giving a talk to Scottish businessmen.

Abolishing Council Tax

Council tax is s a terrible burden for so many people. Its effects warp and control lives in far too many ways: creating benefit dependencies; creating real poverty among vulnerable population groups, particularly the old; creating opportunities for unacceptable levels of snooping by local authorities' employees; enabling many working- age people to pay nothing for local services. Having a beautiful house does not necessarily signal having a high income, it is a choice to devote more wealth to housing than to other consumption.

A local income tax would remove all these disadvantages. And a flattish tax would be straightforward to collect and distribute the costs of local services onto all their users.

Scotland is going to abolish council tax and have local income tax. It already has free care for the old, no university fees, greater availability of health service treatments, no hospital car-parking charges, small class sizes in its schools, and a high level of satisfaction with its government. Which is not surprising given that all this has happened there since Labour were voted out of office.

Newmania is Right of Centre (but less than some)

'Envy for those above me gnaws my innards and vile arrogant contempt for those below eats at my soul.'

Envy is a perfectly reasonable sin, one of the seven deadlies. But that his soul is eaten by 'vile arrogant contempt' just because he came in ahead of the rest of us gives pause. Particularly those of us left of centre who are One Nation conservatives.

Location,Location

Where can anyone buy a house for under £175,000?

Brown Announces Housing Policy for England From Brussels

'Vote for me and I will buy your house' the Westminster Prime Minister announced today. 'What is more, if I pay under £175,000 I will be freed of paying stamp duty which all the rest of you have been stiffed with since I was Chancellor.'

'This offer does not apply to Scotland because Scottish people have refused persistently to vote for me.'

Last Lunch in Moscow

"It is inconceivable that the Georgian action in South Ossetia was not considered at Presidential level."
'So it wasn't some low-level sanctioning which failed to understand the realities?'
"Inconceivable. Any decision, such as there was, was at Presidential level."
An 'of course we support you, have you fully weighed all possible consequences?' that was taken by those who wanted to hear a 'yes,do it' as just that?'
"There may have been a failure to communicate on our side."

'So is the New American Century ending before it has barely begun?' The Russian face became what Italians describe as scuro in volto - utterly dark -
"Yes. It is the end, too, of Russia's century. The things coming out of Georgia are so bad."

Both speakers have long acquaintance with their countries' power elites, past and present. Neither Russia nor the US are monoliths; there is more than one current of belief, power centre, agenda (long and short term). It might be best if the meddling and grandstanding of some European Union state leaders was toned down, and the principals alone, in this frightening readjustment of relative strength between and within two great powers, resolved it.

Mr Darling Learns His Lessons

I thought Moscow was where this kind of thing was supposed to happen.

BBC Scotland’s political editor Brian Taylor asked Mr Darling why he had given such a bleak assessment of the economy.

Mr Darling replied: ‘I think it’s important that I tell people that we, along with every other country in the world, face a unique set of circumstances where we have got the credit crunch coming at the same time as high oil and food prices.

'That means there is a profound difference in the economy, along with every other country in the world.’

Mr Taylor: ‘But isn’t it the job of the Leader of the Opposition to say – and I use your words – “we are p****d off” about the economy?’

Mr Darling: ‘I think it’s important that Government Ministers and me in particular are level with people and explain that every other country in the world, ours included, have a credit crunch the like of which we have not seen in generations at the same time as oil and food prices going up.’

Mr Taylor: ‘But Chancellor, the strategy here is puzzling. Shouldn’t you be reassuring people rather than talking down the economy and saying it’s the worst for 60 years?’

Mr Darling: ‘I think it’s important that while we, along with every other country in the world, are facing the unique combination of a credit crunch, high oil and food prices, that we do everything possible to help people.’

Mr Taylor (clearly becoming frustrated): ‘Do you regret blurting out the truth in such a frank fashion?’

Mr Darling: ‘I have been saying for many weeks now that we along with every other country in the world are facing a unique set of circumstances: the credit crunch along with very high oil and food prices...’

Mr Taylor: ‘Chancellor, forgive me, but you have made that point a number of times. What I am after is what was the thinking behind this?

'Usually Chancellor of the Exchequers should provide calm reassurance. You are talking about people being “p****d off” with the economy and the worst crisis for 60 years. Won’t this make things worse?’

Mr Darling: ‘I think it’s important that when people ask why are these problems facing countries across the world, that finance ministers explain that we have got a credit crunch the like of which we have not seen in generations and rising oil and food prices causing inflationary pressures.

'And we also explain that’s why we need to support the economy now and help the economy through what is undoubtedly a difficult time.

Russia isn't facing this 'unique set of circumstances...' though.

Authoritarian Capitalism

The collapse of Communism was, in the dominant view, brought about because soviet-type central planning was economically inefficient, unstable, unsustainable, and unreformable. The only alternative was a capitalist, liberal, open market economy. [Those averse to history may skip the next paragraph, Ed]

The socialist model was consolidated in the USSR between 1928-32; it transformed from War Communism 1918-1921 to the New Economic Policy 1921-26, to central planning in 1928. It went through many other major changes from vertical integration to Soviet regional decentralisation (1958), the repressed reforms in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), the Yugoslav self-managed market economy (since the 1950s), from Chinese local de-centralisation and market progress after 1978, to Gorbachev's perestroika 1985-1990. The wave of 'Improvements in the System of Planning and Management' that began in the 1960s, and the extensive radical reforms towards market socialism,particularly in Hungary and Poland right up to the Shatalin Plan 500 Days for Russia, made the system remarkably more efficient and closed the distance with a market economy.

In truth, it was capable of extensive reform. What did for it was inflation and fear of inflation resulting in endemic, large scale excess demand for goods and services that were under-priced with respect to market-clearing levels. This repressed inflation was due to the impossible pursuit, by an economically uneducated leadership, of fixing both quantities and prices arbitrarily. Market clearing prices are required under any orderly and efficient system of central planning, as the Chinese accepted from 1978, with their two-track price system, part controlled and part free. Russia ran out of time, the imbalances were too large, and there was too little administrative capacity. Two other obstacles to the successful construction of market socialism: failure to liberalise foreign trade and failure to allow private ownership of land and the formation of new private enterprises (rooted in another political, not economic, ideology) completed the debacle.

Russia was pitched into embracing a hyper-liberal model of capitalism with neophyte enthusiasm in 1992-1999, and suffered economic and political decline, quite unnecessarily, had the transition been undertaken more gradually. The political shock was enormous and led to default and a decade of international weakness that is now being retrenched. The capitalist system Russia seems to have implemented from 2000 is '...a dual economy, in which the rules of the economic game have been evolving rather differently in different sectors'.

Since Mr Putin's second term it has been veering towards statism. The private sector share of GDP is falling (70% in 2000-04, 65% 2005-07).The state share in the oil industry rose from under 20% in 2004 to over 50% in 2007. State control has increased in banks, engineering, defence related industries. State holding companies have been set up (cars, aerospace, shipbuilding, pipelines, railways) and there is a declared policy to Russify or nationalise unspecified strategic sectors. Its sovereign funds own capital stakes within Russia and globally.

A dose of statism seems quite compatible with deep involvement in the globalisation process. It seems too that the socialist model was reformable, was reformed radically and successfully, and a move to the new market socialism or to market socialism 'lite', the European Social Model, might be horribly attractive to our beleaguered Labour regime.

Another View of the Cold War

The Chairman of the Praesidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, Sergei Karaganov offered his take on the re-emergence of the Cold War. The accepted understandings and further analysis are so different from received views seen elsewhere they provide not just another, but a complex other world view, narrative, and future policy possibilities.

Russians traditionally chose between Europe - modernisation, individualism and freedom - or Asia, associated with traditionalism, collectivism, and tyranny. Now they stand poised between a democratic but stagnant Europe which is culturally important, and the rapidly developing, but authoritarian or semi-authoritarian Asia. When communism collapsed it was thought there was only one road map to development, via liberal-democratic capitalism; for countries in the process of development, a category which still includes Russia despite recent economic successes, the Asian model of development now looks at least as promising.

The authoritarian model of development has been accompanied by 'a weakening of international power positions in the West;a redistribution of control over energy resources from consumer to producer states, crisis in traditional ways of managing the international financial system, a decline in the efficacy of international governance, and the consolidation of the state and statism after decades of liberal development and weakening of state power.' Who is now defining the international agenda for the future has also begun to shift, in part due to 'too much self serving rhetoric' and too many mistakes, particularly from the US, and specifically in Iraq. Russia's renaissance from near failed state status in 1998-9, which was accompanied by persistent political efforts to change the rules of the game set at the time of its greatest weakness, has coincided with these adverse changes for the West, indeed Russia has become a symbol of these unfavourable changes for the West, although it is not the cause. Seen as part of an ascendant Asia - as a fast-growing semi-authoritarian state - it looks like a successful model of authoritarian capitalism, providing relative wealth and a 'palatable' level of personal freedoms. Not only is Russia's energy wealth no longer to be at the West's disposal as it seemed only a decade ago, Russia has the third largest currency reserves in the world, and a great part of the country's economic growth is generated by the non-oil and gas sector.

Now that on the whole Moscow is satisfied with its new stature and influence, it is turning its attention to its relative backwardness, demonstrated by an obsolete and decaying infrastructure, corruption, poor medical and social services and an economy yet to move to the post-industrial and post energy-export stage. For this agenda of profound modernisation of the economy and society, Russia turns towards the West and its social and political cultures. Russia has long feared Asia.

Yet 'Asia' is a creation of European culture and political thought. There are at least three Asias: China and Japan, India, and Central Asia and the Middle East. Tha Asias of China and India mean Russia should not now form an industrial policy in the old sense, it cannot compete with Asian production any more than can the West. Russia too has a very expensive and small workforce and can only compete in a tiny area of advanced industrial production. It must build an advanced, knowledge-based economy.

The problems of Russia's relations with the third Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East, are different. Despite the influx of petrodollars, it lags behind in development, and is at odds too with the increasingly affluent East and South Asia. The 'conflict of civilisations' is not just along the Islam/Christianity divide, but has an Islam/Buddhism-Shinto-Confucianism divide as well. It is the only 'Asia' that presents the same concerns as it always has and here Iran plays a crucial role. Relatively successfully developed with good prospects, it is a key to the modernisation of the entire "Greater Middle East'.

All three Asias have been shedding Western economic as well as political postulates as they develop. The 'Washington Consensus' and western institutions are no longer accepted, although there is no anti-western path, rather cooperation if on new terms. After all, the West is for free trade and investment flows and is their main trading partner.

Russia should systematically reorient much of its trade investment and energy supplies to the growing Asian markets so that it does not become merely a materials source and eventually political appendage of China, the next great power. At the same time the modernisation of Russian society must remain the primary agenda and Russia's transformation into a knowledge economy must take place in step with the continuous modernisation of its political system to prevent any slide into stagnant authoritarianism while using semi-authoritarian state capitalist methods to achieve the knowledge economy while times are favourable. Russia must strengthen, too, its European orientation and reassure the Europeans on energy supplies, perhaps by exchanging some of Russia's oil and gas fields for some of Europe's distribution networks in a European energy consortium. Nato must be strengthened by cooperation on many international security issues - not used as a threat to Russian interest by its constant expansionist pressures along the arc of Russia's borders. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation should transform into a new comprehensive alliance in order to fill the political security vacuums in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. Russia should build cooperation with leading nuclear powers to deal together with the greatest imminent nuclear danger - a destabilised Pakistan.

Here is seen a wholly different view from Moscow. Asia is no longer experienced as a threat but provides an alternative model of development and an economic opportunity; capitalist development itself is no longer tied to liberal democracy; the resolution of European energy problems, whch precipitated the stand off in Georgia, can be secured by some exchange of resources between supply and distribution. The notion of an 'alliance of democracies' seems not to fit the newly emerging powers in Asia or the new models of economic development being so successfully applied (in terms of growth and providing rising living standards) there. Not just Russia but the West faces adjustment in its notions of ways to economic success.

However, it is worth quoting these words in full in their expression of Russia's double reinvention, economic and cultural, of itself after the failure of Communism:

'There is no alternative to social or political rapprochement with Europe. Europe is the cradle of what is best in Russian civilisation and the source of social modernisation. Without Europe we are not Russians; we will lose our identity.'
It could be added that without Russia, Europe would be a lesser, poorer, weaker and sadder place.

Five Days That Will Not Shake the World

Angels fly to Moscow at the crack of doom. European Regional Airways (aka Lufthansa) will oblige with bigger wings, and bug resistant leather seats. Equipped with a transliteration of Cyril's alphabet and a supply of Le Carre a new interpretation of the latest aspects of the Cold War will be offered.

Mr Miliband is to go to Kiev, Georgia has had large provinces recognised as separate entities by the Russian Federation, Russian troops are dug in deep inside the Near Abroad; the Impressionists will be examined closely for their view (surely more informative than those of politicians and economists). The IT consultant will put up any comments, suggestions, recommendations and may post.

Paedophilic Murderer's Image Will Often Offend

The tourist board Visit London said in a statement: “This is a general three minute video of London in which an artwork by Marcus Harvey very fleetingly appears.

“The video is not for general public use and has been used many times over the last few years to show to the tourism trade.

“There has never been a complaint made about the video up until this point. However, if any offence has been caused, we will withdraw it from use with immediate effect.”

There are some very sick people working at Visit London, who should be dismissed.

Free the Blackburn Three

What is it with Jack Straw and accusations about politically motivated murders?

During his time as her political adviser, Straw was asked by Barbara Castle to examine the social security file of Norman Scott, who had claimed that the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe was behind an attempt to murder him. Castle had been asked by Harold Wilson to investigate Scott's file to see if it contained any evidence that he was involved in a security conspiracy against Thorpe.

Now MP for Blackburn, three of Straw's constituents are being held on suspicion of conspiring to murder Gordon Brown. The men arrested, all from Blackburn, Lancashire, are aged 21, 22 and 23.

To have been involved once in murder accusations involving politicians might be considered unfortunate, twice begins to look like carelessness.

Mad

Mr Brown said to British troops he had taken in on a stop over on his way to the Olympic Games:

"we are celebrating the Olympics where we have had great success.
"This week also I believe, that our Olympic athletes, who like everyone else in the country, will remember you have shown exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication."

So competing in running, jumping and standing still is of the same order as giving your life for your country.

The Holidays are Over; a General Election Now

Continuing to hold power by the Brown junta is now bordering on the illegal. Certainly it has crossed the line into the immoral and deliberately destructive. Other governments have survived great unpopularity and been re-elected, not least because an intelligent electorate has seen that economic and social change was not engendered by government but that its after effects were being coped with effectively by government; that is not what we are facing.

The United Kingdom is sinking under persistence in false analysis, technical incompetence, intellectual hubris and undeclared corrupt agendas practiced by a tiny group of dug-in fanatics committed to themselves and a burnt out ideology. They are sheltering behind a misinterpretation of constitutional practice, and the obscurity of means to enforce redress. It is not good enough to argue that matters are not sufficiently serious for an intervention by the Head of State to obtain a general election. There are two non violent courses to be taken: the current Leader of the Labour party can be forced to act by the disclosure of the myriad 'compromises' that any political power holder makes, with much of that pressure coming from the Conservative Party - who cannot hang fire any longer as they assess their own advantage; or that book can remain closed, but our constitutional claims to democratic representation are enforced, in our curious 'constitutional monarchy', by the Monarch in the role of defender of our democracy.

The electorate cannot be subjected to a 'we have lost but nothing will be left standing' choice by a vindictive Brown and his losers. Already eleven years of financial mayhem for profit takers, accompanied by 'social market' agendas in conformity with European Union 'voice' strategies in economic and social affairs for the rest, has left a disaster. People are losing their jobs, their housing, their health treatment, their and their children's social and educational provision, their consumption levels, the worth of their earnings, their standard of life. Much of this, as has been demonstrated widely and repeatedly, lies with the activities of the Brown cabal. Desperate times call for the use of the toughest of measures and of reserve powers.

We cannot be expected to accept being governed by a driven madman because of a constitutional convention on calling elections that has both been ignored by our unelected current Prime Minister and is out-ranked by the preservation of the general interest and the well being of the people, and the preservation of our democratic state.

Another year and a half of this viciously irrelevant and incompetent response to the economic and political security of us all will leave too few, for democracy, able to prevent themselves being cowed into an authoritarian, poverty-stricken subservience.

The Labour Leadership Does Matter

The Guardian's poll, with its confirmation of miserable ratings both for Brown and the Labour Party, asked the wrong question. It would be interesting to know if Labour might recover from standing reduced to its core vote if a tri-partite leadership, Harman/Johnson/Cruddas were to be installed. Miliband is clearly as big a turn off as Brown, and for the same reasons - mired in the same New Labour stench and corruption, and failure on every measure.

A Harman/Johnson/Cruddas Front would appeal to women tired to death of the Aspergers boys and their obsessions, reintegrate not just the Unions but the other sectors of the Labour Movement - co-operatives, mutuals, friendlies, more widely-based movements for social and civil liberties, out reach educational movements. Most of all it would offer the kind of policies so acceptable to the population and successful in enlisting their support that are provided by Mr Salmond and the Scottish Government.

This would imply two major reformations: a redrawing of relations within the United Kingdom so that for domestic affairs there is essentially an English Parliament as well as the extant devolved Parliaments, which would be then disposed to intense co-operation in matters of concern to the British Isles; and a Party level reform of Labour, decentralising power and reintroducing constituency party level authority. For how can a political party renew itself as cohorts move into retirement when there is no local level recruiting organisation reflecting the divers communities and localities, and renewing the interest of different sectors of our society? CLPs are hollowed out shells, serving boroughs the central Labor party has sought to make rotten by the purchase of a client vote. It is to the credit of the electorate that once they grasped they are being bribed with their own money they have thrown the New Labour charlatans out at every opportunity since Blair, who at least they elected, was forced out of office by Brownian usurpers.

A Harman/Johnson/Cruddas party would ensure that there is a general election. It will ensure that more than just Labour's irreducible core vote Labour, and could regroup with sensible policies on UK federalism, on relations with the European Union, on investment in infrastructures and power supply, on civil liberties, and on offering a centre left alternative to the Conservative Party.

If Brown/Miliband/Straw/Balls are to retain power then it will be by some means of sidelining the electorate. Brown has presided already over a financial system that has permitted blue murder for the last decade, washing money, arms dealing, tax avoidance on a global scale; London, its unsupervised practices, and its high return currency has started to fall apart. What might Brown agree to preside over in our politics and our state?

A Monroe Doctrine For Our Times

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that Nato would be giving "serious co-operation - militarily and politically" to Georgia in the wake of the crisis in the region, as part of a route to their full membership of the alliance. (Telegraph)

All those weasel words: co-operation, wake of the crisis, part of a route...Not supply, immediately, and membership offer now.

The Near Abroad is not going to join Nato, unless Nato is offering effective membership to Russia. There's a thought; Russia could take the role of the United States in Nato and be senior security partner in maintaining vigilance against terrorism and failed states. The United States could be senior security partner in its own Near Abroad.

Five Minutes to Midnight

Anatoly Nogovitsin, the deputy head of the Russian armed forces, warned Poland that by hosting the US missile shield it could become the target of a nuclear attack in war time. “The US is concerned with its own anti-missile defence, not Poland’s. But Poland, by deploying [the shield], will be exposed to attack.”

Presumably that goes for the inhabitants of Air Strip One, as well.

Some Talk of Alexander, and Some of Hercules

We used to have the British people, the British army, the British empire...love them or loathe them their country deserved the Great in its name as well, considering their impact upon the world and its history. But now all that British carries is a single, overpowering message: New Labour and its Scottish Leader.

The words Britain and British are becoming toxic waste.

Really Hard A-Levels

Here are some sample questions from an A-level politics paper:

Critically examine sociological contributions to an understanding of the nature and distribution of power in industrial societies.

Discuss the Marxist view that institutions such as the mass media maintain the political status quo by spreading the ideas of the dominant class to the rest of society.

"Voting behaviour is now based less on traditional class loyalties and more on individual choice." Discuss.

How and why have sociological explanations of voting behaviour changed over the last thirty years?

Critically examine the view that the State is simply "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie".

"In the last 20 years voting behaviour in Britain has become much less dependent on factors associated with social class." Critically examine the sociological evidence for this viewpoint.

"Britain is dominated by a ruling class." To what extent do sociological evidence and arguments support this statement?

Evaluate the different sociological explanations of the role of the State in industrial societies.

Examine sociological contributions to an understanding of the ideological differences between political parties.

Examine sociological explanations of the successes of the Conservative party in general elections since 1975.

Examine the view that fundamental changes are taking place in the relationship between social class and voting behaviour in Britain.

"The evidence of the last three general elections suggests that we should no longer consider class as the major determinant of voting behaviour." Discuss.

Would you care to tackle any of these? And the intellectual hinterland shown by some of the questions is worrying. Social class is not the same thing as rank, particularly in a society like that of the United Kingdom; and many of the questions are straining very hard for an analysis that fits a leftist ideology. Still - I think these are very challenging discussions indeed requiring high levels of historical and informational input, and sophistication in handling complex data.

Is This Our General Election Chance?

A majority of over ten and a half thousand would normally do. Not after Glasgow East and the leads the SNP is currently displaying in the polls. So is this the moment of truth for Brownian Labour?

A by election cannot be avoided in our normal political world, and will certainly inflict devastaing damage on Brown's prime ministership and the Labour Party as once again appalling failures in economic, financial, domestic, social and foreign policy for the last eleven years are revisited and the lucky Scots vote themselves out from under. What is to be done?

Hold the by election and precipitate Brown's fall from power? That would be best for the Labour Party. They could sort themselves out with a Leader who stands for something identifiably Labour, go into a general election, lose it, but lose it respectably and use the respite of opposition to regroup into decency.

Call a general election straight away, with Brown still Leader so that at least his oh so deserved humiliation is delivered by the whole country and Labour goes into opposition still saddled with a Brownian faction that will find a thousand reasons to stay a least in Party power? This would be the worst possible outcome for the Labour party and is a serious threat to its continuing as one of the two political power holders in the UK.

Argue now that so great is the threat facing the Union from a surging SNP, from financial instability and recession, from international tension after the resurgence of Cold War actions by Russia added to the newer threat of international terrorism that, temporarily, stability springing from continuity of governance requires all electoral processes to be put on hold.

It ought to be replace the Brown Leadership (either forced by the loss in Fife or chosen by those with an interest in self and Party preservation) and a general election; but I wouldn't bet on it.

Give us a vote

A statement from the office of the Westminster MP for Central Fife issued this morning said: 'In March 2007, (Mr MacDougall) underwent radical surgery as part of a medical trial in London, a procedure that held out hope of him being able to continue the job that he so enjoyed. Sadly, despite a considerable amount of therapy, Mr MacDougall enjoyed very little quality of life in the aftermath of his operation.'

It seems only death can now force any voting by the electorate onto this grotesque Brownian regime. Despite being clearly unfit for work for the last year and a half not only was the constituency of Central Fife represented by this close colleague of Gordon Brown, but he enjoyed positions on numerous local and regional bodies.

How many other Westminster Parliament constituencies are just ticking over, for whatever reason, because Brown dare not face a voting electorate?

Beauty Magic no Longer Gazed Upon While Wearing School Uniform

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Beauty Magic and School Uniforms

The Sepim and the Massik may seem as remote from English school children and their dress as Czechoslovakia was from Chamberlain. But 'only connect' and worlds of understanding open.

Our sense of self, expressd through our bodies - our skin, our eyes, hair, and their styling, adornment and clothing are an exploding blossom of communicative exchange with others and assertion of identity with others and against others. And we take our characteristics from the environment's characteristics that are predominant and reflective of our sense of identity. Are we focused outwards on exchange and external linking or inwards on identification and defence? Are we smooth or hairy? Silken-skinned and silkily dressed, or scarred and armoured?

So when schools face the principle, almost only, means of self expression commanded by their young purpose, conflict is de rigueur. Some people never get over the hairiness of defined uniforms right down to colour of gym knickers - the ties, shirts, jerseys, flannels, pleated worsted skirts, specified weights of stocking, belts, indoor and outdoor shoes, with bars, with laces, length of sock, hats velour and panama, overcoats, gaberdines, aertex, divided skirts, gloves black in winter white in summer. These are the essentials of exclusivity and no exchange.

The anguish of those who belong with the Massim, locked into the world of the Sepik, is expressed in tiny trangressions of loosened ties, rolled-up skirt waists, folded hats, tights not lisle, while their happier age cohorts wear what they choose, or 'preferred colours in appropriate styles for the active life of school'. Yet many of them try to formalise the slovenly silkiness of their fellow students, and close the gates against the intruder, the foreigner.

All of this is reinforced by parental generations reliving their own identification struggles and issuing final instructions on what can and cannot be worn. The tyranny of brand and cheap fashion is just as cruelly enforced as black lace-ups and no nonsense.

How we present ourselves to the world is our first and our most important statement. Perhaps those who preach 'school uniform' and those who cry 'no' could reach an Italian compromise. Wear what you like but cover the lot with an overall - black for boys, dark blue for girls. Oh... all right, any colour but standard cut.

Go, Birmingham!

Brummies have been known to rip the roof from Birmingham town hall to get at the politicians inside when incensed sufficiently by the impact of government policies on their lives and work. And burn down the houses of 'intellectuals' (rapidly becoming a dirty word from its usurpation by government sycophants).

[the Brown regime wants to hold a cabinet meeting in he West Midlands to show that it is 'listening to the people'. We know you are listening to us Brown and your vile junta is watching us too, all the time.]

Just Not Good Enough, Labour

“It is clear that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary are at loggerheads; they are actively plotting against each other. What happens if there is an international disaster in the next few months? Either Miliband needs to come up with the courage to challenge Brown or Brown needs to move him. A poor working relationship between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary is not just undesirable, it is positively dangerous.” William Hague has pinpointed a crucial characteristic of Brown's regime.

As Georgia's extraordinary assault on the enclave of South Ossetia ends in the predictable slap down from Russia and opens the way for Russian assertion of hegemony over other enclaves, the government of the United Kingdom has its Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary wholly engaged in Labour party infighting over the leadership. As British troops wait at Basra airport without role or permit to function, the Foreign Secretary, the part time Defence minister (to whom all action at Basra must be referred for permission to proceed), and the Prime Minister leave them publicly accused by the United States and the Iraqi government of secret deals with rebels so as to fail to carry out their ostensible mission of containing violence in southern Iraq; meanwhile the Prime Minister devotes himself to planning his nth relaunch. Attempting to appeal to the electorate, over the heads of his own Party and their contempt for his political and economic failure has taken precedence over running an effective administration, let alone sensible policies in those areas represented by ministers with whom he is feuding being produced. And characteristically, Brown is feuding with everybody, even Darling.

Failure to run an effective administration threatens us all; crises other than the collapse of the pound and the recession (and surely those are enough) are going to occur, one just has. It is imperative that a general election is called and a competent government, of whatever hue, put in place.

Recapturing Enthusiasm

“The Prime Minister is very focused on what we need to do to recapture people's enthusiasm. The Prime Minister, when he comes back from his holidays, will set out very clearly what he intends to do.” Alistair Darling, offering hope to the United Kingdom.

After all, he couldn't be intending to propose any more years of Gordon Brown and his regime, could he?

The idea of 'over the next 20 months I will lay the foundations for another five years of maladministration, economic incompetence, financial irregularity not to say corruption, and further war-mongering; all to be accompanied by the gross impoverishment of every man jack of you. This will be brought about by the abolition of all voting on any occasion and the use of focus groups and appointed citizens' advisory panels, expressing the choices of hard working families to be realised by regional bodies in the newly constituted Britain of the Countries and the Regions (BCR) within the over-arching hegomony of the agreed Lisbon constitutional arrangements.'

He is going to say 'I am going to the palace and asking the Head of State to dissolve the Parliament and call a general election.', isn't he?

Isn't he?

Tidying Up

"Hours ago Russia's Black Sea fleet started to move to Gerogia's territory in Abkhazia," , "Russian troops and heavy equipment are in upper Abkhazia.", said Saakashvili, Georgia's leader.

The eastern member states of the European Union must be pleased to be safely in Schengen. Perhaps the wilder shores of the current United States government's foreign policies will be abandoned at last.

Or are they really willing Armageddon?

Bear Baiting

Never attack Russia is the bottom line for any commander. It was hubris and a vulgar triumphalism from some sections of United States policy-makers to declare that there was only one world power now when the ossified structures of Soviet socialism fractured. Russia itself remained one of the most powerful countries on Earth and even at the low points in the last years of the 20th century was never out, just down.

Russia controls the mineral wealth of its territories, and the access routes from them to the markets they serve. Failure to recognise and accept this will produce the silly and dangerous adventurism displayed by Georgia's leaders and encouraged by strands of Western policy analysis that was summed up succinctly by Ed Shils on Vietnam 40 years ago: 'We are doing it in Vietnam because we can.' And it is as wrong now as it was then. No you can't.

Cheeky Chancellor. Answer the Questions.

Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, was supposed to be interviewing the Chancellor this morning about the lessons of the credit crunch.

"It was something I'd arranged with the Treasury over the past fortnight, to mark the anniversary of when it became much harder for our banks to raise money and a serious downturn in our economy began." The interview was cancelled when the interviewer could not agree to asking no question on the delay, or cancellation of stamp duty.

The financial impasse is impacting on everybody with devastating force - from threatening current housing arrangements, preventing future housing arrangements, causing unemployment, creating gross inflationary pressures.....

Robert Peston writes the finest analysis of economic and financial current affairs available and, as the Business Editor of the BBC, which we all pay for in its status as the public service broadcaster, has every claim, further, to interview the Chancellor on our behalf. The Chancellor can turn the question, give what are for him good reasons not to answer the question, but there is no excuse (though ample explanation) for failing to meet his obligations to our public service interviewer.

New Labour may regard this as news management in their arrogant ineptitude; but they will pay. They are paying now.

Cut Taxes and People Will be Able to Pay Their Way

To go to university in London costs £15,000 and to a provincial university £13,000.
Yet one in four parents said they will only be able to contribute less then £100 a month towards their childrens' student years. A study carried out by Norwich Union found that parents feared helping their children financially during their university years would impact on their own lifestyles considerably.

Well, it would, wouldn't it? Children consume. And being children cannot produce wealth until they are adults. Whoever else should they turn to in their dependent years but to their families? Indeed families usually pull together to provide all sorts of things that are needed at different stages in life and different stages in earning capacity.

The problem is that so much tax is being mulcted that meeting obligations of primary importance to family members is moving steadily beyond the reach of millions. When Cheryl Cox, of Norwich Union, said: "Another generation of UK teens will enter higher education this autumn and, while parents may well be filled with pride, this looks set to be overshadowed by fear and panic over how they are going to shoulder the financial burden.", there are many other causes of 'fear and panic over shouldering the financial burden' it applies to as well. How are obligations to elderly parents and grandparents to be met? Or the needs associated with setting up a new household, including buying a house at all, or changing to more appropriate housing. Or medical requirements unmet by the NHS. Or even keeping warm and reasonably fed?

There must be a drastic cut in tax burdens and government-levied charges of all kinds. It's not just that we do not like, believe or trust the New Labour regime and its policies at home and abroad; we cannot afford them.

What We Are Facing

Sometimes commenters say it best, better than the blog can. Here is Steve, (and pace Alice who holds another view). Steve said,

'Unfunded pension liabilities of public sector employees amount to around GBP 800 billion according to a recent letter to the FT. As the author commented, these represent deferred remuneration and any attempt to welsh on them will come up with strong legal challenges from the unions. So much for GB keeping to the Golden Rule.

PFI and PPP liabilities are also a joke. Conveniently the ONS allows them to stay off balance sheet, to us to meet our Maastrict obligations, whereas the NAO thinks that they should be classified as state liabilities (which clearly they are) and should be accounted for as such.

Transfer payments to claimants of Job Seekers Allowance and Incapacity Benefit, as well as salaries of those who work in the public sector have to be paid by someone - either today's taxpayers, [or]to tomorrow's. An intellectual case can be made for lumbering our children and grandchildren with this burden, but unless I was on holiday at the time, I haven't heard Gordon make it.

After ten years of Finance Bills each of which run to thousands of pages we must now have the most complicated tax code in the developed world, complete with convenient features to keep private equity bosses paying lower marginal tax rates than their cleaners, and non-doms paying practically no tax at all.

You ask what is to be done. To me, it's obvious. The only way to get the government (i.e. future taxpayers) off the hook is to take back control of interest rates from the Bank of England and let inflation rip. It will be pretty grim for some (pensioners certainly, but also investors from the Far East and the Middle East who have bought gilts) but will be wonderful for the rest of us. It will also mean that those of us who are saddled with large mortgage liabilities will see them melt away.

So what if we have to run the printing presses a bit harder?

02 August 2008 23:40'.


We were in a similar position in the 70s with destructive conditions for the fixed income,fixed salary, pensioner and welfare brigade. You have all just experienced a wealth transfer from the salaried and secure to the poor, deserving and undeserving. No other category has been affected, least of all the well-to-do upwards. You will now return to Go, together with those who had a whale of a time for the last years of New Labour scam economics and kept voting them back. For those who paid real, hard-earned money to fund their housing, the education of their children and grandchildren, their retirement and any misfortune, you have been had - again - by Labour whose short term clients want your hard work attributed to their living standards. This time it was dressed up as 'prudence'and 'Brown's financial and economic skills and probity'. In the 70s it cavorted as redistribution in the interests of fairness and access.

If you can, get your money and run. Because you are required to share all you have with those who do not earn, do not save, do not tell the truth, and do not care.

UPDATE

Another commenter (Telegraph)

'the taxpayers have set a precedent; spend , spend, spend and don't worry about tomorrow for, if God helps those who help themselves, the Government helps those who don't.'

Curtains for Gordon

The collapse of the deal between EDF and the sale of sites in England for nuclear power stations and waste disposal, which was to have been signed today, is the latest in Jonah's loss of power. The trouble seems to be about how much EDF has to put upfront and how many of the sites currently graced by closed-down and clapped-out nuclear power stations EDF would have been able to exploit in dealing with French nuclear waste.

If the man can't even sell nuclear contaminated land for hard cash he really is in trouble.

Miliband is not the Man

Losing Labour's core vote, which has happened now in London to some extent, Crewe markedly, and Glasgow East devastatingly must be the chief concern of any Labour politician. The debate about the increasing of 'choice' over publicly provided services, or the outsourcing of service provision to private entities is by the board now. Labour needs to consolidate its very foundations. The 'choice' agenda has lost out to the 'survive' agenda imposing itself in every lower paid home in the United Kingdom.

So David Miliband has been forced to act earlier than he wished, proffering a New Labour programme for the future made up of the usual empty inanities dressed as policy, because the core has begun to act to protect itself. Harriet Harman, Alan Johnson, John Cruddas, and not so much the left as the old Labour members of the Parliamentary Labour Party have rooting systems spreading through the union and affiliated party, as well as the constituency parties - the Party most shocked by the loss of Crewe, and Glasgow East. The membership of the Labour Movement is embodied here, in the unions, affiliates, and CLPs, not in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Harman was voted into office as deputy Leader by all of these party votes, unlike the failed Leader. Others in the PLP are union-based and union supported, or affiliated with parts of the wider Labour movement. They know that the Party must exist either as its mass membership, both organised, and individuals, and seek their interests and their aims, or it will have no purpose and disintegrate. New Labour is not a purpose that interests working people and is becoming understood rapidly as inimical to their hopes and expectations now, in our changed economic circumstances made so much worse by Brown's policies.

Recognising that Labour cannot win a general election, and acknowledging that the Labour Movement has no wish to be involved in any anti-democratic manoeuvres or attempts to prolong artificially the current regime's hold on power, it is likely that David Miliband's weak and disloyal atttack upon his puppet master will be pushed aside. Pushed aside by the leaders of the Labour Movement who will accept the need to regroup, abandon the anti- working people policies of New Labour, limit the damage to the Movement and establish a firm resistance to any damage to the working conditions and lifestyles of the core Labour supporters, who will otherwise abandon the Party to oblivion.

This is not to say that people wanting a continuation of the last eleven years ahould vote Conservative. No Conservative government would engage in the financial incompetence and recklessness, the economic folly and disregard for manufacturing and infrastructures, the grotesque levels and complexities of the taxation system, the warmongering and wasted opportunities of New Labour and its punctured dreams.

It is to say that voting Labour must be a choice for the support of the working people and for their aspirations and security, not a vote for the ruined, lying, deculturalised, economic and financial wreck New Labour's idealogues have brought us to.

What Is Worth Caring ABout

All this stuff about challenges, and meltdown, and full support for, and change, and listening. So what?

It's what is to be done about unfunded pensions, PFI bills coming home to roost, dishonest and incompetent national statistics so that no-one knows what is what any more, tax-mess made by all those years of Brown instead of simply pulling the lowest paid out of taxation, tax avoidance by anybody sane on a massive scale induced by the same meddling fool in the Treasury, transferring the borrowing of the dishonest onto those who remain trapped inside the tax system, and rampant, roaring inflation.

Just to mention a few worries.

Homework

'A new report from the General Teaching Council for England suggests that although many parents would like to be involved in their child's learning, they don't think they have the right knowledge and skills to properly do so.' (Times, and, no, I can't be bothered to sort out that mess of a sentence from a 'professional' writer.)

The whole point about homework is that it substitutes for the lack of hours in the school day for repetition and for the working out of examples following the taught blue print. It should not be used for such undertakings as 'research' projects, or accession to new material or for recouping parts of the curriculum untaught for various reasons - usually classroom disruption. So why are parents feeling unable to help? Sit there with the reading book, spelling list, tables, number bonds, poetry by heart, to be learned, and refuse them their tea until they have memorised the necessary. Is that so hard? No.

Faced with collecting material on 'Castles, their uses and abuses in the history of the British Isles and elsewhere compared and contrasted', or, ' define the proper use of the ablative absolute with at least 5 examples from latin texts you have studied', and who does not blench?

Tea first, I can do tea, then they were on their own.

The Solution

Die Lösung

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?


After the uprising in every election held since he usurped power Brown is
Stating that the people
Have forfeited the confidence of the government
And can win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

[apologies to Brecht for taking liberties with the translation; taking liberties is what is needed in England].

Brown Must Go Immediately

He's lost it, hasn't he? Brown. He doesn't want to understand that either there must be a general election or there must be a determined rejection of democracy. He can't go on wandering about Southwold pretending there is a job to do. There isn't for him as Prime Minister. Not unless he's prepared to accept the reality of refusing to go to the country.

Will he face the electorate and accept their judgment, in full, immediately, or will he use state power illegitimately to maintain his position?

Permitting this deluded man to press on into infamy will be the death knell of the Labour movement; the parliamentary Labour party is so steeped in self interest and corruption it can barely be regarded as part of that movement, unless it moves to co-ordinate the removal of a would be tyrant at once.

Reforming the Union and the Parties

Neither the Labour party nor the Conservative party can expect to win seats for the Westminster parliament in Scotland. A Conservative government in Westminster will drive the Scottish independence movement further forward, and faster than any other stimulus. The seeming inevitability of a Conservative victory, should there be a general election, will see Labour's Scottish heartlands following Glasgow East in voting for a government that can stand up for them against Tory London rule.

This is the end of Labour as a serious power contender, at least as the Party is constituted at the moment. Whether it is possible to build a truly Scottish Labour party, as opposed to the Westminster appendix currently masquerading in the part, depends on the Scottish National Party being budged from the centre left ground it is holding so successfully. For the moment, it seems unlikely. And where is the English Labour movement and its Party to find its lost Scottish support? Wales? The indications from every recent election suggest that only the lack of a serious Welsh-oriented centre left party, for Plaid is not that, is leaving Labour some seats.

The Conservatives need a policy for re-ordering United Kingdom member country relations to maintain the Union and reassure Scotland that there will be no more Westminster diktats or interference in Scotland's choices on how it is governed. The Labour party's 'devolution' and its 'Britain of the countries and the regions' policy is a clear and absolute failure, and they must rethink all they have implemented both wittingly and unwittingly in their destructive years. For Labour too, there will have to be a re-ordering of the Party itself to end the authoritarianism and centralisation of power in the Executive that is the defining characteristic of New Labour.

Glasgow East Shows What Labour Risks in Scotland

The issues are Trident, control of taxation and fiscal policy, oil, and relations with the European Union. Just to list them shows how far Scotland has asserted its interests within the current devolution provisions, and in only a little over a year with a minority government.

Trident is the most important, in terms of importance to the nature of the UK state. International status and the determination of membership of crucial bodies -not just the Security Council - rest on this, as does UK status within US global defence strategies.

There is a model of the resettling of nuclear bases provided by the break up of the Soviet Union, which went better than might have been feared or even hoped.
But resiting nuclear weapons bases, particularly Trident which is a first strike weapon, would raise huge problems and awarenesses in yet another generation that the UK state would not want at all. What part of England would accept Trident bases without protest? What relations with the US, agreements, clarifications of who is in control, would be opened up to debate again.

Settling ownership of oil and gas resources, and particularly the unexploited fields, is a reasonably clear legal process, but the loss of territorial claims to new fields that rest on the unity of the UK state and would otherwise instantly revert to Scotland, could be dramatically damaging to the English economy.

The EU is much less attractive to Scotland in its new constitutional form than it is to England. The Scottish government is making alliances with its geographical neighbours other than England which emphasise and confirm extra-EU interests, as well as accepting EU funding to set up intra-EU energy programmes and are, too, working on the exploitation of the Scottish seas and a new settlement. It makes Brown's behaviour over the ratification of the Lisbon constitution look particularly inept and irrelevant, though it does show the depths of his bullying dishonesty as a politician.

Scotland is much closer to independence than is represented in the press. And engaged in the crucial and delicate real power shifts touching every aspect of the state - not just the government of the UK - is a party Leader who is Prime Minister only because of that unelected status, represented in Scotland by a part-time minister, and whose party is in power only because of Scottish Westminster seats that are now, all of them, unsafe.


[This was written as an answer to Sackerson on the previous thread].

The Voice of Reason

“I wonder whether we can put up with this for another 18 months.

“... whenever people have had a chance to speak about this Government, whether at the local elections, whether in Crewe, whether in Henley, whether in the London mayor elections and now in Glasgow, they have said 'Look, we think you’re failing and we want change’.”

“...the Prime Minister should have his holiday but then... we need an election. ... we need change in this country, and that’s how change should come about.” (David Cameron, speaking this morning).

What does it mean for the Union?

Voting Scottish Nationalist cannot be dressed up as just an anti New Labour vote. The very name of the Scottish Nationalist Party says it all. People in Glasgow East, cradle of the Labour movement, chose to support Scottish independence.

The relationships between the countries of the United Kingdom must be recast or the United Kingdom will fracture irretrievably. The New Labour devolution of 'the powers of a parish council' to Scotland and Wales, rather than the true remaking of the Union, has brought this result. As New Labour's failed policies, persistent lying, individuals' corruption, warmongering, and dishonoured manifesto commitments have brought poverty, poor services, denied democratic control and left the United Kingdom infinitely vulnerable as a revenge target for the illegal attacks on Iraq, as veto powers are handed by Executive act to the European Union, as the surveillance regime is installed upon all of us, and the country collapses into the steady misery of recession, the Scots know it doesn't have to be accepted.

Of course people who have had the chance to vote have done so motivated by the observed threat to their living standards, and the experienced degradation of their services and their environment both physical and social, but it is a cheap and patronising interpretation of their democratic votes to deny that we are all aware of what is being destroyed in our country.

In Scotland they voted out Labour at a national level and have now taken the first opportunity to vote out a Labour representative at United Kingdom level. The experience of government by the Scottish National Party has been widely agreed to be professional, highly competent, socially just and rightly determined in forcing the machinery of devolution to function, and correct in its political actions to raise Scottish self determination. No nuclear power stations, no nuclear waste dumping, well-received links being built with the other countries of the north and western Europe, a proper regard for defending agriculture and fisheries, a determination to resettle oil issues, the encouragement of Scotland's other great strengths - tourism advanced academic and industrial research.... the list is well known.

Scottish vision is embodied in the Scottish National Party governance, and the dying Labour regime is not going to take Scotland down with it. In the hollow pretence that the electors of Glasgow East were voting only on narrowly defined issues that Labour can explain away as beyond their control, the Labour regime risks even further rejection of Scotland's remaining within the Union. If the relations within the Union are not redefined and settled more equitably for England and its people as well as Scotland, the realignment will be imposed by the Scottish people to the disadvantage of us all.

A Horrible Thought About Gordon Brown

Should the SNP take Glasgow East, or come anywhere near it, then Kirkcaldy and Cowden Beath will not be a safe seat for the Leader any longer. Which constituency with a huge Labour majority is in line for its member of Parliament to be ennobled, and then awarded a Brown candidacy? Or are there already no safe seats left for Labour even before the Declaration?

Labour's Failures at Every Undertaking

Tony Blair led New Labour to victory in 2005 offering these pledges:

1. Your family better off
2. Your family treated better and faster
3. Your child achieving more
4. Your country's borders protected
5. Your community safer
6. Your children with the best start

Apart from Blair being defenestrated and replaced by the unelected current Leader (pace Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath electors) who survives on Blair's majority, there is the problem of where we now find ourselves under the New Labour knout.

Families are paying almost £1500 a year more in food and energy costs alone, never mind their housing costs which are excluded from the false inflation figures provided by the regime.

Families are subjected to country, regional, and postcode discrimination in accessing all and any aspect of health care when using the NHS.

More than 40% of children leaving primary school for secondary education are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

Immigration, from inside and outside the European Union, is no longer counted by any government measure. They have lost even the possibility of counting who, and how many, enter the country.

56 young people have been knifed to death in the last 2 months. Alcohol and drug- fuelled disorder is commonplace in all communities and worse in less-affluent centres.

Children are being finger-printed, removed from their parents' care at birth, placed for adoption by force, subjected to gross levels of bullying in and out of school, failing academically, and levels of child labour are rising fast.

It's not just Glasgow East. It's everywhere. In Glasgow East there is the chance to speak for everyone today.

Vote.