You Mess With People's at Your Peril

I want to recommend an article on social housing and housing benefit reforms that you must read.

www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/.../article2781534.ece

Last week saw the first Conservative Party Conference with David Cameron as Prime Minister. And what a week it was. If you've been even mildly aware of the 'goings-on', you couldn't have failed to notice a the controversial decision that the Chancellor George Osborne is planning to cut child-benefit for families as a means of tackling the UK deficit. Child Benefit if the working parent earns over £44,000. But a family in which both parents work, but earn under this amount can still get it; and they could have joint-income of, say, £70,000 a year and get Child Benefit, but the family next door earning just over half this amount would lose out. Is that fair? Certainly not.

The easiest solution for Osborne and his team is to set a limit for joint-income, so that families with a joint-income higher than £44,000 or £50,000 would lose out. Perhaps he is trying to persuade stay-at-home moms and dads to part-time work to get back their entitlement. But in the current market, how does he expect them to find work? So, David Cameron and his comrades are preaching 'the Big Society' theorem- or brain tease- moreso, asking people who are in most financial difficulty to bear the brunt of cuts along with "others"; but where are his words of encouragement for them? How does he plan to increase employment in the economy? He hasn't answered this question. In fact, the only thing I am aware that he said was to the "rich" people of the UK and that if they took some of the cuts aswell, they'd get more money in their pockets in the future.

So, this leads me on to another thing that stinks about Cameron's rhetoric. He talks of a 'Big Society' and 'getting Britain together" and he talked about cuts for middle-income families, but what about the rich? How will they contribute to the deficit reduction plan? The PM, as far as I am aware, said nada, ne plus, nothing about this. And that strikes me as ironic - if not downright irritating.



First of all, he should start with the monstrous 'banker bonuses', which totalled £7 billion in the previous quarter. Obscene! They only need to tax this minimally to generate at least a billion. And at least since the 'bankers' got us into this mess. They should have been allowed to fail.

So, I do sympathise with David Cameron and the need for everyone to bear and take part in the cuts. It's just that so far, he is targeting the needy and not the greedy. I hope he proves me wrong.

So, in short,

On David Cameron. And Salaries.

In an Economics Seminar at the start of term, we were asked to define whether the following question is a Micro-topic, or a Macro-topic:

Is David Cameron's salary fair?

To my surprise, an alarming number of students in the class claimed that since his salary-level is his own business, that it is clearly a micro-economic issue, whereby it only really refers to him and the decisions of a small number of people around this.

On appearances, I presumed that this response was most likely from the right-wing, Conservative minority. But, in my opinion, this is actually a macro-economic issue. Yes, I can see why David Cameron's pay would be considered his business, but doesn't this only really apply to private sector employees? After all, when you are the leader (Prime Minister, no less) of a country, your take-home salary is a question that affects not just you and those in government, but all the inhabitants of your country.

For example, David Cameron's current level of pay is around £143,00-per-annum, which is remarkably low considering he is the current Prime Minister and some CEO's earn ten-fold that. Think what this salary tells you about him and how it alters your opinion. Now I think that for a statesman, this is modest and reasonable amount (though it doesn't include other allowances he may have within overnment Administration, ie. Drivers, food allowance, travel costs paidf for, etc. ), but what if he earned $50,000,000-a-year? How would that alter your opinion of him?

In the current economic climate, people most likely would shudder at the unfairness and adbsurdity of this amount; and rightly so. I would; may even physically be sick. That's because this amount of money brings into question his political integrity. And in this case, we would consider it rich that he is preaching to others on how to accept public spending cuts gracefully and positively, while he lines his pockets with the public cash. This would affect opinion on him and in turn may affect his vote at the next election, which would affect government policy and have consequences for the country's economy as a whole.

So you see, it is a macro-economic issue when referring to public sector pay-levels.

A New Beginning?

Few could have watched the recent events in British politics transpire without feeling slight incredulity. From the Conservative's early campaign for earnest 'Change', to Labour's defeat and finally resulting in a new "co-operative" coalition government. In truth, the past week has been amazing, in terms of action and volatility. Was this really happening, I asked myself?

I was amazed to see how quickly the Tory government rattled together plans for a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats. Well, I suppose it's hardly surprising, given that they couldn't operate without their support. But it does make you question the integrity of our democratic system here in the UK.

Now we Brits have to cross our fingers and hope for the best. David Cameron (our new Prime Minister) has reined in a new era of change, but who else thought that he and his deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg looked incredibly uncomfortable in their press conference on Wednesday? It almost seemed to be a play for the camera. Anyway, I hope that for the sake of this country and its people, they can come together and change things for the better.

And So Becomes the End When We Lay Blame on the Middle-Man.

The attack on Sir Fred Goodwin's home is as shocking as it is understandable. The public are feeling burned for the wayward methodologies of our government in the past 20 years or so: ultimately resulting in the demise of the world economy, but this does not make a deliberate criminal attack on what is a public citizen correct. When blame and resolution are not easily assigned, bitterness pursues and it seems easier to lay it on those who have a seemingly care-free lifestyle and more importantly on somebody who has indeed benefited from the fall of a financial empire. But thus is the work of great novelists - when an empire collapses, there will be those who gain and those who falter. Those who falter will be those who spent too long placing their trust and interest in the powers of higher institutions - without taking their own initiative to get to know the players before they lay their cards. It's a state of the world.

I hope the government will bring these vandals to justice. There are means of displaying public protest and distaste; encouraging criminality is not one of this, nor is it likely to fix our economic woes.

In the name of Palin and Biden

Anybody who may have watched the much-televised, much publicised (and rightly so) debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden - the VP nominees for the US Republican and Democratic parties respectively - will have been anticipating some glimmer of hope from the Right-Wing that their policies are at least mildly containing substance. Following the glamour and glory of McCain's announcement that the Alaskan Governer Sarah Palin would be his 'veep' - the many gimmicks of her campaign, not least her 'hockey-mom' apparatus - this was finally a chance to match up the intellectual capacities between the two candidates and see who really was the most suitable. This was Biden's chance to show that beyond the cosmetic vision of Palin's deer-hunting facade and the excitement generated by her sexuality that he is actually the right man for the job. For Palin, it was her chance to show her worth being more than merely what she has allowed herself to represent since the Republican conference. She didn't.

Whilst I don't always agree with Biden's opinion, nor all of his policies - his stance alone in debate is proving enough that he can hold himself in debate. No, this isn't always enough - since facade alone doesnt a VP make - but what it does show is an ability to consider a response. Some voters may consider Palin's more haphazard approach of answering a question a plus in that she defies the procedural elegance in debating that establishes a flow of ideas but let this not deter from one simple fact: she cannot and does not answer the question. Biden himself is hardly a spring flower - and his responses too weren't at all perfect - but they were considerably more on the mark.

Another thing to be noticed on the table was the amount of back and forth banter about eachother's parties. Senator Obama voted this, Senator McCain voted this; nay, this isn't about their superiors (hasten to use that term loosely in this case, given the choice we have), this should be about their policies). This thus leads me on to another reason why I was disappointed. This debate, above all, was a chance to show the world and - more importantly -America a little more information about the people behind the party; a little more about the policies behind the people. Up until now, little else has subsided from the oh-so aesthetic elements of Obama's colour and Palin's sexuality. What was attained was really useless banter and what became more a reportage of past voting trends. I almost switched off after twenty minutes, but stayed on for want of a surprise. It never came.

You can see the full video here: Biden/Palin debate

Parties Galore

Click on the links below to find all the information you need about the Conferences that took place in September, though most of it is old-news now. Thought I'd at least add this in...enjoy!