Off Topic The Politics Thread

[Willhoops]

Interesting discussion on the Today programme this morning about identity politics.

While I am privileged to have an innate ‘identity’ - white, middle aged man, who is also well educated and in relative terms well off - which means I don’t have to think about my ‘identity’ often, I do know that because of this I find it literally impossible to conceive of being in the position where I feel that my identity - skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity etc, things which I can’t change - puts me at an historic and actual disadvantage, real or perceived, and I think about it all the time. So while my knee jerk reaction to identity politics is irritation, and that equality of opportunity especially in education and health, is the obvious answer, on reflection I really don’t think I have am in a position to have a valid comment. Other than trying to make me feel guilty about my own identity, which I can’t change, won’t help help anything (well I could black up and cross dress I suppose). I can sympathise but I can’t empathise and it would be wrong to pretend that I can.

The radio discussion was about whether the liberal left recent focus on identity politics and clearly defined ‘disadvantaged’ groups has made it unable to be elected to govern. It was claimed that in the US Clinton’s rainbow campaign put many off voting for her (though her clear membership of the ‘elite’ may have had a role there too), but the democrats are suffering everywhere - to the extent that the Republicans only need to gain control of two more states to be in the position to make constitutional changes. Over here, while the Labour leadership is anything but ‘liberal’ it is falling behind in the polls at precisely the time when it should be surging ahead.

So it could be argued (not completely sure if I buy it) that the right and populists, while moaning endlessly about identity politics, are benefitting from it when it comes to elections.

It's not about feeling guilty or anything like that, there really is no reason to, it's acknowledging that others have to suffer prejudice and disadvantage because of a birth right and accepting that measures should be taken to 'level the playing field' over time (this has to be a slow process)

On a different political thread there are a few that throw identity politics about as a negative, these people through their other comments are clearly more towards the 'right' politically and to a man brexiteers, the thing I find most ironic about it is that a huge reason given for the leave vote, was to do with British sovereignty, getting our country back, etc.. Surely I'm not the only one to see the irony there!!

Oh another point from the other board is all of these people are white men 30+. Like myself these people have never suffered from proper discrimination, not had to put up with it all their lives. They certainly come across as that they are scared of the advantages they have had over the years being eroded and equality is of no interest especially when they can scream 'it's political correctness gone mad'.

The times in my life where I have had discrimination, in this case racism, in my life is when I have dated outside of my ethnicity, be that people shouting abuse or coming up to me at the bar and asking me 'what am I doing with a darkie' and I'm not talking about 30 odd years ago either.

 

[Stroller]

Interesting discussion on the Today programme this morning about identity politics.

While I am privileged to have an innate ‘identity’ - white, middle aged man, who is also well educated and in relative terms well off - which means I don’t have to think about my ‘identity’ often, I do know that because of this I find it literally impossible to conceive of being in the position where I feel that my identity - skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity etc, things which I can’t change - puts me at an historic and actual disadvantage, real or perceived, and I think about it all the time. So while my knee jerk reaction to identity politics is irritation, and that equality of opportunity especially in education and health, is the obvious answer, on reflection I really don’t think I have am in a position to have a valid comment. Other than trying to make me feel guilty about my own identity, which I can’t change, won’t help help anything (well I could black up and cross dress I suppose). I can sympathise but I can’t empathise and it would be wrong to pretend that I can.

The radio discussion was about whether the liberal left recent focus on identity politics and clearly defined ‘disadvantaged’ groups has made it unable to be elected to govern. It was claimed that in the US Clinton’s rainbow campaign put many off voting for her (though her clear membership of the ‘elite’ may have had a role there too), but the democrats are suffering everywhere - to the extent that the Republicans only need to gain control of two more states to be in the position to make constitutional changes. Over here, while the Labour leadership is anything but ‘liberal’ it is falling behind in the polls at precisely the time when it should be surging ahead.

So it could be argued (not completely sure if I buy it) that the right and populists, while moaning endlessly about identity politics, are benefitting from it when it comes to elections.

Not sure about the electability theory, but, as someone who has tried and so far failed to trace my Irish heritage, identity is something that interests me. The excellent documentary series by David Olusoga, Black And British: A Forgotten History, is currently being repeated on BBC4. The first episode, which was shown on Wednesday, features Cedric Barber, a middle-aged white man, who recently found out that he is the great-great-great-grandson of one Francis Barber. Francis was a black man, who was born a slave in Jamaica, but was brought as a child to England by a friend of Samuel Johnson and wound up living and working as a free man in Johnson's household. Cedric's view on slavery is very different now than it was previously.....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episo...itish-a-forgotten-history-1-first-encounters#

From about 19.50

 

[Stroller]

why would it cost an extra 20 billion a year just to maintain current services
whats the extra cost from
wont things get easier for the nhs now it wont have to look after all those pesky foreigners for free

This fella knows...

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[kiwiqpr]

From memory pfis were used to build hospital's
Who paid for it before the private sector took over

 

[sb_73]

Excellent and definitively crushing result in the Irish abortion referendum. In addition to allowing women to make their own decisions, another nail in the coffin of theocracy.

 

[Stroller]

Excellent and definitively crushing result in the Irish abortion referendum. In addition to allowing women to make their own decisions, another nail in the coffin of theocracy.

May apparently opposes giving MPs a vote on similarly oppressive abortion laws in Northern Ireland because she thinks it should be a devolved decision. Nothing to do with her not wanting to upset her DUP puppet-masters.

 

[sb_73]

May apparently opposes giving MPs a vote on similarly oppressive abortion laws in Northern Ireland because she thinks it should be a devolved decision. Nothing to do with her not wanting to upset her DUP puppet-masters.

Especially when there isn’t a devolved administration to oversee the process of making a decision.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

May apparently opposes giving MPs a vote on similarly oppressive abortion laws in Northern Ireland because she thinks it should be a devolved decision. Nothing to do with her not wanting to upset her DUP puppet-masters.

At least they can now pop over the border for abortions. Still, scandalous that any supposedly progressive country can have such a backward region still overseen by religious nutters.

 

[kiwiqpr]

Tommy Robinson arrested for 'breaching the peace' outside court during grooming trial
'I haven’t said a word…I’ve done nothing,' far-right figurehead pleads as he is detained by officers

• Lizzie Dearden Home Affairs Correspondent

The Independent Online

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Tommy Robinson being arrested outside Leeds Combined Courts on 25 May 2018 Facebook
Tommy Robinson has been arrested for allegedly breaching the peace outside a court during an ongoing grooming trial.
The far-right activist showed men entering Leeds Crown Court in a livestream on Facebook, where he claimed to be “reporting” on the case.
After more than an hour of broadcasting, footage showed police officers approaching to arrest him for alleged breach of the peace and incitement.
“Can you get me a solicitor?” he asked his supporters while being searched and bundled into a police van. “This is ridiculous, I haven’t said a word…I’ve done nothing.”
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Lennon, had claimed that verdicts were due on Friday but court officials confirmed that the trial of nine defendants is ongoing.
“This isn’t contempt of court?” he asked during the broadcast. “You are allowed to do this, aren’t you?”
Read more

• Tommy Robinson permanently banned from Twitter
• Tommy Robinson threatens to track down UK counter-terror head
• Finsbury Park terror attacker turned to violence by far-right posts

Contempt of court is a criminal offence that can see people jailed for speeches or publications that create a "substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced".
Robinson is already under a suspended sentence for committing contempt of court over a gang rape case heard in Canterbury last year.
Judge Heather Norton handed him a three months imprisonment in May last year but suspended it for 18 months on the condition he did not commit further offences.
“This is not about free speech, not about the freedom of the press, nor about legitimate journalism, and not about political correctness,” the judge told Robinson at the time
“It is about justice and ensuring that a trial can be carried out justly and fairly, it’s about being innocent until proven guilty.
“It is about preserving the integrity of the jury to continue without people being intimidated or being affected by irresponsible and inaccurate ‘reporting’, if that’s what it was.”
Robinson formerly broadcast his activities on Twitter as well as Facebook, but was permanently banned from the platform earlier this year.
He co-founded the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009 and has been arrested numerous times during demonstrations and at fights between football fans, as well as being jailed for mortgage fraud in 2014.
After claiming to have made friends with Muslim prisoners during his time inside, he attempted to found a British branch of the German anti-Islam group Pegida in 2015.
He later became a correspondent for Canadian right-wing website Rebel Media and his posts and emails during the period radicalised the Finsbury Park attacker Darren Osborne.
Robinson has since started his own site and has been working closely with members of the ethno-nationalist Generation Identity movement, whose leaders have been prevented from entering the UK.


Why is it ok to film Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris etc etc but not Muslim predators?
and why did stephen lennon change his name

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Tommy Robinson arrested for 'breaching the peace' outside court during grooming trial
'I haven’t said a word…I’ve done nothing,' far-right figurehead pleads as he is detained by officers

• Lizzie Dearden Home Affairs Correspondent

The Independent Online

You must log in or register to see images

Tommy Robinson being arrested outside Leeds Combined Courts on 25 May 2018 Facebook
Tommy Robinson has been arrested for allegedly breaching the peace outside a court during an ongoing grooming trial.
The far-right activist showed men entering Leeds Crown Court in a livestream on Facebook, where he claimed to be “reporting” on the case.
After more than an hour of broadcasting, footage showed police officers approaching to arrest him for alleged breach of the peace and incitement.
“Can you get me a solicitor?” he asked his supporters while being searched and bundled into a police van. “This is ridiculous, I haven’t said a word…I’ve done nothing.”
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Lennon, had claimed that verdicts were due on Friday but court officials confirmed that the trial of nine defendants is ongoing.
“This isn’t contempt of court?” he asked during the broadcast. “You are allowed to do this, aren’t you?”
Read more

• Tommy Robinson permanently banned from Twitter
• Tommy Robinson threatens to track down UK counter-terror head
• Finsbury Park terror attacker turned to violence by far-right posts

Contempt of court is a criminal offence that can see people jailed for speeches or publications that create a "substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced".
Robinson is already under a suspended sentence for committing contempt of court over a gang rape case heard in Canterbury last year.
Judge Heather Norton handed him a three months imprisonment in May last year but suspended it for 18 months on the condition he did not commit further offences.
“This is not about free speech, not about the freedom of the press, nor about legitimate journalism, and not about political correctness,” the judge told Robinson at the time
“It is about justice and ensuring that a trial can be carried out justly and fairly, it’s about being innocent until proven guilty.
“It is about preserving the integrity of the jury to continue without people being intimidated or being affected by irresponsible and inaccurate ‘reporting’, if that’s what it was.”
Robinson formerly broadcast his activities on Twitter as well as Facebook, but was permanently banned from the platform earlier this year.
He co-founded the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009 and has been arrested numerous times during demonstrations and at fights between football fans, as well as being jailed for mortgage fraud in 2014.
After claiming to have made friends with Muslim prisoners during his time inside, he attempted to found a British branch of the German anti-Islam group Pegida in 2015.
He later became a correspondent for Canadian right-wing website Rebel Media and his posts and emails during the period radicalised the Finsbury Park attacker Darren Osborne.
Robinson has since started his own site and has been working closely with members of the ethno-nationalist Generation Identity movement, whose leaders have been prevented from entering the UK.


Why is it ok to film Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris etc etc but not Muslim predators?
and why did stephen lennon change his name

I believe it’s to avoid people thinking he was related to Aaron Lennon.

This was a sensitive case with reporting restrictions. Yaxley-Lennon Robinson McMaster is/was serving a suspended sentence, has a criminal record and was specifically warned to not do exactly what he did.

 

[kiwiqpr]

I believe it’s to avoid people thinking he was related to Aaron Lennon.

This was a sensitive case with reporting restrictions. Yaxley-Lennon Robinson McMaster is/was serving a suspended sentence, has a criminal record and was specifically warned to not do exactly what he did.

Tommy Robinson And Reporting Restrictions
What happened yesterday to Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who styles himself Tommy Robinson, after he rocked up outside court in Leeds and was later arrested, shows that there are a lot of people out there who do not understand reporting restrictions put in place to ensure that those on trial receive a fair hearing. Lennon’s supporters largely do not want to know about this, and that is a pity - mainly for them.

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As is understood here on Zelo Street, there have been three separate trials in progress in Leeds of more than 20 individuals accused of being part of a grooming gang. Not all of the trails have yet concluded. As with other grooming gang trials, the prosecution has invested a great deal of effort in securing justice for the alleged victims; part of that effort is to ensure that outside interference is not allowed to compromise or even collapse the trial.

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That the trials had not all concluded was confirmed by the Independent’s report, which told “Lennon … had claimed that verdicts were due on Friday but court officials confirmed that the trial of nine defendants is ongoing”. West Yorkshire Police declined to comment when asked by the representative from the Evening Standard.
Free sheet Metro set out why Lennon was arrested: “He showed men entering the court on Facebook until he was approached by officers telling him to stop … Robinson is already under a suspended sentence over contempt of court at a gang rape trial in Canterbury last year … It is a criminal offence that can land people in jail”.

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Former prosecutor Nazir Afzal set out the potential pitfalls of breaking reporting restrictions: “We nearly lost the so called Rochdale grooming case ([HASHTAG]#ThreeGirls[/HASHTAG]) cos of a far right communication … Their lawyers applied at their trial that the jury had been prejudiced by Far Right We had to fight to persuade Court to allow trial to continue Those criminals came close to being freed & victims close to getting NO justice Jury must decide on EVIDENCE, not on your OPINION”. Others added their own cautions.

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Sharon Bottomley warned “It's because this trial has reporting restrictions which are there for a reason. The trial has been split as so many defendants and when all have been tried later this year then restrictions will be lifted. They cannot risk any coverage as all 3 trials linked”. And Mike Stuchbery concluded “Cases involving child sexual exploitation are generally highly restricted. There are so many things that (quite rightly) can't be made public. What he's done is hugely irresponsible”.

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}
Also, the warning given to Lennon by Judge Heather Norton at Canterbury Crown Court should be borne in mind. “In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as ‘Muslim *****philes, Muslim rapists’ and so on and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much”.

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As Lennon’s actions are now linked inextricably to the continuing trial in Leeds, those reporting restrictions, and the contempt laws, still apply. They even apply to his Facebook page. That might be difficult for his supporters, and the likes of Lauren Southern, to comprehend. But that’s the way we ensure fair trials in the UK - for everyone.
It does not mean anyone’s free speech is being curtailed. That is all.

so stephen / tommy knew what would happen
mediawhore

 

[kiwiqpr]

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anyone going
lots of free tickets available

 

[Stroller]

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anyone going
lots of free tickets available

I like the Magic Numbers.

 

[kiwiqpr]

I like the Magic Numbers.

dianne abbotts favourite too stroller

 

[kiwiqpr]

It appears 16 year olds are old enough to vote but not attend #labourlive

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"Selling on of tickets at inflated prices" !!!

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[Stroller]

.

 

[kiwiqpr]

how long will austerity remain in place???

from the new york times


Britain’s Big Squeeze
In Britain, Austerity Is Changing EverythingIn Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything
After eight years of budget cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.
Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Emma Wilde has lost the welfare benefits she depended on to support herself and her two children.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times

By Peter S. Goodman

• May 28, 2018
• For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.
  • When Ms. Lewis and her husband bought their home a quarter-century ago, Prescot had a comforting village feel. Now, core government relief programs are being cut and public facilities eliminated, adding pressure to public services like police and fire departments, just as they, too, grapple with diminished funding.
    By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.
    
    
    
    
    
    “The government has created destitution,” says Barry Kushner, a Labour Party councilman in Liverpool and the cabinet member for children’s services. “Austerity has had nothing to do with economics. It was about getting out from under welfare. It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”
    Conservative Party leaders say that austerity has been driven by nothing more grandiose than arithmetic.
    “It’s the ideology of two plus two equals four,” says Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative member of the upper chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, and a columnist for The Times of London. “It wasn’t driven by a desire to reduce spending on public services. It was driven by the fact that we had a vast deficit problem, and the debt was going to keep growing.”
    Whatever the operative thinking, austerity’s manifestations are palpable and omnipresent. It has refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes.
    Much as the United States took the Great Depression of the 1930s as impetus to construct a national pension system while eventually delivering health care for the elderly and the poor, Britain reacted to the trauma of World War II by forging its own welfare state. The United States has steadily reduced benefits since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Britain rolled back its programs in the same era, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Still, its safety net remained robust by world standards.
    Then came the global financial panic of 2008 — the most crippling economic downturn since the Great Depression. Britain’s turn from its welfare state in the face of yawning budget deficits is a conspicuous indicator that the world has been refashioned by the crisis.
    As the global economy now negotiates a wrenching transition — with itinerant jobs replacing full-time positions and robots substituting for human labor — Britain’s experience provokes doubts about the durability of the traditional welfare model. As Western-style capitalism confronts profound questions about economic justice, vulnerable people appear to be growing more so.
    an analysis by the Institute for Government. Spending on road maintenance has shrunk more than one-fourth, while support for libraries has fallen nearly a third.
    The national court system has eliminated nearly a third of its staff. Spending on prisons has plunged more than a fifth, with violent assaults on prison guards more than doubling. The number of elderly people receiving government-furnished care that enables them to remain in their homes has fallen by roughly a quarter.
    In an alternate reality, this nasty stretch of history might now be ending. Austerity measures were imposed in the name of eliminating budget deficits, and last year Britain finally produced a modest budget surplus.
    But the reality at hand is dominated by worries that Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — Brexit, as it is known — will depress growth for years to come. Though every major economy on earth has been expanding lately, Britain’s barely grew during the first three months of 2018. The unemployment rate sits just above 4 percent — its lowest level since 1975 — yet most wages remain lower than a decade ago, after accounting for rising prices.
    In the blue-collar reaches of northern England, in places like Liverpool, modern history tends to be told in the cadence of lamentation, as the story of one indignity after another. In these communities, Mrs. Thatcher’s name is an epithet, and austerity is the latest villain: London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations. Robin Hood, reversed.
    “It’s clearly an attack on our class,” says Dave Kelly, a retired bricklayer in the town of Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where many factories sit empty, broken monuments to another age. “It’s an attack on who we are. The whole fabric of society is breaking down.”
    
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    Workers from the Cammell Laird shipyard on the banks of the River Mersey. Once a center of the slave trade and gateway to the British Empire, Liverpool has long been in decline.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    Austerity’s ‘Knock-on Effects’
    As much as any city, Liverpool has seen sweeping changes in its economic fortunes.
    In the 17th century, the city enriched itself on human misery. Local shipping companies sent vessels to West Africa, transporting slaves to the American colonies and returning bearing the fruits of bondage — cotton and tobacco, principally.
    The cotton fed the mills of Manchester nearby, yielding textiles destined for multiple continents. By the late 19th century, Liverpool’s port had become the gateway to the British Empire, its status underscored by the shipping company headquarters lining the River Mersey.
    By the next century — through the Great Depression and the German bombardment of World War II — Liverpool had descended into seemingly terminal decline. Its hard luck, blue-collar station was central to the identity of its most famous export, the Beatles, whose star power seemed enhanced by the fact such talent could emerge from such a place.
    Today, more than a quarter of Liverpool’s roughly 460,000 residents are officially poor, making austerity traumatic: Public institutions charged with aiding vulnerable people are themselves straining from cutbacks.
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    A fire station in Allerton, England, is one of several in the area that have closed because of austerity measures.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    Over the past eight years, the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, which serves greater Liverpool, has closed five fire stations while cutting the force to 620 firefighters from about 1,000.
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    “I’ve had to preside over the systematic dismantling of the system,” says the fire chief, Dan Stephens.
    His department recently analyzed the 83 deaths that occurred in accidental house fires from 2007 to 2017. The majority of the victims — 51 people — lived alone and were alone at the time of the deadly fire. Nineteen of those 51 were in need of some form of home care.
    The loss of home care — a casualty of austerity — has meant that more older people are being left alone unattended.
    Virtually every public agency now struggles to do more with less while attending to additional problems once handled by some other outfit whose budget is also in tatters.
    Chief Stephens said people losing cash benefits are falling behind on their electric bills and losing service, resorting to candles for light — a major fire risk.
    The city has cut mental health services, so fewer staff members are visiting people prone to hoarding newspapers, for instance, leaving veritable bonfires piling up behind doors, unseen.
    “There are knock-on effects all the way through the system,” says Chief Stephens, who recently announced plans to resign and move to Australia.
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    The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts. But spending has been frozen in many areas, resulting in cuts per patient. At public hospitals, people have grown resigned to waiting for hours for emergency care, and weeks for referrals to specialists.
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    Treating a patient at Royal Liverpool University Hospital. The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts, but spending has been frozen in many areas.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    “I think the government wants to run it down so the whole thing crumbles and they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” says Kenneth Buckle, a retired postal worker who has been waiting three months for a referral for a double knee replacement. “Everything takes forever now.”
    At Fulwood Green Medical Center in Liverpool, Dr. Simon Bowers, a general practitioner, points to austerity as an aggravating factor in the flow of stress-related maladies he encounters — high blood pressure, heart problems, sleeplessness, anxiety.
    He argues that the cuts, and the deterioration of the National Health Service, represent a renouncement of Britain’s historical debts. He rattles off the lowlights — the slave trave, colonial barbarity.
    “We as a country said, ‘We have been cruel. Let’s be nice now and look after everyone,’” Dr. Bowers says. “The N.H.S. has everyone’s back. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. It’s written into the psyche of this country.”
    “Austerity isn’t a necessity,” he continued. “It’s a political choice, to move Britain in a different way. I can’t see a rationale beyond further enriching the rich while making the lives of the poor more miserable.”
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    Parts of central Liverpool that were rebuilt to attract tourists stand alongside largely neglected areas.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    ‘Prosperity for All’
    Wealthy Britons remain among the world’s most comfortable people, enjoying lavish homes, private medical care, top-notch schools and restaurants run by chefs from Paris and Tokyo. The poor, the elderly, the disabled and the jobless are increasingly prone to Kafka-esque tangles with the bureaucracy to keep public support.
    For Emma Wilde, a 31-year-old single mother, the misadventure began with an inscrutable piece of correspondence.
    Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Ms. Wilde has depended on welfare benefits to support herself and her two children. Her father, a retired window washer, is disabled. She has been taking care of him full time, relying on a so-called caregiver’s allowance, which amounts to about $85 a week, and income support reaching about $145 a month.
    The letter put this money in jeopardy.
    Sent by a private firm contracted to manage part of the government’s welfare programs, it informed Ms. Wilde that she was being investigated for fraud, accused of living with a partner — a development she is obliged to have reported.
    Ms. Wilde lives only with her children, she insists. But while the investigation proceeds, her benefits are suspended.
    Eight weeks after the money ceased, Ms. Wilde’s electricity was shut off for nonpayment. During the late winter, she and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. to save on heat. She has swallowed her pride and visited a food bank at a local church, bringing home bread and hamburger patties.
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    Having lost electricity, Ms. Wilde and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. in the winter in order to conserve heat.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    “I felt a bit ashamed, like I had done something wrong, ” Ms. Wilde says. “But then you’ve got to feed the kids.”
    She has been corresponding with the Department for Work and Pensions, mailing bank statements to try to prove her limited income and to restore her funds.
    The experience has given her a perverse sense of community. At the local center where she brings her children for free meals, she has met people who lost their unemployment benefits after their bus was late and they missed an appointment with a caseworker. She and her friends exchange tips on where to secure hand-me-down clothes.
    “Everyone is in the same situation now,” Ms. Wilde says. “You just don’t have enough to live on.”
    From its inception, austerity carried a whiff of moral righteousness, as if those who delivered it were sober-minded grown-ups. Belt tightening was sold as a shared undertaking, an unpleasant yet unavoidable reckoning with dangerous budget deficits.
    “The truth is that the country was living beyond its means,” the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, declared in outlining his budget to Parliament in 2010. “Today, we have paid the debts of a failed past, and laid the foundations for a more prosperous future.”
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    A community center in Everton. It provides numerous services, like free lunches for the elderly, that were once done by government agencies.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
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    “Prosperity for all,” he added.
    Eight years later, housing subsidies have been restricted, along with tax credits for poor families. The government has frozen unemployment and disability benefits even as costs of food and other necessities have climbed. Over the last five years, the government has begun transitioning to so-called Universal Credit, giving those who receive benefits lump sum payments in place of funds from individual programs. Many have lost support for weeks or months while their cases have shifted to the new system.
    All of which is unfortunate yet inescapable, assert Conservative lawmakers. The government was borrowing roughly one-fourth of what it was spending. To put off cuts was to risk turning Britain into the next Greece.
    “The hard left has never been very clear about what their alternative to the program was,” says Neil O’Brien, a Conservative lawmaker who was previously a Treasury adviser to Mr. Osborne. “Presumably, it would be some enormous increase in taxation, but they are a bit shy about what that would mean.”
    He rejects the notion that austerity is a means of class warfare, noting that wealthy people have been hit with higher taxes on investment and expanded fees when buying luxury properties.
    Britain spends roughly the same portion of its national income on public spending today as it did a decade ago, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    But those dependent on state support express a sense that the system has been rigged to discard them.
    Glendys Perry, 61, was born with cerebral palsy, making it difficult for her to walk. For three decades, she answered the phones at an auto parts company. After she lost that job in 2010, she lived on a disability check.
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    Last summer, a letter came, summoning her to “an assessment.” The first question dispatched any notion that this was a sincere exploration.
    “How long have you had cerebral palsy?” (From birth.) “Will it get better?” (No.)
    In fact, her bones were weakening, and she fell often. Her hands were not quick enough to catch her body, resulting in bruises to her face.
    The man handling the assessment seemed uninterested.
    “Can you walk from here to there?” he asked her.
    He dropped a pen on the floor and commanded her to pick it up — a test of her dexterity.
    “How did you come here?” he asked her.
    “By bus,” she replied.
    Can you make a cup of tea? Can you get dressed?
    “I thought, ‘I’m physically disabled,’” she says. “‘Not mentally.’”
    When the letter came informing her that she was no longer entitled to her disability payment — that she had been deemed fit for work — she was not surprised.
    “They want you to be off of benefits,” she says. “I think they were just ticking boxes.”
    Image
    
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    Dominic Barber and his family get significant help from the food pantry at the community center in Everton.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
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    An Unlikely Villain
    The political architecture of Britain insulates those imposing austerity from the wrath of those on the receiving end. London makes the aggregate cuts, while leaving to local politicians the messy work of allocating the pain.
    Spend a morning with the aggrieved residents of Prescot and one hears scant mention of London, or even austerity. People train their fury on the Knowsley Council, and especially on the man who was until recently its leader, Andy Moorhead. They accuse him of hastily concocting plans to sell Browns Field without community consultation.
    Mr. Moorhead, 62, seems an unlikely figure for the role of austerity villain. A career member of the Labour Party, he has the everyday bearing of a genial denizen of the corner pub.
    “I didn’t become a politician to take things off of people,” he says. “But you’ve got the reality to deal with.”
    The reality is that London is phasing out grants to local governments, forcing councils to live on housing and business taxes.
    “Austerity is here to stay,” says Jonathan Davies, director of the Center for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. “What we might now see over the next two years is a wave of bankruptcies, like Detroit.”
    Indeed, the council of Northamptonshire, in the center of England, recently became the first local government in nearly two decades to meet that fate.
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    Knowsley expects to spend $192 million in the next budget year, Mr. Moorhead says, with 60 percent of that absorbed by care for the elderly and services for children with health and developmental needs. An additional 18 percent will be spent on services the council must provide by law, such as garbage collection and highway maintenance.
    To Mr. Moorhead, the equation ends with the imperative to sell valuable land, yielding an endowment to protect remaining parks and services.
    “We’ve got to pursue development,” Mr. Moorhead says. “Locally, I’m the bad guy.”
    The real malefactors are the same as ever, he says.
    He points at a picture of Mrs. Thatcher on the wall behind him. He vents about London bankers, who left his people to clean up their mess.
    “No one should be doing this,” he says. “Not in the fifth-wealthiest country in the whole world. Sacking people, making people redundant, reducing our services for the vulnerable in our society. It’s the worst job in the world.”
    Now, it is someone else’s job. In early May, the local Labour Party ousted Mr. Moorhead as council leader amid mounting anger over the planned sale of parks.

 

[Stroller]

how long will austerity remain in place???

from the new york times


Britain’s Big Squeeze
In Britain, Austerity Is Changing EverythingIn Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything
After eight years of budget cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.
Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Emma Wilde has lost the welfare benefits she depended on to support herself and her two children.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times

By Peter S. Goodman

• May 28, 2018
• For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.
  • When Ms. Lewis and her husband bought their home a quarter-century ago, Prescot had a comforting village feel. Now, core government relief programs are being cut and public facilities eliminated, adding pressure to public services like police and fire departments, just as they, too, grapple with diminished funding.
    By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.
    
    
    
    
    
    “The government has created destitution,” says Barry Kushner, a Labour Party councilman in Liverpool and the cabinet member for children’s services. “Austerity has had nothing to do with economics. It was about getting out from under welfare. It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”
    Conservative Party leaders say that austerity has been driven by nothing more grandiose than arithmetic.
    “It’s the ideology of two plus two equals four,” says Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative member of the upper chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, and a columnist for The Times of London. “It wasn’t driven by a desire to reduce spending on public services. It was driven by the fact that we had a vast deficit problem, and the debt was going to keep growing.”
    Whatever the operative thinking, austerity’s manifestations are palpable and omnipresent. It has refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes.
    Much as the United States took the Great Depression of the 1930s as impetus to construct a national pension system while eventually delivering health care for the elderly and the poor, Britain reacted to the trauma of World War II by forging its own welfare state. The United States has steadily reduced benefits since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Britain rolled back its programs in the same era, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Still, its safety net remained robust by world standards.
    Then came the global financial panic of 2008 — the most crippling economic downturn since the Great Depression. Britain’s turn from its welfare state in the face of yawning budget deficits is a conspicuous indicator that the world has been refashioned by the crisis.
    As the global economy now negotiates a wrenching transition — with itinerant jobs replacing full-time positions and robots substituting for human labor — Britain’s experience provokes doubts about the durability of the traditional welfare model. As Western-style capitalism confronts profound questions about economic justice, vulnerable people appear to be growing more so.
    an analysis by the Institute for Government. Spending on road maintenance has shrunk more than one-fourth, while support for libraries has fallen nearly a third.
    The national court system has eliminated nearly a third of its staff. Spending on prisons has plunged more than a fifth, with violent assaults on prison guards more than doubling. The number of elderly people receiving government-furnished care that enables them to remain in their homes has fallen by roughly a quarter.
    In an alternate reality, this nasty stretch of history might now be ending. Austerity measures were imposed in the name of eliminating budget deficits, and last year Britain finally produced a modest budget surplus.
    But the reality at hand is dominated by worries that Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — Brexit, as it is known — will depress growth for years to come. Though every major economy on earth has been expanding lately, Britain’s barely grew during the first three months of 2018. The unemployment rate sits just above 4 percent — its lowest level since 1975 — yet most wages remain lower than a decade ago, after accounting for rising prices.
    In the blue-collar reaches of northern England, in places like Liverpool, modern history tends to be told in the cadence of lamentation, as the story of one indignity after another. In these communities, Mrs. Thatcher’s name is an epithet, and austerity is the latest villain: London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations. Robin Hood, reversed.
    “It’s clearly an attack on our class,” says Dave Kelly, a retired bricklayer in the town of Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where many factories sit empty, broken monuments to another age. “It’s an attack on who we are. The whole fabric of society is breaking down.”
    
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    Workers from the Cammell Laird shipyard on the banks of the River Mersey. Once a center of the slave trade and gateway to the British Empire, Liverpool has long been in decline.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    Austerity’s ‘Knock-on Effects’
    As much as any city, Liverpool has seen sweeping changes in its economic fortunes.
    In the 17th century, the city enriched itself on human misery. Local shipping companies sent vessels to West Africa, transporting slaves to the American colonies and returning bearing the fruits of bondage — cotton and tobacco, principally.
    The cotton fed the mills of Manchester nearby, yielding textiles destined for multiple continents. By the late 19th century, Liverpool’s port had become the gateway to the British Empire, its status underscored by the shipping company headquarters lining the River Mersey.
    By the next century — through the Great Depression and the German bombardment of World War II — Liverpool had descended into seemingly terminal decline. Its hard luck, blue-collar station was central to the identity of its most famous export, the Beatles, whose star power seemed enhanced by the fact such talent could emerge from such a place.
    Today, more than a quarter of Liverpool’s roughly 460,000 residents are officially poor, making austerity traumatic: Public institutions charged with aiding vulnerable people are themselves straining from cutbacks.
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    A fire station in Allerton, England, is one of several in the area that have closed because of austerity measures.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    Over the past eight years, the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, which serves greater Liverpool, has closed five fire stations while cutting the force to 620 firefighters from about 1,000.
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    “I’ve had to preside over the systematic dismantling of the system,” says the fire chief, Dan Stephens.
    His department recently analyzed the 83 deaths that occurred in accidental house fires from 2007 to 2017. The majority of the victims — 51 people — lived alone and were alone at the time of the deadly fire. Nineteen of those 51 were in need of some form of home care.
    The loss of home care — a casualty of austerity — has meant that more older people are being left alone unattended.
    Virtually every public agency now struggles to do more with less while attending to additional problems once handled by some other outfit whose budget is also in tatters.
    Chief Stephens said people losing cash benefits are falling behind on their electric bills and losing service, resorting to candles for light — a major fire risk.
    The city has cut mental health services, so fewer staff members are visiting people prone to hoarding newspapers, for instance, leaving veritable bonfires piling up behind doors, unseen.
    “There are knock-on effects all the way through the system,” says Chief Stephens, who recently announced plans to resign and move to Australia.
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    The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts. But spending has been frozen in many areas, resulting in cuts per patient. At public hospitals, people have grown resigned to waiting for hours for emergency care, and weeks for referrals to specialists.
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    Treating a patient at Royal Liverpool University Hospital. The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts, but spending has been frozen in many areas.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    “I think the government wants to run it down so the whole thing crumbles and they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” says Kenneth Buckle, a retired postal worker who has been waiting three months for a referral for a double knee replacement. “Everything takes forever now.”
    At Fulwood Green Medical Center in Liverpool, Dr. Simon Bowers, a general practitioner, points to austerity as an aggravating factor in the flow of stress-related maladies he encounters — high blood pressure, heart problems, sleeplessness, anxiety.
    He argues that the cuts, and the deterioration of the National Health Service, represent a renouncement of Britain’s historical debts. He rattles off the lowlights — the slave trave, colonial barbarity.
    “We as a country said, ‘We have been cruel. Let’s be nice now and look after everyone,’” Dr. Bowers says. “The N.H.S. has everyone’s back. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. It’s written into the psyche of this country.”
    “Austerity isn’t a necessity,” he continued. “It’s a political choice, to move Britain in a different way. I can’t see a rationale beyond further enriching the rich while making the lives of the poor more miserable.”
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    Parts of central Liverpool that were rebuilt to attract tourists stand alongside largely neglected areas.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    ‘Prosperity for All’
    Wealthy Britons remain among the world’s most comfortable people, enjoying lavish homes, private medical care, top-notch schools and restaurants run by chefs from Paris and Tokyo. The poor, the elderly, the disabled and the jobless are increasingly prone to Kafka-esque tangles with the bureaucracy to keep public support.
    For Emma Wilde, a 31-year-old single mother, the misadventure began with an inscrutable piece of correspondence.
    Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Ms. Wilde has depended on welfare benefits to support herself and her two children. Her father, a retired window washer, is disabled. She has been taking care of him full time, relying on a so-called caregiver’s allowance, which amounts to about $85 a week, and income support reaching about $145 a month.
    The letter put this money in jeopardy.
    Sent by a private firm contracted to manage part of the government’s welfare programs, it informed Ms. Wilde that she was being investigated for fraud, accused of living with a partner — a development she is obliged to have reported.
    Ms. Wilde lives only with her children, she insists. But while the investigation proceeds, her benefits are suspended.
    Eight weeks after the money ceased, Ms. Wilde’s electricity was shut off for nonpayment. During the late winter, she and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. to save on heat. She has swallowed her pride and visited a food bank at a local church, bringing home bread and hamburger patties.
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    Having lost electricity, Ms. Wilde and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. in the winter in order to conserve heat.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    “I felt a bit ashamed, like I had done something wrong, ” Ms. Wilde says. “But then you’ve got to feed the kids.”
    She has been corresponding with the Department for Work and Pensions, mailing bank statements to try to prove her limited income and to restore her funds.
    The experience has given her a perverse sense of community. At the local center where she brings her children for free meals, she has met people who lost their unemployment benefits after their bus was late and they missed an appointment with a caseworker. She and her friends exchange tips on where to secure hand-me-down clothes.
    “Everyone is in the same situation now,” Ms. Wilde says. “You just don’t have enough to live on.”
    From its inception, austerity carried a whiff of moral righteousness, as if those who delivered it were sober-minded grown-ups. Belt tightening was sold as a shared undertaking, an unpleasant yet unavoidable reckoning with dangerous budget deficits.
    “The truth is that the country was living beyond its means,” the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, declared in outlining his budget to Parliament in 2010. “Today, we have paid the debts of a failed past, and laid the foundations for a more prosperous future.”
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    A community center in Everton. It provides numerous services, like free lunches for the elderly, that were once done by government agencies.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
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    “Prosperity for all,” he added.
    Eight years later, housing subsidies have been restricted, along with tax credits for poor families. The government has frozen unemployment and disability benefits even as costs of food and other necessities have climbed. Over the last five years, the government has begun transitioning to so-called Universal Credit, giving those who receive benefits lump sum payments in place of funds from individual programs. Many have lost support for weeks or months while their cases have shifted to the new system.
    All of which is unfortunate yet inescapable, assert Conservative lawmakers. The government was borrowing roughly one-fourth of what it was spending. To put off cuts was to risk turning Britain into the next Greece.
    “The hard left has never been very clear about what their alternative to the program was,” says Neil O’Brien, a Conservative lawmaker who was previously a Treasury adviser to Mr. Osborne. “Presumably, it would be some enormous increase in taxation, but they are a bit shy about what that would mean.”
    He rejects the notion that austerity is a means of class warfare, noting that wealthy people have been hit with higher taxes on investment and expanded fees when buying luxury properties.
    Britain spends roughly the same portion of its national income on public spending today as it did a decade ago, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    But those dependent on state support express a sense that the system has been rigged to discard them.
    Glendys Perry, 61, was born with cerebral palsy, making it difficult for her to walk. For three decades, she answered the phones at an auto parts company. After she lost that job in 2010, she lived on a disability check.
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    Last summer, a letter came, summoning her to “an assessment.” The first question dispatched any notion that this was a sincere exploration.
    “How long have you had cerebral palsy?” (From birth.) “Will it get better?” (No.)
    In fact, her bones were weakening, and she fell often. Her hands were not quick enough to catch her body, resulting in bruises to her face.
    The man handling the assessment seemed uninterested.
    “Can you walk from here to there?” he asked her.
    He dropped a pen on the floor and commanded her to pick it up — a test of her dexterity.
    “How did you come here?” he asked her.
    “By bus,” she replied.
    Can you make a cup of tea? Can you get dressed?
    “I thought, ‘I’m physically disabled,’” she says. “‘Not mentally.’”
    When the letter came informing her that she was no longer entitled to her disability payment — that she had been deemed fit for work — she was not surprised.
    “They want you to be off of benefits,” she says. “I think they were just ticking boxes.”
    Image
    
    You must log in or register to see images
    
    Dominic Barber and his family get significant help from the food pantry at the community center in Everton.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times
    Advertisement
    An Unlikely Villain
    The political architecture of Britain insulates those imposing austerity from the wrath of those on the receiving end. London makes the aggregate cuts, while leaving to local politicians the messy work of allocating the pain.
    Spend a morning with the aggrieved residents of Prescot and one hears scant mention of London, or even austerity. People train their fury on the Knowsley Council, and especially on the man who was until recently its leader, Andy Moorhead. They accuse him of hastily concocting plans to sell Browns Field without community consultation.
    Mr. Moorhead, 62, seems an unlikely figure for the role of austerity villain. A career member of the Labour Party, he has the everyday bearing of a genial denizen of the corner pub.
    “I didn’t become a politician to take things off of people,” he says. “But you’ve got the reality to deal with.”
    The reality is that London is phasing out grants to local governments, forcing councils to live on housing and business taxes.
    “Austerity is here to stay,” says Jonathan Davies, director of the Center for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. “What we might now see over the next two years is a wave of bankruptcies, like Detroit.”
    Indeed, the council of Northamptonshire, in the center of England, recently became the first local government in nearly two decades to meet that fate.
    Advertisement
    Knowsley expects to spend $192 million in the next budget year, Mr. Moorhead says, with 60 percent of that absorbed by care for the elderly and services for children with health and developmental needs. An additional 18 percent will be spent on services the council must provide by law, such as garbage collection and highway maintenance.
    To Mr. Moorhead, the equation ends with the imperative to sell valuable land, yielding an endowment to protect remaining parks and services.
    “We’ve got to pursue development,” Mr. Moorhead says. “Locally, I’m the bad guy.”
    The real malefactors are the same as ever, he says.
    He points at a picture of Mrs. Thatcher on the wall behind him. He vents about London bankers, who left his people to clean up their mess.
    “No one should be doing this,” he says. “Not in the fifth-wealthiest country in the whole world. Sacking people, making people redundant, reducing our services for the vulnerable in our society. It’s the worst job in the world.”
    Now, it is someone else’s job. In early May, the local Labour Party ousted Mr. Moorhead as council leader amid mounting anger over the planned sale of parks.

Did you read any of that, Kiwi?

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Did you read any of that, Kiwi?

I know I didn’t.

Austerity is ****e though.

 

[kiwiqpr]

Did you read any of that, Kiwi?

yes
i read it all
thats why i asked how long was austerity designed to last
will things change for the better at some stage
does a surplus need to hit a magic number