This is not, in fact, an Irish bailout. It's a bailout of the European (including British) banks that lent a lot of money to the Irish government and Irish banks. If European governments want to bail out their banks, let them do so directly and openly - not via the subterfuge of country bailouts. Then they should face the music: How is it that two years after the great financial crisis, European banks make so-called systemically dangerous sovereign bets, earn nice yields, and then get bailed out again and again?
As she said time and again if even she, with her public profile, reputation for straight talking and acute knowledge of the mechanics of nursing and medicine could not get the treatment she was entitled to, what hope was there for others?"Let the haunting begin", said her widower, as though Cameron were responsible for the deplorable standards of care in the NHS after a decade of having money fire-hosed at it. For that matter why, given her "acute knowledge of the mechanics of nursing and medicine", did it come as a shock to Claire herself that the NHS treats the dying elderly as "bed blockers"?
Surely the essentials of nursing care are what every patient deserves and should get? The NHS should get this right all of the time. Lack of help with eating and drinking. Lack of help with personal hygiene. Lack of help with toileting needs. It is clear from the stories we hear on our Helpline that too many patients are being badly let down. It’s a scandal and it’s outrageous that has been persisting for years. Families are left with a life sentence of grief, with no lessons learnt and the same failings continuing.
There is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure. It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous. We then mistakenly define ourselves as being distinctive from our opponents because we are morally superior rather than because we have different diagnoses and solutions. It is lazy, wrong and politically dangerous.Shame he did not realize that self-evident fact when his mob was in power. What he says has characterised the so-called "progressives" from their Fabian beginnings in the 19th century. They have always been Pharisees and, regrettably, a recantation by someone marginalised for putting party before country is not going to change anything.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that ‘the public interest’, as defined in these discussions, has very little to do with the living, breathing public. The higher valuation given to the highbrow tittle-tattle spouted by Wikileaks in contrast to the lowbrow tittle-tattle spouted by the News of the World is really a question of taste, of preference, even of snobbery (‘our gossip is worthier than yours!’), yet it gets dressed up in the pseudo-democratic lingo of the public interest. What these journalists and editors really mean when they talk about ‘the public interest’ is what they think is good for the public – what they have decreed, in their closed-off meetings using some narrow legalistic definitions, to be edifying and respectable enough for publication.
Crab bucket, thought Glenda as they hurried towards the Night Kitchen. That's how it works. . . Practically everything my Mum ever told me, that's crab bucket. Practically everything I've ever told Juliet, that's crab bucket, too. . . It's so nice and warm on the inside that you forget there's an outside. The worst of it is, the crab that mostly keeps you down is you.
A mother jailed for retracting allegations of rape by her husband [1], (allegations she now says were truthful [2]) has been freed. A few days ago, appeal judges overturned the eight-month sentence of which she had served seventeen days, ordering her immediate release. A triumph for common sense and compassion, but why was she jailed in the first place? Yes, the CPS thought she’d lied under oath and invented a rape claim - and that’s serious – but, as it turns out, her husband intimidated her into retracting the claim [3].
1. Her husband made these allegations?And on it goes. The "violent" father refused to hand over his children to the woman's sister. Who says he is violent? Why the hell should he hand over his children to the sister of a woman who tried to put him in jail? Have the child welfare gestapo taken the children into care? No? Then he is clearly not an unfit father.
2. What possible legal weight can the retraction of a retraction of a serious accusation have?
3. If so, a crime. Is he being prosecuted? No? Then it's another unsupported allegation, isn't it?
My own personal instincts - partly because I am the Secretary of State responsible for universities and partly because I think the policy is right - are very much to vote for it. But we have got to vote as a group, collectively, and we are discussing how we do that. My position is somewhat different but I am willing to go along with my colleagues. We are a disciplined party, we work together. We are clearly going through a difficult period over this issue and we want to support each other.There is no worse heresy than [to argue] that the office sanctifies the holder of it.The greatest tectonic shift that has taken place in British society in my life-time has been the corruption of the public service ethic. When I was a (highly qualified) young man, public service was still seen as an honourable career choice, which you took knowing you could have earned more in the private sector, because it offered the prospect of making a direct and positive contribution.
Each time the franc loses value, the Minister of Finance is convinced that the fact arises from everything but economic causes. He attributes it to the presence of a foreigner in the neighborhood of the Bourse or to the mysterious and malignant influences of speculation. This is not far removed intellectually from an African witch doctor’s ascription of cattle disease to the "evil eye" of a bystander and of bad weather to the unsatisfied appetites of an idol. - From Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance (2009)Hat-tip: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Financial News explains how France has "seized" €36 billion worth of pension assets: "Asset managers will have the chance to get billions of euros in mandates in the next few months for the €36bn Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), the French reserve pension fund, after the French parliament last week passed a law to use its assets to pay off the debts of France’s welfare system. The assets have been transferred into Cades, the state’s social debt sinking fund. The FRR will continue to control the assets, but as a third-party manager on behalf of Cades".Financial News misses the point - as soon as he got into power in 1997, Brown assaulted the British private pension funds, at that time the best funded in Europe. He did it for purely ideological reasons, with every intention of using the money to privilege and vastly increase the number of state employees.
FN condemns the action as follows: "The move reflects a willingness by governments to use long-term assets to fill short-term deficits, including Ireland’s announcement last week that it would use the country’s €24bn National Pensions Reserve Fund “to support the exchequer’s funding programme” and Hungary’s bid to claw $15bn of private pension funds back to the state system." In other words, with the ECB still unwilling to go into full fiat printing overdrive mode, insolvent governments, France most certainly included, are resorting to whatever piggybanks they can find.
Prosperity alone cannot deliver happiness and the coalition must promote quality of life as well as economic growth. To those who say that all this sounds like a distraction from the serious business of government, I say finding out what will really improve lives and acting on it is the serious business of government.Let's deconstruct the proposal: further, massive, intrusion by the state into private lives, and pressure to force people into the straight-jacket of what the parasites - bureaucrats, politicians and their special advisers - define as "the good life".
[They]are allowed to appeal against this decision. They have 28 days, although I think it is unlikely any appeals will be successful. They have crossed the line. I haven't met anyone - apart from them - who think the discretionary payment was justified. People power has won. Those who have tried to defend the indefensible have found themselves out in the cold.Now that's the "Big Society" at work. How d'you like it, Cameron?
Statist words will go on meaning what the statists want them to mean only if the real liberals and the real progressives allow such foolishness to continue. For the people who really do believe in liberty and in progress can now decide their own language. They can use their own preferred words amongst themselves and they can attach their own preferred words to their enemies, and when they do, there will not be a damn thing that the statists will be able to do to stop them.
Fraught as things are now, imagine how much worse they are in some parallel universe where the UK adopted the euro. After all, even in this world it managed to get itself into arguably more trouble than any developed economy with interest rates a good deal higher than those it would have had from the European Central Bank.
Its orgy of public and private debt-fuelled madness would have been even worse inside the Euro zone than it was out, hard though that is to imagine. The UK’s public-sector net debt was £952.8 billion as of September 2010. Put that in euros, remember that it might well have been higher, and it makes Ireland, Spain and Greece look like well-governed paragons.
Hard not to conclude then that UK eurosceptics missed a trick. They should have been keen to join up. By now their bloated, flailing economy would probably have gone down, taking the whole project with it.
These figures speak for themselves and expose the lie that being in the EU brings Britain trade benefits. These shocking trade figures together with the disastrous performance of the euro, for which we are having to pick the bill, more than ever indicate that it is time for us to pull out of the EU.
It is surely time to abandon the Intelligence and Security Committee in its present form and replace it with a joint parliamentary intelligence committee of both houses with its own independent secretariat.Hello? Earth to the Times: these are people the best and the brightest of whom fall for the most blatant journopuke stings and whose entire existence is one long round of off-the-record briefings to the press. Not to mention going unpunished when they reveal top secret operational details in and outside Parliament, or when exposed as agents of a hostile intelligence service.
What about the Church of England’s social housing programmes? Its inner-city work among the poor and disenfranchised? The fact that it runs thousands of schools? Its advocacy work for prisoners of conscience in repressive regimes? It unparalleled dedication to charity concerns? Its voluntary work with the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable groups? The Church does not only talk endlessly about these things; it does them. But the media aren’t very interested, you see: they wish to focus on the drama of division, contention and conflict.
My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that . . .The singularly under-reported fact is that The One is a loose cannon away from his teleprompter/autocue, and continues to get very gentle treatment from the MSM. But who cares? The social media now reach far more people than the printed press, and reach them more directly than TV. By constantly misrepresenting easily verified facts the MSM simply increases the rate at which it digs its own grave.
Unlike Collins and Dannatt, McGovern at least proved himself to be militant about what he does for a living: writing good, intelligent TV drama rather than viewing it as a form of dumbed-down prole theatre or as a stepping stone to the movies.WTF does that mean? Did Collins and Dannatt not prove themselves to be "militant" by putting their lives on the line and by leading men into battle? And what the hell is wrong with "dumbed-down prole theatre"? Does Bowden think it shows some kind of intellectual superiority to take people's money - by force - and then give them programming they won't watch? Of course I know that's what the Bitchy Boys think, but baby cheeks is supposed to be a TV critic, not an entrant for the Bitchy Boys' suck a golf-ball down a hosepipe contest.
What the hell British troops are fighting for in Afghanistan remains unclear [not if you know how to read - see here, for example], but we should all be thankful that we don’t live in a world where the army can dictate what gets shown on TV.But we do live in a world where the security apparat dictates what gets shown on TV: in all Muslim countries and most of non-Muslim Africa, in Cambodia, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, in Venezuela, in Vietnam - you know? All those people's republics that "Gritty Left-Wing Dramatists" and their Bitchy Boy paymasters have been so careful never to criticise over many decades.
Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems that require increased investment merely to preserve the status quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of bureaucracies, increasing specialization of bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal control and external defence. All of these must be borne by levying greater costs on the support population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society's budget available for investment in future economic growth must decline.
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge 1988)
In his bid to ensure the Labour government took the kudos for sparkling new schools and hospitals while avoiding current accounting of its cost, Brown used PFI as a means of keeping infrastructure investment off the public balance sheet by entering into long term deals. While the capital value of PFI contracts was only £55bn, the vastly higher sum that we will eventually pay reflects the huge mark-up costs of lengthy maintenance contracts. It was a political masterstroke, allowing him to boast of prudence by keeping the headline proportion of public debt to GDP below 40%, as promised, whilst at the same time generously ‘investing’ in public services for immediate gratification.The scam was perfectly apparent, as was the awarding of PFI contracts to Labour constutuencies regardless of merit. The point is that Brown set out to buy the electorate with their children's money, and were it not for the intervening international financial crisis, he would have succeeded.
He (correctly) calculated that by the time his trick was revealed, it would not only be someone else’s problem but would prove too complex a manoeuvre to capture the public’s imagination. After all, what is the more terrifying prospect to politicians? Telling their constituents that the last government has given the country 37 years to pay off a £200bn bill or that the current government is cutting the number of police patrolling their local neighbourhood? The other smart strand to his ruse was that the other chief beneficiaries of these flawed PFI deals were middle class professionals (consultants, lawyers, architects, accountants, building contractors), normally the most vocal and articulate critics of public sector waste.
Northern Ireland is a text-book case of the problems of a currency union. Like most big countries, the UK suffers from having one currency across the disparate regions. Without an exchange rate, varying productivity can be reflected only by prices and wages, which are rarely flexible enough to do the job. So the less productive regions end up with higher unemployment, while the more productive regions end up with higher taxes.Hat-tip NI Centre-Right
This is the internal bargain all nations strike, but it is rare to find such a clear example as Northern Ireland. Because of its huge public sector, Northern Ireland has too many people expecting British pay in British pounds with no allowance for their location. Many public-sector workers get a London weighting, but there is no equivalent Belfast lightening.
Instead, throughout Northern Ireland, there is persistent long-term unemployment, the UK’s highest level of economic inactivity, and a subsidy of about £10 billion a year, more than the one-off bailout London is considering for the republic.
As well as contributing to these problems, currency union denies even a region as developed as Northern Ireland the tools to solve them. Stormont is unable to print money or set interest rates, but it also has little scope to vary taxes. The possibility of lowering Northern Ireland’s corporation tax has been debated for years, but it will still require London’s permission. Even then, there is no guarantee of getting it past the European commission.
When such policies are discussed, Stormont’s status as a glorified county council becomes apparent. This is precisely the status Dail Eireann acquired when Ireland joined the euro. It may have taken a crisis to make it apparent but the surrender of economic sovereignty was complete from day one.
All we need now is to switch
Off the heating of
All MPs who still believe
In global warming
And we might start seeing some sense
Strange though that might seem.
Better still strip them naked,
Coupled in a chain
And parade them round and round
Ancient Parliament Square
Chanting "global warming's nigh"
'Til they drop from cold.
The Kremlin and western governments appear poised to embark on a range of joint security, political and military projects aimed at closing the worst period of friction since the cold war. Russian President Medvedev and NATO leaders are expected to agree on a range of policies and projects today, from Afghanistan to joint analysis of future security threats.OK - that will help take Pakistan out of the loop, and without that there is no hope whatever of getting out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Afghanistan has ALWAYS been a big geopolitical chili up Russia's arse, and now they are going to recover some of the influence they lost in 1979-88, with the blessings and indeed the gratitude of their old Cold War opponents.
The Russians have agreed to expand NATO supply routes to and from Afghanistan, to service Afghan helicopters, train Afghan pilots and conduct joint programmes with the west aimed at countering the Afghan heroin trade.
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