The OBR yesterday showed that the Higher Education reforms will increase net debt by £13bn. The findings contradict Vince Cable’s claims that the policy switch was motivated by the “current economic climate”.
A petition has been launched, that will result in 2,012 children taking part in a peaceful demonstration in Westminster against the savage cuts to school sport.
Tomorrow’s papers will probably note the forecast that, by 2015, public sector employment will fall by 330,000, one hundred and sixty thousand less than the 490,000 forecast in June. 30,000 of the difference is down to “methodological refinements”. The remaining 130,000 reduction is because the Spending Review cut more from social security and less from Departmental budgets than OBR expected – a different balance of misery, rather than a genuine improvement.
This morning, Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, writing on the ConservativeHome website, accused the Labour leader of Lambeth council of “frightening people” about cuts to essential services; here, Steve Reed responds to these criticisms, and explains just who is to blame for the cuts.
Richard North, the influential right wing blogger who was exposed by Left Foot Forward last week for making racist comments on his blog, has lost two cases he brought before the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) about the reporting of climate change in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. North was at the forefront of briefing, and even writing in, mainstream media during the controversy earlier this year about climate science.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has again been caught misrepresenting video footage, claiming the anti-fees protests were a “rebellion against big government”.
Another week, another chameleon-like manouvre from the Liberal Democrats as the tuition fees crisis looks increasingly likely to be the party’s poll tax moment. As Patrick Wintour writes in the Guardian, many Lib Dems have privately admitted their regret over signing the NUS pledge opposing tuition fees at the time of the election, arguing they did it under the encouragement of party HQ.
Wagner’s dreams of snow-capped glory may have gone up in smoke yesterday, but there’s still hope for those hoping to stick it to Simon Cowell – and do the same to the Clegg-eron coalition over their savage cuts agenda. Captain SKA’s hit video “Liar Liar” – featured on Left Foot Forward ten days ago – will go for Christmas gold against whoever wins the X Factor, going on sale from December 12th.
In some respects, managing the North Korean regime is rather like the British government negotiating with Irish republican separatists in the days leading up to and following the Downing Street Declaration and the Good Friday Agreement; talks continued, in one way or another, in spite of attempts to by various elements of the Irish separatists to derail them, in large part because the British government would not be baited into breaking them off, weathering outrage after outrage to keep the process alive.
The Guardian this morning reports that “Labour says ‘squeezed middle’ earns up to £50,000”. The counter-intuitive result is based on analysis by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies.
