The IMF has arrived in Dublin. Despite Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern dismissing on Sunday any talk of Ireland getting a bailout from the IMF or the Stability Fund as ‘fiction’, the reality could no longer be denied on Tuesday evening as Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, was forced to admit that the governement was about to commence “short focused consultation” with the IMF and EU Officials.
Nearly 50,000 people have viewed a music video against the coalition’s cuts, which features a montage of Nick Clegg, George Osborne and David Cameron droning on about us “all being in this together”, and even a star-turn from Mr Clegg’s (alleged) political inspiration – Mrs Thatcher.
At present your Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not discriminate between different types of web data. So the text, images etc. of this Left Foot Forward article are delivered to you at the same speed as a page from the BBC News website or an auction page on eBay.
Yesterday’s leading article in The Times on the Labour Party leadership election system more reflects the paper’s enduring hostility to trade unionism than a serious concern for Labour’s integrity. What other proposal for extending democracy would begin by proposing a radical reduction in the electorate?
The Independent reports that Iain Duncan Smith “misled Parliament” on welfare. This is just the tip of the iceberg in relation to DWP’s misuse of statistics.
The latest Reuters/IPSOS Mori Political Monitor makes grim reading for the Liberal Democrat leadership. Though the headline voting intention figures – Conservatives 36% (-3); Labour 39% (+3); Liberal Democrats 14% (unchanged) – actually represent an improvement from their faltering performance in the Sun/YouGov daily tracker series, satisfaction and perception levels among the public leave Mr Clegg and his colleagues with plenty to think about.
The announcement by Francis Maude yesterday that the coalition government wants to set up mutuals to run our public services is typical of what’s wrong with Cameron and Clegg’s ramshackle regime. On one level the plan seems a good idea – to give people who work in public services the opportunity to run those services. Indeed, the idea of mutual public services is something the Co-operative party has campaigned for throughout its history.
The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has today published the findings of its report to the government on the recommended level for the proposed cap on skilled immigration from outside the European Union. The report demonstrates the scale of the task which the Government has set itself by committing to reduce net immigration to the tens of thousands from the current level of almost 200,000.
Iain Duncan Smith announced last week that the unemployed will, under some circumstances, be required to undertake unpaid “community work”, with strict sanctions for those who fail to comply. His view was that this would help people re-integrate into the labour market, by getting into the habit of work.
What is the government’s version of a ‘Big Society’ all about? According to a strong statement from a new Christian network called Common Wealth – in which I should straight away declare my interest as a supporter – it’s an ideological con trick aimed at co-opting civil society groups (including churches and charities) into the Conservative/Lib Dem agenda to shrink the responsibilities of government so that the poorest get to pay for an economic mess created by the wealthy.
