Politics at Westminster | BREAKING: UKIP

The report, by the Office for National Statistics, reveals that as recently as 1991, around 65% of 25- to 34-year-olds in England had bought their own home. But by 2012 that figure had since declined to under 45%, while among 35- to 44-year-olds it was also down sharply, from almost 80% to around 65%.
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http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/22/collapse-homeownership-property-ons-report

who the feck is that 44%? Less than 10% of the under 30s I know are even close to buying a house. I bet they're all called Tarquin.
 
Silva said:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/22/collapse-homeownership-property-ons-report

who the feck is that 44%? Less than 10% of the under 30s I know are even close to buying a house. I bet they're all called Tarquin.
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According to the English Housing Survey it was down to 36% by 13-14. If the rate of decline has remained steady its probably already close to 30%.
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An almost 40% fall in home ownership/mortgages in 10 years is pretty astonishing though. But let's get back to the important issues, like Corbyn's reshuffle.
 
Untied said:
He should be slaughtered for the contradiction with the Autumn statement. But let's focus on the preemptive resignations by Labour ministers unknown to the public.
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You're really blaming the press for covering the reshuffle that took place over 3 days, and had been extensively briefed by Corbyn's comms director for the past few weeks? That he chose to start on the day that Labour were supposed to be dedicating to rail fare rises?
 
Ubik said:
You're really blaming the press for covering the reshuffle that took place over 3 days, and had been extensively briefed by Corbyn's comms director for the past few weeks? That he chose to start on the day that Labour were supposed to be dedicating to rail fare rises?
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Untied said:


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Genuinely not sure what your point is. I agree that it's dominated the media agenda. Because he took so long to do it and Milne built it up for weeks beforehand.
 
Untied said:
He should be slaughtered for the contradiction with the Autumn statement. But let's focus on the preemptive resignations by Labour ministers unknown to the public.



Amazing from The Times
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Agree these sought of things only interest and excite political analysts and Corbyn bashers.
 
Untied said:
He should be slaughtered for the contradiction with the Autumn statement. But let's focus on the preemptive resignations by Labour ministers unknown to the public.



Amazing from The Times
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:confused:Not read the accompanying article, but hardly looks like a 'smear campaign' looking at that page in isolation.
 
Drifter said:
Chancellor George Osborne warns UK economy not out of the woods yet amid China rout

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknew...amid-china-rout/ar-AAgsABw?ocid=mailsignoutmd

Sticking plaster beginning crack.
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Osborne is so pro-Europe his leadership campaign and chance of becoming pm probably depend on an 'in' vote. And irrespective of other issues the majority of economists say the UK will be harmed by exit. It's in his own interest to start painting his picture about now.
 
From a blog on BBC.co.uk that has since been removed. Right or wrong for the BBC to do?:

Just before 9am we learned from Laura Kuenssberg, who comes on the programme every Wednesday ahead of PMQs, that she was speaking to one junior shadow minister who was considering resigning. I wonder, mused our presenter Andrew Neil, if they would consider doing it live on the show?

The question was put to Laura, who thought it was a great idea. Considering it a long shot we carried on the usual work of building the show, and continued speaking to Labour MPs who were confirming reports of a string of shadow ministers considering their positions.

Within the hour we heard that Laura had sealed the deal: the shadow foreign minister Stephen Doughty would resign live in the studio.

Although he himself would probably acknowledge he isn't a household name, we knew his resignation just before PMQs would be a dramatic moment with big political impact. We took the presenters aside to brief them on the interview while our colleagues on the news desk arranged for a camera crew to film him and Laura arriving in the studio for the TV news packages.
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Ubik said:
Genuinely not sure what your point is. I agree that it's dominated the media agenda. Because he took so long to do it and Milne built it up for weeks beforehand.
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It's just another artificially inflated anti-Corbyn story, being heavily peddled by those in the media with clear agendas, Kuenssberg being one of the main offenders.

I mean the story revolves around how long it took, but no one seems to have a coherent reason for why a reshuffle taking a long time is actually a bad thing.

1. I've not really followed politics closely for that long but a drawn out reshuffle doesn't seem a bad thing in itself. "Oh no. They are taking more than 12 hours to appoint people to the jobs they want".

2. It's been portrayed as chaotic leadership but it was only drawn out because it was sabotaged by the threat of resignations from ministers once the reshuffle was underway. But of course that's also entirely the Corbyn camp's fault and the media shouldn't hold those MPs to account at all. And as a a result it all took so long and isn't that terrible. And look. We said he was going to sack Benn and then he didn't. So he must have u-turned. What a weak leader.

3. Of course we can step back and say again: Corbyn needs to be impeccable because the media is stacked against him and this reshuffle was just another example of him allowing those with an agenda an easy attack. But really this is political/media victim blaming. It is absolutely evident that the media as a whole is stacked against Corbyn.
 
Untied said:
They wouldn't do the same with a Junior Conservative Minister
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Of course they would, they are in the business of breaking news.


Untied said:
2. It's been portrayed as chaotic leadership but it was only drawn out because it was sabotaged by the threat of resignations from ministers once the reshuffle was underway. But of course that's also entirely the Corbyn camp's fault and the media shouldn't hold those MPs to account at all.
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Hold them to account for what, a principled disagreement? The sacking of Pat McFadden, and later appointment of Emily Thornberry, were bound to be contentious. There was also discontent after Corbyn's office were said to have briefed the media with lies.
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Of course they would, they are in the business of breaking news.
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Breaking it, not making it. They encouraged a politician to resign in return for some publicity he wouldn't normally get.
 
Shamwow said:
And shouldn't.
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Yeah. My point is that if we look at it from an impartiality point of view, they clearly wouldn't have done the same for a Junior Conservative Minister out of fear of the shit-storm of impartiality criticism they would have received from the right (and the threat of funding cuts)

Nick 0208 Ldn said:
Hold them to account for what, a principled disagreement? The sacking of Pat McFadden, and later appointment of Emily Thornberry, were bound to be contentious. There was also discontent after Corbyn's office were said to have briefed the media with lies.
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If it's shambolic to have a long reshuffle for some reason (still not really sure why the length of time is actually a problem but anyway), then some of the blame lies with those who are disrupting the process (whilst preaching electability).

Meh, I wouldn't trust the staged resignation statement of Doughty.

People on the right of the party are just throwing their toys out of the pram. It's fine for Dugher to write an op-ed in the New Statesman that prominently features a tweet from a fake Momentum account but not OK for Corbyn's office to brief that McFadden wasn't sacked just for one PMQ. (If he was it would be fair enough. The question could have been written by a Tory whip)
 
If Corbyn's team briefed the press with lies then Doughty should be able to point out specific lies that appeared in the press?
 
Shamwow said:
They aren't any other TV company though, are they?
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Yeah I guess not but they might as well be.

It's really nothing special any more both in terms of programming and news courage, it's seems the reasoning to why we are paying for it now anyway is the exact same as to why we pay for old Queenie - we have to. It's British institution and like any British institution don't expect anything other than self interest.
 
Untied said:
It's just another artificially inflated anti-Corbyn story, being heavily peddled by those in the media with clear agendas, Kuenssberg being one of the main offenders.

I mean the story revolves around how long it took, but no one seems to have a coherent reason for why a reshuffle taking a long time is actually a bad thing.

1. I've not really followed politics closely for that long but a drawn out reshuffle doesn't seem a bad thing in itself. "Oh no. They are taking more than 12 hours to appoint people to the jobs they want".

2. It's been portrayed as chaotic leadership but it was only drawn out because it was sabotaged by the threat of resignations from ministers once the reshuffle was underway. But of course that's also entirely the Corbyn camp's fault and the media shouldn't hold those MPs to account at all. And as a a result it all took so long and isn't that terrible. And look. We said he was going to sack Benn and then he didn't. So he must have u-turned. What a weak leader.

3. Of course we can step back and say again: Corbyn needs to be impeccable because the media is stacked against him and this reshuffle was just another example of him allowing those with an agenda an easy attack. But really this is political/media victim blaming. It is absolutely evident that the media as a whole is stacked against Corbyn.
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Seems like you're just blaming the media. Your opening salvo and point 1 seem to be the same, you don't seem to grasp that this would come across as indecisive. Point 2, this was always entirely predictable, and your point is similar to point 1. Point 3, revert to point 1, the media is to blame.

It looks like a shambles, but apparently that's all the media's fault, I think that's it in a nutshell.
 
:lol: It's almost like Iain Duncan Smith never happened. The press like incompetence. The press like divided parties. The press like rebellions. This is not some plot to stop Corbyn getting into power, he's doing a sound job of that himself. You seriously think they wouldn't lap up the chance of a cabinet member resigning live on TV in the aftermath of the EU referendum? Did they not extensively cover the Reckless and Carswell defections, and talk up the chances of more occurring?

1. I've not really followed politics closely for that long but a drawn out reshuffle doesn't seem a bad thing in itself. "Oh no. They are taking more than 12 hours to appoint people to the jobs they want".
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You've already presented the main problem with it in your original complaint about the press - if the reshuffle takes longer, it dominates the news coverage for longer. If the press are focused on your awkward reshuffle, they aren't focused on things you might be trying to campaign on that day. Like rail fare rises, for instance. The story becomes about your indecision and cracks within your party, rather than on something the Tories are doing wrong.
 
The "it's fine because that's how it works" argument makes me want to bang my head against a wall until I no longer know how to bang my head against a wall.
 
Shamwow said:
The "it's fine because that's how it works" argument just makes me want to bang my head against a wall until I no longer know how to bang my head against a wall.
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Yeah, I know what you mean. For what it's worth, plenty of the criticism at Corbyn is valid. I do think he continues to look more and more out of his depth as time goes on, but it also seems evident that there's an over the top focus upon what appears to be a relatively minor reshuffle. Not to mention the posts which, as per usual have people looking to hound him either way. He's either trying to oust all his internal Labour opponents, or is completely indecisive because he's not doing a lot. In fact, it almost seems like some people want to see him get rid of Benn and co just to have something to moan about in regards to Corbyn.
 
Interesting read from Peter Hitchens whether or not you agree with him

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/01/letting-rip-against-all-this-reshuffle-garbage.html

Letting Rip Against all This Reshuffle Garbage
It’s now plain that our supposedly super-accurate RAF bombers have done very little in Syria since the great Parliamentary vote on the subject. If the military need was so urgent, why is this so?

It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now that Parliament and the government’s regiment of media toadies were actually being invited to authorise raids on Jeremy Corbyn. The government also wanted to implicate us in some way in military action in Syria, presumably to make Saudi Arabia happy and to make deeper engagement possible later - if we can find a way of backing the pro-Saudi rebels who have done so much to turn Syria into anarchy and ruins.

But the ridiculous praise for Hilary Benn’s fatuous speech (regarded as Churchillian by the sort of people who think Downton Abbey is great drama), and the Labour applause for it, were the real victory. Had the Oldham by-election (the following day, on 3rd December) gone the other way, the Blairites in New Labour would have mounted a putsch against Jeremy Corbyn, and tried to recapture their party from its annoying members. This sort of thing has been done to the Tories, when IDS ( a far less competent leader than Mr Corbyn) was overthrown by a supersmooth, pinstriped putsch.

The timing of the Syria debate, in retrospect, looks rather suspicious. There was no special military or diplomatic reason, as is quite obvious now, for holding it that night. The only reason for hurry was the Oldham poll. There was nothing else on the grid that couldn’t be altered. A humiliation for |Mr Corbyn on Wednesday night at Westminster and another one on Thursday night in Oldham Town Hall, and the brave boys of New Labour would have acted.

Alas for Blairism, the people of Oldham didn’t do as the Blairites wanted. This, of course was immediately said to be in spite of Jeremy Corbyn, and not to his credit. If it had gone the other way, it would (I promise you) have been entirely his fault, and the people’s verdict on Corbynism.

David Cameron and his media helpers really, really want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Cameron’s attitude towards Mr Corbyn at Question Time is one of real, venomous enmity. He ignores Mr Corbyn’s actual questions (this week those questions were by common consent pertinent and well-asked) and instead fans the undisguised and inevitable hostility between Mr Corbyn and his MPs.

Why does he do this? You’d think he’d want to keep Mr Corbyn there, if he’s as awful and useless as we are constantly being told.

On Channel Four News last night ( a programme which might once have been a good deal more sympathetic to Corbynism than it would now like to admit, having become a Blairite organ like all the rest) , there was speculation after the supposedly disastrous Labour reshuffle that we were heading for a one-party state, as Labour is now so enfeebled.

Again, you’d think the Tories would like that. But they plainly don’t. The identifiable sycophants of David Cameron in the media are dedicated to attacks on Mr Corbyn, attacks so relentless that you would think there was nothing else to write about, that the economy was fine (rather than poised on a precipice) that the NHS was perfect (rather than in increasingly deep difficulties) and that the Prime Minister’s attempts to escape his EU referendum pledge (a hopeless, illogical tangle) were going well. Not to mention disasters visible to me daily such as the hopeless delay on the electrification of the Great Western mainline, miles behind timetable and mountains of money over budget. Let’s forget HS2 and the Heathrow expansion, or the relentless slither towards a Scottish secession, and the utter failure of all attempts to control our borders.

No, the most important thing in politics turns out to be whether Mike Who swaps jobs with Brenda What, and if Stan Nobody has quit his non-job as deputy minister for Tramways and Fine Arts, in protest at the easing out of Albert Whatsit from his non-job as Shadow Secretary of State for Wind Farms.

Billed for weeks as the ‘revenge reshuffle’, it was supposed to be a sort of Westminster version of the Red Wedding in ‘Game of Thrones’, with the Shadow Cabinet corridor knee-deep in blood and littered with grotesque political corpses and the weltering, obscene figures of the dying, crying ‘treachery!’ and ‘murder!’ What, I wonder, was the source for this fantasy? I don’t think Mr Corbyn talks much to the Parliamentary Lobby, who he rightly recognises are not his friends.

The actual event (in which great crowds of reporters hung about stairwells and lift-shafts trying to find something, anything interesting to write about) involved Jeremy Corbyn boring a few colleagues half to death with conciliatory, polite conversations, and getting rid of a few people from (unpaid, unimportant) jobs because they disagree with him about major policy issues. Well, I never. A party leader who wants allies in his Shadow Cabinet.

Well, I never, a party leader whose authority comes from the old-fashioned left-wing party membership clashing with a new-fashioned left-wing Parliamentary Party whose authority comes from their endorsement by the media and the money men who decide who’s top in politics.

For the first time in my life, this country is actually coming to resemble the Marxist caricature of crude money and power, concentrated in a power elite, versus the disdained people – a caricature that has never hitherto been true at all and which does not prove that the Marxists were right.

For the power and the money are all lined up on the side of the revolutionary radicals of Blairism, whose origins (even if they don’t know it) lie in the raw pre-Lenin, (and pre-Kautsky) Marxism of 1848 - fanatical egalitarians ready to wreck the education of millions for an ideology , wild, dogmatic warmists ready to wreck our economy for the sake of their faith, flingers-open of borders at any cost, wagers of liberal wars and bombing campaigns, overthrowers of foreign governments which don’t conform to their desires, servile slaves of foreign authorities which accord with their desires, viciously intolerant promoters of the most all-embracing social and cultural theory since the Reformation.

To these people, now dominating the House of Commons, the media and the academy, Mr Corbyn is (paradoxically) an infuriatingly conservative person, who (for the wrong reasons, but never mind) keeps open the possibility that they might be wrong, and (worse) that they might one day be defeated by discontent. He thinks in categories they have long ago abandoned, nation, class and history. His old-fashioned good manners alone are a reproach to the modern go-getter who has none.

No, no, I don’t agree with him. Don’t get carried away. But they loathe him just as much as they loathe me – and for what is basically the same reason - anyone with a memory is an obstacle to their project

The only opposition they are ready to tolerate is one that doesn’t raise any awkward questions. They expect to beat Labour whoever leads it. But they don’t want the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition - still an implicitly influential position - to haunt them with memories of when this country had a genuinely two-party system and all that went with that. As Richard Neville said so perceptively right at the start of this revolution 50 and more years ago ‘There is an inch of difference between the two parties – but it is in that inch that we all live’ .

I think that’s it, anyway. I just felt like letting rip against all this humbug and garbage.
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If it's Dugher that he's referring to, probably the stuff about him being incompetent at his job and disloyal.
 
Ubik said:
If it's Dugher that he's referring to, probably the stuff about him being incompetent at his job and disloyal.
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Oh the horror. The latter is actually true and the former is a matter of opinion. Hardly a smear.

Don't see Doughty complaining so loudly about far, far worse smears against Corbyn.
 
I'm pretty certain that he resigned in support of McFadden, and that he contests the officially stated reason of disloyalty.

By the way, what of these stories about Thornberry's relationship with a rather questionable law firm? Considering her portfolio, Corbyn's choice cold be seen as provocative.
 
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One of the other guys that resigned, Kevan Jones, is the one that Livingstone said had mental health issues a few months back. Good to see Livingstone was well disciplined for that.
 
Notorious Blairite Kevin Maguire

 
Ubik said:
Notorious Blairite Kevin Maguire

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Ok it's fine then because some bloke who isn't a blairite says it's fine.

What about those who would be moaning no matter which party was the target? Does their opinion not count?
 
I'm sure you'd be just as annoyed.
 
He was going to resign regardless, but evidently had a message he wanted to put out there while doing so. Andrew Neil was quite understandably more than happy to oblige. If one of McDonnell or Corbyn would like to offer a counter viewpoint, he'll facilitate that too (although they might be wary of such a determined and able interrogator).
 
Nick 0208 Ldn said:
He was going to resign regardless, but evidently had a message he wanted to put out there while doing so. Andrew Neil was quite understandably more than happy to oblige. If one of McDonnell or Corbyn would like to offer a counter viewpoint, he'll facilitate that too (although they might be wary of such a determined and able interrogator).
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It wasn't doughtys suggestion though. The BBC suggested it to him and in their own words he hadn't yet made his mind up. Therefore it's impossible that weren't implicitly encouraging him to resign.
 
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