The future of Government (if any)

[Alan H]

Latest post of the previous page:

I'm afraid I don't understand how it was possible for Theresa May to begin the process of calling for an election on 8th June 2017. In 2010, as part of the coalition agreement, parliament passed an Act called the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which stated that any elected government would run for precisely five years and that no Prime Minister would be able to call for an early election just because he or she figured that an early election would enable his or her party to stand a better chance of winning. That seems to be exactly what has happened. May has called for an election 3 years early because she knows damn well she will win. Surely that's exactly what the Act was designed to stop. Therefore I question the legality of this forthcoming election.

The get-out clause was the one that said fixed terms could be ignored and a GE called if 2/3 of Parliament agreed. Labour duly entered the lobby with the Tories and hey presto, we have a GE.

[stevenw888]

Ah, I see.
So, I am completely mystified as to why Labour MPs voted in favour of the motion to dissolve parliament. surely it would have been in their interests to vote against such a motion. They are presumably all aware that they are going to get slaughtered in a general election, so was this a case of Turkeys voting for Christmas?

[Alan H]

Ah, I see.
So, I am completely mystified as to why Labour MPs voted in favour of the motion to dissolve parliament. surely it would have been in their interests to vote against such a motion. They are presumably all aware that they are going to get slaughtered in a general election, so was this a case of Turkeys voting for Christmas?

Indeed, it's mystifying: I'm not sure self-awareness is one of their strong points.

[Nick]

Ah, I see.
So, I am completely mystified as to why Labour MPs voted in favour of the motion to dissolve parliament. surely it would have been in their interests to vote against such a motion. They are presumably all aware that they are going to get slaughtered in a general election, so was this a case of Turkeys voting for Christmas?

The problem for Labour was that they couldn't really bring themselves to say that 3 more years of Tory government was better than a potential Labour government.

Besides which, I think a fair number of Labour MP's think it will speed up Corbyn's departure. The prospect of a further 8 years (at least) of being in opposition, is not that appealing for any MP.

[animist]

Ah, I see.
So, I am completely mystified as to why Labour MPs voted in favour of the motion to dissolve parliament. surely it would have been in their interests to vote against such a motion. They are presumably all aware that they are going to get slaughtered in a general election, so was this a case of Turkeys voting for Christmas?

Indeed, it's mystifying: I'm not sure self-awareness is one of their strong points.

we probably should research this, and I suspect that parties have not really attuned to the new rules on Parliamentary dissolution which the 2011 law introduced. BTW, our erstwhile TH member, Emma Woolgatherer, predicted on Facebook that Labour would not be able to bear the humiliation of preventing an election, and she turned out to be right!

[Alan H]

Theresa May announces sweeping promises on workers rights

[stevenw888]

Talking of extremely bizarre claims by political leaders prior to the election...

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/801005 ... abour-Tory

[Alan H]

James O'Brien Pulls Apart Tories' Workers Rights Policy

[Alan H]

Conservative manifesto: Theresa May's social care pledge 'will leave people helpless', government expert Dilnot says

Sir Andrew Dilnot, who carried out the coalition’s review into funding for the support in England, said the proposals 'show a less than full understanding of the problems'

[Alan H]

Conservative manifesto: Why many will pay more for care

What the Conservatives have proposed for elderly care in England is complex.

They are changing certain thresholds as well as what can be defined as assets and how long you wait before you have to pay your bill.

But in the end it can be summed up quite easily - they want people to pay more towards the cost of their care, but are prepared to wait until you die before taking it from your estate.

Yes, some elements of their plans sound generous and certainly some people will benefit, but large numbers won't.

Why? Because we are a nation of homeowners and these plans make sure that whatever sort of care you need, the value of your home can be taken into account.

[Alan H]

But... Tory social care plans will leave people helpless, says former adviser

Andrew Dilnot, who reviewed social care for coalition, expresses alarm at proposal that will mean elderly are ‘completely on their own’

The chair of the long-term care commission has attacked the Conservatives’ plan to make more elderly people pay for social care, saying it would leave people “completely on their own” to deal with future costs.

Under the plans to be unveiled in the Tory manifesto on Thursday, people with more than £100,000 in assets will have to pay for their own care out of the value of their homes rather than relying on the council to cover the cost of visits by care workers.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, the economist who reviewed social care for the coalition government in 2011, expressed alarm at the plans and claimed they showed a misunderstanding of the problem.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Dilnot said: “I’m very surprised that there is such specific information that appears to be new thinking, that I’d argue shows a less than full understanding of the problems.”

[Alan H]

Some interesting comments from someone on Twitter:

@jjpalethorpe

The Tory social care policy in the UK really is some fascinating leopard eating faces party stuff.

Previously, if you had over £23250 in savings, you had to pay for your own elderly home care. Below that? Govt pays.

Now it's classed as over £100,000 in assets including your house.

Products will be available to extract value from your house without you having to sell it. Reverse mortgaging the property essentially.

What's particularly evil about this is that the Tories built homeowning up as a surefire way to pass on something to your kids.

All those ex-Council properties that were bought, all the mortgages paid off and the homes are going back to the bank eventually.

People told they'd have something to pass on because Tories weren't going to provide housing...

...will now have nothing to pass on because Tories won't provide social elderly care.

It puts the houses back on the market as the Financial Product Providers take their share after the homeowner dies.

The market which is unaffordable for many of the children of the homeowners who'll receive a fraction of the house's worth now.

The endgame of Thatcher's nation of homeowners, leaving the next generation as a generation of renters on the free market. She'd be proud.

It also renders thirty years of rampant property speculation void as far as it comes to the kids of Right to Buyers and homeowners.

All the times the centrists assured people that jaw dropping house price inflation was ok because intergenerational wealth transfer etc

Eg: "what have you got against homeowners looking to pass something on" even as ex-Council houses got swept up by landlords

Turns out lol, no. Your parents bought a house for a price which might make a deposit these days and it's worth so much more now.

But they're going to have to mortgage it back to the bank to pay for their care because Tories aren't actually humans.

They paid the bank for their house, they paid their taxes and now they're old they have to sell their houses value to pay for care.

Because it's more important to have low Corporation Tax and reduced rates for the rich than it is to provide services. Strong & stable aye?

Only people coming out of this well are the financial services offering to reverse mortgage your home. Everyone else gets utterly ripped off

So that's it. The modern Tories are about to set their, and Blair's homeowning society up as a food bowl for the financial​ sector.

This is the race to the bottom. Being so devoted to competitive low taxes that you can't afford provision of care to your own people.

[Alan H]

Conservative party manifesto launch, factchecked

[Alan H]

Tories confirm London Assembly also faces election rules shake-up

Conservative plans to overhaul how the London Mayor is elected would also be extended to the London Assembly, MayorWatch has been told, potentially eliminating smaller parties from the capital’s scrutiny body.

The party’s manifesto, published on Thursday, commits the next Government to moving Mayoral elections and Police and Crime Commissioner elections to the First Past The Post (FPTP).

MayorWatch has now been told that the party expects to extend the changes to the London Assembly, a move which could radically alter the body’s political make-up.

The 25 Assembly Members are currently elected by a mix of FPTP constituencies and a ‘top-up’ list which ensures smaller parties who can gain the support or 5% or more of Londoners also gain seats.

It’s understood that changing how AMs are elected could also see constituency boundaries changed.

Depending on the new boundaries, the Liberal Democrats, which currently have just one member but have previously won as many as five seats, could potentially do better under a revised electoral system as much of their vote is concentrated in the South West of London.

However moving to an all-constituency FPTP model would make it significantly harder for parties such as the Greens and UKIP, which are currently represented on the body, from being elected.

Commenting on the plans, Labour AM Tom Copley said moving away from the current system “would be a backwards step” for politics in the capital, adding that a majority of Assembly Members “oppose this change”.

Baroness Jenny Jones, a former Green party AM, commented: “Even if Assembly is larger, we are back to the bad old days of fewer elected radical voices”.

[Alan H]

Conservative manifesto: Theresa May announces UK will remain part of European Convention of Human Rights

Theresa May has said the UK will remain signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights for the next Parliament.

The Prime Minister was reportedly planning to make the case to leave the ECHR a central aspect of her 2020 election campaign before she called for an early election.

Critics warned the move would have weakened citizens' rights.

Ms May previously said the ECHR frustrated her plans while Home Secretary to deport hate preacher Abu Qatada.

The Good Friday Agreement, a key aspect of the Northern Ireland peace process, also depends on the ECHR leading critics to warn withdrawing from the Convention would be “playing with fire”.

The ECHR protects freedoms such as the prohibition of torture, slavery, the right to a fair trial and freedom of expression.

[Alan H]

THERESA MAY TO CREATE NEW INTERNET THAT WOULD BE CONTROLLED AND REGULATED BY GOVERNMENT

Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.

Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works.

"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet," it states. "We disagree."

Senior Tories confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the phrasing indicates that the government intends to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online.

The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims.

It comes just soon after the Investigatory Powers Act came into law. That legislation allowed the government to force internet companies to keep records on their customers' browsing histories, as well as giving ministers the power to break apps like WhatsApp so that messages can be read.

The manifesto makes reference to those increased powers, saying that the government will work even harder to ensure there is no "safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online". That is apparently a reference in part to its work to encourage technology companies to build backdoors into their encrypted messaging services – which gives the government the ability to read terrorists' messages, but also weakens the security of everyone else's messages, technology companies have warned.

The government now appears to be launching a similarly radical change in the way that social networks and internet companies work. While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn't published, the manifesto suggests.

The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests.

The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. "We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm," the Conservatives write.

If this is even close to what she intends, then it leaves just one question: how stupid is Theresa May? Xi Jinping would be proud.

[Alan H]

[Alan H]

No photo ID, no vote: why this cynical Tory plan will suffocate democracy

Nestled among a raft of Ukip-esque anti-immigration policies in the Tory manifesto is a plan to force people to show identification when they vote. No passport, no driving licence? No vote. The Tories say this would stop electoral fraud, but statistics suggest they’re interested in making it harder for people to vote.

According to data from the government’s own report of the 51.4m votes cast in all elections in 2015, there were a mere 130 allegations of voting fraud in 2015. That amounts to 0.00025% of votes. Now, these figures can’t be taken as exact; some of the allegations might be untrue, some go unnoticed. And as the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) pointed out, the report largely relies on “anecdotes and self-professed claims to have witnessed (or even just heard about) electoral fraud”. But even when taking all of this into account, you’d be hard pressed to make the case that voter fraud is in any way a significant problem in the UK.

What this means is the Conservatives have decided that if they win on 8 June, they’ll enshrine voter ID in law to deal with a problem that’s far from widespread. What’s more, the ERS says that voter ID wouldn’t stop vote-buying or coercion, even if it were a major problem. What it will do is make it more difficult for everyone else to vote. In fact, the Electoral Commission estimated that 3.5 million voters (7.5% of the electorate) would have no acceptable piece of photo ID – never mind the people who forget their ID or lose it just before an election.

[Alan H]

Dim and Dimmer: two Tory car crashes for the price of one

“There’s an £8bn hole in your plans for NHS spending,” Marr pointed out. Dim twitched nervously. There wasn’t, they were just reallocating £8bn of existing NHS funding, Dim said. “That’s not true,” said Marr. Dim wisely chose not to contradict this.

Things quickly turned worse when Marr moved on to winter fuel payments. These were completely uncosted as no one knew what level they would be means tested. “They aren’t uncosted,” Dim said defensively. It was just that they hadn’t yet been properly costed. Or rather they might have been but it just wasn’t the right moment to let everyone know what the costings were. There was no point bothering voters with loads of numbers just before an important election.

[Alan H]

[Alan H]

Weak and wobbly: Theresa May changes social care plans

Theresa May has said proposed changes to social care funding will include an option for an "absolute limit" on the money people will have to pay.

The Conservatives ruled out a cap on total costs in last week's manifesto, instead saying no-one would see their assets fall below £100,000.

The PM said the plan was "sensible" and would stop the system from collapse.

But she said she wanted to address "shameful" fears that people would be forced to sell their family home.

She told activists in Wales that the Conservatives were "determined the fix the system" and the consultation on the plans, if the party wins the election, would consider a cap among the options.

"We will make sure nobody has to sell their family home to pay for care," she said.

"We will make sure there's an absolute limit on what people need to pay. And you will never have to go below £100,000 of your savings, so you will always have something to pass on to your family"