Labour and the five empty pledges
http://ua.am/9bID

Labour let it be known yesterday that its election manifesto will contain a series of 'guarantees' on the economy, jobs, crime, health and education. Here, EDWARD HEATHCOAT AMORY examines the pledges and the reality behind them.

PLEDGE: Cut Britain's deficit in half in four years.
REALITY: Not only is this pledge extremely modest - it is merely a promise to halve the rate at which our national debt will be increasing, to £89billion a year in 2014 - but Labour won't explain how it will be achieved. Experts estimate that outside the protected areas of health, education and policing, all other departments face budget cuts of 17 per cent, but ministers won't say where the axe will fall. And the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies says a further £13billion of cuts or higher taxes will be needed.


PLEDGE: Neighbourhood police teams for all communities
REALITY: There are already neighbourhood-police teams throughout Britain; just not very visible ones, and nothing in this pledge is going to change that - certainly no new money is being allocated to delivering it. Half of the current neighbourhood teams are mere ' Blunkett's Bobbies', rather than real policemen. In fact, under Labour, the number of police stations in Britain has fallen by 500 - a 25 per cent drop. And beat police officers are so tied up in red tape that they spend only one hour in five on patrol. Labour has already spent £1billion on neighbourhood policing - with nothing to show for it.

PLEDGE: Any young person jobless for more than two years will be offered training or work.
REALITY: The current youth unemployment pledge - that anyone under 24 out of work for six months will be offered training or work - is expensive enough at £1.5billion. Promising to extend it to everyone out of work for more than two years would cost far more, depending on how ministers define 'unemployed'. 250,000 people are officially unemployed for more than two years, but the real figure, which includes 2million on incapacity benefit, is far higher. And since Labour spent £75billion on the New Deal since 1997, while the long-term youth unemployment rate actually rose, more spending might just waste more money.

PLEDGE: NHS treatment within 18 weeks or a legal right to go private
REALITY: These 'rights' - other pledges including a right to cancer care within two weeks, and a right to treatment by an NHS dentist - are not all they seem. The full consultation paper merely says that primary care trusts would have to take 'reasonable steps' to find an alternative hospital, and they would not be allowed to pay more than the NHS 'tariff' for that care. In some cases, where there is a 'limited capacity nationally', the so-called right would disappear altogether. Nor is it clear that tougher targets will help the NHS; up to 1,200 people in mid-Staffordshire lost their lives over the past few years because NHS managers put targets first and patient care second.

PLEDGE: Personal tuition for children falling behind
REALITY: Ministers are offering ten hours of one-to-one tuition for children not meeting key targets. They claim that £315million is set aside for this, but as well as being a hopelessly inadequate estimate of the true cost of one-to-one tuition the cash is already in the schools budget, so nothing will change. Pilot projects have failed because of a shortage of tutors; Labour has no idea how to find enough to deliver this pledge nationally. Nor do ministers address the issue raised by this pledge; that tuition is necessary because overall education standards have fallen; official figures show that half a million pupils have left school under Labour with no 'useful literacy' - unable to read or write.
 

Create the 2 faces of gordon brown:

http://londonlx.com/brown
 

Friday Counts 'entirely appropriate'?!

Sure... if you have a friday vote too.

People have to have confidence in the result and that ain't gonna happen with boxes lying around for hours.
 

They're taking the piss!
Just got a letter through my door saying they are closing the Blackwall tunnel every weekday night for 3 years.

That seems bad enough ... but instead of running a contra-flow in the other tunnel, they are swapping the direction of it entirely and putting in 20mph average speed cameras (that can't be safe!)
Wanna go southbound? .. Tough.

As they say, the tunnel is 112 years old so can't just be left as it is.... but it wouldn't take 3 years to stick an entirely new tunnel in... which could have been associated with a replanning of all the roads around the north side which get clogged up all the time.

I suppose the only reason they aren't running it contraflow is that the speed cameras work in one direction.

I don't often use the tunnel itself but will mean getting anywhere round here after 2100 is going to be a nightmare - especially trying to get into docklands from the a12.

Big fat FAIL.

This is the story about it:
http://ta4.at/.1o3xg
 

Labour are running out of money and won't be able to afford an election campaign:

http://ua.am/8MRg
 

ComHome guesses the date for the election will be 25th March so that labour don't have don't have to make a nasty budget:
http://ua.am/8Mx7
 

Gordon's scorching the earth in his typical party political way, unlike PMs of the past:

http://ua.am/8Mq8
 

Seems we are top of the league!

.... of being the worst in the developed world:

http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/2009/11/worst-in-world.html

full marks, brown, you twat.
 

BBC Gives BNP a Voice, but Not Climate Sceptics

It seems that the BBC are happy to give the highly controversial British National Party (BNP) a voice on Question Time, but didn't give a climate sceptic the chance to have a say on the previous week's Newsnight (15th October), which was laughingly billed as 'Greens on trial.' The idea was supposedly to ask tough questions on whether the Greens were blocking innovations vital to the fight against climate change. Any 'trial' without a witness for the prosecution is surely a sham.

The Newsnight discussion (30 minutes of it) was framed so that the introduction saw the return of BBC 'ethical man,' Justin Rowlatt, warning that we had only six years to act or else it would be too late, together with footage of world leaders speaking about the severity of the problem, plus footage of the US army on patrol and a voiceover saying that even they now see climate change as one of the biggest global threats.

In the studio defending the green movement for a good 20 minutes were Chairman and Director of the Ecologist and Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith, director of the film The Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong, and co-founder of the green PR company Futerra, Solitaire Townsend. All of them got the opportunity to promote the climate disaster scenario. The questioning from presenter Emily Maitlis was pretty hopeless.

ABD Environment spokesman Paul Biggs commented: "Ex-newsreader Peter Sissons recently lifted the lid on what is effectively the BBC's policy of ignoring the legitimate arguments of climate sceptics. Clearly the BBC is impartial when it suits them, but this impartiality does not extend to the climate debate. Apparently climate sceptics rank below the BNP on the BBC's impartiality scale."
 

http://ge2010.co.uk

Wiki for the 2010 UK General Election