Plan B - "Reinflate The Housing Bubble !"

George Osborne is the Son Of Brown :

"George Osborne is going into the mortgage business. What could possibly go wrong?

...(the taxpayer) is to underwrite £130bn of mortgage loans. They, or we, will pick up the tab if the borrower defaults. This will give banks the confidence to accept smaller deposits of, say, 5 per cent, meaning the borrower can borrow more. It is not hard to see how this will encourage struggling banks to get a racier appetite for risk. Imagine the discussion between the buyer and the mortgage adviser: "Oh yeah, it's underwritten by the government, borrow a bit more!" This is supposed to be the way out of a private and public debt crisis.

Remind me, how did the country get into its current mess in the first place? In America both political parties connived to loosen the lending criteria until anyone who wanted it could get a dodgy loan to buy a house. In the UK too, a private sector debt bubble was facilitated by a cheap money policy encouraged by the government. Combined with financial engineering by the banks, and the financialisation of the economy, the UK economy was made very vulnerable to an international shock. Once again, a big gamble is to be made based on pumping up the housing market."

There's no doubt that this will do wonders for buy-to-let landlords, who'll be able to buy new places to live in while renting out their existing residence (the loans are ostensibly not for buy-to-let) - and that's just what the British economy needs, after all. One wouldn't want the average house price to be affordable by the average earner, would one? As the BBC said this morning, it'll aid "recovery in the housing market" - and recovery is a good thing, isn't it?

In other news "Recovery in the fuel market", "Recovery in the food market", and "Recovery in the energy market"!

Oh, and along with handing over 20% of the price to housebuyers, the taxpayer will be on the hook for a chunk of any losses on the loans (losses to the lenders, of course - who else?) in the event of a US-style price meltdown. Altogether now :

"Privatise the profits -  socialise the losses !"

Obviously we'll need a bit of extra demand to keep rents up, too - so don't expect immigration to come down any time soon - or any time at all. Oh, and that inflation "target" that they don't take any notice of ? Well, they're going to take even less notice of it in future !

I guess this is all of a piece with previous policy, and will continue to drive the remorseless widening of the gap between the elite and the rest of us.

The Beginning Of The End (Of The Journey)

Well, tomorrow sees the end of Child Benefit for those bloated plutocrats with a household income of £50,000 and a stay at home mother .

Thank heavens it's been preserved for those struggling families on £98,000 a year and a working mother, not to mention the 37,900 children living in Poland who receive it. The Tories are the party of the Polish family, after all.

I call on the commenters - is this the first removal of a universal benefit since the NHS introduced prescription charges, and a young minister, a left-wing firebrand called Harold Wilson, resigned in protest in 1951 ? Wilson, as Prime Minister, removed the charges in 1965, a rare example of political consistency, then reintroduced them in 1968. They've been there ever since.

The point of universal benefits, like a universal postal system, is social cohesion. They showed that the Welfare State was for everyone, that we were indeed all in it together. The more benefits are means-tested (an expensive and bureaucratic procedure), the more the welfare state is purely for "the poor" and not for "everyone", the less support it'll have from what Churchill called "the broad masses of the well-to-do" and the more uncertain its future.

 For some in or around the Tory party, for the millionaire venture capitalists advising on employment legislation while themselves paying only 10% tax, or the billionaire retailers advising the government on efficiency, while ensuring their company dividends go offshore, that may be considered a feature rather than a bug. 

 On Tuesday there's the vote on the 1% benefits freeze - for 3 years, at a time when the new BoE Governor, Mark Carney, has already suggested that his predecessor Mervyn "Money Printing" King is a tad hawkish on inflation targets, and that some loosening may be required in the fiscal straitjacket that has seen inflation continually above the 2% target.

I have no problem with someone putting forward the argument that benefits are too high, that they afford more than a minimum standard - but no one in the Tory party is doing that. Instead, it's proposed that they should be cut because of 'fairness'. Yet they're meant to afford people a minimum standard of living. When food and electricity prices rise by 10%, and benefits by 1%, what's going to happen to those people ? And that's just one year.            

I must say, the next few years are going to be interesting, in the Chinese sense.

The suicide rate fell dramatically at the start of both World Wars, as those otherwise tired of life decided that, like Vince and Muskie, they just wanted to stay around just to see what happens next.

I feel the same. The next few years are going to be awful but fascinating.
     

More On Universal Credit - Stable Door Edition

When I wrote about the Universal Credit rules for the self-employed, which will do such damage to the self-employed handyman or the single mum selling her crafts at local fairs, I forgot about another target - the Big Issue Benefits Loophole :

"A Big Issue seller is claiming victory in a landmark case to have her work classed as a proper job and thus be eligible for extra benefits.

Romanian Firuta Vasile was refused housing benefit because a local authority judged that her job selling the magazine "didn't count".

But she has successfully argued that because she bought the Big Issues and sold them at her own profit or loss she was self-employed.

Speaking through an interpreter, Vasile, 27, said she came to the UK in 2007 to look for a job, but could only find work selling the Big Issue."

Romanians and Bulgarians aren't allowed to work here unless they're self-employed. And you'll have noticed the terrible shortage of Big Issue sellers which is crippling British industry. But it sounds as if the Big Issue is their flexible friend :

"The Big Issue exists to offer homeless people and those at risk of homelessness the opportunity to work and earn an income. This is offered irrespective of a person’s background or origin. Earning their own money reduces dependency on hand-outs from the state, charities and the public.. "

Even when the entire raison-d'etre of "earning their own money" is to get "hand-outs from the state" ? It's not surprising that Roma Big Issue sellers are an increasingly common sight.

The good news is that, come October, all this will stop and our self-employed sellers will be assumed to have an income of around £250 pw - whether they have or not.

The bad news is that, come December, the entire populations of Romania and Bulgaria will be free to move to the UK, self-employed or not.  

I do wonder if the aim of our rulers is actually to push immigration to the levels where the Brits will, of their own volition, call for the end of the Welfare State. Maybe that Grant Shapps isn't as stupid as he sounds, only as unpleasant as he sounds.

"I do think that it’s right for the taxpayer at large, who after going out, working hard, paying their taxes, should feel that they’re not having to pay for people who are in receipt of benefits to get a higher effective pay rise than the people actually working. So I think this is an argument about fairness."

As I've said before, benefits are meant to afford a minimum standard of living. Raising them by 1% a year for three years, when inflation on necessities is probably over 5%, will drop them a long way below that standard. Now maybe that standard was set too high. But that's not what he's arguing. He's arguing that it's "fair" that a minimum standard set by Parliament should be reduced because other, better-off people are tightening their belts.

I said he's not stupid. People working and still struggling to pay the electric bill aren't going to be overly sympathetic, to put it mildly. Good politics if lousy humanity.     
 

Vote Conservative !

For more expensive wine !

"The ban on cheap multi-buy deals will not apply to pubs, clubs and restaurants and is aimed at curbing binge drinking, especially by teenagers "pre-loading" on very cheap alcohol before they go for an evening out."

 I suppose enforcing existing laws on public drunkenness is a ridiculous idea. Far easier to penalise everyone. It's all about rewarding personal responsibility, you know.

I am going to take a weekend off, spend a night or two in France and fill the people-carrier to the gunwales with the more bearable products of Carrefour and Leclerc. About 300 bottles should suffice, and that nice M. Hollande needs the taxes.

(see also "a substance abuse counsellor has been charged with murder and drink-driving after she allegedly stuck a pedestrian and drove for more than two miles with the dying man embedded in the windscreen.")



For concreting over England !

More than 1,500 square miles of open countryside - over twice the area covered by greater London - needs to be built on to meet housing demand, the Government’s planning minister Nick Boles has said.

I suppose stopping letting half a million people a year into the UK is a ridiculous idea. Far easier to ruin the countryside and build on some of the best agricultural land in the world. Who needs food ?




For electricity bills, utility bills and train fares all increasing faster than inflation.

Who needs to keep warm in the winter ? Us Brits can take it ! 





For an India - EU trade deal which would allow 30,000 (above existing numbers) Indian IT staff into the EU  - because there are still one or two UK IT people earning over £30,000! The BBC were plugging it this morning on Radio Four. The Institute of Directors are very keen.

 "CEDEFOP (2010) estimates show a labour shortage of 12 million in the EU in 2020 cutting across all levels of workers."

You may have noticed how few unemployed there are in the EU.

"In 2007, about three million jobs were unfilled in sectors such as information technology (IT) and engineering (EurActive, 2007)."

Must be why IT salaries have gone up so much in the last six years.

(In India for IT staff it's like the 80s in the UK - wage rises three times a year, go to a jobs fair and pick a job from half a dozen offers. A former colleague told me that two years back he'd trained up three or four people so that they could move his job offshore. He trained them in .NET technologies, they went back to India to start supporting "his" applications - and immediately left, armed with their new skills, to work for a competitor! He's still supporting the apps - the company he works for seem a tad 'burned' by the experience.)

Osborne - The Heir To Brown and his Stealth Welsh Cake Tax

Osborne is truly the heir to Brown, although I doubt Gordon was big on coke and hookers in his student days. He's the heir in that the tax rises only become apparent in the days after the budget, couched in terms like "simplification" (a great phrase for his granny tax) and "correcting anomalies".

The "Greggs Tax", which adds 20% to the cost of food if it's bought hot (effectively taxing a pasty from the bakers like a restaurant meal), will, apart from wiping out the supermarket rotisserie counter (but good news ! when the chickens are stone cold there'll be no VAT!), do terrible damage to Swansea.

At the literal and metaphorical heart of Swansea Market (itself the heart of what the developers have left of the city) are the two stalls which make Welsh cakes on hotplates. There are other stalls selling the cakes, but aficionados like them hot. Whenever I'm there (quite often) I'll pick up some cold ones to take home and for work colleagues, and hot ones to eat within the hour at a relative's. Round the cake stalls are laver bread, cockles, local butter and cheese and other goodies. You may gather I'm fond of the place.

Hot cakes are already more expensive than the cold ones on other stalls, which are baked offsite. Adding a 20% tax to these cakes is a cruel blow to these small but historic businesses and to Welsh cake lovers all over the civilised world.

I doubt very much that Osborne has ever set foot in Swansea Market. It may not be his fault, but in the Commons he has the air of someone who at school might have delighted in holding lower-form boys heads in the toilet then pulling the chain.

I hope that the Welsh Assembly will be in uproar over this iniquitous tax. Let's see what the Plastic Parliament in Cardiff is made of. If ever a tax strike could command overwhelming support it would be here.

Shameless

"The deterioration in the outlook has made it more likely that inflation will undershoot the 2% target in the medium term"

Mervyn King is shameless. Absolutely shameless. But only someone sure of his political backing could come out with such barefaced lies. He knows George "printing money is the last resort of desperate governments" Osborne is on board.

So the moral hazard of bailing out the banks - not once, but soon twice - is paralleled by the moral hazard of robbing the prudent and pensioners. It's a good job I had no illusions to lose about the Tories - and, as I feared, George Osborne's few sensible ideas before the election were soon forgotten after it.



Labour, 2008. QE1 announced. Mervyn King says there won’t be inflation because of the ‘output gap’ – all those factories running two shifts when they could be running three. BoE Pension Fund moves all its assets into inflation-proofed bonds.

Sterling devalues by getting on for 30% (and the printed money goes into share and commodity prices). This raises inflation dramatically, because most of what we consume, especially commodities, is imported – those factories were non-existent divisions on the BoE map board. Wages are static, because mass immigration means it’s a buyers market for labour*.

With prices rising and wages static, the only way to keep household consumption up is to send the wife out to work or spend on credit. But the wife’s been at work since 1989 – it was the only way you could afford the mortgage – and who’s going to increase their personal debts in this economic climate ?

So consumption falls. Working people are getting poorer at around 5% a year. There’s a small increase in manufacturing for export, but the balance of payments is still massively negative. Retailers suffer, the economy flat-lines.

OMG. The economy is not recovering ! Inexplicable !

Conservative, 2011. QE2 announced. King, abandoning reality completely, says it’s because his magic crystal ball says inflation is going to fall dramatically. Sterling devalues (it’s dropped 10c against the dollar in a couple of days). This raises inflation again, because most of what we consume, especially commodities, is imported.

Wages are still static, because mass immigration is still at near-record levels despite the crisis.

So consumption falls again, as it must.

OMG. The economy is not recovering ! Inexplicable ! Time for QE3 !

Rinse and repeat until UK real wages are at Chinese levels and pensioners are self-immolating in Parliament Square. Where's Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle when we need him ?







* Marx - "The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it"

Those Tough New Immigration Rules

... explained by commenter Sassenach in this Guardian thread :

"From the main article:

It is right that immigration must be controlled, which is why Labour was right to introduce the points-based system (PBS) for managing migration.

Speaking as somebody who's worked for the last 6 years as an immigration caseworker and seen PBS in operation right from its infancy, I have to say I found this sentence rather amusing. PBS is a complete shambles. In fact it's such a complete shambles that in my more cynical moments I begin to suspect that it was deliberately designed that way. Fraud and abuse are absolutely rife across all tiers, and there are gaping loopholes all over the place that seem specifically tailored to making our job of controlling the borders more difficult.

Let's take Tier 1, which is supposedly the route for attracting highly skilled people. I know this area very well since it's the area I've spent most of my career working in. At present, if you talk to any caseworker who handles Tier 1 General applications they'll all tell you that it's a complete joke. I know this will just sound like hyperbole, like I'm exaggerating for effect, but I mean no word of a lie when I say that my estimate of Tier 1 General applications is that at the very least 50% of them are completely fictitious. I'm not alone in this view, and in fact I only differ from my colleagues in that I'm slightly more charitable in my assessment, most would put it well above 50%.

The most common ruse, and believe me it's almost physically impossible to go through a day without coming across an application of this type, is to supply completely bogus evidence of self-employment income in order to prove that you score points in the earnings band. This is so pitifully easy to do it's hilarious. The people who drafted the policy for Tier 1, in their infinite wisdom, decided that all we need to 'prove' self-employment income is a letter from an accountant accompanied by unaudited business accounts. Generally these are drawn up by dodgy accountants who deal exclusively with overseas nationals, but in reality it doesn't even require the accountant to break the law since they're not carrying out an audit, all they have to do is add a disclaimer saying that the accounts and accountant letter have been drawn up according to information supplied by the applicant. In effect this amounts to taking their word for it. We ask an applicant how much money they earned and whatever they tell us we accept at face value. I've lost count of the times I've seen somebody who works the night shift stacking shelves in Tesco for £6 an hour and then in his spare time works as a self-employed 'business consultant' on about £60k a year. We even talked one time about doing 'self-employed bingo' in our office, where we'd write out bingo cards with Tesco, Sainsburys, McDonalds etc on them and whoever came across Tier 1 General applicants working there first got to take a cash prize.... (we weren't allowed to do it though).

The reason I mention this in particular is because staff at the coalface who work Tier 1 applications have been making as much noise as we possibly can about this and any number of other laughably lax loopholes ever since PBS began but nothing has ever been done. There have been various changes to the policy but all of them have actually made it even easier to defraud the system. So whoever it was earlier in the thread who quoted that survey that supposedly found Tier 1 General migrants to be regularly working in high salary jobs, I'm afraid I still haven't stopped laughing. Sure, some of them are, but the vast majority are not, or certainly the ones I come across each and every day.

Now let's consider Tier 2. This is the system which was brought in to replace the old Work Permit system. Now, I don't actually have direct experience of working cases under the old system, but I obviously know a helluva lot of people who do and to a man/woman they all say that it was vastly superior to the system Labour brought in to replace it. Which is not to say that it was particularly good of course, but Tier 2 has been a disaster. The root problem is the sponsorship system that's been introduced. Under the old system an employer needed to make an application for a specific permit for a specific job and was required to demonstrate that they'd carried out checks of the domestic labour market and that the job met certain wage and qualification criteria before the permit was issued. In practice of course the checks were not especially tough and it was easily abused, but at least there was some attempt to vet the people who were being given permits and some of them were refused. That all changed with Tier 2, and it changed for the worse.

As I was saying, the change brought in with Tier 2 was sponsorship (which also affects the issuing of student visas under Tier 4, with similar associated problems). What now happens is that a prospective employer simply hasa to apply to go on the Sponsors Register and they will be issued with an allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship. They can allocate these to whoever they wish, and pretty much all a caseworker on Tier 2 now has to do is check to make sure that an applicant has a valid CoS. All of the other checks such as resident labour market tests and various other checks that were supposed to ensure that onl;y suitably talented and necessary individuals get given work permits have been sub-contracted out to the sponsor, who in theory is meant to carry them out before issuing any CoS. Yeah right, I believe that too. It's a massive conflict of interests. We're effectively handing control of our borders directly to businesses who have a direct interest in not playing too closely by the rules.

This wouldn't necessarily be so bad if the compliance features of PBS were effective. In theory there are supposed to be regular audits of sponsors to punish those who are not fulfilling their obligations. In practice of course the resources available for compliance visits are miniscule and the sanctions are too feeble to be a concern. There are no criminal sanctions for failure to meet your sponsor obligations, all that might happen is you may be downgraded from an A to a B rating, or at worst removed from the register. Big deal, you could have sponsored 20 or 30 migrants through the door by then, and in any case it's pitifully easy to just register a new company and get back on the register with a different name. Background checks are absolutely laughable. Tier 2 is absolutely wide open to abuse, and so of course it's being heavily abused.

But the biggest scandal around Tier 2 isn't really fraud and abuse, it's the perfectly legal Intra-Company Transfer scam. This is absolutely staggering. We allow companies to bring in literally thousands of skilled workers from overseas every year under these visas. The worst offenders are the big IT contractors. Tata Consultancy Services have an annual allocation of 2500 ICT visas. 2500 every year ! Many of these come in on short term contracts of just under 1 year and so they benefit from a despicable taxation agreement which allows them not to be subject to any income tax on what they earn in the UK (which is paid as a 'subsistence allowance'). Needless to say this means that Tata (and all the other big Indian players in this market) can afford to pay their qualified staff thousands of pounds a year less than domestic competitors would have to pay to attract somebody similarly qualified. Not only does this depress wages in the sector for domestic workers, it also acts as in effect a massive competitive edge that is driving domestic companies out of business. We're directly subsidising big Indian multinationals and causing unemployment at home through our dysfunctional ICT system, it's a complete disgrace.

Tier 4 is even worse of course. It works on similar principles to the Tier 2 sponsorship system but the numbers are much,much greater. I believe that at last count there are somewhere in the region of 300,000 new Tier 4 students arriving in Britain every year. Approximately 48% of these (or thereabouts, I'm going from memory) are studying at below degree level in non-accredited colleges.This is the source of a ridiculous amount of abuse. There are thousands of bogus colleges out there, they spring up like mushrooms, get onto the sponsor register with ease and sponsor as many new students through the door as they possibly can before eventually being found out and closed down, when the owners (usually foreign nationals themselves) simply set up a new bogus college. All of this could be ended at a stroke if the rules of Tier 4 were to be changed to simply ban any tier 4 visas for non-accredited colleges or below degree level studies. Easy, quick and it would elminate over 100,000 migrants a year without affecting genuine students or university funding one iota. It's enough to make you wonder why they didn't do something like that 13 years ago instead of the opposite......"

At which point someone mentions the Report of the Migration Advisory Committee, particularly the graph on p96 showing that the vast majority of those applying for further leave to remain "are earning more than £40,000 pa" i.e. are "those nice skilled workers the UK needs so desperately".

"The problem with those figures from the MAC report is the methodology by which they were obtained. It was a small sample of cases that came up for extension. Now, there are 2 glaring issues here. One is that the time this data was sampled there was no easily accessible database of application data to draw from. It wouldn't have been possible to simply look at all applications for extension that came through because that would have been a truly enormous effort and required the recall of every file from deep storage and going through them one by one. I know for a fact that this never occurred, so it must have just been a small sampling exercise, probably involving a select few caseworkers who were asked to retain some data as they were working. Secondly of course, it assumes that the applicants were telling the truth. As I already explained Tier 1, and it's forerunner HSMP, are/were abused on a truly epic scale. All MAC did was look at what they claimed to be earning and assume it was the truth, which is a very dangerous thing to do."

The same commenter comes back with :

As for your point about abuse, the sample was restricted only to those whose FLR application was successful. I trust that you guys at UKBA are all professionals, and can quite easily find out who is telling the truth, and who is not.

"You're far too trusting my friend...

My point earlier about abuse within Tier 1 was meant to illustrate how the rules of the scheme had been written in such a way as to make it very difficult to tackle abuse. like I said, we all know that most of the people who apply claiming to be self-employed are lying to us but there's a limited amount we can do about it because they tick the appropriate boxes and supply the evidence that we stipulate. If all we're asking for as evidence of earnings is a letter from an accountant and unaudited accounts then there's not much we can do about it. How do you verify that information ? Since both forms of evidence came from the same source (the accountant) we could ring them up and ask them to confirm it, but all they say is that it was drawn up based on information supplied by the applicant. Since they're not required to carry out an audit they don;t have to actually physically verify this stuff themselves so it's an easy fee for them. This is just one example among many of how our own policy is written in such as way as to make verification of fake evidence extremely difficult.

It's interesting that you brought up the MAC report actually because one of the inadvertant effects of that report was to make Tier 1 even worse than it already was. One of the key recommendations was to bump up the bandings for earnings, meaning you now have to be earning a lot more money to score the same points than you used to. All this achieved was to drive away a lot of the legitimate applicants. We did used to have quite a lot of people earning 30-35k a year and in the old days this was often enough in combination with a masters degree and being under a certain age. Nowadays that's nowhere near enough, the same age applicant with the same qualification would need to be earning around 55-60k a year to get approved. The result has been that pretty much all we ever see these days is the fraudsters. They don't give a damn what level you set the earnings band at because all their evidence is fake anyway. Tier 1 General in the wake of that MAC report's recommendations is almost entirely comprised of fraudsters and merchant bankers (I'll leave you to make the obvious joke....)"

"Look, what I've described is the current situation with Tier 1 General and it's the reason why it's being scrapped (or it ought to be). It wasn't always quite this bad of course, and over the years quite a lot of talented people with good jobs have had Tier 1 or HSMP visas. However, it most certainly has always suffered from rampant abuse, which has been largely ignored by the higher-ups who set the policy but is an open secret among anybody who actually works at UKBA. You can choose to believe me about that or not, but I'm only sharing my perspective as somebody who knows a helluva lot more about Tier 1, and PBS in general, than anybody else in this thread."

Hmm ...

... looks like the days of Lord John Taylor being wheeled out on the Today programme to be asked the vital question 'exactly how racist are the Tories' ? may be drawing to a close :

A Tory peer has been caught using someone else’s home address to claim tens of thousands of pounds in expenses. Lord Taylor of Warwick, a 57-year-old former barrister, told the House of Lords that his main home was a terrace house in Oxford which he neither owned nor lived in. The property’s owner, Tristram Wyatt, a university academic, said he was unaware that his address had been used as the peer’s main home.

Taylor has lived in his family home in Ealing, west London, since 1995. By claiming his address was outside the capital he accumulated more then £70,000 in subsistence expenses between 2001 and 2007. When confronted earlier this year, Taylor claimed he had lived at his mother’s home in the West Midlands during those years. However, this claim was false as his mother died in 2001 and her house was sold that year. His former wife has also confirmed that he lived in London, and nowhere else, until their separation in 2003. The disclosures will be looked at by the police team investigating peers and MPs. Taylor declined to comment last week.

Hmm. He's toast.

*Sigh*

Our rulers seem to have decided that the parliamentary expenses brouhaha is so bad that it can only be put to rest by implementing whatever policies they already wanted to implement.

The ideal solution would be an Irish-style single transferable vote system in which voters elect the person, not the party. But even alternative vote plus – as first advocated by Roy Jenkins in 1998 and now backed by Alan Johnson – would ensure most MPs have a personal constituency link with their voters, as already occurs in Germany and Scotland. Labour made a promise more than a decade ago to hold a referendum on the Jenkins proposals. If the government won't call a general election, let us have this referendum in early September, as the culmination of 100 days of reform.

Together, over the next 100 days, we could achieve nothing less than the total reinvention of British politics.

That Nick Clegg really is a chancer, isn't he ? If there's one thing that the expenses scandal DOESN'T show, it's the need for electoral reform - which might be needed for other reasons, but not for this one.

Indeed the strength of constituency feeling is one of the reasons why, for example, the lovely Julie Kirkbride is feeling the heat at present in Bromsgrove. Electorally, I think she may be able to hang on in there - although the Lib Dims might put up a battle, but every new story leaves Cameron looking less like Mr Decisive and more like Mr Wobbly.

She fights on though - she fights to win.

Like millions of women I am a mother who works. Like millions of other working mothers I have put in place networks to ensure that my child enjoys security and consistency while I work demanding hours and do the best job I can...

But a wider issue gives me great concern. What effect will stories like mine have on mothers who aspire to be MPs? We want Parliament to be more representative and that includes women with school-age children.

Just before this story broke, I spoke to a woman journalist thinking of entering Parliament. Her main concern was the effect it would have on her children. I assured her it was possible to combine an MP's life with being a good mother, as long as she organised her support structure well.

That must continue to be the case - or Parliament risks taking a step backwards.

So it's all about Jimmy being able to go to sleep in his own little room again, is it ? Worth a try I suppose. And Mr Cameron wants to maintain a bit of diversity in the ranks. If she was a bloke her feet would not have touched the ground. Her husband's didn't.




Elsewhere, as has been written on mass immigration:

... where would you like to go ? To Scotland or Wales, with their strong Nationalist parties ? To Ulster, where Sinn Fein/IRA are still killing people because their forebears were immigrants four hundred years ago ? Or to a country whose national flag should really be emblazoned with the word 'Sorry !'. No choice, really, is it ?


Sir Andrew Green was saying pretty much the same thing five years back.


Now it's finally filtering down to Parliament. Immigration is overwhelmingly - and disproportionately - to England :

Scotland's perception of itself as an increasingly multi-ethnic and diverse country will be challenged today by official figures that show almost all of the net international immigration to Britain since 1991 has gone to England.

Between 1991 and the 2007 a net 2.14million migrants came to England. But in Scotland for the same period net foreign migration was a paltry 105,000.

In effect, the statistics mean that England absorbed 20 times more international migrants than Scotland even though the population is only 10 times larger. England also took 11 times more migrants than Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined, even though its population is only 5 times larger than these three parts of the UK put together.

Squander Two on Cameron

"I don't even care why Cameron has said what he's said and done what he's done in the last couple of days. He's right, and he's doing what's right. Sure, you've got to worry about how consistently a man with no principles can be right, but this thing's big enough for the rest not to matter so much. And it's also big enough to significantly shape the behaviour of the party. Overnight, the Tories have become the most principled party, and clearly not because they wanted to, but because they've been forced into it by Cameron. Well, OK, then. I'll take him as Prime Minister."

Discuss.

Losing It ...

Polly Toynbee ...

It's all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep at next month's European elections. They are struck dumb. Why should people vote for them?

"Gorbals Mick" Martin ...

MPs exchanged looks. Now Norman Baker, who has campaigned long and hard on this issue, arose to mutters of irritation. He was urging the release of more information when Mr Speaker, robes swishing, cut him off.

“Another individual member who is keen to say to the press whatever the press wants to hear!” he announced, embarking on another rant, the nub of which was that Mr Baker had said in the past that the Commons authorities had done nothing on this. “It’s wrong for you to say that!” he said.

MPs just wanted it to end now. Yesterday should have been the Commons at its best, instead we were seeing it at its worst.

He just doesn't get it, does he ?

Frozen Washing on the Curate's Line

The Martyrdom of St Yazza :

"tell me you aren't ashamed at what our country has become when a middle aged muslim woman of Asian descent can be treated like this. She was questioned at length by plain clothes police officers who never once told her who they were or why she was being questioned."

I listened to the video, most of which was a moan about how "I love this country but ...", then we got to the facts. She was taking an internal flight, there was a mix-up and her tickets weren't kosher for the flight she was trying to board, so she was taken aside and asked a few questions. No abuse, no threats, no shouting.

I had a similar interview leaving Heathrow for NY on Pan-Am, a year after Lockerbie. I'm presuming the Libyan visa in my passport was the catalyst. They were perfectly polite, I answered their (reasonable) questions and away I went.

This really is a tsumami in some Earl Grey - and Iain Dale, what's all this about "we should be ashamed" ? Are you arguing that middle-aged, middle class Muslim women should be exempt from the (tedious but probably necessary) airline security checks the rest of us go through ?

I love Yazza like I love Melanie Phillips, but both can on occasions see "oppression" when it's not there.

There's enough of the real thing about without nonsense like this.

What a strange way to spin a story.

The UK’s official statistician weighed into the debate about foreign workers yesterday by highlighting the growing numbers of immigrants getting jobs while the British workforce declines.

On the day that figures showed the number of people unemployed at a 12-year high, the Office for National Statistics chose to reveal that the number of foreign workers increased by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year while the number of British workers fell by 234,000 to 27 million.

Karen Dunnell, the National Statistician, sought to focus public attention on the contrasting fortunes of foreign and British workers as the country slipped into recession. Her intervention came as construction workers took part in wildcat strikes at power stations in Nottinghamshire and Kent, angry about jobs going to foreigners.

I see. The figures aren't the important thing, it's that they were released. Que ? I think FWIW that it's 'deeply unhelpful' to characterise telling the truth as a move in some political game. Obviously that's the way Sam Coates, Richard Ford and David Brown see it.


There is no end to Labour sleaze.

LORD TRUSCOTT, one of four peers named in the “lords for hire” scandal, has taken at least £70,000 in allowances for overnight accommodation in London while staying at his home in the capital.

Truscott, 49, now receives £28,000-a-year tax free by telling House of Lords’ authorities that his main residence is a modest flat in Bath, Somerset.

He uses the allowance to maintain a £700,000 flat he owns in Mayfair, central London, with his Russian wife, Svetlana. He bought the property in Bath months after becoming eligible to claim the allowance.

Lord Paul of Marylebone, the billionaire steel magnate and Labour donor who is nondomiciled, is one of a number of other peers who take advantage of the perk.

The deafening silence on the issue at PMQs yesterday seems to be confirmation that they're all at it.

THE financier who has been appointed to protect taxpayers’ money in Britain’s bailed-out banks is a former trustee of a secretive Liechtenstein bank accused of facilitating massive tax evasion.

Glen Moreno, who chairs the powerful body that oversees the government’s £37 billion shareholding in the banks, was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during a nine-year association with Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank based in the tax haven.

The disclosures are an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who last week criticised offshore tax havens and called for international action to stamp out tax evasion.

What with James Crosby, Gordon seems to be an expert at hiring foxes as poultry management consultants. But it's this that really bothers me :

The SNP has demanded an inquiry after it emerged that a record of everyone who voted in last year's contest in Glenrothes has gone missing.

All of the major parties, including Labour on election night itself, had predicted that the Nationalists would win the seat, which borders Gordon's Brown's constituency.

Instead Lindsay Roy, Labour's candidate, swept to victory and dealt a stunning blow to Alex Salmond, the First Minister and SNP leader, who had confidently predicted victory.

The result was a huge fillip to the Prime Minister, who broke with convention and risked his political credibility by joining the campaign trail with his wife, Sarah.

Thus far UK electoral fraud has been confined to Ulster Republicans and other minority communities with a tradition of same, although I wouldn't put it past some well-meaning liberal types to lose a few boxes of BNP votes and think they were protecting democracy - after all, we've all been taught what happened in Germany. The worst the Labour leadership (as opposed to their local party machines) have done is to turn a blind eye. This would be different, and a very worrrying sign for our democracy. I hope and pray that Mr Cock-up is responsible here - but it's not good that we can even entertain the idea of Scottish Labour taking the Mugabe route to electoral success. Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable. It isn't now.


Oh, forgot to say. Remember the liberal myth of Superbowl violence, which inspired our PC police into campaigns against World Cup Domestic Violence ?

Meet the rugby equivalent - Six Nations Domestic Violence 2008. And Rugby World Cup 2007.

Police are launching patrols in the south Wales valleys during the Rugby World Cup to allow them to respond quickly to domestic violence.

Reality trumps satire yet again.

More on the EDF Deal

I mentioned the amazingly positive spin the BBC were giving the sale of Britain's nuclear industry to (French govt-controlled) EDF.

Well waddya know ? Via blogger NotASheep in the B-BBC comments, the news that the director of communications for the UK arm of EDF (they also own elctricity company E On, who recently raised prices to UK consumers by 22% - and to French consumers by 5%), one Andrew Brown, turns out to be a former BBC journalist and Newsnight editor.

Andrew Brown ? That's right. Gordon Brown's brother.

(Dizzy wondered back in January why the Tories didn't make more play of this fact, concluding it was because EDF made a substantial donation to the Tories. I'm not sure at all about the ethics of accepting cash from a company controlled by the French state. On second thoughts, I am - they shouldn't do it. What a dirty bunch. It's the Treaty of Dover all over again.)