Just how much bigger will this week’s ‘biggest shake-up of the welfare state since the 1940s’ be than ‘the biggest shake-up of the welfare state for 60 years’ unveiled by David Blunkett in 2005?

Will the impending ‘Labour Blitz on Dole Scroungers’ hailed by the Sun be more or less of a blitz than the ‘Brown Blitz on the Black Economy’ similarly praised in the Murdoch press eight years ago? Luftwaffe, eat your heart out.

Come to that, how is it that those people singled out in pensions secretary James Purnell’s work for dole proposals are exactly the same people name-checked in Peter Lilley’s ‘I have a little list of benefit offenders who I’ll soon be rooting out and who never would be missed’ speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1991?

Those who make up bogus claims in half a dozen names. Young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list. You know the sort.

No wonder David Cameron has offered the Purnell plan unqualified backing; politicians of all major parties are singing not so much off the same hymnsheet as out of the same Gilbert and Sullivan operetta score. If you get the feeling you’ve heard it all before, that’s because you have.

The unemployed – sorry, I meant to say feckless workshy job cheats, of course – have been a popular target for cheap rhetorical shots since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1832 and probably even before that.

I am not naïve enough to argue that nobody out there is claiming benefits to which they are not entitled. Nobody can have any trouble with the notion of rooting out systematic deliberate fraud, for instance. However, cutting already pitiful levels of benefit is hardly going to achieve that.

Frankly, one of the main reasons that numbers on incapacity benefit remains so intractable is that generations of the long-term unemployed have been deliberated coaxed onto IB, thanks to a tacit government policy designed to massage the headline unemployment figure ever downwards.

But one question is going unanswered in the current debate. If this problem is truly anywhere near as prevalent as Labour, the Tories and Daily Mail would have us believe, how come none of the huge range of initiatives over the last three decades has made a damn bit of difference?

Interestingly, the Purnell purge comes in the same week as Alistair Darling is set – in the words of the Financial Times – to ‘bow to pressure from business by scrapping contentious reforms to the taxation of foreign profits’. A whole raft of anti-avoidance measures will simply be dropped as a result.

It sometimes seems that New Labour does not push through its crackdowns on those failing to pay their way in society with equal determination in all cases.

For those of us who lean centre-right the most dispiriting thing about the row over the crime statistics is the paucity of confidence it demonstrates in some Tory supporters, particularly among bloggers.

We’ve established a near-constant 20pt poll lead, notched up significant electoral victories in London & Crewe, garnered the sort of positive press coverage they’ve only dreamt about for c.15 years and seen even Labour’s most loyal and optimistic supporters in the press now talk about the ‘scale of’ rather than ‘likelihood’ of defeat.

That’s the sort of context most oppositions would shed a limb for.
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Spirit of 1976 has found a secret video exposing the Gay Agenda to Take Over the World.

Steph Ashley can’t understand why everyone quotes Iain Dale as if his views actually matter. I share her mystification on this.

Alix Mortimer compares Lib Dem and Tory campaign slogans and (surprisingly!) finds the Tory one somewhat wanting.

Dreaming of Simplicity wants to pee on Aaron’s bonfire in linking to this article on Digital Spy about the BBC’s commercial impacts.

Aberavon and Neath Lib Dems examine the Tax Credit train wreck.

And finally, Lady Mark Valladares has been up in my neck of the woods. He (and Ros) will be in Bradford today and I shall, if I can drag myself out of bed, be going to have a cream tea with them. The perils of Lib Demmery…

So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let’s do it.

And whilst we’re at it, let’s have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I’m only 5ft tall myself, I’ll lead the chorus. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.

Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.

We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer - but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.
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Reading the Grauniad’s interview with David Cameron and the accompanying article, it’s very difficult not to become depressed that after 10 years of Blair, within a couple of years we’re going to be under the thumb of his very real heir, and with not just the Labour party but the entirety of the left raising barely a whimper of defiance.

Cameron’s broken society gambit is almost certainly the one detail that makes me despair the most. He knows it’s not true, we know it isn’t true, the government knows it isn’t true, even the Times, whose sister paper has done the most to perpetuate the notion knows it isn’t true, and yet I don’t think I can recall a single politician, whether they be Labour or Liberal Democrat who has directly challenged Cameron to provide some real evidence that British society is any sense broken.

Here’s Cameron’s incredibly weak case for it:

He denies he is giving a false picture of Britain by talking of a broken society, saying: “There is a general incivility that people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence; and I think it is important to draw attention to it.”

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David Cameron is moving further away from Thatcherism. This is one interpretation of his call for a US-style chapter 11 bankruptcy law. He says:

Instead of companies going straight into liquidation and having to lay off staff, they get a stay of execution and they can be restructured to try to save the business, to try to save the jobs.

This is a flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics. This says that the very fact that a company is bankrupt is a sign that it has little value; the market - customers  - judges things right. The firm should therefore be broken up, so that workers can be released to find more productive employment. And in removing excess capacity from an industry, the firm’s more efficient rivals will become more profitable, allowing them to expand.

And the notion that bankrupt firms can be restructured is pish; if there were a way for the firm to become more efficient, either the existing managers would have found it, or the firm would have been bought by those who can make a go of it. That this hasn’t happened shows there’s no hope for the firm.

Now, this view was pretty much orthodox Thatcherism. “Lame ducks must go to the wall” was a cliché of the early 80s. And the reason Thatcher called coal mines “uneconomic” - rather than just unprofitable - was because she thought miners would find better work than digging up cheap coal*.
In calling for a chapter 11, Cameron is rejecting this view. Why?

One possibility is that the evidence is on his side. We know now that displaced miners generally did not (pdf) find work, suggesting that workers don’t quickly find valuable work elsewhere. There’s some (but limited) evidence that firms can turn themselves around in chapter 11. And it’s not clear that firms in chapter 11 in industries with excess capacity actually do harm their more efficient rivals. Chapter 11 does, then, have its supporters.

But there’s another possibility. Whether or not chapter 11 is good for the economy generally, it’s certainly good for investment bankers and lawyers, as creditors spend a fortune fighting over the scraps.  So perhaps Cameron has just listened to his friends.

* Of course, it’s possible that Thatcher’s pit closure programme was motivated not by economics but by mere class hatred. But no-one believes this, do they?

I nearly choked on my cereal yesterday when Tim sent a link to this story at the Mail on Sunday stating Margaret Thatcher was to be honoured with a state funeral.

It has not yet been decided whether the 82-year-old former Conservative leader will lie in state in Westminster Hall. To date the only Prime Minister in the 20th and 21st centuries to be given this honour was Churchill.

There were four non-Royal State funerals in the 19th century – Nelson, Wellington, Palmerston and Gladstone.

I accept that it’s incredibly discourteous to speculate about someone’s death and I want to state I don’t wish anything terrible to befall Magaret Thatcher.

But c’mon, a state funeral? For such an incredibly divisive PM? For someone who decimated entire industries? For a Prime Minister who went out there to destroy the trade union movement? For someone who supported South Africa’s racist apartheid regime and branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist? And that’s just the start.
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I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne.

Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.

He said:
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David Davis has won the by-election, according to Sky News, with a total of 17,113 votes. The Green Party’s Shan Oakes came second with 1,758 votes, which is also great news.

A BBC News article says turnout was at 35%, much higher than expected and very high for a single-issue election.

Worth noting:
The turnout was comparable to most by-elections.
This was a single issue by-election;
It faced a lot of hostility from the media
It was a very safe seat and Davis had no opponents who could unseat him.

That makes a 35% turnout much higher than expected.
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“It’s a total waste of bloody money!”; “I have not made my mind up yet”; “I’ve voted for him already” (one of 10,000 postal ballots requested, 59 per cent sent them in); “I just don’t know about politics, I don’t vote.

A lady somewhere will be turning in her grave” (clearly meaning her mother); “I never thought I’d vote Tory, but this time I will” (an enthusiastic Lib-Dem); “Look at all these leaflets!”; Definitely I’m voting for Mr Davis … I don’t need a car thank you, my son will walk me there”.

I canvassed for David Davis on the eve of the by-election. The uncertain did not want to discuss. We had a single conversation with a man who did raise 42 days - he was for locking them up, but not, on consideration, if they were innocent. Davis’s core team is very competent. But it is hard for them. Many voters are puzzled about why David Davis has done it, especially Conservative voters. I’ll come back to this, his core problem at the moment. But also party activists who worked especially hard to ensure he won the constituency in 2005 to frustrate the Lib-Dem’s “decapitation strategy”. They backed a leader. They wanted him to be Home Secretary.

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Good. Bad. Right. Wrong. In a speech in Glasgow on Tuesday, Tory leader David Cameron inveighed against ‘moral neutrality’, and evinced a desire to reinstate categories as basic as these in British political discourse.

Nor will this performance a one off; spindoctors confirm that this theme will be central to Conservative agitation and propaganda over the summer months.
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After two months of bungled appointments, lost salaries, and enforced resignations, the London Assembly have decided to launch a formal investigation into the way Boris Johnson has appointed people at City Hall.

The decision to launch an investigation came after the assembly were told that the current appointment procedures were ‘adequate’ by Boris Johnson’s First Deputy Mayor.

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Ray Lewis intends to clear his name. But – while I am not entering into any discussion of the particular allegations against Lewis – this episode highlights some potentialy important challenges to the Cameron project.

The resignation has already generated increased scrutiny of whether the Conservatives are ready to govern. Boris Johnson and David Cameron may suggest they were unlucky: that they took a risk which backfired. But could this episode also cast the spotlight on what David Cameron’s ‘big idea’ of social responsibility adds up to?
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The BNP have a lot to answer for in regard to pulling down the gene ral tenor of virtually any electoral debate, but it is not to them that I refer herein.

No, it is to ‘independent candidate’ Jill Saward who is running against David Davis in Haltemprice and Howden on the basis that all our society seems to be interested in are the rights of the accused, not the rights of the victims.

This one could give the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade a run for their money when she declares that…

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[Editor's note: It has barely been two full months and Boris Johnson has already been involved in a long list of gaffes and controversies. Below, we want to keep an updated list of of mis-steps so far and record his flip-flops because we can guarantee you certain newspapers won’t.]

This list will be updated regularly. (Last updated 8/7/08, 22.45.)

Help us build it up into a comprehensive Gaffopædia by submitting suggestions for additions and improvements in the comments below (or by e-mail).

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I am going to make a prediction - the Liberal Democrats are going to lose the next election.

Now, this may not strike you as one of the great feats of prognostication. The Liberal Democrats have never won an election and the Liberals last won an election before the first world war. Even though in the council elections and the Henley by-election we came in second place, I don’t think there’s a single person in the country who actually believes we’re going to win a General Election in the near future.

But I don’t mean we’re not going to gain the majority of seats; I mean we’re actively working against our own interests. The decisions being made are going to actively damage the party - and, more importantly, damage the chances of getting some of our principles put into practice.
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Sorry the netcast is a bit late today, folks. I got caught up in emailing Woman’s Hour and lost track of time. As always, tips to the usual address (although we give no guarantees you’ll be included) and hope you find something of interest in this.

Paul Walter has a handy précis of ConHome’s “How to become a Tory MP” guide. Essentially it involves throwing lots of money at it. *I* thought that was supposed to be the *Labour* way…

Lynne Featherstone calls people who don’t support Harriet Harman’s proposal to allow positive discrimination “Tory Boys”. Thank, Lynne! I assume the penis and blue rosette must have been lost in the post…

Lee Griffin is a Tory Boy like me, then. I particularly like this rabid right-wing point: “If schools want more male teachers then incentives are necessary to increase numbers, not putting a worse teacher in charge of educating our children for the sake of some equality figures.”

Anthony Hook thinks that the age discrimination proposals might be ill-thought-out too. Continue reading…

I have spent about five hours so far collating reactions to last night’s Who and am still not done yet, so if this is a bit disjointed, blame Russell T Davies. When I’ve finally done I’ll be making Liberal use of this and picturing Rusty in the role of Boss.

Tips to the usual address: all submissions will be considered, although there’s no guarantee of inclusion.

Andrew Hickey has a great post about why the Lib Dems’ current strategy is completely arse-about-face, which neatly encapsulates my own feelings on the matter and chimes with Mike Smithson’s recent post too.

Stuff White People Like dissects Godwin’s Law: “all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.”

Shakesville reports on a fiscal fly in John McCain’s soup.

On my blog there are tips for those who wish to pile the pressure on Heinz like Lynne F. Continue reading…

There are some who say that the past is a different country and they do things differently there; those people aren’t involved in politics. For people who are, there are valuable lessons to be learnt from the history books — not least when deciding whether or not it is advisable to eject one’s Parliamentary toys out of one’s pram.

On 20th November 1997 a by-election was held in Winchester. It was technically a re-run of the General Election that May which the Liberal Democrat candidate Mark Oaten (of later infamy) won by a mere two votes. The deposed Conservative — one Gerry Malone — had contested the result and the voters of the area duly returned to the ballot box. They weren’t the only ones who were returned: the Conservative vote collapsed the second time around leaving Oaten with a majority of 21,556, a swing of 19.72 percent from the Tories to the Liberal Democrats.
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Am in a bit of a rush this morning as am the the Fantastic Films Weekend in Bradford and overdosing on Peter Cushing. And possibly booze also. With that in mind, today’s Casting the Net might be a bit rough around the edges… All views expressed are the views of the author, not of the site, etc.
Andrew Ducker links to a very interesting article about how people read on the web. Everybody who writes for the web ought to read it, and the comments. Yes, even the contributors to this fine site. I felt the tl;dr reaction coming on me about half way through it, which is a bit ironic, but that’s because this is mostly stuff I have heard before.
Adrian Sanders MP has news that we are subsidising the aviation industry to the tune of £10bn a year. Yes it’s a MySpace Blog. No, I don’t get why his constituents like it either, but apparently they do.
Jonathan Calder has the same point of view as me on the Davis situation. Of course, we’d be screwed if we ran as well, but which way are we MORE screwed? I suspect Lib Dems will be arguing about this for some time.
Norfolk Blogger meanwhile, thinks that if the polls are right, Labour should run. Of course, he is relying on the pre-Davis resignation polls…
Political Betting reports on the predictable Lib Dem poll squeeze (and much smaller Labour poll squeeze) on voter intention for a general election after we stupidly supported David Davis we didn’t field a candidate in a single issue election.