New Face of No Campaign: “Salmond speaks a lot of sense”

A Thousand Flowers

A week of video-related embarrassment for the No campaign was rounded off today as it emerged that the star of Better Together’s cinema adverts has previously said he believes Alex Salmond speaks “a lot of sense”. Rory Elrick, a politics student at Edinburgh University, takes a leading role in Better Together’s “Best of Both World’s” cinema trail, which has spent a month being consistently booed at cinemas across the country since its unveiling at the start of May.

A flood of complaints about this and other indyref adverts culminated in major cinema chains laying down a ban on them  earlier this week, which will kick in from 5 June. The large number number of complaints is in part due to some cinemas having up to four referendum ads prior to film showings over the past month, with one each from Better Together and Yes Scotland, and two from No Borders, the “grassroots”…

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Radical Balladry: Folk Protest Songs against the Credit Trap

Radical Balladry: Folk Protest Songs against the Credit Trap.

Tax credit debt collection is a double-edged attack on the poor

Mike Sivier's blog

There’s more than a little of the piscine about the fact that our Conservative-led has set debt collection agencies onto poor families who have been overpaid tax credit due to errors made by HM Revenue and Customs.

Firstly, the move undermines the principle behind the tax credit system – that it is there to ensure that poorly-paid families may still enjoy a reasonable living standard. Tax credits are paid on an estimate of a person’s – or family’s – income over a tax year and the last Labour government, knowing that small variances could cause problems for Britain’s poorest, set a wide buffer of £25,000 before households had to pay anything back.

By cutting this buffer back to £5,000, the Conservatives have turned this safety net into a trap. Suddenly the tiniest overpayment can push households into a debt spiral, because their low incomes mean it is impossible to pay…

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Government boosts GDP by adding sex and drugs to economy

Pride's Purge

(not satire – no really, it’s not!)

The government’s thought of a sure-fire way to boost the economy.

The Office for National Statistics has decided to include prostitution and sales of heroin in its assessments of the UK economy – adding 5 per cent to the UK’s gross domestic product at a stroke;

Drugs and prostitution add £10bn to UK economy

Now we know why George Osborne was chosen to run the economy.

He might only have worked as a towel folder in Selfridges before becoming chancellor but he’s a real expert on prostitutes and illegal drugs.

Allegedly.

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Please feel free to comment.

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Mandatory Work Activity Is Wobbling, Keep Kicking Till It Breaks

the void

In a victory for anti-workfare campaigners, the number of people forced to work without pay on the Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) scheme is steadily falling.

MWA is just one of several workfare programmes and involves four weeks full-time work for charities or so-called ‘community organisations’ under the threat of meagre benefits being stopped.  2,670 people were sent on the scheme in February 2014, compared to a high of over four thousand during the same period last year.  In December 2013 only 1,720 starts were recorded, the lowest figure since the scheme was just beginning in the summer of 2011.

The fall in the number of unpaid workers comes after two years of campaigning against by Boycott Workfare and other claimant’s groups which has now seen hundreds of charities rejecting forced labour schemes.  Household names such as Oxfam, Scope and Shelter have been joined by over 300 organisations to sign the

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This Is Not About UKIP

DWP’s decision to abolish the Independent Living Fund overturned

DWP’s decision to abolish the Independent Living Fund overturned.

Euro Trash

Where does David Coburn live?

Edinburgh Eye

Edinburgh is a lovely place to live. (Second on the quality-of-living index for the whole of the UK.) Edinburgh is one of a few cities around the world that are genuinely beautiful.

David Coburn is the list-topper candidate for UKIP in Scotland in the EuroElections on Thursday – Nigel Farage feels “bullish” that Coburn will become one of UKIP’s MEPs after the elections on 22nd May. And, Coburn says, he lives in Edinburgh.

David Coburn was born in Glasgow, and moved to London over twenty years ago: he was working in Kensington in 1993, where he ran the Lexicon School of English, which was dissolved in 1993 by the Companies Registrar after failing to file accounts.

He’s lived in Kensington, W11 at least since 14th August 2006 (from Companies House – he’s been the director of several companies) and he was still living there on 24th April 2014…

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The Staggering Cost Of One Man’s Delusions: £25 Billion Squandered On Bungled Welfare Reforms

the void

The recent report from the Major Projects Authority, which revealed that Universal Credit is such a fucking disaster they had to invent a whole new category to describe it, also laid bare the astronomical cost of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms.

Just under £11 billion is budgeted to be squandered on some of the DWP’s largest projects, and that figure doesn’t include Universal Credit.  The cost of this hare-brained experiment is shrouded in mystery now it has been classed as ‘reset’, but last year the Major Projects Authority reported the that bill would reach £12.8 billion.

Even this is far from the whole story.  Community Work Placements, the latest mass workfare scheme, will cost almost a third of a billion.  The costs of other Jobcentre schemes, such as Mandatory Work Activity, are not included in the above figures.  At the very least the budgeted costs of welfare reform exceed…

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