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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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How are they actually going to hack the phones? It's one thing writing legislation permitting police to do something, but if legislation allowed police to phase through walls and take the form of animals it still wouldn't necessarily make it possible.
I guess there are known vulnerabilities in some platforms, but Apple aren't acting like the type to cooperate and I can't imagine custom ROM providers for Android doing so either.
Supposedly by ordering Apple to do so: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/investigatory-powers-bill-and-apple
quote:The newly proposed British spying law, the Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB), already includes methods that would permit the British government to order companies like Apple to re-engineer their own technology, just as the FBI is demanding. Worse, if the law passes, each of these methods would be accompanied by a gag order. Not only would Apple be expected to comply, but the IPB would insist that Tim Cook could not tell the public what was going on without breaking UK law. At least in the current fight between Apple and the US government, we're having the debate out loud and in public.
There's at least three parts of the IPB that could theoretically be used against Apple to compel it into undermining the company's own security technology.
First, the IPB would grant the UK the power to issue a “Technical Capability Notice" (S.189). a secret order that the UK would be able to serve on a telecommunications operator (which the bill currently defines so broadly it would include companies like Apple) to force it to "remov[e] electronic protection applied ... to any communications or data" and to "provide facilities or services of a specified description."
Second, the law would also grant the UK the power to issue a "National Security Notice" (S.188)—another secret instrument, even more vaguely drawn, that would require operators to "carry out any conduct, including the provision of services of facilities," which the British government "considers necessary in the interests of national security."
As Privacy International have noted, both of these instruments include gag orders that would prohibit Tim Cook from telling his customers what was happening.
Third, the new bill provides for "equipment interference"—the UK’s name for tailored access, or hacking in the popular sense of that term. It would allow the UK to break into private devices and insert new code for the purposes of surveillance or extracting data. Equipment interference orders include a requirement (S.101) that any communications provider (again, this includes Apple) take any "reasonably practicable" steps in effecting a hacking warrant. This requirement, like the other two notices above, is of course accompanied with a matching gag order (S.102), preventing providers from informing others. (We believe the gag could even preclude them from discussing the order with technical and legal advisors they might have.)
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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http://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2016/mar/04/jeremy-corbyn-sex-trade-left-women-exploitation
quote:Yet again the males on the left have let women down, while kidding themselves that they are being progressive. Jeremy Corbyn has said, during a talk at Goldsmiths University, that he is in favour of decriminalising the sex trade. “Let’s do things a bit differently and in a more civilised way,” he said.
But there is nothing civilised about legitimising one of the most exploitative industries on the planet.
It is apt that Corbyn made his admission at Goldsmiths. Any feminist in support of criminalising sex-buyers is instantly accused by Goldsmiths’ feminist society of hating prostituted women, or “whorephobia”, as it is known. This twist of logic is quite something considering the law that criminalises demand also decriminalises those selling sex.
I cannot believe that Corbyn is so misinformed as to see the blanket decriminalisation of the sex trade as necessary to uphold the human rights and safety of those selling sex. In Sweden, the first country to introduce the sex-buyer law in 1999, not one prostituted woman has been murdered by a pimp or sex-buyer since then. In New Zealand, where the sex trade was decriminalised in 2003, there have been five murders.
What decriminalisation actually means is that control is taken away from the criminal justice agencies and given to local authorities. Under this model, pimps become managers, and brothel owners are business entrepreneurs.
The only difference between decriminalisation and legalisation is that under legalisation the state becomes the official pimp by making certain aspects of the trade legal This way it can collect taxes and impose compulsory health checks on prostituted women – something the great feminist abolitionist Josephine Butler campaigned against in the 19th century.
Many on the left believe any criminalisation of the industry stigmatises those who sell sex, and that the selling of sex should be regarded as a job like any other. But there is a growing body of research showing that in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Nevada and the Netherlands, where prostitution has been legalised or decriminalised, there is an increase in demand, which in turn has led to an increase in people coerced into prostitution. Such regimes lead to an increase in the legal as well as the illegal sex trade.
In researching my forthcoming book on the international sex trade, I have spoken to a number of women currently and formerly involved in the sex trade in New Zealand, the country hailed as nirvana since the disaster of legalisation in Holland became public.
One interviewee began working in a New Zealand brothel just after she turned 18, prior to decriminalisation. I asked her what decriminalisation had changed. “I don’t think it made any difference,” she said, “because the boss still does everything really dodgy, and I think that’s how he did it when it was illegal.”
The idea that pimps and other exploiters would suddenly turn into considerate employers who pay taxes and abide by the law simply because they are no longer technically criminals is ridiculous.
The sex workers’ rights lobby that has targeted Labour with its propaganda on the benefits of decriminalisation minimises and denies harm. The only harm it is prepared to acknowledge is caused, according to this logic, by feminists and police officers.
One sex workers’ rights activist recently claimed in her blog: “No sex worker I know reports clients as being the biggest problem … It’s always the rescuers, the police and the state that do them the most harm.”
What utter rubbish. While police brutality is prevalent towards women in prostitution in a number of countries, the rapes, homicides and violence from pimps and punters is well documented. In the UK alone, there have been 153 murders of prostituted women since 1990 – none committed by feminist abolitionists or police.
Why the left supports the rights of pimps and brothel owners is a mystery. It is akin to supporting tobacco industry profiteers in order to destigmatise smokers.
Corbyn and his colleagues would do well to listen to survivors of the sex trade before taking such an uninformed line on the best way to regulate prostitution.
As Rachel Moran, sex trade survivor and author of Paid For, remarked: “Males of the left defy every principle they purport to stand for when they contort their own political values to view women’s bodies as commercial products subject to purchase in free market economics. No other social group is treated this way by the men of the left.
“It is only women who are deemed so worthless as to be denigrated with this indignity, and it is only women whose equal human status is so unthinkable as to motivate them to turn their backs on their own politics.”
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Mar 4, 2016 18:14
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Have you any specific examples out of curiosity. I'd argue the tax credits u turn probably wasn't the core Tory base, more the people who want to be Tories. Though it does help with making a show of unity and compromise in the run up to the referendum. So you could well be right, but it is also aimed at the Brexit MPs as well.
This maybe? Budget 2011: Sighs of relief as George Osborne goes easy on non-doms
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Mar 5, 2016 09:21
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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dependency theory is sketchy even as applied in the long 19th century; in the postwar era it is implausible. Poor countries are not principally poor because of extractive transfers. Rich countries are not principally rich because of extractive transfers.
So if I engage in an activity that has two negative effects I can claim that overall it isn't negative because I can point to one of the effects and argue that it wasn't the principle cause of my targets misery?
Economists have a strange way of reasoning about things.
E: pedantry
dispatch_async fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Mar 5, 2016
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Mar 5, 2016 11:13
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/04/ed-miliband-praised-after-giving-a-rough-sleeper-10
quote:Former Labour leader Ed Miliband has been praised for setting a good example after he was filmed giving a rough sleeper a £10 note.
Miliband handed over the money outside Kentish Town tube station in north London, where the young man was begging.
A video of the incident was circulated on Facebook by 18-year-old Rob Braban. He said he and his friends asked Miliband to make the contribution after they had bought food and water for the man.
“You’re a good man, Ed,” Braban is heard telling Miliband after the former Labour leader made the donation.
In a Facebook posting sharing the video he said: “I think Ed is setting a good example here for other MPs and human beings to follow. Share this around to show that common decency goes a long way.”
But Ed, isn't giving that man money encouraging the evils of idleness and dependency, something that greatly concerned you as Labour leader?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2080776/Now-Ed-Miliband-gets-tough-onslaught-evil-benefits-scroungers.html
quote:Mr Miliband’s somersault on benefits will be signalled in a speech later this month by Labour welfare spokesman Liam Byrne to mark the 70th anniversary of the Beveridge Report.
The report was used by post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee to lay the foundations of the modern welfare state – and helped earn him a hallowed place in Labour history.
But Mr Byrne thinks Beveridge would ‘turn in his grave’ if he knew how billions of pounds of benefits fall into the hands of lifelong spongers.
He will argue that widespread benefits abuse flies in the face of one of the ‘five giant evils’ identified by Beveridge: idleness.
Mr Byrne believes there is a new ‘giant evil’ – the evil of benefits dependency.
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Mar 5, 2016 11:41
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Don't get too close to a wounded cow, it'll have your leg off
That reminds me, was this Peak Guardian article posted in here?
Life isn’t a cartoon, and animals are not our playthings
quote:You can nearly hear the whinny. You can practically picture the carnage that would probably have ensued had they hung about a minute or two longer, had the fence not held and had the father enabled video mode. I don’t know what kinds of smiles the Thomson reps are usually met with, but celebrating Betty’s horrific grimace as a classic of the form makes me grateful I don’t work for the holiday company. quote:I’ve barely fed a horse carrots, let alone sat on one, but even I can see in her face a combination of anger, hunger and confusion, rather than the larky desire to promote some lols on Instagram.
The author then goes on to chastise modern society for anthropomorphising animals.
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Mar 5, 2016 17:29
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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EU referendum: Former Bank of England governor Mervyn King suggests he could vote for Brexit
Graun live blog posted:Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, has suggested that he could vote to leave the EU. In an interview on the World at One, he claimed he had not yet made up his mind as to how he would vote in the referendum. He appeared to criticise the government and Remain/Leave campaigns for not setting out the arguments properly. He said:
"I think that you and the BBC have a vitally important role here because the protagonists don’t seem to be capable of setting out carefully and dispassionately the arguments. We need the BBC to explain to everyone the arguments for and the arguments against. There are good arguments for both sides of this debate."
Asked to give his own objective analysis, he said he would need a two-hour programme to do that. And, when asked if he had made up his own mind yet, he replied:
I’m still waiting to hear the facts and the arguments from I hope the BBC which will enable me to make up my mind.
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Mar 7, 2016 16:48
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Sadiq Khan aide resigns after offensive tweets and gun video emerge
quote:An aide to Labour’s candidate for London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has resigned after he apparently posted offensive comments on social media and posed with a gun while joking about being a hitman.
Shueb Salar, a parliamentary assistant to the former minister, was pictured with a gun. A message apparently posted by him bragged about spending a weekend “shooting stuff with real guns, knives, crossbows and bow and arrows”, according to the Evening Standard.
The posts included joke comments “I’mASecretHitman”, “ShoutMeIfYouWantMeToTakeCareOfSomeone” and “I’llMakeItLookLikeAnAccident”.
A video clip shows him taking aim at a target in a firing range. A spokesman for Khan said the firing range formed part of a shooting weekend which was innocently bought by Salar and a group of friends from a discount offers website.
It emerged at the weekend that Salar had sent a series of offensive tweets. In one message, posted in May 2012, Salar said “currently hating on all you faggots who have finished uni”, adding “lucky cunts”.
A post from June 2012 read “gently caress all you hoes”, while a message from April 2012 suggested that the way to “treat a lady” was to “buy her a nice iron and extend the kitchen for her”.
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Mar 7, 2016 17:15
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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In contrast to the Guardian the Independent is painting Corbyn as the messiah.
Corbyn has been drawing 1,000-strong crowds in ex-mining communities - but they're poor, so it doesn't matter
quote:The average audience size for the Cynon Valley Labour Party’s annual Keir Hardie Memorial Lecture is 50-60 people. One year David Miliband managed to fill the hall at the local bowls club.
On Saturday night, a far larger venue had to be found. 1,000 people wanted a ticket to come and see Jeremy Corbyn. The organisers booked the leisure centre in Aberdare, a cavernous sports hall with bright turquoise walls.
Saturday night was, according to the organisers, the biggest political rally in the Welsh Valleys for 20 years. It was a huge event, not just for Aberdare. The story, ignored by much of the media, is that Jeremy Corbyn has become a cross between a rock star and a saint.
Just north of Aberdare there was, until recently, the Tower Colliery – the oldest deep coal mine in the UK. This is an area that has faced great hardship since Margaret Thatcher’s Government and which remains one of the most socially deprived areas of Wales. But while the Cynon Valley is a Labour stronghold, this was not a gathering of die-hard Labour supporters.
In the scrum at the end of the rally, families queued up to have their photo taken with Corbyn and hundreds of people reached out to shake his hand or just touch his sleeve. Another man told me that he was gratified to have watched a woman he knew was a Ukip voter clap continually throughout Mr Corbyn’s talk. One woman grabbed Corbyn’s arm and repeatedly called him ‘a beacon’.
[…]
It seems that Corbyn has reached a celebrity sainthood status that very few politicians will ever know – but it’s mainly confined to underprivileged areas, so it’s not supposed to matter. Aside perhaps from the Prime Minister, however, is there another UK politician whose presence can turn an event of 50 people into one of 1,000 people? Who can fill leisure centres and town halls, not just in the Valleys, but in Liverpool, Glasgow, Middlesbrough and London?
At the end of his speech in Aberdare, Corbyn’s team faced the near-impossible task of trying to extricate him from the hall. Calling him ‘JC’, they tried to gently steer him away from the crowd of well-wishers blocking the main door.
People were singing and Corbyn stopped to shake the hands of two elderly people selling pamphlets about Keir Hardy. Then his team intervened before any more selfies could be taken and took him out of back door and on to another event.
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Mar 8, 2016 19:27
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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The Lib Dem ‘cool dad’ call to legalise cannabis is an insult to young voters
quote:When I was about 15, my friend’s parents got divorced. Her mum seemed to really flourish following the split but her dad took it extremely badly. Without the security of his marriage he felt exposed and alone, and he responded by desperately latching on to his teenage children in an attempt to rediscover his lost youth. His house became a popular place to hang out because of his lax attitude towards loud music, underage drinking and recreational drug use. Sometimes, he’d even smoke a spliff and share it with my friend’s older brother and his mates.
Though we had appreciated the way he was more relaxed and permissive than most of our own parents, we stopped going round after one particularly raucous party, when his mortified daughter discovered him trying to coax a noticeably intoxicated girl from the year above into what had formerly been his marital bed. None of us trusted his motivations again. In my experience, young people are rarely the credulous idiots they’re portrayed as.
Which brings me rather neatly to the current predicament of the Liberal Democrats. Try as I might to suppress my cynicism, it’s hard to interpret the party’s recent report calling for cannabis to be legalised as anything other than a desperate grasp for relevance. Drug decriminalisation is a policy they’ve quietly backed for a while, but choosing to trumpet it now feels like a pitiful attempt to appeal to young voters – the group most likely to believe drug laws should be liberalised.
Like my mate’s dad, the Lib Dems experienced a messy break-up and weathered it far worse than their former partner. As the Conservatives stride forward with heads held high, stronger than they’ve been in decades, the Lib Dems have been left sobbing along to Adele and lamenting what could have been. Now that their support network has all but disappeared, they’re making a last-ditch effort to revivify a strategy that worked so well for them in the past: pandering to young people.
That's just what the Guardian needs - articles comparing sexual predators to political parties.
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Mar 9, 2016 12:43
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/10/george-osborne-rebuked-no-cuts-police-budgets-claim
quote:George Osborne, has been rebuked by the statistics watchdog for wrongly claiming there would be “no cuts at all in police budgets” in his autumn statement last November.
The chancellor’s declaration that “now is not the time for further police cuts, now is the time to back our police” was widely regarded as his major “rabbit out of a hat” surprise at a time when cuts of up to 20% had been expected.
But Sir Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, ruled that despite Osborne’s claim to be providing “real-terms protection” for the police, forces actually faced a £160m real-terms cut in their Whitehall funding in 2015-16 and 2016-17.
A House of Commons analysis estimated that the £160m cut was equal to the salaries of 3,200 police officers over the two years.
Osborne and the home secretary, Theresa May, have insisted their pledge not to cut police budgets holds good if police and crime commissioners across England and Wales make up the shortfall by pushing through the maximum allowed increase – 2% – in their share of council tax bills, known as the police precept.
But several forces including Greater Manchester, West Midlands and the home secretary’s own Thames Valley have warned that even with maximum increases in their police precept they face cuts to budgets including losing officers.
Dilnot said in a letter sent to the shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham, who raised the issue with him and copied it to the Home Office, that an investigation by the Statistics Authority found the chancellor was wrong to claim real-terms protection in Whitehall funding for the police.
“We agree with the findings of this analysis [by the House of Commons library] that between 2015-16 and 2016-17 there has been a decrease in this element of police funding in real terms,” said Dilnot.
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Mar 10, 2016 17:05
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Government not backing down on disability cuts despite minister's words
quote:Suggestions by a Cabinet minister that the government may back down over cuts to disability benefit have been played down amid a growing Conservative row.
Education Secretary Nicky Morgan described the plan as a "suggestion" and said it was "under consultation".
But sources close to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said her comments don't "tally with what we and Downing Street are saying".
The BBC was told Mrs Morgan didn't "seem to understand" the proposals.
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Mar 18, 2016 11:18
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/scratch-one-tory-1efdada64080
Paul Mason posted:Iain Duncan Smith has resigned from the British government after the annual budget included a £1.3bn attack on disability benefits. Here’s what it means in five bullet points:
1. Austerity has hit the buffers. Its aim, according to Conservative economic theory, is to kickstart growth. But it hasn’t so they need more austerity. At some point the austerity vs humanity problem was going to trigger the conscience of a Tory minister and this is it.
2. The background is the vicious Tory infighting over Europe. Given the Cameron faction is using the whole bag of dirty tricks against the Johnson/Duncan Smith faction over Brexit, IDS has clearly had enough. There will now be a strong challenge to Cameron after 23 June, whether Britain votes to stay or leave.
3. Osborne’s budget is unravelling. The education secretary Nicky Morgan last night suggested billions of pounds worth of cuts were “suggestions”. She had to cut short a TV interview today. My long engagement with Westminster leads me to see this as circumstatial evidence of a wider civil war inside the Conservative government over the scale of pointless austerity Osborne is imposing to reach his — clearly unreachable and stupid — fiscal targets.
4. This is Jeremy Corbyn’s victory. In one speech he’s blown apart the Tory front bench, made likely two substantial revolts, destroyed the cabinet and made the Tories look like incompetent fools. And the weekend is young: it’s probably not over. IDS’ letter to Cameron draws the logic clearly.
5. It’s a disaster for Blairites. They’d prepared their cabbage patches of opposition to Labour’s own new fiscal rule, and spent weeks revving up to diss Corbyn over his expected mishandling of the Budget. Instead Labour is ahead in one poll, tied in another, and its radical left leadership looks not just vindicated politically, but — and this matters in the Commons — tactically: Corbyn and McDonnell executed a near perfect hit on the government by announcing their own fiscal rule; denouncing the benefit cuts; and now splitting the cabinet.
It is no longer “put up or shut up” time for the Progress wing of Labour. Just the latter.
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Mar 19, 2016 16:19
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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What kind of mental gymnastics are required to think austerity promotes growth? I thought the stated aim was to maintain what infrastructure a country has and limit the impact of a poor economy. I mean I know it doesn't work and makes things worse but I can at least understand that aim.
The confidence fairy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuHSQXxsjM&t=2689s
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Mar 19, 2016 17:32
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Doctors accuse Tories of deception over 'extra £10bn for NHS' claim
quote:Doctors’ leaders have accused the Conservatives of deceiving the public by giving the NHS less than half the extra £10bn ministers regularly cite as proof of their support for the service.
The government has used a series of accounting tricks to wrongly give the impression of generous backing when in reality it is leaving patient care underfunded and refusing to face up to the NHS’s deepening financial crisis, a report from the British Medical Association claims.
Former Lib Dem minister David Laws said on Sunday that Downing Street dismissed the NHS boss Simon Stevens’s bid for the £15bn-£16bn more he believed the NHS needed as “mad” and unaffordable and told him to make do with much less instead.
The BMA has joined the row over the integrity of the government’s approach to NHS spending with a highly critical analysis of persistent claims made and figures cited by ministers including David Cameron, George Osborne and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt.
The doctors’ union points out that the Department of Health’s budget to fund health in England will only have gone up by £4.5bn by 2020-21 compared to the current financial year, well below the £10bn extra the government has pledged to increase it by.
“This continued and repeated misuse of figures is nothing more than a political deception that is damaging to the long-term future of the NHS,” Dr Mark Porter, the BMA’s chair of council, told the Guardian. Its report seeks to expose what it calls a worrying “mismatch between the cosy political rhetoric and the practical reality of an NHS facing an unprecedented funding crisis”.
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Mar 21, 2016 08:01
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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It is simply no longer possible to be disabled and a Tory, says angry activist
quote:Conservative disability activist Graeme Ellis was so incensed by last Wednesday’s budget that he immediately sabotaged the Conservative Disability Group website he ran, and resigned from the party.
Ellis came to the sudden realisation that it was simply no longer possible to be disabled and a Conservative supporter when he heard that disability benefits were to be cut just as tax breaks were being given to high earners – the same issue that Iain Duncan Smith said motivated his resignation as work and pensions secretary.
Now Ellis says he feels cynical about the ex-minister’s attempts to portray himself as a martyr. “I read his resignation letter. I can’t believe he is sincere,” Ellis says. “He has had ample opportunity in the past to speak out, but he has voted for cut after cut after cut after cut. Has he just now developed a conscience?”
A lifelong Conservative voter, Ellis has been an active member of the Conservative Disability Group for the past four years, responsible for its website. Immediately after the budget, he vented his fury by destroying the group’s online presence, removing all its content and replacing the home page with a curt note stating: “This website is temporarily closed owing to disability cuts ... Graeme Ellis has resigned and will no longer develop or host this site.”
His protest had an unexpectedly powerful impact, attracting headlines, and crystallising the sense that this was a cut too far, even for Conservative activists. “I just exploded. I was so incensed. Any sense of caring for the vulnerable in society went out the window. They were taking money from disabled people with one hand, and were giving money back to big corporations and high earners with the other,” he says.
“It wasn’t premeditated or planned. It was supposed to be a small snub to the group and the Conservative party,” he says. It was only later when he received several stern texts and emails informing him that Conservative party headquarters wanted him to reinstate the site immediately, and when news programmes started calling, that he realised that his modest act of protest had hit a nerve. There is a revealing news clip of the chancellor looking uncomfortable as Ellis sets out how the cuts will hurt.
Ellis, 59, a mild-mannered disability rights adviser from Lancaster, who has used a wheelchair for the past seven years because of diabetes-related nerve damage, suddenly found himself landed with the job of explaining to the country why this latest set of disability cuts were intolerable – even to a committed Conservative supporter.
“I want to highlight what a load of crap disabled people are going through at the moment. That’s something good that has come out of this,” he says, in an upstairs room at Lancaster’s, Here To Support centre, a precariously funded advice centre, that currently receives about 60 calls a week from people locally who believe they have been wrongly refused disability benefits and are in financial and emotional turmoil.
Ellis is very well-informed about the complexities of disability policy, after spending thousands of hours untangling refused benefit applications, and attending hundreds of tribunals with clients, fighting for decisions not to award disability benefit to be overturned. He is convinced that the two latest cuts – the £30 weekly reduction in employment support allowance (ESA), and the cuts to those eligible for personal independence payments (which the Institute for Fiscal Studies say will hit 370,000 people, with an average loss of £3,500 a year) – will have catastrophic consequences.
He is unconvinced by the government’s decision not proceed with the policy in “its current form”, noting that the money is still set to be cut from the disability budget. “To cut our income, to reduce our ability to survive is one way of making a cull. People will die,” he says. While he recognises that this may sound melodramatic, he points out that this is precisely what has happened with previous decisions to tighten eligibility for other disability benefits.
Ellis is now planning to join the Labour party, and will meet with shadow minister for disabled people, Debbie Abrahams, this week, to discuss how he might advise the party on disability policy.
Ellis has been feeling doubtful about his own allegiance to the Conservative party for some time. He has felt unhappy with the “scrounger and shirker” narrative that has underpinned much of the party’s thinking on benefit cuts, and was unimpressed when he heard Duncan Smith talk at one of the Conservative Disability Group’s annual public meetings. But when he discussed resigning after last May’s election, colleagues in the group urged him to stay and continue to try to influence the party from within.
Until recently, he had a residual affection for the Conservative party. “I liked the talk of the ‘big society’, the idea that they were a new caring Conservative party. I support the shrinking of the state, devolution, more regional devolution,” he says.
“As a disabled person your heart went out to David Cameron; he was contending with his son’s difficulties. I thought that if he has a son that is that disabled, he is going to care for the disabled.”
By joining the Conservative Disability Group he had hoped to “be able to influence policy a little bit for the greater good. It turned out not to be like that”. He is sorry to have burnt bridges with colleagues at the group, but when he saw the budget headlines, his “blood boiled” and felt he had no choice but to resign. “I had to speak up because I felt that this was a huge injustice for the disabled community.”
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Mar 21, 2016 08:53
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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https://twitter.com/labourwhips/status/711894033354919936
Unclear if Osborne is going to actually show up. Should be fun.
E:
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/711892061717397505
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/711893619054084096
dispatch_async fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Mar 21, 2016
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Mar 21, 2016 13:46
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Surely he has to turn up himself. Even our biased press would be unable to turn down the chance to tear him a new one for running from confrontation on the spectacular misifing of this budget.
Apparently not:
https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/711902555769536512
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Mar 21, 2016 14:12
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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The state of the Communities and Local Government Minister's hair… just give up and shave it off, ffs.
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Mar 21, 2016 16:04
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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I was going to ask wtf is wrong with the author of that tweet but I see she writes for the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/allison-pearson/
"Cambridge's politically correct brigade is ruining all our fun"
"It's not racist to worry about the migrant effect"
"Our schools and hospitals simply cannot cope with the influx of migrants"
"The only way to protect women is to regain control of our borders"
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Mar 22, 2016 09:55
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Bangladesh government angered by Danczuk's call for sanctions
quote:Simon Danczuk, the suspended Labour MP ordered to repay £11,000 in expenses, has come under fire by Bangladesh’s government for interfering in its “internal affairs” after he flew to Dhaka and called for sanctions to be imposed on the south Asian nation.
Danczuk, who flew to the Bangladeshi capital on Friday, addressed tens of thousands of supporters of the opposition Bangladesh National party – telling them that since taking power, the current government had created a “culture of fear” with a “break down in human rights ... and political opponents disappearing”.
Speaking of the ties between Britain and Bangladesh, Danczuk called on British ministers to say “ the relationship has … soured. Sanctions should be applied if there is not a return to true democracy”.
British ministers have not broken off relations despite political violence scarring the country – and regularly visit Bangladesh. The UK remains the largest bilateral donor to Bangladesh, sending about £180m a year.
A spokesman for the Bangladeshi high commission in London said the MP allied himself with the opposition, including extremist groups, to “interfere” in democratic politics.
“Talking about Bangladesh’s internal politics is interference in the internal affairs of the country,” he said. “Bangladesh has a flourishing democracy and the next elections are set for 2019.
“Danczuk’s comments are similar to the one of the opposition parties Bangladesh Nationalist party, which is allied to the Jamaat-e-Islami party – which has been described as a ‘criminal organisation’ and has been identified to have links to all radical ... terrorist groups.”
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Mar 24, 2016 10:58
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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He didn't incite any violence towards them though, did he?
Even when he went into meltdown he didn't say anything as bad as what the legions of shitheads say daily on Facebook article comments, unless I missed something.
In this case it appears his crime was catching the attention of the Twitter outrage machine rather than the severity of the things he said, as has happened a few times before.
Well…
https://twitter.com/MatthewDoyle31/status/712733588106649600
Also he seems to have a weird obsession with women who present sky news (predating his racist meltdown).
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Mar 24, 2016 15:01
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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The polling has a similar gap between the main parties as it did in 2011, so it's not amazing (given how the last election turned out), but it's not absolutely terrible either. Something we could build on.
They could build on it. Or they could start stabbing each other in public…
Labour MP Stella Creasy attacks Momentum movement
quote:Labour MP Stella Creasy has launched an attack on Momentum, the grassroots group of Jeremy Corbyn supporters, accusing its activists of trying to deselect members of parliament and draining energy out of the political process.
Creasy, who came second in Labour’s deputy leadership race, also claimed the group was more interested in “meetings and moralising” than real campaigning.
Despite Momentum repeatedly saying it does not support attempts to oust sitting MPs, she said there was an “emphasis by some in these groups on controlling the levers of power to select – or deselect – MPs and party officials”.
Her criticism of Momentum is the most forthright of any MP for some time, after Tom Blenkinsop called for the group to be banned and Tom Watson dismissed it as a “bit of a rabble”.
There have previously been reports that Creasy herself has become a target for deselection in her Walthamstow seat after some campaigners marched to her office to protest against her voting for bombing Islamic State (Isis) in Syria.
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Mar 24, 2016 20:48
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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That seems to be one of the Tories favourite tricks at the moment. If the percentage stats aren't all that great you can always make hay with things like 'more people in employment than ever before'.
There's also the possibility that she uses raw numbers because she doesn't understand percentages
quote:In December 2014 Morgan was advised by Sir Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, that she should “reconsider her comments” and possibly “take advice” about misleading information given to Parliament. Morgan had claimed that one third of children under the previous Labour government had left primary school unable to read or write. In fact 91% of 11-year-old pupils tested in May 2010 had reached at least level 3 of Key Stage 2 – defined as being able "read a range of texts fluently and accurately" – whilst 83% achieved level 4, the expected level. The BBC noting that 64% achieved expected results in all subjects tested suggests Morgan had both misunderstood official literacy level definitions and confused literacy results with expected overall attainment levels
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Mar 26, 2016 17:59
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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May 22, 2024 08:18
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Imagine having the time to have played through 20 generations of one family in The Sims 2. Imagine making the original two members of that family Neil Buchanan and Cat Deeley. Imagine complaining to Maxis there was no technological progression. You've successfully imagined my life
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Tony Blair: west must be ready to deploy ground troops against Isis
quote:Britain and its western allies must be prepared to send ground troops to defeat Islamic State forces or risk a terror attack in Europe of “such size and horror” that draconian security measures would have to be introduced, Tony Blair has said.
In a lengthy article on the Brussels bombings, the former prime minister said local forces could be used against Isis in Iraq, Syria and Libya. But he said western ground forces would eventually be needed to defeat Isis as it sought to create a caliphate.
Blair wrote in the Sunday Times: “We must build military capability able to confront and defeat the terrorists wherever they try to hold territory. This is not just about local forces. It is a challenge for the west. Ground forces are necessary to win this fight and ours are the most capable.”
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He said the military fight against Isis should be part of a wider strategy to confront what he called the “perversion” of the Islamic faith by the ideology of Islamism. He sad people should be careful talking about tackling violent extremism because Islamism was a “much broader problem of ideology”, whose supporters run into the millions across the globe.
Blair wrote: “The reality is that the adherents of this view of Islam are numbered in many millions, have, in some countries, elements of official support, and are systematically teaching it to millions of young people across the world … This ideology is not interested in coexistence. It does not seek dialogue but dominance. It cannot therefore be contained. It has to be defeated.”
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Mar 27, 2016 12:47
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Mar 1, 2016 16:44
