Month: December 2014

WARNING: CONTAINS VERY STRONG LANGUAGE. Many of you should recall VP’s article A few words about respect, in which Yr Obdt Srvt appealed for a little more common decency from commenters – especially those claiming to be supporters or representatives of UKIP, the SNP or the Green Party. That article was prompted partly by personal experience and partly by that endured by fellow blogger kittysjones, whose Greens: the myth of the “new left” debunked attracted an unprecedented amount of vitriol. When Ms Jones pointed this out, some of her more vocal antagonists…

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Research on top executive pay over the last decade has found that it had little or no correlation with key performance indicators that companies highlighted to shareholders, according to Mr Meacher. The research … undertaken … over the 10 years from 2003 to 2013 at 30 of the FTSE-100 companies… found that executive managers’ pay is still determined by simplistic measures that bore little relation to long-term drivers of companies’ value. As a result, over a period when average incomes across the nation have now fallen in real terms close to 2003…

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Joseph was Thatcher’s mentor in the Tory party, and an enthusiastic supporter of Milton Friedman’s monetarism and the Chilean dictator General Pinochet. Although he guided Thatcher and served in her cabinet, he never actually became prime minister himself because of a speech he made about the poor in 1974, writes the Beast. Joseph’s view was that there were too many of them, who were too poorly educated, breeding too young. Too many of their children were mentally retarded, and they were thus a danger to solid, genetically and morally superior…

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The lack of a surge in migrants from the two EU countries after seven years of transitional controls were lifted on 1 January 2014 confounds predictions by Ukip’s Nigel Farage and others that 5,000 Romanians and Bulgarians would arrive “each week, every week” for several years, according to The Guardian. The Oxford University-based Migration Observatory said the growth in the Romanian and Bulgarian populations of the UK had remained at the same steady pace for the last seven years. A quarter of a million Romanians and Bulgarians are now living…

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Thanks to Scott Nelson for the above image, which is self-explanatory. One has to wonder what Cambridge’s Labour council has, that has kept it in the money. A university? Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike Join the Vox Political Facebook page. Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site (but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here: Buy Vox Political books so we can continue bringing you the best of the social media. Health Warning: Government! is now available…

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Reposted here purely because of the comment from cartoonist Gary Barker on Twitter: “Cos it’s worked so well so far. What a clown.” Chancellor George Osborne indicated he was planning to unleash a fresh raid on benefits to help salvage the nation’s financial fortunes, according to the Excess. Mr Osborne said he was not prepared to raise taxes or borrow more money to achieve his goal over the next five years, admitting that “difficult decisions” are going to be required. “Cos it’s worked so well so far.” Gary is right.…

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David Cameron’s policy advisor – Oliver Letwin – explicitly suggested that Scotland be used as a testing ground for the introduction of the poll tax, papers released under the 30-year rule have revealed. The Cabinet Office minister emerges in official papers publicly released today (December 30) as the man who single-handedly kept the idea of the poll tax alive in the mid 1980s despite attempts by two senior ministers to strangle it at birth, according to The Guardian (and many other news sources). “’If you are not willing to move…

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New analysis by Labour of Ministry of Justice figures has revealed that evictions from rental properties are at their highest since they were first measured over a decade ago, according to the Labour Party. The figures show that in the 12 months to September 2014, there were 41,195 landlord repossessions by county court bailiffs, an increase of 49% on the same 12 month period to Sept 2010. This would have seen an estimated 90,000 tenants lose their home. The 11,100 landlord repossessions by county court bailiffs in the latest quarter…

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