Month: August 2016

What was I thinking? I can only blame yesterday’s lapse of judgement on the medicine I have been taking for the cold I caught last week. Of course badges indicating disability – hidden or overt – are a bad idea. If Transport for London thinks differently, perhaps a reminder of the infamous ‘black triangle’ badges in Nazi Germany is required? The black triangle badge was used in Nazi concentration camps to mark out people deemed to be “asocial” or “workshy” and experience suggests that ignorant people here in the UK…

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And TISA has been under negotiation while we’ve all been fussing over TTIP. How clever. The worst part of the Independent article raising the alarm about this newly-revealed plan is the lack of detail. Apparently, TISA will include clauses that will prevent governments taking public control of strategic services, and inhibit regulation of the banks that created the financial crash. And there’s a threat to the UK’s sovereignty that would turn Brexit into a pointless gesture: It seems that if we sign up to TISA, our ability to control our…

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This is for all the commenters who come to Vox Political to tell us all that the polls say Jeremy Corbyn can’t win an election. The polls are saying he’s certain to win the Labour Party leadership again. YouGov – a polling company that was famously founded by Tories and is run by one of them to this day, has finally released the long-awaited results of its poll on the Labour leadership election. Many social media commentators have speculated that the poll result was delayed because the results weren’t what its…

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The possibility that Owen Smith could ever be a “champion of disabled people” should be ludicrous to anybody who reads This Blog – for well-documented reasons. The fact that his cronies in the Labour ‘party machine’ have just booted out the woman in his publicity photograph, for no very good reason, makes his claim doubly laughable. But there is a serious side: This man and his supporters are making the Labour Party look ridiculous. Owen Smith’s campaign team have been busy distributing to the media a photograph of the Labour leadership…

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Here’s an excellent idea being piloted by Transport for London: badges for people with hidden disabilities, allowing them to claim a seat on the Tube. Is it possible that the architects of this scheme have visited one of the Asda superstores that have signs to show that people with hidden disabilities are entitled to use toilet facilities for the disabled? This Writer’s only doubt refers to the company “recruiting” people to start wearing the badges from a particular date. That smacks of “tokenism” – doing something for people with disabilities…

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There is only one surprise about John Godfrey’s proposal to scrap publicly-funded state benefits and replace them with compulsory ‘insurance’ – that it has taken the Tories six years to get around to it. For the people earning the least, it would be a financial disaster. It’s all very well saying someone earning £27,000 a year could pay in £11 per month and claim 40 per cent of their earnings (£10,800) from an insurer over a 12-month period. Most people don’t earn £27,000. If you’re on £13,000 or thereabouts, paying in…

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Isn’t it interesting that a French minister has joined Germany’s Vice-Chancellor in calling for negotiations on the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership to be called off, so soon after the UK voted to leave the EU? We know that David Cameron was very much in favour of the planned agreement between the United States and the European Union, that would have driven down the quality of products, harmed working conditions, and sealed privatisation into the UK’s National Health Service. But the UK has voted itself out of this issue and now…

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Any plan to bypass a biased mainstream press is a good idea, in This Writer’s opinion. I made the point to a Wales-based Labour MP at the start of the Assembly election campaign earlier this year and it seems to have been taken seriously (although that’s not to suggest I’m taking credit for this in any way). Left-wing commentators like Vox Political, The Canary, Another Angry Voice and many more have a huge amount of influence because we are very good at supporting any arguments we put forward with factual information.…

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A vocal Owen Smith supporter had a sharp knockback – from another Smith supporter – when she criticised Mr Corbyn’s plan. She said it was like the technology sector in the late 1970s; he responded by pointing out that this would put current Labour Party policy somewhere in the 1960s. And we all laughed. I’ll leave you to work out the identities of the disputants. Here are the details of Mr Corbyn’s digital manifesto. Decide for yourself if either of them are right, or if he has devised something worthwhile,…

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Silly question; of course they are. They did it before the 1983 election, precisely in order to make it easier for them to win. They tried to do it whilst in coalition with the Liberal Democrats – but the plan was postponed after disagreements between the two governing parties. It seems the plans would have meant the LDs losing a quarter of their seats. Now the plans are back on the political agenda. The Liberal Democrats can no longer get in the way because their support for the Conservatives ensured…

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