Despair at the coalition government

So we have now had this coalition government in power for just over a month, and the true out dated Tory views are coming to light again.

As the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley says that we should give children a choose for school dinner, why do the Tory's have this idea that 'choose' is good. Would you let your 6 year child choose what to have for dinner at home, I guess the answer is no, so why let them choose at school. And for the government to say that feeding our children at school is not a matter for the government just says it all about this coalition government. I believe that Jamie Oliver was correct to try and deal with the situation.
When I was at school we had school dinners, we would never dream of going of going out to near by shops,

IMF raises global economic growth forecast

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has raised its forecast for global economic growth this year, from 4% to 4.5%.


It said the world economy grew strongly in the first part of this year, mainly due to robust growth in Asia.

Developed economies maintained a modest but steady recovery in the same period.

But it warned risks had increased and there had been a setback in progress towards financial stability.

Debt concerns

UK economy continues to grow, says BCC

The UK economy continued to grow in the second quarter of this year, according to a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

The organisation, which collected data from 5,600 businesses across the country, predicted growth for the three months to the end of June of between 0.6% and 0.7%.

However, serious concerns over sustained recovery remained, it warned.

It found that the service sector presented the biggest worry.

The BCC's members reported sluggish growth in retail and services, which account for around three quarters of the country's gross domestic product.

Another, more tangible problem was the rising cost of raw materials, cited by 80% of its manufacturing members as putting pressure on prices.

Born Again Thatcherites are preaching fiscal austerity to the unconverted

George Osborne's dedication to fiscal masochism is overlooking the markets' worries about growth.

As the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition embarks on Margaret Thatcher's Economic Experiment Part Two, and Lloyd George, Roy Jenkins and the departed members of the generation of "wet" Conservatives turn in their graves, I am occasionally asked whether I regret having been so hostile to Thatcherism, Mark One. The answer remains a resounding "no".

When the subject was raised the other evening, there came to mind a conversation I had with a former cabinet minister after the fall of Thatcher in 1990. He was a senior figure, and certainly not in the wet bracket with my friends Ian Gilmour, Peter Walker and Jim Prior. "She must be suffering," I ventured. My interlocutor stared hard at his lunch and picked up his glass. "Yes," he replied, "but is she suffering enough?"

This particular politician had once been a believer but was horrified by the extent of the social damage. It had not been as easy as he thought to reform the public sector without pain; and the simple monetarism he had espoused turned out to be seriously flawed. Now, it appears, it is a case of "here we go again", with our new chancellor congratulating himself in public for "taking the necessary courageous action".

Departments told to draw up plans for 40% spending cuts

The Treasury has told most government departments to prepare "illustrative plans" to cut spending by 40% - as well as the expected 25% - within the month.


Education and defence have been given some protection, and must produce plans to cut 10% and 20%. International aid and health budgets are being protected.

The full 40% plans are unlikely to be implemented but will inform future decisions on cuts, the BBC understands.

Labour says the news will raise fears about the future of frontline services.

'Swingeing cuts'

The government says cuts are needed to reduce the UK's £156bn annual budget deficit - the amount it must borrow each year to plug the gap between public income and spending.

However, public sector unions are threatening "co-ordinated industrial action" if ministers try to implement cuts as deep as 40%.

BBC political correspondent Gary O'Donoghue said ministers were told by the Treasury at a cabinet meeting in Bradford last Tuesday to draw up what are being called illustrative plans, and have them ready by the end of July.

Sources have stressed that Labour's pre-election plans had already implied cuts of 20% around Whitehall, he said.

Tax concerns jeopardise US financial reform effort

Members of Congress are revising an agreement on reform of the US financial sector after Republicans objected to a tax on large financial institutions.

After a marathon 19-hour negotiating session by House and Senate legislators on Thursday, Democrats were confident their bill would pass both chambers.

But Republican Senator Scott Brown now says he will withdraw his support if his concerns over the tax are not met.

The bill would bring the biggest change to financial regulation in decades.

The reforms are intended to impose strict limits on banks' ability to take risky speculative bets on markets.

The legislation had been expected to pass both chambers of Congress this week in time for President Barack Obama to sign it into law by 4 July.

But without Mr Brown, Democrats have no Republican votes for the package in the Senate - and with the death of Senator Robert Byrd on Monday, they are two votes shy of the 60 required for passage.

Mr Brown said on Tuesday he would no longer back the bill if his concerns over the $17.9bn (£11.9bn) tax on large financial institutions were not addressed.

The tax, which helps finance the bill, was included during Thursday's all-night negotiating session.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chris Dodd has said he is assessing alternatives to the tax.

One option under consideration is to put an early end to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) - often referred to as "the bank bailout" - to help offset the bill's price tag.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Tuesday that if the controversial tax was stripped from the bill, it could still be pursued as a separate piece of legislation.

1.3m jobs 'could go due to spending cuts', report says

Cuts announced in the Budget could lead to up to 1.3 million jobs being lost by 2015, a newspaper report claims.


The Guardian says leaked Treasury figures predict that up to 120,000 public sector jobs and 140,000 private sector jobs could disappear annually for the next five years.

Labour figures said the true cost of George Osborne's Budget was now clear.

But the government said independent experts expect "unemployment to fall in every year and employment to rise".

Duncan Smith considers incentives to relocate jobless

The new government has announced a new plan to move unemployed people from their council houses to another part of the country with work.

From my understanding we don't have enough council housing in the first place, and what about the family's other family's, friends and more importantly the children's schooling.

Is the government promising, a new job, a place for each child at the nearest school, funding to help for travel, funding to help for child care and a new council house, I don't think so.

This feels like another short sighted attempt by the government to reduce its unemployment numbers without really helping the people that need it.

These are my questions below:

• What happens if one person has a job, but the other partner doesn't are their still expected to move.
• A lot of working people use their family and friends to look after children, under this system the government will have to pay for extra child care.
• What happens if you turn down the job (do you then loss your benefits and housing)
• Were are all these jobs, Britain no longer has mass factory's or manufacturing sites.
• Will the government also give them money to put a car on the road or pay for public transport, because you can't say well we have a job and a council house for you, but they are twenty miles apart and we are cutting all the public transport systems.
• Also this migration will be from the north to the south, since the north was so heavily hit by the Tory's back in the 80's the jobs on scale needed just don't exist.
• Are you guaranteed a school place for your children in the nearest school, which then will have a knock on effected, do we just add more children to the class or will local family then get turned down.

written by Recession2009

Please read press story below

Duncan Smith considers incentives to relocate jobless

Unemployed people living in council homes could be offered incentives to move to areas where there are jobs, the work and pensions secretary has said.


Iain Duncan Smith said millions were trapped in "ghettos of poverty" unable to move for fear of losing their homes.

Labour's Ed Balls called the idea "profoundly unfair" and likened it to Tory calls in the 1980s for people to "get on your bike" to look for work.

But Mr Duncan Smith said such comparisons were "ludicrous".

The coalition government has promised bold welfare reforms to ensure work pays better and to tackle generations of unemployment in families.

'Trapped'

Mr Duncan Smith said that the fact that there were five-and-a-half million people who were not working showed that current policies were not working.

Britain had one of the most static workforces in the western world, with people "trapped" in areas with high unemployment, he said.

Under the last government, he told Sky News, "almost ghettos of poverty" had appeared "where people are static and unable to get work because there is not work there".

The government wanted to distribute unemployment more evenly across the country and to make it as easy for people on low incomes to travel to do a job as the better-off, he added.


Mr Duncan Smith said he did not expect people to relocate to different parts of the country, nor did he want everyone to move to the south east of England.