Woodstock Jag

How does having a duty of oversight amount to it "being removed from the ambit of government to become someone else's problem"? It's not for government to give national guarantees on the provision of any service. The whole point of these reforms is that local providers determine local services. That's liberalism in a nutshell.

No, it would downgrade the role of government/state from autocratic rule to oversight.

Salmond was a class above without getting out of first gear. Goldie had a solid and typically bullish evening. Tavish Scott was reasoned but cautious and Gray was a complete and utter travesty. Someone please do something. This man CANNOT be allowed to become First Minister.

Glasgow Caledonian University? Surely you mean Glasgow Borstal?

Salmond should wipe the floor with them. I hope Gray gets annihilated.

Except it's not being "mauled" or "torn apart" and the only people doing anything to it aren't "rabid" or "right wing". They are not "constantly champing at the bit to give even more public money to their fat cat mates in the private sector" In fact, the only accusation that holds water in this post is that they're politicians.

I have read the White Paper. Thanks for patronising me again, though. Having the NHS as preferred provider is fundamentally unfair. If other providers can do it better and or more cheaply, they damned well should have the opportunity to do so. If you really don't want the most efficient operation doing things, and you think that to want that is ideological, more fool you. This is nowhere near the US system. The US system is horrifically set-up and sees subsidised drugs companies and vested interests sewn throughout private insurers. The legitimate comparisons are with the German system, where private companies co-ordinate healthcare but the state is ultimately the macro-observer and provider of funding. It works absolutely fine over there and it will work absolutely fine over here.

The only cuts that have been made to date, which you could legitimately attribute to the Coalition government, would be the £6 billion of efficiency savings in the last fiscal year. Most of that was in scrapping the ID cards database, among other things. There were no front-line cuts imposed for the last financial year by the Coalition. Anything that was cut at a lower level was done so by councils and would have done so anyway under Labour. The cuts this year are within £2billion of those Labour planned to implement. If you really think that that final £2billion is "devastating" when public spending is STILL going up and will only just get back to 2007 levels by the next election, then you're using the incorrect definition of devastation.

Hey you had to be right on something eventually

If there was something wrong with tax avoidance it shouldn't be tax avoidance, but tax evasion. Tax is the specific authority of the government to appropriate funds from those under its jurisdiction. It is factually not immoral not to pay tax by not coming under that jurisdiction. The authority for tax is construed (and always has been) contra proferentem: if there is no explicit authority, it shouldn't happen. By engaging in tax avoidance it isn't that you're "not paying your fair share" but that you are not paying tax on something which the government erm... didn't intend you to pay tax on. The "people at the top" already pay more in actual amount of tax: their companies pay corporation tax and employers' NICs; they personally pay UK income tax where they earn money in the UK (at higher rates). They pay more VAT by buying more non-exempt stuff. They pay more fuel duty for their bigger cars. They pay more alcohol duty for their bottles of Glenmorangie. Tax avoidance doesn't "give them a way out". It is simply a case of them not being kettled into a harsher box in the first place. Not doing a good job? Increased personal allowance, abandonment of IHT threshold increase, increase in CGT... what more do you want, exactly? They'll lose votes, but they might not lose that many seats because of the system. Let's wait and see.

1. Public spending is still going up! All the Coalition are doing at the moment is reducing the rate at which it rises! I only wish the actual public spending figures were being cut! 2. The NHS changes are being completely overblown. All that's happening is PCTs' responsibilities are being transferred to GP consortia. It's not privatisation beyond the independent involvement that already exists and spending on the NHS is being protected. Massive ideology, huh? 3. That's not what the benefits changes are doing at all! Removal of child benefit from higher rate taxpayers: very "right wing" ; introduction of a Universal Credit that means you keep getting to keep more of your money the more you earn... very "right wing" ; increase in the DWP budget in the medium term... very "right wing" 4. Tax is a punishment. It is not voluntary or linked to the right to the service like any other form of (e.g.) insurance or service consideration. The tax system is profoundly unfair and became even more so under Labour, with stealth rises in the taxes of those earning a modest income. To fail to recognise the improvements in the tax system under the Coalition (influenced hugely by the Lib Dems) by bringing people completely out of income tax and closing the CGT loophole, not to mention preventing changes to inheritance tax is very unfair. Coalition tax changes are not only expedient, but they're also very fair and a huge improvement. Next up we can hope that the 50p rate finally gets scrapped, because it's costing the treasury money (it increases the profit margins for tax avoidance) and we'll have a system as we so often see, where lower marginal rates of tax actually shift more of the burden onto the broadest shoulders. 5. There's nothing wrong with private sector involvement in the NHS. Indeed you see intensive private sector involvement in some very good health services in the world, Germany being one such example. The disability benefits one is a legitimate point, and I do think it needs worked on, but when taken in the round, the Coalition have made a pretty good stab at dealing with a horrific balance sheet.

The difference being that the opposition don't NEED ideas when things are going well. If you're going to criticise the status quo you absolutely have to offer concrete alternatives. Cameron actually did relatively little to criticise the status quo in opposition. His criticisms were as much of competence as they were of ideas. No they're not. There have been hardly any cuts yet. Most job cuts have come from the private sector. That's because the economy is simply in the shit. Bad investments and high levels of personal debt (as predicted and drawn attention to by Vince Cable a good 3 or 4 years before the crash happened) have caused consumer demand to plummet. It was artificially high based on cheap credit caused by fractional reserve banking. The whole "no one has any money to spend" because there's no jobs is also a Keynesian fallacy. People have no money to spend because the money was wasted on a debt-fuelled binge from about 2000 to 2008. Government creating jobs by spending more money doesn't actually cause the economy to improve at all. All it does is create artificially cheap credit which is confused for real funds. That means that "stimulus" spending is just deferred inflation. This is akin to saying that smashing lots of windows in Whitehall is good for the economy because it boosts GDP when the handymen come in to fix them. It's not. It's just a waste of glass. For growth you need to accept high levels of unemployment and a lower standard of living for at least 5-10 years. Harsh but true. The recovery is not to be driven by employment, but by innovation and foreign investment. Growth built on debt is not growth. Growth built on investment of prior savings IS growth. There is nothing wrong with tax avoidance. Indeed sometimes it is actively encouraged by government to influence the behaviour of individuals and corporate entities. Tax avoidance does not necessarily infer a loophole, and often includes deliberate methods of relief. Even then, the loopholes are notoriously difficult to close. We have the single most complicated tax system in the world and that's not changing any time soon. The richest are those with the best accountants. The best accountants will always find loopholes. Loopholes by definition are the product of mistakes in the drafting of tax legislation. That's just life. The more you try to close the loopholes, the more loopholes you create. If you then try to use the nuclear bomb to crack the nut, countries and individuals will just up-sticks, because they can. Clamping down on tax avoidance is one of the most futile things a government could ever try to do. It's time they were just honest about it, simplified the tax system and stopped taking such exorbitant amounts from people's paypackets.

Okay then, let's tell HSBC et al leave. I'm sure job creation would really benefit from that happening.

The point is increased public spending to stimulate growth is just deferred inflation. With inflation over 4% already it's not the answer. The reality is that the cuts being made this year are within £2 billion of those planned by Labour and it's relative tinkering. There haven't even been any notable central government cuts yet, so it's a total fallacy to attribute low consumer confidence on cuts. It's a brave decision to take the hit now and accept that the proper rebalancing between investment and debt is necessary. The cuts aren't remotely ideological. One credit agency said that the AAA rating *may* be reviewed if growth is not sustained at revised levels over the next 2 years. Compare and contrast with several credit agencies actually downgrading their medium-term prospect for the AAA rating from good to poor under Alastair Darling's plan. There's nothing wrong with tax avoidance though! Also the people who avoid tax will always find ways of avoiding tax. The current laws are a total mess. 7 tax volumes taking up a whole bookshelf as it is. Meanwhile they've reduced the incentive to channel profits into capital gains by upping that rate (a Lib Dem achievement) and increased the threshold at which people start paying income tax (another Lib Dem achievement). When you realise that actually NI is just a sham and another income tax, the base rate in this country is 43.8% (because employers' NIC is just a levy on employment thus attributable to a wage someone would otherwise get). That's just appalling. If you look at the upper and marginal rates of income tax and the supplementary levy on upper rates of NI, that means well over 50% of some people's income is being taken by the state in direct taxes. If that's "fairness" then I'm Bob Crow. This is Clegg's real issue. The Lib Dem grass roots are burying their collective head in the sand. Government's tough, especially when there's no money left. With HSBC already having surreptitiously leaked the potential of leaving London, the reality is clear: the growth generators will leave unless taxes are cut. Until Labour can produce a credible alternative by spelling it out penny by penny what they would be cutting, the only credible spending plan is that of the Coalition. It might be tough and those who rely on state support the most by definition may be the ones that suffer most directly, but that's a consequence of a 6 year structural budget deficit *before* the banking crisis for you. A binge requires a cold turkey remedy.

Tangerine would fuel it with the "William" connection. What you really need is to invite a few Cardinals in. Seems to work in the Lords...

Sounds like institutional Proddy bias there...

The thing that continues to sadden me is that vast swathes of the Scottish people vote for Labour not because of policy considerations or their actual record but because of inherited loyalty and hatred of their main UK counterparts. You get the same thing with the Tories, the only difference being it's among pensioners and they're dying out. That and the public seem to have a pervasive disregard for their own liberty as soon as the word "terrorism" is thrown about (Benjamin Franklin summed up that approach for me pretty well) but that's another issue entirely.

The Lib Dems' best hope in Scotland is to get Charlie K on the rounds on a damage limitation exercise. The perception I'm getting of Lib Dem grass roots (especially the lefty types) is that they're running out of patience with the Orange Bookers (even though they're the only ones brave enough to face up to realpolitik). Parallels about Major are interesting, though. I've heard of the "Shy Tory" but 12 months ago I didn't think we'd reach the stage where we'd found the "Shy Lib Dem".

Pesky router's playing up at the moment. I blame the Coalition's cuts, after all everyone's blaming everything else on them at the moment so it's worth a shot. Anyway, I've got a wee thought that should make people think very carefully before voting in May: "Iain Gray First Minister"

Whilst I broadly agree with the original poster, the Lib Dems are going to get massacred in the Holyrood Elections. And it's completely undeserved too.

It is theirs. Until someone else wins it, that is.

This is Australia's.

The problem is that by signing up as Jedi, Voodoo monster or whatever, you artificially increase the "% who have a religion" figure even if it's clear to anyone objectively looking at it that you're taking the piss.

Long story short is they aren't. I would imagine that our pre-existing debt levels, to whom we owe it, and on what terms it is owed have a big impact on our budget. You will probably also find we have higher overheads than other clubs relating to the size, design and location of our stadium.

The pitch was absolutely fine until about December. It looks bad, but I'm not convinced for a minute that it's as bad as some people make it out to be, or that it's substantially worse than some of the other pitches in the first division which don't have the extra strain put on them. Attendances are plummeting all round Scottish football. To blame our pitch in isolation doesn't provide the real reason IMO.