Thursday 10 January 2008

Light blogging (6)

We are moving home today ...

... it may be a while before we get Ye Olde Interweb up and running kwaWadsworth, so output will be restricted to brief rants while I'm at work.

5 comments:

CatWoman said...

Send us a pick.
Or not.
Too many crackers out there.
Congrats on new home.

Gregg said...

Good luck Mark and rather you than me. Are you moving far?

Anonymous said...

Last time we did it, the cack-handed ones didn't steal much but they managed to bugger the fridge and the deep-freeze.

Newmania said...

I have just had thre same problem. It takes forever. IN THE US IT TAKES FIVE MINUTES grrrrr.

On welfare your earlier psts being ,I thought unfairly critical of the Conservative proposals. The in practice I was reffering to wasno the imaginary world when this has all been implimented and accepted but the realwordl in which the serried ranks iof public sector dependents and the rest of the objections made it hot .

This from the Spectator Cofee House


"sound objection to David Cameron’s welfare reform policy is raised today by Richard Littlejohn. Norman Fowler took him out to Washington and Baltimore in the 1980s when he was a Labour Correspondent to show him workfare, and pledged to introduce workfare to Britain. Nothing happened. “If Thatch couldn’t force it through, it’s not going to happen now,” he says today. It’s unclear just how hard Thatch tried – but it’s true that the Cameroon team may underestimate how hard it is to get the civil service to do anything. The drawback of a long period of Opposition is one forgets the frustrations of government – and you enter the delusion that you can go into a department, say “do X” and X happens. Now, take John Hutton - a forceful and sincere advocate of welfare reform. All he managed to do was pledge to get a million off (gross, not net) over ten years. Why so little? Because he was defeated by (as Littlejohn puts) "the Guardianistas who run the system ". The DWP wants to keep its empire. It commands some 5.2m subjects (or “clients” as they call them”) – more than the population of Norway, Ireland or Cyprus. Blair lost several battles against this mammoth government machine. Cameron had best be ready to win them"

Mark Wadsworth said...

GB, just a few miles up the road to be nearer the kids' schools.

D, everything seems to be there up to now!

Newmania, I said we should split the welfare system in two. Every non- or low-earner (legally resident etc) gets a low Citizen's income or citizen's pension. And housing & council tax benefit (average pay out per houshold £90 per week) get replaced with Workfare jobs.

Simple and straightforward.

Your comments about the civil service are of course perfectly valid.