Immigration minister Phil Woolas called the move a “stunt by the Conservative Party”.Read on.

Dannatt appointment row continues

Senior military army officers have criticised General Sir Richard Dannatt’s recruitment as military adviser to the Conservatives.

The former head of the Army will join Parliament as a Tory peer before potentially becoming a junior defence minister under a future Conservative government.

The Guardian reported that senior Conservative frontbenchers have lodged complaints after the leadership failed to consult them on the appointment.

Meanwhile, Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff, told the Independent that General Dannatt should not accept the offer.

He said: “If he is going to the House of Lords, it’s best to be a crossbencher. I will give advice to anyone, Labour or Conservative, but I wouldn’t want to be associated with any one political party.”

There have been concerns that the prospect of General Dannatt becoming a Tory minister could mean politicising the Army at a time when it needs broader support.

And worries in the Ministry of Defence centre on the effect of General Dannatt’s appointment on the working relationship between serving commanders and ministers.

Another reason for the backlash has been that General Dannatt is still on the Army payroll and has recently accepted the position of constable of the Tower of London, a Crown appointment which is historically non-political.

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague insisted that the general would be an asset to the party, providing advice on war.

And shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said: “It’s not a crime to bring weight and experience into government with you, and I very much welcome Richard Dannatt as a member advising my team.”

However, Lord Guthrie said: “On a broader basis, this is not good for the Army. It would now be easy to paint the criticisms he made about Afghanistan as political, and that is not fair on others who have also tried to get better resources for our forces.”

Ministers have attacked the appointment, which came after General Dannatt said in the summer that he was not acting for party-political reasons.

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Territorial Army told to stop training for six months to save money!what a joke we are fast becoming a laughing stock-

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The Territorial Army has been told to stop training for six months to save millions of pounds from the Army’s budget because of growing financial pressure on the Ministry of Defence.

Drill-hall instruction, weekend exercises and all other training associated with the TA will stop, cutting costs by about £20 million.

The Land Force budget of the Army has been cut by £54 million, and the TA is the first to be affected. The huge cut in TA spending will mean that the weekend warriors will not be paid. “They are paid to go training, and if there is no training, they won’t get paid,” a Ministry of Defence official said.

A spokesman insisted that the savings and the ban on training would not affect the TA’s operational contribution to Afghanistan, where about 500 Territorial soldiers are serving. There are also ten TA soldiers in Iraq.

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The spokesman said that TA training for Afghanistan would carry on as normal. TA soldiers train with their regular army counterparts, before deployment to Helmand province. The MoD’s pledge to keep the operational TA safe from cuts was, however, greeted with scepticism by senior officers in the volunteer reserve force. “This is dangerous. When you cancel training at one end, it is bound to have an impact through the TA, especially if this goes on longer than six months,” one senior TA officer told The Times. “If the MoD shuts the whole place down and says, ‘Come back in April’, there will be a number of TA members who will just go off and find something else to do, and all the skills they have learnt will fatigue.”

That would have repercussions throughout the TA, and could eventually affect the availability of volunteers for Afghanistan and other operations, he said.

One MoD official said that care would have to be taken to ensure that the temporary suspension of training did not undermine the TA’s role in Afghanistan. The official also said that, given the budget restrictions, the training suspension could last longer. The annual budget for the TA is about £143 million. The TA officer said: “This decision means that people’s advancement and promotion within the TA will be arrested, and the MoD will find it cannot get recruits to join the TA if the whole thing is being put in mothballs. You cannot suspend training and expect people to come back as normal six months later.

“The decision is tragic and dangerous, especially when you look at the contributions made by the TA to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years. The regular Army could not have done these operations without the TA. People will feel undervalued and not properly respected and they’ll just go off.”

Another former senior officer in the TA said: “Here we go again, cutting back the TA.”

The size of the TA has fallen rapidly since Labour came to power in 1997. The following year there were 57,620 in the TA. Today the Territorials, trained and untrained, should be about 39,000-strong, but the trained strength is only 19,300, according to the latest MoD figures.

The senior TA officer told The Times that the downward spiral in numbers was shocking and reflected the dangerous neglect of this part of the services. In 2003, 9,500 reservists, the vast majority from the TA, were mobilised to take part in Operation Telic, the campaign in Iraq. About 1,200 members of the TA continue to be deployed annually on tours of duty.

The trend in recent years has been to pare down the TA and integrate them more into the regular Army, preparing them for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. An MoD spokesman said: “These are challenging times and, like all government departments, we have to live within our means. We routinely review spending to balance priorities, focusing on the highest priorities, including on our operations, particularly in Afghanistan.”

• Yesterday a soldier from the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards was killed in an explosion near Camp Bastion in Helmand province. His death takes the number of British troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001 to 221.

David Blanchflower: Tory spending plans are ‘wildly dangerous’

10/10/2009

Professor of economics and former Bank of England monetary expert

The plans that David Cameron and George Osborne outlined this week are the most wildly dangerous economic proposals that Britain has seen in the past 100 years.

They show absolutely no understanding of basic economics.

I guess that isn’t surprising given that neither of them, as far as I can tell, has any background or training in economics. And it shows.

You don’t cut public spending in a recession. No ifs, no buts. It’s as simple as that.

The Great Depression was actually W-shaped rather than V-shaped.

The Great Crash occurred in 1929 but by 1933 the US economy had largely recovered.

But a series of monetary and fiscal mistakes drove the country back into a deep recession at the end of 1937. The authorities assumed the recovery was fully established and tightened monetary and fiscal policy too soon.

We are still in the depths of the deepest recession of our lifetimes and the Tories look like making a similar policy error. It’s 1937 all over again.

Just like in medicine, a fundamental principle of economics has to be to do no harm.

If a doctor offers you a cure but says there is a 50% chance the treatment will kill you, you would surely think twice unless faced with certain death.

But we are not in such a situation. Monetary and fiscal stimulus has so far kept us out of a depression and will keep doing so as long as stimulus continues.

In fact I would like to see even more stimulus. John Maynard Keynes taught us that the appropriate policy in a recession to stop it turning into a depression is to raise public spending.

The Conservatives plan to reverse all that progress. And it is actually unclear why.

Recessions are not the time to pay off the public debt.

You don’t start saving when you are unemployed – that is the time to dip into your savings.

The downside risks to the economy of the Conservative Party’s proposals are unacceptably high.

And they have the potential to drive the economy into a depression, the like of which few of us have ever seen before.

That means rapidly rising unemployment, social disorder, rising poverty, falling living standards and even soup kitchens.

The Tory economic proposals have the potential to push the British economy into a death spiral of decline that would be almost impossible to reverse for a generation.

Their plans appear to be driven by ideology rather than by any serious insights into how an economy like ours works.

I haven’t seen such blinding incompetence for a very long time.

Source The Mirror

Found this on my good Friend Steve Middletons site take a look

The Tories aren’t indecisive…..they just can’t make their minds up

Filed Under (Politics) by Steve Middleton on 9th October 2009

What a disaster the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester turned out to be for the “government-in-waiting”.

Prior to David Cameron’s yawn-fest speech, where he told the country nothing new and mentioned in passing a few half-baked ideas, that Vince Cable dubbed “Lib Dem lite” – I came across this gem of a video on the BBC News website.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8294010.stm