I wonder will the Liberal Democrats vote for student fees or bottle it?

I wonder what Salford Liberals have to say? support the increase or not.

I found this on our Local Tories Blog

RT @VoteDavidHenry: @GreenJennyJones article arguing for a campaign of civil disobedience http://bit.ly/eYG9uI << extremist Greens!

It really makes me weep i suggest people read the article before passing judgement,i for one do not think myself or my fellow members extremist.

in my opionion this Tory peers comments are shameful.

Tory peer Flight apologises for benefits remark

 New Conservative peer Howard Flight has issued an “unreserved” apology for saying child benefit changes would encourage the poor to “breed”.

In a statement issued by the party, Mr Flight said he would like to withdraw the remark, made to a newspaper.

His comments came after David Cameron urged him to apologise but rejected calls to block his peerage.

Labour branded Mr Flight’s comments “shameful” and said they showed the Tories were out of touch with people.

Mr Flight, a former Conservative deputy chairman, was named last week by Mr Cameron as one of more than 20 new Tory peers.

The former MP for Arundel and South Downs, who is yet to take his seat in the House of Lords, was commenting on the government’s plans to cut child benefit for top-rate taxpayers.

He told the London Evening Standard: “We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive.

“But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.”

Life under the Condems ?

Here’s an extraordinary story. It appears that not only are councils in the most deprived parts of England (generally Labour run) going to be hit hardest and fastest by local government spending cuts, but that the largely Tory-run authorities in some of the very wealthiest parts of the country may even find themselves better off.

Or put another way: the likes of Liverpool, Burnley and Hartlepool (to name but three) face a reduction in their budget of almost a third as result of the comprehensive spending review (CSR), while the leafy shires of Tunbridge Wells and West Oxfordshire will see their budget increase by over a third over the same period.

So staggering is the imbalance, according to the Local Government Chronicle (LGC), that the normally implacable communities secretary Eric Pickles – who delivered his department cuts package to the Treasury in September with such gusto – has been forced to go back to the Treasury to plead for extra money to mitigate the impact on the poorest areas. According to LGC, he has been unsucccesful

Dickensian Christmas ahead as Conservative cuts hit kids’ toy spending

New research from OnePoll hints that toys may not be as recession-proof as thought, predicting cut-backs on kids’ Xmas presents.

Children will receive fewer presents this Christmas than they did in Dickensian Britain as a result of Government cuts, experts said yesterday.

One in three families across the UK are planning to cut the number of gifts for their kids by half in a bid to save money.

But it’s not just children who will be affected. More than 37 per cent of couples will buy fewer presents for each other, and almost 38 per cent of families have agreed to cut out presents entirely.

It means children could bag less than two gifts each – a little less than they received in the 19th-Century.

The results were published this week in Consumer Mums, a quarterly report into the spending habits of British mothers.

Question

George Osborne announced a £7 billion hit on the welfare budget today as he took an axe to public spending.

The Chancellor said that departments across Whitehall would face swingeing cuts over the next four years as the Government acted to pull the country back “from the brink of bankruptcy”

Is this money now going to be used to bail out the Irish?

Second question what will be the cost if Portugal and Spain go the same way.

Last question who will be left to bail us out?

“What the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is doing to this country is socially destructive, and we must stop it”

JennyJones, Green Party member of the London Assembly, and Sam Coates, co-chair ofthe Young Greens, today issued a joint statement, calling for a forceful but peacefulescalation of the protest against the government’s “socially destructive” plansto increase tuition fees.

SamCoates and Jenny Jones write:

“A whole generation of young people are having their futurestorn up in front of their eyes as policies they explicitly voted against areput into effect with the support of a party many of them voted for.”

They note that university fees in the UK are already among themost expensive in Europe, and if trebled to £9000 will be the most expensive inthe world.

Under these circumstances, Jenny Jones and Sam Coates say that disillusionmentand outrage at education cuts and fee increases are “unsurprising”.

They say:

“Democracy has failed young people and many of them areincreasingly desperate which is why direct action has been and will continue tobe a key tactic in the fight for their futures.”

Clickhere to read the statement in full.

Just for Fun

Can you think of a good caption?