Labour supporter Jack Monroe defects to Green Party

[minestrone]

I do feel sorry for the neoconservative right. The results of their 30 year economic global experiment are in and it has been an unadulterated disaster for all but a tiny minority. OECD countries have introduced more regressive taxes, taxing the rich less and the poor more, with the promise that economic efficiency and investment would follow, enriching us all. But no, as state incomes and the spending power of the poor contracted, so did demand, and investment rates. We were also promised that removing labour constraints and a 'flexible' workforce would reduce unemployment. The opposite has occurred - income inequality and unemployment have soared. The wage stagnation forced people to supplement their income with debt, fed by the deregulated banks, with consequences we are now all paying for.



UN CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT



Blinkered by an elevation of profit above all other values and an unreasoning idealogical hatred of anything that looks like common provision or restraints on private companies' ability to maximise profits, the Right has had to blindfold itself and deny the overwhelming scientific concensus on climate change, a truly despicable policy revealed by Republican activist Frank Luntz in a 2002 memo to George Bush.



So, lie to the electorate, and the planet can go to hell in a handcart, just so long as our Oily friends keep the billions rolling in. Yep, that's the Right for you.

The dramatic decline in preventable child deaths over the past quarter of a century is one of the most significant achievements in human history - See more at: UNICEF STATISTICS

I hope you will be the first to get the coins out next time I am in doing a walk for UNICEF pj.

[minestrone]

You know.. this whole... "try living off this money and see what it is like" mantra.

I could quite easily live with benefit sized income.

[SueEllen]

You know.. this whole... "try living off this money and see what it is like" mantra.

I could quite easily live with benefit sized income.

Depends where you are in the country - it's been that way for years.

Anyway the issues with the welfare budget are caused by lack of housing especially in areas where there are a lot of jobs e.g. London, South East and too many pensioners not supported by enough workers.

[d000hg]

You know.. this whole... "try living off this money and see what it is like" mantra.

I could quite easily live with benefit sized income.

If you can get full housing benefit, you're off to a great start especially with no council tax to pay. But yes it does depend not only on cost of living, but location - if you are somewhere rural and rely on public transport (or even worse need your own car) the costs mount up very fast. That's why I think people on JSA should get a free bus-pass... it's not that attractive as something to abuse and even if unemployed people did spend a lot of the time riding the bus for fun, it wouldn't exactly cost anybody anything. In fact in many cases I'd say getting unemployed people out of their house/village just to ride around on a bus wouldn't be a bad thing.

[SueEllen]

If you can get full housing benefit, you're off to a great start especially with no council tax to pay. But yes it does depend not only on cost of living, but location - if you are somewhere rural and rely on public transport (or even worse need your own car) the costs mount up very fast. That's why I think people on JSA should get a free bus-pass... it's not that attractive as something to abuse and even if unemployed people did spend a lot of the time riding the bus for fun, it wouldn't exactly cost anybody anything. In fact in many cases I'd say getting unemployed people out of their house/village just to ride around on a bus wouldn't be a bad thing.

They have changed the rules on council tax so depending on where you live and the benefit you are on you have to pay 10%.

Lots of councils have decided not to implement this as it's too costly to chase people who simply don't have the means to pay.

Agree with you about the bus pass.

Lots of minimum wage and lower paid jobs are given to people who pop in and ask for work, so giving someone a bus pass would increase their chance of work.

[pjclarke]

pj is correct of course. my figures were wrong because I took the lower estimate of the 13 -39 million killed by wind every year.

I wanted to be fair, rather than a propagandist or lobbyist who ignores all contrary evidence.

(39m vs .3 m PA)

Really, my 'sceptical', cat-owning bird-loving friend?

No source is given for the multimillion estimate, but would I be right in thinking you're relying on 'Save the Eagles International', the source of the photo?

Save The Eagles - this sounds like an international grassroots organisation of birdlovers championing the rights of our beloved raptors. It is not. Its pretty much one man, Mark Duchamp and his website, plus a handful of zealous mates around the world. So is Duchamp a qualified ornithologist? An experienced field researcher? An environmental scientist? A statistician? Er, no, he self-describes as a 'retired businessman'.

Bizarrely, of the pressures facing eagles, habitat loss, poaching, pesticides, poisoning, illegal egg collection, Duchamp writes almost exclusively about one risk, you guessed it, wind turbines.

So where does his 'multimillion' fatalaties number derive from? It seems to be a single press release from the Spanish Ornithological Society, extrapolated worldwide. This number implies that every turbine in Spain is mincing up 1-3 birds per day, as opposed to the more generally accepted number of 2-4 per year. One has an image of every turbine peeking out of a mound of feathery corpses, or some very happy Spanish Foxes. Verity Jones debunks the claim here

https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.c...ills-in-spain/

So I call BS, I think its a bogus number from a crank website. I love birds of prey as much as anyone, I am thrilled at the success of the reintroduction of the Red Kite, I just don't think wind farms are anywhere near as big a threat to them as portrayed. One suspects the alarmists are far more anti-Green than they are pro-bird.

[tomtomagain]

One suspects the alarmists are far more anti-Green than they are pro-bird.

Completely agree. Once upon-a-time I worked in a wind-farm company, for each farm put up environmental impact assessments were undertaken and we found that bird strike was extremely rare.

Birds have these things called "eyes" that let them perceive the wind turbine from hundreds of meters away and this thing called a "brain" that allows them to alter their flight-path to avoid the turbines.

The idea that turbines are bird-mincing machines is .... cuckoo.

[SueEllen]

So I call BS, I think its a bogus number from a crank website. I love birds of prey as much as anyone, I am thrilled at the success of the reintroduction of the Red Kite, I just don't think wind farms are anywhere near as big a threat to them as portrayed. One suspects the alarmists are far more anti-Green than they are pro-bird.

The only time I've seen Red Kites I was in a town. Some birds of prey have worked out how to use human structures e.g. towers to their advantage.

While towns and cities don't tend to have wind farms they do have randomly placed wind turbines. If birds were being killed by the wind turbines there would plenty of objects by their neighbours.

[pjclarke]

The only time I've seen Red Kites I was in a town. Some birds of prey have worked out how to use human structures e.g. towers to their advantage.

We have a pair where I live in rural Derbyshire, but the most I've ever seen were over Maidenhead. Friday lunchtimes we used to go to a curry restaurant named (from memory), The Balcony, which had a good view over the town and it was not uncommon to see up to eight Kites wheeling high over the rooftops. Quite beautiful.

[Flashman]

Completely agree. Once upon-a-time I worked in a wind-farm company, for each farm put up environmental impact assessments were undertaken and we found that bird strike was extremely rare.

Birds have these things called "eyes" that let them perceive the wind turbine from hundreds of meters away and this thing called a "brain" that allows them to alter their flight-path to avoid the turbines.

The idea that turbines are bird-mincing machines is .... cuckoo

Wind turbines have killed more birds of prey than persecution this year - Telegraph

Greens. Mental cases the lot of them

Build your wind turbine farm.

Take a nice green field.
Then build a tarmacked road on your field then dig a massive hole. Next fill it thousands of tons of concrete to support a giant steel structure. Dig trenches all over what remains of your green field for the cables to connect to the grid.
Charge poor people extra for the privilege of using your very expensive electricity.
Pay rich landowners to use their land.
Handover large subsidies to multi-national corporations to maintain wind turbines.

Greens