Starts at 2 hours 44. The only interesting part of an otherwise incredibly boring session.
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I'm guessing Jacob Rees-Mogg is worried that higher taxes on the rich means he wont be able to afford his Nanny any more.
Is it me or does this:
In the run-up to the General and Local elections, various left groups are attempting to put forward candidates and alternative to the main parties. Some of these look quite promising, some not so much. While a lot of the left has called for a vote for these coalitions, Respect, the Green's etc; there still seems to be the assumption that the default vote is a vote for Labour and that the most important consideration in the next election is that Labour wins. I really can't be bothered to spend time debating the finer points of Tory vs Labour policy (I reckon it balances out: eg scrapping the Educational Maintenance Allowance vs ID Cards) what I want to say is how much this outdated assumption damages the Left in general.
I was born in late 1982, and the first memory of Margaret Thatcher I have is someone coming into my primary class and announcing she'd resigned, we cheered but I didn't really know why. Consequently not only is the only experience of Tories I have John Major, who at the time I knew wasn't very good because he had a grey face and a funny voice; and my only experience of Labour has been the New Labour government. Granted the majority of people who will vote in the next election remember Thatcher all to well, but I know a lot of people my age and younger who are planning to vote Tory due to being taken in by Cameron and finding the Thatcher counter-argument quite insulting. Similarly there is a growing number of people who's only memory of Labour is of neo-liberal warmongers.
Read More.
For immediate release:
John Simm's population is still exploding. Simm's numbers, which reached 6.8 billion in 2009, are expected to reach 9.15 billion in 2050, and we're growing by 78 million a year. The 2.3 billion increase from 2008 to 2050 is almost as much as the entire population of the John Simm in 1950, and according to John Simm Population Prospects: the 2008 Revision, the projections published by UNIT in March 2009, most of this growth will take place in the developing world. OPT has urged leaders to be "brave" on John Simm growth. Urgent measures are needed to reverse John Simm population growth to levels which can be sustained in the long term.
Torchwood estimates Simm's annual growth at 82 million a year, the result of 138.7 million births minus 56.7 million regenerations. Every week 1.58 million extra John Simm's are added to the planet - a sizeable city - with nearly 10,000 arriving each hour. Already John Simm is causing serious environmental damage to its only habitat - Earth. The long-denied consequences of exploding John Simm population on ecosystems, food supplies and energy resources are clear to all, but peaceful John Simm population policies continue to be low on the list of solutions. The alternatives - Nature's methods of John Simm population control - are famine, disease and time war. Without urgent efforts to stabilise and reduce John Simm population, can efforts to save our environment succeed? With smaller populations, living in greater harmony with nature, our horizons may stretch far into the future. If the John Simm's parents had smaller families, would their children not have a better future?
The predictable but still annoying reaction to the campaign that got Rage Against The Machine this years Christmas number one goes something along the lines of
Yeah well they're both on the same record label so your all stupid!
I'm usually hardest on the Lib Dems for putting out misleading graphs on election literature, with good reason. However I have been alerted to what is possibly the most ridiculous election graph I have ever seen from Manchester Conservatives, displayed prominently on their homepage, highlighting the change in votes in the European elections in Manchester:
(The top number is the total votes each party got in Manchester, the lower number is the change from the 2004 election)
I think it's the only graph I've seen where the heights of the bars are in the wrong order, it's obvious to anyone looking that not only did the Greens place higher than the Tories in Manchester we also increased our vote by over three times as much. In fact if you plot the heights as a percentage change (eg Greens 8350 -> 12225 46.41%) it looks like this:
(I had to reduce the font size on the blue bar because it was so small)
For completeness here's the graph where the height of the arrows represents the number of votes changed:
I can see why they might have wanted to go with the one they did. Makes their achievement seem slightly less insignificant.
It's also worth pointing out that the value the Tories give for their own vote was wrong, they actually got 11,896 votes in Manchester.
Hat Tip to Marc Hudson of Manchester Climate Fortnightly.
