to think that St Vince Cable's halo has slipped..

[MulledWineandGingerbread]

.. and that he couldn't make a decision to save his life. First he'll vote for the tuition fee increase, then abstain, then for, then still might abstain...

He's making himself (and his party) look ridiculous.

I think dismantling the welfare state as it stands is an excellent idea.

newwave The unemployment rate is higher now than it was in 1997. I'm not a tory but I think you are a bit paranoid about them, Cameron and Osborne want to improve the country and create prosperity they just go about it in a different way to how you would do it.

just for starters, decent maternity leave and minimum wage.

LFN, yes labour would have made cuts and raised taxes but would have aimed them at those that can afford them not on the most vulnerable, typical Tory spite as always.

I think dismantling the welfare state as it stands is an excellent idea. no suprise there.

Currently, the welfare state incentivises people to stay on welfare.

Remember, one of Beveridge's great evils was idleness.

We have to go back to the original conception of the welfare state.

We also need to simplify the system.

Get rid of tax credits entirely, get rid of housing benefit, get rid of child benefit, make unemployment benefit strictly time limited. Use all the savings to make huge reductions in income tax, and huge increases in the bottom tax threshold.

Make work pay, and don't create public sector non-jobs administering stupidly complicated things like tax credits in the process.

Has the minimum wage helped though. I think the minimum wage is one of the main reasons for the ever widening regional disparities that we have. It doesn't allow regions other than the south-east to boost their competitiveness due to labour rates being fixed at a minimum point. I think it was a nice idea in theory but I'm not sure its been as good as its proponents claim

And how does that work with more people out of work than jobs avaiable

GiddyPickle - OK, that's what coalition means, and also, as we're seeing in Scotland just now, being a minority government means you can't necessarily deliver what you said in your manifesto.
However, what you do have to do is agree a policy, and then vote for it - the notion that Vince Cable could abstain is farcical.

newwave the poorest always suffer when you have a budgetary crisis and have to reduce public spending. Do you really think that Labour would have introduced policies that didn't hurt the poor.

Longfingernails - ha ha at the thought that Labour would have done what the Coalition is doing now.

Darling's plan was nowhere near as draconian as Osborne's. He planned to reduce the deficit by the end of the Parliament, not to eliminate it. And would certainly not have cut as hard and as quickly as Osborne has been allowed to by his LD figleaf.

And God save us all if Michael Gove is the answer to anything. Free schools, if they benefit anyone, will benefit the middle class at the expense of the poor. Scrapping educational maintenance allowance is extremely regressive and will mean that many children from poorer backgrounds will simply not be able to stay on at school. So they needn't worry about not be able to afford the eye-wateringly high tuition fees - if they can't stay on and do A Levels, they're not going to university anyway.

The EMA cuts are even worse than the HE policy. It makes my blood boil.

There's a difference between saying, right, we have to negotiate with the other party in the coalition, that means we can't achieve X and saying oh, you know we specifically promised we would vote against Y, well actually we had our fingers crossed behind our backs and are going to vote FOR it.

A party that promises free biscuits for every voter might well have to go into coalition and say sorry, we've talked to the other side and there will be no biscuits. Fair enough.

But promising to vote against an increase in biscuit taxes is a very, very clear promise. When you do the deal, you say to the other party 'all our MPs signed a very specific pledge to vote against any increase in biscuit taxes so sorry old son, we can't budge on that one, or we'll be a laughing stock'.

Prolesworth No-one is demonising the poor. They are demonising the feckless.

Giddy - well, you could make sure that companies like Vodafone actually do pay the tax they owe. That'd bring in what, £6bn straight off.

MulledWineandGingerbread The difference between "cutting the bulk of the structural deficit" and "halving the deficit" isn't that much.

Giddy, It is a matter of proportionality, Labour would have possibly hit the most vulnerable but nowhere near as hard as the Tories and as said before they were never going to cut as deep.

One thing that no one has argued against (even LFN) is the fact that the Tories are the "nasty party" and ALWAYS target the most vulnerable.

edam- Iwas talking to one of the tax accountants at work about vodafone and he seemed to think that this £6 billion figure was fantasy and that HMRC did well to get what they got.

edam Why should Vodafone pay more than they have to, legally?

Do you send an extra cheque to the Inland Revenue just because you feel like it?

Tax avoidance is perfectly rational. Indeed, to not avoid tax if it is possible is to do a disservice to your shareholders.

I fully recognise that scrounging on benefits whilst staying within the letter of the law is also perfectly rational. However, large scale tax avoiders often fulfil a socially useful function - they generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tax-paying private sector jobs. Benefit scroungers play no socially useful function.

Labour were going to do it over twice the timescale IIRC - so the Tories are going to halve it over one parliament, Labour were doing to do it over two. That's a massive difference.

What's more, many of these policies don't actually save money, they just shift the costs around so they crop up under new headings. Postponing hip and cataract operations doesn't make ill-health go away - although obviously the government is hoping some people die on the waiting list to save a few quid. Meanwhile the poor sods who need new hips or are going blind are are left increasingly disabled, family members have to give up work to care for them - it's actually far MORE expensive than just doing the damn surgery as soon as someone needs it.

newwave- Would they have hit the poorest any less hard, Brown took away the 10% tax band (I know he created it before anyone reiterates that) before there was any serious fiscal problems

Vodafone DID owe the taxes. We are not talking about an optional donation. But they did a squalid deal. On the lines of the old saying about if you owe the bank £100 it's your problem, if you owe them £1m it's their problem.

newwave I can't let that stand. The coalition's policies will do more to combat poverty than Labour ever did.

The Labour mentality is to give the poor money. That is the lazy solution. Sure, it alleviates poverty today but it just exacerbates the problem.

The real solution is to help them help themselves. Provide the economic conditions for the creation of many long-term, sustainable, private sector jobs. Align all the financial incentives so it pays more to work than to sit at home. Encourage social mobility by giving people choice in public services, especially education. Cut taxes for the poorest instead of wasting money on bureaucrats to administer costly benefits.

People died waiting for operations under a Tory government, labour got the waiting time down to it's lowest since God knows when now "Dave" is abandoning the targets.

LFN you still navent explained how we are going to get all these people back to work when Tory policies are adding to ever increasing unemployment