Where was that recent poll suggesting that the Labour lead in the polls would be much reduced with Boris at the helm?

Not that it will make any difference to what the public thinks (facts don’t seem to matter any more), but the ONS has reported some interesting new data this week:

1. On education, there has been no reduction in the number of teachers

2. The number of people working in Health is actually higher now than when the government came to power (so much for Union’s constant rhetoric about hidden cuts and privatisation)

3. On jobs – there are now around 1m more people working in the private sector than when the current government came to power. That’s almost the same number of new private sector jobs created in 2 1/2 years that Labour managed to create in 13 years when most of their efforts went into expanding the public sector.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/12/unemployment-figures-public-sector-cuts?newsfeed=true

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2202429/Economists-encouraged-private-sector-creates-million-jobs-coalition.html?openGraphAuthor=%2Fhome%2Fsearch.html%3Fs%3D%26authornamef%3DJames%2BChapman

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/how-many-public-sector-jobs-did-labour-create/2860

Farmer John – how many of those “additional” Private Sector jobs have been outsourced from the Public Sector?

1) academies are the devils work, goves managed to balls up this years gcse

2) so looks like the unions are winning that battle!

3)your link points out that 200000 6th form and FE teacher were reclassified as private sector workers

Farmerjohn, you obviously have not read the articles, your daily mail one, go read it from beginning to end, then come back and give a synopsis, think you’ll find its a classic mis-quote of stats–

Even the govt spin docs wouldn’t dare use these things….

The ONS data shows a change from 22,519,000 private sector jobs in Jan-Mar 2010, and 23,896,000 in Mar-Jun 2012. That’s a net change of 1.37m. Take out the 196,000 Academy jobs and that still gives us 1.181m new private sector jobs.

http://fullfact.org/factchecks/million_private_sector_jobs_PMQs_David_Cameron-28124

druidh – Member

Farmer John – how many of those “additional” Private Sector jobs have been outsourced from the Public Sector?

Indeed. 3000 ‘new’ private sector jobs in Plymouth just from health reforms meaning NHS staff being moved out of the NHS. Plymouth is barely big enough to be called a city yet has contributed 3000 of those just from Health, along with the loss of about 300 jobs altogether (really, all we have in our service both frontline and behind the scenes are ‘streamlining’, vacancy freezes and vacant posts being wiped out rather than filled again), I wonder how many more of those 1 million private sector jobs are not actually ‘new’ at all?

Don’t worry,
Liam fox has come up with a solution. Get rid of capital gains tax, to boost the economy.
This should apparently be paid for by cutting benefits and maternity leave. 😯
Way to go.

This is my real fear. Bumbling Boris would be bad enough.

Liam Fox though? Could the Conservative Party actually lurch that far right?

I heard that Liam Fox nonsense this morning.

Attract business to this country by not requiring them to pay any tax? But if all the companies don’t pay any tax, then who pays for the NHS, education, the benefits system?

Oh… I see…. we won’t be having any of that nonsense any more?

Brilliant idea Liam. We’re now aiming to become the western equivalent of Burma!!! Shall we set up some ‘Export Processing Zones’ where workers rights, and international law, no longer apply? We might as well go the whole hog eh? 😯

I really have difficulty working out what planet fox is on.

Sadly he is on our planet.

Back onto more-or-less topic. We’ve been here before of course. Back in the eighties, where a vicously right-wing govt got away with it because the ‘Labour’ movement was too timid and ineffective. What happened? Despite everything, Thatcher won three terms, yes three fooken terms (as did NuLab later on…) proof that you can be utter b’stards, and be re-elected despite that, or because you ARE utter b’stards, and large sections of the great british moronic X-factor electorate don’t think you’re being b’stard enough…

Attract business to this country by not requiring them to pay any tax? But if all the companies don’t pay any tax, then who pays for the NHS, education, the benefits system?

The corporate tax take is responsible for approx 10% of the total tax take, the theory is by reducing it you encourage more companies to come here and this creates more employment. The tax these new employees pay far outweighs the corporate tax given up.

If you look the first half of the “Irish Miracle” they did very well out of such a strategy, unfortunately the second half was dependent upon a massive property bubble which exploded thus wiping out many of the gains.

Personally I am not convinced this is a great idea, as our problem seems to be generating jobs where the biggest unemployment is. A regional corporate tax holiday would therefore may a lot of sense in theory. However, I am not too sure how practical it would be to police.

The problems of the poor won’t be solved by giving more money to the rich.

One man’s “ahead” is another’s “behind”.

An “absolute” popularity scale would be more revealing. It might reveal that people still hate Labour, but they now hate the ConDems even more.

buzz-lightyear – Member
One man’s “ahead” is another’s “behind”.

An “absolute” popularity scale would be more revealing. It might reveal that people still hate Labour, but they now hate the ConDems even more.

IIRC that’s the situation regarding the leaders in opinion polls, all on negative points but Milliband less negative than the other 1.5.

Can we not just do away with this democracy lark once and for all? Its clearly failed. If we’re going to outsource – and it seems both parties think thats the way forward – can we not just outsource the running of the country to Tesco or someone?

At least, minus the idiot politicians, they’d sort the logistics out. And if looking at it from a purely business point of view, they’d surely put a stop to massive pointless vanity projects, aircraft carriers with no aircraft, and £20 billion computer systems that never work

Naive I know, but I had great hopes in the run up to the last election that between a combination of the expenses scandal and 3 unelectable parties, that the mould might just get broken and a new politics emerge from the ashes of the corrupt and flawed system that we have now. I needn’t have bothered, it should have been plain that the old boy network would belch into action and maintain the status quo. How else can you explain the fiasco of the elctoral reform referendum? Nick Clegg basically floored the minor parties for the foreseeable future with that one, and with it any hope of real change.