Revenge of Trickledown Economics

EXTRACT: George Osborne’s budget was essentially one for the wealthy - hardly astonishing, given that over 20 cabinet members are millionaires. The basic assumption was that those at the top of society are the wealth-creators and hence need to be incentivised - lots of carrots - to encourage them to create yet more ‘wealth’ (ie, make larger profits and grow even richer). Given this grotesque premise, tax cuts - personal and corporate - are a vital necessity if we are to unleash a wave of entrepreneurship that will in turn create jobs for those languishing at the bottom.
Meanwhile, the working class and the poor find themselves at the wrong end of below-inflation increases to the minimum wage, less generous tax credits, regional differentials in public sector pay, and so on. In other words, the budget saw the unwelcome return - or revenge - of trickle-down economics. Not that it had ever gone away, of course.

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Rowan Williams Quits Before Next Great Schism Happens

Rowan Williams: hairy but no leftie

EXTRACT:  For communists the established church represents a violation of elementary democratic principles, which can only rest on the basis of secularism. By which we mean a state of fundamental equality between all faiths/denominations and non-believers: no-one should be privileged or enjoy special access to state power. Hence we in the CPGB demand the immediate disestablishment of the Church of England - the state should have no say in how it finances itself or appoints its leaders. Like trade unions or political parties, the church itself should decide who gets to be its leader - not the prime minister or any other state official or body.

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Are you my Mother?

Claude Lorrain

Eric Pickles Puts the Knife In

Eric Pickles: Christian values and the crown

EXTRACT: For more than a decade the bourgeois ideology of multiculturalism has acted to divide the British working class into numerous, and seemingly ever-subdividing, supplicant groups competing for the largesse and favours of central government. This required the bureaucratic machinery of tick-box multiculturalism and ‘equal opportunities’ schemes (which in some respects are a parody of what genuine equality is or should be about). In turn, this acceded a disproportionate amount of political influence to all manner of democratically unaccountable petty patriarchs and local power-brokers operating from the local community centre or church/mosque (or whatever). Such people, for the most part, were then viewed as a valuable asset by the establishment - for the ability to ‘deactivate’ local militancy.
We should hardly be surprised by such a political phenomenon, whereby the politics of top-down establishment anti-racism and multiculturalism has generated divisive communalism. After all, that was exactly the result the Thatcher government intended when it introduced the beginnings of multiculturalism as deliberate state policy in reaction to the 1980s inner-city riots.

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The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius