This was the PMQs defeat Jeremy Corbyn had been threatening to deliver to the prime minister since he became Labour leader. He found the right question to ask David Cameron, ignored his evasive tactics and hammered him with it, Paxman-style, over and over again. He took a subject which damaged his opponent and used the opportunities offered by PMQs to make it much worse for him. It was sturdy, convincing stuff.

The prime minister is not, at bottom, a very good debater. This is partly why he was so desperate to escape leaders' debates at the election. He really only has three tactics in response to difficult queries.

Usually, he answers a question on process with a statement on goals. If you ask how he is going to protect those who are having their tax credits cut, he answers by saying we need a high-pay, low-welfare economy. It is irrelevant, but it sounds like the kind of thing almost everyone would agree with.

Alternatively, he lists related government policies. You ask how he is going to protect those who are having their tax credits cut and he answers by citing changes to the income tax benchmark or rising employment figures. It is broadly relevant, but it does not answer the question.

Finally, when he's desperate, he falls back on the standard 'Labour will wreck the economy' line. So if you ask how he is going to protect those who are having tax credits cut, he just says you're a "deficit denier". It is irrelevant, childish and logically pernicious.

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/10/28/pmqs-verdict-corbyn-just-hammered-cameron

David Graeber

British public life has always been riddled with taboos, and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of economics. You can say anything you like about sex nowadays, but the moment the topic turns to fiscal policy, there are endless things that everyone knows, that are even written up in textbooks and scholarly articles, but no one is supposed to talk about in public. It’s a real problem. Because of these taboos, it’s impossible to talk about the real reasons for the 2008 crash, and this makes it almost certain something like it will happen again.

I’d like to talk today about the greatest taboo of all. Let’s call it the Peter-Paul principle: the less the government is in debt, the more everybody else is. ...

... if the government declares “we must act responsibly and pay back the national debt” and runs a budget surplus, then it (the public sector) is taking more money in taxes out of the private sector than it’s paying back in. That money has to come from somewhere. So if the government runs a surplus, the private sector goes into deficit. If the government reduces its debt, everyone else has to go into debt in exactly that proportion in order to balance their own budgets.

...

Now, obviously, the “private sector” includes everything from households and corner shops to giant corporations. If overall private debt goes up, that doesn’t hit everyone equally. But who gets hit has very little to do with fiscal responsibility. It’s mostly about power. The wealthy have a million ways to wriggle out of their debts, and as a result, when government debt is transferred to the private sector, that debt always gets passed down on to those least able to pay it: into middle-class mortgages, payday loans, and so on.

... if you push all the debt on to those least able to pay, something does eventually have to give. There were three times in recent decades when the government ran a surplus ...

... each surplus is followed, within a certain number of years, by an equal and opposite recession.

There’s every reason to believe that’s exactly what’s about to happen now. ...

This takes us right back to exactly where we were right before the 2008 mortgage crisis. Do you really think the results will be any different?

...

A furious Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to set out plans to curb the powers of the House of Lords after his party's tax credit cuts proposal hit a major hurdle when peers voted to delay the policy until the government came up with an alternative scheme to help low-paid workers. Downing Street is expected on Tuesday (27 October) to outline plans for a "rapid review" that will guarantee that the House of Commons always has supremacy over financial matters.

Despite threats of a constitutional crisis prior to the voting, peers went ahead and voted in favour of two motions that basically sent a strong message to the government that the Upper House will not pass the cuts until the working lower income Britons were protected. Three motions were put to vote in the Upper House yesterday and two were passed.

The House of Lords voted 289 to 272 to former Labour minister Lady Hollis' motion to delay the tax credits cuts until a scheme to compensate those affected for three years is put on the table. Another motion by crossbench peer Lady Meacher was also adopted by 307 to 277 votes that refused to support the cuts until an independent assessment of their impact is carried out.

...

A Downing Street spokesman said: "The prime minister is determined we will address this constitutional issue. A convention exists and it has been broken. He has asked for a rapid review to see how it can be put back in place."

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/david-cameron-curb-powers-house-lords-after-tax-credits-defeat-1525828

Audience member: Will you put to bed rumours that you plan to cut child tax credit and restrict child benefit to two children?

David Cameron: No I don’t want to do that—this report that was out today is something I rejected at the time as Prime Minister and I reject it again today.

...

David Dimbleby: “Clearly there are some people who are worried that you have a plan to cut child credit and tax credits. Are you saying absolutely as a guarantee, it will never happen?”

David Cameron: “First of all, child tax credit, we increased by £450..”

David Dimbleby: “And it’s not going to fall?”

David Cameron: “It’s not going to fall. Child benefit, to me, is one of the most important benefits there is. It goes directly to the family, normally to the mother, £20 for the first child, £14 for the second. It is the key part of families’ budgets in this country. That’s not what we need to change.”

A team of United Nations investigators has this week begun a two-week visit to the UK as part of an inquiry into allegations of “systematic and grave” violations of disabled people’s human rights.

...

They are due to meet parliamentarians, disabled people’s organisations, civil servants, representatives of local authorities, academics and senior figures from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

They will also hear direct evidence from scores of individuals about the impact of government austerity measures, including former users of the Independent Living Fund (ILF), whistleblowers and disabled activists.

Among the issues being raised are believed to be the government’s decision to close ILF; cuts to legal aid; benefit cuts and sanctions, including the impact of the discredited work capability assessment; the severe shortage of accessible, affordable housing; the impact of the bedroom tax on disabled people; cuts to social care; and the rise in disability hate crime.

http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/un-investigators-begin-taking-evidence-in-uk-on-rights-violations/

After the second world war, Melanesian islanders formed cargo cults near abandoned airfields. They thought that if they carried out the rituals they had observed the troops performing at the American air force bases, planes would land. So they would march up and down in improvised uniforms performing parade ground drills with wooden rifles, believing that if the rites were performed correctly the planes would return and bring them cargo. I only mention this as a useful point of comparison for the Liberal Democrat conference. An isolated tribe going through the formal motions of something they think will bring votes, failing to understand that their actions are meaningless and vestigial. In fact, it’s more like the tribe had recently been allowed to fly a plane and had smashed it right into a mountain and nobody was ever going to let them anywhere near a plane again until the world was over.

Labour’s conference featured quite an impressive run-up by Jeremy Corbyn, tackling TV interviewers like a soothing GP talking to a hypochondriac. There was remarkably little infighting at the conference, as happens when a party realises it needs to put divisions aside and show solidarity to become electable, or, indeed, when two separate halves of a party loathe each other so much that they have to go to different sets of meetings.

Corbyn took to the stage with his head like a haunted tennis ball, and the general air of a pigeon that had inherited a suit. His speech lasted 59 minutes, one minute for every Labour MP who would like to see him fed into a sausage machine. The new Labour leader insisted, “Leadership is about listening.” If leadership is about listening, the great political speeches would have been a little different. Churchill saying, “Can you tell me what you’d like to do on the beaches?” Or Martin Luther King, surrounded by civil right activists at the Lincoln Memorial: “Did everyone hear that? He said a dog came into his bedroom but it had the head of his dead mother … it sang the Camptown Races and then all his teeth fell out. That’s a great one. OK, hands up who’s got another dream?”

Many in the party think Corbyn won’t last the full term, especially if we have a couple of cold winters. Actually, I have high hopes for him and his deputy Tom Watson, who could be mistaken, in a low light, for a chest of drawers with a telly on top. Perhaps their contrasting styles will complement each other. Corbyn looks like he will be killed by a mole from the secret services, Watson by a roll from the motorway services. Corbyn even came to the rescue of a speaker at the conference when her wheelchair became stuck while on stage. If it had been the Tories, she would have been removed by Iain Duncan Smith side-kicking her into the orchestra pit.