Ed Milibands speech Lib Dems Made Tragic Mistake'

Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party, said today in a speech to the Fabian Society:

We've just witnessed our first by-election of the Parliament in Oldham East and Saddleworth.

It was an unusual by-election not only because - I am proud to say - Labour won, but also because of the behaviour of our opponents and the great churning of votes between the parties.

David Cameron became the first prime minister in recent years to campaign in a by-election.

And definitely the first party leader that I can remember to not know the name of his own party's candidate.

Then we saw Nick Clegg vowing to have more public rows with Mr Cameron just to remind people that the Liberal Democrats still have a separate identity.

That is an unusual, probably unhealthy, way to conduct any relationship let alone one in a government that is having such a profound impact on people's lives.

I suspect it is a symptom of a having coalition based on political convenience rather than values.

But, as I said, it was also unusual because we saw significant transfers of votes from the Liberal Democrats to Labour. From the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats. And from Conservatives to Labour.

Above all, what the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election shows us is that people are deeply uneasy about where this Conservative-led government is taking the country.

However our party would be deluding itself if we thought that meant that the next election would fall into our lap.

The next election will be as much about us as about them—and our ability to change and become the voice and standard-bearer of Britain’s progressive majority once again. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

Because I believe that from the very founding of the Labour party as the Labour Representation Committee through to the great reforming Labour governments of the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of this, Labour has succeeded when it has seen itself not as a narrow party of sectional interest, but when through a sense of mission, passion and optimism for the future it has become the voice and vehicle for progressive change.

We need to be honest over 13 years in government we forfeited the right in too many people’s minds to be the natural standard bearers for this progressive majority in Britain.

I want to talk today about the reasons why that happened and about the three ways we need to change and change profoundly if we are to put it right.

The first is to understand why our economy has stopped working for people – and how we can again offer a new economic model for Labour and for Britain. In particular, understanding that simply redistributing taxpayers’ money through the welfare state, important though that is, is inadequate and will not build the more just, more sustainable economy.

The second is to recognise the way our managerialism took us away from the instincts and values of the broad progressive majority in Britain.

That our communities came to see us as the people who put markets and commerce before the common good.

And many citizens came to see us also as the people who did not understand that the state could be intrusive as well as empowering.

We must respond to this by breathing new life into our sense of ideological purpose, drawing on what is enduringly good in the Labour tradition, and reaching outside it too.

And third we must accept that in how we do our politics we came to be not leaders of a broad, open progressive majority built on a coalition of values, but into a political force that was far less than that.

We must respond by putting democratic renewal and a willingness to reach out to others beyond our party at the heart of the way we do our politics.

Understanding that Labour must change the way it works and that no one party can claim to have a monopoly of wisdom in today’s politics. That Labour must earn its leadership of Britain’s progressive majority - it is not ours by right.

The Context

Before turning to my argument, let me set the context.

It’s two years since I opened the Fabian New Year Conference of 2009.

I remarked then that the Tories had never been more on the ideological defensive in my political lifetime.

The financial crash had demolished the Conservative fallacy that markets always know best and David Cameron was busy discovering that there was such a thing as society.

Two years later, we are clearly in a very different place.

David Cameron didn’t win the general election last May. But he did end up as Prime Minister and he hasn’t let the absence of a mandate stop him from embarking on the most ideologically dangerous assault on our public services in a generation.

These changes will re-shape Britain in as profound a way as Mrs Thatcher re-shaped Britain in the 1980s. I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I say that everywhere I go I see an assault on many of the things I value – from Sure Start to the way in which the trebling of student debt will kick the ladder of opportunity away from a generation of our young people.

The combination of this assault on our institutions, the global economic crisis and the formation of the Conservative-led government has marked a period of change which occurs only once in a generation.

There have been two other moments in my lifetime when economic upheaval has been followed by a dramatic break in the established pattern of British politics.

The first was the IMF crisis in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent two years later, followed by the defeat of the Callaghan government, the formation of the SDP and eighteen years of Conservative government.

The second was Britain’s ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, the emergence of New Labour and the election of the first three-term Labour government in our history.

In both cases a fundamental shift in the character and direction of our national politics proved to be enduring.

Facing Up to Defeat

On these two occasions a governing party lost power on the expectation of a quick return to office, and it ended up in the wilderness for a generation.

In both cases that was because they didn’t learn the right lessons about the changing economic circumstances, about what their values meant for their time, and the way they did their politics.

We cannot afford to sit back and wait for this Conservative-led government to fail. That is why we must seize this moment to understand these lessons and to change if we are to ensure that this is a one-term government.

This government is making costly mistakes and will continue to do so. But it is the changes we make to ourselves that will decide whether we avoid the fate that has befallen parties in the past.

That is why “one more heave” just won’t do.

A party that slumps below 30% of the popular vote has a responsibility to face up to the scale of its loss.

Understanding why we lost touch means learning to see ourselves as the British people see us.

We began learning that lesson after 1983, but it took us far too long. I am determined that we will not make the same mistake again.

Of course I am proud of the achievements of our last Labour government. The truth is that for a lot of people those achievements are clearer, now that they are under threat from this government.

But let’s not mislead ourselves – aspects of our record in government are also the reason we are now in opposition.

Parties don’t suffer defeats like the one we suffered last May because of an accumulation of small errors.

They do so by making serious mistakes, and that’s why I have said what I have said on issues like Iraq, failing to properly regulate the banks, ignoring concerns about economic security and not doing enough to deliver on the promise of a new politics.

We have to show that we have learnt lessons if the British people are to trust us again.

The Progressive Majority

So that is the scale of the challenge we face.

But if the result of the election showed why we need to change, it also revealed something important about the nature of British politics from which we ought to draw encouragement.

Most people cast their votes for parties that talked about the need to make Britain fairer and more equal, that warned against the dangers of cutting the deficit too early and urged a deepening of democratic reform.

It’s easy to forget today, but that brief bout of Cleggmania was animated by this progressive hunger for change.

So there is a progressive majority in Britain. It’s just that we failed to attract enough of it to Labour’s cause to return a viable progressive government.

We will rebuild ourselves as a broad movement by understanding where the centre-ground of British politics truly lies.

I want us to become the voice and hope of those who feel squeezed by an economic system that promised to liberate them.

I want us to articulate the frustration of people who are fed up with bankers taking vast public subsidies and then rewarding themselves for failure while the rest of the country struggles.

I want us to be the party that answers the call for a fairer sharing of the nation’s wealth, strong and responsive public services and a different kind of politics.

Over the coming months, I will be talking in greater detail about how we approach the economic challenges, the challenges of renewing our values and the challenge of renewing our politics.

Today I want to set out the direction of that journey.

Economic Crisis

So let me start with the first change we need – on the economy.

The financial crisis shook the world economy, but more specifically it exposed some of the flawed assumptions on which the economic policies of Britain have been based under successive governments.

The last election saw a majority crying out for a party and a government which had learned the lessons of the crisis and could offer Britain a new economic future. But we must accept that we failed to win the argument that it was Labour that could offer people a better economy working in their interests.

If we are again to offer a vision of hope and change to the majority in Britain it is essential that we learn the right lessons of the crisis. This is the argument that will define this decade and beyond.

The implication of much of what the Conservative-led government say is that it was high levels of public borrowing that caused the crisis. That is just not true.

In fact, it was the crisis that caused high levels of public borrowing.

The deficit rose from manageable levels of around 2% of national income to above 10% because of the global financial crisis.

And when the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are trying to propagate this myth about the past we must not let them get away with it.

The reason is not simply because of desire for truth about the past but because they are using it to shape our future.

They want to tell people that the only lesson to learn from the crisis is that as long as we simply cut back spending far and fast enough, we will contain the deficit and reach the sunny uplands of economic prosperity.

But just as we need to counter their myth about the past, we need to acknowledge what we got wrong. Along with other national governments, we didn’t get banking regulation right.

And our economy was too vulnerable to the crisis because we were too reliant on financial services.

These are two important lessons of the crisis. But there is a deeper issue about why the crisis happened and what it teaches us about the economy we need to create.

Freer markets combined with ‘light touch’ regulation were sold to middle Britain on the basis that they would guarantee economic freedom, rising living standards and a fair reward for the hard working majority.

For the best of reasons, New Labour signed up to this vision precisely because it spoke to the hopes of aspirational voters.

Our period in office was marked by notable successes: record levels of employment, a decade of continuous growth until 2008, low inflation, low interest rates and the minimum wage.

What is more we used the proceeds of growth to both rebuild public services and tackle poverty.

Whereas before 1997, relative poverty had trebled and the public realm had crumbled, we comprehensively changed the direction in which our country was headed.

But economic growth and productivity masked a hidden truth: that life in the middle was getting harder not easier.

Real wages in the middle may have been rising but they weren’t keeping pace with the rest of the economy.

And they were wildly outstripped by the gains made by those at the top.

And though Labour did a lot to offset this with tax credits and other forms of public support, we found ourselves swimming against stronger economic currents.

The “squeezed middle”, a phrase some people might have thought I would never use again, is not a marketing concept but a reality of life for millions of people as the result of the economy we have.

It speaks to families working hard for long hours, stretching a limited family budget and who found the only way to increase their living standards was to increase their personal debt.

pple-style-span" >The lesson we must draw is that there is a connection between the inequality of a system that distributes wealth unfairly and the economic imbalances of a country that became too reliant on personal debt and financial services.

Put these parts of the argument together—about regulation, about the need for a broader industrial base and about inequality – and I come to this conclusion: we can’t build economic efficiency or social justice simply in the way we have tried before.

It won’t be enough to rely on a deregulated market economy providing the tax revenues for redistribution.

New Labour’s critical insight in the 1990s and 2000s was that we needed to be stewards of a successful market economy to make possible social justice through redistribution. The critical insight of Labour in my generation is that both wealth creation and social justice need to be built into the way our economy works.

That’s why I think the living wage, for example, is such a powerful idea.

Because I know that tax credits for all the good they do have their limits.

If we can build an economy with more living wage jobs – and well paying jobs – we embed social justice at the heart of the way the market economy is run rather than having to make it an optional extra.

This is important for us not just because it is necessary to create social justice but because it reflects the fiscal climate we will face in the coming decade.

Why was the last Labour government too slow in the language that we used, after the financial crisis had created a big deficit, to acknowledge what our own plans implied, that there would eventually have to be cuts? Part of the answer is that we hadn’t shown other ways of delivering social justice.

So the first part of the way we must change is to show we can build a fair economy, with wealth creation and social justice for all at its heart.

Our Values

The second part of our challenge is to understand how over 13 years of government we came to seem detached and remote from the instincts and values of families across Britain – families who share our values but saw a party that was out of touch with their daily struggle.

For all our achievements, I know what our biggest problem was – it afflicts all governments.

We became too technocratic and managerial.

But more than that, we sometimes lost sight of people as individuals, and of the importance of communities.

In our use of state power, too often we didn’t take people with us. That is why over time people railed against the target culture, the managerialism of public service reform and overbearing government.

At the same time, we seemed in thrall to a vision of the market that seemed to place too little importance on the values, institutions and relationships that people cherish the most.

We turned a blind eye to the impact of out of town retail developments and post office branch closures on our high streets. We knew all about the benefits of a flexible and mobile labour force, but we didn’t think enough about its impact on weakening social bonds and squeezing time with our families.

So people began to see a government which looked remote from they cared about. They could see a government doing things they either agreed with or disagreed with, but not a political movement that spoke to their values.

To change, we will look critically at our traditions and why they have led us to become remote.

Among the many strands of the British Labour tradition, two have proved particularly influential.

The first was the idea of socialism as a kind of missionary work to be undertaken on behalf of the people.

I’m sorry to give the Fabians a hard time, but this view is most obviously associated with the early Fabians around Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

The alternative strand, represented by the co-operative movement and the early trade unions, saw Labour as a grassroots, democratic movement to enable people to lead the most fulfilling lives.

As we seek the right traditions to draw on as a political party in the 21st century, it is so important that we understand the appropriate role of each tradition.

The Webb Fabian tradition was born of an era where the challenge of the Left was meeting people’s basic needs for health, housing, education and relief of poverty.

That need will always remain.

But people rightly expect more out of their lives than simply meeting basic needs.

The New Labour tradition which embraced dynamic markets is also important for our future and creating wealth.

But people don’t just care about the bottom line, there is so much more to life.

So the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market will never meet our real ambition as a party, that each citizen can be liberated to have the real freedom to shape their own lives.

To do that, we need to draw on that other tradition based on mutualism, localism and the common bonds of solidarity that captures the essence of our party at its best.

The belief in those common bonds means we should also be defenders of the things that people value and which are threatened – sometimes by market, sometimes by government.

When we say we care about the closure of a Sure Start, it isn’t just about the supply of a service to individual families. Sure Start is a place where community is built, as families get to know each other and form friendships.

The same is true of local libraries.

The same is true of ways of life which are deeply ingrained in our country and which we should understand.

Just before Christmas, I went with Jon Cruddas to Billingsgate fish market and met a porter there who told me that the best day of his life was when he got his porter's badge and that there has not been a day since when he has not woken up feeling proud to be doing the job he does.

That is why politicians should not shrug and walk away when they hear that traditional ways of life are under threat. We should seek to defend ways of life which give people self-respect.

And a Britain of respect and decency demands obligations from all of us. What offends me most about the outrages in the banks is the sense that some of the bankers apparently feel little obligation to the society and country in which they are located.

It isn’t enough to say this is what the market will pay me – societies are built on deeper social obligation.

I care about the success of our financial services industry – about the jobs it creates.

But today when we you see some of our leading bankers constantly threatening to leave the country, trying to hold the country to ransom and thinking only of themselves, it makes me angry.

And that is why it makes me so angry that this government is refusing to act.

To be at heart of the progressive mainstream, we also need to draw on values that may not have always been central to our party. One of our tasks is to learn the lessons of the green movement and put sustainability at the heart of what we do. Another is to draw on the traditions of liberty.

Progressive politics is not just about meeting economic and social needs.

Those are only ever a means to human flourishing and freedom.

Part of that is about upholding the liberty of the person.

Nobody should pretend there aren’t important and difficult choices to be made about how to uphold security and protect liberty. But we didn’t take the need to uphold liberty seriously enough.

In recent months, we have shown with our willingness to support the reduction of 28 day detention to 14 days, we are determined to take liberty seriously as part of our governing philosophy.

The Way We Do Politics

So we must renew our approach to the economy, and renew our values.

But thirdly, we also have to reform our approach to politics.

Not since the era of the rotten borough has our political system faced such a grave crisis of legitimacy as the one it now faces.

From declining turnout and shrinking electoral rolls to anger over expenses and broken promises on tuition fees, people have lost trust in politics and its ability to offer solutions to the problems they face.

That crisis is a matter of national urgency. It’s a crisis of unreformed institutions, broken promises, remote political parties and a knee-jerk adversarial political culture.

Part of the problem has been the failure of all parties to honour repeated promises to usher in a new politics.

Of course that involves reforming our political institutions. Our own credibility was undermined by our failure to honour a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on voting reform and the stalling of democratic reform of the House of Lords.

We will take every opportunity to reform the way our political system works. That is the reason I will be campaigning in favour of the Alternative Vote in the referendum. I will keep my promise.

But this audience knows that very few people on the doorstop ask about the Alternative Vote or reform of the House of Lords. They think the reason politics is discredited is because politicians always break their promises.

The reality is that that the broken promises of this government do not just damage their own reputations, but that of all politicians. That is why we have to be careful not to over-promise, either in terms of language or in terms of policy.

But that is just part of the story of how we renew our politics.

Think back to our early days as a political party.

Of course, we fought elections but we did a lot more than that.

We were part of the fabric of community life through our wider movement: not just the trade unions, but the co-operative movement.

Nostalgia for times past is not an answer to the challenges of the future.

But the challenge to us all is to be a genuine movement for change appropriate to our time up and down the country.

That is why as part of our party reform, we want to learn the lessons of organisations like London Citizens to become a genuine community organising movement.

The only way we rebuild the case for politics is from the ground up.

The campaign for the local library, the local zebra crossing, the improvement of a school, must be our campaign.

And not just campaigns for the state to do things, but campaigns that achieve things themselves.

There is one other thing we need to change in our politics.

No party has a monopoly of wisdom or virtue, and it is foolish to pretend that they do.

The decision of the Liberal Democrats to join a Conservative-led government was a tragic mistake, and I hope they come to see that in time.

Forgive me if I decline to join those who are gloating at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.

Because their mistake means they are part of a government attempting to shift politics to the Right.

I am certainly pleased that many Liberal Democrats now see Labour as the main progressive hope in British politics.

Thousands of them have joined us since the election.

I want them to find a welcome home in our party – not just making up the numbers, but contributing actively to the strengthening of our values and the renewal of our policies.

But equally there are many Liberal Democrats who have decided to stay and fight for the progressive soul of their party. Most of them do not want to see their progressive tradition sacrificed for personal ambition.

I respect their choice too and I understand how painful it must be to watch what is happening to their party.

We do not doubt that they hold sincere views and we will co-operate, where we can in Parliament and outside, with those that want to fight the direction of this government.

It is our duty to work with progressives everywhere.

Conclusion

So this is the way we need to seize the mantle of progressive politics and shape the economic, ideological and political landscape of the future.

Building a fair economy.

Rooting our values in traditions and ideas that go beyond the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market

And a different kind of politics

The prize is not simply a Labour government but more than that.

It is about a political movement that in every community up and down this country can shape the politics of the future.

Make our values and our ideas the commonsense of our age.

And shape a country and a world based on our ideals.

Byelections In Oldham East & Saddleworth

Its alleged by the opinion polls that Labour is on course for a comfortable win in next week's Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election in what would be a serious blow for the Liberal Democrats, opinion polls indicated today.

Labour Party activists and guest appearance from all over the UK has been in Oldham East & Saddleworth to help our candidate to #keepoldhamlabour this because Oldham East & Saddleworth this will be a test to see if the coalition will hold this seat. I will continue to urge all our Labour activist both young and elders to come on up to Oldham East & Saddleworth to contiune to canvass for a Labour victory and give the #Libcon and partner #conservatives a bloody noise in this byelections cheack your Regional Office for transport details.

Nick Clegg's party trails by 17 points in two separate surveys of voters in the key marginal.

The huge deficit contrasts starkly with the general election when its candidate lost by just 103 votes and then won a legal bid to have Labour victor Phil Woolas stripped of the seat for lying about him.

Not enough Tory backers have been willing to switch to the junior power-sharing partner to make up for the haemorrhaging of support away from Lib Dem Elwyn Watkins to Labour's Debbie Abrahams.

A poll of 1,500 voters in the constituency conducted for the ex-Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft put Labour on 46 per cent, the Lib Dems on 29 per cent and the Conservatives on 15 per cent.

Its findings were mirrored by an ICM poll which gave Labour a 44 per cent to 27 per cent lead over the Lib Dems - with the Tories' Kashif Ali doing slightly better at 18 per cent.

Unemployment Hits National Insurance Reserves

I have to say since the coalition took over from Labour the coalitions figures has increased under their management. The question is is this management or mismanagement that is the question that all of us need to ask ourselves. It looks like this is the time when the coalition needs to reflex on whether to take on board what Labour as been saying all along that if you raise VAT, Petrol, and National Insurance, Diesel that the rate of growth will hit the poorest and middle income the hardest in a time of recession.

Rising unemployment has cut the amount of money the government holds in reserve to pay out-of-work benefits, new figures reveal.

The National Insurance Fund lost £4.5bn in the year to March 2010 - the first time since 1993 it has gone down.

But it still stood at £48.5bn - well within what is considered prudent by government accountants.

All UK workers pay into the fund - sickness benefits and jobseekers allowance are paid from it if needed.

According to the fund's accounts for 2009/10, £4.9bn of the decrease was down to rising unemployment claims and a £663m reduction in National Insurance contributions.

Interest earned on the fund "also decreased significantly due to the historically low interest rates", the accounts say.

In 1992, the government actuary set a rate of 16.7% of annual expenditure on benefits as a prudent level for the fund to hold.

It currently stands at 64% of the annual welfare bill and is expected to remain at that level next year.

This suggests the government will have enough in reserve to carry on paying benefits if unemployment continues to rise as some economists have predicted.

According to figures released by the Office for Budget Responsibility at the end of last year, rising unemployment will cost the government £1.5bn more than expected in welfare benefits, over the next four years.

The OBR also calculates the government will have to pay out £700m more in unemployment benefit than previously forecast.

Official data showed 2.5 million people were unemployed last month - compared with 1.63 million in the same month in 2009.

But a survey released this week suggests the jobs market is "on the road to recovery", with a strong rise in demand for staff.

The survey of recruitment consultants and employers in December found permanent staff vacancies rising at their fastest level in four months.

But one of the reports sponsors, KPMG, warns the future of the recovery is uncertain, as the government's austerity measures take effect.

Testing Times For All The Three Main Parties

The by-election in Oldham represents the first chance for voters to pass judgement on the coalition government, Labour leader Ed Miliband has said.

Mr Miliband was campaigning in Oldham East and Saddleworth for a third time ahead of Thursday’s by-election.

He told party volunteers voters could “send a message” about tuition fees, police cuts and the VAT rise.

David Cameron has rejected claims the poll amounts to a referendum on the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition.

The by-election was called after former Labour minister Phil Woolas’s victory in May was annulled by a court.

Speaking to Labour supporters on Saturday, Mr Miliband said: “For the first time since this Conservative-led government was formed, voters will have their chance to pass judgement on David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

‘Soft-pedalling’

“They can send a message about the betrayal on tuition fees. They can show the government what they feel about police cuts both here and across the country.

“Start Quote

It is important people who want to send a message to the government turn out in this by-election”

End Quote Ed Miliband

• Cameron ‘fighting for every vote’
• Lib Dems ‘here to win’ in Oldham

“And they can make clear their anger about a VAT rise which is the wrong tax at the wrong time.”

He later knocked on doors, chatted and shook hands with households, accompanied by Labour candidate Debbie Abrahams.

Lib Dem leader Mr Clegg has visited Oldham twice and the prime minister visited on Thursday.

The poll is being closely watched by analysts who see it as the first major test of how the two coalition parties intend to campaign against each other.

During Mr Cameron’s visit, he denied the Tories were soft-pedalling in the seat to give the Lib Dems a better chance and said his party would fight very hard for every vote.

He denied it was a “token” gesture, claiming he was the first prime minister in the last 10 years who had been to a by-election in England.

Lib Dem candidate Elwyn Watkins lost the seat in the May General Election by 103 votes.

But Mr Woolas’s victory was annulled when an election court ruled he had made untrue statements about Mr Watkins in campaign leaflets.

Mr Woolas was then dropped by the Labour Party after losing a legal challenge.

Although Mr Watkins is Labour’s nearest challenger, the constituency was a three-way marginal in May with Conservative Kashif Ali – who is standing again – fewer than 2,500 votes behind.

Since then, the Lib Dems’ fortunes have plummeted in national polls after the furore over tuition fees.

Mr Miliband said: “It is important people who want to send a message to the government turn out in this by-election.

“The stakes are too high to stay at home. The danger is if they stay at home they end up with a Lib Dem or Conservative MP by the back door.”

Ed Ball To CoaltionCameron 'playing politics' on control orders

Ed Ball MP was right to hit thte Coaltion where it matters the most in regards to control Orders

Control orders were introduced under the former Labour government in 2005

Labour has accused the government of "playing politics" with national security over control orders.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the controversial anti-terror measures "haven't been a success".

But Labour claims plans to modify them are motivated by a desire to please the Lib Dems, who promised to do so in their election manifesto.

Labour's Ed Balls said Mr Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg should put national security first.

The shadow home secretary insisted he would wait until the outcome of a review into control orders, a form of house arrest introduced by the previous Labour government in 2005, before passing judgement on whether they should be scrapped.

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For David Cameron and Nick Clegg there are two political imperatives over control orders.

First, that the compromise they reach must not damage, or risk being presented as, damaging national security.

Second, both men need an agreement they can sell to their own backbenchers because all the signs are the new regime will require legislation and a Commons vote.

For Mr Clegg, in particular, it is crucial there is no repeat of the tuition fees revolt.

Hence its likely the Lib Dem leader will be given plenty of space to claim a political success - even if core elements of the control order regime remain.

But he accused Mr Clegg of keeping up a "running commentary" in the press, amid stories claiming the orders were going to be axed.

He told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "The experts I have spoken to in the security services and the police are very unconvinced that it is possible to keep our country safe without some kind of successor regime in place. That is not consistent with the Lib Dem manifesto. That is Nick Clegg's political problem.

"And this desperate attempt to play politics with this issue is, in my view, very mistaken."

Mr Clegg is under pressure to prove that he is delivering on Lib Dem manifesto commitments as his party's opinion poll rating hits a new low - but Mr Cameron has insisted control orders are not a party political issue and he would act in the public interest.

On a visit to Leicester on Wednesday, Mr Cameron told the BBC: "I think we need a system that keeps the country safe but that respects our freedoms. Nick Clegg and I are working very hard to bring this about."

He added: "The control order system is imperfect. Everybody knows that. There have been people who've absconded from control orders. It hasn't been a success. We need a proper replacement and I'm confident we'll agree one."

Mr Cameron also said: "It's not about a victory for the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. It's about trying to do the right thing for our country, for the security of our country and our civil liberties."

Delayed

Opponents of control orders say they infringe civil liberties, but supporters, including backbench Tory MPs, argue they are necessary to protect the public.

The BBC understands that discussions have now reached detailed negotiation about the powers that should be put in place instead of control orders. They include curfews, relocation requirements, electronic tagging, travel bans, restrictions on the use of telephones and computers and on who the suspect can meet and where they can go.

The Lib Dem manifesto promised to scrap control orders which lead to house arrest.

A review of control orders was announced in July and is being overseen by former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald.

The results had been due to be published before Christmas, but this was delayed amid reports of policy disagreements between the coalition government partners.

BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said there were currently only eight control orders in force and a few of those were believed to involve "very light touch" measures.

The previous Labour government argued it had to control some suspects who could not be prosecuted because secret intelligence was not allowed in British trials.

Ed Miliband Has Found His Way

Who would have thought that Labour leader Ed Miliband has accused the Coalition of spreading the "myth" that Britain's debts were caused by the last Government spending too much rather than a global financial crisis. So for the non voting and Labour bashing people that has nothing better to do watch out Ed Miliband has finally found his strength to lead a party to victory

Ed Miliband said the Labour Party would not oppose every spending cut

In an article in The Times, Mr Miliband said Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne were leading the country in the wrong direction.

He said their "politically motivated desire to propagate a myth about the last Labour government" was being used to justify cutting too deep and too fast.

Mr Miliband said the pair were "airbrushing" history and ignoring the fact Britain's debt at the start of the crisis was the second-lowest in the G7 and lower than it had been under the Conservatives.

He warned a "great deceit designed to damage Labour has led to profoundly misguided and dangerous economic decisions that I fear will cause deep damage to Britain's future".

Chancellor George Osborne said the UK economy is out of the danger zone

"What is this deceit? It is that the deficit was caused by chronic overspending rather than a global financial crisis that resulted in recession and a calamitous collapse in tax revenues," he added.

The Labour leader said his party would not oppose every cut and believed borrowing was too high, but that the conditions were not there for the kind of "rapid rebalancing" Mr Osborne has gambled on.

Mr Miliband's approach is in marked contrast to the view of the coalition Government - Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne have said the UK economy was in the "danger zone" due to economic mismanagement by Labour.

Cutting the budget deficit by 2015 and scaling back public sector spending will reinvigorate the private sector, reduce interest payments and restore confidence in the economy, they argue.

Cabinet Office green paper to put forward series of ideas to define the elusive 'big society' in Britain

The Big Society now wants your money from your cash point now being proposed by the coalition all those in favour say Yay Or Nay. Lets see it looks like the to the right has it in the form of Green paper, drafted by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, is designed to encourautge philanthropy.

I am convince it is a Big con to make money just look around in today's economic climate public sector funding is being halved three times the rate under this coalition than a Labour Gov would have proposed.


The way how I read into it at the moment is people don't mind knowing what needs to be cut but when you look at the wider implications for the nation the Tories will let their partner in crime to happy to take the fall for it. Nice one Cleggy your the man.

Cash machines should automatically give customers an option of donating to charity, the coalition proposes tomorrow in a green paper designed to define the elusive "big society" in Britain.

The proposal is one of a series of ideas put forward by the Cabinet Office to shift what the coalition sees as the stubborn British refusal to be philanthropic with time or money. Prompts to give to charitable causes might also be developed whenever someone fills in a tax return or applies for a driving licence or passport.

Other ideas aired in the innovative green paper include a thank-you letter from ministers for giving large sums, a national day to celebrate donors, and a televised weekly thank-you to national lottery winners who have donated.

The green paper also considers whether the government should try to set as a social norm that everyone should give 1% of their income to charity, or a fixed proportion of their time. Overall, the green paper, drafted by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, argues that the internet and apps are now "providing an unparalleled opportunity to access information on how to make a difference".

Other ideas include developing an app so that retailers automatically send very small donations to charity every time a customer uses a particular search engine to look at the retailer's website.

At present 8% of the UK population contribute 47% of total donations, and with income tax now rising to 50% for those earning more than £150,000 a year, the government faces an uphill task in creating a new culture of giving. Charities also complain that their national funding is being cut by the government.

Following objections from the Treasury, the green paper is noncommittal about fresh tax breaks for giving, but says many of the existing incentives are poorly understood by UK corporations. Payroll giving is perceived as too time consuming by many small businesses, while big corporate donors tend to give to a narrow range of causes likely to be uncontroversial with shareholders.

The green paper, drawing on the analytical work of the so-called nudge unit in No 10, takes a strong view that social action is not something the coalition can or should compel people to take.

The paper says that "it has to be built from the bottom up on the back of free decisions by individuals to give to causes around them". Maude said last night: "We are arguing for new social attitudes that celebrate giving.

"Talking about what we are doing for good causes is often seen as vulgar, but sharing experiences can often inspire others."

The coalition claims there is evidence, for instance, that people will give time if approached properly. The London 2012 Olympics organisers have attracted 240,000 applications to be stewards.

The green paper also suggests it is vital that giving is more visible: "The more people see that their peers are giving, and how much they give, the more likely they are to give, or give more, themselves."

The green paper quotes David Halpern, one of the advisers to the nudge unit, who argues: "Our behaviour is generally far more influenced by what we see other people doing than what we think we should be doing."

He also draws on the pioneering work of the sociologist Richard Titmuss to argue that there is a gift relationship, claiming: "Evolution has endowed us with a social brain that predisposes us to reciprocate acts of kindness, not just blindly to follow anyone and everyone, regardless of how they treat anyone."

As a result there has been a growth in peer-to-peer lending and financing platforms such as Zopa that allow people to give money to individuals or projects that post requests for funding online.

The paper argues that social media such as Facebook "offer enormous potential to normalise giving with developments such as Twibbons that allow people to share their support for a cause in the online environment."

"Transparency should make it possible to tell whether charities are good value through sites such as New Philanthropy Capital's ratings and comparison websites."

Clegg aims to calm Lib Dem fears

How many of us in the Labour Party remember the good old days when we continued to fight among ourselves while we were in opposition and in government. While on the other the Tories had there fair share they were in opposition for 13 yrs and yes they too have their fair share with in house fighting too when they were deciding who they wanted for their leader of the party. What do we all have in common the is most the leaders of the three main political parties are fairly new leaders they all have to go through what Blair, Cameron, and Clegg all had to learn the lessons.

Now some of us may agree or disagree the fact is two of the main three political parties have been voted by the Citizens of the United Kingdom whilst the third the Lib Dem's have come in third. Now we have learnt that that the Lib Dems have turned their backs on the students most of them who publicly signed a Student Pledge that they will not support the rise of tuition fees.

Give credit where it is due the leader of the Student Union did nothing wrong by holding those who signed the pledge to account publicly and because he he condemed the few went out of their way to smash the Troy HQ for this his leadership is on the line. I know which side I will be.

Now here comes the most interesting part of this story which the media has not been quite honest about Nick Clegg in current opinion polls may be bad for the Liberal Democrats - however some specific polling has emerged today that suggests the electoral impact of the coalition agreement could be even worse for the Lib Dems than the headline figures suggest. Polling on behalf of former Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, published today on ConservativeHome, suggests that there has been a 17.5% swing from the Lib Dems to Labour in Nick Clegg's Sheffield Hallam constituency. Labour have now moved ahead of the Tories into second place in the seat, and are only two points behind Clegg on current polling - making the seat a potential three-way marginal (33/31/28).

Hence Nick Clegg says his party has faced "testing times" in a message aimed at calming grassroots Lib Dem concerns. In his New Year message to members, the deputy prime minister pledged to start 2011 with action on social mobility, civil liberties and the environment.

He also launched a renewed defence of the decision to break a pledge to oppose rises in student tuition fees.

And he insists he had delivered on "every single one and more" of the party's general election priorities.

In the message, sent from Spain, where he is celebrating Christmas with his wife Miriam's family, he told the Liberal Democrat membership: "Well, what a year! A white-knuckle election; a new coalition government; Liberals in power for the first time in 70 years.

"Just eight months ago we were campaigning on our four big manifesto priorities - fairer taxes; extra money for disadvantaged children in schools; a green, rebalanced economy; a new, open politics. And now we are delivering on every single one, and more."

'Difficult decisions'

He went on: "I don't want to pretend it has all been easy. These are testing times for the country and for our party too. Action to tackle the deficit, and the need to reform higher education, have forced us to take some incredibly difficult decisions.

"But that is government. And when we promised people that we were ready to govern, that is the commitment we made. I genuinely believe that the choices we are making will stand the test of time."

He says the decision to almost treble tuition fees, which saw the party break a pre-election pledge, was needed to retain "world-class" universities and protect poorer students.

And he says backing the Conservatives' package of public spending cuts would "make sure future generations are not saddled with the burden of our debt".

"And by showing people that [the] coalition can work, we can prove that plural, liberal politics is best for Britain," he told them.

He says he will start the year by concentrating on "three big changes" in addition to campaigning for a "yes" vote in May's referendum on changing the Westminster voting system to AV - a key concession won in the coalition negotiations.

He set out his priorities for 2011: "Radical reform of our political system and restoring our hard-won civil liberties; boosting social mobility so that no child is held back by the circumstances of his or her birth; and making sure the economic recovery is green and balanced, with opportunities spread across the whole country."

He concluded: "All of us are going to hear some people predict the worst for our party. The same people who have been underestimating the Liberal Democrats for as long as we have existed.

"But we prove them wrong at every single turn. The next 12 months will be no different, because we will continue to build the Liberal, fairer, greener Britain that we all believe in."

Margaret Hodge elected chairman of Commons spending watchdog

Now the truth is coming out when a FormerLabour MP Margaret Hodge says ” Why should the Department for Transport, for instance, be so dependent on consultants”?”

Central government departments spent more than £1bn on consultants and temporary staff in 2009-10, a report by the Commons spending watchdog says.

It said departments should negotiate more fixed price contracts and develop “core” skills among their own staff.

And it warned “uninformed” cuts to spending and training could end up costing more in the long term.

The Cabinet Office says spending on consultants dropped 46% in the months after the election.

And in his evidence to the committee, Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell said that spending on consultants, as a share of spending on goods and services, was about 4% – while in the private sector it was about 15%.

The report by the public accounts committee says that, in 2009-10, departments spent £789m on consultants and an estimated £215m on interim managers. In 2006-7 £904m was spent on consultants – that dropped by £126m in 2007-8.

The report said new measures brought in by the coalition to control the use of consultants seemed to be having some effect but some departments’ spending was “unacceptable”.

It flagged up the Department for Transport, which spends £70 on consultants for every £100 it spends on its own staff while HM Revenue and Customs spent only £2 per £100.

‘Stop-go approach’

A further £700m a year was estimated to be spent on consultants by arms-length bodies, which should be required to report their spending, the report said.

It said departments did not control what they spent on consultant, with 70% of contracts based on the amount of time spent on a project, while only 29% were based on a fixed price and only 1% were based on achieving specific goals.

It also warned against a “stop-go” approach. It pointed out that the Department of Health appeared to be reducing consultancy spending by 95% in 2010-11 but that Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell was anticipating a resurgence in consultancy spending “as new policies are developed and implemented”.

Cabinet Office figures suggest overall spending on consultants dropped 46% in the six months between April and September 2010, compared with the previous year.

Ian Watmore, who heads up the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform group, told the committee that the drop was largely due to the number of projects and programmes cancelled by the coalition. But he also thought spending would rise again within the five-year parliament, when new programmes were implemented.

The committee said reducing what was spent on consultants “in an uninformed way to make short term gains” could cost more in the long run, adding that HM Revenue and Customs had stopped hiring consultants for six months, which had put an end to revenue-raising tax collection campaigns.

And it warned the pressure to save money could mean cuts to training, which would undermine commitments to develop staff skills to reduce reliance on consultants.

More work was needed on improving civil servants’ skills – particularly in project management and IT, the committee said.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus said more graduates were being recruited into those specialist areas but the government was at a disadvantage in recruiting senior people because they “can often earn significantly more in the private sector”. He said it was also difficult to persuade staff to stay in project management roles “due to a preference for policy related work”.

Committee chairman Margaret Hodget said Whitehall was “largely in the dark” about whether consultants were good value for money.

“There are of course legitimate reasons for a department to buy in specialist skills where they are in short supply internally. But departments have become too reliant on buying in core skills rather than developing them in their own staff.

“Some departments depend far more on consultants than others. In itself, that is not surprising. What is unacceptable is the poor understanding of whether the extent of a department’s use of consultants is justified by the nature of its business. Why should the Department for Transport, for instance, be so dependent on consultants?”

A spokesman for the Department for Transport said it had brought in “new, more rigorous controls which require close examination and approval of any requests to appoint consultants”.

It said the department had spent £12.5m less in the 6 months to September 2010, compared with the same period in 2009 but added sometimes the use of consultants was “the best value for money option”.

Leading Senior Tories Cant Be Trusted Then Who Can You Trust

How long with the Coalition will last do I hear people are saying the anwer to that is that they will last for the full five years. Labour is in the perfect position to drive home the message of the fault of the coaltion by driving a wedge between the Tory Right and the Cameronians. the other fault lines between the Libdem Leadership and membership has been driven wide open.


Well. well, who would have throught that David Heath, the deputy Leader of the House, said the Chancellor had the “capacity to get up one’s nose” and did not appreciate what it was like to lose £1,000 a year – the value of the cut in child benefit for higher earners.

It is further alleged by Paul Burstow, the care minister, told reporters from The Daily Telegraph: “I don’t want you to trust David Cameron.” And Andrew Stunell, the local government minister, said he did not know where the Prime Minister stood on the “sincerity monitor”.

Norman Baker, the transport minister, even privately compared the Conservatives within government to the South African apartheid regime, claiming that it was his job to campaign from the “inside”.

The disclosures come on the third day of this newspaper’s investigation into the true feelings of senior Liberal Democrats towards the Coalition.

The deep personal animosity and distrust at the highest level of government between ministerial colleagues can be disclosed today. Their remarks were made during covertly recorded conversations with two undercover reporters posing as concerned Liberal Democrat voters.

In his comments, Mr Heath suggested that the Chancellor, a multi-millionaire, was out of touch with the common voter. “George Osborne has a capacity to get up one’s nose, doesn’t he?” he said.

“I mean, what I think is, some of them just have no experience of how ordinary people live, and that’s what worries me. But maybe again, you know, that’s part of our job, to remind them.”

Mr Baker said some of his Conservative colleagues were “beyond the pale” and also says he does not like the Chancellor.

“I mean, there are Tories who are quite good and there are Tories who are, you know, beyond the pale, and, you know, you have to just deal with the cards you’ve got,” he said.

“I don’t like George Osborne very much … I mean, there are Tories who are all right — Ken Clarke’s all right — there are the ones you can do business with. But what you end up doing in the Coalition … is we play them off against each other.”

Mr Baker also made the bizarre claim that the position of Liberal Democrat ministers was akin to that of Helen Suzman, a South African MP who almost single-handedly sought to change government policy from within the regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Mrs Suzman, who died in 2009, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and received numerous death threats.

He said: “I always think in South African terms, should you be Nelson Mandela, outside the system, campaigning for it to be changed, or should you be Helen Suzman, who’s my … one of my political heroes actually.”

“Helen Suzman was in the apartheid regime when everybody was male and white and horrible actually … she got stuck in there in the South African parliament in the apartheid days as the only person there to oppose it … she stood up and championed that from inside.”

He added: “You do get your hands dirty by dealing with things you don’t want to do, and sometimes you get results which aren’t quite what you want. But the issue we have to make, the calculation in coalition, is we have to make as a coalition is do we get stuff that we do want which outweighs some of the stuff we don’t want, and that’s the reality of it.”

The comments are likely to infuriate Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne, who are sensitive over claims about their privileged background, which Labour has also tried to exploit.

They were echoed during a separate meeting with Mr Stunell, a junior local government minister, who was one of the key Liberal Democrat figures in the Coalition Agreement talks.

Mr Stunell told the undercover reporters: “I don’t know where I put him [the Prime Minister] on the sincerity monitor. He’s, umm, he’s certainly a very skilled operator. He’s worked his way through the Tory system and he’s, is he sincere? I do not know how to answer that question.”

Mr Burstow added: “I don’t want you to trust David Cameron … in the sense that you believe he’s suddenly become a cuddly Liberal. Well, he hasn’t. He’s still a Conservative and he has values that I don’t share.”

When asked whether Mr Osborne was out of touch, he replied: “Yes, I know, I know, I know. There are going to be some Conservative politicians in particular who are detached from reality. I mean, Lord Young’s comments, a lot of people are unhappy with …”. This was a reference to his comments last month that Britons had “never had it so good” during the recession, which led to his resignation as Mr Cameron’s enterprise adviser.

Mr Heath and Mr Baker also publicly admit that they oppose the rise in tuition fees, despite voting in favour of the policy in the recent crucial Commons vote. “I’m still wholly against,” Mr Heath said. “I’ll say it perfectly openly, I’m wholly against tuition fees.”

Mr Baker added: “Well, it is a big shock and it’s a big shock to me and I almost resigned over the matter, on that particular one because it was just pretty horrific.”

In today’s recordings, Mr Stunell expresses his hopes that the situation will improve before the next election.

“We knew from the very start of what we were doing that this financial stuff was going to be really tricky. Difficult. I mean, horrendous … and that clearly the first two or three years were going to be absolutely dire … so it’s not all about cutting, there is going to be some good stuff.”

Caught Caught Out By The Media- Vince Cable

First it was Vince Cable now we have learnt from the media that there is more to come in regards to Libdem MPs who are not happy with the coalition.

Ed Miliband was right to publicly to call on the coaltion to sack the Business Secretary as he is untenable for the postion now we have learnt that some members of the coalition and not to mention some back benchers of Tories & Libdems(Libcons) have been caught out by the media.

what fools these mortals be — and such talkative ones too. Vince Cable has enlivened the dull slide into winter recess with a pratfall worthy of the finest pantomime.

The Business Secretary’s boastful indiscretions to constituents, who turned out to be starring in the Telegraph’s version of The Wire, have backfired on the man, his cause and his party.

At first sight, my sympathies lie with people caught out by wiretaps. Most of us have had moments of candour about our bosses, companies or families, which would make horrifying listening if caught on tape.

But Mr Cable isn’t a civilian. He is, as one photo caption put it yesterday, “the second most important Liberal Democrat”, though we must add: not any more.

The revelatory thing is how bitter such a senior figure in the Coalition feels about aspects of the realities of life with the Tories.

Effectively, Mr Cable was portraying himself as a fifth columnist “fighting with nuclear weapons” without launching a war “which destroys us all”.

A minister saying this off the record to a journalist would already be taking a risk. To indulge his hostility to “our Conservative” friends and boast of an ability to bring down the Coalition which is his party’s best — only —crack at power to two visitors to his surgery whom he had never met before is stunningly dim.

This is before we get on to Rupert Murdoch. Of course the Business Secretary doesn’t like him, his ideology or his newspapers. But an intelligent man with a corporate background such as Mr Cable should know his enemy and plan accordingly. He was required to appear objective — and failed the test.

The saga of Mr Murdoch’s plans to expand his BSkyB control and the Government’s referral of the bid to Ofcom is a stealthy game of cat and mouse.

The Tories have no principled objection to the consolidation — but are wary of being seen to pay court to Rupert as slavishly as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did, so they wanted the regulator to report to Mr Cable, not to them.

Now exactly the opposite of his intentions has come to pass. Who picks up responsibility for the Murdoch referral? Jeremy Hunt, the media and culture secretary, a pragmatic Right-winger and Mr Cameron’s go-to man when things go wrong.

With the EU ruling in Murdoch’s favour, it’s hard to say why Mr Hunt would now stop the bid. That hardly suits the Telegraph, which had lobbied against the expansion — but it’s the price they pay for a sting that turned out more potent than even they could have expected.

If Mr Murdoch could hardly have wished for a better Christmas present, Nick Clegg could hardly conceive of a worse one.

Mr Cable’s continuing tenure is absurd. Whatever the business job entails (and frankly, they make most of it up as they go along), it does require that the incumbent is taken seriously.

Peter Mandelson sculpted the role elegantly around his ability to appear sovereign and sound convincing to business people, while doing not very much.

Mr Cable’s stock was already whizzing down the political FTSE for his dalliance over tuition fees, when he had to reluctantly persuade himself to support a policy put forward by his own department. He is also at odds with the Chancellor over bank bonuses.

The time when he is invited to spend more time with his ballroom dancing would not be far off, were it not for Mr Clegg’s shortage of ministers to replace accident-prone Lib-Dem politicians.
This, and Clegg’s fear of his own party, explains the lifeline thrown to Mr Cable, who remains in Cabinet on sufferance.

I gather that there were several senior Tory voices urging Mr Cameron to make a clean break and that Mr Osborne was less convinced than others that their loquacious colleague should remain.

As today’s further revelations show, the tolerance for the Coalition inside the Lib-Dems is already dangerously low.

If senior Lib-Dems such as Ed Davey, Michael Moore and Steve Webb cannot knuckle down into a five-year power- sharing deal with the Tories and Mr Cable finds it all so trying, why should voters stick with the Coalition in the difficult year to come?

This is a sizeable hangover for Messrs Cameron and Clegg as the year ends. Contrary to smooth reassurances that their deal will stick for the duration, there is no guarantee at all that it will: and it certainly won’t, unless Mr Clegg can assert his authority more firmly in his own ranks. He should have let his turbulent colleague go.

I know many Lib-Dems will instinctively identify with Mr Cable’s criticism of the Government. But if he and others feel so strongly against the Coalition, they should have the courage of their convictions and refuse to serve in it.

To accept the spoils of office and then bandy about criticisms of the Government as ”cack-handed” and “perverse” and deride “Maoist revolution” in public services is beyond hypocrisy.

It’s not all plain sailing for the Prime Minister either. He is beginning to look like a man making some strange decisions purely to keep the Coalition from knocks.

Sacking Lord Young as an adviser for commenting that the recession wasn’t bad for everyone looks downright unjust, when he is prepared to keep a lame-duck Business Secretary in place.

My impression from senior Tory backbenchers is that they are becoming less patient with the imbalance of power, as they see it, inside the Coalition.

Much more of this and the appetite will surely rise for Mr Cameron to cut loose his troublesome junior partners.

That is emphatically not what he wants to do: but this week has shown that he may not be master of the Coalition’s eventful destiny.

A large phalanx of Mr Cable’s civil servants is being removed from his department, a cruelly public humiliation as he concedes control of key areas to one of his “Conservative friends”.

The symbolism could not be clearer. The Business Secretary is a dead minister walking. Far better for him and everyone else if he were to walk.

MPs & TradeUnion Leaders warn on NHS cuts

An influential committee of MPs warned today that the government's demand for a £20 billion NHS budget cut risks a health and social care meltdown.

The health select committee said that such huge savings had never been achieved anywhere in the world and meeting them would pose "a significant challenge."

It warned that deep cuts to services were inevitable if the four-year target was not achieved through "greater efficiency."

"The government's plans for health and social care are based on assumptions which will test these services to the limit," said the committee's Tory chairman Stephen Dorrell MP.

"There is no precedent for efficiency gain on this scale in the history of the NHS.

"Nor has any precedent yet been found of any health-care system anywhere in the world doing anything similar."

And campaign group Health Emergency chairman Geoff Martin warned the savage cuts enforced on NHS trusts would "obliterate" patient care, leading to massive reductions in bed capacity and staffing levels as well as a new wave of casualty and maternity ward closures.

NHS unions also seized on the committee's findings.

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey argued that the Tory-led body's findings revealed "deep qualms that even seasoned Conservatives are showing towards the coalition's helter-skelter plans to reorganise the NHS."

And Unison warned that the coalition's plans to push through reorganisation in both social care and the NHS posed "a huge danger for services and the people who rely on them."

"The last thing patients, staff and health trusts need now is a chaotic reorganisation that has not been properly thought through or costed," said Unison general secretary Dave Prentis.

However a Department of Health spokeswoman claimed that massive budget cuts forced onto the NHS by the coalition were not optional but a necessity.

Let Down By Con-Dems Fail Communities

David Cameron's mantra "we're all in it together" has all the malice and dishonesty of his hero Margaret Thatcher's equally duplicitous slogan "there is no alternative."

Nothing sums up Con-Dem duplicity more than the studied cynicism of the coalition government's Localism Bill launched yesterday by Eric Pickles.

Stripped of the Communities Secretary's slippery misleading rhetoric, the Bill is a naked assault on current jobs and services and equally on local councils as democratically accountable deliverers of essential services.

The government's sweeping reductions to local authority funding in England will result without doubt in savage cuts to employment and service provision, yet Pickles insists that local authorities will be able to do "more for less."

He claims to be guided by advice from the Local Government Association over what councils can manage by way of a reduction in their spending powers.

But the LGA warned three weeks ago that 140,000 local authority jobs are expected to be axed as a result of spending cuts, a full 40 per cent higher than originally estimated in response to the government's October comprehensive spending review.The reason for this is the coalition's determination to frontload many of the cuts into the first year of the four-year spending review.

LGA chairwoman Margaret Eaton said that councils had known that cuts funding cuts were on the way and had trimmed their budgets in expectation.

"But the unexpected severity of the cuts that will have to be made next year will put many councils in an unprecedented and difficult position."

Ministers claim that this savagery is necessary to convince international speculators - called euphemistically "investors" - that the government is acting decisively to tackle the deficit, for which bankers' reckless speculation was largely to blame.

But they are also seizing the window of opportunity to drive through changes that will alter the face of the country, approaching their goal of a slimmed-down state.

That's what lies behind Pickles's chatter about "a new constitutional arrangement" aimed at shifting power down to localities.

He speaks of local people banding together as volunteers to run libraries, post offices and community centres as though these facilities were on a par with managing a local shop.

They are staffed by professionals trained to carry out their duties and, aside from the issue of such people being forced out of their jobs, it is highly unlikely that untrained local groups would be able to take over.

Nor does the Communities Secretary accept any responsibility for a safety net in the event of services being taken on unsuccessfully by volunteer groups. Effectively, the government is washing its hands of its responsibility to fund local services.

And that responsibility is definitely national since government has seized control of local funding through a number of measures, including centralising business rates and capping council tax levels.

The government's perverse decision to increase funding for some of the most prosperous local authorities and to slash that of some of the poorest makes a mockery of "all in it together."

Those at the sharp end of this cynical Con-Dem assault have no choice but to resist it.

Trade unions cannot merely rely on condemnation of these criminal cuts. They have to unite, drawing in communities, to win the arguments and oppose the cuts effectively by every means, including co-ordinated industrial action.

Black Day For Our Public Services

Government plans to grant more power to local communities were exposed by unions today as a sham to disguise huge job cuts and the privatisation of public services.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles unveiled the Localism Bill which he claimed would be a "ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities" from central government and would start a new era of "people power."

He described the Bill as a way of empowering communities where local people would be encouraged to compete against private firms to bid to run services.

"This powerful series of measures puts new rights in law for people to protect, improve and even run important front-line services," he claimed.

"For too long people have been powerless to intervene as vital community resources disappear."

Mr Pickles added: "I am expecting councils to provide more for less and a reasonable level of service."

But the Unison union's head of local government Heather Wakefield said the huge job losses faced by councils meant Mr Pickles's claims were simply not possible.

The Local Government Association predicted last month that 140,000 council jobs will go over the next four years as the cuts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review begin to bite.

The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accounting also predicted that 70,000 of those could come go in the next year alone.

"Eric Pickles may talk about local authorities doing more with less but the public should not be fooled - this is not possible," Ms Wakefield said.

She labelled the day "Miserable Monday" for workers and councils across the country and delivered a litany of the services at risk from the Tory axe.

"Vital local services such as libraries and day centres are already shutting their doors.

"Charges for others such as home care for the elderly and meals on wheels are on the up," Ms Wakefield said.

"Meanwhile, the bankers are still in line for their massive Christmas bonuses. Why are hard-working families paying the price for a recession they did not cause?"

London School of Economics Professor Tony Travers said: "There's no doubt that it will be unlike anything that has been seen before in modern times.

"The scale of reduction in grants, which will be 27 per cent over four years, is without precedent and it's very hard for local authorities to do that without any effect for front-line service."

The Bill will also introduce a "community right to build," giving towns and villages powers to build new homes and amenities.

The National Housing Federation has calculated that councils in the north will lose £104 million a year while those in the south will gain £342m when the scheme is fully operational.