ID Cards set to be scrapped & Other Coalition stuff

[FoxyPV]

Next up! Home information packs (HIPS) have been sent. err packing, Good move. Some idiot from the body who represents inspector types who will find business drying up a little was trying to make out that this would cost the treasury £100m in tax reciepts. Yes... becuase people who are buying and selling houses could not find a better way to spend the money...

I was wondering why people on those property shows had to have a separate flyer for their house.

Did that apply in Scotland or Wales?

[l444ry]

Am I missing something here? People who are spending hundreds of THOUSANDS of pounds are jumping for joy about saving a few hundred quid? Can we have a sense of proportion?

Admittedly, the HIPs were not implemented correctly but the original idea was sound - do all the searches ONCE to avoid unnecessary duplication. This could have saved everyone money. Unfortunately, the searches were still done by every prospective buyer - why was this? Why were the searches in a HIP not trustworthy? Surely this could have been fixed and then the only real losers would have been those involved in conveyancing who have been flogging searches over and over and over again.

Honestly - the idea that someone wouldn't sell their house because they had to stump up three hundred quid is ludicrous - they'll be paying at least ten times that to the estate agent.

[dandannieldanok]

HIPS may not have been great, and a pain in the arse for some people, but scrapping them also means scrapping thousands of jobs which isn't good and slightly hypocritical after both Cameron and Clegg have attacked the previous government's record on unemployment.

I also find it difficult to listen to anything Clegg says now, especially after newsnight found out the Lib Dems were still angling for taxpayers money even though they're not in opposition anymore.

[davieG]

Am I missing something here? People who are spending hundreds of THOUSANDS of pounds are jumping for joy about saving a few hundred quid? Can we have a sense of proportion?

Admittedly, the HIPs were not implemented correctly but the original idea was sound - do all the searches ONCE to avoid unnecessary duplication. This could have saved everyone money. Unfortunately, the searches were still done by every prospective buyer - why was this? Why were the searches in a HIP not trustworthy? Surely this could have been fixed and then the only real losers would have been those involved in conveyancing who have been flogging searches over and over and over again.

Honestly - the idea that someone wouldn't sell their house because they had to stump up three hundred quid is ludicrous - they'll be paying at least ten times that to the estate agent.

I'm inclined to agree but it wasn't set up properly. As it is it buying/selling a house will still continue to be dogs dinner and ripe for rip off pricing which increases in cost without justification as house prices rise. With the energy assessment still there that will cost circa £100 and I guarantee it wont be long before people are paying double that as Assessors try to replace lost earnings.

[Webbo]

The mortgage providers insist on having their own search done making the HIP search a pointless waste of money. Also I think it has to be redone after 3 months if you haven't sold your house by then.

[FoxyPV]

What exactly are HIPS?

[Zingari]

What exactly are HIPS?

dunno,

but they don't lie

[FoxyPV]

Walked into that one.

[FoxyPV]

How to pass the buck

[DANGEROUS TIGER]

This looks like the best Government we have had in my lifetime.

[Daggers]

What exactly are HIPS?

Home sale packs.

They include pointless information which no one reads, cost in excess of £450 and were just one in a thousand inept, expensive ideas from Gordon Brown and his ****ups.

No one looked at the one on my old house, I never looked at the one for the new property. £900 of wasted money.

Labour were really shit.

[Jon the Hat]

How to pass the buck

Yeah, you consult and people accuse you of passing trying to pass the buck and say you don;t know what you are doing. You don;t consult, you make your own decisions and get on with it and people say same old Tories, they couldn't wait to get in and cut public services etc...

Same old politics...

[FoxyPV]

Yeah, you consult and people accuse you of passing trying to pass the buck and say you don;t know what you are doing. You don;t consult, you make your own decisions and get on with it and people say same old Tories, they couldn't wait to get in and cut public services etc...

Same old politics...

It is the same old politics but at least have the courage of your convictions and cut what YOU want to cut rather than hedging your bets by asking the public. We all know what the public will want to cut first ...

The only thing they won't cut that can easily be dispensed with is Defence.

[Jon the Hat]

It is the same old politics but at least have the courage of your convictions and cut what YOU want to cut rather than hedging your bets by asking the public. We all know what the public will want to cut first ...

The only thing they won't cut that can easily be dispensed with is Defence.

They aren't really asking the public, they are asking people who see waste to identify it. Fro example head teachers can come out and call for their LEA's to be cut.

[FoxyPV]

Labour coasted to victory in the Barnsley Central byelection, in spite of the jailing of the party's previous MP for expenses fraud, with the Lib Dems slumping to sixth place.

Ukip ended the night with a huge rise in its share of the vote and most to celebrate.

The result was particularly grim for the Liberal Democrats whose vote fell sharply collapsed despite the party fielding an experienced candidate in Dominic Carman, son of the celebrated barrister George Carman.

Voters took revenge on Nick Clegg, whose U-turn on student fees and hawkish line on cuts have made him particularly unpopular in South Yorkshire, where he represents Sheffield's affluent Hallam constituency. His party was beaten by the BNP and a local independent as well as Labour, Ukip and the Tories.

Labour's Dan Jarvis, a former paratroop major, won an overwhelming share of the vote but on an abysmal turnout of 36.5% which left the coalition partners with humiliatingly low figures.

Clegg and the prime minister David Cameron stayed away from the contest, after little evidence emerged that the disgrace of Illsley, Labour MP for 24 years, was damaging Labour's campaign. A popular former miner, Illsley's conviction and 12-month prison sentence caused genuine shock locally.

Jarvis, 38 and a single father-of-two after his wife's recent death, chimed with voters in one of the services' traditional recruiting grounds, modestly down-playing a record in Iraq and Afghanistan which spoke for itself. This outflanked initial hopes by the BNP that its candidate, Enis Dalton, might win a showcase result. Internal splits also affected the former BNP stronghold, where the party has previously polled more than 25% in four of the constituency's wards at local polls.

Jarvis is the first Labour MP for the seat since 1938 not to have been born in Yorkshire or have links with coal mining - even the Tories' James Hockney beat him on that with a grandfather who worked down the pit. But none of his serious contenders were from Barnsley either and his energy, enthusing activists by naming his campaign Operation Honey Badger after the 'ferocious and fearless animal' – kept morale high.

Born in Nottingham, he has moved from Hampshire to Barnsley after resigning from the army to fight the election. He joined the Labour party 20 years ago but was not allowed to take part in active politics while a serving soldier.

Hockney was credited with sticking to his guns in Barnsley, where he fought the neighbouring East constituency in May and achieved the biggests swing to the party in Yorkshire. He was briefly threatened with replacement by Darren Gough, hankered after by Cameron, but the Barnsley-born England cricketer decided that he was too busy to add a hopeless by-election to his commitments.

Carman's political experience includes an aggressive campaign against the BNP last May in Barking, where the extreme right wing party's leader Nick Griffin was trounced by Labour's Margaret Hodge. But he made no headway against the national tide in Barnsley, in spite of eager pavement politics including a 4,000-strong petition over the future of the town's famous market. The Monster Raving Loony party was as happy as ever with its day in the sun, although its co-leader Howling Lord Hope, who shares office with his cat Cat Mandu failed to come anywhere near the high point of 1,114 votes achieved by his predecessor Screaming Lord Sutch at the 1994 by-election in nearby Rotherham.

A sign of things to come for the Lib Dems?

[ajthefox]

A sign of things to come for the Lib Dems?

I'm not so sure it will be this bad nationally but coming 6th is ridiculously bad, not that they should really be surprised by it.

[Zingari]

Enis Dalton, the BNP candidate is a bit of a looker though

i thought that would have swung it for her on such a low turn out

maybe the ex soldier, single parent , credentials of Jarvis was a bigger seller in this one

[Bellend Sebastian]

Enis Dalton, the BNP candidate is a bit of a looker though

i thought that would have swung it for her on such a low turn out

maybe the ex soldier, single parent , credentials of Jarvis was a bigger seller in this one

She's no Liz Kendall.

Lovely, lovely Liz

[FoxyPV]

Tory MEP reignites row over Kenneth Clarke rape remarksRoger Helmer condemned by other Conservatives for suggesting some victims 'share a part of the responsibility'

Tweet this Share738 Allegra Stratton, political correspondent guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 May 2011 18.49 BST Article history

Conservative MEP Roger Helmer suggested on his blog that some rape victims shared responsibility. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP

A Tory MEP has reignited the controversy about degrees of severity in rape, suggesting that some rape victims shared responsibility for the crime.

Writing on his blog, Roger Helmer weighed in behind the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, who last week suggested some forms of rape were more serious than others. Helmer's comments were criticised by a party spokesman and by Tory MP Louise Bagshawe, who said his remarks were "appalling".

Helmer described a "classic stranger rape" scenario, where a "masked individual emerges from the bushes, hits his victim over the head with a blunt instrument, drags her into the undergrowth and rapes her, and then leaves her unconscious, careless whether she lives or dies".

He then described "date rape" as being when a woman "voluntarily goes to her boyfriend's apartment, voluntarily goes into the bedroom, voluntarily undresses and gets into bed, perhaps anticipating sex, or naively expecting merely a cuddle.

"But at the last minute she gets cold feet and says 'Stop!' The young man, in the heat of the moment, is unable to restrain himself and carries on.

"In both cases an offence has been committed, and the perpetrators deserve to be convicted and punished.

"But whereas in the first case, I'd again be quite happy to hang the guy, I think that most right-thinking people would expect a much lighter sentence in the second case. Rape is always wrong, but not always equally culpable."

The East Midlands MEP admitted he would be vilified for adding: "While in the first case, the blame is squarely on the perpetrator and does not attach to the victim; in the second case, the victim surely shares a part of the responsibility, if only for establishing reasonable expectations in her boyfriend's mind."

A Conservative spokesman said: "This is clearly not the view of the Conservative party or the UK delegation in the European parliament, and does not reflect the comments made by Ken Clarke."

On Twitter, Bagshawe wrote: "He speaks for himself alone. A woman (or man) always has the right to change their mind. What if their partner insults them (one example)."

Labour frontbencher Caroline Flint branded the comments "outrageous". "To suggest that the victims of date rape can 'share responsibility' for the crime is outrageous. Roger Helmer should apologise immediately," she wrote

Granted the Tory Party has admonished this publicly but they really don't help themselves.

[FoxyPV]

Seriously - what the **** is the government playing at?!?!

Anti-abortion group drafted in as sexual health adviser to government

Coalition appoints pro-abstinence charity Life to key sexual health forum, while omitting British Pregnancy Advisory Service

A group which is opposed to abortion in all circumstances and favours an abstinence-based approach to sex education has been appointed to advise the government on sexual health.

The Life organisation has been invited to join a new sexual health forum set up to replace the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV.

Stuart Cowie, Life's head of education, said: "We are delighted to be invited into the group, representing views that have not always been around on similar tables in the past."

In contrast, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has been omitted from the forum despite its long-term position on the previous advisory group and 40-year track record in providing pregnancy counselling nationwide.

"We are disappointed and troubled to learn that having initially been invited to the sexual health forum we have been disinvited, particularly now we understand that Life have been offered a seat at the table," said Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS. "We find it puzzling that the Department of Health would want a group that is opposed to abortion and provides no sexual health services on its sexual health forum."

Cowie said Life would seek to build "common ground" with other members of the panel. "If we can be involved with other people in reducing [the number of abortions] then that fits with our charitable objectives and I don't think is unpalatable to anyone else, regardless of their position on when life begins."

However, Life's support for greater emphasis on abstinence when it comes to sexual education is likely to be one of a number of areas where it will be a collision course with other members of forum. For example, Life has been critical of literature about contraception which had been distributed by the sexual health charity, Brook. They will sit alongside each other at the forum. Life claimed that teenagers were not being told that condoms only gave partial protection against some STIs (sexually transmitted infections) and little or no protection against others.

Brook's national director, Simon Blake, said its literature was based on clinical evidence and linked the provision of such information to underlying figures from abortion statistics released on Tuesday which showed a reduction in teenage conceptions, despite an overall rise in the number of abortions. The under-18 abortion rate has reduced from 17.6 per 1,000 women in 2009 to 16.5 per 1,000 women in 2010.

Blake said: "Having made such massive progress, what we have to do is sustain that … and not go back to a time when the young had really poor sexual and relationship education and see a rise in teenage pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted infections as a result."

The new committee has held one meeting but Life was not represented. The invitation to the group by Anne Milton, the public health minister, appears to have caught some forum members by surprise.

It could yet open up another area of disagreement within the coalition. The former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, warned on Tuesday night that the organisation's presence could prevent the panel functioning properly.

"When you have an organisation campaigning against the law and against current policy on sexual health, which is pro-contraception and about ensuring that abortion is a choice, then the risk is that you prevent the panel being given access to confidential information," he said.

"It can prevent the advisory panel having frank and open discussions because you have a group there that is committed to opposing current policy."

A Department of Health spokesperson said: "To provide balance, it is important that a wide range of interests and views are represented on the forum.

Marie Stopes International and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service have similar interests. We offered them shared membership but they declined, and after careful consideration we concluded that it was not feasible to invite both organisations."

BPAS asserts that the department withdrew the offer of 'shared membership'.

The forum consists of representatives of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV; the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; the Association of Directors of Public Health; the British HIV Association; the Terrence Higgins Trust; Brook; the Family Planning Association; the Sex Education Forum and National Children's Bureau; Marie Stopes International; and Life.

The department said the criteria applied in terms of appointments to the group was that the core membership would be drawn from national level organisations with a remit covering sexual health across England. They also had to be able to demonstrate clear evidence of impact in improving sexual health and must have a sufficient infrastructure to be able to field deputies at a senior level in the organisation.

Life also became a founding member last week of a new Sex and Relationships Council, which was launched in parliament with the endorsement of the education secretary, Michael Gove.

The council, which includes the Christian-run pro-abstinence group the Silver Ring Thing, says it aims to bring the voice of what it describes as "value-based, parent centred" sex and relationship education (SRE) providers to policy discussions on the future of SRE in schools.

A total of 189,574 abortions were performed in 2010 – a 0.3% increase on the previous year, the figures released on Tuesday show.

Marie Stopes described the rise as small but warned the figures sent a warning for the government's family planning strategy.

"There are three key areas that need to be focused on: education, access and choice," it said, calling for the delivery of "comprehensive and standardised sex and relationship education in all schools".

In its response to the figures, the Family Planning Association said: "Clearly there needs to be a much better relationship and tighter integration between local contraceptive and abortion services. Despite the advances, women still live in a postcode lottery. Where you live dictates how quickly you'll get an abortion. This is unacceptable."

Life, which provides its own pregnancy counselling services and describes itself as non-denominational, reacted to the figures by suggesting that a "cooling off" period before abortions could play a role in reducing the number being performed.

Some secular organisations have been growing increasingly worried that Tory ministers are opening up government to the agendas of faith-based and pro-life groups.

Some of the same groups have already been preparing to capitalise on the government's big society agenda, which would potentially allow them to replace secular groups in terms of providing services.

In Richmond, south-west London, the Catholic Children's Society has taken over the £89,000 contract to provide advice to schoolchildren on matters including contraception and pregnancies. Another Christian-run charity, Care Confidential, is involved in providing services crisis pregnancy advice under the auspices of Newham PCT in east London. Care's education arm, Evaluate, was one of the founding members, alongside Life, of the Sex and Relationships Council.

Meanwhile in parliament, the battle lines on abortion are set to be drawn again after cross-party amendments to the health and social care bill were put forward by anti-abortion MPs in a bid to tighten the rules on terminations.

The first amendment, put forward by Nadine Dorries and Frank Field, would establish a new precondition for any women having an abortion to receive advice and counselling from an organisation that does not itself carry out terminations.

[Jon the Hat]

Seriously - what the **** is the government playing at?!?!

Balance? What is the point of a panel on which everyone has the same view? It doesn't represent the views o the country if it ignores the views of one significant segment. Clearly BPAS shares views with others on the panel and hence has made way for another group. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they shouldn't have a voice now does it?

[Jon the Hat]

Granted the Tory Party has admonished this publicly but they really don't help themselves.

The bloke is clearly an idiot. He makes sense re sentencing, clearly judges do consider there are different degrees of severity, hence different sentences are given, but he clearly hasn't actually got enough brain cells to realise that if someone says no then it is rape regardless of when in the process they say it. He - and probably a lot of people in fact - are confusing the fact that the victims can expose themselves to risk by putting themselves in particular situations - in the same way as you are more likely to have a car crash if you drive a car - and that somehow making them in any way responsible for the criminal actions of others.

[FoxyPV]

Balance? What is the point of a panel on which everyone has the same view? It doesn't represent the views o the country if it ignores the views of one significant segment. Clearly BPAS shares views with others on the panel and hence has made way for another group. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they shouldn't have a voice now does it?

Teaching abstinence does not work.

Trying to talk people out of abortions usually involves scaremongering and lies.

Educate by all means - teach people about the various types of contraception, sex, its consequences etc

Life, which provides its own pregnancy counselling services and describes itself as non-denominational, reacted to the figures by suggesting that a "cooling off" period before abortions could play a role in reducing the number being performed.

This is the bit that scares me the most.

The government is trying to combat the problem of single mothers/ teen pregnanacies etc so why try and talk the women out of abortions? It doesn't make any sense. If a woman decides on an abortion it's usually because she either doesn't want be/ can't afford to be/ knows she is incapable of being a good mother or is in an unstable relationship which would not be the most conducive to raising a child in.

When it comes to anything linked with religion, no.

[Webbo]

Teaching abstinence might not always work but tbf the masses of sex education we get nowadays is hardly a rip roaring success either.How anyone can object to teaching girls not to be pressured into sex along side the safe sex and contraception advice, especially after the recent discussions about rape, is beyond me.

As for abortion you don't have to religious to be concerned about it. If a premature baby can be born at 26 weeks and survive it seems wrong to me that you can just remove an unborn baby of that age and kill it.

I've no doubt some people on here will go berserk at what I've just said but that's my opinion.

[l444ry]

Gideon has suddenly become persona non grata, no one is returning his calls and economists who previously backed him are now lining up to criticise him. It appears they have suddenly realised what many of us have realised from day one, that Osborne is a twat and should never have been allowed anywhere near this country's economy.

His only remedy was an already failed concept of his "mother's", Margaret Thatcher, who never understood economics either. These economists are all now like rats leaving the proverbial sinking ship (in some haste) before they become tarnished with the chancellors failures. No doubt in a year's time they will be all saying that of course they saw this coming all along and it will be extremely hard to find anyone that never saw this coming, and will be equally as hard to find anyone who will admit to voting Tory (or Lib Dem).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/04/george-osborne-plan-not-working