Clegg has managed to surface again!

First topic message reminder :

Today, after what seems like a couple of months in hiding, Clegg has crawled out from his bunker and made a 'bold' announcement on youth unemployment.....

He has 'promised' places on what could be called YTS v2011 but is being called 'Youth Contract', in which £1 Billion will be spent (Given to employers) over the next 3 years to provide upto 6 months work experience to the 16 to 24 year old's.........

Clegg said that the youth contract scheme would create work experience opportunities for 410,000 young people, as well as wage subsidies of £2,275 for employers to hire 160,000 young people. The subsidy, which lasts for six months, are equivalent to half the youth minimum wage.

The Confederation of British Industries (CBI) has been lobbying for the creation of a £1,500 credit for firms that take on 16-24-year old. CBI director-general John Cridland said on Friday that the youth contract "will encourage firms to take a gamble on a young inexperienced person and help tackle the scourge of youth unemployment."
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/25/youth-contract-how-is-it-funded_n_1112727.html?ref=uk

Lord Sugar has already said he can see some employers take the young on for six months then get rid of them and take on new ones.........as happened in the 1980's Torys Youth Training Scheme.....the only difference between then and now is it was for only 3 month then........and 6 month now........

The other thing about this is that Clegg has not said where the money is going to come from???????

Some of 'em could have been expected to troop into the Government Lobby because they are too lame to think for themselves, but the likes of Beith, Bruce, Campbell, Farron, Foster, Hughes, Laws, and Russell should be very, very ashamed of themselves.

But they won't be...and may they pay the price...

Many of them evidently expect to enjoy "business as usual" as part of a continuing Coalition with the TORIES next May.

Heh, heh, heh!

Too little, and much too late.......  

Clegg: Osborne casually cut welfare for poorest to boost Tory popularity

Nick Clegg has accused the former chancellor George Osborne of casually cutting the benefits of the poorest people in society because he believed taking the austerity axe to welfare would boost Conservative popularity. In a candid interview looking back on his five years as deputy PM in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, Clegg said he found the behaviour of his senior Conservative partner “very unattractive, very cynical”. “Welfare for Osborne was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn’t really matter what the human consequences were, because focus groups had shown that the voters they wanted to appeal to were very anti-welfare, and therefore there was almost no limit to those anti-welfare prejudices”, he told The Guardian'.

Speaking before the publication of his anticipated political memoir, written after his party was reduced to eight seats in last year’s general election, Clegg hit out at Cameron and his Conservative partners in government. He said the former Tory leader or the chancellor, “I honestly can’t remember whom, looked genuinely nonplussed and said: ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters’. They genuinely saw housing as a Petri dish for voters. It was unbelievable.”

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/02/nick-clegg-george-osborne-cut-welfare-poorest-boost-tory-popularity

Slaughter of the innocents, but what did they expect?

However, since when has it been possible to believe anything Clegg says...?

I wonder at which point in his 5 year partnership with Cameron, Osborne et.al. he came to this conclusion?...Was it just after the 2015 election results?

He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon.
(14th. Century)
The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

"...should have a long spoon"

..and positively no conscience...

This is a bit like the constant resurrection of billionaireBliar - the dead seem to find it extraordinary difficult to lie down nowadays!

Why I can’t forgive Nick Clegg and his party of useful idiots

From an article by Polly Toynbee:-

The Lib Dems swallowed the story that the country needed a boiling down of every function of the state to its bare bones. They were useful idiots for what was always an ideological project: Cameron and Osborne said within a short time that even once the deficit was down, there would be no restoring of cut-down public services.

Clegg abandoned his party’s greatest thinker, Keynes, who would have gone for growth through government investment. But even if Clegg has been right on austerity, why did he let the axe fall on the most vulnerable? The bottom half bore the brunt as VAT rose, while the top had an income tax cut and kept their tax reliefs and cuts to capital gains and corporation tax. Clegg had no need to fall in with the vindictive spirit of the bedroom tax, the sale of swaths more social housing, or the ever-tightening screw of work capability tests, as food banks opened everywhere.

In 2012 Lansley’s health and social care bill was stumbling in Parliament, as it dawned on the Lords that this was a project to blow the NHS into fragments. “No top-down NHS reorganisation”, said the coalition agreement, and the Lib Dem grass roots rebelled. But they were soothed by Shirley Williams, and Clegg voted it through. Deep, lasting damage was done to the NHS that Clegg could easily have stopped.

Can you forgive him? That depends on whether you think Nick Clegg venal or just a political idiot. Almost everything he colluded with in the Cameron government was an error, while almost all he achieved was piffling in comparison. He was treated as a minor irritant in the great Tory project – and that’s all he was.

For the whole article:-
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/06/i-cant-forgive-nick-clegg-lib-dems-useful-idiots-coalition-tory-savagery-pr

... and he looks such a decent chap. Can't judge a book by its cover.

I Imagine he knew exactly what he was signing up to, when he took the thirty pieces of siver

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t radicalise me – Nick Clegg did

From an article by Matthew Turner:-

"At the age of 14, perhaps naively inspired by ‘Cleggmania’, I found myself going door to door for a party I would later despise. But after seeing what it sacrificed to get into power, I never looked back. Clegg and Cameron’s press conference in the Number 10 rose garden felt like a sucker punch to the gut.

It was Clegg’s spine of jelly that radicalised my politics. After his staggering capitulation to a Tory Party hell-bent on targeting the young and the poor, my conclusion was that if we were to see real change it would not be via the careerist centre-left. Now at university, I am reaping what the Tories and the Liberal Democrats in their capacity as useful idiots have sown. Millennials are rapidly becoming the most indebted generation to ever exist. One cause of that is Clegg’s complicity in the marketisation of higher education – despite his previously stated commitment to abolish tuition fees.

Clegg and his party stood back while the Tories cut the top rate of income tax and slashed corporation tax, while burdening the poorest in society with an austerity project that has since been deemed a disastrous failure. The only consolation is that they got exactly what they deserved in the form of a calamitous performance in the subsequent election.

As a Labour Party member, it is bewildering for me to see accusations levelled at Jeremy Corbyn that he is responsible for pushing the membership in a leftwards direction. This is simply not the case, and Labour MPs ought to look at their own failings. Corbyn was simply the first person to galvanise the distrust people have felt after years of abandonment by mainstream politicians."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-radical-policies-labour-left-wing-leadership-young-people-not-radicalised-nick-clegg-a7231861.html