With cat-like tread the revenue we steal
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[The Chorus of Labour M.P.s] [The Chorus of Lobbyists] [Labour M.P.s] Come, friends Gold reserves [ |
[Lobbyists] With cat-like tread [Lobbyists] [Labour M.P.s] With cat-like tread Influence ped- My thanks again to the
University of Iowa Summer Opera ΠΞ |
General Election Announcement 2010
The Prime Minister – has announced the General Election for May 6 with the rallying call to his party: ‘Let’s go to it’
The Budget Song 2010
To keep up with a small Dungeekin tradition here is a specially commissioned little Budget Song for you all. Enjoy.
Ronan Keating ‘When you say nothing at all’
You can keep up with Dungeekin via his inimitable tweets @dungeekin
It’s amazing how you can still try to be smart,
Thanks to you our economy’s fallen apart,
This Budget Day you have done it again,
Talked a lot but you don’t say a thing,
David Willetts MP responds to Boris and baby boomers
This is not an attack on the baby-boomer generation; it is instead an appeal to the better nature of the boomers – an appeal to Edmund Burke’s understanding that a nation is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”
One of the highlights of my political career was when Boris Johnson put me on his list of ideal dinner party companions (a great opportunity to meet Aristotle and Scarlett Johansson), so I recognise that behind his brilliantly effervescent articles there is often a deep wisdom too. I paid careful attention, therefore, when on Monday he challenged the argument in my new book, The Pinch. My book argues that the baby boomers have ended up doing very well for ourselves but that we are dumping too heavy a burden on the generations after us.
Boris is ideally positioned to make the case for the baby boomers, roughly those born between 1945 and 1965. Our baby boom had two peaks. The first came in 1947 – those were the teenagers who shrieked for the Beatles and promenaded up Carnaby Street in their bellbottoms. The second peak, when we had more than a million born in one year, came in 1964 – those are the boomers whose formative years were framed by punk rock and the poll tax protests. Somehow I do not quite see Boris participating in those social movements but demographically he is at their epicentre. He was born in summer 1964, the very quarter when we had more babies born than in any other three months in the past 60 years.
Boris celebrates the extraordinary technological advances of the baby boomers. I do not deny this achievement and indeed recognise in the book that human creativity and enterprise can continue to raise living standards. But that leaves open a host of questions. Take his example of perhaps the greatest single benefit of this advance: the improvement in life expectancy. That is marvellous. But it has very different effects on different generations because of, for example, contracts to pay people pensions after a fixed chronological age. It makes those promises far more valuable than expected for those people who already have them and makes employers very reluctant to be caught out making such promises again. I estimate therefore that over half the nation’s pensions wealth belongs to the baby boomers. They are doing much better than those generations coming before or after.
Gordon Brown and Alternative Voting
Downing Street has admitted “time is tight” to get laws for a referendum on scrapping Britain’s first past the post voting system through Parliament. Gordon Brown wants to replace it with “alternative vote,” where candidates are ranked in order of preference. The Prime Minister says this is a better way of choosing MPs but the Conservatives say the existing method is fair and “keeps extremists out”.
To continue Boris’s theme of voting methods here is a latest offering from Dungeekin who thinks we should have a little song in honour of the debate:
The Queen’s Speech 2009 (The Mikado)
Dungeekin provides a musical rendition on the Queen’s Speech this afternoon
Many of the original words are resonant today.
In a break from Tradition, this year saw Her Majesty the Queen deliver the speech at the State Opening of Parliament not in words, but instead in song:
As each year for the Government a speech one must propound,
One’s reading Labour’s list – one’s reading Labour’s list
One pretends to be a mouthpiece for a Leadership unsound,
And they never will be missed – they never will be missed,
One regrets that for Tradition’s sake one can’t just sit and laugh,
At the bare-faced cheek of Labour with their promises daft,
Their MP’s claiming second homes and cash for this and that,
And equating one to vermin, like one was not Royal but Rat,
One wishes one could just dissolve the House so they’d desist
But instead one sits upon one’s throne and reads out Labour’s list.
CHORUS.
She’s reading Labour’s list–She’s reading Labour’s list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed–they’ll none of ‘em be missed.
