Political Thoughts - the magazine

This article was written in 2009 but is still useful to understand the motivation behind New Labour - from the global financial crisis through the over-regulated, surveillance society to the break up of the UK into nationalities. The past lives of Labour Ministers have long been sanitised and many biographies that include their shady communist and Marxist pasts are inaccessible or removed from the net. The truth about these guys is similar to discovering that leading Tories were members of the Nazi Party. If you are a British voter and do not think that this is important then I despair for British politics.  Had these people taken jobs in industry their past might be forgotten and forgiven but they continued in left wing politics and even today boast of being "Stalinist" or International Socialist (or in Blair's case, Trotskyist ). Peter Mandelson (first Secretary of State and Labour Supremo): "Mr Mandelson was born into a Labour family - his grandfather wa...

The general strike by the British Public Sector unions is a protest against pension reform.  Are the Public Sector workers really suffering terrible hardship compared with the rest of the population? The median pension paid to members of public service pension schemes is about £5,600 a year (2009/10). About 90% of pensioners receive less than £17,000 a year, and about 10% are on £1,000 a year or less. By comparison, the median private pension income across both the public and private sectors (sum of occupational and personal pension income), for a single pensioner, is about £3,900 a year (2009/10). The public sector employees pay varying amounts towards their pensions: When it started, members of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme put in the same as the taxpayer – 5% each. Today, current members pay 6.4%, with employers contributing more than double - 14.1%. NHS employee contributions vary from 5.5 to 8.5%, whereas the employer contributes 1...