Not So Sweet Caroline (Weekly Poll Lowdown)

You may have noticed the new poll yesterday. I asked the question whether we should arrest Caroline Lucas MP because she said she was 'prepared to be arrested' at the fracking protests near Balcombe. I thought at the time of posting it that she would chicken out at the last minute and leave the protests before getting arrested and thus for the rest of the week there would be a question as to whether she should be arrested or not. However, she stupidly did get herself arrested so the question is a little bit pointless and it is better to discuss this juicy story now.

Should we arrest Caroline Lucas MP (she was at the fracking protests and said she was 'prepared to be arrested')?

Yes	42%
No	58%
Unsure	0%

Total votes: 12

Weirdly most of you think that Caroline Lucas shouldn't have been arrested despite the fact she was clearly breaching the provision the police imposed on the protest as it caused 'serious disruption to the life of the community'. People were being terrorised in their place of work by the protest and had their freedoms restricted. Arguably also she was blocking a public highway and so is restricting people's freedom of movement as well. Her protest may not have been violent but definitely restricted the freedoms of all the people in the area and the ability for Cuadrilla to carry out its business. Hopefully she faces a court of law for her criminal actions. 

 See you in court Ms Lucas.

There is no reason for anyone to siege proposed sites of fracking, especially Caroline Lucas. As an MP the appropriate way to raise issues is to do it through Parliament. Considering being an MP gives you more voice than every other person you'd think she would be there all the time. Yet she chooses to squander that voice and commit crimes. If people want to protest about something they should do so where it doesn't restrict anybody else's freedom. There are plenty of areas to organise protests nearby the site where nobody is effected and people have their say. Clearly then protest was not the objective of this demonstration instead it was eco-terrorist militancy using seemingly old style flying pickets to close down businesses. The protesters recently had success at Caudrilla's HQ which they successfully shut down and essentially yesterdays protests was an attempt to shut down another site.  

 Fracking protesters yesterday were stopping people from carrying out or leaving work.

The justification for this protest from the protesters was that it is democratic considering 85% of locals do not want fracking. However that particular poll is very dodgy as it takes only a small slice of people who replied back, those who answered on the whole had a clear interest in wanting it to be stopped. The people of YouGov would frown on the green campaigners. Also a majority of people support fracking in the country. It has been allowed by a government which has the support of 60% of the British population and the actual planning permission for Cuadrilla (who is actually looking for oil at this moment) was approved by a democratically elected local government. 

I won't even begin to majorly explore the arguments that the anti-frackers are using because it is essentially bonkers. The water table doesn't get poisoned by fracking and even if it did the UK water table is below the fracking seam so there would be no risk of it happening. More gas on the market with less transport costs means lower prices so how on earth can prices not fall with shale gas, it fell by 1/3 in the USA where it is harder to extract shale gas. Also wildlife nearby fracking sites are not damaged. In Nottinghamshire for example a RSPB reserve is campaigning against the nearby turbines not the existing fracking wells, which take up less than a 50th of an acre and power 20,000 homes.

 Fracking protesters are just a desperate mob of left-wingers who don't have any argument that stands up to facts about fracking. The protest in part yesterday was to vent off their political radicalism, thus the Iran placards and Unite banners.

So go away Lucas and your eco-terrorist gang and let people lead better lives by not committing crimes and allowing fracking.

Vote in the New Poll.

Weekly Poll Lowdown

Well it seems after calls last week from the UK opposition, only before they found out that councils controlled by Labour employ people on 'zero contract hours', you agree that zero contract hours should be abolished. Just over half of think this should be the case and this is pretty much dead on what the public thought when polled about it last week. So well done for being highly representative.

Should 'zero hour contracts' be abolished?

Yes.	53%
No.	38%
Unsure.	9%

Total votes: 34

I think getting rid of zero contact hours is a stupid idea because it gets rid of economic freedom of both employers and also of employees. 

 Its not just Sports Direct that uses zero hour contracts, the NHS, caring businesses, Charities and most government departments use them too.

Firstly, just so everyone is clear about this, a zero hour contract is where a person is employed but there isn't an amount of set hours they do. The business would call up a person and say 'can you do X amount of hours at this time' and the employee can accept or decline to do it. Zero contract hour workers are subject to other employment legislations because the law sees them as employees and not just workers. Also as another side point, it's not just big business who use zero contract hours. 24% of those who are on a zero hour contract work in the public sector and 34% work for charities. 

The idea behind zero hour contracts have been around for a very a very long time. It's essentially to give flexibility for businesses and staff. People are able to work for as much as they want because they individually want to be flexible. For example those who can only physically work short hours or want the potential of more money than a 9-5 job often use Zero hour contracts.

Employers too have the bonus of being able to have more staff when needed without having to spend lots of money on longer contracts. Indeed if zero contract hour jobs did not exist it is debatable that they would be replaced by full time jobs as the cost would be too great, especially true in small a medium size business because they have less money.

  

 Vince Cable wants tighter regulation of the zero hour contracts because people are willingly working on them and its up to him to decide what people should do.

So what is the cumulative effect for employers and employees, let's forget the obvious benefits to the consumer at this time? Well people who would otherwise be unemployed have a job because it's cheap enough for employers to provide positions for labour. Therefore employees have more choice about what job they can do, and that's on top of the flexibility they get in accepting the work when asked to do it. Employers too get a benefit of potentially saving costs and gaining productivity. This in turns creates more money for them and then leads to an expansion with more jobs and so there are even more people employed, which is what people want at the moment.

 People on the left don't actually realise that people just want to work to have more control over their lives. Employees are winners from their trade of labour too.

So what is all this nonsense about? It comes from two ideas espoused by the loony left of the UK. Firstly that somehow everyone is entitled to full employment. These are the sort of Marxist ideas that Owen Jones espouses which ends up with the country being bankrupt and no one in employment. This hasn't been peddled in the media because it doesn't make sense, but be sure that many of the hard core lefties who bring these to light believe in this. 

A much more used argument then is that people are not getting enough hours to work and therefore can't afford to live, a classic case of oppression of the working population by the 'evil' capitalists. However, only 16% of zero contract workers in research done by the CPID 'felt they did not have an opportunity to work enough hours', which is pretty low and also highly subjective on 'enough'. But even if it were the case that people on zero contract hours were struggling to get by as the norm they would not be getting by at all if they did not have any jobs. Then again we could always have these people on benefits, perhaps that's what the lefties want? They're not interested in jobs for people only to have voters stuck in a situation where they have little freedom and rely on the state letting them live. We already know that the lefties in the Guardian just want to control people's lives, this may just be another way about it.

 The lefties just don't want people choosing to improve their lives by earning money.

Vote in the new poll on the sidebar.

Mamma Mia

I'm quite interested in Sweden at the moment in light of the riots going on. I'd like to pull out some of the inconsistencies on this Scandinavia Country that the Left have spun and continue to spin.

Till very recently the only way has been Scandinavian for the Left. Sweden is apparently one of the few countries in the world where growth is high, the economy is always booming, everyone loves immigration and the government is so big that everyone receives a massive pile of cash in welfare. In short a Social Democratic utopia where everything is rosy. In Sweden this utopia is thanks mostly to the Swedish Social Democratic Party being in government since 1930 to 1991 and the Centre Right Party changing few policies when ever in power.  

Utopian riots in the Swedish Capital.

That above paragraph could have been written by a Guardian journalist. A Few Years ago the Guardian wrote this article saying how the 'Tories can learn from the centre right Swedish Government'. It said that "For three generations universal, efficient health care, access to education, child care, generous funding for arts and cultural activities have been simply assumed in the conduct of people's lives. The result has not been, as was once alleged, an ant-like conformity, but its opposite: a degree of individuality and autonomy that is becoming its major cultural challenge." (if you want to see even more recent Guardian Sweden love see the recent videos they published in February about how Sweden has bucked the economic trend).

Interesting stuff from the Guardian. Looks like a social utopia. But now they are saying "After decades of practising the Swedish model of generous welfare benefits, Stockholm has reduced the role of the state since the 1990s, spurring the fastest growth in inequality of any advanced OECD economy. […] successive governments have failed to substantially reduce long-term youth unemployment and poverty, which have affected immigrant communities worst." So a complete turnaround. Why is that?

I'm surprised the Guardian hasn't been recategorised in all Libraries as fiction rather than a newspaper.

Well it's because people would realise that what they had said before about Sweden was one massive Porkie. Sweden has never had this left wing utopia. The reason why it can spend so much on welfare is because it has one of the smallest states in the world. There is no minimum wage in Sweden, taxes are low and the people are free to do what they want. Welfare consequently is able to be very high in Sweden, they get in more tax with a bigger economy that has low tax than a small one with high tax. Thatcher did it in the 1980s, don't you know people from the Guardian.

So why is Stockholm on fire every night? Well the same reasons why there was problems in London, it's almost a copy. Unlike what the Guardian has said above its nothing to do with reducing the role of the state and how now there is no welfare and so everyone is in poverty. It's to do with the open door immigration policy and its effect on the Swedes jobs market.

Swedes have a big history of emigration as well as immigration.

As it stood in 2010, 14.3% of the population are immigrants more than 2/3rds of these were born outside of the EU.  In a country where the population is just shy of 10 million, that's a lot of people. Most of these immigrants as with the UK live in major cities so you get a large proportion of immigrants living in certain districts. The problem is probably as acute as a cultural divide as in Oldham, Luton or Tower Hamlets, to give a rough scale of what is going on.

The vast majority of immigrants have come over for jobs and most are employed. Sweden has a long history of migrations doing low skilled jobs and coming over to fill the positions. Thus they under cut most of the low skilled workers already living in Sweden. These workers then rely on a substantial welfare state to rely on, a classic situation of a large proportion trapped on welfare. The Swedes are stuck in catch 22 position of being unable to move socio-economically because welfare pays best but unable to leave because work pays worst. Thus the Swedes are not a happy bunch abandoned by their government on welfare and blaming immigrants for it.

So there you are. Sweden far from being a left wing Utopia is stuck in a benefits trap.