In the News

Sometimes I feel like half of my job is essentially keeping up with the news. Which is fantastic, because that's what I do in the good ol' States anyway. Now, I just need to keep up with British news, start to recognize names and Committees I've never heard of before and be able to write about all of it.

So here are some of the news items that seem to be continually popping up on my computer at work. And yes, most of them have the word "cuts" in the headline...

EMA Cuts
I mentioned this topic a bit in my post about student protests, but it deserves a little more recognition. The Coalition government basically decided to cut the Educational Maintenance Allowances, which help certain students pay for their educational expenses.

Scrapping this plan set off more student protests, and basically every Labour MP endlessly criticized the government for changing the British institution of accessible higher education.

Go England, Go.




Forestry Commission Woodlands Sell-Off
Yes, this seems random. Yes, I have spent a good deal of time researching it. It turns out that while the United States is full of random forests and field, Great Britain is the size of the state of New York. So when the government plans to take 15% of public forests and woodlands and sell them to private owners, people get slightly upset. Especially when millions of people go to the English countryside for recreation and whatnot...

But having the ability to to make 100 million pounds by selling publicly owned forests: priceless to a coalition government pledging to stimulate the economy by cutting the deficit.


NHS "Reforms"
To the average American citizen, the UK's National Health Service probably seems like one of those outrageous European health care systems. The UK has actually had the NHS since after World War Two, when the overwhelming majority Labour government adopted the system in 1948 as a wartime and emergency health service. NHS is now a publicly funded health care system, a valued institution in the UK and the only still-standing achievement of the Labour government majority following World War Two. It never actually was supposed to grow as large as it is today, but from what I have heard the British still view it as one of their idyllic institutions.

The NHS came under scrutiny two weeks ago, however, when Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to drastically cut the NHS budget in favor of reducing the deficit. Scrapping the NHS would be one of the biggest cuts in the UK government since the infamous Margaret Thatcher.

Deja vu, right?


In other news circulating Portcullis House... which I unfortunately don't have the time or space to discuss thoroughly enough... ahem...

-The protests in Egypt. Cameron and Obama discussed the Egyptian protests. The House of Commons also held a debate today on them. This is going to be a huge international issue.

-AV filibustering was still occurring as of yesterday... Today the Labour peers finally reached a deal in the vote though.

-And Ed Miliband, the Labour Party leader, is a square.
To fully understand how the British public perceives Ed Milliband, check out Awkward Ed Miliband Moments.
And now you know everything.

British Filibustering

There's an electoral reform referendum circling through Parliament at the moment, with the final vote currently set to occur on May 2nd. The referendum would change the current first-past-the-post electoral system, where simply the candidate with the most votes is elected. The problem with this system in the UK is that many of the MPs didn't receive more than 50% of the votes.




Instead, the AV system the referendum would put in place would allow voters to rank the candidates based on preference. If there still isn't a clear winner, they would take the voters' second preferences into account until a candidate receives more than 50% of the votes.





But today, the House of Lords members (aka, peers) are basically filibustering the bill, except the press doesn't call it that. So as I read the London Evening Standard, the paper they distribute at the Underground, I stumbled upon the article about their "tactics."

It's the best thing ever.

The lead reads: "Labour peers were accused of 'behaving like dinosaurs' today by forcing the House of Lords to debate plans to reform the voting system through the night."

Priceless.

The article goes on to say MPs were sleeping in their offices or staying up all night trying to delay the bill.

"Labour lords were unrepentant, joking over bacon and eggs this morning about winning medals for endurance and warning of more of the same.
Debate on the ninth day of committee stage was still going strong as the Standard went to press, having begun at 3.48pm yesterday.
It was fractious and bizarre in equal measure, with accusations of abuses of parliamentary procedure combined with time-consuming discussion on arcane subjects such as the UK's last living cannibal."

...What?

The article says Labour is trying to delay the bill because it also reduces the number of MPs and redraws constituency boundaries (...gerrymandering?)

"Camp beds and sheets were laid on by Lords authorities, and tea and coffee provided through the night "so peers don't expire" as one source put it.
...
But Baroness Warsi said the filibustering would turn people off politics. "You can laugh at the scenario and spirits are high but the serious part of it is this is a weird way to pass legislation. It is an abuse of the process."