Owen Tudor

Foreign Ministers from Commonwealth countries met representatives of civil society on Thursday. Chaired by Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, it was a mostly good natured meeting with civil society representatives making the case for rights for disabled people, indigenous communities and funding for HIV/AIDS. But the meeting got more tense over the sticking points at this CHOGM – human rights in general and gay rights in particular. And some ministers had harsh words for civil society generally.

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• Why the Government is Wrong to Change Unfair Dismissal Rules
  Sarah Veale writes for Huffingon Post on millionaire Tory donor Adrian Beecroft's report suggesting Britain needs a reduction in employment rights against unfair dismissal.
• Unions in court over RPI/CPI switch
  Report from our Pensions Justice campaign site on the court case currently being heard against the government's switch to CPI indexing of public service pensions, which will see pensions decline in value year on year.

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Philip Pearson

The government is about to halve its support next year for domestic solar power. It looks like the feed in tariff will be cut from 43 pence per kilowatt hour (KWh) of solar energy produced at home to perhaps 20p per KWh. According to the FT, Energy Minister Greg Barker will announce this cut tomorrow (October 28^th). It describes this as a “lifeline” thrown to an industry expecting the support tariff to be pared back to 9p per KWh. Greg Barker sought to reassure the industry today at its annual conference that his Government strongly supported the principle of an effective feed in tariff. But the industry fears a cut to 20p per unit of electricity may well mean casualties and job losses.

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Brendan Barber

I’m giving a lecture at Liverpool University this evening, this is a slightly edited version of what I’m saying:

Tonight, I simply say to the Chancellor: Plan A isn’t working. We can’t go on like this. We need an alternative. And we need it now.

Let me set out the TUC’s vision for an alternative, a five-point plan to help get our economy on track and help get Britain back to work.

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Chris Ball

How odd that the Government should ask a venture capitalist to advise on employment law and how intemperate and ill advised a response Adrian Beecroft appears to have offered in his report, a draft of which is leaked in the Daily Telegraph today.

I know nothing of Mr Beecroft’s background but I wonder how much he really understands the daily practices of people managers. It seems he wants to get rid of the right to bring a claim for unfair dismissal, introducing instead a basic no fault dismissal law in which individuals dismissed through lack of performance would receive the equivalent of a redundancy payment.

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Owen Tudor

The Commonwealth is often portrayed as an imperial relic, and some of the flummery surrounding the royal visits and High Commission garden parties back that image up. But it’s one of the few inter-governmental bodies willing to suspend member countries over breaches of democratic rights.

Fiji is currently suspended, and Zimbabwe left to avoid the same fate. But this year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth WA is facing up to the widespread view that without an even greater focus on human rights, the Commonwealth will become irrelevant.

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Matt Dykes

Justine Greening’s promotion to Secretary of State for Transport has come at a crucial time.  The government has some very big choices to make on the future of rail in the UK.

The government will be producing a white paper on the future of UK rail in the next month or so.  With three quarters of franchises up for renewal in the next five years, the opportunity remains to make a significant change to rail policy.

Will the government put the interests of rail passengers and tax payers first and put an end to our dysfunctional and costly privatised rail industry?  Or will it take the option presented by the McNulty report and slash jobs, break up the rail network further and hand more power to private train operating companies, rewarding their executives and shareholders alike?

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Nicola Smith

It’s no secret that the recovery is on the rocks. Growth of 0.1 per cent over nine months and the highest unemployment levels in 17 years is nothing to shout home about, and with global demand slowing sharply and the crisis in the Eurozone still unresolved the future direction of the UK economy is looking increasingly uncertain. With the UK recovery still one of the weakest in the developed world (as well as being the slowest on record) we are still only 2.8 percentage points off our recessionary slump.

Given this challenging outlook it is perhaps no surprise that debate about the causes of our economic stagnation is raging. While the Government maintains that the Eurozone is to blame the evidence is fairly convincing that our problems significantly pre-date its difficulties.  But the argument doesn’t stop there – the second question is whether the Government’s spending cuts can legitimately be blamed for our current mess.

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Richard Exell

We all know the type of story:

• £33,000 benefits cheat who had SEVEN jobs while claiming he was wheelchair-bound Daily Mail, 24 August
• 500,000 on sick are fit to work Daily Express, 3 April
• Two in three benefit claimants are fit for work Daily Telegraph, 11 February
• A benefits cheat who claimed she needed crutches to walk framed herself with her holiday snaps – zooming down a WATER SLIDE in a bikini The Sun, 23 August

How fair are they? Are stories like this becoming commoner? What effect is this having on disabled people?

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Richard Exell

How often do we hear that regulations are driving businesses into extinction? Especially the small ones? Last month, the British Chambers of Commerce made:

Immediate and real action on existing pledges to reduce regulation

the number one item in their 5-point “Plan A” to boost business growth. Earlier this year, the Federation of Small Businesses complained that:

Despite the rhetoric, the burden of regulation continues to get heavier

Back in February, the CBI’s Budget Submission argued that companies “expecially SMEs” are discouraged from hiring by employment regulations.

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