poor pay more tax than rich

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-graph-that-shows-how-the-poor-are-paying-more-than-the-rich-in-tax-10353982.html

Dinner Party

Monty Don
Kevin McCloud
Kate Humble
Pam Ayres
Ruth Goodwin
Colin Baker

Don't call it a 'fightback'

The Liberal Democrats have to rebuild as a party. Already people are calling for a "fightback" a singularly inappropriate word for the situation. A rebuild, new growth, they would be better words, politics is not a fight or a war, still less a street brawl.

The scale of the disater to hit the Lib Dems

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/2015guide/lib-dem-targets/

right to buy - more greed

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/may/26/ex-council-homes-london-gold-mine-landlords

hedge fund managers don't do anything useful but the top 25 in the UK are obscenely wealthy

2015 rank	2014 rank	Name	Company	2015 wealth (£m)	YoY change (£m)
1	1	Alan Howard	Brevan Howard	1,500	-100
2	2	Michael Platt	BlueCrest Capital	1,500	Unchanged
3	3	Alexander Knaster	Pamplona Capital	1,364	98
4	4	Sir Michael Hintze	CQS	1,230	175
5	8	Crispin Odey & Nichola Pease	Odey AM	1,100	580
6	5	Robert Miller	Search Investment Group	1,034	55
7	6	David Harding	Winton Capital	1,000	250
8	7	Sir Chris Hohn	Children's Investment Fund	663	6
9	9	Martin Hughes	Toscafund	510	32
10	10=	Andrew Law	Caxton Associates	425	75
11	14=	Paul Marshall	Marshall Wace	400	100
12	22	Chris Wokos	Rivercrest Capital	400	170
13	14=	Ian Wace	Marshall Wace	400	100
14	10=	Sir John Beckwith	Rivercrest Capital	350	Unchanged
15	14=	Yan Huo	Capula Investment	350	50
16	13	Michael Cohen	Och-Ziff Capital	335	5
17	14=	Sir Paul Ruddock	Lansdowne Partners	300	Unchanged
18	24=	John Armitage	Egerton Capital	280	80
19	21	Pierre Lagrange	Man Group	258	18
20	19=	Andy Hall	Astenbeck Capital	250	Unchanged
21	24=	Jonathan Hiscock	GSA Capital	250	50
22	34=	James Vernon	Brevan Howard	250	100
23	18	Hilton Nathanson	Marble Bar Asset Management	230	-23
24	19=	Nicolai Tangen	AKO Capital	225	-25
25	23	Chris Levett	Moore Capital	220	Unchanged

another reason for Labour to support a democratic voting system

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/9418

Looking at how the vote was distributed at the general election the Conservatives should, on a uniform swing, be able to secure a majority on a lead of about 6%. Labour would need a lead of almost thirteen points. On an equal amount of votes – 34.5% a piece – the Conservatives would have almost fifty seats more than Labour, Labour would need to have a lead of about four points over the Conservatives just to get the most seats in a hung Parliament. The way the cards have fallen, the system is now even more skewed against Labour than it was against the Conservatives.

How did this happen? It’s probably a mixture of three factors. One is the decline of the Liberal Democrats and tactical voting – one of the reasons the electoral system had worked against the Tories in recent decades was that Labour and Lib Dem voters had been prepared to vote tactically against the Tories, and the Lib Dems have held lots of seats in areas that would otherwise be Tory. Those factors have vanished. At the same time the new dominance of the SNP in an area that was a Labour heartland has tilted the system against Labour. Labour had a lead over the Conservatives of 9% in Scotland, but Labour and Conservative got the same number of Scottish seats because the SNP took them all.
Finally there is how the swing was distributed at this election. Overall there was virtually no swing at all between Labour and Conservative across Great Britain, but underneath this there were variances. In the Conservative held target seats that Labour needed to gain there was a swing towards the Conservatives (presumably because most of these seats were being contested by first time Conservative incumbents). In the seats that Labour already held there was a swing towards Labour – in short, Labour won votes in places where they were of no use to them, piling up useless votes in seats they already held
.And, of course, these are on current boundaries. Any boundary review is likely to follow the usual pattern of reducing the number in seats in northern cities where there is a relative decline in population and increasing the number of seats in the south where the population is growing… further shifting things in the Conservatives favour.