The Commons Standards and Privileges Committee said there was "no intention" of MPs having to go "into any detail" about the work they pay family members to do. Erm, why? We, the poor suffering taxpayer, are paying for them so why should we not know what work they are doing?

Besides, what exactly would the point of just having a register of who has family members working for them without any further details? The issue with Derek Conway wasn't that he was employing his sons, but that he was paying them over the odds to do work that they weren't actually doing. If the details are not known and recorded, why bother creating this register? It's a waste of everyone's time and our money in that case, and worth nothing except as an attempt to appear transparent rather than to be transparent.

And it seems that even the European Parliament - despite it own great problems over Members finances - are to go a significant step further than Westminster and ban MEPs from employing family members.

This is a step too far in my opinion. All that is needed is a proper register of what family members do and the payment they received - not a piss-poor attempt like that suggested for Westminster, but a proper full register. Otherwise there's no point.

Do it properly or not at all. Half-measures help no-one.

It appears that being a teacher really is no guarantee that you're not a fucking moron, as demonstrated by the National Union Teachers. They want to ban the Ministry of Defence from giving talks to students on a potential career in the military, because they use "misleading propaganda".

Apparently they don't give a true enough picture of life in the armed forces. Bollocks. Besides, any half-intelligent person would, y'know, check up on the details before they took a job.

And they really did come out with some complete bollocks:

Any one who can say this with a straight face really is too stupid to be a teacher. Even a PE teacher.

It isn't up to teachers to decide what careers their students should consider. It is their duty as educators to provide all the information to their students to enable them to make their own informed and intelligent choices - not just the ones their teachers would prefer them to make.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach go to NUT conferences and pass idiotic Leftist motions like this.

UPDATE: Two teachers object to the NUT's statements.

The nationalised of Northern Rock is to be shrunk to half its size, with thousands of jobs being axed, due to EU competition rules.

I thought the idea of the nationalisation was to prevent thousands losing their jobs through the inevitable slimming down that any private purchaser would enact?

Why didn't Brown and Darling think of the EU rules before they decided on nationalisation? Or did they just not look through it properly - despite the length of time they took to come to a decision?

Seems like the next queue won't be outside Northern Rock, but ex-Northern Rock outside the Job Centre.

A Labour government planning to axe thousands of jobs in a nationalised bank primarily based in the north of England. You couldn't make it up.

The minimum wage. It's all well and good.

But raising it to £5.73 just when economic turmoil is predicted to about to strike is an exercise in sheer stupidity.

The a higher minimum wage will mean that those in work get paid a little bit more. But it doesn't help those not in work get a job. In fact, the very opposite. After all, if your current workforce is costing you more without any increase in output or efficiency, you're hardly going to increase it.

Raising the minimum wage won't do what the Unison general secretary wants and "protect the poor from the constant price rises in essentials like fuel, food and housing" but the very opposite [yet again], and drive those very same people into problems with paying for essentials such as fuel and food. After all, who produces these things? Yes, those working on [or close to] minimum wage. And if the cost of their labour goes up, so will the price of their product.

So no benefits will be achieved from this raise, bar fewer recruitments and maybe some redundancies.

This proposal by Carline Flint, he Housing minister, that unemployed people who live in council or housing association owned property should either get a job or leave their home is absurd. Making them homeless isn't going to help anyone, and is hardly likely to enable them, to get a job after being evicted.

All people on Jobseeker's Allowance should be expected to actively seek work, but not on the pain of losing their home. Rather, if they are serious about getting people into work and off state handouts, they should adopt the Conservative proposal of removing benefits from those who refuse to take or look for jobs.

Throwing them out of their homes and on to the streets demonstrates that it is Labour who are the new "nasty party". Either that, or it's all just a load of hot air, trying to make them look "tough on benefit scrounging and tough on the causes of benefit scrounging". But it won't work, and certainly not with insane ideas like this which any with half a brain would suggest. And Downing Street is already distancing themselves from Flint.

I'm all for being tough on benefit scroungers, but working, or looking for work, should not be a condition of housing. To evict anyone from their home for not looking for work would be immoral. Rather, their benefits should be cut or removed entirely. Eviction won't help them get jobs, just put more people on the streets.

Why do MPs have until April 1 to declare details of family members they employ? Why do they need so long? Why shouldn't they have to declare them by the end of February? Next Friday? Or even, why not this Friday?

It's not like MPs either employ that many people or have so many relatives that it would take three months to list them all. MPs should know who of their employees are family members and how much they are paying them. It's not like I object to MPs employing family members, just that they should have to declare them, and immediately.

There is no excuse for MPs not to declare how many - and who - of their relatives they employ right away. Any who wait until the deadline to make their declaration should be viewed with great suspicion by the electorate.

The only reason I can think of to pick April 1 as the deadline is to thumb their noses at us Fools.

The government's own welfare advisor says that less than a third - nearly two million people - of those who receive incapacity benefit deserve it. And why are they on it? Because the system is too easy - "ludicrously" easy - to cheat and benefits are set too high and thus encourage those who can work not to bother.

Thus, all those receiving incapacity benefit should be independently assessed, and those who are able to work should be moved on the the Jobseeker's Allowance - and told to go and look for a job.

There is a difference between the deserving and undeserving. Those who actually can't work should be paid Incapacity Benefits. It is our duty as a civilised country to do this. But those who can work should go and do so. Those who can't work deserve our support. Those who can work but would rather sit at home leeching off the rest of us don't deserve it. The classification of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor goes back to the Poor Laws, and much it is correct right to the present day.

Everyone deserves some support whilst they are looking for a job, so long as they will actually take one when they get it. If they don't take a job that they are offered, then they should not receive any benefits for a month, increasing by a month for each job they refuse. Those who are claiming Jobseekers Allowance should also have to actually prove that they are looking for work, each and every time they go to get their benefits.

Maybe now those who claim that those on benefits would work if they could will admit that they are wrong?

Sources: BBC, The Times, The Telegraph

It is interesting that nowhere in the Guardian has this story been mentioned, that I can find. I wonder why that is?

Seventy Conservative MPs - including David Cameron - and "about 12" Lib Dem MPs employ members of their family. Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have made no declarations of the number of their MPs who employ family members, though 33 Labour MPs are said to have admitted they do.

I can't see any issue at all with MPs employing members of their family. Derek Conway wasn't "employing" his children, but just passing them money under the guise of employment. But actually just employing them to do a job is no problem - so long as they are actually doing the work. Like I wrote before:

This is what appears to be happening voluntarily in the Conservative and Lib Dem parties, and piecemeal with Labour.

However, the fact that David Cameron is employing his sister-in-law "as a correspondence secretary in his private office... paid £15,000 a year out of Conservative funds to work three days a week at the party's headquarters" is a complete non-issue. This money is not coming out of the taxpayer's pockets, but out of the donations made by Conservative party members and donors, like myself. There is no compulsion to donate in the first place, and I for one have no problem with him employing a member of his family so long as she is doing the job she is being paid to do.

Chris Dillow makes an argument that Konnie Huq in her decade as a Blue Peter presenter has cost the economy around £3.9bn:

But Blue Peter doesn't start until 5pm! It's perfectly possible to work a full day and then watch Blue Peter, especially now that BBC iPlayer is up and running. Blaming Konnie Huq for the £3.9bn cost to the economy is rather unfair. She's attractive, but not that attractive!

Many of the people on benefits could work if they wanted to. How else can so many immigrants find work? Because so many Britons aren't doing them, preferring to sit on the dole. That premise is by no means wonky. The idea that Konnie Huq and Blue Peter persuaded them not to go to work is, though. That reason is down to benefits being too high.

UPDATE: Matt Sinclair also responds to Chris' post.

Usually I can but agree with most of Chris Dillow's posts. But with this one, he is totally wrong. In his response to the Tories proposals to crack down on incapacity benefit fraud, he asks:

The very simple answer answer is that we have a duty as a civilised nation to support those who cannot support themselves. His proposal of a "flat rate payment to all, a citizens basic income" means that the very people who really need help won't get it, whilst those who could work if they could be bothered to get off their arse will get paid just as much. That is absolutely immoral. Those who can't work deserve support because they can't improve their own situation themselves. They can't work and earn money.

Those who can't work deserve our support. Those who can work but would rather sit at home leeching off the rest of us don't deserve it. They deserve some support whilst they are looking for a job, so long as they will actually take one when they get it. The classification of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor goes back to the Poor Laws, and much it is correct right to the present day.

And this is the reason why I support the removal of benefits from those who refuse to take jobs, where "[b]enefit claimants will lose a month's worth of state handouts for the first job they turn down, three months' of payments for the second "reasonable offer" and a third employment refusal will be punished with a bar on unemployment benefits for up to three years." Those who refuse to take jobs shouldn't be paid Jobseeker's Allowance, since surely the whole point of something with that sort of name is to get people into work, so why should those who won't work get paid it?

Why are immigrants still flooding into Britain and getting jobs despite rising unemployment amongst unskilled Brits? Because unemployment benefits are too high, and act as a disincentive for actually getting paid work. The report from Migrationwatch shows that:

• A family with two children is just £30 a week better off working on the minimum wage than not working.
• A single person under 25 on the minimum wage of £193 per week is only £10 a day better off than a non-working person.
• A family with two children and one working member receives £79.50 a week of Working Tax Credit. However, after means testing he keeps only £6.77.
• Working families with children and one working member on the minimum wage are slightly worse off than the same family receiving the maximum Incapacity Benefit.
• A single person on the minimum wage would be £3 a week better off than a single person on the highest level of Incapacity Benefit.

No wonder they don't bother to get a job when it makes bugger all difference to their income, but takes a lot of time and effort! That's why they are just lazy - because be hard working isn't worth their while! What kind of society is being fostered by this? A fat, lazy, unproductive one - that's what.

What we need to do to cut immigration and to produce great benefits for Britain - such as huge savings on the social security budget, an increase in GDP per head, less pressure on our infrastructure, less downward pressure on low wages, and a reduction in the non working underclass - is very simple: Cut unemployment benefits. Make it worth their while to get off their arse and get a job, otherwise they just won't bother.

What this Labour government has done over the past decade is foster a society in which living on the dole is both possible and nigh-on acceptable. Unemployment benefit should exist simply to tide them over between jobs, not as a substitute for a job in itself.

I would far rather than working immigrants than lazy-arse Britons in this country.

The police are to be balloted over the right to strike. They don't currently have the right to strike, which is as it should be. If the police had the right to strike, they could very easily hold the government to ransom as the very fact that they are on strike would undoubtedly cause a break-down of law and order, on which modern society is reliant.

Police officers must not have the right to strike, whether or not they want it. Frankly, this should extend to all people directly employed by the state - policemen, civil servants, prison officers, doctors, teachers, the lot. If you take your pay cheque directly from the government, you should not have the right to strike for any reason. Don't think you're getting paid enough? Argue for more, put pressure in any way you like, such as only doing what is required of you in your contract, but no full-out striking. Really don't think you're not getting paid enough or whatever and the government won't give in? Quit and get another job.

If you are employed directly through the state, and paid by taxpayer's money, you should not have the right to strike.

I am a temp, and it seems that the EU plans to put my job at risk by insisting that temps get the same working rights as permanent staff after just six weeks. This would put the jobs of 250,000 people in positions such as mine at risk.

I currently temp at a large, well-known company which will remain unnamed on this blog. I have been there for more than two months now, and recently moved to a new role within the company - with a pay rise. This job was the first 'real' job I have had. Before I got it, I had been unemployed [though not claiming benefits] for nearly a month, and getting quite depressed over my apparent inability to get a job. But then I signed up to a new agency [some are seriously crap], had an interview the next day, and then started work the following Monday.

But if this new EU law had gone through, I doubt that I - or many of the other new graduates who temp - would be in their current jobs, earning money and gaining skills. It is impossible to suggest that companies would take these sorts of risks and hire completely inexperienced people such as I was and most new graduates are if this law went through. It's not like I'm anti me getting paid more, but I can't see how this will really help anyone. Instead of hiring temps, companies would just expect their permanent staff to do more. And everyone would suffer.

Of course, temping is not all great. You have a lack of permanence, and your job is not always secure, and you usually lack some of the benefits. But you have a far greater freedom of work. You can move as you like, with far fewer strings attached, and on a whim. Some prefer temping, some don't.

But this EU plan will just cost temps their jobs, and cost new graduates the chance to gain experience.

UPDATE: It's been delayed - but for how long?

Sources: The Times, ePolitix

More than half of new jobs created in the last decade have gone to immigrants. I have no problem with the immigrants coming in and working. They are coming here and doing the jobs which are available, helping our economy expand.

But I do have a problem with the millions of Britons who just sit on the dole, rather than taking these jobs for themselves. Get off your lazy arses and work! I can't see how it is not possible for any of these people to get any sort of job at all. They may have no skills, but there are always supermarkets or construction sites that need workers! It may not be nice work, but every job has to be done by someone, from cleaning the toilet, to sweeping the road, building houses, all the way up to running the country!

Every job has to be done, and I can't see how low-skilled immigrants can come and get a job so easily and yet so many "indigenous" people are unable to. It doesn't make any sense. Get off your arse and get a job. It may not be a great job or for great pay, but why should us who do work pay for those who literally just can't be bothered?

If you actually have real medical problems, fine. If you are actually unable to get a job - and actually continue to try to get a job - any job - then fine. But you're just lazy, tough. No more dole money for you.