The usual approach is that employees who do not want to join the union and support its political activities must opt out. The Supreme Court ruled five years ago that if a state chooses it can require that union members who want to participate in political activities must opt in, though that is not the law in California and several other states.

Are you really Rik from The Young Ones, treborc?

1. Government spending is going up, not down, and will do for years to come. Thank Gordon Brown for that. 2. Keynes is now discredited, rightly. 3. The government can boost the economy by cutting taxes, cutting spending, and cutting regulation. Government spending is the wrong route. 4. Left wingers do tend to WAFFLE, get to the point or SHUT UP.

Labour has an easy way out--start talking about tax increases for big business, finance, and the wealthy. The austerity programme simply won't work, and in 18 months no one will remember yesterday, so many other cataclysms will have arrived in the interim. The only solution is redistribution of wealth, and it's time Labour said that openly. It is more likely we see that as the policy of a major party in 2020 than we continue on this road, with the standard of living stagnating at best, for an entire decade. If it's not Labour it will be somebody else.

Allie - there's a long way to go yet before the general population of the UK reaches the level of squalor and poverty which International Finance thinks is appropriate for a post-industrial society. Which also happens to be the same as that which powerless people in the far east have to endure.

There are some desperate left whinge denialists on here - it is obvious to any rational thinker that the current situation is world wide bought on by over spedning by both governments and by their electorate - and this situation was clearly made worse by brown and balls spending during a time of boom, and when the boom ended the spending could not be turned off quickly.
Balls was pushing for more spend as plan B - Osborne has not been able to reverse the trend thansk to the world economic situation, so he has in fact met ball's plan re slower cuts, albeit not deliberately - and look where we are - so that should say all a rational person needs to know about the wisdom of the balls plan - its balls.

Repay .. The Coalition are using the credit crunch or banking crisis to justify draconian cuts in the living standards of ordinary UK citizens. As Mike Cobley said to the level of a post-industrial society. They are Plutonomists or neo-feudalists .. only the top 1% the global financial elite matter because they account for 60% of the global economy (see Citicorps docs). The rest of us are irrelevant.

The deficit is ephemera.. it is the construct which is used to bamboozle. The size of the so-called structural deficit could be vaster, and the amount of borrowing could be doubled without worrying the markets. The whole neoliberal nonsense is designed to keep and increase the wealth of the super-rich and the markets hold governments to ransom to that end...

That the Coalition has made zero cuts is all part and parcel of the redistribution of wealth upwards. That there have been very real cuts to ordinary people is indisputable. Just as it is indisputable that the 1000 richest UK citizens have quadrupled their wealth since 2008, from 90 billion to 400 billion (see Prem Sikka).

It's just a very right-wing coup.

Graeme.

If this government persists, it raises the increased likelihood of an electoral pact or standing as a 'Coalition'.

Hi Union Steve, I'd like to think that capitalism in it's present form-the collusion of big business, state bureacracies and politicians-has had it: perhaps if some more banks had been allowed to fail a few years ago, we'd be on the road to a genuine liberal economy. Hopefully we'll get there in the end, though.
Is that your preferred option? Or would you rather see a continuation/expansion of failed, special interest directed Keynesian policies? Or even more ridiculous, an economy directly controlled by the state rather than by the billions of voluntary and mutually beneficial exchanges that make a free market?

War seems to be the only way they'll get out of it.

More neoliberal bullshit no government has ever cut it's way out a mess like this. More public investment will have to be injected by government no mater who's in power FACT! Don't you lot realise that capitalism in it's present form has had it. youer all mad heed the lessons from history.

Milly/Balls...
What an indictment of an Oxford degree !

I don't see what the problems is for the Labour Party. Darling's plan always involved making cuts into the next parliament. The strategy was already laid out.

Why on earth would anyone care if the LibDems "blow a hole" in their manifesto? Their subservient alliance with the Tories show it's nothing but a lie anyway.

The deficit is ephemera.. it is the construct which is used to bamboozle. The size of the so-called structural deficit could be vaster, and the amount of borrowing could be doubled without worrying the markets. The whole neoliberal nonsense is designed to keep and increase the wealth of the super-rich and the markets hold governments to ransom to that end. http://www.homeremodeling101.org/

Look any reference to Miliband and Balls as the 'Abbott and Costello' of British politics is ludicrous. This matter is much to serious for such levity.
Just as George Osborne has as much grasp of economics as Tommy Cooper had of magic is no reason to go down that road.
Lord Home's matchbox indeed!
Yes, admittedly Cameron's as much use as a circus MC shouting at lions munching on their 'tamer'
Get a grip. This is serious. No corpsing you lot at the back!

Clubman