Salmond and Unionist politicians both talk as though theirs is the risk free option that will eliminate uncertainty about the future for Scots. Risks and uncertainty can only be reduced by recognising we can’t know for certain what the outcome of any choice will be and making plans for various possible outcomes

The SNP leadership and unionist politicians both talk as though if we just adopt the option they favour, Scots will face no uncertainties about the future and no risks. Salmond and Osborne are both stubbornly sticking with their own plan, with no plans on what to do if it doesn’t lead to the results they expect.

After the financial crisis, the Iraq war and the floods, continuing with no plans for different possible outcomes and just sticking to old assumptions will not do fine.

Eliminating risk and uncertainty is impossible, but by having plans prepared for various possibilities we can reduce both.

Scotland and the pound – Or the Euro?
Or its own currency?
Or staying in the UK? Every option brings risks

It’s true that the UK government couldn’t stop an independent Scotland using the pound, but that’s only half the truth. An independent Scotland would inherit its share of the UK’s assets and liabilities. That means it would inherit a share of the UK’s national debt – i.e an independent Scotland would be in debt. True, it would be at most no higher a debt as a percentage of GDP than the UK has.

However the UK has its own currency. If an independent, indebted Scotland didn’t have its own currency it would risk being in the same position as Ireland and Greece were after the financial crisis – forced to beg other governments or the IMF to provide them with pounds.  We might face the same harsh terms imposed on Ireland and Greece. If it joined the Euro it might have exactly the same problem.

Scotland could issue its own currency, but if it issued its own currency immediately on independence it would increase the risk of being targeted by currency speculators. There are other options though.

First, keeping using the pound for a few years after independence, before issuing our own currency. We could issue our own currency once the recession caused by the financial crisis has ended, and after uncertainty among businesses and investors over how independence would affect them has become less intense.

Ireland kept using the British pound for many years after independence before issuing its own Irish pound.

Of course lacking our own currency for several years while in debt would restrict what the Scottish government could do until it issued its own currency.

Another option would be to issue our own currency (e.g Scottish Pound) pegged in value to equal to the British pound. We could ban international currency trading of it and large transfers of it outside the country for the first 5 years.

During the Asian financial crisis in the late 90s the IMF advised Asian countries to keep their currency markets open, continue deregulated markets etcetera. The result was disaster for most of them.

Malaysia managed to make the crisis much less bad for it by pegging its currency to the dollar, banning all international currency trading of it and imposing limits on the amount of currency Malaysians could take abroad to stop the run on its currency which was fuelled by speculators.

As with the US and European financial crises the cause was deregulation empowering fraud and speculation.

Some might ask, so why not stick with the pound and stay in the UK to avoid these risks? The pound is no guarantee for economic stability for Scotland or even England though. We had the pound and were in the union and suffered the banking crisis and the recession since it.

In the 1980s an economic boom in the city of London financial sector led the UK government to increase interest rates to double figures during a recession in Scotland and the North of England, whose economies were devastated as a result.

With a government led by a party which gets more than half its donations from banks and hedge funds, UK economic policy continues to be made for the benefit of the banks and hedge funds, not the whole country. So the status quo carries its own risks. Another crisis as bad as the banking crisis could happen at any time.

Independence would provide a chance of regulating Scotland’s financial sector properly, which would be an example UK governments would find it difficult to ignore.

A country’s size doesn’t make it safer from economic crises
Regulation and having its own currency do
So staying in theUK doesn’t guarantee our economic future

Unionists politicians often claim Scotland couldn’t have survived the financial crisis as an independent country, pointing to Iceland, Greece and Ireland as supposed evidence that small countries can’t make it.

This is confusing the causes of the crisis, which was nothing to do with the size of the countries and everything to do with deregulation and in Greece and Ireland’s cases with not having their own currencies.

Norway, which has a population of 5 million – similar to Ireland’s and less than Scotland’s – regulated its banks properly and has its own currency. As a result it didn’t suffer the financial crisis suffered by the UK with over 10 times its population or the US with over 40 times its population, nor did it suffer any recession as a result.

Safe and secure with small government, welfare cuts,
personal debt crises and deregulation?

Welfare cuts and public sector job cuts by successive UK governments of both parties have eroded the welfare state on the false assumption that the market, left to its own devices, will provide employment to all who want it.

The  Conservatives in the Coalition government have gone far further than Labour did with this, but most of the “reforms” being carried out under the Conservatives were already being planned under Brown and Blair, even if they might not have taken them to the same extremes.

As a result the number of people reliant on food banks has increased by a factor of 10 in the first 3 years of the Coalition government, many genuinely disabled people are denied enough money to survive. Is that certainty, security and lack of risk?

Neither unionist parties nor the SNP have put forward any plan to deal with the personal debt crisis facing millions of people in the Scotland and the UK, which could also lead to an economic crisis affecting even those who are not in debt as millions go bankrupt and default on their debts.

Neither have either side put forward any serious plan to reverse the growing inequality which, if it’s not changed, will make any economic growth irrelevant as only a tiny minority will benefit from it.

So the unionist claims that staying part of the UK automatically makes Scotland (or any of the rest of the UK’s population) safe and secure is ridiculous.

To even significantly reduce the risks and uncertainties most people live with we need several things. Proper regulation of the financial sector. An end to allowing banks and hedge funds to buy political influence through donations to political parties. Enforcement of anti-monopoly and oligopoly laws. A guaranteed comprehensive welfare state.

The floods in England again show how the minimal government neo-liberal theory backfires. Man-made climate change, cuts to the Environment Agency’s budget and relaxing of planning processes (especially on building on flood plains) led to disaster for thousands - and a government left impotent by its own small government agenda.

Acknowledging Uncertainty,
Planning for various possibilities

Yes and No campaigns, unionists and nationalists, alike, need to start acknowledging that they can’t be certain what the results of the choices they advocate would be - and providing a set of various plans to deal with each major possibility.

Politicians are frequently successful by telling people what they want to hear – and we all often convince ourselves that what we want to believe is the truth. But that often backfires with severe consequences for everyone. Better to face up to the facts, including the fact that there are many questions which we can’t be 100% certain of the answers to – and that it’s better to have planned various options to deal with various possible outcomes.

Time for a debate on the system of private donations to party funds, public schools and Oxford University that creates vile politicians like George Osborne, David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith

Some might say that Chancellor George Osborne's use of the Phillpott case to try to justify taking benefits from the most vulnerable people in the country is a lot like when Bush used 9-11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, or when Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to seize power and carry out the Holocaust - and if that seems like an outrageous statement to any of Osborne's supporters you'll now know how the rest of us feel about Osborne trying to use a psychopath’s crimes to take from the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country (1).

His attacks on the welfare state are morally wrong as they take from the most vulnerable people in the country while cutting taxes for the wealthiest and allowing tax evasion by them, big banks, or big firms through UK government approved tax havens in UK dependencies like the Channel Islands.

On top of that they are economic stupidity, especially in a recession, as people on benefits will spend every penny as they’re struggling to get by, boosting demand in the economy. By comparison tax cuts for the wealthiest will often lead to them saving more money, or transferring it to investments in other countries. So common sense and justice would suggest the government should be increasing taxes on the highest earners, closing down tax havens in UK dependencies and increasing benefits. Instead they’re doing the opposite.

So it’s time we had a debate on the systems of public schools and Oxford University, along with big private donations to political parties from billionaires big banks and big firms, that create vile politicians like David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne who attack the poorest to cut taxes for wealthy donors to party funds – and who try to use the deaths of children at the hands of a lunatic to try to justify this.

Philpott would have been a violent, manipulative and “vile” man whether the welfare state existed or not. George Osborne would also probably be a vile man whether private donations to party funds were allowed or not, but he might not be Chancellor of the Exchequer and he , Cameron and Duncan Smith might not have the power to take from the poorest to give to the richest.

There are plenty of sociopaths who have got to much higher positions than Philpott ever attained – for instance Roger Carr, the head of Centrica, who was given a knighthood for supposed services to the public in 2010 while his energy company is one of those which has been shown by studies by Manchester University to systematically over-charge customers over years. So we have a system where organised theft results in knighthoods.

Tony Blair, who got tens of thousands killed for nothing and ordered British forces to co-operate in US-led torture is similarly rewarded with a paid position as a UN envoy – and his bodyguards and their hotel rooms and flights are paid for at public expense while he works for the dictators of Kazakhstan (where protesters are shot dead) and Kuwait among others as a public relations adviser (4).

Time for a debate on the system that rewards these sociopaths with not just thousands a year but tens of millions and which allows them to gain positions of power so easily.

(1) = guardian.co.uk 04 Apr 2013 ‘Mick Philpott's benefits 'lifestyle' should be questioned, says Osborne’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/04/mick-philpott-benefits-lifestyle-questioned

(2) = BBC News 31 Dec 2010 ‘New Year Honours: Broughton and Carr business knights’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12093737

(3) = Guardian 02 Dec 2011 ‘Big six energy firms face fresh accusations of profiteering’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/02/energy-firms-accusations-profiteering-electricity

(4) = Independent 29 Dec 2011 ‘Bullets, beatings and Blair's brutal friend in Kazakhstan’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bullets-beatings-and-blairs-brutal-friend-in-kazakhstan-6282490.html

We shouldn't listen to the markets who caused the crisis - time the markets were forced to listen to the majority

Chancellor George Osborne says his economic policy is aimed at maintaining market confidence – and even his political opponents debate on his terms of “what the markets want”. If “the markets” – an impersonal sounding euphemism for stock market traders, hedge funds and bank executives - could be trusted to make the right decisions, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

They caused it by demanding deregulation, getting it from governments ideologically driven to “listen to the markets”; and using it to create fraudulent “assets” like collateral debt obligations (a name designed to hide the fact that they were many bad debts packaged together and dressed up as good ones), then selling them to others or buying them and treating them as assets.

Most of them were euphorically confident that this was unprecedented genius that couldn't go wrong and would lead to everlasting and ever accelerating economic growth - right up until the crash - and this wasn't the first time - most of "the markets" believe this every time, never learning from experience. The minority who questioned these practices were laughed at or accused of maliciously trying to destroy others' incomes

No government has made any serious attempt to re-regulate the banks or financial sector since. They’re still out of control and still driven by short term greed, irrational swings between euphoria and panic; and now a selfish determination that everyone else should pay for the hole in their accounts created when everyone realised that marvellous new “financial products” or “financial instruments” like CDOs were worthless frauds.

“The markets” have no idea what policies will benefit the majority in the long term and no interest in the effects on the majority, they only care about how much profit or loss they might make right now. Getting a vote of confidence from a market 'rally' is like getting praise from a drug addict for securing them another hit. It means nothing in terms of the long term, the real problems or the real economy.

That’s why they tell us that we’re supposedly all equally to blame, that “we’re all in it together” and that “market confidence must be maintained”. Bank chief executives continue to award themselves annual incomes of millions a year topped off with millions in bonuses while accusing nurses, teachers and doctors of a “sense of entitlement” for wanting to keep their jobs and pensions.

The solution is to stop listening to “the markets”, start repudiating the debts we supposedly owe them; and demand interest payments on the bail-outs, plus repayment of capital. Governments can loan directly to businesses rather than subsidising banks to do it through quantitative easing.

Keeping on giving in to the people who caused the problem is dangerous and brings no benefits.

The Spanish government agreed to the markets’ demand for austerity measures including sacking public sector employees to avoid having their credit rating cut, then private credit rating agencies cut Spain’s credit rating anyway, citing unemployment as one of the reasons. The private credit rating agencies have a conflict of interest too – as many of them receive payments from the creditors for reports on creditworthiness.

Allowing uncontrolled and unlimited greed is not good, it does not benefit everyone. It brought us the Great Depression and the current crisis, just as it brought the South Sea Island Bubble and Tulipomania in the 18th century long before there was any real government regulation or intervention in the economy , any significant number of people employed in the public sector (other than police, soldiers and tax collectors).

The only period of economic stability (at least for the developed world) was between the end of World War Two when the markets were put under stricter government regulation and the 1970s – when it ended due to fuel price rises caused by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the subsequent OPEC oil price rises on the one hand – and deregulation like British Prime Minister Edward Heath’s scrapping of controls on capital transfers to and from the UK.

The only way to stop one crisis keeeping on turning into another - from financial crisis to recession to euro zone crisis and on and on - is to stop listening to "the markets" and start telling them what government and society will tolerate them doing and what they'll be jailed for

Nick Clegg's claim that the Coalition government's policies won't hurt the poorest most is hopelessly unrealistic

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has disputed the Institute of Fiscal Studies’ analysis, which found that government policies will hurt those on low incomes most (1).

He claims tax cuts will lead to economic growth which will create jobs, increasing the incomes of the poorest as they are employed. This is wishful thinking. Even the most enthusiastic advocate of this theory would have to admit that in the past such policies have never ended mass unemployment, which rose under both Reagan and Thatcher.

Even the government influenced Office for Budget Responsibility estimated over 600,000 public sector job losses by 2015, with 700,000 more made unemployed due to knock on unemployment in the private sector due to reduced demand (2) – (3).

Clegg is claiming that unemployment will fall under a government which is going to be sacking hundreds of thousands of public sector employees, both directly and by cutting funding to local councils.

This is combined with public sector pay freezes (effective pay cuts taking inflation into account) and benefit cuts, including changes in the way inflation is calculated for increases in benefits and pensions, so both will effectively rise more slowly than inflation and be cut in practice (4).

Only full employment and everyone working for life could avoid benefit cuts and unfair taxes hurting the poorest (including the poorest pensioners). Neither Clegg nor his coalition partners have guaranteed that.

There will be a lot more special pleading from Cameron, Osborne and Clegg on how the debt left to them by Labour makes these measures unavoidable if the debt's to be tackled.

This lacks all credibility while they continue to provide unlimited funding to grossly over-priced ‘Private Finance Initiatives’ and ‘Public Private Partnerships’, keep pretending Britain can afford it's own nuclear deterrent and keep subsidising privatised rail companies (as well as BAE arms exports through arms credit export guarantees) ,just like the previous government.

It would also be interesting to know how they can afford big cuts in corporation tax for all companies, including the biggest multinationals, if the public finances are in such a bad state that they're cutting benefits for the poorest (5).

How is it that the poorest are once again being made to pay most in cuts, while taxes for the biggest companies are being cut?

If the job cuts in the public sector do lead to knock on job losses in the private sector and another recession, the result will not have been to reduce the debt or increase tax revenues, but to increase it massively as tax revenues collapse in another recession. This is a scenario seen as a serious risk by most economists – and all the more likely because Angela Merkel’s government in Germany and Nicholas Sarkozy’s in France have adopted similar policies – and the rest of the EU is one of the largest markets for British exports.

 (1) = BBC News 25 Aug 2010 ‘Nick Clegg slams 'partial' IFS report on Budget’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11086137

(2) = BBC News 30 Jun 2010 ‘Forecast suggests 600,000 public sector jobs to go’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10457352

(3) = guardian.co.uk 29 Jun 2010 ‘Budget will cost 1.3m jobs – Treasury’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/29/budget-job-losses-unemployment-austerity

(4) = Observer 04 Jul 2010 ‘Public sector pensions lose £20,000 as calculations switched to lower index’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/04/public-sector-pensions

(5) = Guardian 22 Jun 2010 ‘Budget 2010: corporation tax slashed to 24p’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/22/budget-2010-corporation-tax-slashed-to-24p

Cuts to welfare and public sector jobs ballooning out of control in Britain

The housing benefit cap and public sector sackings are unfair, un-necessary and risk increasing our national debt, unemployment and homelessness

George Osborne claims welfare spending had to be cut because it has “ballooned” and this is presumably his justification for cutting housing benefit, despite the fact that homelessness charities such as Shelter Scotland say this will increase homelessness.

Welfare spending has certainly increased over the years, but so has spending on everything else, because the economy has over-all grown a great deal over the decades and there’s also been inflation.

The website ukpublicspending.co.uk has compiled tables based on figures released by the government from 2009 on, covering the entire period from 1950 to the present.

These show annual public spending, annual GDP (the output of the economy) and how much was spent on each area of public spending.

Welfare spending as a proportion of public spending fell from 20% in 1997 to 15% by from 2005 to 2009. Compared to the 1970s and 1980s it’s actually fallen significantly from levels of 20 to 30% of annual government spending.Since there has been a recession since the 2008 credit crisis the fact that welfare spending didn't increase in 2009 suggests that, if anything, people made unemployed by the recession are not getting the benefits they need, further depressing demand in the economy and hampering a recovery.

The government’s budget is supposed to be about spreading the cost of cuts fairly, according to ability to bear them. That makes it hard to understand why housing benefit should be capped.

There is certainly waste in the housing benefit budget, but that has been created by Conservative and New Labour governments’ selling off of council housing without building or buying nearly as much new public housing. This has resulted, in a significant minority of cases, to the government paying large amounts out to private landlords, which is the fault of government, not of people who can’t afford to buy or rent their own housing. It could be solved by a mixture of buying and building more council housing and regulating private sector rent levels, rather than capping housing benefit and throwing people onto the street as a result.

Are large scale public sector job cuts necessary and are they wise?

That’s apart from the fact that public sector job cuts on this scale aren’t necessary and aren't wise. What determines the future of government revenues is mostly the performance of the economy, not whether the government is in debt. While it’s not advisable for governments to take on debts that don’t help the economy or prevent severe poverty or suffering for large numbers of people, they can operate with considerable levels of debt. (Look at the US for instance, with decades of a bloated and ever increasing defence budget leading to a vast national debt).

As many economists (and Labour MPs) have warned, sacking large numbers of public sector employees to reduce the budget deficit may actually increase it in the long run by reducing tax revenues, increasing unemployment benefit payments, reducing demand in the economy (i.e sacked public sector workers will buy less goods and services as they won’t be able to afford what they need) and making private sector employees unemployed as the reduced demand means reduced sales for private firms.

The Conservatives claim that large and immediate budget cuts are necessary in order to avoid a crisis like Greece’s, where a rise in interest rates demanded by creditors, combined with speculation by currency traders selling the euro, left the Greek government unable to pay the interest on its debts and the euro falling. Only a bail-out package from other EU members prevented this crisis spreading to the rest of the euro-zone countries.

However Britain’s debt is only 53% of it’s GDP, compared to Greece’s debt of over 110% of it’s GDP, so Greece’s public debt relative to the output of its economy is more than twice as big as Britain’s relative to it’s economy. France and Germany both have government debts of over 70% of their GDP, while Italy's, like Greece's is over 110 of it's GDP.

Osborne's claim in his budget statement that we have the highest deficit in the EU in absolute terms may be true, because we are the largest economy among those with a government deficit, but as a percentage of GDP it's not true.

This is distinct from the annual deficits – the amount being added each year to the debt due to the gap between tax revenues and public spending, – at a bit over 13.6% of GDP in Greece’s case and 11.5% in the case of the UK – i.e the debt of the UK and Greece grew at a similar rate relative to the size of their economies over the last year. However Britain came out of recession this quarter for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008. Governments routinely rack up debts during recessions and by doing so get their economies out of recession, resulting in growth, increased revenues and so the ability to pay off some or all of their debt.

What’s more, while there has certainly been a lot of wasteful spending and we did have a considerable public debt before the credit crisis, Britain’s debt is only as large as it is because of the financial crisis which was caused by a combination of deregulation of the financial sector on both sides of the Atlantic by both ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing governments in the UK and liberals and conservatives in the US.

A ‘third way’ plan by the Clinton administration to make banks and other lending companies give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to re-pay them also played a role. This was an alternative to building more public housing, which was seen as unacceptably anti-market or socialist.

The British government bailed out the banks for hundreds of billions, took on their debts and suffered reduced tax revenues due to the recession caused by the financial crisis. While they were partly to blame for deregulating banking there was no criticism of deregulation of banking from the Conservative party in the 1990s – they supported it right up the financial crisis.

Osborne plans to cut spending further and faster than any country in the last 50 years; and to do so by sacking 500,000 public sector employees and freezing the pay of the rest, while continuing to fund a pointless war and vast taxpayer subsidies for private arms companies, PFI consortia and privatised rail firms . This looks more like the ideological opposition to public services than hard-headed realism

Other ways to reduce our debts

Of course if it’s possible we should gradually eliminate our annual deficit and start reducing our total amount of debt and annual interest payments on it. It certainly doesn’t make sense to be paying interest on debt for decades if it’s avoidable; and we don't want a continuing deficit leading to ever larger debts and interest payments on them.

However there are lots of ways we could do that without hurting the poorest or in fact anyone but the very richest.

Bringing our troops home from Afghanistan would save a lot of money and a lot of lives. Scrapping or renegotiating private finance initiatives or ‘public private partnerships’ would reduce massive annual costs that aren’t even put on the books, due to an accounting fiddle. Ending public subsidies to privatised rail companies would save even more. If they really are investing in the railways, let them do it from the profits from their fares, which have risen at well above the rate of inflation. Ending export credit guarantees for arms companies like British aerospace would also save money, as would ending military aid to governments which are either dictatorships or whose governments and militaries are involved in the drug trades and death squads (e.g Colombia).

Building more council housing would also reduce the government’s annual housing benefit costs, as maintaining a council house is much cheaper than the rents paid to many private landlords.

Cracking down on tax evasion and tax avoidance by international co-operation with the EU and the OECD to close down tax havens (and even cracking down ourselves on the Channel Islands and the Bahamas) would bring in far more revenues than cracking down on benefit fraud ever has.

Given all that putting caps – and very low caps – on housing benefit, seems downright mean, unfair; like the increase in VAT which is paid at the same rate by everyone, whatever their income.

There are a few fair and progressive elements in the budget – like raising the level of income at which people pay any income tax at all, taking 900,000 of the lowest earners out of tax; and making big cuts in the corporation tax paid by small firms. Unfortunately the housing benefit cap and the VAT rise more than cancel them out.

We’re also developing another problem – that maintaining an environment that humans can survive in reasonably well is not possible in an economic system which demands maximum profit in the short term from every company – and constant, infinite economic growth.

Are the Conservatives the Vulture Party?

Conservative MPs including whips killed a bill to prevent profiteering from third world debt; If Cameron and Osborne didn’t want them to why haven’t they expelled them from the party?

Every time I think the Conservatives couldn’t be any worse than ‘New Labour’ they do something to prove me wrong. This time they pretended to back a bill to outlaw ‘vulture funds’ – funds that buy up the debts of third world countries when those debts are about to be written off, before suing the debtor governments for huge amounts of money. Then they blocked it at the last minute (according to the Guardian here and here, the Independent here and the Jubilee Debt Campaign here.).

This is not just a technical matter of finance law. People are dying in their millions every year from hunger and preventable diseases due to poverty. This is partly due to foreign debts which countries like Haiti, Liberia and the Congo have to pay interest on to private firms, banks, funds and governments in the wealthier countries (which, despite the credit crisis, still includes the UK). These debts are largely the result of unfair trade policies pushed by the US, the EU and other economic and political powers.

For instance Haiti was self-sufficient in rice, until US governments backed dictatorships there which agreed to abolish import tariffs on American (US government subsidised) rice imports. Even when there was a democratically elected government in Haiti (briefly, before two more US backed coups in 1994 and 2004) the US and EU made aid conditional on the continuation of these policies by the Haitian government and the privatisation of more of Haiti’s public services. As a result many Haitians often have to pay to eat mud mixed with salt because they can’t afford food.

So the Conservative party, if they continue to block this bill, will be condemning people to death in large numbers, possibly even so that those profiting from this suffering will donate money to party funds. I might be wrong – but if i’m wrong the party leadership’s failure to expel these MPs from the party is very difficult to explain.

David Cameron and his Shadow Chancellor George Osborne say the party leadership was not involved in blocking the Bill, despite two of the three Conservative MPs who were in parliament at the time being party whips appointed by David Cameron as party leader. The three MPs moved together on the benches and hid their hands with their mouths to try to prevent anyone knowing which of them had killed that reading of the bill by shouting ‘I object’ (see the Guardian here, Jubilee Debt campaign here and Osborne’s response to the Jubilee Debt Campaign here).

If Cameron is telling the truth why hasn’t he sacked both the whips and expelled all three MPs from the party to ensure such a shameful action is never carried out again by any Conservative MP? If they don’t, everyone will know they are liars who couldn’t care less about how many people die as a result of their actions.

If he refuses to expel these three from the party then perhaps this is the ‘transparency’ that David Cameron says he would ensure in government – transparent lies?

The think-tank Ekklesia has reported that a previous planned amendment to the bill (since dropped) which would have killed it came from Conservative MP Phillip Davies, who accepted campaign donations from a firm which the Times newspaper reported as being owned by the billionaire Lord Ashcroft (whose lordship derives from donations to party funds). Does Lord Ashcroft have investments in vulture funds?
; I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.

You can ask David Cameron whether he will prove he opposed killing the bill by expelling the three MPs responsible from the Conservative party on the Jubilee debt campaign’s site here.

You can email Shadow Chancellor George Osborne at osborneg@parliament.uk and David Cameron at david.cameron@conservatives.com

There’s a facebook group which you can join which includes the email of the Conservative MP identified by the Independent as responsible for blocking the bill – Christopher Chope MP. It’s chopec@parliament.uk It also has a link to his constituency party’s website.

You can ask Harriet Harman, the leader of the Commons, to give the bill more time here (it may be too late for this now, i’m not sure – only found it this evening unfortunately)

P.S. Christopher Chope claims his motive was to avoid a bill that might make it harder for poor countries' governments to get loans from private banks in future. Some people think this shows his intentions were good. Maybe they're right, but personally i greatly doubt it. Vulture funds buy claims to debt that is about to be written off and then use those claims to sue for debts that were written off. The cause of the 'developing' countries'' debts is not lack of loans, but unfair trade imposed on them by more powerful governments and companies(including banks and loans funds) lobbying those governments. So i suspect Christopher Chope's explanation is just an excuse or a cover story.