Cameron retiring from the House immediately

I don't put any particular faith in the judgement of the British people - I just happen to recognise that this is a democracy. Pulling out arguments that people are too stupid to know what's good for them may well have some rational credibility to them - people are indeed on the whole pretty daft at times - but equally it undermines the entire concept of democracy.

In a democracy, you do not have the right to be well-governed. You have the right to involvement in the governance of your country, just as everyone else. I suspect, however, if we were to do away with democratic government, it'd probably create rather bigger problems than technocratic arguments on policy being overlooked.

I'm not arguing that it's bad that we're in a democracy, I'm arguing that it's highly questionable whether this referendum could really have been called democratic given that Vote Leave has already admitted that most of the promises it made aren't actually going to be fulfilled - the British people are not going to get what they voted for, so I find it hard to understand how you can see the result as valid. And of course there's the fact that a lot of people seem to have forgotten recently that there's a reason why we live in a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy.

Oh give over.
Largely by changing how the unemployment figure was calculated.
Just as they changed how child poverty was calculated. Both of which reflected better on the tories than the previous measure did. Hmm..

Except of course you're brazenly lying there. The health budget increased in real terms each and every year under Cameron's tenure as Prime Minister. There was never any cut at all to the NHS, never mind a "severe" one.

As for the "Bedroom Tax" - the shibboleth of the irrelevant far-left - I for one backed it fully. It is appalling that when hundreds of thousands of people are living in cramped, overcrowded or temporary accommodation that the state is funding others to have empty rooms. Not only was this sensible from a financial perspective, but from one of social justice too.

How is this any different from our parliamentary democracy though? See the austerity propaganda, that is mostly based on lies and deceit.

I'm not arguing that it's bad that we're in a democracy, I'm arguing that it's highly questionable whether this referendum could really have been called democratic given that Vote Leave has already admitted that most of the promises it made aren't actually going to be fulfilled - the British people are not going to get what they voted for, so I find it hard to understand how you can see the result as valid.

And of course there's the fact that a lot of people seem to have forgotten recently that there's a reason why we live in a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy.

Well, one has clearly led to another in some forms. Where there is exceptional public demand for referendums, a representative democracy will grant them. You cannot really isolate one from the other.

There are many lies circulated by government about NHS spending. The underlying reality is that in real terms it fell during the Coalition government (https://fullfact.org/health/nhs-spending-rising-or-falling/) - let's call that, Cameron NHS Cuts Round 1 - and whilst it's true that it's slightly risen in subsequent years, Cameron Cuts Round 2 has ensured that during the next few years, if nothing changes, there will be stagnating real terms budgets, which amounts to a cut against soaring demand and costs. (http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-budget)

The truth is that NHS spending has been severely restrained and we are now one of the low spenders on health as a percentage of GDP in the OECD. This against a background where NHS staff make huge efforts to try to keep a creaking system going for the benefit of patients, yet are constantly criticised and attacked by the Tories, most recently the 'Junior' Doctors. (That's most doctors in hospitals.)

He'll become another 'government advisor', who wouldn't if they were in his position?
Edit: I'd also like to see a TED talk from him in the future

The worst thing about referendums is that they help in the long process of devaluing and downgrading Parliament. Why do we send people to a national lawmaking body if we then don't trust them to, er, make the laws?

It's really despicable of Cameron to have tried to take this way out, but I suppose he was acting in the tradition of referenda established over the devolutions, so it all looks fine and dandy, apart from completely undermining our established constitutional arrangements.

I'm sorry, but that's ludicrously uninformed. If you're genuinely suggesting millions of jobs were magicked out of thin air by statisticians, then that is laughable. If you're again suggesting the UK has not become a very high employment society, then that's ignoring every shred of evidence going.

The Government did not change how child poverty is measured at all. It created additional measures in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 on material deprivation - which also made clear that existing income measures would be required to be published. This approach was to be expanded under Cameron's Life Chances Strategy, due to be published in the summer but the future of which is now up in the air.

Child poverty is of course down to a historically low level by the long established income measures.

It seems unfortunately it is you ignoring all the evidence going. Your assumptions are based off the unemployment figure, not the employment figure.

The unemployment figure is not calculated by the amount of people who are actually unemployed. It is calculated by the number of people who claim JSA. Under this government, there were greater restrictions placed on who could claim JSA and there was a huge amount of people who were placed on 'back to work schemes' in which they earned nothing but were not classed as unemployed.

in 2013 Sheffield University did a huge amount of research into real unemployment figures and found that almost three times as many people were unemployed as the official figure suggested.

Under Cameron and Osborne the way in which unemployment figures were calculated were manipulated as to exclude anyone who was actually unemployed but;
(a) Not claiming JSA and
(b) Placed on a back to work scheme.

If you manipulate how a figure is calculated, you can pretty much get it to say what you want.

What is baffling is how someone like you, who holds themselves as an independent thinker can be so smitten with Cameron that you lose your ability to objectively assess him and instead become little more than a cheerleader.

I agree here, you're quite right unemployment has been under stated but the total percentage of employment has actually hit a record high, 74.2%, so that means 25.8% are unemployed or economically inactive but nonetheless still the highest level of employment and you can't redefine employment although I'm sure zero hours contracts have helped inflate the figures

They certainly ran an extremely right wing ideological government

It seems unfortunately it is you ignoring all the evidence going. Your assumptions are based off the unemployment figure, not the employment figure.

The unemployment figure is not calculated by the amount of people who are actually unemployed. It is calculated by the number of people who claim JSA. Under this government, there were greater restrictions placed on who could claim JSA and there was a huge amount of people who were placed on 'back to work schemes' in which they earned nothing but were not classed as unemployed.

in 2013 Sheffield University did a huge amount of research into real unemployment figures and found that almost three times as many people were unemployed as the official figure suggested.

If you manipulate how a figure is calculated, you can pretty much get it to say what you want.

What is baffling is how someone like you, who holds themselves as an independent thinker can be so smitten with Cameron that you lose your ability to objectively assess him and instead become little more than a cheerleader.

No. The ONS uses the International Labour Organisation's definition of unemployment and is based on the Labour Force Survey - asking questions about individuals' circumstances. The Claimant Count is the relevant metric for people on out-of-work benefits (JSA and ESA).

Once again though, you're tinkering around the edges here by definitions. Employment is considerably up, unemployment is down - and it's not by account of any sort of fiddle.



The Sheffield study points to 2.5 million unemployed in the mid-2012 figures according to the official LFS figure. It suggests 3.4 million.

To come to this figure, above the LFS figure, it looks at incapacity benefit claimants who are wrongly parked on these benefits. It notes the stringency of the Work Capability Assessment, but that this process had - at that time - not been rolled out for existing claimants. Now it has been.



You're not attacking Cameron here, you're attacking the independent Office of National Statistics. They do the calculations. Instead you're buying into a conspiracy theory that no serious organisation gives any credibility to: that there has not been a significant rise in employment under Cameron's tenure as Prime Minister, and that it's not some sort of bizarre fiddle.