Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

What about your right wing pals then Chris especially last night. Come on be fair youve always been a decent type in the past and I feel your a little upset over maggie. Handshake?

Well GF, if your not pissed then you really are just a 'Moron' have you heard yourself?

Fair enough chris believe me you wont like me as an enemy.

Now run along its bed time for you.

Ahhhhhhh waste of time this the opposition is the weakest Ive faced in years. I do hope the Torys give Labour a better fight than this in the local elections.

Off to watch newsnight.

Wow!

Did he actually post that?

"you wont likie me as an enemy."

That a bit like "my dad is bigger that your dad". He certainly is losing the plot.

just catching up on this thread.
seems to be loads posted today. i am currently on page 1159 so not sure of later posts but post 23179 on this page posted by Haystack. i just cant believe what he said.
"It is perfectly sensible to get benefit recipients to work 35 hours for £56"
what?
would you do it?
H has lost all respect that i may have held for him.
regards to all including H
jkd

No minutes silence at the Cardiff v Barnsley game tonight ... not surprised really.

jkd

I am glad you reacted to my post. The point I was trying to make was that getting £56 for 35 hours is just as unreasonable as getting the benefits for zero hours. I have met plenty of people over the years that never intend to work and freely admit it. Is that better than making someone work a whole week for their benefits?

It is pretty much impossible to make people take jobs instead of benefits. The principle is that someone may be sent for a job and then they will deliberately fail the interview. If that fails they get themselves fired. Realistically there are only two choices. One is to cut the benefits if someone won't take a job. This has problems as the genuine ones and their families will starve. That isn't sensible. Now we come back to my suggestion. That is that they work a full week for their benefits no matter how much they are. Now they have a straight choice. Don't work and no benefits or maybe try and get a job that pays better than benefits. That way no one starves and there is an incentive to get off benefits. If you just get people to do a market rate number of hours for their benefits it would be just a few hours then there little incentive to get off the benefits. Maybe my idea doesn't look so bad now.

It's an unworkable suggestion Haystack , Tories would have done it years ago if it were feasible.

How Osborne abandoned social mobility

By Louie Woodall.

The words and deeds of this government have rarely been in alignment. However, the gulf between aims and actions is at its starkest when it comes to the goal of greater social mobility.

This mission is supposed to be at the heart of the Coalition’s strategy for creating a fairer Britain, one where a child’s life chances are not dictated by the class and income of their parents.



Yet this laudable policy was grossly absent in last week’s budget. Despite the bluster that this was a budget designed to reward hardworking people, the policy announcements that look like routes out of poverty at first, on closer inspection are nothing more than dead ends.

Take childcare. The government trumpeted its additional spend of £150 million on childcare vouchers as proof of its commitment to remove barriers into work for hard-up families. But an analysis of the distributional impact of the policy reveals that fully 80% of the earmarked funds will go to parents already in the top half of the income scale. Worse, part time workers will receive nothing under the scheme.

What about Osborne’s celebrated help to buy mortgage guarantee scheme? This was the one part of his Budget speech he singled out as a means to boost social mobility:

“The deposits demanded for a mortgage these days have put home ownership beyond the great majority who cannot turn to their parents for a contribution. That’s not just a blow to the most human of aspirations – it’s set back social mobility and it’s been hard for the construction industry. This Budget proposes to put that right – and put it right in a dramatic way.”

Going beyond the strange idea that home ownership = social mobility in the first place, again the benefits are skewed in favour of the better off, (those earning above the median wage)- and even they will struggle to make use of it.

Housing charity Shelter explains that the mortgage guarantee fails to tackle the problem unaffordable homes at its roots, Robbie di Santos says:

“The trouble is, while this makes it easier to get a deposit, you’d be borrowing 95% of already very high house prices, which are way out of kilter with what ordinary people earn. Our calculations – again based on local house prices and local double income households – suggests that the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee would bring the average local home within reach of the average double income household in only 16% of the country.”

Are these the actions of a government committed to a fairer distribution of opportunity across the income scale?

It certainly doesn’t look like it to me. Some argue that faith in social mobility as a weapon against rising inequality is misplaced, and that we should measure our progress in becoming a fairer and more civilized society by how far apart the richest and poorest stand on the income scale rather than by how easy it is to get from one end of that scale to the other.

However, if we understand social mobility as a mechanism for empowering the very poorest to escape the poverty trap, than it does have the potential to change lives and transform society.

Sadly, in the Budget this government has proved it is far, far away from working towards such an end.

Louie Woodall is Editor of Anticipations.


http://www.youngfabians.org.uk/blog/index.php/2013/04/09/how-osborne-abandoned-social-mobility/

British children facing bleaker future under coalition, says Unicef

Children's charity says situation facing young people in UK is expected to worsen as cuts threaten to 'sideline' a generation
Share92

James Meikle

The Guardian, Wednesday 10 April 2013

Jump to comments (32)



Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is expected to worsen as a result of government policies. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images


Children and young people in the UK are facing a bleaker future under the coalition government than they did under Labour, according to children's charity Unicef.

In what amounts to a direct challenge to the government's austerity agenda and widespread tightening of access to benefits, Unicef ranks the UK 16th out of 29 developed countries for overall wellbeing – and warns that teenagers' prospects trail behind their counterparts in many European countries, including Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.

Continuing high rates of teenage pregnancy, relatively low levels of young people in education, employment or training and problems of alcohol abuse in young teens push the UK down the international league table.

Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is "expected to worsen" as a result of government policies, and it warns that "since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people".

Unicef says although the picture for British children may appear better than when the charity last compiled a league table – which put it at the bottom of a 21-country list in 2007 – their prospects are worsening once more as the cuts threaten to "sideline" a generation.

The country is placed 29th on further education – bottom of the list of developed nations in Unicef's report – 27th on teenage pregnancy, and on youth unemployment it is ranked 24th.

The charity's report cites more than £300m – or 26% cuts – in budgets for young people's services in England in 2011-12 and other warnings that 400,000 more children will be in child poverty in 2015-16 from the Family and Parenting Institute and Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Anita Tiessen, the deputy executive director of Unicef UK, said: "There is no doubt that the situation for children and young people has deteriorated in the last three years with the government making policy choices that risk setting back children in their most serious stages of development ….

"The government needs to acknowledge this and act now. While children and young people will be the first to bear the brunt if we fail to safeguard their wellbeing, over time society will pay the price."

The report draws on statistics from 2010 and shows a general improvement in children's experiences over the first decade of this century, compared with the previous scorecard from 2007, which looked at data from 2001/2.

But Unicef says further education participation rates in the UK are falling below 75%, compared with 80% in other developed countries.

The country is in the bottom third of the table for infant mortality, with a rate of 4.4 per 1000 live births, double the rate of Sweden or Finland and below Estonia and Slovenia. Furthermore, the report says that about 20% of 11-15-year-olds in the UK report having been drunk at least twice, and there is a teenage pregnancy rate of more than 30 per 1000.

The Unicef report, which suggests Labour policies in the first decade of the century had paved the way for improvements which are now under threat, follows international charity Save The Children's first domestic fundraising appeal last autumn to help families hit by the cuts and recession.

The overall table was topped by the Netherlands, the only country ranked among the top five countries in all dimensions of child wellbeing.

The first covers both relative poverty and the proportion of children being deprived of access to materials such as three meals a day, books suitable for their age and development, bikes or roller skates, indoor games, appropriate clothing or an internet connection. Others are health and safety, educational wellbeing, proper housing and environment, and a "behaviours and risks" category covering factors such as teenage fertility, smoking, alcohol and cannabis use, fighting, bullying, being overweight or lacking exercise and daily breakfast and fruit.

Following the Netherlands on the overall league table are Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, while at the opposite end, from the bottom, are Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, the US and Greece. Unicef says there does not appear to be a strong relationship with countries' per-capita GDP and there are signs that the countries of central and eastern Europe are being to close the gap on more established industrial economies.

Its report says: "As a moral imperative, the need to promote the wellbeing of children is widely accepted. As a pragmatic imperative, it is equally deserving of priority; failure to protect and promote the wellbeing of children is associated with increased risk across a wide range of later-life outcomes.

The report says that these outcomes range from "impaired cognitive development to lower levels of school achievement, from reduced skills and expectations to lower productivity and earnings, from higher rates of unemployment to increased dependence on welfare, from the prevalence of antisocial behaviour to involvement in crime, from the greater likelihood of drug and alcohol abuse to higher levels of teenage births, and from increased health care costs to a higher incidence of mental illness."

Shocked me this. Very shocked.



Margaret Thatcher accused of holding 'unabashedly racist' views

Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr, reveals former British PM warned him of challenge posed by immigration


Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 April 2013 23.49 BST



Australia's foreign minister, Bob Carr, said that Margaret Thatcher pleaded with him to ensure Sydney did not 'end up like Fiji'. Photograph: Achmad Ibrahim/AP


Margaret Thatcher has been accused by the Australian foreign minister of having held "unabashedly racist" views after he revealed that the late former British prime minister had warned him of the challenge posed by immigration from Asia.

Bob Carr, who served as premier of New South Wales between 1995 and 2005, said that Thatcher pleaded with him to ensure Sydney did not "end up like Fiji" where citizens of Indian heritage formed a majority until a coup in 1987.

Carr, whose wife is of Malaysian origin, spoke of his surprise at Thatcher's remarks. The senator told the Lateline programme on ABC TV: "I recall one conversation I had with her in her retirement where she said something that was unabashedly racist, where she warned Australia – talking to me with Helena [his wife] standing not far away – against Asian immigration, saying that if we allowed too much of it we'd see the natives of the land, the European settlers, overtaken by migrants."

Carr expressed astonishment when Thatcher drew an analogy with Fiji, where the Indo-Fijian community formed a majority of the population in 1970 when it achieved independence from Britain. The community, descendants of labourers who travelled to the former British colony to work on sugar plantations in the late 19th century, has fallen to just over 38% in the last two decades after a 1987 coup. In 2000 Mahendra Chaudhry, the first Indo-Fijian prime minister, was taken hostage in another coup.

Carr said: "I was astonished. Helena fortunately was out of earshot. I remember one thing she [Thatcher] said as part of that conversation. She said: 'You will end up like Fiji. I like Sydney but you can't allow the [Asian] migrants … to take over otherwise you will end up like Fiji where the Indian migrants have taken over."

The foreign minister added: "I was so astonished I don't think I could think of an appropriate reply. I think we moved on to other subjects pretty quickly."

Carr, a Labour senator who was appointed foreign minister after the resignation of the former prime minister Kevin Rudd last year, made clear that he still respected Thatcher on the grounds that she challenged the centre-left to modernise.

He said: "She produced a realignment of politics. She forced my side of politics, the social democrat parties, to think more deeply about the role and function of the state, of the public sector. [She] forced Labour parties around the world to consider whether government could remotely pretend to be the answer to many of the problems it was assumed it could be. I also think she was right in joining Reagan and denouncing the old Soviet Union as an evil dictatorship."

Carr's remarks contrasted with warm praise for Thatcher from Julia Gillard, Australia's British-born and first woman prime minister. Speaking in Beijing, she said: "Her service as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom was a history-making achievement. Her strength of conviction was recognised by her closest supporters and her strongest opponents."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-accused-racist-views?CMP=twt_gu

By the way just to set a few facts right which I already knew about. This just tweeted on twitter.............

Glenys Kinnock ‏@GlenysKinnock Apr 10

#TUC poll 2012: on average people think 41% of Welfare budget goes to unemployed (truth - 3%) and fraud rate is 27% (truth 0. 7%) Tell all !

Retweeted by Rachel Reeves MP............ ends

And in that 3% is included employment support allowance ie, the old incapacity benefit.

Just goes to show how some on here have been hoodwinked by tory propaganda on benefits.

Why wasnt the other 97% mentioned........... Ill give you a clue ....not vote winning.

Good God - what a load of tripe - another no go thread for me.

I am giving the 'Goldfinger' thread a rest for a while as I accept that he will not change his views and will continue posting blinkered thoughts and beliefs.

He has a habit of asking people to justify their views and yet hardly ever justifies his, in fact there is a trend to ignore what facts he has posted when others have proved him wrong.

Several of my questions to him have been totally ignored.

greek - i'm afraid that's par ..... a few days back he accused me several times of a couple of lies or similar ..... when asked several times to produce the evidence, the best he could was to reiterate the accusation

A lot of tax payers should be asking how come you have retired so early and receive such a big pension as an ex copper and then most of you go onto another full time job.

Is that good value for money for the tax payer?????????????????.

This thread should be re-named 'The Son Of Fred Thread' :O)

Certainly not in my eyes in fact id rather give the so called scroungers as you call them greekman a rise than contribute to your over bloated salary and then pension or pensions.

Fact is the truth hurts doesnt it in your case when its outlined like that.