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 Maggie started Dave is finishing.

But get this MONEY IS NO OBJECT and SPENDING IS MY PRIORITY.......Camoron says.

health tourists
beloved had to spend pretty much the whole of yesterday in St Mary's Paddington A&E
not remotely provable, but by her reckoning, foreigners were in a significant majority and, by her reckoning, an awful lot of them were non uk residents - i.e. health tourists

“The truth is that independent statistics show that unemployment is falling significantly and 1.3million more people are in work than in 2010.”



If this statement is correct, why is the social security budget rising year on year?

Manuel,

Did you ancestors arrive on the shores for the benefit of their health?

I think all those of non-celtic origin should off back to their countries of origin.

Of course all with Celtic ancestry can stay.

=========#

Max,

The unemployment figures are a distortion.

======

GDP. is also very questionable marker of the economy. Unless you want a measure of pocket to pocket!

max - because, and quite legitimately so, there will be an awful lot of people in part-time employment who are still entitled to receive benefits - eg those who opt to work <16 hours a week

============

fred - my ancestors came to these shores when the labour party was barely formed, the bolsheviks etc totally unheard of, and decades before nhs or other state benefits were on offer

So Cyners the state is effectively subsidising employers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Channel 5 planning its own version of Benefits Street
17 Feb 2014 07:15
TV channel planning a documentary called Living On The Social

Still a good reason for you to leave now!

They must have been the root of all our problems.

What was the date?




8-)

Reader's Digest sold for £1
Mike Luckwell buys struggling title from Jon Moulton's private equity company, Better Capital, with plan to target over-50s

Mark Sweney
theguardian.com, Monday 17 February 2014 14.20 GMT

Reader’s Digest, which had a circulation of 23 million an issue in the 1960s, has been sold to Mike Luckwell for £1. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Reader's Digest has been sold for just £1 to Mike Luckwell, whose previous major investments have included Bob the Builder creator HIT Entertainment and WPP.

Jon Moulton's private equity company, Better Capital, has offloaded Reader's Digest UK – the waiting room staple that was once the biggest selling magazine in the world – after investing tens of millions of pounds into trying to rejuvenate the struggling business.

Luckwell, the venture capitalist whose personal fortune is estimated at more than £135m, has acquired the title with the aim of targeting the "frisky over-50s" group that holiday and insurance company Saga has built a successful business on.

"Saga cleverly focused on holidays and the financial sector for the over-50s, but now has a finger in many pies," Luckwell said. "Today it has annual sales running into hundreds of millions – that merits a bit of competition."

Luckwell said the acquisition will provide access to a database of more than 1.5 million names, of which only 9% have recently purchased a Reader's Digest product.

"There is significant potential to further develop and utilise those large databases," he said.

Better Capital took the business out of administration in a £13m management buy-out in April 2010, and has since ploughed a further £23m into the company.

The investment failed to fuel a turnaround at the title, which no longer has its sales officially audited in the UK.

Luckwell has made his fortune through a range of deals and investments, starting with his launch of the Moving Picture Company post-production business in 1970.

In the 1980s, MPC merged into Carlton Communications, with Luckwell becoming the latter's largest shareholder and eventually selling out for £25m.

In the late 1980s, he was the biggest shareholder in Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP. In the 1990s, investments included HIT Entertainment, home to Bob the Builder and Barney, from which he made £33m when it was sold to Apax in 2005.

Reader's Digest was founded in 1922 by DeWitt and Lila Bell Wallace. By the early 1960s it had a global circulation of 23 million an issue with 40 international editions.

The title remained the biggest selling consumer magazine in the US until as recently as 2008.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

sticky - 36750 - strange logic; indeed none at all
it is those on benefit who may well choose not to work >16 hours a week, as that is the point at which their benefits get hit
for sure there will some employers who do not require more than 16 hours a week from a given employee, but even then, i fail to see how that means that employers are being subsidised
finally, and of course, a few hours of honest work are a damn sight better than none

Are you sure of that?

Don't think the market is that honest!

Money is no object and spending is Camorons priority Cyners.

How long is a piece of string.

Jail the DWP fraudsters who tried to fix UK unemployment figures!
17
Monday
Feb 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits

Iain Duncan Smith and everybody else associated with this scam should be facing charges and the possibility of imprisonment, rather than re-election next year.
Let’s be honest about this: The government hasn’t messed up by omitting Universal Credit claimants from the official unemployment benefit claimant count – the Department for Work and Pensions messed up by admitting this had happened.

It means we may be looking at a long-term attempt to defraud the electorate. The plan seems clear: When the general election finally takes place next year, Iain Duncan Smith would have claimed that his policies have been a brilliant success in creating jobs and cutting down the number of people claiming benefits.

If people are convinced that the DWP has succeeded in cutting the amount of money being paid out in benefits – the burden on the taxpayer – then they are more likely to vote for the Conservatives. Electoral victory means more money for everybody involved – what’s known as a pecuniary advantage.

But the claim has been made by deception. Obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception is the dictionary definition of criminal fraud.

There can be no doubt that the omission was deliberate. When it comes to fiddling the official figures, the DWP has ‘form’ going back for years. Look at the lies about the benefit cap pushing people into work; the way people on ESA were encouraged to say they were self-employed and claim tax credits – even though this is not permitted and they were racking up a huge overpayment.

Look at the abuses of the sanction system; look at the abuses of the IB/ESA work capability assessment; look at the number of successful appeals against the DWP that have been kept out of official figures.

The claimant count, which provides the headline unemployment figure, is the number of people claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance every month – and has been for many years.

But Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship (if the ship was the Titanic) Universal Credit is up and running – on an extremely limited basis – in certain pilot areas of the country, and people without a job in those areas should be included in the claimant count.

This has not happened. It is possible that this is yet another oversight by Mr Duncan Smith, the government’s top bungler (indeed, he was recently voted favourite cabinet minister by ConservativeHome, so he must be doing something right, and the thing he does most often is make mistakes).

Mr Duncan Smith himself would disagree, however. He has claimed repeatedly and vehemently that his department does not make mistakes with statistics; that everything done on his watch has been justified and that everybody at the DWP is entirely competent.

So we must accept that there was a decision to keep Universal Credit claimants out of the claimant count, meaning that there was a decision to make it seem there are fewer people unemployed than is actually the case.

This seems to be supported by the complaint from the Office for National Statistics, which publishes unemployment figures. The wording runs as follows: “The DWP have not been able to supply ONS with this information in a way that has allowed its inclusion within the Claimant Count [italics mine], resulting in the exclusion of UC claims from this measure.”

This implies that the DWP is perfectly capable of supplying the figures in a manageable way but has deliberately done otherwise.

Further indication that DWP officials knew exactly what they were doing comes from a spokeswoman’s response to this affair, published in the Daily Mirror: “We have been fully transparent in publishing the number of people claiming Universal Credit.

“To ensure consistency the Department released these figures alongside the employment statistics. Universal Credit is both an in- and out-of-work benefit so some claimants may be working.”

In that case, the DWP cannot have been “fully transparent”, can it? Transparency would have required the department to separate UC into “in-work” and “out-of-work” claims, and we have no evidence that this has happened. Until it does, neither the ONS nor the rest of us have any way of knowing how many people are unemployed in the UK.

This has been going on for nearly a year, as Universal Credit was rolled out in its first pilot area in April last year. This means that all unemployment statistics since then have been falsified by the DWP and unemployment figures have been higher than claimed.

The Labour Party has tried to paint this as incompetence, but it is wrong to do so.

This was deliberate, premeditated disinformation.

Now the deception has been uncovered, they are unrepentant.

Perhaps someone should remind them that fraud is still a crime.

sticky - 36756 - you're sure off the rails today old bean ...... go and lie down for a few hours :-)

There aren't that many people on Universal Benefits as the scheme is running as a pilot.

Up to end of October there were only 2,720 people on Universal Benefits and that includes people who are working. The figures involved are tiny and the effect on the numbers of unemployment is minute!

errr Hays care to add these groups on.............

Unemployed people claiming the new Universal Credit are not the only benefit recipients not to be included in official unemployment figures. Those claiming sickness benefits, early retires, some students of working age and jobseeker’s on the government’s controversial Work Programme, are also not included in the ONS statistics, among a few others......................ends


Everyone knows even Cynic the figures are fiddled.

You Hays are the only one on the planet who doesnt.

Sickness benefit claimants, early retirees are not unemployed. Their description tells you that.

sticky - i'll say it for the umpteenth time ...... if the methodology is consistent for (at least) 12 months, then the numbers are not fiddled .... that they may not give the result or even the picture you would like is a different matter entirely

Weve discussed these fiddled figures before.

I was proved right you 2 Tories WRONG.