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.

The benefit debate is a diversion – that’s why it will go on and on
18
Tuesday
Feb 2014

How many of you tuned into the last episode of Benefits Street on Channel 4, and stayed on for the debate that followed?

Quite a few, I reckon.

They were worth watching, but the feeling that was left with this viewer (and I’ve been reviewing television for 20 years or more) is that we are talking ourselves around in circles – led by politicians with a vested interest in perpetuating the discussion.

They don’t want a solution. They want us to keep going over the same ground – which they have laid out for us with very specific limits – and they want to concentrate our anger about this issue so that we blame, not the people responsible – the tax dodgers who put money into tax havens that could be invested in British industry, the private landlords and low-paying bosses who are subsidised by the benefit system and the bankers who caused the economic crisis a few years ago – but the people who have been forced onto benefits through no fault of their own and are being persecuted for it by a punitive system that penalises them for failing to find jobs that really do not exist.

Look at the way David Cameron leapt forward with fistfuls of cash to pay for flood relief when Tory heartlands were affected, saying that money was no object and Britain is a rich country. We’re rich enough to look after the playing fields of Eton, but not our poorest citizens, according to his mentality. Property is worth more to him than people.

Why? Because the people who send their children to Eton are the people Cameron hopes will elect him (he can’t be re-elected; he didn’t win the 2010 election) in 2015. The unemployed are less likely to vote for him – in fact they are less likely to vote at all. It seems there is something about being rejected by society that instils a sense of listlessness and despair in the human psyche. People ask themselves: Why bother?

There are solutions, but it is cause for concern that we are not hearing about them from our MPs and politicians. Journalist Owen Jones came out with the clearest plan during the debate on Channel 4 last night, and it is well worth quoting in full.

He said: “Firstly let’s make it clear – work does not pay in this country. We hear that as a mantra, when most people in poverty get up in the morning and earn that poverty.

“We’re talking about people milking the system. Let’s talk about the low-paying bosses who are being subsidised with in-work benefits because, in the seventh-richest country on Earth, they won’t pay.

“If we’re talking about getting people into jobs I actually think we need to talk about solutions here. One in six workers in the last two years have claimed Jobseekers’ Allowance at some point; that’s a lack of security.

“What we need firstly is a massive house-building programme that would reduce the amount spent on Housing Benefit which, by the way, is not going into the pockets of these tenants – it’s lining the pockets of private landlords charging rip-off rents. If we build housing, it would create jobs and we would stimulate the economy as well.

“It goes the same with the need for an industrial strategy because what successive governments have done, and it started in the eighties, is let the secure jobs go to rot, if you like. Now, other countries like Germany, what they’ve done is had an industrial strategy. Instead of saying, ‘Hands off, let the market decide,’ they’ve said, ‘Actually we want to create jobs in renewable energy.’ Now we’ve just seen the floods; we’re going to have a lot more extreme weather, so let’s have an industrial strategy to go and create renewable energy jobs, giving people secure, dignified jobs, taking on the environmental crisis.

“These are solutions… We’ve got to change the debate we have at the moment where the real villains of the piece, like the tax dodgers who get away with not paying £25 billion a year in tax, like the private landlords and the low-paying bosses milking our welfare state, like the bankers who caused the economic disaster – they get away with it, but all we ever hear about is kicking people at the bottom.”

Absolutely right. And that’s all we’ll hear about it for the foreseeable future, as well. We won’t hear about returning to a full-employment society (which is perfectly possible), because that means the greedy rich will have less money for themselves in the short term.

In the long term, ensuring that there are properly-paid jobs for the most people, so they do not have to claim benefits, means that there is more money moving around the economy – and money makes money. The parasites – who are making a fortune unsustainably by working people hard and paying them poverty rations – would be just as rich in the long run, but they cannot bear to consider the possibility.

One has to consider whether they want to force people into poverty, just to make their own wealth seem more remarkable - the poverty trap as ego-trip, if you like.

But we won’t hear about that because it is politically inflammatory. Far better to set the lower classes against each other, laying blame on each other for problems that are caused by different people entirely – and laugh all the way to the offshore bank.

If I had to describe Britain to a foreigner, I would ask them to imagine a person being robbed outside a public lavatory, by the mayor of his town, while council workers started demolishing the building; the rich are destroying our public services and mugging us at the same time.

Very soon, the same people who are mugging you will be asking for your vote…

… while blaming you for problems they have done nothing to solve.

usual garbage

Anyone can calculate the CPI as it is from published prices. Therefore NOT possible to fake it.

I think the Labour party when they get in next year will make firstly the Mansion tax their priority closely followed by a tax on public schools.

GF,

Did you write Post 36801 ?

If not where did you gather it from?

I sums up much of what is happening?

apart from a sop to the left, what on earth would be the point of taxing public schools?
yes - easy peasy; let's bankrupt them in one easy move
what a totally preposterous idea that would barely raise 2 beans

that many of them provide a top class education would of course be of no interest at all to the iconoclastic left who would rather see everything dumbed down

further, many if not most public schools are registered charities, and in those cases, they most assuredly have to pass stringent checks and proof of benefit to more than just the few to continue to hold that status

Wage inflation figures fiddled negative not positive.

Total figure therefore fiddled.

Fred you have e-mail.

Crime figures fiddled. We had a whistle blower on TV last week.

Crime going up not down.

Nobody reports it now that the police are a recovery service like National Breakdown.

In most cases dont even bother coming out just give a crime number for insurance company.

Debt and deficit figures fiddled.

Anyone who is a full bag of crisps knows that.

What a mess this country is in.

Tories made a right bollox up.

sticky - you must have forgotten your medication this morning .... get a grip old chap!

I only read 2% of the posts on this thread.

That includes yours.

Call me MR 2%

I think labour will put an extra tax on familys second cars.

And about time too.

Interest rate hike coming in November see this........

Bloomberg TV ‏@BloombergTV 1m
BREAKING: U.S. February Empire State Factory Index at 4.5 after 12.5

GF.

Received e-mail.

Thank you!

No probs Fred.

have you got a dose of fossy-gastroentertitis this morning?
i don't ever recollect you spouting quite so much nonsense in just a single morning before

Just think it could be WORSE, instead of MR 5% I could have called you MR 5 INCH

lol lol lol ll lol lol lol lol

gf is going at a hundred miles an hour this morning. It reminds me of a friend who was a manic depressive (now called bipolar) when he hadn't taken his Lithium Carbonate.

Just thinking the Armed Forces figures are fiddled aswel.

Basicaly run by the TAs these days. 2 aircraft carriers with no planes on them, complete assholic shambles.