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.

of course it does .... it's the silly season and it's fun copy for the papers

Passports have always been a problem. There used to be passport crises every year. You had to allow at least 6 weeks. One of the causes is that expats cannot get their passports locally in their own countries now because of the chip system. They have to apply to UK. It is a temporary fuss. It is just a lack of other stories that makes the papers interested.

6 weeks Hays, 6 weeks is nothing at the moment.

You need to catch up.

Its due to government austerity cuts that werent necessary.

stop rattling sticky and go out and enjoy the sunshine :-)

Food bank charity told to stop criticising benefit system or face shut-down – by the government 12/06/2014.....



What would you do in that situation?

It seems that food bank charity The Trussell Trust has been making too many waves around the Conservative-led Coalition government’s policies regarding benefits, social security and welfare.

Readers may recall how the charity warned that Coalition policies had created a need for a huge expansion in the number of food banks across the UK. The Tories countered this by accusing the trust of “misleading and emotionally manipulative publicity-seeking”, and also of “aggressively marketing [its] services”.

After this failed to make a dent in public opinion, the Daily Mail tried to discredit the trust by claiming it was handing out food parcels without checking whether the people claiming them were bona fide.

But it turned out that the paper’s claim of “inadequate checks on who claims the vouchers, after a reporter obtained three days’ worth of food simply by telling staff at a Citizens Advice Bureau – without any proof – that he was unemployed” was not true. The reporter in fact committed fraud by telling a string of lies in order to falsely claim his food parcel in a flagrant abuse of the system.

The public response was immediate – donations to the Trussell Trust’s fundraising appeal shot through the roof.

Now the government has tried a different tack: blackmail. Instead of trying to justify the government’s position or undermine that taken by the trust in public, it has been revealed that “someone in power” told trust bosses that the government “might try to shut you down” if the trust continued to cause it embarrassment.

The Trussell Trust is in a fairly robust position with regard to government interference; a 2005 decision by the charity’s trustees to avoid seeking government funding means it is in a better position to resist pressure.

But the trust has to consider the worst-case scenario. If the government did manage to shut it down, hundreds of thousands of people would starve.

That is the real threat posed by the Conservative-led government. Shutting down the Trussell Trust won’t hurt anybody who runs the charity or volunteers for it.

But it could kill food bank users across the country.

It is exactly the kind of covert, backstabbing move we have come to expect from the likes of Iain Duncan Smith.

Oh, come on! You knew RTU (it means Returned To Unit and is our tribute to his Army career) would figure in this article somewhere.

According to Trussell chair Chris Mould, he received a phone call from “someone” in the office of the Secretary-in-a-State about Work and Pensions, back in 2011. He said it was “basically to tell me that the boss was very angry with us because we were publicising the concerns we have over the rising number of people who were struggling as a consequence of delays and inefficiences in the benefits system”.

Unfortunately – for sly abusers like Duncan Smith – the kind of threats recorded above are really only useful when they are kept secret. The idea is always to present the victim with a double-bind – in this case, not only would food bank users suffer, but the Trussell Trust would get the blame for having withdrawn the service (whether voluntarily or not).

Now that we all know the government itself is putting the screws on – and is doing so in retaliation against the Trussell Trust’s entirely legitimate attempts to raise awareness of government policies’ disastrous effects – it would be electoral suicide.

That being said, watch Iain Duncan Smith on Question Time today.

He’s probably stupid enough to go through with it anyway.

I can't say I care if it is sixth months. I have a full set of passports. It is a storm in a teacup. Let them have a holiday in the UK.

You stop trying to bury bad news Manuel.

HEY.....SMWH going very well again today.

The Trussel trust have just generated demand.

well done sticks .... i've actually been reducing exposure for i still think a big sneeze from wall street is on the cards, or at least i quite hope so :-)

Not too sure about that Cyners although IRAQ could make things difficult.

Yanks now seem to be rather upbeat compared to 6 weeks back.

Hays stop talkin -hite thats been proved to be totaly wrong even 'get on yer bike' Tebbit as admitted it and apologised.

true, but market has been charging ahead almost without pause
correction or consolidation is surely warranted

Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have taken full control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk as the army flees before an Islamist offensive nearby.

"The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga," Kurdish spokesman Jabbar Yawar told Reuters. "No Iraq army remains in Kirkuk now."

Number Of Employment Support Allowance Claims On The Rise – Is Iain Duncan Smith Making Us Sick?

Posted on June 11, 2014 by johnny void | 23 Comments

IDS-I-dont-care-whos-diedThe total number of claimants claiming out of work sickness or disability benefits rose by 15,000 between March and April provisional DWP statistics report.

2.485 million people are were claiming Employment Support Allowance or Incapacity Benefit in April, representing a steady rise of 1.2% since November 2013. This comes despite the horrific Atos regime which has seen hundreds of thousands of claimants being stripped of benefits after being assessed as ‘fit for work’. The number of people on out of work sickness benefits should be plummeting, and it was until just over a year ago.

It is hardly surprising that people are still becoming ill or disabled despite the magical Atos assessments. The UK did not have significantly more people on out of work sickness or disability benefits than other comparable countries even before the despised Work Capability Assessment began. It is unusual however that the number of people unable to work for health reasons should be rising at a time when unemployment is allegedly falling.

There is growing evidence that Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms are damaging people’s health. Some parts of the UK have reported soaring malnutrition linked to benefit cuts. A report produced by Citizen’s Advice last year told of people being unable to meet special dietary needs due to sanctions or having to beg or go through bins to find food. Homelessness charities have said that sanctions are causing people to lose their homes. And a damning report by the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland claimed that 35% of psychiatrists said at least one of their patients had been admitted to hospital as a consequence of the stress of Atos assessments.

Using hunger and homelessness as a weapon against benefit claimants will not incentivise people to find work, it will demolish lives. Forcing people with mental health conditions into stressful and demeaning assessments under the threat of destitution will not magically cure them of their condition – in many cases it will make it worse. Iain Duncan Smith really is making us sick, and with more workfare and sanctions on the way then things are only going to get worse.

The latest ESA figures can be downloaded from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-summaries-2014

So much for reducing benefits.

Another Government Department failing the public.

“Without change, Labour is choosing to lose.” That is the damning verdict of the Fabian Society in a wide-ranging intervention attacking Ed Miliband’s leadership this morning. Their analysis trailed in this week’s New Statesman is stinging in its criticism of the Labour leader. They warn: “it’s clear that Labour needs to reverse its trajectory, particularly as improvements in the economy will boost Tory polls in 2015″, that Labour is in danger of “abandoning blue-collar Britons and becoming a party of the urban middle class alone”, asking “what is the point of a social-democratic party that loses its working-class soul?” The study also find that Labour is “haemorrhaging” support to UKIP, and that the party is on course to lose six seats to Farage:

“Ukip’s results in the 2014 local and European elections demonstrate the importance of blue-collar voters for Labour. These are the voters it has been haemorrhaging for over a decade; those who once sat at home on election day and are now coming out to vote Ukip.”

The numbers say it all:

Labour will win significantly less than half of its 106 target seats
They will lose at least nine currently Labour-held seats
They are on course to win only 58 seats from the Tories and LibDems, ten short of the 68 they need for a majority

RUBBISH........

LATEST UNS PROJECTION

30 SEAT LABOUR OVERALL MAJORITY.

A year to go!!!!

so why do you keep posting counter-polls then?