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.

MailOnline - news,politics.. Saturday, Dec 28 2013 3AM

"

Denis Skinner ‏@BolsoverBeast 35s
What they don't tell you, one Iain Duncan-Smith does more damage to our well being and economy than a bus load of Bulgarians and Romanians.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2013/dec/30/ben-jennings-plans-charge-health-tourism

goldfinger

You have finally found a poll that Edd Ball's comes top in , i know its very rare but don't go on posting it every day.

Dennis Skinner is a clown , he as no answer's to today's problems just ranting at PMQ a class war outdated diatribe and his joke's are not has good as William Hague's

Alders think again.....LOOK HERE....... just out on twitter..........

Only one in 50 says economic recovery is making things better as living standards crisis continues
Dec 31, 2013 00:00 By Mark Ellis

According to a YouGov poll, just one in eight expect their pay to keep up with living costs and only one in five reckon their living standards will actually rise in 2014

George Osborne: Some services have been 'savagely hit' by the Chancellor's austerity cuts

Britain's skewed economic recovery has left hardly any ordinary workers better off.

In a new blow to the Tory-led Coalition, a YouGov poll shows most expect the living standards crisis to continue – with just one in 50 saying things are getting better.

Just one in eight expect their pay to keep up with living costs and only one in five reckon their living standards will actually rise in 2014.

More than half want services savagely hit by Chancellor Osborne’s “austerity” cuts restored as the economy grows.

Just 29% quizzed in the survey for the TUC wanted cutbacks retained as the economy grew.

In another key finding, the poll showed 58% of the 1,666 quizzed “expect gains of a recovery to go mainly to the types of people and parts of the country already doing well”.

The TUC blames the lack of a “feel-good factor” on the Government’s failure to deliver a growth strategy based on rebalancing the economy.

It warns too many of the new jobs being created combine the “three lows” - low skill, low productivity and low pay.

Frances O'Grady
Poll: Frances O'Grady says the findings are bad news for the Government

Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary, said that the big political question in 2014 will be “whose growth?” and it reflects the big divide about the Britain of the future.

She explained: “Our poll is bad news for the Government . Voters do not expect it to spread the benefits of recovery fairly. Above all they do not share the Chancellor’s ambition to permanently shrink the state.

“By more than two to one they want services restored when the economy grows. Voters accepted austerity but now they are realising that what they thought were unpleasant side-effects, the Chancellor sees as a cure.

“Recovery seems to mean food banks, zero hours and pay cuts for the many; tax cuts and pay growth for the few at the top.”

She says we could go back to pre-crash times of housing bubbles, overmighty banks and inequality or enjoy a future of “high-skill, high-pay, high-productivity” that “shares prosperity.”

In a new blow to the Tory-led Coalition, a YouGov poll shows most expect the living standards crisis to continue – with just one in 50 saying things are getting better.


Hays and Alders in DENIAL.

ohhhhhhhhhhh dear.

Hays,

Post 34742

"A poll has revealed Britons would rather share their Christmas Day with David Cameron than Ed Miliband."


Quite possible, that 4 out of the 5 who would like to share Christmas Day with Wavey Dave would have seen it as a possibility to poison him!

aldo - no, your eyes do not deceive you ......

fossy continues to post his usual repetitive ad nauseam nonsenses and of course - why on earth would you expect otherwise? - refuses to answer questions directed at him, specifically about francois hollande and the efficacy or otherwise of his left-socialist policies

sticky - survey for the TUC rather diminishes the credibility of the result .... imagine how TUC would have reacted had the survey concluded that the austerity measures were exactly what the country needed!

that said, it comes as no surprise that the overall feeling (forget the %) is that living standards are not improving ..... it is inevitable that this aspect will lag behind industrial (economic) recovery

honours list
i'm wrily amused that there has been no rant from the usual suspects about those so honoured and the elitist air surrounding them

Cyners what on earth are you talking about ?, its a YOUGOV poll.

The TUC have commented on it.

Obviously the Tories darent go near it.

unequivocally the survey was instructed and sponsored by TUC - it states so in black and white (well black anyway) - so my observation remains valid

Of course people don't see any improvement in their living standards. That follows improvements in living standards. You have to wait till later in 2014.

The awkward truth about funding the NHS

It doesn’t bode well if we can’t even charge foreign visitors when they go to see our GPs


By Philip Johnston

7:46PM GMT 30 Dec 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/nhs/10542622/The-awkward-truth-about-funding-the-NHS.html



For the first time, foreign visitors using A&E services are to be charged for doing so – but they will still be able to visit GPs’ surgeries for nothing. This is, apparently, a bold political decision. But why do we consider it so contentious to ask people who have made little or no contribution to general taxation to pay to use the NHS? It isn’t controversial in any other country. Only in the UK, where we are wedded to the notion of health care free at the point of delivery, is this such a toxic issue.


Yet the truth – although you will not hear many politicians say it – is that this concept was watered down long ago, with the introduction of prescription and dental charges. Moreover, foreign visitors (apart from those from the EU, where there are reciprocal arrangements) are meant to be charged in advance for hospital treatments. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that many are never pursued for the costs – but why on earth not, since most of them will have travel insurance (or ought to have as a condition of entry)?


In fact, the Government should not have stopped at A&E consultation fees. Ministers should have gone the whole hog, and charged foreigners for GP visits, too. The reason they haven’t is that they do not want to open up the much bigger question: should we all start to pay to see the doctor in his surgery or when we go to hospital with a broken ankle?


It is at this point that many people have an apoplexy. Haven’t we already paid through our taxes and National Insurance? It is one thing to ask foreigners to cough up; but why should those of us who live here and hand over a third or more of our income to the Treasury have to make a further contribution?


We are, in other words, still in thrall to the founding principle of the NHS as an almost entirely taxpayer-funded service for which no one is charged when they use it. But while this may have seemed magnificently enlightened in 1948, it is unrealistic today. It has also made a sensible debate about the future of the NHS impossible.


Yesterday, Earl Howe, the health minister, made the now ritualistic genuflection before the great NHS totem when he announced the new charging plan, whose details have yet to be worked out. “Having a universal health service free at the point of use rightly makes us the envy of the world,” he said. “But we must make sure the system is fair to the hard-working British taxpayers who fund it.”

While the “envy of the world” mantra might have been true once, it isn’t any longer. Yet we cleave to a sepia-tinted image of the NHS that should have been dispelled long ago – certainly by recent tales of sub-standard geriatric care and the ongoing crisis in out-of-hours provision.

One of the fundamental assumptions that underpinned the introduction of universal care in the Forties was that demand for medical treatment would diminish as the nation’s health improved. In fact, the opposite has happened. Increasing life expectancy means more people live to an age where they contract diseases that are expensive to treat. We are also less predisposed to queueing and rationing than we used to be.

In a consumerist age, people compare their health care with other services, and expect to have the same choice and speed of delivery. Or at least they compare it in every way but one – the cost.

Many people believe they pay for their medical bills through their National Insurance contributions. But this is not the case, even though revenues from the additional one per cent on NICs introduced by Labour 10 years ago do go to the NHS. The bulk of the money comes from general taxation – and while annual expenditure has almost doubled since 1999, we still spend less than in France or Germany, where mixed funding systems harness the strengths of public and private sectors.

If we want to keep pace, we will either have to pay more in taxes, or find the cash elsewhere – because while the NHS may be free at the point of service, it isn’t free full stop. A report earlier this year from the King’s Fund, the health think tank, predicted that if NHS spending grows at the same rate as over the past half-century, it will take up 20 per cent of GDP by 2050. In reality, it will grow even faster than that. A bigger population (in every way) means more people will be using the NHS – and they will all consider they are entitled to expensive treatments, most of which haven’t even been invented yet. These will have to be paid for.

Yet while we have had a succession of structural reforms and efficiency drives in recent years, the basic question of how the NHS should be funded has become a political no-go area. Relying on the economic recovery to provide the revenues is misguided: an ageing population means there are fewer taxpayers as a proportion of the total, and a majority now take more out of the system than they put in.

Given these realities, some form of charging is inevitable. Yet even to hint at this is to risk ostracism. When the think tank Reform made some relatively modest proposals for NHS fees a few weeks ago, there was a furious response from people who otherwise have no answer to the problems coming down the track.

Reform’s report pointed out that most OECD countries require their own nationals to pay for basic GP visits or even for elements of secondary care, backed by personal insurance. If we won’t even make foreign visitors pay to visit the GP, then we have serious trouble ahead.

Dave Camoron ‏@EtonOldBoys 4m
Heathrow Airport is full of Brits flying out to Romania and Bulgaria to start new lives with better prospects and pay, than in the UK

Cyners OK YOUGOV have been asked to survey certain questions but the TUC dont chose the pollsters neither do YOUGOV fiddle the books like so many organisations affiliated to the tories.

And by the way what is wrong with the questions asked.

Is it the results you are sore with.

probably nothing, and i merely made an observation rather than a major political issue as someone like fossy would have made
you'll note that i also made a supplementary observation re standards of living

by the way, there's no need for you to start making very silly and unsubstantiated political accusations about poll rigging

Dave Camoron ‏@EtonOldBoys 4m
Breaking News Portland......... The Old Mulberry Harbours used last in WWII are full of Brits Escaping the Tories to live in Bulgaria