The French do fund horse racing better than us, you've only got to look at their prize money to see that. But a tote monopoly is never going to fly in a free market economy like the UK.
Totally agree regarding the NHS. In the last few years I've unfortunately had to use their services on a couple of occasions and was treated fantastically well. From the old boys/gals volunteering right through to the consultants, I just don't recognise the image that is portrayed in the media with my experience. One of my abiding memories of my couple of stays though was the staggering lack of respect paid to the NHS staff by some of the patients and their visitors. These people clearly felt they were entitled to a 5 * hotel. What I really don't understand though is why we as a nation cannot train our own nurses, doctors and consultants rather than rely on folk from other countries, with less resources available to them than us, to supply our NHS staff. The NHS needs de-politicising and a 25 year development plan put in place. Top priority should be training up of the next generation of NHS workforce. Would it really be that difficult or costly to identify those career paths which the country desperately needs and provide that training free of charge. In the case of medicine you could add a caveat that anyone benefitting from free education in medicine has to work (paid of course) in the NHS for a defined period after qualifying to pay back that 'debt'. With regard to rail I remember the nationalised days very well and the service was complete and utter ****e. Now it's ****e but very expensive. At least the carriages look like they are shown some cleaning products once or twice a year now.
When I took my mother-in-law to hospital last year I was quite shocked to see the number of notices around the place warning about abuse of staff. Is it really that bad?
It's not that blatantly obvious gaz. Everyone has the same card with a chip in it. When circumstances change you can just enter your card in one of several places (eg Pharmacy) and the chip is updated. When you go to the hospital/doctors etc you have to supply your card. That card goes into a machine and depending on the central records you may or may not be asked for your insurance top up certificate/card. If you don't have one and aren't fully covered you will be billed.
Ron there is a total lack of respect in the UK. People scream at nurses etc but should they dare to respond then its straight to a compensation claim about how offended, hurt, scared, abused intimidated etc etc. Train staff get it asking for a .... erm .... valid ticket to travel. I blame the liberals get the pits reopened just to get the kids down them then theyll know!!!!
Why not Archer? If it works in a free market economy like ours in Oz, then why not in the UK? It is after all just a gambling instrument. Totes are brilliant for racing, they plow huge sums back into the sport. As mentioned before, on any average Saturday in either Sydney or Melbourne, usually 7 out of the 8 races on each card carries about $80,000 in prize money. We're a Liberal led democratic society that tends to bend over backwards to court foreign investment. We've a pretty healthy way of sharing the power so that nothing gets too centralized. Of course this leads to top heavy government, but the folks here have a distrust leadership, so it works well. It costs in bucks to have Federal, State and local governments, but it tends to keep the bastards honest. And of course if you want to pay up big to rip **** from mother Earth, we'll welcome you with open arms. We're free market alright, and the tote is part of it. Piss the bookies off Archer and get on board the tote express. UK racing will grow fat and happy.
Unfortunately Cyclonic, the major UK bookmakers are well established business's with massive lobbying powers. Doubtless they also contribute large sums to each of the major political parties election campaigns. They can also afford to employ the very best corporate lawyers to defend their business's through the courts. Whilst I think a tote monopoly would be good for racing, I'm afraid that horse has already bolted. There's about as much chance of the UK shaking off Hills, Ladbrokes and Corals as there is of Oz ridding itself of the big mining companies. Of course, anything can happen if the political will exists, but its a safe bet it doesn't happen in my lifetime.
I think you will find that what you advocate is actually policy with UKIP – free medical tuition if you pay for it by working for the NHS.
Those of you with extreme socialist tendencies, looking for a home for your vote, read on: Each day on the Daily Politics show, they have been interviewing representatives of some of the miniscule parties standing in the election. On Monday they spoke to the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). They advocate the Nationalisation of all of the utilities, all of the transport infrastructure, all of the banks and pretty much anything else that you can imagine. The have costed their spending commitments completely: they are going to tell the Bank of England to print all the money that they need. The TUSC economic plan even makes Ed Balls look fiscally responsible and the Green Party look moderate. I loved the first question on Jack Dee’s Election Helpdesk on Monday night, where the audience member said that he had been made redundant on 31st March, so as he was now no longer a ‘hardworking family man’ for whom should he vote.
If that is the case QM it just further proves the old adage that a broken clock is right twice a day.
That TUSC representative was Dave Nellist from Coventry. Having lived in the Midlands for over 25 years I'm used to this nutter getting airtime to spout his extreme left wing views. Someone clever once made the point that there isn't much difference between the extreme left and extreme right, just opposite ends of the same horseshoe.
The Green Party are going to prioritise mental health care – presumably for those that vote for their crackpot manifesto. I wonder where the student protest vote will go at the next election? They struck out with the LibDems and now they have joined the tree huggers. Since the IFS said that Labour’s plan to put the top rate of income tax up to 50 per cent would raise nothing, why do the Greens think that putting it up to 60 per cent will raise £2bn? Why do they think that anybody that has £3m is going to just sit still and pay an annual wealth tax rather than go offshore? That is just fantasy economics so even with a Maths A Level, I can see a £25bn black hole in the Green spending plan. Obviously everybody on the Forum will be delighted that, on animal welfare grounds according to Green leader Natalie Bennett, there should be a review into Horse and Greyhound Racing. When asked on the Daily Politics about whether she wanted to ban the Grand National, she professed to not having watched the race. So on 8th May, she will be applying to run the BHA because she used to ride a horse as a child back in Oz.
The Conservatives are now the “Party of Working People” – if you listen to Dave. I thought Labour was the worker’s party but now they are supposedly the economically responsible. Everybody wants to be on the other’s turf. They are going to sell off some more social housing at a discount and use the money to build replacement houses. How does that work? You sell off House A at less than its value then build House B for less? Of course, if you rent privately you cannot buy your house off your landlord but you are subsidising people renting social housing to buy it. The race to build loads more housing is hotting up, with the Tories pitching in at 400,000 houses. If I were a Polish builder, I would get myself over here quick because there are not enough builders. Middle England had better start worrying about negative equity because with all these new houses, prices must drop. Maybe I was not listening closely enough and I missed the bit where Dave explained where the £12bn in cuts were going to be made and which hat the £8bn in NHS funding was going to be pulled from. With inflation stuck at zero, he cannot use that to magic away the debt like Maggie did in the 80s, so the numbers take some believing.
I see that the release of unemployment numbers has reached a 5 year low. One up for the Conservative Party I suppose. It all helps.
There's no problem finding work in the UK cyclonic. But finding a place to live and a job that pays enough to live on is a different matter.
I do not think that the Conservatives are going to get more than five minutes coverage out of the unemployment numbers and they will make no difference on polling day in three weeks. The opposition will just point to stagnant wage levels – people have jobs but it is only zero inflation that means they are not worse off. They may represent something of a problem for the country going forward because there will be a considerable hard core of the 1.84 million remaining on the unemployment register that they will never be able to shift so if business continues to increase the vacancy count more immigrants will be required. That then raises the issue of where they are going to live (fantasy house building numbers again) and what services they are going to require (e.g. schools for their kids). For what it is worth, the unemployment numbers are a persistent lie as there will be a lot of people up and down the country who do not register (e.g. stay-at-home mums with wealthy husbands, people close to retirement age who already have enough N.I. contributions to get a pension). Nobody is bothering to make much noise about the record numbers in employment and just how many of these are immigrants; and how many of the 1.89 million jobs created over the last five years have gone to immigrants. I would have thought that UKIP would have something to say.
I missed the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party doing their manifesto launches on Wednesday because I was driving to Newmarket; however, I do not expect I missed much. Cleggy has a handful of “priority” commitments – note that nobody amongst the minor parties is talking about “red lines” anymore as they realise that if they want to be in a coalition/alliance they will not get much from long lists. Since the LibDems are going to be too small in number for another coalition, they had best get used to the idea that they might be propping up a minority government on a vote-by-vote basis. There appears to have been little unexpected in the UKIP offering, which like every other manifesto is claimed to be fully costed. It was amusing listening to Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show because he had a Polish Prince on the show who has challenged Nigel Farage to a duel. Because of BBC rules and the law, they had been forced to bring in a Beefeater to carry the Prince’s large cavalry sword; and he was also accompanied to some BBC security personal to ensure that the Prince himself did not touch his own sword on BBC premises. Curiously, no word from UKIP about whether their leader was going to take up the challenge! Having missed the “Challengers’ Debate”, the aftermath seems to be that nobody gained much but Miliband had a hard time with the also-rans muddying the waters about any prospect he might have of getting support for a minority Labour regime. Miliband is still banging on about having a head-to-head debate with Cameron as he is desperate to raise his profile and Dave’s refusal allows Ed to keep painting him as undemocratic. There is a supreme irony that the perceived winner from the TV debates has been Nicola Sturgeon, who is not even standing for election and continually contradicts SNP actions at Holyrood in her Westminster aspirations. As it looks like the Jocks have gone so far to the left that even Syriza in Greece look to the right of the SNP and their anti-austerity “progressive” spend, spend, spend agenda, the most likely prospect at the moment is the SNP tail wagging the Labour dog by the end of May. If Ed gets into bed with Nicola, she might put a real smile on his face! The LibDems blocked Conservative attempts at constituency boundary reforms in the Coalition (despite getting their PR referendum in exchange), so the Conservatives will need to get five or six per cent more votes than Labour just to get the same number of seats.
And speaking of "stagnant wage levels" QM, I found the piece in The Guardian quoting Neil Farage's opinions on the minimum wage, quite interesting. He opposes it, tying his thinking to the immigration issue. That'll make struggling workers happy. The bit at the bottom of the article where he'd previously attributed overcrowding on the roads to immigration, because traffic had made him late for an appointment, brought a smile to my face.
What i am suffering from during this election is simply the fact that i cannot find any single person that inspires me to vote for them through optimism, my greatest fear however is that we have the very likely hung parliament and either Farage or Sturgeon get their hands on some leverage within power. The worst scenario is if this Sturgeon character gets anywhere near power as her agenda has no interest in anywhere but Scotland and she views the rest of the UK through eyes only focussed on what it does for Scotland and how near it may move her utopian dream of an Independent Scotland in which everyone lives in the aforementioned utopia due to oil and whiskey revenues. The SNP's agenda was firmly rejected in the recent referendum, supposedly for a generation ( a phrase that suited at the time) but these SNP politicians are not straight (are any) and they will seek another and another until getting the result they wish, and so you can bet should Milliband rely on their support the price will be steep. We must always remember this was a party which openly resorted to blackmail by saying if they were not allowed to use sterling and thus have their financial institutions underwritten they would renege on a debt which was in part theirs. If a friend treated us in this way we would not forget it and so we should not forget that little number they tried to pull. Whoever is in Govt next needs work on a new replacement for Trident which has nothing to do with Scotland so that their bargaining chip is taken away, couple this with a hopefully continued lower oil price and renewable energy sources being developed and the SNP will find themselves without a leg to stand on with regard their agenda, at which point they will crawl away again. I remember Sturgeon before she had the make over and she looked very different a very out of her depth, I think Alex Salmond pulls the strings still and that is a man who hates the English basically and so if allowed to weald you can bet it will not be in interest of the UK as a whole.
