General Election

Any particular reason? Only I voted SNP at the last Scottish elections in 2011, but having had to put up with the little Jimmy Krankie lookalike since Salmond stepped down is making it impossible for me to even consider it now or in next year's Scottish elections, she's been carrying on as though 45% is more than 55% since the referendum.

 

just like Allam views the ASI - **** our own lets subsidise the visitors

 

Clearly you don't know exactly what social workers do, not talking about management here.

Over the last 5 years the average case numbers for each social worker has increased by more that 150%

Social workers do a very good & important job & are not only involved in child protection, there are vulnerable adults as well as senior citizens. Much of the paperwork is a result of government interference like the NHS....where nurses are no longer nurses, they spend half their time completing paperwork which in the past would have been done by admin staff on the wards who have now been removed .... social work departments also used to have admin staff, but budget cuts mean they have gone, reducing the time the staff have to do their real jobs & that's before the increased caseloads

 

If you read it properly those are the net figures

 

That's Tory cutbacks for you
Get used to it if they get back in

 

Get used to worse....by their own claims only 40% of the necessary cuts have been made so far

 

Exactly our house is £200 a month worse off already due to funding cutbacks
I expect a lot more if they get in now

 

My god not the paperwork excuses, in the good old days before proper procedures when doctors and nurses and social workers teachers were all allowed to do their jobs we gave *****s like Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris free reign!

 

W

Well said.
What some on here don't realise is that it's already stretched to breaking point and another 60% will decimate it.
But hay oh as long as pricks like Lewis Hamilton , Philip Green and the likes can live tax free life's while someone on £20,000 per year as to pay their dues let's have this lot back in shall we

 

An earthquake is cause by a sudden and rapid release of energy along a geological fault.

Without getting into the geology of Oklahoma (and the areas which are undergoing fracking) it's an area which would be prone to such events during fracking, it was a bad choice to frack there, simple as that.

The UK has completely different geology, fracking alone will not cause any significant earthquakes, so strategic planning of fracking sites, taking into the regional and local geology would be enough to reduce this risk.

There are hundreds of sites in the UK that meet this criteria.

 

That may well be true however sales for disability equipment, which is probably 99% government/nhs funded, have been on a massive rise since this Tory government came in and are now higher than ever before.

There are there benefits to them being here as well. How many of you enjoy the luxury of having your car hand washed/waxed/polished for relatively little whilst you go out and do the shopping? They run a lot of these sort of little operations that make our lives easier.

On the flip side, I have a mate who's a supervisor at a huge company. The workers there fought long and hard to get and keep a lunch break, the Eastern Europeans don't care about a lunch break and carry on working, which has seen a load of british workers laid off and replaced with an influx of Eastern Europeans working an hour less instead.

There's positives and negatives big and small on each side of every topic.

 

Proof that as a nation we live beyond our means.

What's the other option ? Spend more and keep adding to the overall debt and hope that interest rates never rise above 5% again?

Currently the debt is around £1.4tr and as a country we pay around 4% on our gilts which historically is very low. It's already costing over £50b to fund the debt.
If that rises to £1.8tr for example and we end up paying 6-7% interest then that will be over £100b in interest payments every year.

That's around half of what we spend on the NHS. No, the deficit and overall debt has to be a priority.

However, it needn't all be spending cuts. We could raise taxes, corporation tax being one example or maybe a land tax.

The paradox is of course, the one party that sees reducing the debt as a priority has the support of the very people that unfortunately see taxes as a cost for only the 'little people'. We have incredible wealth in this country and only a small % of that would be enough to pay off the debt instantly. But you try and get those ****ers to part with their wealth.....

 

The entire deficit & debt could be wiped out in as little as 5 years if just one EU suggested policy were introduced

The EU would like to see a tiny % tax on global financial transactions (ie those through the stock markets)....a tax on these transactions of 0.5% would raise enough revenue over 10 years to completely eliminate the debt & allow a general rate of taxation of around 10%

If this tax were to be 1% then the debt & deficit could be gone over the term of the next government & in 10 years there would be no need for anyone to pay tax on under £20k a year

The problem is that the people who would be hit hardest are those who bankroll most of the right wing parties globally

 

There's two ways of looking at it, I see it more about keeping these people here, living and spending their money in the UK. I'm sure they put more into the countries economy whilst they live here paying a lower percentage in tax than they would living in Monaco.

 

Well if we're making lists - Labour: The Blair/Brown years

Massive national debt

Huge public sector pension deficit

Gold sold at record lows

Unemployment rising

Years of uncontrolled immigration leading to an overloading of schools, hospitals, public services in general

Over 100 different tax rises - the longest national tax code in the world

Number of pensioners living in poverty up by 100,000

The lowest level of social mobility in the developed world

Hospital infection rates through the roof

Falling dramatically in the rankings concerning education in maths and literacy, and world competitiveness

Small business' taxes going up and up

Boom and bust abolished (ARF!)

Post offices closed even if profitable

Dodgy dossiers and the Iraq war

How much information and personal details went ‘missing’

Mandleson and Campbell

Introduction of student fees

Gave away the EU rebate

Decline in manufacturing

Slowest growth for 50 years

Longest recession since the war

etc. etc. etc. etc.

 

and what's that ?

 

Okay....immigrants don't just come from poor countries, anybody who relocates here from any country is an immigrant. All the students studying medicine at our universities, all the potential lawyers, teachers, scientists are wasting our money because....what they aren't British? Or do they not count either? What about American immigrants?

So let me get this straight, when the working class man gets annoyed at immigrants, they aren't getting annoyed at all immigrants. So in fact, immigrants would be the wrong word to use. What you mean is, people who move here for a better quality of life and to scrounge our benefits? Well yeah, obviously we don't like those people. But then, I don't much care for British people who do it either.

Furthermore, I have nothing against the Romanian/Kosovan people at the car-washes, shows how business savvy they are. How many British run hand car wash businesses were there in Hull before they started? If a working class person can't get a job in a factory because some bloke from Poland took his job, then they don't deserve the job. For ****s sake, you need NO qualifications to do that kind of work, so if you can't get a job that requires no qualifications and your response is "bloody immigrants took all our jobs", then you're wrong. They just took all the **** jobs that required no qualifications or aspirations to undertake. I'm not going to sweat it if Don from the Estates can't get a low paying job because he got beaten in the interview by Zlatan from Moldova. Tough ****, work on your interview technique, get some qualifications behind you and make yourself a more attractive prospect for employers.

What's that? It's cheaper to pay foreigners to do the work of an Englishman? Let me just check the rules employment law.....

It's just ****ing excuses for lazy people who can't get even the ****est of jobs.

 

I don't disagree with that at all.

In fact it would also stabilise exchange rates and stock markets. A lot of these algorithmic programs buy and sell every second for a tiny % profit. A financial tax
of 0.5% would make those sorts of trades impossible.

 

Probably not, but as that's just redirected funds from elsewhere in order to be headline grabbing I wouldn't get too worked up about it. It's a bit like the falseness of "free" university places. When it comes to paying "loans" after uni, unless we're really high fliers we end up paying back £13,500 more than English students that earn the same wages throughout their life. That figure is going to get bigger due to the payment levels being adjusted by inflation.

*assuming starting salary is £21-35k rising with inflation so that both are making payments but neither will "pay it off" in full before it gets wiped.

 

UKIP for me

 

You can't state that as a fact.

There's simply not enough known about how shale gas /oil extraction would affect the British sub terrain, to make any sort of informed comment.

However, what we do know is how it's affected other areas of the globe and the environments that surround the activity, both during and post extraction. The idea that it can be done without significant negative impact on an island as small as ours is absolutely mad.