This type of thing does the Tories no favours, at all. By Ben Glaze MINISTERS have blown nearly £103,000 of taxpayers’ money challenging a court’s Bedroom Tax ruling. Iain Duncan Smith, as Work and Pensions Secretary, spent £50,626 fighting a Court of Appeal decision that the tax should not apply to a domestic violence victim and carers for a disabled teenager. His successor, Stephen Crabb, has forked out £52,000 more on the battle in the Supreme Court. The Appeal Court ruled that neither Paul and Sue Rutherford – who need an extra room for carers looking after their disabled grandson – nor a domestic violence victim with a police-built panic room should have to pay the tax. Shadow Work Secretary Owen Smith urged Mr Crabb to “quickly bring an end to the Bedroom Tax”.
Can't have the 'ordinary man' setting precedents against unfair taxes and winning, whatever next, oh we already know.. it would lead to one nation policies..
Just watching an old Mock the Week, from pre 2010 General Election times. They showed an official Tory poster with David Cameron saying:- "We can't go on like this. I'll cut the deficit not the NHS". Didn't know Dave did irony. With local elections coming up, surely even Corbyn can take advantage of this type of own goal?
Erm, I wouldn't bank on it. Incidentally, I noted the other day that it was reported that the Liberal Democrats are the best performing party on local council elections since the establishment of a Conservative majority in Westminster.
This is the problem. You only see black and white. Everybody in the country is entitled to Social housing. The only means testing is on how high up the list you are in terms of priority. So the poor and needy are first in the queue and a Millionaire would be right at the back of the queue, however they do still have the right. Thatcher didn't 'sell off social housing'. That is a very simplistic way of looking at things. She tried to enable poorer people to own their own home. To aspire to be on the property ladder. Houses not being built/replace was a problem yes but the actual right to buy was a pretty good idea. Labour then did not build many houses at all because they wanted house prices boosting up. The Tories now whilst not achieving the amounts of houses necessary are building more houses than for many decades. The problem here is that people are attacking the nasty Tories when Labour are just as bad. Protecting worker's rights? Labour want to remain in the EU. Being in the EU has destroyed a lot of worker's rights because employers ditched their UK workers to utilise the cheaper migrants that do not enforce their worker's rights. Its all very well having laws and procedures but if a factory wants 20 workers to work double shifts they will not ask the worker. They will tell the agency that is what will happen and the agency will say to the worker if you aren't going to do it then we won't give you the job. They got rid of the British workers because of worker's rights in the first place. Housing. Do you really think that you can use social housing as temporary accommodation and means test it? That would be unworkable and even if it was it would destroy aspiration. Why aspire to improve yourself and work your way up the ladder when it will mean you end up having to move house because someone says you can afford to. It is hard enough to get people to work as it is when they are getting so much in benefits. Whilst in reality it is subsidised housing because it is cheaper to rent than the market value you should ask why is that? Is it because the market value is too high or that council rents are too low? Then ask why is market value too high? The reason for that is the buy to let boom which has changed the demand for houses in this country beyond recognition. When you are getting an immigration net of 300,000+ a year then they are virtually all renters. There has been a non stop supply of new renters for the market since the early 2000s and thus it is a win win for those that can afford to buy. Traditional first home areas like terraced areas are now nearly all rental. First time buyers cannot compete with buy to let because buy to let have more money and more access to money. They can outbid the first time buyer who is at the limit of borrowing already and therefore the buy to let wins and the first time buyer has to stay in the rental sector and so the vicious circle goes on. What the 'nasty' Tories tried to do was to make it less attractive for the buy to let market however that has backfired because the large property portfolios are just buying up even more now. The rich are still getting richer on the property merry go round. Then you have the unions. What do the unions achieve for the poor worker? At the moment the unions only fight for well paid professions like teaching and doctors. They shout a lot and stir up anger just to justify being a paid union worker and as you say earn £100k (or more.) It is a long way past the days of union reps and shop stewards looking after fellow workers. These days it is just another business making money out of the very people they are representing. As bad as all the campaign groups that make money out of protesting or stirring the pot up. Telling people they should be offended by something even though those people had never even thought about it before they were told they should be offended. The NHS will be privatised if we stay in the EU because they are trundling along with their TTIP which will enforce the NHS to be put out to tender. It will be illegal not to and you could even see state education fall into this as well. All these naive people warbling on about the lovely EU and seconds later shouting that the Tories would privatise the NHS. Read up on TTIP. It will in effect remove the restrictions in the banking sector and put it back in the hands of the bankers. The EU lost it's plan to relax data security 4 years ago and as the EU do they don't give in. They repackage it and here it is again now as part of TTIP. That will mean that information about you is more accessible by others yet information about medical research will be less accessible to you. TTIP in itself will either mean workers rights will have to be reduced in Europe because the US has much less worker's and trade unions rights. The EU has already admitted that it is very likely that many jobs will be off to the US because of that. TTIP will also be very bad for governments because in effect any business can sue the government for loss of profits. That means that virtually all governments will not be able to make any changes at all because if they affect anyone's profits they will be sued. It is in effect a back door way for the EU to wipe out the power of member state governments. So you should think very carefully about just how nasty the 'nasty party' are because around the corner we have the EU backed by Labour which will only seek to look after a much worse gravy train even than the Tories are on. Someone in a post talked about Tories making decisions and being employers and business owners and rich people. Are people still living in the past thinking the Labour party are working class 'poor people' like us? They are just as rich as the party opposite. Corbyn like most modern socialist is a rich boy, privately educated and being brought up in a manor house owned by his parents. He is paid by the taxpayer £110k a year and owns his house in Islington. They are all the same Chuka Umunna, Miliband, Blair, Burnham, Abbott. The lot of them. They love people shouting the Tories down as a bunch of toffs and rich kids while nobody seems to mind the Socialists sending their kids to private school and voting for the EU that will destroy the poor in this country. I am poor. Work is very hard to get in the Midlands because employers don't want British workers. I voted Tory and a huge amount of poor people I know did the same because at the moment the middle earning lefties seem quite oblivious to how we at the bottom have been affected by EU membership and in particular the free movement of Labour. Maybe down South this isn't a problem. Maybe you are still loving getting cheaper food and the continental lifestyle. Spare a thought for those of us up here that used to make, pack and process that food that were booted out of the factories and farms in favour of "agency" workers. These jobs are not advertised in the UK anymore. Because the job does not exist. It is not a vacancy for the employer to fill. They simply have a set amount of agency workers a day rather than employees of their own.
I agree with you Beddy. This isn't about departments spending it or losing it. It is about heads of departments defending their jobs for the boys club. Councils have billions in reserves and have departments that are continually refurbished pointlessly and then the council leaders are on the telly blaming cuts in services on imposed government cuts. They have all been told to make efficiency savings and it isn't hard to see that they are wasting a lot of money on new colour schemes, artwork, rebranding and loads of other things but then a lot of Councils have a lot of people in jobs that are funnelling work to their mates and what they spend benefits their mates' businesses. What needs doing is council's being properly audited and the truth be told. They cannot blame the government for the cuts saying there are no more efficiency savings to be made while they are having this years 'in' look implemented throughout their workspaces. There is massive waste in the public sector just as there is in the private sector however in the public sector no-one seems to want to admit to any of it.
Tata Steel planning to cease operations in the UK. Around 15,000 people could be about to become unemployed. In a twist, apparently the Conservatives are actively discussing nationalising the steel plants rather than see the plants shut.
Yes you are when you suggest that once people are earning enough they should be moved out of social housing. You would just put another block in front of people. When tax credits first came in a lot of people wouldn't do as much overtime as they used to because it would affect their tax credits. People will not move upward because they don't want to have to move house and/or pay more money for their new house thus leaving them worse off.
Surely not. Apart from the banks, a Tory government lets firms go to the wall if they are failing. It's in their capitalist DNA. But yeah, if they nationalised the steel industry I might think so too. Must find a decent feather to knock myself down with.
I enjoyed Imp's rant. It's always good to hear another point of view. Although I disagree with most of the rant, the assertion to beware of TTIP is spot on. This is a very nasty piece of pan European/American scheming that will ensure multinationals can take full advantage of globalisation. The thin end of a very nasty wedge.
Absolutely, I'm with you on TTIP, it needs to be publicised as the evil it is. Imps is unfortunately incorrect in that TTIP will go through anyway, whether we stay in the EU or not. It does need many more people to stand up against it though. And, like you, I couldn't find much else to agree with in Imps' diatribe apart from the assertion that "Labour are as bad as the Tories". This is generally, but not completely, true, and is one reason I have given up on political parties as providing a way out of the mess the world is in. The Internet has thrown up a lot of campaign groups which gather opinion and throw weight behind a lot of issues, and I see these groups as a way of breaking away from the old party system. If we had a voting system based on proportional representation it would hasten the end of the endless, pointless, ya-boo scenes we see at Westminster. People of different backgrounds, ethnicity, social position, and so on, should be able to agree or disagree with each other without having labels of "Tory" or "Socialist" hung round their necks. In fact the debate on the EU referendum might actually be helping this breakup to happen anyway. And finally, I agree with Fats. Imps, please change your avatar for something less political. It's fine on this thread, but not on any others on this board.
TTIP is a free trade agreement aimed at reducing tariffs and harmonising regulations between two of the world's biggest trading blocs. Can't really see how that in itself is anything other than a good thing for all the economies concerned, though I admit I haven't read the small print. One of the lessons of the 1930s is that economic protectionism exported recession and thrust the world into a downward economic spiral. Seems to me that any attempt to reduce protectionism ought to benefit the whole world's economy.
You need to read the small print Archers. TTIP takes all decisions about trading essentially out of government hands and into those of multinational businesses. This would include commercialisation of the NHS. And I would remind you that it wasn't governments or protectionism who brought about the crash of 2008.
Indeed it wasn't. Protectionism just has the potential to make a bad situation worse, which is exactly what happened in the 1930s. As for holding banks and multinational businesses to account, it seems to me that the best way to do that is through international co-operation. But yes, I do need to read the small print. Though broadly speaking I am in favour of free trade as an economic principle. Countries that turn in on themselves can't hope to thrive in a global economy.
http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/143...ip_as_you_could_be_in_for_a__nasty_surprise_/ Any one likely to be affected?
No I'm not. You say everyone is entitled to social housing no matter what they earn. That is black and white. I say morally it is wrong, in my opinion, as they are blocking the way of people who can't afford to rent or buy and for people who are living in accommodation too small for their families. Why should people who can't afford to rent or buy suffer because someone who can won't move? I don't want to get into a lengthy debate about it as I won't change my mind and it appears you won't either, so why don't we just agree to disagree?
