I don't agree with a lot of what you say but I have never understood why successive Governments have not built more social housing to replace the ones sold off. I also don't think they should have been sold but then I don't think people should be able to live in social housing once they are earning enough to either rent normally or buy. It blocks the way for someone who genuinely needs it and just adds to waiting lists. I remember there was a top union boss earning over £100k and he couldn't see why it was wrong for him to live in subsidised housing.
At least the NHS dentists are back now. They disappeared for a while and you couldn't find one for love or money. It's not all doom and gloom...although I hate going to the dentist so maybe that's not a good thing.
Privatising the NHS would be political suicide and I just can't see it happening. Sections may be done by private firms for the NHS but patients aren't having to pay. As long as it's remains free to patients that is what matters.
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.
