Starkey I made a comment earlier and the response I was given was "typical tory crap" and there are others referencing bullingdon etc etc and only looking after the rich. If people are unwilling to look closer to home then more fool them.
Zero-hour contracts: the Tories say that there are seven hundred thousand whilst Labour say that there are two million, so who is fibbing? If you do not want to bother with the official facts – i.e. the rest of this post – the answer is that the Tories are rounding up by 3,000 whilst Labour are exaggerating by over 1.3 million. No surprise that Labour are able to lie on the doorstep because they are innumerate and most of their voters will put a cross in their box simply because they are the party of the working class; and big numbers get on the news as soundbites. According to the apolitical Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey for December 2014 (published 25 February 2015), there are 697,000 people on zero-hours contracts, which represents 2.3 per cent of the workforce. The ONS defines a zero-hours contract as a contract that has a “lack of any guaranteed hours”. The ONS numbers show that the number of zero-hours contracts in December 2013 was 586,000 (1.9 per cent of the workforce); therefore, it has risen by 111,000 in the last complete calendar year. Far and away the largest category of employers using zero-hours contracts – more than fifty per cent – are classified by the ONS as “Accommodation and Food” businesses. From the BBC website, the following large corporations are cited as employing some people on zero-hours contracts: Boots, KFC, McDonalds, Sports Direct, Subway and TNT. The ONS statistics break down the zero-hours contracts into these subsets: Part-time workers: 66 per cent. People aged 16-24: 34 per cent. People aged 65 and over: 6 per cent. People in full time education: 17 per cent. People that wanted to do more hours than they got: 34 per cent. Women: 55 per cent. Next time you buy a Big Mac or a bucket of chicken, are you being served by a young female student doing a few hours a week to pay her tuition fees?
We as consumers need to be much more informed when making our choices, which is why I think threads like this are invaluable. Everywhere you look (and I live in Berlin, but the UK is no different) 95% of shops are about "cheap, cheap, cheaper". A few years ago here in Germany, the cheap supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl started a price war on a litre of milk. As a guide, I pay about 89cts for a litre these days. Aldi bottomed out the price war at 58cts which caused thousands of dairy farmers onto the streets protesting that they were selling their milk at a loss. The government intervened and actually implemented a minimum recommended price. As long as we consumers care more about price than quality, then the market will continue to supply cheaper and cheaper products. In terms of food this leads to dodgy practices and the outbreak of BSE etc etc etc. In the case of clothing it leads to the shocking deaths of those poor workers in Bangladesh a couple of years ago. Next time you pass a branch of Primark, go in there and look at their prices, and then think about what it takes to make those products. Then REALLY think about it. To be able to sell jeans for 10 quid you are looking at production costs of a quid or thereabouts. That can only be slave labour. Chances are the jeans will fall apart after 6 months (the zip will certainly break) and if you look at the long term you would actually be much better off shelling out 50 or 60 quid for a decent pair which will last. Our habits as consumers drive so many bad practices in global commerce. We owe it to ourselves to be much more critical when making our choices.
Also seems the zero hours contracts is muchado about nothing! Labour lies bit like no more boom n bust eh?
Toryboy when are you gonna realise the banks bailout was the biggest financial crisis the world has seen. We will be paying for it for generations to come, no matter who's in power
Florida - labour had many boom years did they act prudently? Put anything aside? Or flood people with tax credits etc etc? Labour never appear responsible! Banking crisis = world problem austerity due to no money left = bad bad torys Dearie me do you wear blinkers/visor/hood?
We have soup kitchens and the like for homeless people, must admit I'm not sure whether the food bank concept exists here though
I didn't even realise we had them here until I saw in the news that more and more people are using them! I thought it was an American concept and have never actually seen one in this country. At least I know there's somewhere I can still go get food when the Tories get back in power and take all my money to give to their rich friends!!
Seriously, is there really that big a difference between the leading parties? He in Oz, both sides pretty much occupy the middle ground. The conservatives are of course just to the right of centre, while Labor sit marginally to the left. No mater who wins, we just about get more of the same thing. Radical politics seems to be a thing of the past.
Very little difference Cyc. Both in my opinion are unfit to run the country and both are extremely arrogant. There's nothing more depressing from a political perspective than listening to folk saying they were born and raised a labour voter. I hear this all the time. How about being born and raised to have a mind of your own. Labour propose to put one of the chief economic clowns from their last stint in government into the big house next to number 10 too.
Difficult one though isn't it? On the one hand I think it's absolutely correct that there should be a mechanism to stop people fromgoing hungry but on the other hand if they advertise it then it creates negativity and the idea that we're somehow degeneratinginto a "third world" country- as we're seeing! Still, some would have you believe that nobody actually needs them and they're spending the money they should have for food on holidays in Florida amd the like.
Oddy, I cannot say that I have ever shopped at Aldi or Lidl but they have caused quite a shake-up in the UK supermarket arena. When Tesco announced their results this week, they had made a loss of £6.4bn, not because of retail which made a profit of over £400m but because of write-downs of property losses, a huge hole in the corporate pension fund and various other losses. Their share price dropped five per cent as investors realised that more dividends were a few years away. The home big four are all now engaged in a price war; and as you say the losers in that will be the suppliers at the bottom, who the supermarkets put the squeeze on. The dairy farmers have been complaining for years before the Germans arrived. I do not shop at Primark either but I do recall that last year the BBC’s Panorama did a programme on the sweat shops in countries like Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka that supply several of our retailers. The retailers claim that all the factories that they use have strict contracts that make sure the workers are well treated, but when the reporter showed up they were more than a little reluctant to have cameras around and they were quickly able to get workers to tell them how the contract terms were being flouted. It is not just cheap clothes but also consumer electronics. There was a programme last year or the year before (I think it was Channel 4’s Dispatches) where they visited the factories in China that make mobile phones and games consoles for some of the world’s biggest names. When they tried to speak to people they found that workers were effectively slaves living in dormitories and working twelve hour shifts for a pittance; and most of them had been recruited from poor rural areas of China and were sending money back to their families (familiar sounding story...). We imported the idea of the consumer-led economy from the USA back in the 90s: it was flawed then and it has never worked since.
Archers - labour say there 2 million tory say 700000 true figure is put at 697000! So massage the figures but to treble them is a lie! Also Glasgow City Coucil (labour controlled) has INCREASED their zero hour contracts in the last year! Yet labour are against them? Do as I say not as I do politics from labour!
He is probably going to be unemployed in a couple of weeks, but credit to Nick Clegg for appearing on Channel 4’s The Last Leg on Thursday night – for the second time. When asked why he had risked coming back on he said: “I heard you had Piers Morgan on and I thought there’s a popularity contest I can win.” They also filmed a short piece out with Natalie Bennett on the campaign trail, but I do not think that she realised that she was being asked stupid questions by two comedians because it was not Nigel Farage and Ed Miliband.
One stone cold certainty about this election is that nobody’s housing policy adds up. The current Coalition operates a Help To Buy scheme that is effectively taxpayers being used to subsidise people to buy houses at the low end of the market through government debt. This stupidity can only force house prices up. Labour and the Greens are now proposing to give first time buyers stamp duty relief to buy houses at the low end of the market. Stamp duty is a tax, so this is effectively cutting tax revenues, which means that anybody that is not a first time buyer is subsiding them. This stupidity can only force house prices up. Marxist Miliband has already proposed a return to the 1970s with rent controls. This is a policy that is historically proven to not work (and is currently a disaster in Sweden) but it sounds good to bash all landlords by categorising them all as rich property moguls with huge estates of properties. No word on making it easier for landlords to pursue bad tenants for losses, Ed. Somebody bangs the heads of these morons together and explain to them how market forces (supply and demand) work – there are not enough houses and more people want them. All they have are vacuous commitments to build hundreds of thousands of houses that none of them can actually deliver.
QM --you call yourself an economist and call Milliband a 'marxist ' -he's no more a marxist than boris johnson !
