Off Topic The Politics Thread

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Should the UK remain a part of the EU or leave?

  • Stay in

    Votes: 56 47.9%

  • Get out

    Votes: 61 52.1%
  • Total voters
    117
  • Poll closed .
I find it quite disturbing that in the last year or so our 3 local supermarkets now all have food banks on their premises. We have a health system which is failing people daily. But as long as MP's can score a few points from each other then nothing changes. Charity begins at home, we should concentrate as a country on fixing these problems together. It is disgusting that somebody should die yes die due to a system not performing. The whole world seems to be hell bent on causing death more than saving lives.
 
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T
Stroller said:
Underdeclaring profit in one tax jurisdiction by means of transferring it to another with lower tax rates is not fraud, sadly. It's just tax 'efficiency'.

Look at Starbucks.......

Starbucks reportedly paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years and nothing in the last four years - despite sales of £400m last year.
As part of its tax affairs, the firm transferred some money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments, bought coffee beans from Switzerland and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business.

They just move the profits around until they wind up somewhere with low or zero tax rates. Dirty ****s.

You don't trust Corbyn with the NHS? OK, you don't like Corbyn, I get it, but don't dismiss the importance of keeping the NHS out of Tory hands. It's a simple fact that the NHS is currently disastrously underfunded because the Tories are in charge. To fund it properly requires increased taxes and the Tories are fundamentally opposed to that. Since Blair, Labour has been ****-scared of saying that they would raise taxes, but now the game has changed and we have a Labour party that will properly oppose the small state, low tax agenda. The Tories cannot be trusted with 'our' NHS as they seem to have decided they should keep calling it.

I warn you not to be ordinary;
I warn you not to be young;
I warn you not to fall ill;
And I warn you not to grow old’
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Have a look at this chart and think about which party was in power for these years. It’s not as black and white as you would like it to be. It’s been bad since 2010 with all this austerity crap.

Blair increased funding to the NHS a lot in his second term. No facts are ‘simple’ when it comes to this kind of stuff.
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I think it’s great people are waking up to the fact that things in U.K. society and culture are widely off track. That is not to say things can’t get put right.

As for remoaners etc stock check required
That is exactly what we are all doing on this thread since it’s birth ... moaning and not being able to agree anything but I see that as progress of sorts.

How far are we off?

Last year the entire hamlet went to a town called St Pons to demonstrate that EDF was proposing to build a couple of wind turbines 20km up in the hills
This included people of 93 years of age down to children. The local mayors of the surrounding areas plus all elected people also went because they work for the people
There is not a hint of a career path inside these people ...it’s a choice of duty and care and also a very good living . Even Police went to support the cause

EDF was slaughtered and with the clear message that if they tried to muscle in on land again they would never be allowed to lay a foundation with or without the EU approval... it won’t happen if the people don’t want it

Big businesses is not allowed to behave the one we are have allowed it to happen. The root cause is really imo about how corrupted our politicians and systems have become.

Careers come first in the U.K. couple that with very little chance of people to unite you have the current stare of play
 
Stroller said:
You do know how opinion polls work don't you? They don't just ask Mirror readers.
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Stroller if you actually believe there will be another referendum then you are deluded. It ain't gonna happen. We don't want it, the EU don't want it. It is just a few that cannot accept a democratic vote.
Dream on and believe but you will be disappointed. :emoticon-0148-yes:
 
ELLERS said:
They have just been discussing that on the news and I agree. To answer Nuts. My mate and Mr's Ellers who were both 'Remoaners' said they would now vote leave.
Mr's Ellers, probably because she has had enough of my rhetoric but my mate said on Saturday that he would leave now as he felt that we would be better off in the long run.
I think the huge majority of leavers would not change their vote but maybe a few remainers might.
It won't happen anyway.
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Agree. There's quite a number of Remainers that wanted out of the EU, but for the threat of financial Armageddon promulgated by Project Fear. Now this hasn't materialised, I'm sure they'd have more confidence in voting Leave, but as you say, as second referendum isn't going to happen.
 
sb_73 said:
Of course they should pay tax, but the numbers in the first paragraph are crap - add a huge wedge of turnover and only a tiny bit of profit, at a sub 5% margin? So they have won 33% of the NHS ‘private’ contracts worth £3bn. The overall NHS budget is £126bn. It’s peanuts. Alleged ‘privatisation’ little or nothing to do with the state the NHS as it is. I have no idea whether allowing private organisations o bid to run NHS services is a good thing or not, all I know is that it wouldn’t happen unless the government thought it would save taxpayer £.

I’ve covered the legal stuff already I think.


The irony is that by the end of the Blair/Brown years the NHS was funded something close to Western European levels, and its waiting time metrics, including A&E waits, were all being hit. The target then was for 97% of patients to wait no more than four hours in A&E. The coalition relaxed that to 95% and now they are struggling to hit 85%. The 18 week wait from consultant referral to treatment deadline was close to 100% complied to under Labour. The entire metric has been abandoned now. I have mentioned the nearly entirely irrelevant nature of the ‘privatisation’ argument above. The NHS was better funded and worked better for more people under Labour than it does now. You can blame austerity, but it has been a government decision to limit NHS funding.

Your desire to blame Blair for everything is touching, but doomed. Private health insurance peaked in 2008 at about 12.5% of the population, then fell back and is now rising again, close to 11% covered now. Over three quarters of those covered are in company schemes, like me. As an aside, it’s a good business to be in, the margin (I.e excess on what insurance premiums bring in over the cost of paying over for treatment) is over 25%. Much better that NHS ‘private’ contracts - Branson take note.

I don’t especially want ‘expedited’ training, if it takes 7 years to get a junior doctor qualified properly, it takes 7 years. But unless the terms and working conditions improve we will never fill the gap, because who the **** would want to do the jobs?
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Happy to go with your statistics - this is your professional area, not mine. I'm more than happy to give Blair a good kicking when he deserves it (which is frequently), but there was no criticism of him in my post. I was merely pointing out that we seem to be going round in circles, with successive governments forced to involve the private sector, before monied middle classes move wholesale to private.

By "expedite training" I meant expedite commencement of training, not shortcut anything in the process.
 
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ELLERS said:
M&S food sales slide over Christmas
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42646021

Cost savings prop up House of Fraser despite weak Christmas
https://www.ft.com/content/b9e7d8b4-caed-30b7-8e33-9f90f17a0b87

Not so good for these 2 though. I went in M&S before I went away, the food looked nice and packaged well but was a bit expensive. I noticed the shop was full of older people. Both need to appeal more to a wider population or they will fall
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Yes, M&S is over priced now, against competitors that have radically cut profit margins. The food is good quality. If they start delivering competitively priced food in cities with a two hour lead in, they'd do well. Add the food delivery to a vamped up website. Someone needs to challenge Amazon.
 
GoldhawkRoad said:
Agree. There's quite a number of Remainers that wanted out of the EU, but for the threat of financial Armageddon promulgated by Project Fear. Now this hasn't materialised, I'm sure they'd have more confidence in voting Leave, but as you say, as second referendum isn't going to happen.
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Even with all the project fear, the bias media like BBC/Sky, the continual moaning, the EU lies, Blair and the rest of the 'remoaning' lot. I am looking forward to leaving and seeing our great country pull away from that failing organization that just geared up for Germany and big business.
 
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ELLERS said:
Even with all the project fear, the bias media like BBC/Sky, the continual moaning, the EU lies, Blair and the rest of the 'remoaning' lot. I am looking forward to leaving and seeing our great country pull away from that failing organization that just geared up for Germany and big business.
Click to expand...

yep, me too # (!)
 
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GoldhawkRoad said:
Happy to go with your statistics - this is your professional area, not mine. I'm more than happy to give Blair a good kicking when he deserves it (which is frequently), but there was no criticism of him in my post. I was merely pointing out that we seem to be going round in circles, with successive governments forced to involve the private sector, before monied middle classes move wholesale to private.

By "expedite training" I meant expedite commencement of training, not shortcut anything in the process.
Click to expand...
We are certainly going round in circles. What is needed is a cross party long term strategy with a detailed step by step implementation plan, take health services out of short term politics on the grounds that all parties, with the possible exception of UKIP, support a free at the point of delivery comprehensive cover system. Unfortunately given the nature of our politics I can’t ever really imagine this happening. No one is ‘forced’ to involve the private sector, but as I pointed out to Strolls, the NHS has always been a mixed public/private enterprise since its inception. The focus on the small number of direct service provision contracts is a bit of a red herring, diverting attention from the key issues of staffing, funding and an unsustainable pattern of services.

I can’t see any signs of wholesale movement into private health insurance by the monied classes, certainly the industry figures don’t back this up. But it would be a good thing if they did, freeing up NHS capacity. The way services are set up in the U.K. there are loads of things that the vast majority of private hospitals can’t do (there are some exceptions, mainly in London) including emergency work, major surgery requiring intensive care, infectious diseases etc. Essentially it’s for diagnosis, outpatients appointments, elective surgery and rehabilitation. After a bit of an issue in 2016, I am now seeing a consultant for a check up once a year. The cost to my insurers is about £250 for the consultation and blood tests. At the last one my (excellent) consultant offered to transfer me to his NHS list. I declined, noting that the timing and location of the appointments (early evening a five minute drive from my house, easy free parking) was perfect for me, my company paid for my insurance, even if it didn’t it’s not that much once a year, and why would I clog up his NHS list if I didn’t have to? But nobody who has private insurance ‘opts out’ of the NHS. You have to visit your GP (probably not employed by the NHS but paid by the taxpayer) to get referred privately (usually to the same doctor you would be referred to in the NHS) and in the case of an emergency - accident or medical, you will certainly need NHS services.
 
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ELLERS said:
Even with all the project fear, the bias media like BBC/Sky, the continual moaning, the EU lies, Blair and the rest of the 'remoaning' lot. I am looking forward to leaving and seeing our great country pull away from that failing organization that just geared up for Germany and big business.
Click to expand...

Very good stuff hope it goes well and it may very well go well. Pulling away is fine but to what ? I grant you freedom and hopefully a surge of brilliant business will occur. If however the very big business machine gets better deals inside the EU they look a bit stronger to me. It will be a fight to get a level playing field in terms of power and clout but it’s all possible after a period of time.

By the way I get to see and handle some very big money accounts in the advertising industry linked to most of the everyday brands you take for granted. The biggest accounts won last year i’m afraid all have one thing in common and that is relocation to European Offices ... with the exception of Lego and Sainsbury’s all will be based away from the U.K.

So I am back to tell you I know a lot more than your blind hopes and wishes. If you can understand this simple point ... everything in business starts with Marketing and do the industry I am involved with gets a head start often working years in front of Joe Public.

Post Brexit the U.K. market will be just as massive and the fight is on already for positioning in many sectors I touch.

Make no mistake business loves the U.K. mentality to consumerism it’s getting ready.
No one will mind one bit of the U.K. is allowed to think it’s great and won a great victory ... they will let you show your pride no problem. But they will retain the power and wealth even lend you the money to buy your products. The question has to be how sustainable will the market be and how U.K. industries can compete with goods and products produced for the export market.

Start by listing me some wonderful UK exports that are that not only to compete but are also going to rebuild the U.K. I think you may struggle with substance

We haven’t even got legals and standards in place yet to compete and I can guarantee you they will not be ready in time so we will start the race with a massive penalty.

This is not fear mongering this is factual stuff

Again Advanced marketing skills kicks everything off worldwide ... it’s always the very first thing anyone looks at. Can you honestly believe the U.K. knows the actual outcome and position it will find itself in?

Saw the other night on TV even Tomato and Brown sauce in made in Holland. I think there will be a shock in store for people a complete melt down and shake up on the high streets and a fight to the death of U.K. supermarket brands ... I noticed you published released trading results to suit your belief and opinion. They can’t leave the EU but you bet that their head offices will be

Any profits you think maybe used to to boost the U.K. economy sadly will be outside it.

I have seen hundreds of the products I design for already prepare their t&cs, legals on artworks. They are ready for all eventualities so expect to moan yourself when everyone is doing a Starbucks. I haven’t mentioned digital assets for marketing yet but work is already starting on that strand now.

They hold the cards and we will all have to face the facts what do we intend to buy anything with? Still at least we can control our own destiny... dream on
 
Lawrence Jacoby said:
Very good stuff hope it goes well and it may very well go well. Pulling away is fine but to what ? I grant you freedom and hopefully a surge of brilliant business will occur. If however the very big business machine gets better deals inside the EU they look a bit stronger to me. It will be a fight to get a level playing field in terms of power and clout but it’s all possible after a period of time.

By the way I get to see and handle some very big money accounts in the advertising industry linked to most of the everyday brands you take for granted. The biggest accounts won last year i’m afraid all have one thing in common and that is relocation to European Offices ... with the exception of Lego and Sainsbury’s all will be based away from the U.K.

So I am back to tell you I know a lot more than your blind hopes and wishes. If you can understand this simple point ... everything in business starts with Marketing and do the industry I am involved with gets a head start often working years in front of Joe Public.

Post Brexit the U.K. market will be just as massive and the fight is on already for positioning in many sectors I touch.

Make no mistake business loves the U.K. mentality to consumerism it’s getting ready.
No one will mind one bit of the U.K. is allowed to think it’s great and won a great victory ... they will let you show your pride no problem. But they will retain the power and wealth even lend you the money to buy your products. The question has to be how sustainable will the market be and how U.K. industries can compete with goods and products produced for the export market.

Start by listing me some wonderful UK exports that are that not only to compete but are also going to rebuild the U.K. I think you may struggle with substance

We haven’t even got legals and standards in place yet to compete and I can guarantee you they will not be ready in time so we will start the race with a massive penalty.

This is not fear mongering this is factual stuff

Again Advanced marketing skills kicks everything off worldwide ... it’s always the very first thing anyone looks at. Can you honestly believe the U.K. knows the actual outcome and position it will find itself in?

Saw the other night on TV even Tomato and Brown sauce in made in Holland. I think there will be a shock in store for people a complete melt down and shake up on the high streets and a fight to the death of U.K. supermarket brands ... I noticed you published released trading results to suit your belief and opinion. They can’t leave the EU but you bet that their head offices will be

Any profits you think maybe used to to boost the U.K. economy sadly will be outside it.

I have seen hundreds of the products I design for already prepare their t&cs, legals on artworks. They are ready for all eventualities so expect to moan yourself when everyone is doing a Starbucks. I haven’t mentioned digital assets for marketing yet but work is already starting on that strand now.

They hold the cards and we will all have to face the facts what do we intend to buy anything with? Still at least we can control our own destiny... dream on
Click to expand...
What a load of tosh. You seem to do a lot yet nothing.
 
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Lawrence Jacoby said:
Very good stuff hope it goes well and it may very well go well. Pulling away is fine but to what ? I grant you freedom and hopefully a surge of brilliant business will occur. If however the very big business machine gets better deals inside the EU they look a bit stronger to me. It will be a fight to get a level playing field in terms of power and clout but it’s all possible after a period of time.

By the way I get to see and handle some very big money accounts in the advertising industry linked to most of the everyday brands you take for granted. The biggest accounts won last year i’m afraid all have one thing in common and that is relocation to European Offices ... with the exception of Lego and Sainsbury’s all will be based away from the U.K.

So I am back to tell you I know a lot more than your blind hopes and wishes. If you can understand this simple point ... everything in business starts with Marketing and do the industry I am involved with gets a head start often working years in front of Joe Public.

Post Brexit the U.K. market will be just as massive and the fight is on already for positioning in many sectors I touch.

Make no mistake business loves the U.K. mentality to consumerism it’s getting ready.
No one will mind one bit of the U.K. is allowed to think it’s great and won a great victory ... they will let you show your pride no problem. But they will retain the power and wealth even lend you the money to buy your products. The question has to be how sustainable will the market be and how U.K. industries can compete with goods and products produced for the export market.

Start by listing me some wonderful UK exports that are that not only to compete but are also going to rebuild the U.K. I think you may struggle with substance

We haven’t even got legals and standards in place yet to compete and I can guarantee you they will not be ready in time so we will start the race with a massive penalty.

This is not fear mongering this is factual stuff

Again Advanced marketing skills kicks everything off worldwide ... it’s always the very first thing anyone looks at. Can you honestly believe the U.K. knows the actual outcome and position it will find itself in?

Saw the other night on TV even Tomato and Brown sauce in made in Holland. I think there will be a shock in store for people a complete melt down and shake up on the high streets and a fight to the death of U.K. supermarket brands ... I noticed you published released trading results to suit your belief and opinion. They can’t leave the EU but you bet that their head offices will be

Any profits you think maybe used to to boost the U.K. economy sadly will be outside it.

I have seen hundreds of the products I design for already prepare their t&cs, legals on artworks. They are ready for all eventualities so expect to moan yourself when everyone is doing a Starbucks. I haven’t mentioned digital assets for marketing yet but work is already starting on that strand now.

They hold the cards and we will all have to face the facts what do we intend to buy anything with? Still at least we can control our own destiny... dream on
Click to expand...
Isn't LEGO a Danish company headquartered in Denmark?
 
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