OK, I'll kick off tonights Political thread.....

[Darkwood]

Which one had the brain must be Blair he left Brown holding the baby when Prudence ran out and boom turned to bust

Actually in their own context they were both astute clever people... as much as brown might seem stupid announcing a mass gold sell off with times and dates that can only plummet gold prices he was shoring up an American bank with our reserves to avoid a crash and it worked as banks trade with each other relative to gold prices and because he dragged it down he stopped a bank going bankrupt in the USA but this is classed as manipulating the stock market which has severe penalties for any government or person doing so,,,, the fact he couldn't be proved shows how astute he was ..and yes Blair handed a sinking ship to his next in command so he covered his own butt too.

My issue with Brown was his robbing of gold reserves and pension pots thus giving a short term solution by shoring up the bank in question but drained our own safety net and ended up raiding our pension funds after to hide his mistake ..several yrs later we saw all the public pensions drop massively in value which led to striking disruption etc all because a Labour so called business expert gambled our future money and lost....and people want to elect Labour back even though regardless of the recession destroyed our security bond

 

[Adam W]

Tourism is a major part of some countries economy so the thinking behind "You did not take a native's job" is very flawed. You also then go on to say that you could claim (in the past) £10.5k per year.....I am assuming you are a qualified electrician so I fail to see how you could possibly be better off claiming benefits....not even close to be fair.

I am now, but I was talking about the minimum wage jobs I did before I went to college - working in bars, shops and call centres.
I lost a call centre job for losing my voice, couldn't claim any benefits (under Labour) and had to relocate and do 3 jobs to repay my £10k debts.
One of my jobs in Portugal was to stand outside trying to get people into a bar, as was the job of most of the young Brits who had gone out there to work. All the restaurant staff and all the bar staff apart from an Irish girl were Portuguese nationals.

 

[Adam W]

So the £25k benefit cap does not exist then ? Must be nice living in your world lol.

That was brought it recently.
And why should someone who goes to work 5 days a week, often at weekends, earn less than someone who has simply got pregnant to introduce more spongers?

 

[Diddy]

That was brought it recently.
And why should someone who goes to work 5 days a week, often at weekends, earn less than someone who has simply got pregnant to introduce more spongers?

Never said there should be no benefits cap...just that you can not recieve 25k in benefits....I think like a good politician you are trying to move the goal posts without anyone realising :willy_nilly:

 

[dingledong]

So the people who.live in these big houses or hook hands family there rent is about four grand a month isn't it plus other benefits ?? They have not been moved into smaller premises have they ?

 

[Diddy]

Actually in their own context they were both astute clever people... as much as brown might seem stupid announcing a mass gold sell off with times and dates that can only plummet gold prices he was shoring up an American bank with our reserves to avoid a crash and it worked as banks trade with each other relative to gold prices and because he dragged it down he stopped a bank going bankrupt in the USA but this is classed as manipulating the stock market which has severe penalties for any government or person doing so,,,, the fact he couldn't be proved shows how astute he was ..and yes Blair handed a sinking ship to his next in command so he covered his own butt too.

My issue with Brown was his robbing of gold reserves and pension pots thus giving a short term solution by shoring up the bank in question but drained our own safety net and ended up raiding our pension funds after to hide his mistake ..several yrs later we saw all the public pensions drop massively in value which led to striking disruption etc all because a Labour so called business expert gambled our future money and lost....and people want to elect Labour back even though regardless of the recession destroyed our security bond

Ok two things here about the gold and pensions.
1. What would have happened to the world economy if the American bank collapsed ? Think 2008 for your answer.
2. After 18 years of Tory rule we had schools and hospitals that were falling apart. You had class sizes in excess of 30 kids. People were literally dying waiting for major surgery I know this 1st hand....Heart surgery that today you would have within 3 months had an 18 month waiting list. The whole public sector was falling apart and someone had to pay for it.
Now I don't say I agree with the pensions raid, Nor did I agree with PFI funding, I would much rather have seen a 5p increase in income tax to pay for these things. But you mention raising income tax in the UK now and your finished as a party. For some strange reason over the last 30 years we have become a selfish ME ME ME society. We want the best schools, hospitals, health service, utilities ect and yet we don't want to pay for them. If labour had stuck to what they were good at which was raise tax and redistribute the wealth then we would not be faced with crippling payments today in the pfi contracts. You mention the word tax rise and people want to throw up.
BTW PFI was introduce in 1992.....I think Blair and Brown were still learning the ropes under John Smith in opposition at that time. PFI is a Prime Ministers dream....Buy "stuff" on credit look great when delivering all the infrastructure ect while sticking to the pledge of not raising tax....And the best bit its your successor is left with the bill.
I blame Thatcher's era for the attitude of I'm alright Jack and stuff you....as long as I can send my kid to a nice school and have private health care then what do I care about the rest for ? Why should I pay an extra £5 per hundred in tax just so others can have access to the best in services ?
Then when the services start to fail it is pointed out how inefficient they are and why not let private companies in to streamline them.....Because we all see how well that works in the Railways, water,Electric and gas.....we save billions don't we ????? People are inherently sheep. They have been conditioned to think tax is bad and yet they probably pay 10x more to the private companies who run all of the above than they ever would if it had been state owned and paid for through taxation.
Give me an old style tax and spend labour government any day and I will gladly vote for them. I am a realist and a socialist. I see the need to spend money on services and I realise that money would/should really come from taxation. I also realise that at the moment until people are sufficiently either educated(unlikely) or ****ed off that they cant heat and light there homes or that they cant afford that heart operation.....only then will people wake up and think hey maybe we should all get together and pay for this stuff to be available for all...by then it will be too late to save what we once had though and we will probably end up having to start from scratch.

 

[Diddy]

So the people who.live in these big houses or hook hands family there rent is about four grand a month isn't it plus other benefits ?? They have not been moved into smaller premises have they ?

Well er....yes they have. It is happening as we speak. Huge swathes of the population are faced with the choice find the shortfall yourself or move. I agree with the rent cap in every way......BUT there will come a time when there will be no access to the lower paid professions in affected areas.....That's everything from burger flippers to waitresses to cleaners and even teachers and firemen. There is an answer and it is to build more social housing on a huge scale and cancel right to buy.

 

[dingledong]

Yes they should cancel right to buy , I think that was a big mistake now but not then

 

[trev]

Yes they should cancel right to buy , I think that was a big mistake now but not then

Of course it was a mistake then! Why should you be able to buy an appreciating asset that we all have paid for (well everyone in your area) for a knockdown price just because you have used it for x number of years. Another mistake was not to use the money from those sales to build more social housing to replace the stock lost.
Another of Thatcher's economic miracles (since she's spoken of as some sort of demi god on here) was the cancellation of Tony Benn's sovereign wealth fund financed by north sea oil. Instead the revenue was squandered cutting the top rate of income tax to benefit the richest in society (hmmm, anyone seeing a pattern emerging here?) while giving those lower down the food chain a bloody good war (that she knew was coming) to rally patriotic support for the "deal leader" and scraps from the table

 

[Diddy]

Yep that sovereign wealth fund is what Norway is using it's oil surplus cash for. That and a higher taxation of its people has created a country that is happier than any of the countries we model ourselves on....Infact on the happiness index (Which is obviously not an exact science lol) we only come behind the good ole USA in how bloody unhappy we are.
I have even heard UK Mp's label the Norway model as a recipe for lazyness and go on to label all the Scandinavian countries as lazy too. Bloody mugs they are with their high taxation ect ect. How can they possibly be happy with the best services the world has to offer almost free of charge to the end user. They as a block of countries perform better than us, Are happier than us, Work a lot less hours than us and retire much earlier than us.....bloody mugs, maybe we should invade them and secure that oil for us and the yanks.

 

[trev]

The yanks would take it for themselves mate.

 

[UNG]

Ok two things here about the gold and pensions.
1. What would have happened to the world economy if the American bank collapsed ? Think 2008 for your answer.

May be a CTRL - ALT - DEL moment was is needed for all these so called "Talented Bankers" that still believe they are worth the massive bonuses

2. After 18 years of Tory rule we had schools and hospitals that were falling apart. You had class sizes in excess of 30 kids. People were literally dying waiting for major surgery I know this 1st hand....Heart surgery that today you would have within 3 months had an 18 month waiting list. The whole public sector was falling apart and someone had to pay for it.
Now I don't say I agree with the pensions raid, Nor did I agree with PFI funding, I would much rather have seen a 5p increase in income tax to pay for these things. But you mention raising income tax in the UK now and your finished as a party. For some strange reason over the last 30 years we have become a selfish ME ME ME society. We want the best schools, hospitals, health service, utilities ect and yet we don't want to pay for them. If labour had stuck to what they were good at which was raise tax and redistribute the wealth then we would not be faced with crippling payments today in the pfi contracts. You mention the word tax rise and people want to throw up.

You paint such a poor picture of Tory government my mother who is close to 80 comes from a working class family of 7 kids always says that in her lifetime she can never understand how every Labour government really seems to screw it up.

Yes we want the best facilities but do we have to pay for inefficiency and the poor management that run these

BTW PFI was introduce in 1992.....I think Blair and Brown were still learning the ropes under John Smith in opposition at that time. PFI is a Prime Ministers dream....Buy "stuff" on credit look great when delivering all the infrastructure ect while sticking to the pledge of not raising tax....And the best bit its your successor is left with the bill.

Although the Tories introduced PFI it was Labour who massively expanded it's use

I blame Thatcher's era for the attitude of I'm alright Jack and stuff you....as long as I can send my kid to a nice school and have private health care then what do I care about the rest for ? Why should I pay an extra £5 per hundred in tax just so others can have access to the best in services ?
Then when the services start to fail it is pointed out how inefficient they are and why not let private companies in to streamline them.....Because we all see how well that works in the Railways, water,Electric and gas.....we save billions don't we ????? People are inherently sheep. They have been conditioned to think tax is bad and yet they probably pay 10x more to the private companies who run all of the above than they ever would if it had been state owned and paid for through taxation.

The country was so on it's rear end by '79 after 4 or 5 years of Labours wage restraint is it any wonder when Thatcher came to power and we got back to proper wage negotiations not the "you can have an extra £2.40 a week this year" attitudes changed

You must remember the dinosaur that was British Leyland run by the unions on behalf of the government they couldn't build cars for toffee, was British Rail that good at it's job dirty trains and stations and people realised the convenience of the car as it became affordable.

When I hear the term "I'm all right Jack" can't Help think of this quite funny film.

Give me an old style tax and spend labour government any day and I will gladly vote for them.

Would this be a Labour government that collects £3 in tax and spends £4 then leeves a note saying the country is broke

I am a realist and a socialist.

I don't think you can swing both ways, The reality of socialism is there will always be someone that wants more than their neighbour, Abramovich and his mates didn't become billionaires overnight in Russia so much for the The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ideal

I see the need to spend money on services and I realise that money would/should really come from taxation. I also realise that at the moment until people are sufficiently either educated(unlikely) or ****ed off that they cant heat and light there homes or that they cant afford that heart operation.....only then will people wake up and think hey maybe we should all get together and pay for this stuff to be available for all...by then it will be too late to save what we once had though and we will probably end up having to start from scratch.

If Labour came to power tomorrow and raised the basic rate income tax to 40p or 50p in the pound would you welcome it with open arms I think not.

The bigger picture is why these services are struggling our infrastructure is being overwhelmed by the sudden population increase from abroad, the question is do you expand all these services to accommodate this and if it is just a blip and people return to their native country are we left with something we don't need

The problem with this country and it's attitude is that the social security safety net is no longer that, by many it is seen as a never ending pot of money that they can exploit. Why should I or anybody else pay just because somebody wants 17 kids and then wants the state to pay because it doesn't pay them to work to support their family, I have 2 kids because that was what my wife and I could support

 

[Darkwood]

Ok two things here about the gold and pensions.
1. What would have happened to the world economy if the American bank collapsed ? Think 2008 for your answer.
A very good point raised there, the thing is anyone with an ounce of financial knowledge knew what the banks were doing even in them days with mis-selling of mortgages creating an invisible empty well of artificial market value... it was clear any kind of bail out was like sticking a small plaster to cover an axe wound and would only be a delay not a cure. My argument was that Gordon Brown took most of our Gold reserves created a scenario to crash the gold price market to allow a bank in America to pay back it debts at a more affordable price...Where was America here! to bail out their own crap?
What he did by squandering our reserves was highly illegal in the financial market and questionable even at a government level of why he had the power to do so in the first place... It worked anyway but he knew now the cupboard was bare and because Labour had promoted a Benefits dependent culture and left our borders open to unrestricted influx of legal immigration for so long not enough money was coming back into the pot so he had to find other methods ...yes he stole it from the very pension pots most had worked hard for all their lives....I use the word stole because changing the law to allow him to do this was as low as any government has got in my mind... the collapse of the banking system was ineviteable anyway and would be bad for any government in power but he should have been propping up our protective barrier not stripping it down... yes then I believe he should has let the bank collapse.... these 2 acts Ive described stripped more money out of the UK than any other cock up by any government to my knowledge and ensured the crash of 2008 would be a lot harder and longer to recover from, regardless of when the crash would happen it was clear it had to occur and he knew this.
2. After 18 years of Tory rule we had schools and hospitals that were falling apart. You had class sizes in excess of 30 kids.
Yes I can agree here ... my points are not specifically anti Labour or pro Tories they brought the class sizes down, I was in a class of 40 at school but by the time I left it was 28 the strange twist to this tail is the schools are now stuck in a corner created by Labours open boarders policy meaning schools now are going to have to breach the classroom full figure Labour set into place.. not enough time to build schools to account for the short fall this time or add classroom huts to ease the issue as that option has been exhausted already by most schools... they really didn't solve the problem they just masked it over with short term solutions like portacabin classes etc.

People were literally dying waiting for major surgery I know this 1st hand....Heart surgery that today you would have within 3 months had an 18 month waiting list. The whole public sector was falling apart and someone had to pay for it.

This obviously has a personal tone in the point you make and hope you family wasn't one of the unfortunate on the long waiting list that didn't make it, yes they did bring down the waiting list and prioritising certain operations so yes a good thing but again they didn't cure the base issue they masked it over by just bumping the problem to another department namely mental health issues a thing I have family experience of and frustration with as my lass has M.E. and she had to wait 8months between appointments as her condition worsens by the week, the target was 4weeks and this isn't a problem caused by the Tories here its a legacy of the shuffling Labour did in the NHS.
Now I don't say I agree with the pensions raid, Nor did I agree with PFI funding, I would much rather have seen a 5p increase in income tax to pay for these things. But you mention raising income tax in the UK now and your finished as a party. For some strange reason over the last 30 years we have become a selfish ME ME ME society. We want the best schools, hospitals, health service, utilities ect and yet we don't want to pay for them. If labour had stuck to what they were good at which was raise tax and redistribute the wealth then we would not be faced with crippling payments today in the pfi contracts. You mention the word tax rise and people want to throw up.
BTW PFI was introduce in 1992.....I think Blair and Brown were still learning the ropes under John Smith in opposition at that time. PFI is a Prime Ministers dream....Buy "stuff" on credit look great when delivering all the infrastructure ect while sticking to the pledge of not raising tax....And the best bit its your successor is left with the bill.
I blame Thatcher's era for the attitude of I'm alright Jack and stuff you....as long as I can send my kid to a nice school and have private health care then what do I care about the rest for ? Why should I pay an extra £5 per hundred in tax just so others can have access to the best in services ?
Then when the services start to fail it is pointed out how inefficient they are and why not let private companies in to streamline them.....Because we all see how well that works in the Railways, water,Electric and gas.....we save billions don't we ????? People are inherently sheep. They have been conditioned to think tax is bad and yet they probably pay 10x more to the private companies who run all of the above than they ever would if it had been state owned and paid for through taxation.
Give me an old style tax and spend labour government any day and I will gladly vote for them. I am a realist and a socialist. I see the need to spend money on services and I realise that money would/should really come from taxation. I also realise that at the moment until people are sufficiently either educated(unlikely) or ****ed off that they cant heat and light there homes or that they cant afford that heart operation.....only then will people wake up and think hey maybe we should all get together and pay for this stuff to be available for all...by then it will be too late to save what we once had though and we will probably end up having to start from scratch.

Lastly agree with your 'tax' thoughts that the country has become very afraid of the word and thus governments would no doubts be hanging themselves to even mention a hike of taxes but in defense of the Tories here on one of the few occasions I will defend them considering the mess and financial debt the country was left in due to Labours attitude of if its broken just throw money at it attitude as it wasn't all to blame on the crash we were running an unsustainable system before the crash..in a good way the crash exposed just how badly thing were, the Tories did clear up a lot of the mess and got us out of the recession faster than most other countries in the world and now been copied by America and some European countries to try speed there own recovery up. Yes we have all had to directly feel it in our pockets and jobs but it was a global crash thats what happens.

Overall agree with some of the points you make but the methods chosen to achieve these measures were ultimately going to bite us back and they did with avengence after been exposed by the crash... to the Joe public they made it look like they were making things better but in fact the Labour legacy of throw money at the problem rather than fix it left us with overheads of over a trillion debt, if the crash never occured it was a matter of time before the countries debts brought us down internally.

 

[trev]

Let's, once again, debunk the myth of an open door immigration policy.
My brother is married to a Nigerian woman, under Labour she suddenly became ineligible for an entry visa despite having been here for visits several times and never outstaying her welcome or putting any strain on any services. She came for a couple of months, went back to Lagos at the appropriate time, reapplied for a visa and was told "no"
She applied for what I can only describe as dual nationality because of being married to a Brit and this was again refused. Since then, under this administration she has reapplied for a visa recently and it looks like she is going to get unrestricted access for one year after which the situation will be reviewed.
How does that fit with an unrestricted immigration policy which allows Uncle Tom Cobley and all to come here?
Yes there is free movement of people within the EU but you have exactly the same rights of movement as Yarrick and Darrick, there are several million Brits living on mainland Europe which proves that

 

[Darkwood]

Let's, once again, debunk the myth of an open door immigration policy.
My brother is married to a Nigerian woman, under Labour she suddenly became ineligible for an entry visa despite having been here for visits several times and never outstaying her welcome or putting any strain on any services. She came for a couple of months, went back to Lagos at the appropriate time, reapplied for a visa and was told "no"
She applied for what I can only describe as dual nationality because of being married to a Brit and this was again refused. Since then, under this administration she has reapplied for a visa recently and it looks like she is going to get unrestricted access for one year after which the situation will be reviewed.
How does that fit with an unrestricted immigration policy which allows Uncle Tom Cobley and all to come here?
Yes there is free movement of people within the EU but you have exactly the same rights of movement as Yarrick and Darrick, there are several million Brits living on mainland Europe which proves that

When I say open immigration policy trev I'm discussing legal immigration here from the EU mainly not limited or illegal immigration, I sympathise with your friends plight but as a small Island we have to have some kind of policy in place to the wider global populous and yes this will always create situations like you describe, I also know a couple in the same boat but any system we set is always going to have stories like this.
Open door Immigration policy is a term coined by the papers and government parties to mean unrestricted legal movement but to note under Labour the global immigration was much more relaxed too so in some respects it does mean influx from outside the EU too.