2015 Election

[Garacesh]

I agree we need to get more people off benefits and into jobs, sure, but not by pushing anyone on benefits (including those who can't work) into poverty.

 

@zag is correct, though. The old incapacity benefit was ridiculously easy to scam your way onto. I used to know a guy I met in college who did after college.

Edited April 23, 2015 by Garacesh

[Andrew_C]

I don't think anyone is behind cutting real disabled benefits, but there was a huge need after the election to weed out the fraudulent claims.

Someone shoot me... Or better still...

 

Have you actually concidered the scale of the "benefit fraud" compared to say one submarine, or a multinational's avoided tax bill?

 

Nah, thought not.

[zag]

I always find this sort of comment amusing for one simple reason - it comes from all sides. UKIP have accused the BBC of being biased, as have Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and SNP. Everyone calls the BBC biased - their stats for complaints of bias are nearly always pretty equal also. I remember seeing a set of stats a while back of a politics show which had nearly equal numbers of complaints saying it was pro and anti Labour/Tories.

 

I was on a zero hour contract for 7 years during college and university in a local supermarket. Not once did I have a problem with that. It was a great way to work around my studies and travelling at the time.

 

I also heard the current UK MD of McDonalds started on a zero hour contract, he made his way right to the top from the shop floor.

 

Basically they are not always bad thing in my opinion

[localzuk]

Someone shoot me... Or better still...

 

Have you actually concidered the scale of the "benefit fraud" compared to say one submarine, or a multinational's avoided tax bill?

 

Nah, thought not.

 

Exactly, it was a point of a percentage that goes out through fraud, even using the government's own figures. It is about £1.5bn total, across all forms of benefits. 0.2% of the entire budget. The amount of money spent dealing with this fraud is quite frankly not worth it. The money could be better spent assigning those people to help more people into work, or to chase tax dodgers. Its estimated that £14bn a year is lost in tax fraud!

Edited April 23, 2015 by localzuk

[LosOjos]

I was on a zero hour contract for 7 years during college and university in a local supermarket. Not once did I have a problem with that. It was a great way to work around my studies and travelling at the time.

 

I also heard the current UK MD of McDonalds started on a zero hour contract, he made his way right to the top from the shop floor.

 

Basically they are not always bad thing in my opinion

 

The problem isn't zero hour contracts per sé; like you say (and I agree), they can be very useful when you're just trying to fit work in around studying; the problem is that when you're on job seeker's allowance, you're expected to actively seek employment (as you should be) and will be stricken off if you turn down valid job offers (again, rightly so) - this is where the problem starts. You get offered a job with zero guaranteed hours ("zero hours contract") and you have to take it, but in doing so you've now got no money coming in, no benefits, you can't quit because then you can't claim JSA (for 3 months I believe) so you're up a creek, and the whole time you have to sit at home watching the PM and his cronies grinning from ear-to-ear about how they're reducing unemployment and getting people back in to work, knowing you're worse off for trying to do the right thing.

 

My younger brother struggled for years to find reliable work, it was horrible to watch it destroying him. Now he thankfully has a job and is working every hour $deity sends while he has the chance.

 

EDIT: IMO, employers should be made to pay at least the equivalent of JSA to all of their employees every week; it's already a cripplingly low amount of money to live on, but at least people wouldn't be better off not working!

Edited April 23, 2015 by LosOjos

[sonofsanta]

If the tories loose this election it will be because:

 

-David Cameron is so uninspiring and unlikeable he couldn't win a majority last time against the most uncharismatic politician ever to walk the halls of Westminster after an economic crash had destroyed the reputation of the incumbent government, and he seemingly still can't do it now when his chief opponents are an Aardman plasticine figure, a sad puppy and Toad of Toad Hall:

[sonofsanta]

The problem with zero hours contracts (link to a Facebook post):

 

AN OPEN LETTER – TO JD WETHERSPOON

I have dined in your establishments many times but I write to inform you that I will never do so again and nor will any of my friends or family.

 

 

The reason for this is that my stepson has the misfortune to work in your Thomas Sheraton bar in Stockton and I am now aware of the basis upon which you operate and profit.

 

 

He is “employed” on a zero hours basis and earns barely enough to feed himself. Not long after joining your establishment he got into trouble with his rent due to the extremely low wages and was evicted from his home. I blame the basis of his employment with you for this. He now lives 2 miles away from your bar and is obliged to walk this distance to and from work as he does not earn enough to afford public transport. Yesterday my wife was obliged to buy him new shoes as he had worn holes in his existing ones. I think it is appalling that you do not provide your kitchen staff with appropriate footwear. If you feel that this communication is becoming a stream of negative comments then I urge you to read on as I have more to say. This 4 mile round trip trudge is sometimes made to attend a one hour shift. Unbelievable, a day’s work of just ONE HOUR. Furthermore, if he attends expecting a longer shift this is sometimes not the case as he is sent home if trade is slack. He, your employee takes all the risk, you the employer take none. You’ll note that I do not mention his name. This is for fear of reprisals. Before you scoff, let me tell you this: When he first joined you, after two months of working every single weekend he politely enquired if he might have a weekend off. He was given the weekend off but worked no other hours either. A genuine ZERO hours. This was clearly a reprisal and he has never asked for the weekend off again.

 

 

The only way he can survive on such grindingly low wages is by getting benefits top ups. In order to do this he must provide pay slips which you do not provide. He is obliged to download them and print them himself and given that he will never be able to afford a computer and printer so long as he works for you, he must go to the library. I put it to you that it takes him more effort to work for you for a pittance than it does me to fulfill a full time job.

 

 

Clearly your business model requires that the public purse subsidise your employee’s wages. This to my mind makes your firm and others like you one of the benefit scroungers we hear so much about these days.

 

 

Yours sincerely

 

STEVE THOMPSON

[Garacesh]

Aardman plasticine figure

Dear lord, that's hilarious.

[LeMarchand]

The problem with zero hours contracts (link to a Facebook post):

 

So that's how the Spoons keep their prices so low. No wonder one of the bar staff in our local one always looks so miserable! I just wish I had the moral fibre to boycott them too. Mind you, I suspect many pubs operate on a similar basis.

[Garacesh]

I wouldn't especially think so.. I used to work for a pub/carvery doing potwash, and if things were dry their waiting on staff and bar staff were always found something else to do. The manager basically said "Well if I send them home and it gets busy, everybody loses. They get less pay, I get less customers. I'd rather find them something else to do and give them a little extra pay."

[LosOjos]

So that's how the Spoons keep their prices so low. No wonder one of the bar staff in our local one always looks so miserable! I just wish I had the moral fibre to boycott them too. Mind you, I suspect many pubs operate on a similar basis.

 

Chain pubs yeah, not so much the smaller ones*. It's this practise of employing more staff than you'll ever need then giving them barely enough hours to live that boils my blood - they should be up front with you before you apply; can they guarantee you x hours a week? If not, fine, there'll be students who will appreciate it anyway, but as I said previously, employing people then not paying them is life ruining for those who need the money. I'm glad I've never had to claim JSA, watching my brother and brother-in-law go through it, it's absolutely soul destroying if you're the kind of person who genuinely wants to work, which I believe most people are**

 

* obviously, this is a generalisation

** I know we'd all love to win the lottery but I genuinely believe the vast majority of people want to earn a living rather than live off benefits

[sparkeh]

On another note, does anyone else find David Cameron strangely... disengaged from this campaign? Heard/read lots of rumours about him being throughly fed up and wanting out with others preparing leadership bids. Theresa May has been noticeable by her absence... distancing herself from an election defeat perhaps?

[witch]

I guess I'm a tory because I believe that people are better in jobs that on benefits all their life

 

That sort of comment really makes me angry. Why would you think that having that opinion makes you a Tory? Many of us believe that people are better off working, you don't have the moral high ground here. But the Tories ARE cutting disability benefit, and housing benefit and I happen to believe that we have a social responsibility for those who really cannot work as the rest of us can. Of course there are fraudulent benefit claimants but as has been said, they are a mere drop in the ocean compared with tax avoidance/tax fraud and all the other ways big business avoid their responsibilities.

[LeMarchand]

I wouldn't especially think so.. I used to work for a pub/carvery doing potwash, and if things were dry their waiting on staff and bar staff were always found something else to do. The manager basically said "Well if I send them home and it gets busy, everybody loses. They get less pay, I get less customers. I'd rather find them something else to do and give them a little extra pay."

 

Chain pubs yeah, not so much the smaller ones*. It's this practise of employing more staff than you'll ever need then giving them barely enough hours to live that boils my blood

 

Non-chain places often do seem to be fairer to staff! I'm wondering if management and location can play a factor. Our local Spoons seems to have a core staff that are often in. If I ever bump into someone I know whose brother was the licensee for a while, I'll have to ask how he ran things. I'd also imagine that in some places you get a lot of staff who are pretty unreliable, but employing so many that you are offering someone an hour/day if he's lucky seems ridiculous.

[Garacesh]

Four of the major parties have not provided "anything like full details" on plans to cut the deficit, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said.

The think-tank said "broad outlines" of the choice on offer were on show but the electorate had been left "somewhere in the dark" over cuts planned by the Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and SNP.

 

Source: BBC News

[localzuk]

On another note, does anyone else find David Cameron strangely... disengaged from this campaign? Heard/read lots of rumours about him being throughly fed up and wanting out with others preparing leadership bids. Theresa May has been noticeable by her absence... distancing herself from an election defeat perhaps?

 

Agreed. I've barely seen him in the media to be honest. His underlings appear a lot, but Cameron himself is strangely quiet, in comparison to Ed Miliband, or Nicola Sturgeon. Maybe its just the news sources I read though!

[sted]

C. I'm glad I've never had to claim JSA, watching my brother and brother-in-law go through it, it's absolutely soul destroying if you're the kind of person who genuinely wants to work, which I believe most people are**

 

** I know we'd all love to win the lottery but I genuinely believe the vast majority of people want to earn a living rather than live off benefits

 

I did that after college for about 2 years on and off it was soul destroying and the stuff they send you on is worse towards the end i had to go to some place once a week and sit down and write applications. Id spent the rest of the week at home applying for pretty much anything i thought i had a chance of doing i diddnt need to go and sit in a room for x hours without music/any other distractions to keep me going. Then there was the silly team building things yes im sure building a raft at Hatfield marina was really useful and not at all a total waste of money

[zag]

Agreed. I've barely seen him in the media to be honest. His underlings appear a lot, but Cameron himself is strangely quiet, in comparison to Ed Miliband, or Nicola Sturgeon. Maybe its just the news sources I read though!

 

Your probably watching the BBC and reading the Mirror, independent and Guardian

 

Then again you are right, he lacks the campaign charisma of someone like Boris so kind of disappears from the news.

[Garacesh]

Boris has charisma out the wazoo.. It's just a shame he's utterly bonkers.

[witch]

I find Boris insufferable. I know he is a very intelligent man so why he has to behave like that is beyond me. I would find it hard to vote for someone like him.

[Garacesh]

Honestly I think Boris just suffers from George W 'Can't-Get-Fooled-Again' Bush disease.

 

He's intelligent enough and he does have some good ideas, his heart is certainly in the right place.. I think he's just a terrible public speaker and he immediately cracks under pressure whenever there's a camera around.

[witch]

I think he's just a terrible public speaker and he immediately cracks under pressure whenever there's a camera around.

 

Make a great leader of a political party then...

[zag]

Boris wrote this on facebook the other day, its a brilliant piece even if you don't agree with his politics.

 

One of the top comments is from a teacher asking if she can use it in her persuasive writing class

 

The other day I was driving past the port at Bristol and I saw all those thousands of cars lined up on the quayside – and whoa… I did a double take. There they were: phalanx upon phalanx of shiny new vehicles glinting like Dinky toys in the sun; and I suddenly realised that they weren’t arriving in this country.

 

These cars hadn’t just disembarked from France or Germany or Japan. They were about to make their own journey overseas – they were British cars, for goodness sake.

They were examples of British manufacturing and design and engineering – and they were about to be loaded on to ships and taken to other European countries, and to Africa, and Asia; and I reflected on one of the most stunning turnaround stories in the economic history of this country.

 

Britain last year produced more than 1.5 million cars – the most since 2007 – and we are poised to overtake France and become the second biggest car manufacturing power in Europe.

Across the West Midlands – and indeed across the country – there are now literally thousands of businesses, large and small, that are engaged in automotive innovation and supply; and there was a time when no one would have believed that was possible.

 

I remember the 1970s. You, too, may remember that mullet- haired decade. The music was superb, the food was mediocre, and British industry was on its knees.

I remember when our motor manufacturing industry was in the hands of ‘conveners’ and ‘shop stewards’, and when the man who ran British Leyland – then our biggest car company – appeared to be an avowedly communist trade union official called Red Robbo.

 

When I was a child I am afraid to say that British cars were the butt of international derision. They leaked oil, and they were generally assembled with such slovenly imprecision they gained a reputation for unreliability that it has taken decades to shake off.

 

Lemon after lemon rolled off our production lines, culminating in the ludicrous rustbucket called the Austin Allegro – and there was a reason for the disaster. We had atrocious relations between management and unions, and a legal framework that gave all the power to the unions.

 

We had a Labour government that believed companies existed not to serve the needs of the market, or the desires of their customers – but to satisfy the rights of their workers.

We had an era of tea breaks and ‘demarcation disputes’ and closed shops and one-out-all-out strikes, with the Labour government trying to impose such insane solutions as Tony Benn’s communist-style motorbike ‘collective’ at Meriden. It did not work then, and it seems to me to be deranged that we could be even contemplating going back to such arrangements now.

 

I am not surprised to discover that one of the key authors of the Labour Party manifesto is my former adversary Ken Livingstone, who has long been on the Bennite wing.

By Ed Miliband’s own admission, Livingstone has been a big influence in his thinking – and in their return to the Benn/Livingstone approach Labour’s plans are truly nightmarish for business and enterprise.

Miliband is turning the Labour Party sharply back to the Left, and actively repudiating the chief insight of Tony Blair – that the party can only be successful if it makes a sensible accommodation with capitalism and the market economy.

 

That is why British business people are so unanimous in their horror, including many former Labour supporters and donors.

 

They are not wrong. Labour wants to hit small- and medium- sized businesses with more corporation tax and higher national insurance – but it is worse than that. They want to recreate the stifling environment of the 1970s, in which management was deprived of the ability to manage.

 

They want to make it easier for employees to take firms to employment tribunals – when you might think the system was already out of control, with people endlessly and automatically and indeed very often vexatiously claiming racial or sexual or age or disability discrimination.

 

They want all companies with more than 50 employees to have a system of profit-sharing – a return to Bennery – and they want the workers to be able to block takeovers.

That is before you have even begun to calculate the impact of their attacks on the City, higher income tax, and the higher interest rates that small firms would have to cope with – the result of Labour’s failure to tackle the deficit. What makes this anti-capitalist agenda so dangerous is that the British motor manufacturing industry is not in the hands of a few giant firms.

 

We are talking about huge numbers of often tiny companies – firms that pride themselves on making a more efficient windscreen-wiper or a quieter air-conditioning unit or a more easily wipeable dashboard fascia. It is incredible but true that Britain now has more specialised motor manufacturing marques than any country on earth – Lotus, McLaren, Bristol, Morgan, Caterham, TVR… the list goes on.

Think of London’s new hop-on hop-off Routemaster bus, a glorious piece of low-carbon technology and one of the greenest new buses on the market – made in Northern Ireland by Wrightbus. The West Midlands is once again the epicentre of one of the world’s densest ecosystems of motor manufacturing and development.

 

How mad, how tragic, that this extraordinary British triumph should be faced with a Labour government that regards capitalism as ‘predatory’.

The problem with Ed Miliband is not his method of consuming a bacon sarnie – in fact I totally sympathise on that one. The problem is not even that he crashed the economy last time, though he did. He and Balls were at the controls in Downing Street when this country experienced the worst economic catastrophe in living memory – a catastrophe that was gravely exacerbated by their irresponsible fiscal policies.

The problem with Ed Miliband is that he wants to take the country back to the 1970s.

 

He genuinely thinks France is the model we should emulate, when the French – whatever the splendours of their civilisation – have 12 per cent unemployment, and when huge numbers of the most talented French people have decided that they wish France was more like Britain. How many Brits work in Paris? 16,000.

 

How many French men and women live and work in London? About 400,000. Mais oui. That should tell Miliband all he needs to know about the relative dynamism and competitiveness of the two economies.

Labour wants to go back to the 1970s, Ukip to some non-existent version of a monochrome 1950s, the Greens would like to go back to the middle of the stone age, and the Lib Dems would probably settle for any epoch in which they were above five per cent in the polls.

 

There is only one party presenting itself for election on May 7 that seems to believe in the genius of this country, and that has a plan to take it forward.

 

It is only the Conservatives that understand the real economic and social significance of all those British cars lined up at Bristol.

 

They aren’t the results of an evil and predatory system, by which workers are exploited and the boss class luxuriate in ever greater privilege.

 

They are the fruits of a long and painful post-war period in which Britain has learned that in order to survive we must innovate and compete, and that we cannot hope to compete if we over-tax and over-regulate in the way that Ed Miliband is proposing.

 

Those British-made vehicles are the sign of an economy that is back on its feet after the Labour-made disaster of 2008-9, in which motor manufacturing fell by half a million cars; an economy that has seen the creation, since 2010, of about two million jobs.

 

And those glistening British cars at the Bristol docks therefore embody the great moral purpose of wealth creation – because it is only if you have a strong and vibrant economy that you can hope to raise the tax to pay for roads and schools and hospitals and pensions and welfare – not to speak of strong defences – and all the other civilised objectives that we want to meet.

I really don’t think Miliband gets that.

 

He is one of those theoretical socialists who thinks the problem with socialism is it has never been properly tried; and I am horrified at the idea he should be given another go.

There is only one party presenting itself for election on May 7 that believes that on the whole today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow is going to be better than today. That is David Cameron and the Conservatives.

We need five more years to entrench this economic recovery, five years to take this country forwards and not backwards.

That is the Battle for Britain next month, and one this country can’t afford to lose.

[sonofsanta]

Conversely, I think Boris is very, very clever, and he's realised that the people don't want an incisive, intelligent figure of authority to lead them, they just want a buffoon to entertain and distract them. He is a very capable debater, written* and spoken, and plays up the fool to disarm opponents and leave them underestimating him.

 

He's also the man who wanted to overturn 1500 years of legal theory and a basic principle of human rights by making a "swift and minor change" (his words) to British law by overturning the presumption of innocence, instead assuming that people travelling to Iraq or Syria were guilty until proven innocent. He's terrifying.

 

 

*EDIT: @zag provides the written example I was thinking of above. I don't agree with him, but it's masterfully done.

Edited April 23, 2015 by sonofsanta

[localzuk]

Very long winded and waffley, which is typical of Boris. It also lacks reality. Much of what he has said is nonsensical, and not based in reality. However, it is a very easy to follow piece of writing, which engages the reader well.

 

Also, he buys into the idea that people are there to service the economy and therefore businesses, rather than the idea that I subscribe to which is that the economy is there to serve us, the people. Its a tool to allow us to have a good life, not the reason to be alive.