Life under the Tories: don't say you weren't warned

[mattx]

Life under the Tories: don't say you weren't warned

 

The Tory nightmare: don't say you weren't warned | Ian Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian

[Dos_Box]

I hate to be pedantic here, but that article is mainly a comment about how the author perceived the 1980's and this particular part really got my goat:

 

Of course the health unions, the teaching unions, the public sector unions are doing great work. Alas, the wider "economy" these days is awash with such "silly" jobs isn't it? IT support. Vajazzling. Blogging.

 

Nice to see the Guardian respects our area of expertise then.

[sonofsanta]

Alas, the wider "economy" these days is awash with such "silly" jobs isn't it? IT support. Vajazzling. Blogging.

 

He kind of lost my sympathies at that point, when he likened my job to someone who sticks little gems on lady parts.

 

 

EDIT: ...and that is why I should refresh the page before replying.

[Dos_Box]

Don't worry about it. It just shows we all agree on the same point independantly.

The comments below the article are also make good reading too. It's like a school playground with everyone stood around chanting 'Fight, fight, fight'.

[GrumbleDook]

When people say 'IT Support' or even the more generic 'a job in IT' it starts to sound a bit like 'oh, I do stuff with cars' ... except that saying you do stuff with cars makes no distinction between a trained mechanic, a designer, a cabbie, someone working on Bloodhound SSC, someone doing decal and pimping of cars, someone running a car wash on their driveway at home or Jenson Button ... so yes, there are roles times when the jobs might be a bit pointless but the catch-all attitude of that point in the article stinks ... but probably sells well to the general readership. It's all about the audience!

[DT2]

I usually stay well away from politics, but in this instance I'll make an exception...

They're all as bad as each other, back-stabbing spineless fools. If Labour had their way they'd spend us into oblivion, supporting the lazy, work shy, and generally everyone but the hardworking. Tories come into power and try to save us a few bob, but still fail to see the cuts are all in the wrong place and that really, they're all just blue-nosed wigs with a half-a##ed agenda...... And lib dems, I wouldn't give the vapour from my bodily returns.....

I read a book a while back by Richard Littlejohn - To Hell in a Handcart.... And from my perspective, that's exactly what this country is heading into.

Where are all the inspirational leaders of yesteryear like churchill, and chamberlain..... Oh, wait. They were all drunks, liars, and philanderers too...

 

Pfff...

[Dos_Box]

I've just seen this t-shirt on the Daily Mash:

 

 

Is it trying to say something?

[Theblacksheep]

It's only going to get worse under this bunch.

[Disease]

It's only going to get worse under this bunch.

 

You seem to forget who spent all the money in the first place, it does make me laugh how labour supporters forget what a state financially this country was in under labours spend spend agenda, keeping more ready made voters on benefits.

[sonofsanta]

I usually stay well away from politics, but in this instance I'll make an exception...

They're all as bad as each other, back-stabbing spineless fools. If Labour had their way they'd spend us into oblivion, supporting the lazy, work shy, and generally everyone but the hardworking. Tories come into power and try to save us a few bob, but still fail to see the cuts are all in the wrong place and that really, they're all just blue-nosed wigs with a half-a##ed agenda...... And lib dems, I wouldn't give the vapour from my bodily returns.....

I read a book a while back by Richard Littlejohn - To Hell in a Handcart.... And from my perspective, that's exactly what this country is heading into.

Where are all the inspirational leaders of yesteryear like churchill, and chamberlain..... Oh, wait. They were all drunks, liars, and philanderers too...

 

Pfff...

 

The main problem with the system, that AV (for all its benefits over FPTP) still failed to address is that, ultimately, we can still only vote for politicians.

 

I fear we're now entering a new era of political apathy thanks to the complete bunch of numpties we have competing for our attention. I reckon the next election will be a record low turnout.

[Michael]

I have to agree with DT2. Labour did play a big part in creating the financial crisis. Although all the banks themselves created the financial crisis selling unsafe loans as safe loans, it is or should be the Government who regulate the whole thing and they did, extremely badly.

 

Conservatives at the time were the official Shadow Government and they also are just as bad, as they just let it happen and blamed the Labour Government when they came into power.

 

I also think a good percentage of politicians are absolute control freaks, obsessed with power and wealth. How many politicians have now resigned due to money/financial gain? The number is growing everyday.

 

How many of the EU countries fiddled with their books just to get into the Euro? Pretty much all of them, the worst being Greece. And who let this happen? Politicians! I think the official definition in the English dictionary should be changed.

Edited March 26, 2012 by Michael

[Theblacksheep]

You seem to forget who spent all the money in the first place, it does make me laugh how labour supporters forget what a state financially this country was in under labours spend spend agenda, keeping more ready made voters on benefits.

 

I love how Tory supporters/voters instantly jump on anyone that points out the obvious, instantly branding them Labour and proportioning blame to them. I'm not, but thanks for being so narrow minded.

 

Is this stupid two party politics that limits actual debate and discussion on subjects, even here it seems.

 

The Tories are not reducing the debt. They are still borrowing. They are also selling the country off forcing us to pay more and more. Like I said, its going to get worse and it'll not do anything to our debt.

[ZeroHour]

This did make me laugh: Cash4Access.com - Get up close and personal with your favourite Conservative politicians.

[mattx]

This did make me laugh: Cash4Access.com - Get up close and personal with your favourite Conservative politicians.

 

That's class. :-)

[Guest Guest]

He kind of lost my sympathies at that point

 

He lost my sympathies after the first paragraph. The entire article is just a long winded way of saying "the Tories destroyed the unions"

 

Living in the North I've had my fair share of "nasty Tories" with absolutely no substance to the argument. Yes they destroyed the unions, but he unions almost destroyed the country, and then what have the unions done for us? Oh thats right, make deals behind closed doors about our pay and working conditions; JE, single status, no overtime rates...

 

It would be interesting to see how long Westminster could function if the Amalgamated Union of Baristas and Sandwich Fillers called a strike. And the civil servants came out in sympathy. And the drivers and the cleaners and the couriers and the receptionists and the child-minders and, now I come to think of it, the grandparents.

 

If this is the standard of writing I think I'll be applying for a job for a Newspaper. What exactly is it he is trying to say? Is he just being stupid, in which case he might want to remember hes writing for a supposed broadsheet. Or is he being serious, which quite frankly is just frightening that people would still hold the opinion that bringing the country to its knees is justified because "they took our free teabags away from teabreak" or other such nonsense.

[Garacesh]

This did make me laugh: Cash4Access.com - Get up close and personal with your favourite Conservative politicians.

Gave me a good giggle, that one did!

[Trapper]

I love how Tory supporters/voters instantly jump on anyone that points out the obvious, instantly branding them Labour and proportioning blame to them. I'm not, but thanks for being so narrow minded.

 

I come from a long line of socialist Labour supporting miners, and even my Dad who sat on the bloody NUM committee for Leicestershire gets wound up by the fact Labour refuse to acknowledge they spent too much, and continue on as if it was all rainbows during the last three years of the previous Government.

Edited March 27, 2012 by Trapper

[LosOjos]

I keep asking this question but I'm yet to get a definitive answer: who the bloody hell do we owe all this money to? I keep hearing about the massive debt we're in but nobody seems to know who the debtor is!

 

This may be controversial, but with all these daft oil-grabbing wars we keep poking our noses in to, why don't we just refuse to pay them back and let them start a war with us? Of course I jest...

[Flatpackhamster]

Don't worry about it. It just shows we all agree on the same point independantly.

The comments below the article are also make good reading too. It's like a school playground with everyone stood around chanting 'Fight, fight, fight'.

 

It's hard to decide who are the bigger trolls, the ones below the article or the article writers. The Guardian has really leapt off the sanity rails in the last two years. Mad Pol started it, of course, when she compared capping housing benefits at £20,000 a year to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, but scarcely a week goes by without someone writing an article for the Guardian claiming that Labour Britain was a paradise which has been cruelly smashed by Evul Torays.

[jinnantonnixx]

I keep asking this question but I'm yet to get a definitive answer: who the bloody hell do we owe all this money to? I keep hearing about the massive debt we're in but nobody seems to know who the debtor is!

 

This may be controversial, but with all these daft oil-grabbing wars we keep poking our noses in to, why don't we just refuse to pay them back and let them start a war with us? Of course I jest...

 

Banks, foreign (and domestic) investors, other countries, etc.

 

It really is just like a personal bank account. The govt gets taxes from its taxpayers, and spends the money. If it doesn't have enough money to meet this spend, it borrows (from other sources, countries) or issues bonds or gilts.

 

The hilarious part to this is that the banks just conjure money out of thin air. Don't believe me? Look up "fractional reserve banking", or if you have a spare 45 minutes or so, look up the eye-opening "Money As Debt" presentation on Youtube.

Edited March 27, 2012 by jinnantonnixx

[AMLinington]

I, like DT2 usually steer well clear of politics but the whole argument drives me up the wall. Ultimately, every party is just as bad as every other party just in different ways.

 

The labour tolerance for spongers and wasters and their ever-spiralling borrowing to fund the 'living-off-the-social' lifestyle at the expense of anyone NOT living off the social has had a knockon effect. It is about time the level of benefit handouts is capped. But, like everything else the governements (generally) do, it will have no effect on the REAL spongers and wasters and only serve to hurt the very people it pretends to be helping.

 

We received a letter addressed to the previous owner of the house we bought, lacking a return address or other details, I opened it - it was a bill from a nursery for a single child for the month of December - £890!!!!!! I couldn't believe it. The cost of living in this country and the legacy of poor governance has led to a situation where no individual on low to middling income (IT supporters for example rarely break the £25k mark) can afford to pay his or her mortgage and all the bills AND support their family whilst one spouse stays at home to look after the children, but in forcing that spouse out to work, child care costs of £900 a month render the entire exercise almost pointless!!!

 

THEN when grandparents become involved, social services poke their pointless noses into the lives of decent, hardworking people with generous parents and start dictating that the grandparents can't look after the children. It is my opinion (and before I get flamed, note that I said it was MY opinion) that social services persecute the innocent families because they are too afraid to actually get involved in the environments and communities that really ARE perpetrating atoricities on children! That is not to say that child abuse only occurs in poor economic areas or certain community types, but I can't help but feel that it is easier to 'get the numbers up' by hassling innocent families.

 

A friend of mine is now 'known to social services' because her son fell over in the back garden and a teacher saw his bruise. I mean SERIOUSLY? Children will be children, they will fall over, they will scrape their knees, they will get cuts and bruises. That is part of growing up. Now we have to stop children doing anything lest social services get wind of a bruise or scrape! Parents are too afraid to take their children to the doctors in case that little graze they got riding their bike is interpreted as child abuse! It's ludicrous!

 

I shant bother to vote at the next election as they are all as bad as each other and we'll get shafted whichever way we look at it. The Tories and Lib Dems are screwing us into the ground, and Labour were burdening us with unsustainable debt. We can't win either way. The tories and lib dems claim to be making changes for the good of all, but so far everything they have done has caused myself and my partner, my parents (who are near to retiring), my colleagues friends and family nothing but anguish and additional expense. LeBoyfriend and I barely break even every month as it is, how am I going to afford to have children? I don't have much time left on the old bio clock so I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't...

 

People like to point fingers and place blame, but quite honestly there is no one single 'root cause' of any problem. It is a combination of factors and the only way to address it is to wipe out each factor at a time. But this will never be done and it is probably impossible, so we will limp on as we are with rising living costs and more and more interference from the nanny state until such time as we are either mindless drones or we snap and rebel and Nostradamus is proved right again...

[sonofsanta]

I keep asking this question but I'm yet to get a definitive answer: who the bloody hell do we owe all this money to? I keep hearing about the massive debt we're in but nobody seems to know who the debtor is!

 

This may be controversial, but with all these daft oil-grabbing wars we keep poking our noses in to, why don't we just refuse to pay them back and let them start a war with us? Of course I jest...

 

Every year the UK runs a large budget deficit. The Government spends more money than it can tax, so we plug the gap by selling bonds to investors at home and abroad. These bonds - known as gilts - have to be repaid in full, with interest. Added together, our unpaid loans make up the UK's national debt.

Source: UK National Debt Clock - No-nonsense Guide to Britain's Debt Crisis with more at The Bond Market Explained

 

Which is why the talk of credit ratings matters so much - if the influential credit agencies drop our rating and say we're not as good for the money, we'll have to pay higher interest on those bonds to make up for the added risk of taking them on.

 

Osborne has been talking about 100 year bonds recently as well, which did make me wonder who's going to take out an investment on that long a timescale... the only answer, of course, is corporations, so I think it's safe to say that, pending the invention of the Persuadertron, we're about to be living in Syndicate. The old one, that is, not the new one. Alternatively: Snow Crash.

[Michael]

I keep asking this question but I'm yet to get a definitive answer: who the bloody hell do we owe all this money to? I keep hearing about the massive debt we're in but nobody seems to know who the debtor is!

 

This may be controversial, but with all these daft oil-grabbing wars we keep poking our noses in to, why don't we just refuse to pay them back and let them start a war with us? Of course I jest...

 

It's quite simple really - ourselves. The Government used tax payers money to prop up the banks, yet when we borrow our own money back from the bank, such as a loan or mortgage you pay interest.

 

The tax paid on this then goes back to the Government, so it's going to take a long time (realistically a few decades) to pay it all off. When the current Government wanted to balance the books in 5 years, it's completely an unrealistic target.

Edited March 27, 2012 by Michael

[Flatpackhamster]

I keep asking this question but I'm yet to get a definitive answer: who the bloody hell do we owe all this money to? I keep hearing about the massive debt we're in but nobody seems to know who the debtor is!

 

This may be controversial, but with all these daft oil-grabbing wars we keep poking our noses in to, why don't we just refuse to pay them back and let them start a war with us? Of course I jest...

 

One of the reasons you can't just 'refuse to pay them back' is that large amounts of that debt (which is in the form of government bonds) is owned by the pension companies. The pension companies buy government debt because it represents a long-term investment.

 

If governments default on their debt, the pension companies go bust and people's pensions disappear.

[aerospacemango]

I, like DT2 usually steer well clear of politics but the whole argument drives me up the wall. Ultimately, every party is just as bad as every other party just in different ways.

 

The labour tolerance for spongers and wasters and their ever-spiralling borrowing to fund the 'living-off-the-social' lifestyle at the expense of anyone NOT living off the social has had a knockon effect. It is about time the level of benefit handouts is capped. But, like everything else the governements (generally) do, it will have no effect on the REAL spongers and wasters and only serve to hurt the very people it pretends to be helping.

 

We received a letter addressed to the previous owner of the house we bought, lacking a return address or other details, I opened it - it was a bill from a nursery for a single child for the month of December - £890!!!!!! I couldn't believe it. The cost of living in this country and the legacy of poor governance has led to a situation where no individual on low to middling income (IT supporters for example rarely break the £25k mark) can afford to pay his or her mortgage and all the bills AND support their family whilst one spouse stays at home to look after the children, but in forcing that spouse out to work, child care costs of £900 a month render the entire exercise almost pointless!!!

 

THEN when grandparents become involved, social services poke their pointless noses into the lives of decent, hardworking people with generous parents and start dictating that the grandparents can't look after the children. It is my opinion (and before I get flamed, note that I said it was MY opinion) that social services persecute the innocent families because they are too afraid to actually get involved in the environments and communities that really ARE perpetrating atoricities on children! That is not to say that child abuse only occurs in poor economic areas or certain community types, but I can't help but feel that it is easier to 'get the numbers up' by hassling innocent families.

 

A friend of mine is now 'known to social services' because her son fell over in the back garden and a teacher saw his bruise. I mean SERIOUSLY? Children will be children, they will fall over, they will scrape their knees, they will get cuts and bruises. That is part of growing up. Now we have to stop children doing anything lest social services get wind of a bruise or scrape! Parents are too afraid to take their children to the doctors in case that little graze they got riding their bike is interpreted as child abuse! It's ludicrous!

 

I shant bother to vote at the next election as they are all as bad as each other and we'll get shafted whichever way we look at it. The Tories and Lib Dems are screwing us into the ground, and Labour were burdening us with unsustainable debt. We can't win either way. The tories and lib dems claim to be making changes for the good of all, but so far everything they have done has caused myself and my partner, my parents (who are near to retiring), my colleagues friends and family nothing but anguish and additional expense. LeBoyfriend and I barely break even every month as it is, how am I going to afford to have children? I don't have much time left on the old bio clock so I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't...

 

People like to point fingers and place blame, but quite honestly there is no one single 'root cause' of any problem. It is a combination of factors and the only way to address it is to wipe out each factor at a time. But this will never be done and it is probably impossible, so we will limp on as we are with rising living costs and more and more interference from the nanny state until such time as we are either mindless drones or we snap and rebel and Nostradamus is proved right again...

 

What a beautifully written post.

 

I pretty much agree with everything you have said, there, and it makes a really pleasant change to see someone take the time to post an opinion that is not governed by the papers....whichever side of the fence you are on.