Politics Thread (encompassing Brexit) - 21 June 2017 onwards

[Guest]

43 minutes ago, nnfox said:

It is a difficult situation but there are no easy fixes.  If a company pays its top executives massive wages, then that is a matter for them and the shareholders. I'm not sure I would turn down a big pay packet if it was offered to me.  In my opinion the unjust element of fat cat pay is where the CEO gets a huge salary despite the company making big losses and workers being made redundant. 

 

As far as raising minimum wage in line with top pay, I'm not sure how that would work in reality.  I mean, if a warehouse worker, burger flipper or shelf stacker got paid as much as a nurse, then you would soon have no nurses left.  So you would have to raise everybody's pay to a level that keeps them off the bottom of the pay ladder.  If everybody's pay was elevated, then everyone would have more money, meaning companies would charge more for goods and services, meaning bigger profits and even bigger pay for the ones at the top and so the cycle continues.

 

 

Precisely why the entire ediface needs to crumble.

[Rogstanley]

Train fares up way above inflation yet again

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42536159

 

 

While bosses get multimillion payrises and train operators are bailed out

 

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5225221/amp/Rail-bosses-multimillion-pay-despite-strike-misery.html

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Rogstanley said:

Train fares up way above inflation yet again

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42536159

 

 

While bosses get multimillion payrises and train operators are bailed out

 

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5225221/amp/Rail-bosses-multimillion-pay-despite-strike-misery.html

 

Not to forget the dividends which go towards subsidising railways on the continent.

[Guest]

Andy McDonald's Today interview - Summary

Andy McDonald, the shadow transport secretary, was on the Today programme earlier talking about Labour’s plans for rail. Here are the main points he made.

• McDonald said British Rail, the old nationalised service, was a “remarkable achievement” because it was more efficient than the privatised service operating now.

You’ve got to remember, through British Rail there was a remarkable achievement. [It was] so derided and abused, when we have the curly-lip sandwiches stories and all the rest of it. But that was actually 3% more efficient in its last 20 years than we’ve had under privatisation, with little or no investment, because it was a declining industry and the investment didn’t go in. If British Rail had half the investment that’s gone in under privatisation, we’d have had a gold standard railway.

But he also insisted that Labour’s plans to nationalise the railways should not be seen as the party just wanting to bring back British Rail. When asked if he was nostalgic for the days of British Rail, he said:

No, it’s not about British Rail. It’s about a new era of railways that delivers the very, very best for the British people.

• He said Labour would peg rail fare increases to the CPI measure of inflation, not RPI, saving commuters on average £500 over the course of a parliament.

• He explained how nationalisation would save passengers money. Asked how Labour would pay for cheaper tickets, he replied:

You pay for that by not wasting money in the franchising system itself, which is immensely costly for the taxpayer and for the TOCs, the train operating companies, and who pays for that ultimately? The passengers.

You reduce that cost. You take out this terrible duplication, you’ve seen it over the last couple of days, endless CEOs on massive amounts of money duplicating costs. And, lastly, [you stop] profits and dividends going out to, not only the corporate entities, but to [foreign] state-owned and controlled railways.

• He described the rail franchising system as “an absolute racket”.

We have a fractured, expensive and complex system, we are wasting money in the franchising system itself, it duplicates costs ... This is a nonsense, this is an absolute racket.

• He confirmed that under Labour’s plans it would take time to bring train companies back into public ownership. This would happen when franchises came up for renewal, he said. He said after two parliamentary terms (10 years) all but one of the current franchises would have expired.

• He defended Labour’s tendency to support rail workers in industrial disputes. He said:

I think instead of being at war with the people who work in the rail industry, we should be in partnership with them to ensure that we deliver the best possible service and they want to commit to that, but what’s happening here is ideologically we’ve got a government who prefers to have battles and wars, rather than sit round a negotiating table and resolve these very, very real issues.

[Buce]

 

This is what grinds my gears when people say how proud they are to be British: frankly, regardless of political affiliations, this shames us all:

 

"Our Benefits system has become a racket for cheating poor people"

 

When Moira gets scared, she cuts herself. “It’s my way of taking control.” Right now she’s very scared. In a few days she faces a tribunal that will judge whether she is entitled to her disability benefit. She has been through forms and examinations and the officials who tell her one thing and those who tell her another, and she is nearly broken. In a low-ceilinged office at the back of a housing estate, she starts sobbing. “I cannot live like this any more.”

 

Steph Pike lets Moira talk, before telling her, “stay focused”. After years as a welfare rights adviser, Pike knows what tribunals want: short, direct answers shorn of humiliation and pain. Now in her late 40s, Moira was raised in care, went to jail and has been repeatedly cheated of her benefits. Part of her life story is of being let down and punished by authority – but Pike needs her to set all that aside. “Bear with me,” Pike keeps saying. “This is important.”

Such meetings are normally confidential, but for three days over two weeks I had exclusive access to Pike in her work for the Child Poverty Action Group charity. I saw her advise others who appeared to have been wronged by state officials – and I accompanied Moira to that tribunal.

That our benefits system is broken is no longer up for debate. Ministers are told universal credit is a fiasco and MPs weep over starving families in one of the richest societies in human history. Even rightwing tabloids run grim updates on how men with terminal cancer are declared fit to work just weeks before they die.

Such cases are described as shameful. As failures. They are lined up like so many one-offs – not representative of fair-play Britain. But Pike and her colleagues know different. They see a system that routinely snatches money out of the hands of people who need and are entitled to it and bullies claimants with contempt.

 

Such meetings are normally confidential, but for three days over two weeks I had exclusive access to Pike in her work for the Child Poverty Action Group charity. I saw her advise others who appeared to have been wronged by state officials – and I accompanied Moira to that tribunal.

That our benefits system is broken is no longer up for debate. Ministers are told universal credit is a fiasco and MPs weep over starving families in one of the richest societies in human history. Even rightwing tabloids run grim updates on how men with terminal cancer are declared fit to work just weeks before they die.

Such cases are described as shameful. As failures. They are lined up like so many one-offs – not representative of fair-play Britain. But Pike and her colleagues know different. They see a system that routinely snatches money out of the hands of people who need and are entitled to it and bullies claimants with contempt.

 

That’s Moira’s experience, too. Her trouble started when she found herself feeling steadily worse – and so did as she was told and rang the Department for Work and Pensions. Her recent back operation hadn’t worked, the arthritis in her spine, hips and knees was getting worse and the heavy-duty painkillers were wrecking her kidneys. She was summoned for a reassessment in Southend, a 70-mile round trip from her home in London – tricky for a woman who cannot walk more than 10 steps without crutches. Claimants such as Moira are entitled to a home assessment, but Pike told me they are often dispatched “miles away”. She was still told off for being late, says Moira. After the examination, she lost her personal independence payment.

 

I have seen a copy of the report by the nurse employed by a private firm, which notes that Moira “has a bath mostly every day”. Wrong, she tells Pike. Her depression means that she needs to be “motivated” to bathe – or else “I’ll run a bath and it’ll sit there for four days.” More tears, this time of shame.

The nurse says she has three meals a day. “Lying ass,” shouts Moira, who says she doesn’t eat more than once a day. The report claims: “She is able to get on and off the toilet without difficulty.” Moira’s own form says, “I have great difficulty getting up off the toilet as the joint in my right hip gets stuck.”

The nurse concludes: “Since her last assessment two years ago, this lady’s restrictions have considerably improved.” Yet Moira’s own GP has written to the tribunal, “I would feel that her general overall condition has got worse.” None of these contradictions surprises Pike. Moira, she says, is simply the latest victim of “a lack of care and a culture of money-saving”.

 

Moira never went looking for welfare advice; she was just starving. In February her GP practice referred her to a food bank. At east London’s First Love Foundation, you walk into a church hall, a volunteer sets aside two bags of food for you and then, by a sign that reads “the way, the life”, you talk to Pike or one of her CPAG colleagues.

Normally, that hardly ever happens. Welfare advice has almost vanished after years of Conservative cuts to councils and legal aid. Pike started out at a council, until it was forced to cut back its welfare advice service. Nowadays, if you’re disabled or unemployed, you’ll most likely get a few leaflets “signposting” you to other services, which themselves can’t help much. As for someone to represent you at a hearing, as Pike is for Moira, “It’s a desert out there,” says Alan Markey, head of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers. So the people who need welfare advice can’t get it, even while they’re being short-changed of their benefits. Just as the government is making the welfare system meaner, blunter and more prone to malfunction, it is also hacking away at any means of redress.This means poor people are bilked out of millions of pounds that are rightfully theirs. One of Pike’s colleagues, who also advises at the food bank, went through his records for the Guardian and calculated that he filed 36 appeals in the past year. Fifteen still await conclusion, but of the rest, 20 out of 21 DWP rulings were overturned after a welfare adviser got involved.

 

In just one year, Pike and her colleagues won a total of £852,288.84 back from the DWP: benefits wrongly withheld, years of back payments, compensation to cover the debts claimants racked up. And that’s for just one food bank in one pocket of London. Multiply it for the rest of the country, and you realise that this isn’t about a few bad decisions or rotten apples. It is a predatory system. Last May, the DWP was forced to admit that it has a target to refuse 80% of requests for any reconsideration of benefit decisions. Poor and often seriously ill people with legitimate claims to state support have been left to starve by the government, in order to save money that has been recycled into tax cuts for rich people and big businesses. This happened under “compassionate Conservative” David Cameron and continues under Theresa May, who promised to “always act in the interest of ordinary, working-class people”.

 

Moira herself was wrongly denied housing benefit, which led to her landlord almost evicting her. She was put in the wrong universal credit group, which mandated her to look for work. She lost money under a mistakenly imposed benefit cap. Each time, her protests were ignored, Pike had to file an official complaint. Without a representative, Pike believes, “Moira would have been forced to go out and look for a job. She would have been sanctioned. It’s a real possibility that she could have ended up destitute and homeless.”

By the time Moira goes in for her appeal, she has been crying and dry-retching. She sits in the hearing room, a black woman in an Adidas tracksuit and on crutches facing three white people with their laptops and thick handbooks. This is how Tory politicians’ rhetorical divide between the deserving and undeserving poor is made bureaucratic reality. Moira has minutes to prove she is on the right side.

It goes well, until the doctor asks about her limited mobility, and Moira makes a passing remark about an elbow getting “dislocated”. The doctor pounces: what does she mean? It seems an obvious slip; she simply means her elbow pops out of its socket, and it has nothing to do with her appeal. Yet the doctor won’t let go.

 

We’re sent out of the room, as Pike mutters that the elbow has nothing to do with her claim for PIP. On coming back in, the chair announces the hearing has been adjourned while the panel awaits more medical evidence. Moira’s case will drag on well into 2018. The chair drones calmly on – but Moira cries out “I’ve got to go” and grabs her crutches. Once outside the room, she starts vomiting and bawling, “These people have ruled my life since the day I was born.” She bangs on doors, as if giving back some of the violence that has been done to her.

 

Five guards appear, but are persuaded that a woman on crutches poses little security threat. Finally, Pike gets her into a taxi. She goes home, crying, humiliated and with just over £140 a week to live on through Christmas and New Year. Just before leaving, she says in a low, flat voice: “I’m going to cut so good tonight.”

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

This is what grinds my gears when people say how proud they are to be British: frankly, regardless of political affiliations, this shames us all:

 

"Our Benefits system has become a racket for cheating poor people"

 

When Moira gets scared, she cuts herself. “It’s my way of taking control.” Right now she’s very scared. In a few days she faces a tribunal that will judge whether she is entitled to her disability benefit. She has been through forms and examinations and the officials who tell her one thing and those who tell her another, and she is nearly broken. In a low-ceilinged office at the back of a housing estate, she starts sobbing. “I cannot live like this any more.”

 

Steph Pike lets Moira talk, before telling her, “stay focused”. After years as a welfare rights adviser, Pike knows what tribunals want: short, direct answers shorn of humiliation and pain. Now in her late 40s, Moira was raised in care, went to jail and has been repeatedly cheated of her benefits. Part of her life story is of being let down and punished by authority – but Pike needs her to set all that aside. “Bear with me,” Pike keeps saying. “This is important.”

Such meetings are normally confidential, but for three days over two weeks I had exclusive access to Pike in her work for the Child Poverty Action Group charity. I saw her advise others who appeared to have been wronged by state officials – and I accompanied Moira to that tribunal.

That our benefits system is broken is no longer up for debate. Ministers are told universal credit is a fiasco and MPs weep over starving families in one of the richest societies in human history. Even rightwing tabloids run grim updates on how men with terminal cancer are declared fit to work just weeks before they die.

Such cases are described as shameful. As failures. They are lined up like so many one-offs – not representative of fair-play Britain. But Pike and her colleagues know different. They see a system that routinely snatches money out of the hands of people who need and are entitled to it and bullies claimants with contempt.

 

Such meetings are normally confidential, but for three days over two weeks I had exclusive access to Pike in her work for the Child Poverty Action Group charity. I saw her advise others who appeared to have been wronged by state officials – and I accompanied Moira to that tribunal.

That our benefits system is broken is no longer up for debate. Ministers are told universal credit is a fiasco and MPs weep over starving families in one of the richest societies in human history. Even rightwing tabloids run grim updates on how men with terminal cancer are declared fit to work just weeks before they die.

Such cases are described as shameful. As failures. They are lined up like so many one-offs – not representative of fair-play Britain. But Pike and her colleagues know different. They see a system that routinely snatches money out of the hands of people who need and are entitled to it and bullies claimants with contempt.

 

That’s Moira’s experience, too. Her trouble started when she found herself feeling steadily worse – and so did as she was told and rang the Department for Work and Pensions. Her recent back operation hadn’t worked, the arthritis in her spine, hips and knees was getting worse and the heavy-duty painkillers were wrecking her kidneys. She was summoned for a reassessment in Southend, a 70-mile round trip from her home in London – tricky for a woman who cannot walk more than 10 steps without crutches. Claimants such as Moira are entitled to a home assessment, but Pike told me they are often dispatched “miles away”. She was still told off for being late, says Moira. After the examination, she lost her personal independence payment.

 

I have seen a copy of the report by the nurse employed by a private firm, which notes that Moira “has a bath mostly every day”. Wrong, she tells Pike. Her depression means that she needs to be “motivated” to bathe – or else “I’ll run a bath and it’ll sit there for four days.” More tears, this time of shame.

The nurse says she has three meals a day. “Lying ass,” shouts Moira, who says she doesn’t eat more than once a day. The report claims: “She is able to get on and off the toilet without difficulty.” Moira’s own form says, “I have great difficulty getting up off the toilet as the joint in my right hip gets stuck.”

The nurse concludes: “Since her last assessment two years ago, this lady’s restrictions have considerably improved.” Yet Moira’s own GP has written to the tribunal, “I would feel that her general overall condition has got worse.” None of these contradictions surprises Pike. Moira, she says, is simply the latest victim of “a lack of care and a culture of money-saving”.

 

Moira never went looking for welfare advice; she was just starving. In February her GP practice referred her to a food bank. At east London’s First Love Foundation, you walk into a church hall, a volunteer sets aside two bags of food for you and then, by a sign that reads “the way, the life”, you talk to Pike or one of her CPAG colleagues.

Normally, that hardly ever happens. Welfare advice has almost vanished after years of Conservative cuts to councils and legal aid. Pike started out at a council, until it was forced to cut back its welfare advice service. Nowadays, if you’re disabled or unemployed, you’ll most likely get a few leaflets “signposting” you to other services, which themselves can’t help much. As for someone to represent you at a hearing, as Pike is for Moira, “It’s a desert out there,” says Alan Markey, head of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers. So the people who need welfare advice can’t get it, even while they’re being short-changed of their benefits. Just as the government is making the welfare system meaner, blunter and more prone to malfunction, it is also hacking away at any means of redress.This means poor people are bilked out of millions of pounds that are rightfully theirs. One of Pike’s colleagues, who also advises at the food bank, went through his records for the Guardian and calculated that he filed 36 appeals in the past year. Fifteen still await conclusion, but of the rest, 20 out of 21 DWP rulings were overturned after a welfare adviser got involved.

 

In just one year, Pike and her colleagues won a total of £852,288.84 back from the DWP: benefits wrongly withheld, years of back payments, compensation to cover the debts claimants racked up. And that’s for just one food bank in one pocket of London. Multiply it for the rest of the country, and you realise that this isn’t about a few bad decisions or rotten apples. It is a predatory system. Last May, the DWP was forced to admit that it has a target to refuse 80% of requests for any reconsideration of benefit decisions. Poor and often seriously ill people with legitimate claims to state support have been left to starve by the government, in order to save money that has been recycled into tax cuts for rich people and big businesses. This happened under “compassionate Conservative” David Cameron and continues under Theresa May, who promised to “always act in the interest of ordinary, working-class people”.

 

Moira herself was wrongly denied housing benefit, which led to her landlord almost evicting her. She was put in the wrong universal credit group, which mandated her to look for work. She lost money under a mistakenly imposed benefit cap. Each time, her protests were ignored, Pike had to file an official complaint. Without a representative, Pike believes, “Moira would have been forced to go out and look for a job. She would have been sanctioned. It’s a real possibility that she could have ended up destitute and homeless.”

By the time Moira goes in for her appeal, she has been crying and dry-retching. She sits in the hearing room, a black woman in an Adidas tracksuit and on crutches facing three white people with their laptops and thick handbooks. This is how Tory politicians’ rhetorical divide between the deserving and undeserving poor is made bureaucratic reality. Moira has minutes to prove she is on the right side.

It goes well, until the doctor asks about her limited mobility, and Moira makes a passing remark about an elbow getting “dislocated”. The doctor pounces: what does she mean? It seems an obvious slip; she simply means her elbow pops out of its socket, and it has nothing to do with her appeal. Yet the doctor won’t let go.

 

We’re sent out of the room, as Pike mutters that the elbow has nothing to do with her claim for PIP. On coming back in, the chair announces the hearing has been adjourned while the panel awaits more medical evidence. Moira’s case will drag on well into 2018. The chair drones calmly on – but Moira cries out “I’ve got to go” and grabs her crutches. Once outside the room, she starts vomiting and bawling, “These people have ruled my life since the day I was born.” She bangs on doors, as if giving back some of the violence that has been done to her.

 

Five guards appear, but are persuaded that a woman on crutches poses little security threat. Finally, Pike gets her into a taxi. She goes home, crying, humiliated and with just over £140 a week to live on through Christmas and New Year. Just before leaving, she says in a low, flat voice: “I’m going to cut so good tonight.”

As I've said before, I've worked within the benefits system so am more qualified than most to have an opinion. Those who abuse the benefits system exist but are relatively small in number. The vast, vast, vast majority of people seeking help are simply in need, primarily because their wages don't cover life. 

 

What this government has done to benefit recipients, particularly the ill and/or disabled is appalling. It has taken away their dignity and the safety net that is supposed to exist for all of us.

 

Unfortunately right wing media has scewed public perception to such an extent that its believed all claimants are scamming taxpayers and that unfortunate circumstances such as this one are simply the price to pay for fixing a system that is too generous and too easily abused. This is nonsense. 

 

Just wait. The usual suspects will be along in a minute to tell you all the reasons the lady in the article is probably fine and playing the system, despite having never met her. Despite the evidence of DWP targets and the rate of appeal victories against wrong decisions.

 

It's funny how people will go to the end of the earth to protect pensions as "they've paid in for it" ( even though many pensioners receive the non-contributory Pension Credit) but not benefit recipients who in the main have also "paid in to it".

[Buce]

2 minutes ago, toddybad said:

As I've said before, I've worked within the benefits system so am more qualified than most to have an opinion. Those who abuse the benefits system exist but are relatively small in number. The vast, vast, vast majority of people seeking help are simply in need, primarily because their wages don't cover life. 

 

What this government has done to benefit recipients, particularly the ill and/or disabled is appalling. It has taken away their dignity and the safety net that is supposed to exist for all of us.

 

Unfortunately right wing media has scewed public perception to such an extent that its believed all claimants are scamming taxpayers and that unfortunate circumstances such as this one are simply the price to pay for fixing a system that is too generous and too easily abused. This is nonsense. 

 

Just wait. The usual suspects will be along in a minute to tell you all the reasons the lady in the article is probably fine and playing the system, despite having never met her. Despite the evidence of DWP targets and the rate of appeal victories against wrong decisions.

 

It's funny how people will go to the end of the earth to protect pensions as "they've paid in for it" ( even though many pensioners receive the non-contributory Pension Credit) but not benefit recipients who in the main have also "paid in to it".

 

I'd like to get involved by volunteering as a Welfare Rights advisor.

 

Any idea how I'd go about it?

[Guest]

43 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

I'd like to get involved by volunteering as a Welfare Rights advisor.

 

Any idea how I'd go about it?

I worked directly within the system so not entirely sure though I'd have thought that the CAB would be the bet place to start as that's where most people go for advice (it's usually signposted by councils)

[Buce]

1 hour ago, toddybad said:

As I've said before, I've worked within the benefits system so am more qualified than most to have an opinion. Those who abuse the benefits system exist but are relatively small in number. The vast, vast, vast majority of people seeking help are simply in need, primarily because their wages don't cover life. 

 

What this government has done to benefit recipients, particularly the ill and/or disabled is appalling. It has taken away their dignity and the safety net that is supposed to exist for all of us.

 

Unfortunately right wing media has scewed public perception to such an extent that its believed all claimants are scamming taxpayers and that unfortunate circumstances such as this one are simply the price to pay for fixing a system that is too generous and too easily abused. This is nonsense. 

 

Just wait. The usual suspects will be along in a minute to tell you all the reasons the lady in the article is probably fine and playing the system, despite having never met her. Despite the evidence of DWP targets and the rate of appeal victories against wrong decisions.

 

It's funny how people will go to the end of the earth to protect pensions as "they've paid in for it" ( even though many pensioners receive the non-contributory Pension Credit) but not benefit recipients who in the main have also "paid in to it".

 

I doubt it.

 

The usual suspects usually ignore the difficult questions.

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

I doubt it.

 

The usual suspects usually ignore the difficult questions.

"And then, like a puff of smoke, they're gone"

[Webbo]

1 minute ago, toddybad said:

"And then, like a puff of smoke, they're gone"

Actually I don't see the point. None of us are going to change our minds, I'll just get a load of abuse and be told I want people to suffer so why bother?

[Buce]

2 minutes ago, Webbo said:

Actually I don't see the point. None of us are going to change our minds, I'll just get a load of abuse and be told I want people to suffer so why bother?

 

In all honesty, Webbo, I don't know what your opinion is on the issue raised, so saying you wouldn't change your mind doesn't really tell us anything.

 

I'd like to think you could put party politics to one side on this one and accept that something is wrong.

[Webbo]

1 minute ago, Buce said:

 

In all honesty, Webbo, I don't know what your opinion is on the issue raised, so saying you wouldn't change your mind doesn't really tell us anything.

 

I'd like to think you could put party politics to one side on this one and accept that something is wrong.

Neither I nor you know this person that was interviewed, we don't know the truth of what's being said. The interviewer is clearly promoting an anti tory angle, she's telling him what he wants to hear. She probably does see herself as a victim doesn't mean that that that's a fair assessment . Now if you could all just call me an evil cvnt and lets move on.

[Buce]

4 minutes ago, Webbo said:

Neither I nor you know this person that was interviewed, we don't know the truth of what's being said. The interviewer is clearly promoting an anti tory angle, she's telling him what he wants to hear. She probably does see herself as a victim doesn't mean that that that's a fair assessment . Now if you could all just call me an evil cvnt and lets move on.

 

That's unnecessary.

 

To the best of my recall I don't think I've ever been that offensive to you.

 

 

[Webbo]

1 minute ago, Buce said:

 

That's unnecessary.

 

To the best of my recall I don't think I've ever been that offensive to you.

 

 

No you haven't, I apologise for that.

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, Webbo said:

Neither I nor you know this person that was interviewed, we don't know the truth of what's being said. The interviewer is clearly promoting an anti tory angle, she's telling him what he wants to hear. She probably does see herself as a victim doesn't mean that that that's a fair assessment . Now if you could all just call me an evil cvnt and lets move on.

 

6 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

That's unnecessary.

 

To the best of my recall I don't think I've ever been that offensive to you.

 

 

I probably have. If the cap fits....

[Countryfox]

News Years Quiz !! ....       I know you like a good quiz Webbo ...   

 

RESTBEW IS AN VILE TUNC.   (anag).

[Countryfox]

Lets move on ! ...   

[Webbo]

1 minute ago, Countryfox said:

News Years Quiz !! ....       I know you like a good quiz Webbo ...   

 

RESTBEW IS AN VILE TUNC.   (anag).

Xollob

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Webbo said:

Neither I nor you know this person that was interviewed, we don't know the truth of what's being said. The interviewer is clearly promoting an anti tory angle, she's telling him what he wants to hear. She probably does see herself as a victim doesn't mean that that that's a fair assessment . Now if you could all just call me an evil cvnt and lets move on.

In all seriousness, if you ignore the particular woman and just look at the broader picture, I still have a great many friends who work in the world of benefits and they all believe there to be a problem. 

Edited 2 January 2018 by Guest

[Innovindil]

1 minute ago, toddybad said:

In all seriousness, if you ignore the particular woman and just look at the broader picture, I still have a great many friends who work in the world of benefits and they all believe there to be a problem. 

Well don't keep us in suspense toddy. What's the problem? 

[Countryfox]

And that, ladies and gents, is my sole input on the Politics thread for 2018 ...    back to mi chainsaw ! ...    

[Guest]

Just now, Innovindil said:

Well don't keep us in suspense toddy. What's the problem? 

Primarily two issues:

 

PIP assessments are rushed, inadequate and routinely giving results that beggar belief. Severely disabled people are losing benefit entitlements wrongly.

 

Universal credit having such a long lead in period causes destitution. Although advances can be paid, they don't cover the whole period of the wait. This is causing evictions and once again making benefit recipients persona non grata to landlords.

[Buce]

5 minutes ago, Countryfox said:

And that, ladies and gents, is my sole input on the Politics thread for 2018 ...    back to mi chainsaw ! ...    

[Webbo]

15 minutes ago, toddybad said:

Primarily two issues:

 

PIP assessments are rushed, inadequate and routinely giving results that beggar belief. Severely disabled people are losing benefit entitlements wrongly.

 

Universal credit having such a long lead in period causes destitution. Although advances can be paid, they don't cover the whole period of the wait. This is causing evictions and once again making benefit recipients persona non grata to landlords.

I seem to recall a couple of months ago you saying that the unemployment figures weren't accurate as the govts(Labour and Tory) put people on invalidity benefits to massage the figures.