Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[lifetime fan]

Duncan smith talking of ending the something for nothing culture. Will they fuck off MPs expenses. They can do what everyone else does and use their wages to buy things like food. God I fucking hate conservatives, could it be any clearer they genuinely think the vast majority of people exist purely to serve them and their needs.

 

I'd love to see someone ask him whether Betsy was a skiver or a scrounger.

[lifetime fan]

True, this. It's a very risky business if you're not in the fortunate position of having substantial family wealth to fall back on. 60, or even 90k is a joke.

 

 

As opposed to earning £20k a year and constantly facing the prospect of redundancy?

[stringvest]

As opposed to earning £20k a year and constantly facing the prospect of redundancy?

No, I'm talking about recruiting MPs Col and driving up the quality. There aren't many of them and we should try and get the best that we can. I understand you could argue this applies to most jobs, but it was the point related to MPs.

[lifetime fan]

No, I'm talking about recruiting MPs Col and driving up the quality. There aren't many of them and we should try and get the best that we can. I understand you could argue this applies to most jobs, but it was the point related to MPs.

I really don't agree with the job security point of view. It is what it is.

 

I would actually increase their salaries but wipe out all expenses.

[Rico1304]

Again, I'd do the opposite. I'd keep the current system but make it 100% transparent to the public what every MP was claiming - available online. It'd make campaigning easier, they'd think twice about claiming for shit and they'd have to be able to justify every single purchase to voters and more importantly the opposition.

[stringvest]

Yep. Me too. In any normal case, an MPs expenses would dwarf their salary, so it would be in the public interest to see that.

 

[Scooby Dudek]

I think it's the other way round, we need to increase MP wages so clever, talented but 'normal' people see it as a career path. At the moment the money isn't great iif you consider they could get fucked off after 4 years so you get previliged twats who couldn't make it in the real world.

 

I'd do the same for teachers too, attract the best people to the job.

 

I think a major problem we have now, is we already have too many who see being an MP as a career path, as opposed to a vocation. Maybe paying them the countries average wage would help get a few more "normal" people in and also give them a big incentive to helping the majority of the population increase their lot.

 

I agree with you about teachers, as well as wages it would help if the government didn't try and undermine them whenever possible. They do a massively important job and should be treated with the respect that job deserves.

[Rico1304]

With the best will in the world that's a bit daft. You need the brightest people possible, with experience to form a decent government. However I think a bright person with decent ideals is more likely to listen to the electorate if they aren't over privileged tossers. Of course it doesn't mean a rich person can't make a decent politician either.

 

I watched an old QI the other day and Stephen Fry said the only solution to career politicians and those with power retaining it was to have a parliament made up of randomly selected people. No elections, just a lottery and if your name comes out you serve as an MP for an allotted time. It'd been done in the past but I can't remember which civilisation it was.

[Sugar Ape]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

[lifetime fan]

Again, I'd do the opposite. I'd keep the current system but make it 100% transparent to the public what every MP was claiming - available online. It'd make campaigning easier, they'd think twice about claiming for shit and they'd have to be able to justify every single purchase to voters and more importantly the opposition.

MP's expenses are already published mate, shaming them does not work.

 

Zak Goldsmith to his credit doesn't claim a penny, yeah he's a filthy rich Tory but it doesn't stop dozens of others so credit where it's due.

 

Labour are just as bad when it comes to fiddling their expenses. It simply wouldn't work (publishing expenses and letting the opposition hold them to account) because they're all at it. Well a wide enough selection from all parties for it to be the norm.

 

And I'm not just referring to the obscene expenses, I'm on about the 'allowed' ones too.

 

Raise the MP's salary to say £100-120k a year. You want an assistant? You pay for it.

You want stationary? You're provided with standard HoC stationary.

You want first class rail travel? Tough shit.

You want air fair? Travel is paid through a central pool that purchases 'standard fair' tickets for every trip no exceptions.

 

And if I hear that cunt John Redwood moan about politicians pensions one more time I'm likely to serve time the hypocritical wanker.

[Red Phoenix]

100 of UK's richest people concealing billions in offshore tax havens

Global investigation gets under way as HM Revenue and Customs acts on leaked data

 

Rupert Neate and James Ball

The Guardian, Thursday 9 May 2013 21.17 BST

 

More than 100 of Britain's richest people have been caught hiding billions of pounds in secretive offshore havens, sparking an unprecedented global tax evasion investigation.

 

George Osborne, the chancellor, warned the alleged tax evaders, and a further 200 accountants and advisers accused of helping them cheat the taxman: "The message is simple: if you evade tax, we're coming after you."

 

HM Revenue & Customs warned those involved, who were named in offshore data first offered to the authorities by a whistleblower in 2009, that they will face "criminal prosecution or significant penalties" if they do not voluntarily disclose their tax irregularities, as the UK steps up its efforts to clamp down on avoidance ahead of the G8 summit in June.

 

The 400-gigabyte cache of data leaked to the authorities is understood to be the same information seen by the Guardian in its Offshore Secrets series in November 2012 and March this year. It reveals complicated financial structures using companies and trusts stretching from Singapore and the British Virgin Islands to the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands.

 

The Treasury is working in collaboration with American and Australian tax authorities in the biggest ever cross-border tax evasion investigation, and warned that the alleged evaders may be publicly named and shamed if they fail to come clean and explain their tax affairs.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/09/100-richest-uk-billions-offshore-tax-havens

 

 

 

 

Not sure if I remember correctly, but has this been all over the news in the same way that benefit "scroungers" and "cheats" have? Hmm... I think I can smell corruption.

[Red Phoenix]

Isn't it right to suggest that if all the tax dodging was dealt with, there'd be no deficit at all? And if so, this whole problem is a 100% con?

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Isn't it right to suggest that if all the tax dodging was dealt with, there'd be no deficit at all? And if so, this whole problem is a 100% con?

It would suggest that potential is there.

[Rico1304]

I've always wondered if there was no evasion how much our tax bills would go down? It might increase everyone's tax free allowance massively. They should chase the fuckers to the ends of the earth.

[Skidfingers McGonical]

Damn right rico.

 

Even a sporting club from down the Eadt Lancs are registered in The Cayman Islands or so I heard.

[Scooby Dudek]

With the best will in the world that's a bit daft. You need the brightest people possible, with experience to form a decent government. However I think a bright person with decent ideals is more likely to listen to the electorate if they aren't over privileged tossers. Of course it doesn't mean a rich person can't make a decent politician either.

 

I watched an old QI the other day and Stephen Fry said the only solution to career politicians and those with power retaining it was to have a parliament made up of randomly selected people. No elections, just a lottery and if your name comes out you serve as an MP for an allotted time. It'd been done in the past but I can't remember which civilisation it was.

I get the point you are making, however, paying lots of money does not mean you get the brightest.

What sort of experience do these current career politicians bring into parliament ? Research jobs for other career politicians.

 

As an aside, if politicians were picked like a lottery (which I agree is a very logical idea), the brightest with experience is a lot less likely. 

[Red Phoenix]

Am going to start researching further into this, it's insanity. This is from UK Uncut's website :

 

The Government's Line lies

 

“There is no alternative.”

 

We are told that the only way to reduce the deficit is to cut public services. This is certainly not the case. There are alternatives, but the government chooses to ignore them, highlighting the fact that the cuts are based on ideology, not necessity.

• One alternative is to clamp down on tax avoidance by corporations and the rich and tax evasion, estimated to cost the state £95bn a year
• Another is to make the banks pay for free insurance provided to them by the taxpayer: a chief executive at the Bank of England put the cost of this subsidy at £100bn in a single year

Either the tax avoided and evaded in a single year or the ongoing taxpayer subsidy to the banking industry could pay for all of the £81bn, four-year cuts programme.

 

“We are all in this together.”

 

Since the banking crisis:

• average pay of FTSE 100 directors has risen 55%,
• corporation tax has been cut,
• the government have not delivered on a manifesto pledge to clamp down on tax avoidance, instead cutting staff at HMRC,
• bank profits and bonuses are back in the many billions (last year banks paid out over £7bn in bonuses and just four banks made £24bn in profit),
• there has been no reform of the banks.

David Cameron himself has said that the cuts will change Britain's "whole way of life". Every aspect of what was fought for by generations seems under threat – from selling off the forests, privatising health provision, closing the libraries and swimming pools, to scrapping rural bus routes. What Cameron doesn't say is that the cuts will also disproportionately hit the poor and vulnerable, with cuts to housing benefit, disability living allowance, the childcare element of working tax credits, EMA, the Every Child a Reader programme, Sure Start and the Future Jobs Fund to name a few.

 

The facts speak for themselves; we are not all in this together, we are paying for the folly of reckless bankers whilst the rich profit.

 

The government are forced to claim that there is no alternative to making drastic public sector cuts as they know that people would never accept their plan otherwise. By repeating the same lies over and over again, they hope to brainwash people into inaction.

 

There are alternatives to the cuts, and we are not all in this together. But unless we take action, and take the facts to our friends, our families and those around us, they will get away with it.

 

 

http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/about/cuts

[Scooby Dudek]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10173107/MPs-pay-rise-how-politicians-pay-has-risen-quicker-than-the-workers.html

 

11th July 2013

 

Members of Parliament were today offered a 11-per cent pay increase, taking their annual salary in 2015 to £74,000. It comes as public sector workers are given a 1-per cent pay increase and many salaries in the private sector are frozen or seeing below-inflation increases.

Thanks to a series of generous pay deals, since the mid-1970s the growth in MPs' salaries has outstripped the rise in wages received by the average working family.

In 1977, MPs' pay was set at £6,270, while the average household income in wages was £4,268 a year - meaning an MP's pay was 1.46 times higher.

By 2011, MPs' pay had risen to £65,738 a year, while the average household income in wages was £28,280 - putting MPs' earnings 2.3 times higher.

It means MPs' earnings have risen by 10.4-fold in the period, while an average family's earnings have risen 6.6-fold.

 

The gulf has widened since the credit crisis. The wages of a working family fell by £785 between 2008 and 2011, while MPs' salaries rose by £3,918 in the same period, according to ONS figures.

Economic forecasts expect low wage growth until 2015, meaning the gulf will widen further.

The dramatic increase is thanks to a series of generous pay deals, voted for by MPs, that linked their pay increases to those enjoyed by the most senior Civil Servants.

MPs were first paid in 1911, set at £400 a year - compared to an average industrial worker's wage of around £250 a year - so that the growing number of working class MPs would be able to afford to take their seats. Pay was cut between 1931 and 1935 because of the economic crisis. Pay was first raised in 1937, and again in 1946.

A pay rise was recommended in 1953, but never implemented. It was not until the 1970s that ad-hoc pay reviews were replaced with regular increases.

After the MPs' expenses scandal, exposed by the Daily Telegraph, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was set up to remove decisions about pay and perks from MPs.

 

 

I wouldn't say politicians have gotten a lot better since 1977.

I find the last bit in bold particularly interesting.

[Section_31]

The thing with MPs is that to an extent some of them are just doing what everyone else is doing, trying to screw what they can. The zeitgeist isn't to contribute or to pull for the collective good, and I don't mean that in a socialist way, I mean in a way that isn't leading the country towards economic and social oblivion, it's to feather your own nest as much as you can in case the worst happens and you need to eject. When even your leaders think like budding property developers, what hope have you got?

[Strontium]

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/09/100-richest-uk-billions-offshore-tax-havens

 

 

Not sure if I remember correctly, but has this been all over the news in the same way that benefit "scroungers" and "cheats" have? Hmm... I think I can smell corruption.

Citing a news article to support your claim that something hasn't been in the news. Awesome.

[Red Phoenix]

Citing a news article to support your claim that something hasn't been in the news. Awesome.

I didn't say it hadn't been in the news, I said : has this been all over the news in the same way that benefit "scroungers" and "cheats" have?

 

Of course it hasn't, because they wouldn't dare fuck around with the rich like they do with the poor. The deficit could probably be wiped out by getting the right taxes in, and/or just stopping the banks carrying out all types of illegality, not demonizing people on benefits. It seems to be mainly about greed, and Osborne is clearly corrupt. You don't have to take it personally if you like the Conservatives, I'd probably be saying the same thing if Labour were in power because they both seem to be sides of the same coin. (Would be interesting to know what Osborne and Balls were discussing at this years Bilderberg conference too, but nope, we're not allowed to know that.)

 

I'm just surprised at how these politicians can talk so much shit and hardly ever be called out on it, it's almost like all three big parties, and most of the media are in on the same game. It seems like a complete sham, and one that's been going on for quite a while now.

 

This is one of the only times I've ever seen a journalist from a big outlet really have a go at the way the whole thing is set up :

 

So the rightwing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the trade unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambast the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values – the worship of power, money, image and fame – which advertisers love but which make this a shallower, more selfish country. Most of them deceive their readers about the causes of climate change. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the multimillionaires who own these papers.

 

The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests. In this respect the media companies resemble the Tea Party movement, which claims to be a spontaneous rising of blue-collar Americans against the elite but was founded with the help of the billionaire Koch brothers and promoted by Murdoch's Fox News.

 

Journalism's primary purpose is to hold power to account. This purpose has been perfectly inverted. Columnists and bloggers are employed as the enforcers of corporate power, denouncing people who criticise its interests, stamping on new ideas, bullying the powerless. The press barons allowed governments occasionally to promote the interests of the poor, but never to hamper the interests of the rich. They also sought to discipline the rest of the media. The BBC, over the last 30 years, became a shadow of the gutsy broadcaster it was, and now treats big business with cringing deference. Every morning at 6.15, the Today programme's business report grants executives the kind of unchallenged access otherwise reserved for God on Thought for the Day. The rest of the programme seeks out controversy and sets up discussions between opponents, but these people are not confronted by their critics.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/11/media-corrupt-hippocratic-oath-journalists

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Anybody see Alistair Campbell rip the arsehole out of the Mail on Newsnight? He said to him, 'you are the worst of British values, posing as the best' and he's spot on. Say what you want about that horrible cunt, Campbell, but he is one of the smartest political operators about.

[RedRazor]

I agree with all that.

 

One of the thing which annoys me about all this shit, and the fact the training organisations employed by the government are all short termist, corrupt thieving cunts, is that adult education should be massively expanded and free.

 

At some point, and this is a tragedy, education has become viewed as a commodity, a bigger example of a bankrupt society you will never find.

 

But one of the things good quality unions always advocated, and the likes of the socialist and communist parties in Britain, was the importance of education for their members, and the arts for that matter, that's just not in the equation now at all. The onus will be getting people off the taxpayers' tit by fair means or foul, nothing more.

 

Imagine if the state bankrolled its own company and its own educational institution and just took the reins again in a major industry? It'd be fascinating. Say it took on something like BAE again, trained people en mass and started churning out major projects we could be proud of as a nation like Concorde again. It'll never happen though, B&M is the best these people can hope for I imagine.

Something like the national rail infrastructure? They could launch a project to build a super fast network link between London and the outlying regions and..... oh, wait a minute.

[RedRazor]

I can see both sides of the coin, I'm as liberal as you in most matters but I've also been raised on, and still live on, council estates. My extended family are all benefit fraudsters too. I've seen first hand how fucked up the welfare system can be.

 

I've seen single mothers tear an entire neighbourhood apart because of the behaviour of her kids and the people who come to their house for parties, safe in the knowledge that nobody will ever kick them out and, if they do, they'll be rehoused.

 

There is a sense of entitlement that's bled into the system, there's no doubt about that. People who have no vested interest in society, they've never owned anything, they've got no problem with smashing your car window because they don't know what it feels like to save for something and then see it destroyed.

 

The reasons for that level of poverty existing in the first place is an argument we've waded into many times, theirs a lot wrong with the way wealth is distributed in this country, but as a self contained argument, there's a lot wrong with the safety net too.

This is possibly the best and most sensible post I have seen on this site. Covers it all. If anyone repeats this in an election debate they will get my vote irrespective of their party. 

 

*applauds and bows

[Carvalho Diablo]

I didn't say it hadn't been in the news, I said : has this been all over the news in the same way that benefit "scroungers" and "cheats" have?

 

Of course it hasn't, because they wouldn't dare fuck around with the rich like they do with the poor.

 

I fucking HATE bullies.