FlightMan

so Gordon brown did save the world then?

EddScott

"Gordons ALIVE"

TelBoy

He took some bold steps, no doubt. But let's be clear, it was the banks who went to him on their knees, telling him that basically he had no choice. But i suppose if i was a politician i'd turn that around and take credit for being the hero. The leader of whoever was in power would have had to have done the same thing.

hodgy0_2

and a point I made in another thread recently, that I dont think people realise how close we came to you putting your card in an ATM and it not paying out

-- I made this to posters who continually knock the government response without ever putting forward a counter argument

I also go on to say that you can make an argument for letting the whole thing collapse (although I am unsure that anyone on SNet has the intelect to make that argument properly)

after all if you are chav scum living half way up a council block you probably never go to a cashpoint and the failure of the global banking system would more than likely pass you by anyway

in fact he would probably be best place to profit from the global chaos with his ready access to guns and knowledge of the drugs trade

but Telboy you still don’t seem to be drawing the same conclusions I have, that public money was used to save private money

TelBoy

I'm not denying that public money was used to save private money. Of course it was. But what i am saying, is that a) it has benefitted far fewer people on a personal basis that you're suggesting, and b) there simply wasn't any choice. It's a moot point. Ok it happened, ok you can pub talk about it all day long, it won't change the fact that it HAD to happen, given what we were facing. I just don't see why that should continue to be a point of conversation. The money will be paid back, the rules have been changed, job done.

hodgy0_2

thank you we got there in the end

Public money (tax payers) bailed out the banking finance industry

now back to my original post -- it was an ironic post on the fact that the Tories just revert to type and the first public statement of policy is that the benefits systems is going to bare the brunt of the pain in getting us all back onto an even keel

so wow betide a single mum taking an extra cash in hand job to help her make ends meet

And as i stated in my OP some reform is desirable and inevitable

TelBoy

We got where "in the end"?? I'm not in the habit of denying plain facts. And i didn't. Are you reading more into my posts than i'm writing perhaps?

And i'll also go back to your original point. Would you have been happier if the financial meltdown hadn't happened so that the benefits system remained the wasteful, archaic system it is, beautifully designed to disincentivise people from looking for work?? I just don't see where we're going with this.

kingofturds

iTrader: (1)

Housing benefit should be scrapped altogether imo, if you cannot be bothered to work you get a tent and that's it.

hodgy0_2

well the two posts just don’t add up imo and you seem to be confused

but hey i really don’t give a fvck because life is a percentage game -- and the more ridiculous posts that I see on Snet are like money in the bank of life

figuratively and literally

in the same way that Saxoboy, when he logs onto his online poker and sees a total numbty playing thinks "great money in the bank

I feel the same about life, the more idiots in the world just makes my life easier – has to

warrenm2

Class war comrade! To the barricades! Soak the rich - redistribute to the poor!

Ahahahaha

hodgy0_2

another idiotic post -- keep em coming I am going to be rich even earlier at this rate

TelBoy

Weird way of thinking. You talk as if all bankers' pensions have been subsidised by taxpayer's money when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Is that the basic misunderstanidng of yours that is going into your bank of life or whatever you called it? No confusion here, pal, i live it each and every day.

hodgy0_2

really quick question -- who is underwriting the pensions of Northen Rock and RBS

stilover

Your parents are on a Pension, not Benefits.

The majority of people on Benefits these days are work shy scum. Why get a job doing 9-5 or shifts, when they can sit on their @rse (at home or in the pub) and get Mr & Mrs Tax payer to foot the bill.

My Dad has worked very hard and due to working probably too hard has now had to take early retirement (End of November this year) due to Stress. He's 62.

Fortunately, due to working hard he's made a comfortable life for himself. On his death however, the Tax man will be rubbing his hands. Ok, he's taken fanancial advice etc to make what the Tax man gets as minimal as possible, but there is something wrong where if you work hard and want to leave your wife/children a nice little nest egg + property, you get hammered. Considering he's been taxed on his money while earning it in the first place. Inheritence tax is a bit of a P!ss take.

If the Torries raise it to £1m. Good.

TelBoy

The Government is the major shareholder of both companies. Fact.

Really quick question back, how does that make them the paymaster?

They're being run in exactly the same was as before nationalisation, you know that, right?

hodgy0_2

yes -- but doesn't that mean the pensions are underwritten by the state - i..e taxpayers money

just because the consequences of letting the banks fail prevented any other outcome doesn't change the fact that public money is subsiding priviate money

Anyway the Tories will get in and everything will be alright we will all live happily ever after

TelBoy

This just seems such an obtuse way to view things. A few thousand people had their jobs saved. If they'd lost their jobs they'd have still had their pension pots. The Government is now the major shareholder. At some point, they will not be the major shareholder. In the meantime, those few thousand people keep on contributing to their pensions. I'll say it again, i just don't get what point we're trying to prove here. Believe me, the notional state "subsidisation" of a few banking pensions is just a dot on the horizon compared to what you'd be experiencing if those banks had been allowed to fail. I just don't think you grasp that fundamental point.

hodgy0_2

no worries TB -- i'll leave it there

just make sure you keep your job coz I suspect it will get might cold without one

Martin2005

Now whilst I agree with an overhaul of our failing benefits system is long overdue, I cannot agree with your comment. It cannot possibly be true that the majority are 'work shy scum' (why do you need to use such a simplist thought process and infantile language to describe such a complex issue?)

I'd love you to substantiate your 'fact' or are you basing your whole argument on a channel 4 TV show

Comments like yours are completely false and unfair, and say far more about you than they do about people claiming benefits

Simon K

Ok, how about this idea. I'll keep every single penny I make, and will pay for everything separately, aka instead of my taxes going to `just` causes, Ill keep every penny pay my way.

So, if I call the police, I'll pay for it, If I go to the library, I'll pay for it, if I use the NHS, I'll pay for it. At the moment, if feels Im working and all those lazy dole poncing ***** are living off me ! My taxes are going to a war I didnt want, and to an olympics I never wanted to see. My taxes are paying for a load of immigrants from Poland who have come over here to sell drugs and rob my house.

Tory / Labour, all the same, so lets vote in BNP, have a few years of this, sort the country out, then go back to normal.

Tremendous.......... just opening my mail at home, and IVe got a corporation tax bill ! Mmmmmmmmmmmm f**king lovely.

SBK

Martin2005

First off if your post was being ironic then sorry!!

What kind of world do you want to live in then fella?

We pay taxation because it's the law, it's moral and it ensures we have a functioning society. I cannot abide selfish attitudes like yours.

As for letting the BNP 'sort things out' what bits of our society would be left once that bunch of racist thugs had finished their handwork?

My advise to you is to move abroad, if you can find a society that offers you the opportunities that ours does, then go for it. You might also be in for a bit of a shock when you saw how much tax is paid in other countries

Chip

Maybe the single Mum should have thought about things little more before getting up the duff.

Chip

Martin2005

Yeah curse the child as well

Deep Singh

Let's get back on topic?

Over hauling the benefits/welfare system may well be 'reverting to type' as Hodge puts it, but so what?
Labour always financially ruins our country and then the Tories have to sort it out. One of the ways is to cut unnecessary spending, 'good house keeping' as Lady Thatcher called it.

As well as making sense financially, it sets the right example and ideology, ie less state dependence more individual responsibility.

I think all the unemployed should be sent to state run work houses for their benefits. There is no reason why money, housing allowance etc should be given for years on end to millions of people to sit on their fat ***** and watch TV.

Come on Dave and George, let's sort them out!

Chip

No not necessarily. More time and effort should be spent bringing back family values, something labour has destroyed over the past 12 years.

We need more discipline in schools , more parental responsibilty.

For all its frailties, marriage is still the best way of ensuring that a child’s parents stay together for the duration of its upbringing. Other relationships break down much faster, and their encouragement has led directly to our horrifying epidemic of mass fatherlessness.

The result has been such a catastrophic failure in parenting, particularly among the poor, that the Government is now assuming the role of surrogate state parent, with an oppressively detailed and prescriptive strategy for telling parents how to bring up their children.

Thus, the Government had to respond to this ‘cry for help’ — by forcing some parents on to state parenting courses so that mothers with children by multiple partners could be taught the basics of controlling their offspring.

Having torn up all the rules on marriage, the state then claims that it is best placed to bring up the unfortunate children who are the result of the collapse of this institution.

Thus, the state takes draconian control of our lives, parents are radically disempowered, freedom is grossly undermined — and the social catastrophe of family disintegration still continues apace.

Parenting is not a ‘mystery’ — we know beyond a shadow of doubt that, by and large, being brought up by their own mother and father is the best guarantee that children will be raised healthily and happily.

Of course it doesn’t always work out like that. Of course there are lone parent households who do a magnificent job in raising secure and thriving children, but increasingly there are households where a man plays no role whatsoever.

Indeed, it emerged that in one in five cases examined by the Child Support Agency (CSA), no father was registered on the child’s birth certificate. And too often the absence of a parent is directly linked to the crime, educational underachievement, drug and drink abuse, mental and physical ill health and other disadvantages that now blight so many of our children’s lives and cause so much damage to our society.

The reason our society once revered marriage was because everyone knew it was the fundamental institution that kept the national show on the road. Take an axe to marriage and society itself cracks wide open.

That is what has happened. There are now areas in our country where committed fatherhood is almost entirely unknown and where children are simply abandoned to emotional chaos and blighted life chances.

The reason for focusing upon marriage is precisely because that is the best way of focusing upon the welfare of the child and the quality of its upbringing.

Yes, the stigma that was once attached to unmarried mothers and children from broken homes was often cruel. But that is in fact, society’s way of protecting the most vulnerable and enforcing rules of behaviour that upheld the sense of commitment and duty to others that binds us together as a civilised society.

The worst thing that can happen is treating people differently and hurting their feelings by criticising their behaviour. But treating everyone the same regardless of how badly they behave is a totally amoral position. It licenses people to behave badly and creates victims out of betrayed spouses or children to whom lasting damage is done.

Since Mr Blair was first elected — and found himself facing within Labour’s ranks an assortment of radical feminist man-haters, serial adulterers, cohabiting partners who thought marriage was irrelevant and gays — this Government’s whole family agenda has been about putting the desires of irresponsible adults first and then crying crocodile tears over the human tragedies left in its wake.

It has systematically undermined marriage by loading the financial dice heavily against married couples and in favour of lone parents. By doing so, it put a rocket motor under the phenomenon of mass fatherlessness. The result is that more than one in every four babies is now born out of wedlock — a terrifying indicator of social breakdown for which the taxpayer has actually been paying through the nose.

In the twelve years, the benefits bill for lone parents has, according to maverick Labour MP Frank Field, rung up an astounding £60billion. This massive sum has been poured into subsidising family breakdown. Has there ever been a society that has put its hands so deeply into its pockets to fund the mechanism for its own disintegration?

Further billions have been wasted in attempting to pick up the pieces. The CSA has been an unmitigated disaster, with billions of pounds of unpaid maintenance that will remain uncollected while the Government plans desperately to create yet another type of maintenance payments agency.

But the real reason for this failure lies deeper. The concept of restoring responsibility to parenthood by forcing fathers to pay maintenance is fundamentally flawed. It has actually subsidised mass fatherlessness.

This is because family breakdown is too often driven not by feckless fathers (who certainly exist, to the detriment of the women they betray), but by girls and women who now treat men as no more than sperm donors, walking wallets and occasional au pairs, and think they are otherwise entirely disposable.


In the light of that New Labours attempt to bury the traditional family is not just irresponsible, it is a sinister attempt to recast our society so that the state — not mothers and fathers — takes the dominant role in bringing up children.

chip

hodgy0_2

good old victorian values --maybe we can send young boy up chimneys too

the idea that labour ruined our economy is sooo ludicrous -- but you are right it's a common view and one that will gain currency, allowing the finance/banking sector to revert back to type too and start shuffling money around for no purpose other than to make themselves rich

thats why I didn't sell my properties in Ladbrook Grove last year --- despite the estate agent telling me I was crazy as the offer I had was "very good"

because in a few years time they will double in price - especially with lax regulation from lord snooty

Simon K

Okay, lets try this for an idea. I give up my job, take up smoking, drinking at Wetherspoons and go on the dole. I'll claim that my back hurts and I cant work and therefore will get medical benefits, I can then get myself a new car, paid for by the state, my rent paid for, by the state, and I can sit and smoke all day, drinking cider. Mmm the only trouble with this option is that I have to loose one or two teeth, wear gold sovereign rings and have lots of tat's.

If I then convert to a muslin, growing a beard might be hard, change from liking females to males, then Im pretty much set for life. Obviously I will have to shout and complain about everything, sue anyone and everyone for abuse / racisim / sexual discrimination and complain not enough mosques are being built and therefore get a government grant / lottery money to build one, whilst your local A&E is closed due to money shortages. Even though I'm doing nothing, getting paid, I must still complain about this country and hate everyone in it.

As for governing powers, okay if not the BNP, let the Green party get in, we can then get rid of our cars, walk to work, whoops the dole office, all our woman can have underarm hair and long pubs, and I can change my name to Tarquin, whilst living in a mud hut, using fart's as a form of engery.

Not too sure what this has to do with this particular thread, but just wanted to complain about something. My lady has just had a go at me, so Im having ago at someone else ! :-)

SBK