Be Excellent To Each Other

I know what you mean - and actually agree with you - but we must remember that actually, it is NOT the case that things (i.e. living standards, disposable income, access to luxury goods etc.) are getting shittier across the generations. Actually the reverse is (broadly) true?

Recalling my childhood from the mid-70s through to the early-80s, my parents' generation basically, inarguably did not have it anywhere near as good as people of mine, and your generation. My old man worked all hours (and by that I mean 60hrs+/week; we hardly saw him as kids), slaving away as a toolmaker (a HUGELY skilled job with 7 year apprenticeship; he proudly wore his shirt and tie on the shop floor and was massively respected). My mum worked full time also, in an electronics factory (among other places), yet the five of us were crammed into a very modest (heavily mortgaged) semi in Clacton; he drove a 20 year old Austin 1100 which took whatever spare time he had in home maintenance and welding (as the thing was dissolving before our very eyes), and my mum (and we) got the bus. We had one rented Bush TV set in the house, an old school spin dryer and a washing machine that was at least 10 years old, went on ONE holiday (to Great Yarmouth) in my ENTIRE childhood and adolescence combined. I still remember the wonderment and awe when my mum was able to buy a microwave. I mean like, can you seriously imagine this now?

What IS true to say is that the gulf between rich and poor has got greater (much greater, both under Tory and most especially New Labour administrations), which is actually what I think you're alluding to here. However, even the 'poor' - and most especially those of average means - ARE better off than they were.



Again, I agree. I'm not saying this to piss you off, but the last PM I heard discussing these big ideals/concepts was Thatcher - one way or another, be it the sale of council houses, deregulation of the mortgage market, removal of the closed shop, low taxation - she freed the working classes such as my dad and his family to aim far, far higher than they could ever have dreamt (or been 'permitted' to do), empowering and enriching them. Sure, she did not get everything right, far from it (the legacy of insufficient housing stock, most notably council housing, is all too evident), but the ideals, political ideology, objectives and deliberate execution of those big ideas were all there. With seismic results. Does anyone seriously think someone like me could've done what I have managed to do, if I was living in the 60s or 70s? I'd be where I started, in a factory somewhere, in a council house, earning a pittance with no realistic prospect or incentive for self-improvement.

Today's media-friendly "career politicians" lack that essential raw energy, vision and objective, which is one of the reasons why Farage has (wrongly imo) totally captured the public's imagination. We instinctively - and finally - rail against the 'me too' politically correct, consensus, media-driven politicians of today who dare not say "the wrong thing", who've never had a real job, who don't really seem to believe in anything much, besides themselves. For me, New Labour were the absolute epitome of this, and we've gone on from there. Cameron bears many similarities to Blair.



Agreed; "something" needs to be done about the Living Wage. Why should the likes of Tesco or whoever be allowed to hire people in the middle of London @ £7/hour, with the UK taxpayer picking up a huge tab in Tax Credits? I don't pay my taxes to subsidise the likes of them paying low salaries!

The question as to what to do about it is a thorny one though, for sure.



Agreed, but I'm sorry, I want to differentiate between genuinely poor, disadvantaged, ill and/or disabled people (or people who are genuinely trying, but failing, to improve their lot) - upon which no decent person would not sympathise, and want to do something about their plight - and people who are not "ill" in any meaningful sense of the word (at least not too ill to contribute something useful to our society), or just plain lazy. Apologies, but we must acknowledge there are people like this, and plenty of them.

Bamba, I don't want to be a massive bore here, but can you explain to me what you meant with that comment? Maybe you were joking when you dug out the old PC gone mad thing, what I was on about is you don't kick someone when they're down. It's not about being able to take a joke, it's about endless repetition of the same thing again and again over years, nothing to do with common sense or political correctness, that sort of thing can drive you to distraction and more eventually. It's about common courtesy and decency and generally not getting a kick out of making other people feel bad.

It's a cross-thread "joke" - if you haven't read the relevant thread today (I think it was B&B, not sure) then it looks like he meant it, which I'm sure he didn't.

[edit]Ah, here it is: viewtopic.php?p=822900#p822900

Grim's explained it; I thought my original post he references was made in this thread so my subsequent comment would make sense in situ but I was obviously mistaken there.

Also, as I hope you realise, none of the stuff you list there (endless repetition, kicking someone when they're down, getting a kick out of making other people feel bad, etc) or anything like it was actually happening here. It's essential that context is taken into account whenever someone makes a joke about anything and in this context, with respect, I think you're over-reacting and giving poor Saturnalian a hard time over nothing. Cue: someone shouting at me for even saying anything in the hallowed halls of the politics thread.

..."Hallowed halls"? Surely you jest!
This is nowt more than a place for Beexers to (very loosely) chew the political chat, with hopefully some funny stuff, japes and even the odd barney or two to keep things amusing and interesting, but not to be taken seriously. None of the stuff I do is.

Um, bit of a misunderstanding there, I think. The kicking when down and endless repetition weren't about anything on the forum, it was about what happened in real life with real life consequences. I wasn't bashing you or Saturnalian at all, the "uggo" comments just reminded me of what can happen in real life when these things are taken too far. As such, I suppose you could at a pinch call it an overreaction on my part. It simply made me sad to think of that subject again, sorry about that. Pretty sure Cavey got what I was trying to say, bloody annoying having a nice Tory around the place gnawing at your prejudices

Some interesting stuff on Wiki about Patrician (One Nation) Conservatism and its origins:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-nation_conservatism

Wise words indeed from history, in my opinion at least.

Joey Barton, QT, and his "four ugly birds" analogy....

Man, it was excruciating

Wait, they let Barton talk? I thought he was there solely to lamp Piers Morgan.

The whole 'employment' thing is a thorny issue. Full employment is a thing of the past (unless you go the Soviet route of bullshit jobs) so, what do you do with the people who can't get jobs but are willing to work, or the people who don't want to work. You could almost say the lazy fucks on Benefit Street are actually performing a social function by deliberately taking themself out of the jobs market.

The 'Tesco pays bullshit wages' thing, well the government will always allow them to get away with it, because if you made them pay a living wage, they'd cut staff right to the minimum, and that would fuck up the employment figures. (Three people doing 16 hours a week for fuck all topped up by tax credits = three employed people. One person doing 40 hours a week at a decent wage= one employed person. Amount of actual work done = the same.)

Surely that's just the same bullshit about how bringing in a minimum wage was going to destroy millions of jobs.

Comedic football tea time email thinks the same as all 1,057 of us.

A tie in a workshop? Sounds dangerous.





I don't think you can avoid lazy people. Most utopian ideas always fall in the face of 'lazy people', and we're talking "sit around doing nothing" lazy rather than "become an artist rather than a bricky" lazy here. I think most people want to work, or at least *do something*, i.e. create stuff. Even in a world full of automation and robots that do every back breaking job, allowing people to sit on their bums, I imagine most people won't. I suspect they'd find things "to do" with their time which, on the whole, would probably benefit society. But there's always a few people content to do absolutely nothing, and I think any form of society needs to recognise that and just work around them.

I would suggest some kind of social ostracisation, but that seems a step too far along the "why not just shoot them?!" route.

I work incredibly hard at being lazy, it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's a skill I've learned over the years and i'm now extremely proficient at it...

Y'see, I was born with it. I guess I was just lucky.

You wear clip-ons, that will come loose of they get caught. (My grandfather also moved into management in a workshop...)

According to the Mail this morning, they need to spend 4 Billion on the houses of parliament to stop it falling down.

As its the Mail I guess the figure is probably closer to 1 Billion

Wonder which brave party will be willing to try and get this spending approved!

I'm going to stop you there.

My sister in law hates the right but loves reading the Mail Online due to the huge number of bullshit celebrity articles!

I remember years ago being in Paris Airport in the BA lounge where of course the Mail is free. A US guy I was with couldn't understand the paper as it started with right wing semi serious political stuff and by the time you get to the middle its got stuff about Big Foot or a secret code in the Bible spelling the end of the world

I've heard reports from other sources that Parliament is in a serious state of disrepair (eg BBC, 2012).

EDIT Link to their own site: http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-h ... n-project/

BBC are saying the cost will be 3 Billion so the Mail wasn't that far off!

I actually think that saving the building and ensuring it can still be used for its intended function would be money well spent. Be cynical about politicians, but Parliament as an institution matters, and the building symbolises this (although the Victorian Gothic can get a bit boring after a while).

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In some respects I think its right that long term benefit claimants do some sort of work

Depressingly you just know this scheme will be run by pencil pushers, who are obsessed with volume not quality.

Also it will be abused by employers who will just use it for free labour doing repetitive work with no real skills to be learnt.

The people doing this should be paid something as well, by the employers. maybe £1 or £2 an hour. This is not saving the tax payer anything, just letting the government twist the figures, so I don't see why employers should get totally free labour.

I don't think private companies should be able to use benefit claimants for cheap labour.
Long term claimants doing work for the community and local charities if they can isn't a bad thing though.

Surely the main point is that most benefit claimants are genuine and the Tories only have widespread support for their policies because most people's perceptions (as demonstrated by countless surveys) are way out of whack with the reality of the situation. Whole sections of society have been dehumanised by the right wing press and by shite like Benefits Street on the telly which basically stigmatises anyone who lives on a council estate.

They're starting filming another one of these shitty types of shows now where a whole area of Blackpool (Mereside) will no doubt be portrayed as being full of scroungers when the reality of the situation is that most of the residents are just ordinary working people. The whole thing is fucking shameful. Realistically having to support a few wasters is the cost of any benefits system which doesn't humiliate the majority of genuine claimants.

The makers of Benefits Street wanted to do a show in Birkenhead. The locals basically told them to Fuck right off and never come back. Kinda made me proud

Absolutely agree

So very much

I agree, as well.

My experience of being on the rock and roll was incredibly dispiriting. And the stigma was even worse.

Marks for President!

6/10, could do better.

Perhaps surprising, but I actually broadly agree with Mark's sentiments here, although I do think there is a separate, but related issue wrt. to people "on the sick" (comparing historical head counts with those of the last 15-20 years). Clearly though, the vast majority of those claiming benefits would much rather be working/productive, whatever BS Channel 4 or hard line Tories would have us believe.

For me, it is imperative that as a collective, we simply MUST do something about it; all stakeholders in this country of ours need to contribute, one way or another. We don't want to be like Spain and other countries where 25% unemployment (and 60% youth unemployment) is somehow acceptable; once you've reached those sort of numbers, one has to understand that 'society' itself has demonstrably failed, and it's time to start again?

What most Tories seem to miss, however, is that such a (genuine) programme is a massive money LOSER - it COSTS money, it doesn't save it. But it is money bloody well spent! I honestly think IDS' heart is vaguely in the right place, but financial circumstances/politics have dictated the rug being well and truly pulled. It just isn't possible to achieve these objectives AND save money? What we end up with is a grotesque, dehumanising persecution of people who already have nothing.

Opening a can of worms perhaps, I do honestly think the mass immigration of Eastern Europeans HAS led to a situation whereby many low-paid jobs are have been taken which could've been done by our own unemployed? (and I say that as someone of Eastern European descent; xenophobic/racist/UKIP supporter I am not, but let's face empirical fact?) Perhaps if there was some compulsion on the part of the fit and well unemployed to take such jobs (stick) BUT with financial help, redress, support and genuine incentive from government (carrot), the problem may sort itself out despite necessarily open borders which we ourselves benefit from? There again, this smacks of the 'British jobs for British workers' line which is undesirable - there is not a quick and easy fix, else it'd been done by now.

What would the money be spent on, though? With all the good will in the world, more and more jobs are being done by robots or computers, and that's going to continue to increase (along with the population, who are going to want a job).

In an ideal world things would keep progressing the way they were until greed became so utterly rampant. People should be earning more for working less. Or we could just keep on down the road of making people work longer hours for lower wages and creating a new handful of squillionnaires because that is clearly a plan for long term stability.

Not fair to weigh in on this one point usually, perhaps, but as I'm agreeing it's a bit less wanky. There was a More or Less episode recently looking into the numbers around immigration which found exactly that. Yes, adding people to a country increases GDP (of course it does) and yes it adds people who want to work. But the competition for low-paid jobs does disadvantage those who are competing for those jobs.

Never thought I'd be cheering the Tories winning a by-election!

Well that's the issue, isn't it. Everything is a race to the bottom. Whenever someone's willing to work for a pittance to do a job, regardless if they're native or immigrant, the market value of that worker drops. Which means jobs going to those people who will work for less and less money each and every time. The minimum wage should be a brake on that, but then you come up with great ideas like zero-hour contracts to ensure that you're absolutely not paying a penny more than you have to in order to get the work done. Unskilled/semi-skilled labour hasn't been more undervalued since the building of the pyramids, and the only way to do something about it is to insist on some sort of living wage. And all the major parties are too scared of upsetting the large businesses that make use of so much of that labour (particularly retail) to make a step in that direction.

That's true to an extent of course, but there's so much stuff that needs doing and no-one is doing it. I'm not talking about picking up chewing gum/dog turds off the street, but meaningful things like our millions of lonely elderly people, housing stock being left to fall apart, help in hospitals and elsewhere, the voluntary sector etc. People need to feel valued and they need a function. Sitting at home totally dejected, depressed, watching daytime tv, chasing an ever-diminishing pool of 'basic' jobs with fierce competition from here and abroad isn't doing them - or the rest of us - any good. Time for some radical new thinking? (But with the expectation this will cost us more, not less, but we'll surely be living in a better, more equitable, fairer world).

Wanky? No, not at all, glad to hear from you.

I agree on all fronts; you're right.

Exactly. I mean, where I live in the southern parts, there's no practical difference between 'Eastern Europeans' (the definition of whom is rather nebulous) 'taking' low-paid jobs from locals than if those jobs go to people from generally poorer areas of the country like Tyneside or Greater Manchester who've relocated. Or people who live with family members or in social housing and need less money for housing costs. Or under-21s, apprentices, etc, who don't get the full minimum wage. The list is endless. Migrants are just a more convenient scapegoat than others. TBH, I'd be far more concerned about the rise in unpaid forced workfare, as that is taking away the bottom rung of the employment ladder and very harmful for equality of opportunity,amongst other issues.

I have a lot of sympathy and respect for 'Eastern Europeans', incidentally. (My own girlfriend counts herself as Eastern European to some extent.) Many I've known have improved their own personal situations while being here in the way they couldn't in their own countries, or not to the same amount. If anything the 'Eastern Europeans' often are stuck in employment they are over-qualified for rather than seeking bottom-end wages; many I've met had/have postgraduate qualifications that they can't use, and find having an obviously foreign name a real red flag to employers when they try and apply for employment, as if employers only see worthy of using them for low-wage menial jobs. One Polish girl I've known for years has said that she wishes she could Anglicise her name for job applications to greatly improve the chance of an interview! They're certainly not some of privileged group that always gets first in the employment queue.

No-one is 'scapegoating' Eastern Europeans, or indeed blaming them in any way for wanting to better themselves by coming to the UK and taking work - any work.

It simply cannot be denied, though, that in so doing they have occupied (many) jobs which could, theoretically, be done by British unemployed people. I'm sorry, but that's just plain fact.

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Even if we don't go independent we'll probably no stop that if it's on the cards. http://wingsoverscotland.com/why-labour ... -scotland/

Of course, Stu fits the data around his initial assumption, rather than around the more obvious question of "What would that do in the current political climate?"

The answer to that question was, and likely is, make a majority Conservative government.

Trouble in UKIP



Wonderfully understated.

I just can't really take UKIP seriously. Perhaps I should, but I just can't.

This is pretty much the first thing I have heard about them since the European elections. I'm not at all convinced they are going to be as much of a factor in things as people were making out.

I hope you're right, but there again it's the month or two leading up to an election that's obviously key (same goes for Scottish Referendum); that's when most ordinary people are actually going to start thinking about stuff and their voting intentions. UKIP are bound to be very vocal and visible at such times (unfortunately), but here's hoping for a few more "gay floods" type nutjob stories to undermine their credibility further.

I assume that since they got all those Euro seats they have enacted some pretty strong legislation by now, and we're all living in a right wing utopia.

Indeed. Here are my shoes mate, thanks. I'll be back in ten.