Further Developments on UK Immigration and Reciprocal Rights in Europe

SHOCK ANNOUNCEMENT BY HER MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT




In a shock New Year announcement Prime Minister David Camoron, wringing his hands as if strangling a scrawny turkey, described his new idea to deal with the increasingly expensive and annoying number of British Pensioners. "We are all increasingly concerned about the over population of the United Kingdom so we are going to round up all those over 65 and move them off shore including in Europe where many of them seem to want to live anyway. We can then convert their old houses into dormitories for Eastern Europeans to solve the housing problem. Then we'll cut the Winter Fuel Payments for the pensioners and freeze their pensions if we can. They won't need bus passes where they are going. Then we'll see if we can get out of reciprocal health care costs a these old people have a nasty habit of getting ill and costing us all a fortune. The good part is that can't even vote- we made sure of that he he he !!!!!! With the money we will save we can afford to increase parliamentary salaries and pension schemes." Retired war hero Colonel Fulkington-Smythe, aged 108, but as bright as a regimental button shook with anger and frustration when he got the news. "Jerry didn't get me, but this lot seem to want to finish me off. Mine's a double, please!!" He quipped. The Dunkirk Spirit indeed!







So was the "Lend Lease" agreement signed in 1941 between the USA & GB acceptable then ? Failure to come to this agreement would no doubt have resulted in VE Day in Trafalgar Square being celebrated in german...

Incidentally, the estimated £12bn losses can only be the present government and not the previous because it is all part of the DWP's 'flagship' Universal Credit project and other linked in schemes that have fallen apart.

Having said that, previous governments do not have a better track record in any way, simply thus far nobody has brought about such a massive write off on a totally unusable software and system for a project that was never going to work in the first place despite civil service advice.

Two wrongs do not make a right, no regime selling arms is an acceptable norm, no more than the deteriorating state of those in need in a number of European countries including France and the UK which is why these threads have been continually appearing for several months.

Quite agree Brian, I am an apolitical animal. Selling arms etc is sadly a fact of life always has been with massive profiteering at the expense of human loss. I don't condone it just accept it as the norm. If the uk doesn't sell to unscrupulous regimes then france & the like will.

Peter, sorry but in my working environment we do look at armaments and it is a totally immoral sector where governments sell to dictatorships, oppressive regimes and other less than benevolent regimes. We measure it in terms of children killed and injured because of those weapons and then add to that the deprivation caused by regimes spending vast amounts on armaments instead of infrastructure and development within their countries.

Yes, there was an opt out clause in the contract, if you had read the press widely enough it was certainly there in the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent. Nobody in the previous or present government kept an eye on the ball. By the way, in the form in which it fell apart it was ordered in 2010 by the present government. It does not matter what our political alignments or preferences may be, I personally have no truck with any party in the UK, it is government who wasted the money. Tax payers' money. Since 2010, apart from that IDS has wasted vast amounts of money on schemes to deal with the unemployed that have failed as well. The more we look the worse it gets.

Doesn't really matter if the nurses would have seen the £12 billion, fact is the money would surely have gone to something more rewarding than down the drain. The damage was done well before IDS and friends became involved. In any case i'm pretty sure signed contracts can't be terminated just like that, at least not without substantial compensaton being paid out.

The armaments industry is indeed colossal, it always has been and always will be. Spending on Defence is important to the economy of many countries as is exports of military hardware etc. It's big business, don't knock it !

Isn't that known as redistribution of wealth? Bit of a one-way street though.

None of the British Government's IT schemes have ever been a success. This applies whatever the party in power. Yet the contractors always seem to make a healthy profit.

Mostly rhetoric so far, it doesn't worry me too much. At least, it may not affect us in our remaining lifetimes as long they may yet be.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25678829

Even Labour is climbing on board now! It would seem that if you don't have a job offer you won't be entitled to free movement within Europe. What happens if you are self employed? What happens if you are retired? The opportunities for debate and argument are huge! The snowball is rolling nicely! Will it melt?

Hohum, it's all Gordon Brown's fault, but wait, hold breathe and ask why in the over three years in office the scheme was allowed to continue to create and sustain a vast great black hole in the economy? Neither party is to blame directly, ministers made decisions. However, IDS could have stopped it straight off in 2010, the Daily Grail just omits that bit of the equation.

Mind you, £12 billion is a drop in the economic ocean and the question is whether nurses would have got it, which I doubt, rather than this being the 'small change' injected into, for instance, the armaments industry which outstrips £12b many times over.

To a point that is the point Irene. Since the most recent economic crises even the professions have been 'rationalised' thus reducing entry level posts and generally upward. Those who get in and thrive all the way to the top join the bigger management echelons and some go on to join the much increased number of directors whose income comes from company profits. Less graduates get jobs, but the crème de la crème are taken in. The vastly increased number of degree holders does not help except that there are far more students from whom those who join the elite will stand out, therefore employers can even be selective among the 'best'.

Bilderberg perhaps, but not entirely. Russian banks are not in that group and have done outrageously well since the end of the Soviet Union. This week China announced they are to allow private banks to be set up. In both countries capital has been built up by careful selective investment from modest at first to gigantic now. The so-called oligarchs were not all already rich and powerful, the majority were rather ordinary business who looked for 'bargains' such as businesses about to go broke, bought them up and restructured along Soviet/Chinese centralised lines but within the free market and largely succeeded. Bilderberg is threatened by and afraid of these people but the competition is fierce and the battle between them is for who can get their hands on the biggest share of global capital. Keynesians like Stiglitz warned that Smith's 'invisible hand' was growing more powerful immediately the East Bloc disintegrated and it was politicians with their hands in the pockets of the increasingly powerful capitalists who refused to listen. That is for a good part how we have arrived where we are and why it can get much worse.

thanks to the previous government for wasting £12 billion yes, that's TWELVE BILLION POUNDS on an IT system that could never work - thanks Mr Cameron and friends for relieving the british taxpayers of this financial mill stone. The final pargraph is sad reading

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040259/NHS-IT-project-failure-Labours-12bn-scheme-scrapped.html

"Analysts say the sum would have paid the salaries of more than 60,000 nurses for a decade."

"Absolute shower old boy!" as TT would and did say!

Re a Brian's family member student loan of £80k how ridiculous! My own profession of architects now earn an average of £31k gross (principals in private practice). Most have to live and work in the SE. Most would be paying rent of min £1k plus rates, living travel etc etc etc. A five year course would leave a minimum £50k loan outstanding (unless you live and study in Scotland) It just doesn't add up!

I would add the 1960 cock up when Lord Robbins refused the miners' demand for a £1 a week rise which was well below inflation at the time and gave 7/6d instead, he led them to be amongst the lowest paid manual workers in the UK and set the agenda for 1972. Ever since the industrial labour force has been demoralised as key industries disappeared or moved away.

Much the same here. It used to be said that a doctorate was a guaranteed future. Statistics are hard to come by but some rough guesstimates show that after postgraduate studies the UK citizens obtaining them are finding the going tough. Roughly a third leave the UK, another third go into academic work (including school teaching after adding TTC to their study years) which is most certainly not well paid at entry level and never fantastic anyway. Of the remainder they go into a variety of jobs, some of them well paid research and development posts in the sciences and technology, a few into the civil service and administration posts and then down the ladder to packing parcels for Amazon and such jobs for lack of other options, some into the building industry doing manual work, a street cleaner is known of and about 10% of all are reputed to be job seekers. In the 1970s and early 80s it was exceptional ever to hear of the latter examples and they were choice rather than no choice.

But yes, we were better off. Most of us studied without accumulating pretty enormous debts (my niece owes around £80k in fact), there were jobs for most degree holders generally, starting salaries were fine but have not really increased very much. How then can they buy homes, etc? Many of them are actually unable to pay back their loans so renege, leave the UK, work 'black' or remain unemployed or in very low paid work to avoid repayment. That is not helping the economy or anything else either.

As for Stiglitz, well his analysis in The Stiglitz Report which is based on data that is now a few years old could already do with updating. Corporate and banking clout is far greater than when he wrote Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics a decade or so back, however his 2010 book Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up is pure genius and The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future his most recent really says it all too well. Scary stuff. To be part of a 'vulnerable' group today means a growing number of any population and the subject of this thread, pensions, at least the pensioners, are not the powerful political lobby it was predicted they would be two decades ago. Following what Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' tells us about 'individuals' being able to make a profit and maximise it without the need for government intervention, thus describing the self-regulating behaviour of the marketplace particularly, Stiglitz is simply pointing out how many centuries we have let this build up and overcome us all. Today his 'individuals' are the banks and corporations who steer the will of governments and everybody outside of the labour force not serving them is surplus. That is our reality and what is actually behind what we are confronted with, not really the politicians.

Certainly is true that many of us were far better off in the 80's, but also paying more tax, than people of roughly the same age and education now. A few in the City are still raking it in. I don't know how young graduates in London will be able to pay off student debts of perhaps 50k and buy a house and have a family. A few lawyers maybe. My own profession's purchasing power is now below that of bus drivers even after five years of full time education and several years' experience. I am sure that there are good bus drivers but the investment and responsibility are really poles apart. No doubt bus drivers here will shriek!!!!

You don't follow your argument through - lets look at income sources. From the 50s through to the 80s government income included taxes from a broad swathe of well paid workers in industry and manufacturing. High wages delivered high income into the government purse. Those jobs moved abroad and lower paid service jobs came in. Jobs so badly paid they attracted government payments through tax credits and benefits, instead of contributing to tax income those jobs added to the costs.

Behind that situation the companies concerned continued to make profits' even increasing them through reduced costs - deregulation of various kinds have allowed them to hide those profits all over the world. So big multinational businesses are raking it in -their workers are being part funded by us and they pay little or no tax into the UK purse. Amazon is a typical example - The Financial Times did a good piece on how they operate in the UK.

So the argument of living within our means is fair - but look closely at UK wealth production - the money is there. Not only is it not being paid into the public purse - these hugely profitable companies are taking a share of our taxes. They now have enough clout to have laws changed so they can take an even bigger slice of the financial pie. Read Joseph Stieglitz - world renowned economist (Nobel prize for Economics around 2002) to find out how its done.

what income would yours be Colin? and how do you spend it? I think if you want a discussion with other people about how you think they ought to be spending theirs, you should first agree to be open about exactly how you spend yours. The best way to lead, after all is by example, isn't it?