If you want recognition, you steal the winter Fuel Payments from those entitled to them, you tax people because they live in social housing with more bedrooms than ‘they’ say you need, no matter that there are no other houses to go to with fewer bedrooms , you cause people untold suffering with your reforms to the Benefit System all without any semblance of concern, all the time benefitting from a grace and favour house from your father-in-law and owning other houses yourself.
I really do not know who is worse, those who have arranged this travesty or IDS for accepting it.
18 Likes
A taste of many things to come for the UK, I’m afraid Jane. I also see today that Michael Howard has attacked the independence of the judiciary and suggested US-style political appointment of judges. The UK has chosen to go away from the European Social Model towards the American free-market-free-for-all, and this I’m afraid includes adopting the entire Republican playbook - gerrymandering voting, attacking media impartiality, politicising the law, etc, etc…
We should just be glad we don’t have to live there!
5 Likes
I do think that the overall UK benefits system needed looking at as it was not sustainable but IDS made an absolute dogs dinner of it.
Focus benefits to those who really need it.
With any change to such a system some will be better off and some worse off.
Winter Fuel Payments are a good example, I have heard that it costs more to assess to see if someone is due such a payment than simply giving to it them.
I do have an issue with simply making Winter Fuel Payments, TV Licence and say bus passes to somebody due to their age rather than their need. My parents are due all of the above but they are significantly better than we are - but also much better off than young families just starting out.
It is a tricky balance to get it correct but certainly IDS cocked it up but particularly for his stand on Brexit I detest him.
I cannot imagine that this will be particularly popular but difficult to disagree with the principle of focusing benefits on those who need it most and keeping it affordable for the country.
1 Like
It might have not been so bad if George Osborne hadn’t raided the benefits piggy bank and used the money for other schemes… it was the reason IDS resigned from the Government if you recall.
The only reason the wanker gets a gong is because he was no-show BloJo’s leadership campaign manager.
Certainly not for chivalrous ability 
It frankly demeans the whole process particularly when the person most deserving of elevation to the peerage - John Bercow - is denied his privilege because no-show BloJo can’t stand him.
The best one can hope for is that La Rein’s right arm loses its strength at the moment of the dubbing of IDS and she slices his head off - now that would be a spectacle to behold 
4 Likes
No problem with WFP according to need, but fiddling the meteorological data to include Caribbean and Indian Islands shows just what a cheat he is.
6 Likes
Put the thieving Tory bastards against the wall & shoot the lot
8 Likes
James O’Brien seems to sum it up, speaking of IDS’s knighthood:
I would add “and John Bercow not” to the end of that sentence.
9 Likes
Completely agree Jane, seething when I saw this in today’s paper.
and just to add insult to injury, it transpires that the full home addresses of some 1000 recipients - including “sensitive” security ones were published by the Cabinet Office in a spreadsheet this morning.
The list remained up for an hour before being taken down.
Incompetence beyond belief…
1 Like
That’s pretty damned incompetent! Despite not really approving of the honours system I was pleased that my aunt was awarded one today, for her work to combat genocide as as a holocaust survivor herself. So I really hope her address wasn’t there as she is subject to enough anti-semetic abuse as it is, which is disgraceful for a little old lady to have to deal with.
8 Likes
Meanwhile, unelected Lord Howard (former failed Tory leader and enduring mediocrity, Michael Howard) railed against the ‘unelected judiciary’ making biaised decisions, but what really annoyed me was that his BBC interviewer failed to point out that members of the House of Lords are also ‘unelected’. It seems as though most of the R4 news team (reporters and editors) are either former Oxbridge Union Young Conservatives and/or former Daily Mail employees. And yet there is this pretext of ‘balance’.
In the space of just a couple of weeks since the election, the new government has cut Parliament out of any role in the Brexit negotiations, threatened Channel 4 and the BBC, is refusing to give interviews with mainstream media and is now attacking the judiciary, the last remaining body that might be able to hold them in check. Meanwhile ultra right wing activists are flooding into the Conservative Party:-
It’s all very worrying… is the UK (or rather, England) going the way of the USA, Poland and Hungary? Sadly, I could have added quite a few more countries (such as Australia) but let’s keep it fairly local 
Glad to be in France!
9 Likes
IDS is one of the foulest, smug bastards I have ever come across and that’s in a party that specialises in smug bastards.
6 Likes
makes me want to perform surgery on his adenoids using knitting needles 
3 Likes
I think you’ve answered your own question but I’ll say it anyway. Targeting (as in means testing) is an expensive process . No system is foolproof and to try and get benefits to those who truly need them by means testing is largely humiliating for the receiver and costly to the administrator. A case in point was Labour’s proposal to compensate the WASPI women (something that sadly won’t now happen) . Their actuary worked on a process for over 18 months. Eventually it was concluded that means testing was impractical and they came up with a formula which , whilst it wouldn’t have pleased everyone, was simple and would have been straightforward to administer.
Similarly the idea that people in social housing should only be housed according to their needs seems logical and fair.
But. Take a family of 3 (a parent , a girl and a boy) were “given” a house 26 years ago . It met their needs.
Fast forward 26 years , the parent has remarried and the children have grown and left home. In theory two people no longer need a 3 bedroom home . So , you tell them they will have to move out of the home they have spent money on & turned from a hovel to a comfortable home. That couple could by now be in their 60’s or 70’s or even as one couple I know , their 80’s . Would you forcibly remove them from their home of 26 years? Move them from the house and garden they’ve looked after for years into a tiny one bedroomed flat? Would you, as the owner of your own home , give it up when your children left home so that those less fortunate or more in need of the space you occupy could live in it?
When brought down to practicalities , to a human level , such ideas don’t seem quite so simple or palatable.
8 Likes
Forcibly, no - but I would encourage to move to something smaller so that the house can accommodate a bigger family again.
It should be remembered that it is a rented house for the purpose of accommodating people.
3 Likes
We have done exactly this - in downsizing whilst moving to France.
It’s one thing to attempt to reduce state expenditure, that’s ideology about which we vote.
It is another thing to lie to achieve your objective.
IDS lied about average temperature in France. None of our politicians would call him out.
In case you have forgotten, the average qualifying temperature in Metropolitan France is lower than the qualifying temperature in the UK. He had to add the DOM/TOM’s to get it above.
Pensioners in Sicily get paid WFP. Pensionees in Dunkirk do not.
3 Likes
Brilliant!!!
4 Likes
come on Graham… give us the link to the petition… I only found a French one with some 500 signatures… 
Naught will come of it. Petitions have their uses but can anyone point to an online one which has changed diddly-squat.
1 Like