Forthcoming General Election

(07-05-2010 12:15 )elgar1uk Wrote:  It's looking like another election will be called, either late this year or early next year.

I'm not sure that anyone's keen on that elgar. It looks like some deal will get sorted out to avoid having another election in the immediate future.

Alastair Campbell winds up Adam Boulton.


FIGHT ........nearly

Can't say I've ever had much time for campbell but that is class. Sky were absolutely shitting themselves that labour would pull off a deal with liberals.

Thanks to the new "govenment" we are now the ConDemnation,shoot me now.

Part of me is hopeful that we'll see the Lib-Dem sense of fairness and social justice coupled with the Tory ability to get things done quickly, but I have a sneaky feeling that what we'll actually see is the Tories learning to have the Lib-Dem passion for high taxation, while the Lib-Dems pick up some of that good ol' Tory callousness. Oh joy...

Cameron is to visit Scotland!!! Most Scots feel like the turkey that saw Bernard Matthews smile at it

Cameron has slashed his pay by £7,500 to £142,500 i wonder why, it wouldn`t have any thing to do with the 50% tax on anyone earning £150,000+ would it

Wont be long before the next round of General Election who gives a fuck. Anyone watch the spending review debate? Poor bastards on minimum wage that gets the sack, will now have to wait 7 days before they can make a claim. As the torys said, "we are all in it together" yeah, and the poorer paid take the hit

(26-06-2013 13:28 )SOCATOA Wrote:  Wont be long before the next round of General Election who gives a fuck. Anyone watch the spending review debate? Poor bastards on minimum wage that gets the sack, will now have to wait 7 days before they can make a claim. As the torys said, "we are all in it together" yeah, and the poorer paid take the hit

Just reading this elsewhere.

Jobseekers will also be required to sign on weekly. The offices can barely cope as it is! Where I live, the office in the nearby town shut last year, so everyone from that town, and the surrounding villages, must now travel all the way to my town to sign on. That's pretty much a day's work in itself, a day that could be better spent looking for work!
Jobseekers must also have a CV before being allowed to claim. If you are at the lower end of the food chain like me, a CV is pointless, it serves no real purpose at all.

Don't know if anyone has attempted to look on the 'new' job centre website for work recently, but it really is a joke. I look for jobs within 10 miles of my postcode. I used to get maybe 6/7 pages of jobs, 1 or 2 if I went just for part-time vacancies. Now I routinely get over 20 pages, even just part-time. I get offered jobs 100 miles or more away, even though I filtered distance. And worse thing is, the results can't be ordered any better, so I have no choice but to look at every single page in case there is a worthwhile job there. What used to take 5 minutes, now takes over an hour! You need to be unemployed to have the time to look for a job this way.

This spending review was really about setting the scene for the next election as the Coalition offers more austerity in the hope of providing a narrative to the electorate of Britain's political economy being on the road to recovery after the 'mess' that Labour left it in. The reality is that economic growth has been sluggish since 2010 due to the Coalition's austerity and difficulties in the global economy so tax receipts have not really recovered. What we are seeing is the welfare state being 'hollowed out' with social protection via benefits being eroded, particularly for people of working age.

The 7 day waiting period, weekly attendance and CV ready before being able to claim out of work benefits are all part of a strategy to scapegoat unemployed and workless people for structural economic problems - a lack of jobs, especially reasonably paid ones. The DWP's Work Programme has not been successful in providing unemployed people with support to find jobs although the contracts for private providers, like A4E and others, have been so generous that even failure is rewarded.

Austerity and eroding social protection will cost thousands of lives, increase levels of mental illness and make Britain a much less pleasant place to live. We need to break away from the shackles of neo-liberalism that says that markets are always best, the state should be shrunk and people made to stand on their own two feet. We need to have a political vision that is genuinely inclusive and fair based on economic efficiency and social justice...I fear that we won't get that even after 2015 when this miserable Coalition is cast out of office.