U.K. Politics: Nadhim Zahawi sacked by Rishi Sunak

[UKMusicLova]

I'm still not sure who I will be voting for. In certain aspects I am more right wing and in other aspects I am left wing. I guess most people are like that, it's just which way you sway most.
It would probably make most sense for me to vote Lib Dems, but I was in the thick of the student thing when I last voted (i mean I didn't pay the £9k fee) but I voted because Nick Clegg sold that party to me but now I don't trust them.

Whilst as I said there are some policies I agree with the Tories more, I do find it funny how a party that isn't voted for by Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, London, Birmingham, Manchester and most of our major cities can win the general election. It's all the rural constituencies like the one my parents live in that keep David Cameron and his party doing well.

Controversial to my fellow English folks, but if I lived in Scotland I would vote SNP.

[Graham76man]

Bankers will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Even Jesus Christ had it in for you guys

Is that why you are a dog Marius? Dog eat Dog world?

I'll be anxiously waiting for the revolution. If it is going to be started by the hugely entrepreneurial and determined people on benefits and by Milliband, I may just have to wait a bit more

Actually many former millionaires were either on benefits or in trouble with the law. For example Richard Branston was caught fiddling the tax system, when he was sending out records for people to buy when they should have been export only. If it wasn't for the fact the taxman prefers money then sending people to jail, Richard would have gone to jail. And his story is not alone, Jade Goody made a fortune, from having entrepreneurial skills, which were not recognised at the time. And Pete Waterman was caught stealing locomotive nameplates from British Railways and sent to work at British Railways as a punishment.

But I think you won't see any revolution in the UK, with the kind of people that are in the UK and the views they have currently. For some changing the chart day to Friday is radical. You have only to listen to James Masterton on his site to see that he thinks that were ALL stuck in the past, when it comes to change. And that's just about the Friday change I dread to think what he thinks about the rest of society. My worry is that there are too many of his type around.

[Marius]

Bankers will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Even Jesus Christ had it in for you guys

Is that why you are a dog Marius? Dog eat Dog world?

I'll be anxiously waiting for the revolution. If it is going to be started by the hugely entrepreneurial and determined people on benefits and by Milliband, I may just have to wait a bit more

[Wayne]

Revolution.

[Graham76man]

Bankers will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Even Jesus Christ had it in for you guys

Is that why you are a dog Marius? Dog eat Dog world?

[Marius]

^That's what jobseekers are made to feel like every time they visit the "job"centre. It is not our fault the system doesn't work. Raise the minimum / living wage, stop zero hours / exploitation, treat us like adults not illiterate children. Stop giving bankers bonuses, sort out tax evaders like Amazon.

Bankers' bonuses: I work in the City so I have some insight into this matter...

Here’s what happened in banks when the EU came with a random rule stating that bonuses should be max 200% of the fixed salaries

- Everyone got huge bumps in the fixed salary: say someone was on 100K fixed (“base”) and 300k bonus. Now the same person would be on 200k fixed and 200k bonus. The total impact on the income tax paid to the state: none (same money paid to the employee). The total impact on the bonus tax take: 33% lower. Overall taxman loses

- Other people resigned and started working under consultancy agreements (where work was of such nature). Impact on income tax: slightly negative, as tax rates for self-employed are a bit lower. Impact on bonus tax: down 100%. Overall the taxman loses

- Many not very qualified jobs and entire teams were moved to places like Mumbai, Poland or somewhere in the US that is not NY or LA (ie Salt Lake City). I recently ran some projects where all the low-level work was done in Mumbai (and I had 2 calls a day with the guys), while just the Managing Director and I were based in London. Impact on income and bonus tax: down 100%. Overall the taxman loses.

Do you still want to cut bankers’ bonuses?

I’ll elaborate on the impact that an increase in the min wage / ban on zero hr contracts would have on the total employment numbers tomorrow – am just about to wrap up a delicious long Easter weekend break in Tokyo with another cup of sake

[Brad]

I've been away for the weekend so I'm just catching up on this thread.

I think Nicola Sturgeon won the leaders' debate by far and if I lived in Scotland, the SNP would have my vote.

Unfortunately, I don't and that leaves me with very little choice. I would never vote for UKIP or the Conservatives. I think the right is always the wrong way to go when it comes to politics. Voting for them would go against everything I stand for.

Farage should be ashamed of his HIV comments.

Labour doesn't strike me as a secure choice and I wouldn't like them to get a majority vote at all. It would be very interesting to see a Labour/SNP coalition. Nicola would certainly wear the trousers in that government because Miliband is weak, weak, weak.

The Lib Dems are a waste of space on the ballot paper this time. The votes they get probably won't be enough to hold the coalition card again. Even if they did get enough, it's most likely they'd go with Labour and that would be worse than Labour alone.

That leaves me with the Greens who I do agree with on many/most things. I'll be voting for them and I do think their candidate for my constituency is the best choice. Their manifesto reads as a party who know they don't have a chance of winning the election, but I do think they could do very well in a coalition if they stood their ground (unlike the Lib Dems). It's a shame Natalie Bennett is leading them at the moment. Someone who was better at debates and interviews would've been a great gift for them during this election. Natalie is lucky Leanne Wood was part of the leaders' debate so she didn't come across as the weakest link.

I'm looking forward to the "challengers" debate on the BBC even though it's being presented by the insufferable David Dimbleby.

[Blondini]

Many JCP staff are sick of being told to give sanctions, and meeting targets that DWP always insists don't exist. I'm "lucky" in that i have never had any trouble with them but others aren't. You still get this feeling of unease all the time though - that you're constantly being judged when they should in fact be helping you - they now have "Job Coaches" but they're just glorified advisors with no real difference to their old roles. They can't offer real help because there's nothing there to offer.

RE: Food banks.

[Graham76man]

It's awful to say this but the people who work at the Department of Work and Pensions must be terrible individuals if they have to carry out such extreme rules. I know from my own time of dealing with them most of them are beyond hope. I remember seeing jokes (around 1999) taking the piss out of claimants clearly on display in the offices they worked in.
I always thought that the people who worked on the Social Security were attracted to work there because of that name. Or should I say the initials part - S.S. As going to see them one was like being interviewed by a member of the S.S.

Personally I now avoid any contact with them and even though I could claim a lot more money under my own present circumstances, I wouldn't for the reason that facing that sort of person is like banging your head against a brick wall. They know that the people who come to see them are genuine and looking for work, but they are not interested in the truth.
In the past when Wham sang "make a claim sign your name that's all you have to do" the staff could ignore the boss and the governments efforts to fiddle the dole figures, by stopping people's money who were looking for work. Simply by accepting the person who told them the "sob stories" - which was one of the jokes in the office back in 1999 - and instead concentrating on getting those "Wham" people off the dole. But the computerised system took it out of the hands of the "claimant advisors" and from what I've read and heard made them interested only in targets - or they finish up being in the other chair!

Welfare covers a vast amount of areas, there is money that can be saved. I just hope the Conservatives get it right

Wayne there isn't money to be saved. It's going to be redirected to paying for rich idol people to spend money on. Perhaps even put in your pocket
If you think there is money to be saved you should have a word with some of the patients at Darnall Doctors Sheffield, who currently are waiting weeks to see a doctor there. Of course it's a multicultural area and the part-time doctors don't need to have the money to employ interpreter's to listen to complainants about how long it takes to get even a telephone interview with a doctor there. Especially as they have paid out for such people out of the money intended to treat patients. I found out this today by just moving along the dial from stations playing the top 40 and saying that around £2 million pounds this week alone was made by selling Now 90. I wonder Wayne what that doctors could do with just the tax alone from that?

[oasisbobo]

Wow. The Tories are now trying to discredit Nicola Sturgeon by printing lies about her (and David and Ed are buying into it when they ought to be staying silent).
Bit of a strange "coincidence" that Tory paper The Telegraph does this right after she surges in public opinion after the ITV debate.

^That's what jobseekers are made to feel like every time they visit the "job"centre. It is not our fault the system doesn't work. Raise the minimum / living wage, stop zero hours / exploitation, treat us like adults not illiterate children. Stop giving bankers bonuses, sort out tax evaders like Amazon.

Yeah very strange coincidence.

The jobseekers bit is spot on. Having experienced it myself. Sometimes I would see women talk to grown men as if they were nothing which is disgusting. Their job isn't to help people find jobs but cut as many peoples benefits as they can. People are just stats and sadly 64 suicides is just 64 less people to pay.

I was on a 'get into work' course a while ago and we weren't allowed to use the toilets in the jobcentre we had to use the ones in the shopping centre across the road.

[Wayne]

Wayne I find your "dogged down by the Scottish agenda" comment extremely disrespectful. Scotland are constantly governed by Westminster and a government we haven't voted for.

As a Scottish man/woman, I would expect nothing less. And as you'll see from that post, I also said I'd like to see more devolution of powers - regardless of who wins this election.

You've just stated that you'll be voting for SNP - and that's because SNP will do most for you, as a Scottish man/woman. Does nothing for me personally.

[Hype]

I personally find another term with the conservatives in government nauseating.

I don't like ed milliband he is a bumbling fool, it should've been his brother who won leadership of labour- they would be in a much better trustworthy place right now.

I'll be voting SNP.

Wayne I find your "dogged down by the Scottish agenda" comment extremely disrespectful. Scotland are constantly governed by Westminster and a government we haven't voted for.


I think it'll be interesting to see what will happen with the party leaders after this election. Who will step down and who will replace them etc...

[Blondini]

Wow. The Tories are now trying to discredit Nicola Sturgeon by printing lies about her (and David and Ed are buying into it when they ought to be staying silent).
Bit of a strange "coincidence" that Tory paper The Telegraph does this right after she surges in public opinion after the ITV debate.

Found this article about benefit sanctions published recently - an official report has been made and it's uncomfortable reading.

I am not sure how we reached the point where we need an inquiry to establish that stopping a person’s benefits to the level that they can’t feed themselves or their children may be wrong. But here we are, it seems. The recent MPs’ inquiry into the coalition’s benefits sanction system released its findings on Tuesday – a catalogue of cruelty with footnotes to add details of the claimants who have been starved.

The report is damning. As it should be. We have watched a system develop in which it is normal for ordinary men and women to be thrown by their own government into financial and psychological crisis. The scale is staggering. More than 1 million jobseekers had their unemployment benefits stopped last year – and, as the report states, the government has failed to prove this is not “purely punitive”.

Who exactly are we punishing? A disabled, single mother described to the committee the day she was sanctioned for missing an appointment because a flare-up of her hip condition meant she was physically unable to walk or drive. Despite explaining this to The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), she was told she’d receive no money for four weeks. The sanction remained in place for almost three months.


None of this occurred by magic. The examples the report lists are not anomalies or accidents of a flawed system with good intentions. They are the human consequences of this government’s active decision to bring in “tougher” measures. Measures such as significantly increasing the amount of money they were able to take from sanctioned disabled and chronically ill people. And quadrupling how long they could stop the benefits of a jobseeker making a mild error (in 2012, the minimum sanction was increased to four weeks, rather than one). The DWP did not even bother to “first [test] their likely impacts on claimants”, the report notes.

Still, ministers do not have to look far. Food bank queues are hard to miss.

Forcing the unemployed to beg charities for handouts is “motivational”, apparently. Even for the 23-year-old pregnant woman who, MPs heard, walked two miles to a food bank after her benefits were stopped. She was receiving employment and support allowance for mental health problems following the stillborn birth of her first baby eight months earlier. She had missed one work-focused interview because on that day she had found it too difficult to leave her flat.

That is enough, apparently, to leave a mentally ill, pregnant woman without food.

Emergency hardship payments are meant to pick up some of the pieces of sanctions – a sort of sub-net when the safety net has been cut. Except the rub is that claimants of jobseeker’s allowance are not allowed one until the 15th day of being sanctioned. So they are left to feed themselves with nothing for two weeks.

This is not being done to the middle classes with savings in the bank. Or those with power who are used to navigating a complex system. It is being done to the people who are already struggling – where a hardship fund exists but the application process is designed to be too difficult for vulnerable people to understand. Or, as the report states, making it so “the people potentially most in need of the hardship system were the least likely to be able to access it”.

One clinically depressed man had his benefits sanctioned when he didn’t attend an assessment for work capability because he didn’t have the bus fare to get there. His older sister told the committee that her brother found it “impossible to cope with normal life” and “couldn’t open the mail”. He was given no benefits for 16 months.

That the DWP is investigating 49 deaths of people in this system – including those “where suicide is associated with DWP activity” – seems almost predictable against that backdrop. The government was not able to provide details to the committee of anything it had done to alter how the DWP responds to claimants dying – or even to confirm how many of the dead had been subject to a benefit sanction.

The MPs’ call that an “independent review of benefit sanctions is urgently needed” seems almost polite for what is going on here. People are literally starving and their crime is that they dare to be poor and unemployed.

It is no surprise that the report concludes there is limited evidence that benefit sanctions actually help people find work. A jobseeker system that has sanctions at its centre is founded on the lie that the unemployed are too lazy to look for work unless they are threatened. The DWP acts as if it is training disobedient dogs.

Stopping the money people need in order to eat is not the purpose of government. The benefit sanctions regime should be scrapped – but let’s not stop there. The culture that created them needs shredding to pieces.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ent-review

I'm sure Dispatches mentioned 64 suicides as a result of sanctions.
Still want to vote Conservative/Labour (no difference as they are both the same on this)?

[youtube:11tdessl]pLFIxt2cK_0[/youtube:11tdessl]
^That's what jobseekers are made to feel like every time they visit the "job"centre. It is not our fault the system doesn't work. Raise the minimum / living wage, stop zero hours / exploitation, treat us like adults not illiterate children. Stop giving bankers bonuses, sort out tax evaders like Amazon.

[Wayne]

If the Tories get in they will take about 12 Billion out of the welfare budget and give it to the rich presumably :evil:

What frustrates me most about this is that Cameron hasn't been clear about where this money will come from. And therefore, we're left with scaremongering. I fear his complacency on this will be his biggest downfall.

Welfare covers a vast amount of areas, there is money that can be saved. I just hope the Conservatives get it right, if they end up in government.

I was watching that Channel Four drama about the collation being formed 5 years ago. The hope from that was that we would get rid of the election system that can give massive majorities from a party with less than 50% of the total vote.

FPTP isn't a perfect voting system but it's certainly better than the US system. I think if we went on the popular vote alone in the UK, then we'd be prone to fads such as the BNP and UKIP.

[Graham76man]

I liked and agree about what Tony said about the poor and benefits.

If the Tories get in they will take about 12 Billion out of the welfare budget and give it to the rich presumably :evil:
I was watching that Channel Four drama about the collation being formed 5 years ago. The hope from that was that we would get rid of the election system that can give massive majorities from a party with less than 50% of the total vote. The Lib-dems at the time wanted that more than anything. But it was a wiped off the agenda and you don't hear about it much now.
I dread that one of the major parties will get a working majority when they will get about 40% of the vote. For they can push forward extreme plans that can have impact on those who are marginalised in our society. Often these plans are done in such a way that don't alienate powerful groups of voters. For example when the bedroom tax was introduced they removed all pensioners from it. That's how these Governments get away with cutting benefits. They avoid measures which would see huge protests about. They often fudge issues like this.
Like elections of the past few years it will be decided by pensioners votes. One thing is for certain they won't be cutting winter fuel payments to the pensioners to save 12 billion. Even if some of the pensioners that get them have the odd million or so in the bank.

[SholasBoy]

I appreciate that that's how it might've come across, but that wasn't how I meant it to.

I wasn't talkng about you dear ;)

I found your post quite helpful actually

[Plym]

"dogged down by the scottish agenda"...

I knew that would piss you off.

[Wayne]

Wayne, you do realise that the Green Party will support Labour just as much as the SNP and Plaid Cymru. All those parties are very much on the left of British politics therefore they have much in common despite the obvious differences such as the SNP fighting for Scottish independence. Nicola Sturgeon gave a great performance and as an English voter the idea of a Labour government aided by a coalition of the smaller parties now seems the best option to me. The alternative, the possibility of a Conservative government propped up by some deal with UKIP, terrifies me. The most vulnerable in society have been shamelessly targetted by the current government and I could only see this worsening if this country shifts any further to the right.

I don't think a Conservative-UKIP coalition is on the cards - the Conservatives currently won't gain enough seats to form a coalition with UKIP. Unless we get a majority, it is a near certainty in my view that the SNP will be in power, they hold the balance needed to creep over the magic 326 mark.

[Madgefan]

Wayne, you do realise that the Green Party will support Labour just as much as the SNP and Plaid Cymru. All those parties are very much on the left of British politics therefore they have much in common despite the obvious differences such as the SNP fighting for Scottish independence. Nicola Sturgeon gave a great performance and as an English voter the idea of a Labour government aided by a coalition of the smaller parties now seems the best option to me. The alternative, the possibility of a Conservative government propped up by some deal with UKIP, terrifies me. The most vulnerable in society have been shamelessly targetted by the current government and I could only see this worsening if this country shifts any further to the right.

[Wayne]

"dogged down by the scottish agenda"...

I knew that would piss you off.

Ps I hate when people get all pompous about whether they know more about politics than another person or not, its no wonder so many people lose interest and refuse to vote.

I appreciate that that's how it might've come across, but that wasn't how I meant it to.

[SholasBoy]

Ps I hate when people get all pompous about whether they know more about politics than another person or not, its no wonder so many people lose interest and refuse to vote.

[Plym]

"dogged down by the scottish agenda"...

[Wayne]

For this election, I think it's important to understand that...

• It is highly unlikely that we will get a majority government - therefore, a minority government or most likely a coalition [as a result of a hung parliament] will govern.[/*:m:3lgf5c2w]
• Due to the above, it is widely expected that a vote for Miliband [Labour] is a vote for the SNP - as Labour will almost certainly enter into a coalition. If the SNP get into power, then the term agenda [in my view, for my personal circumstances] takes an ugly turn, and we are dogged down by the Scottish agenda. If the SNP do get into power, I sincerely hope that we see a further devolution of powers.[/*:m:3lgf5c2w]
• A vote for the Greens is a smart vote in my view - this is the most uninteresting election I can recall, the most positive outcome of which is the least likely outcome [a majority, single part rule - Conservative would be best, for me]. Therefore, the smaller parties will probably do quite well, if only due to the British public's alienation with the three main parties. Any progress for the Greens will be positive and mean that the next 5 years can be used to build a more comprehensive party plan [and possibly gain a more charismatic leader!][/*:m:3lgf5c2w]
• This is the only hurrah UKIP will get in my view - and I do think they'll underperform.[/*:m:3lgf5c2w]

The idea of a Miliband-led government is absolutely cringe-inducing.

[MadeOfBricks]

That leaders debate was the first thing I've truly paid attention to with regards to politics. I feel with this election that it's the first time I've been compelled to vote but after that broadcast I don't know who far. In terms of what was said, I know my vote isn't going conservative or labour, neither of their policies speak to me as a 24 year old, not particularly well off, graduate. I think Clegg actually came across quite well but they had my vote last time as I was a student however for obvious reasons the lib dems no longer hold my trust. Farage, I think, did the best job of putting across his party policy however fundamentally, working as a recruitment consultant and as a homosexual male, some of the UKIP policies are so far away from what I agree with, his performance doesn't matter. That leaves me with the Green Party - I wasn't impressed with what I saw and I feel that a vote for them would be a) wasted and b) just a vote for the lesser of all the evils. Is this actually what politics is about?!

[SholasBoy]

The UK is not the USA. We don't vote for Leaders of Parties, the parties do. If you are put off voting for a party due to it's leaders debate on a TV show, then you don't really understand politics in the UK at all.

I completely understand that we are voting for our local MP's, but I still think it's important to bear in mind who will be running the country.