A clever bonus
27 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Economy, Employment Tags: Employment
Why do they grumble about Mr Hester’s bonus? I think it is clever at the least and cynical at most to give the boss of a share listed company shares as a bonus. If Mr Hester’s leadership is useless his shares are going to be worthless but if he is good he’s shares increase in value. A very good motivator. After all it was a publicly accepted argument that employees should become shareholders to increase their motivation in the company.
Whether RBS is owned by the people is not really the point, it is still depending of a good manager.
Can men be exploited
26 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Business, Tower Hamlets Tags: sympathy
I am not even wanting to comment on equally on gay rights but think that the argument that men cannot be exploited by the sex trade is plainly wrong. There are many desperately poor men out there who find it even more difficult to get abode than women do. Women can always claim housing with a child but men can’t get pregnant. There might not be exploitation or prostitution on the premises but what exactly is the perimeter of a premises and what is going on around the corner or over the phone?
Equality-wise it would be wrong to exclude a gay pub just because it is a gay pub from similar rules around an area. I personally did not sign the petition against sex establishments.
Bread and water
26 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Taxes Tags: elections, voting, Conservative, standards
Bread & water used to be the diet of prisoners, condemned to jails but that is the diet that the ordinary working person on a small salary has to endure to survive the current financial and economic climate. They know it and this article proves it. It proves that they can change the tax threshold to £10.000 but that they don’t want to do it because that is the little stick of sugar they are trying to throw us when it comes to the next elections.
They might as well then put up election posters saying “Fed up with Bread & Water, vote Conservative and you’ll be able to afford Meat and Veg, we raise the tax threshold to 10k”.
Whilst the New Labour posters could simply say “Britain isn’t working”, that is of course a swift development from the Tories one a few years back. We are being ripped off, ripped off because they stole our lifestyle, our quality of life, you name it.
You are better off being in jail today as at least you get a decent meal each day, whilst if you are just working and living a lawful existence, you cannot afford to eat properly any longer.
Of course the economy has to shrink if people spend less. Go to any supermarket today and you get ridiculously reduced articles because they have to sell something. That of course reduces company’s turnover and so the whole economy shrinks.
Yet Cameron and pals insist that they make us better off in work than on benefits. But he forgotten to mention that you are still better off in local authority care or in jail rather than living the life of the law abiding free person.
Obsessive Tories
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Child Care, Conservative, House of Lords Tags: Conservative
The Tories are obsessed with themselves and despite many defeats in the House of Lords, continue to maintain that their policies are the good ones, the right ones, the only ones, and so fort …..
Persistence can become a bad habit and turn into an unhealthy obsession. I just don’t know why they do not give up and hang up their coats, go home and have a nice hot cocoa instead of telling us that we are wrong and they are right. Yes they are right, they always have been right, but not right in their decision but right politically.
The most recent defeat in the House of Lords, is that single parents cannot be charged by the Child Support Agency to get their maintenance monies from the children’s other parent, mostly the father. I think the government wants to show enterprise and charge people extra for supporting the people that already pay taxes for the services the government provides.
I am just waiting for the Tories to float the government on the stock market for some extra income. What is that, a Flotilla.
Looking for easy victims?
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Debt, Economy, Employment Tags: Employment
A further round of cuts has been announced, this time it affects London based army personnel. It is savage to announce now that all ranks from Sergeant and above lose their London allowance from 1 April 2012. The army is not allowed to strike and so the government beats up the voice-less public servants. It is plainly unfair to choose army personnel for the latest round of cuts when they are already running very high risks to their life and general safety every day.
Considering that most of us have long-term lease and borrowing agreements with banks and other companies, such a sudden withdrawal of income is fatal for most of us who are living on the brink of financial ruin every day.
This government has cowardly tactics to make those suffer that have the least voice. The poor, who cannot go out and argue against a cut in benefits because they do not have the money to print the leaflets needed to show the people that those scaremongering tactics are achieved by a propaganda machine that constantly churns out half-truths. They keep on telling us about the debts but they do not tell us what is owed to us as a nation.
The right to delete data
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
I think it is a good move that people have the right to get their data deleted of some databases, rather than things being kept forever. In Germany for example, the authorities delete court files after 30 years.
We have internet sites that archive websites without owner’s consent and any accidental publication can be seen online forever. It is not fruitful so far to write to these people because they just ignore your request to remove stuff from their site.
If you jot down a draft on paper, you can always bin it, but if its done on the Internet, your draft can be seen forever, even if it was not meant to be final and was actually wrong.
We don’t just owe them, they owe us back
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Debt, Economy, Politics Tags: Christian
I was very disappointed to read that Ex-Archbishop Carey supports the condemnation of the poor by supporting the debt argument, that is being used as a reason to repress poor families and their children.
We do not just owe them, they owe us back, should become a more widely used slogan but that is the fact. It is just that some people, who are very powerful, just use the debt we owe them, to use is as a reason to annihilate poor families.
The church bishops, did what they had to do; because traditionally the churches stand up for people and that is what they are supposed to be doing.
Why do they do it? Why do they not print every day the figures other countries owe us, to show that our debts are really not all that bad? I presume they do it to get some good reasons to step on the poor and make them poorer and drive them into bigger dependency and cut their income.
EU criticises political populism using the press
25 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Children, Economy, Europe Tags: Europe
It is quite extraordinary that the most senior judge at the European Court of Human Rights recognises that the popular press pushes out a lot of over-hyped news and uses that ‘fact’ to belittle David Cameron’s attempts to get a reform in the court’s procedural mechanism.
It is quite true that the current press propaganda is more than irresponsible. They keep on printing every little bit of government propaganda, emphasising how bad it all is and how bad all our debts are and that we deserve to be punished for it. During the Thatcher years, they only stepped on the single parents and now they step on all children from poor families. It has gotten worst not better in that respect.
I have seen only one good attempt from the BBC to counter-act that endless stream of negative propaganda, that the Tory government churns out; that was with the publication of a table that showed that in fact others owe us and if we worked out those figures that our real debt is actually only one third of what they say it is if we weigh it up against what others owe us.
Yet the press constantly supports those popular attacks on the poor by only publishing those most negative debt figures out of the context of what is owed to us.
Then we hear about gang cultures but the press fails to inform us that the young people of today only learn from us older persons and that they take us as example. If we look at those political strategies, that is sheer gangland culture what is going on there. We hear Blair wanted to progress Europe, he was the popular arm of the Catholic church, that is deeply rooted in Germany and then we’ve had the Brownies, breaking away and going more in the direction of the Tories by paving the way for today’s popular policies, which are in agreement to turn away from Europe. Only difference was that Brown more celebrated all children whilst he neglected the upkeep of council properties, whilst the Tories now upkeep the council properties but condemn the children that live within them.
We need a much better analytical press that not just repeats what the bigwigs want them to print but actually show us what is behind those tactics.
David Cameron’s argument do make no sense because they just limp behind the European decisions just to accept them in any case. It is just his personal pride that is being hurt by having to listen to somebody else.
There is this constant tit for tat going on between Europe and the UK. Most recently, Strasbourg upheld a challenge by radical preacher Abu Qatada that deporting him from the UK to Jordan would breach his human rights. Simultaneously they agreed on extradition to the US for UK citizens though.
I think our minds are filled with constant pin-pointing arguments that are part of a bigger agenda but are not related to those bigger agendas, so that we can rationalise the problems.
The clever way to go about this is to come to an agreement between the most powerful heads of the institutions and talk amongst each other rather than publicly have slanging matches. Cameron’s strength is actually his weakness, he is a good speaker but he wants to hold speeches that upset others rather than speeches that unite us with others.
I don’t think we can trust the Tories, because they want to push people into deeper poverty and do not appreciate large parts of the population at all.
And another one bites the cap
23 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Child Care, Child Trust Fund, Culture, Economy, Employment Tags: Children, community
I am more than glad that the government’s welfare bill was rejected at the House of Lords stage but sorry that families had to suffer a great deal of stress since the proposal of the change till today.
The amendment on child benefit was put down by Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt Rev John Packer.
He said child benefit was “a universal benefit” and it was “wrong to see it as being a welfare benefit”.
“It’s a benefit which is there for all children, for the bringing up of all children and to say that the only people who cannot have child benefit are those whose welfare benefits have been capped seems to me to be a quite extraordinary argument.”
The Rt Rev John Packer puts it quite blandly and to me it seems that this Tory government wants to make child benefit a privilege of the rich and deprive the poor of its income if their total income goes over a certain threshold.
In very practical terms it was the Child Tax Credit and the Child Benefit that makes up the household budget a woman has to play with and with a new universal benefit this unique partition of the household income, that enables a woman to keep her kids fed and clothed and the home maintained is in danger of being broken away from the ownership of the main carer of the children, which is in most families still the woman. Considering that domestic violence is at an increase, the universal benefit will increase it even further if women have no save heaven for their household budget.
The government seems to want to make children of poor households an unspeakable event because the universal benefit does not even differentiate between households that have and households that do not have children. the Rt Rev John Packer said the cap “failed to differentiate between households with children and those without” and child benefit was “the most appropriate way to right this unfairness”.
That is an astonishing complete reversal of the policy Labour brought in, which celebrated the birth of each child by awarding it an amount for the Child Trust Fund,which was immediately abolished when the Conservative government came in.
It does not make sense of Mr Duncan Smith to argue that they want to save the low wage earner from paying towards luxury accommodation of child rich benefit recipients. Tax liability is staged and low earners pay less and their contribution towards the housing of benefit recipients is a minimal percentage, that is almost too minicule to even mention it.
Surely there is an argument from stopping families existing only on benefits but there is much more to it than just cutting off the benefits. The whole working market is geared to supporting more and more people who do not wish to have children. It would be quite possible for employers to prefer employing families with lots of child care responsibilities and if those families were given preferred employment, then I would much more support the Tory ideas.
To pay or not to pay
21 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Employment Tags: Conservative, Employment
This is a quite, not to say, very hot off the press, extremely interesting decision of the High Court, to grant an injunction, which halts the replacement of paid workers with volunteers.
It also quite nicely demonstrates this government’s schizophrenic attitude towards employment, in that they on one hand, they want us all to get a job and on the other they replace paid workers with unpaid ones.
It does not make economic sense to replace paid workers with unpaid ones, just to pressure those “volunteers” into seeking paid work. That is what is happening today, that the government sticks us into unpaid “voluntary” work placements and then forces us to look for paid work.
Incidentally some other High Court Action has been started by a person complaining that she has been forced into working for free and seeking redress as she considers this slave labour. That is the proof of the pudding, that if you replace paid workers with unpaid ones, that is in fact slavery.
Good on the Surrey Libraries Action movement to take that step against Surrey County Council, that seems the only effective way forward these days to achieve change with this crazy government.
