People don’t abandon their own country and families because they don’t like the weather.

wrong.

i would – fuerteventura is the favoured destination for this chimp.

kids’ll be all right

GrahamS.

You don’t need to be on any benefit to have a council house. Dependant on your local council the amount of housing benefit you can get varies with income.

Lets say the maximum housing benefit you can get is £300 per month. That is £300 towards your rent in private housing. That rent may be £450 per month. You need to pay the difference. Say that is for a 2 bed flat.

A 2 bed flat from the council will only cost £280 per month to rent. You have to pay nothing.

Obviously if you dont get any housing benefit the cost differnce matters just as much.

I want this bird to come and be “the face” of Edinburghs new tram project!

bobbyg81: right that was pretty much as I understood it. So that means if they pay for folk to be in private rented accommodation then it costs the council more money long term than if they give them council houses? (paying £300pm to a private landlord versus £280pm to themselves).

Why is that a better system?

It’s not about being better for the council. It is about being better for the British citizen. Wherever they may have been born. British citizen for 2 years? I think you should get the house over someone who has been a British citizen for 1 month. I can’t really see how that is unfair? Perfect? Far from it.

Its all academic anyway. Given the Tories latest wheeze, council houses will be dimly remembered anachronism before too long anyway. And knowing them, my tents suggestion will presently be being batted about in Steve Hilton’s Blue-Sky-Ball-Endery dept.

Lets run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it eh?

From twitter;

The BNP announce this years pantomime is entitled ‘The Lady and the Tram’.

I got a 2 day ban for posting this the other day , I think the horrible lady in the vid Is John Terrys sister. Just a hunch.

As a (sometime) archaeologist, I’d like to post up a vid of meself on the tube, ranting about (1) what we now call the UK was first settled by humans nearly a million years ago (2) that, as modern humans, we ALL came from Africa (albeit probably with a bit of inter-breeding with in situ hominin populations, e.g. Neanderthals in Western Europe) (3) that things like skin colour are environmental adaptations, for fug’s sake (4) and most of all… that anything that made this country great is largely the result of us being a tolerant, utterly mongrel (think: successive waves of invaders…) heinz 57 island nation.

But I generally mumble, so it wouldn’t be very exciting to look at. 😕