we are told that unemployment has hit the lowest level since 1997. If that’s to be believed, something is going right

I suspect this has more to do with cracking down on benefit cheats and proliferation of part-time jobs. It also does not show how many of those unemployed are young people – it is a disproportionate percentage I believe.
I do think we are in for a tough winter. If there is bad weather, some very practical support from councils etc will not happen, and we may well have some other issues.
On top, it feels like the cuts that were made a few years back are biting hard now. We once again have not had our rubbish collected here – council is clearly making do, and not doing usual collections across a lot of Stirling.
This is then all set against a background of a feeling that the rich are getting richer again (see bankers, see Aberdeen etc etc).
It will be a bumpy ride for a couple of years IMO still.

The only ray of light is that the con dems will loosee the next election,look forward to that…..

Yeah. Fantastic.
We get another set of clueless, lying, self serving ****wits but this time with different colour ties.
Forgive me for not bursting with excitement.

Oil refinery workers where due to strike in Scotland, but called it off, so management still close down the refinery for a while,possibly to make sure they show who is in charge,

Seems unlikley, they’ll have planned to shut down, and not everyone being on strike so will probably be doing turnarround work upgrading and replacing plant to make the most of the down time. The contracts for all that work will have been long ago signed so it was shutting down regardless.

totalshell – Member
a country where more people than ever are in work where the number of claimants for benifits fell at its sharpest for 16 years where inflation is amongst the lowest in the developed world where the income tax bill for your first 10 grand is NOWT… did all this happen under ed millimuppet or the condems.. look at what a mess nice but dim gordon left us in.. was that soooooo much better..

yeah its a paradise right now

going to Uni means more debt than ever before

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/17/working-poor-cuts-social-mobility-commission

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24553611

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hungrier-than-ever-britains-use-of-food-banks-triples-8882340.html

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/16/warning-crisis-nhs-mental-health

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ5ypmTtL_s[/video]

piemonster – Member

What’s the breakdown of that employment?

Does that include part time and zero hours?

Takes no account of underemployment, so is pretty much meaningless.

going to Uni means more debt than ever before

So don’t go. Many should be encouraged NOT to go, and take up job, apprenticeship or college training with direct, practical skills.

Yep, in a time of record youth unemployment that’s dead easy.

What Northwind said.

We should be thowing students into university right now, what’s the cost of housing benifit etc for a kid in a Zero hours McJob on minimum wage versus the cost of sending them to university?

Aprentiships maybe, but my perception was the few available are massively oversubscribed (whilst engineering courses at university are struggling to fill up).

p.s. the real issue with the Inneos strike is what would happen to the BP Forties facility next door which really would be an issue if closed.

thisisnotaspoon – Member – Quote
What Northwind said.

We should be thowing students into university right now, what’s the cost of housing benifit etc for a kid in a Zero hours McJob on minimum wage versus the cost of sending them to university?
Why? There is already a generation who were conned into going to university getting into debt to find there were no jobs, why push more into it?

Matching skill shortages to training & education funding would be better.

So don’t go. Many should be encouraged NOT to go, and take up job, apprenticeship or college training with direct, practical skills.

did you read your previous post, have you read about the cuts to further education?

Why? There is already a generation who were conned into going to university getting into debt to find there were no jobs, why push more into it?

I’m guessing TINAS meant that universities should be free/subsidised like they used to be. A job may not be guaranteed but a more educated population can not be a bad thing.

mikewsmith – Member

Matching skill shortages to training & education funding would be better.

It would- but would still leave us with the basic problem jobseekers>number of jobs. Worrying about the route to unemployment kind of misses the point.

@Northwind but wouldn’t it be better not to saddle them with debt and a degree in nothing very useful just to delay them into the workforce

Mikewsmith

Being on benefits is habit forming so its best if people are doing something vaguely worthwhile. Having said that real alternatives to A-levels and degrees would be a better option.

Maybe. Maybe not. You’re still far more employable (and more widely employable) with most degrees than with most college qualifications, and you have a wider pool of likely job opportunities.

Work experience makes a huge difference though and that’s hard to judge now with school-leaver or college-leaver work being harder to come by (it used to be pretty simple, if you did a degree then went into non-graduate work you were usually worse off than if you’d gone to college and started work earlier, now, not so clearcut)

Further education is fairly wonky in this country now imo (though, it’s not my field so that’s not the most informed IMO). Just seems like it’s pointing in the wrong direction, and instead of fixing the problems we’re cutting it further saying “It’s not working, let’s make it worse”.

The question of debt’s now a ridiculously complicated one. But here in civilisation, you don’t have to pay for your degree 😉 In RUK, real terms, being long-term unemployed with or without a student loan isn’t so different.

Anyone got a link to that plug in that blocks selected forum member’s posts?

Seems unlikley, they’ll have planned to shut down, and not everyone being on strike so will probably be doing turnarround work upgrading and replacing plant to make the most of the down time. The contracts for all that work will have been long ago signed so it was shutting down regardless.

Nope, they’re playing hardball with Unite and showing that they are happy to shut the plant. This weakens Unites position as all Unite can do is threaten to strike, which shuts the plant. So, they have shut down the plant regardless with a cold stop, just to show Unite that they will close it for good unless they get the concessions they want.

just dial 0800Don’tbotherreading

footflaps – Member

So, they have shut down the plant regardless with a cold stop, just to show Unite that they will close it for good unless they get the concessions they want.

Pretty much. Ironically, Ineos have gone on strike.

I suspect this has more to do with cracking down on benefit cheats and proliferation of part-time jobs

I would imagine this is a result of the numbers who have been sanctioned under the new regime than the fact they have found jobs

A study conducted by the DWP in 2006 showed that around 130,000 claimants in total were subject to sanction referral in a year. These latest figures are seeing figures of over 110,000 in a single month.

From April 2000 to October 2012 there has been a total of 3,192,910 sanctions where a decision has been made over whether the claimant’s benefit should be stopped for a fixed period. The fact that two and a quarter million of those sanction referrals have been recorded should be cause for serious concern as to the vigour at which they are being applied.
They have hiot the poor not found them employment – FWIW the DwP has delayed the publication of figures but I know they do have them.

As for training. I often hear this and it is not hard to see why folk think this is the solution though think about it for a minute

What are the industries that are booming in the UK with a huge shortage of qualified staff that anyone who trained in would walk into a job…anyone …what is this magical career training?
Is industry screaming that there ar enoit enough graduates? Doe sanyont think that 50% of jobs are for graduates and that thi snumber is desirable. Education has become little more thna a cash cow for the industry tbh
Look at colleges and the explosion in forensic studies [ as one example of hundreds] at college and uni – this comes at a time when we cut the labs from 3 to 2 – it employs next to no one as an industry. i would imagine we get about x 100 or even more qualifications each year than there are jobs so training per se is not the solution as there are no jobs.
its pointless to think that education is the solution its not employment is. Education may support this but it wont cause it.
The reality is young people still want to do child care, hair dressings, beauty therapy, construction, motor vehicle etc. i would estimate that in excess of 85% of these never work in the industry and as less than 5 % actually have a career in it.

Education is excellent but it wont create jobs or employment except for the education sector.

The case against, from the ITEM Club

not an economist but all the ITEM club is saying is that as house prices rise consumers can spend more, isnt that all just based on building up more debt??

It seems like a rosey outlook if you are already a homeowner but otherwise- for the underemployed and young out of work?

wages are still barely rising, certainly not keeping up with inflation, gas prices just been raised by 8-9%

so we are consuming more yet earning less

I suppose all that matters is that its sustainable until after the next election

kimbers – Member – Quote
not an economist but all the ITEM club is saying is that as house prices rise consumers can spend more, isnt that all just based on building up more debt??

Supporting/propping up house prices is key to any government seeking election, the number of people living in properties that are probably valued(or perceived to be valued) at way over their real life value is a problem. Still avoiding property crashes is good for those with houses but for those approaching it the distance to buying is getting further away. When the average age of first time buyers hits retirement do people accept there is a problem?

Oil refinery workers where due to strike in Scotland, but called it off, so management still close down the refinery for a while,possibly to make sure they show who is in charge.

Shows how much you know – it takes a week or more to shut a refinery the size of Grangemouth down.

Ineos had initialised shut-down procedures as a contingency in case Unite decided to strike. As it happens, they’ve called it off but not before the point of no return in the shut-down procedure had been reached.

So it’s nothing to do with Ineos showing who’s in charge – it’s the muppets in Unite playing their silly little pseudo-communist games.

Winter of Discontent (note spelling)? Yeah right, get back to your Daily Fail…

the number of people living in properties that are probably valued(or perceived to be valued) at way over their real life value is a problem.

Do people really care about this and give it much thought?

unless you plan to move it is largely irrelevant whether my house is worth one million or £2.50 as i still need a home.

Its obvious that it will burst at some point as the price of a starter home is above the point at which folk can enter the market
No point having a house worth more than what people can afford to pay

johnellison – Member

Ineos had initialised shut-down procedures as a contingency in case Unite decided to strike. As it happens, they’ve called it off but not before the point of no return in the shut-down procedure had been reached.

So it’s nothing to do with Ineos showing who’s in charge – it’s the muppets in Unite playing their silly little pseudo-communist games.

Oh come on, there’s a veneer of truth on that but that’s all. Ineos set the timescales, they refused to go to ACAS until it was so late that the shutdown was inevitable, so that’s undeniably on them not Unite. So while it’s true that the talks didn’t reach a conclusion fast enough to stop the shutdown, that’s because Ineos planned it that way.

And now that the plant’s shut, they’re refusing to restart it, even though the strike has been called off. I’m sure they’d like us to think that’s Unite’s fault but it’s not even sabre rattling, it’s sabre stabbing. If Unite were to do what Ineos are doing, it’d be illegal.

And that’s leaving aside that the strike wasn’t about pay or pensions at all, so Ineos’s attempts to conflate it with profitability/costs is absurd- that’d be the case even if Deans hadn’t already been cleared of the offence for which he was suspended (and don’t forget, the Police also reviewed the evidence and concluded that there was no grounds for an investigation).

My bet is Ineos will close the plant, they hold all the cards, but Unite is too stubborn / stupid to realise it.

it’s the muppets in Unite playing their silly little pseudo-communist games.

Winter of Discontent (note spelling)? Yeah right, get back to your Daily Fail…

Looks like George Osborne quite likes “pseudo-communists”, yesterday he declared :

‘Second-rate Britain’ needs to be more like China

Quote :

Britain is no longer great, is defeatist and unambitious and needs to be more like China, the Chancellor has said.

Dismissing suggestions that China has a “sweatshop” economy, he said he wished Britain would be more like the communist country.

The strange thing is that it’s completely at odds with what his boss David Cameron thinks :

Cameron Warns Africans over ‘Chinese Invasion’

Quote :

‘I believe the model of authoritarian capitalism [in China] we are seeing will fall short in the long term.

‘When people get economically richer they make legitimate demands for political freedoms to match their economic freedoms. This model is unable to respond.

‘Neither can it offer the confidence and stability needed for investment.’ He added: ‘If you are going to set up in business, you need to know that you can go to a court confident that a contract will be enforced objectively – including against the government.

The Tories really are staggeringly incompetent, they are totally incapable of joined-up thinking, they can’t even sing from the same hymn sheet ffs.

But now at least we know, it’s not just the “Daily Fail” which publicly trashes Britain, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer is also prepared to do so.

You seem to have put a lot of thought and effort into that post ernie lynch, well done. Have you not thought of contacting your local MP with the same thoughts rather than some obscure mountain bike website that hardly anyones ever heard of? Apologies if you already have 🙂

The Tories really are staggeringly incompetent, they are totally incapable of joined-up thinking, they can’t even sing from the same hymn sheet ffs.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/18/labour-demands-home-office-immigration-text-costs

Labour has demanded to know how much the Home Office has spent on sending almost 40,000 texts to members of the public saying they should go back to their home country because they may have overstayed their leave to remain.
But the party was caught out as it tried to dismiss the anti-illegal immigration scheme as a gimmick, only for it to be revealed that the programme had been started in 2007 by the Labour home secretary John Reid.

😆

Zulu in most-predictable post ever SHOKKA!

Darcy:

Ba$tard!!!!!!!!

Pipped at the post after 3 pages.

Mine’s better though. 😉

I love it when your likes shows a sensitive side Zulu. 😀

How long do you think you’ll last before a ban or a name change “for personal reasons”?

Well the firemen appear to have been bought out,so one less strike then.

Darcy

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgAYFVHwY_c[/video]

ninfan – Member

😆

I fail to see how your post is in anyway relevant to this thread Z-11, or why the Labour Party’s hypocrisy and double standards are particularly amusing – care to explain ?

The reality is that the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this week held up China as an economic model that we should aspire to, whilst his boss, the Tory Prime Minister, has specifically held up China as an economic model which no should aspire to.

The fact that the Labour Party is hypocritical doesn’t in some bizarre way justify this very clearly muddled Tory thinking.

You’ll have to tell me what’s in the video Zulu. It’s not coming up on my jellybone.

Anyway, how long so you think you’ll last this time before you’re banned again? I was confused as to why you were the last time to be honest. Why was it?