The fact that Labour’s biggest union donor uses zero hours contracts and 70 of their own MPs also use them tells you everything you need to know about the integrity of Ed Milliband and the party. We also shouldn’t forget that Labour pledged to end them in 1995 and did absolutely nothing about them for the 13 years they were in power.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11510523/Labour-MPs-accused-of-hypocrisy-over-use-of-zero-hours-contracts.html

it’s a great place to go if you want to see stray dogs in very poor health at every turn.

There were loads on the beaches we went to – mostly covered in mange and with hundreds of ticks in their ears and paws – they are often so hungry and thirsty you see them drinking sea water from the rock pools – so great if you want to lie on the beach drinking a beer whilst a poor animal dies bit by bit in front of you.

The locals have little / no compassion – the final day we were there some kids were stoning a dog to death on the beach and people were just laughing. The government has done nothing about the problem bar sending a team to kill the beach dogs every few weeks – they either net them and dump them in a hole or string them up and stab them – there’s plenty about this online.

If you do go please give the lion walk a miss – the poor beasts are drugged and have been beaten into submitting to stupid tourists. Same with the dolphins that get terrorised by dolphin tours.

It’s one of the most upsetting places I’ve been to and for that reason I’ll never go back – it was one of the most unhappy breaks I’ve ever had and that’s with a reasonable amount of travel to places where there are strays.

the productivity gap is hardly new news and is a direct by product of the government encouraging employers to reduce hours in order to avoid redundancies and allowing flexibility in contracts – so we’ve got more people working but collectively producing slightly less… the alternative was a massive increase in unemployment and slow job creation.

I’ve been on several zero hours contracts. At the time it suited me very well for much the same reasons others have given.

Having said that, two issues do need addressing so that workers for whom the zero hours contract is there only means of income are protected:

1. They should have the automatic right to seek work / offer their services elsewhere – I think this is something the government recently legislated on

2. Telling people on the day or within 20 mins of shift start that they are not required is absolutely wrong – there’s no reason why 24 hours notice can’t be given in every instance so that the worker can potentially find different work for the following day. It would also require a bit more discipline on scheduling and forecasting which isn’t always a bad thing with the exception of work impacted by weather e.g. in tourism, events, construction etc.

But hey we have accepted it across the utilities market and railways and what a resounding success thats been! still heavily subsidised, inefficient and guess what more expensive.

This would be a good point if it wasn’t for the fact that retail gas and electricity prices are amongst the lowest in Europe including government levies / taxes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25200808

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Energy_price_statistics

As for railways, a record number of passengers was carried last year and a record number of services ran on time. If railways were subsidised any more there would simply be demand that couldn’t be accommodated given the extremely long lead time for rolling stock and new lines.

http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/2014/passenger-numbers/

You can’t just setup a market stall one morning and shout ‘roll up, roll up’.

That’s effectively what happened.

A smarter approach (and used by other banks) would have been to sell the gold over a longer period and in smaller units. Given that income tax receipts were rising in the same period there was actually no need to sell so much of the gold off in one job lot.

This is a particularly ridiculous criticism for Tory supporters to make given they are continuing to sell off the few national assets we have left to their mates, for peanuts.

Like what – and is it more or less than the c£450B of outsourcing and PFI that the last government presided over?

The tax credit system has just pushed wages down and decreased mobility at the bottom, whilst effectively creating a massively expensive to administer system by which literally of £tens of billions of fraud and overpayments have taken place – the cumulative total of these is more than the cost of the NHS for a whole year.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise though – the 2 lead contractors on the project to design / implement it repeatedly raised these risks as the design was being finalised- Gordon Brown and John Prescott (in his role of ODPM) ploughed on though and a decade down the line the effects are clear for all to see.

If the various corporates and wealthy individuals who can afford to exploit the loopholes in our tax system actually coughed up then we’d have more money collected to actually pay for things”

What, like the top 1% now paying 30% of all tax and the top 14% of earners now paying 62% of tax?

Top earners are paying substantially more now in real terms than they ever did under Labour…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/10368203/Top-earners-to-pay-third-of-all-income-tax-despite-rate-cut.html

And top earners are paying around 58% of income in tax. How many people are motivated to work harder or create businesses when they will have to give up 60% of what they earn in tax?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26327114

one of the problems of the last parliament was that Labour for every £1 collected in income tax, they borrowed another and then spend £2.

Their new spending plans have £15B of additional taxes and another £30B of spending – the 2:1 ratio is predictably familiar and still unsustainable.

With this kind of thinking (see the tweet and Channel4 fact check response) it’s not too hard to see what kind of problems the country will most likely be facing in 18 months time:

Rachel Reeves Finally Admits Bedroom Tax is Not a Tax

Jebus, are youse going to descend this into tedious point scoring, fact is food bank usage is through the roof under the tories. It’s inconsequencial where the food is coming from.

seosamh77, are you unable to understand the very simple points (supported by facts and data) that food bank usage:

– rose throughout the last Labour government as well as under the current one?
– is a by product of additional costs incurred by retailers in disposing of food?
-reflects that it’s cheaper for shops to take unsold food to distribution centres run by the likes of the Trussell Trust rather than paying to have it dumped in a hole in a ground?

It’s absolutely NOT inconsequential where the food is coming from when the increase in free food is used as de-facto proof that the country is starving to death /it’s all the fault of the current government.

If vodafone or EE started giving out completely free phones, is the collective opinion that demand would remain unchanged?

See that word “often” I used? I’m well aware of those schemes, but at least with the foodbanks I’m aware of here in Glasgow the majority of donations aren’t surplus supermarket food.

That’s not what you wrote though is it?

It’s pretty lame trying to wriggle out of having branded someone “simple” by subsequently saying you were only basing your understanding on only Glasgow when the original discussion was about the national doubling of foodbanks.

So do you now accept that a significant volume of the food given out by foodbanks is donated by retailers in order to avoid food waste / landfill and that with a significant increase in the volume of food donated it’s hardly surprising that many more people can be fed “free” as a result?

This is a classic supply side issue albeit one that has been conveniently overlooked in the interests of lazy political point scoring.

Ben Cooper:

“The answer to this is surprisingly simple…”

As are you. Are you seriously suggesting that the huge increase in food bank use is because of landfill tax? Nothing to do with many more people needing their help? Oh, and foodbanks often don’t get the food drect from supermarkets, and it’s not usually surplus food – it’s bought and donated by the public.

Ben, as you appear to be quite happy to brand others Simple, perhaps you can tell us how “simple” someone has to be to brand others simple whilst themselves being apparently incapable of checking the facts for themselves first?

Home

http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/responsibility/case-studies/archive/food-donation-at-sainsburys/

or maybe Tesco, one of the Trussel Trust’s biggest donators?

http://foodcollection.tesco.com/surplus-food-distribution/#who-benefits

or waitrose?

http://thirdforcenews.org.uk/tfn-news/blogs/trussell-trust-and-waitrose-in-foodbank-drive

you keep waffling on about food banks, tell me, why have their numbers gone up about 10 fold in the last 5 years under the uk parliament.

The answer to this is surprisingly simple.

Historically food waste has been sent to landfill. Landfill tax has risen tenfold in 20 years so it’s now cheaper for retailers to pay for it to be taken to food banks and given away for free than dumping it in a hole in the ground.

Incidentally, food banks doubled under the last Labour government as well, and for the same reason, not that you’ll hear any Labour MPs having the honesty to admit this.

labour has the chance to get rid of Ed/Ed and put [andy] Burnham/Cooper in charge

Is that the same Andy Burnham who presided over a significant uplift in private sector involvement in the NHS, the Andy Burnham who oversaw £00s of £billions in poor value LFI deals or the Andy Burnham that spent years telling us there wasn’t a problem and refusing to meet relatives of the hundreds of people killed by the NHS at Mid Staffs and who with Alan Johnson refused 81 requests for a public inquiry?

Or is it the Andy Burnham that is in fact all of the above Andy Burnhams but who now tells us he has always been against private sector involvement in the NHS and has also always been passionate about patients receiving safe care?

It’s little wonder that Labour will almost certainly form the next government when their past misdemeanours appear to slip from public consciousness so quickly.

As usual,the truth is more complicated than a soundbite

Indeed it is.

There can be absolutely no doubt that Gordon Brown is responsible for the destruction of private sector pensions due to the changes he made on Pension Fund dividends AND Labour’s abject failure to reform public sector pensions; the guarantees of which will become completely unaffordable within the next 10 years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/10343130/Who-will-end-this-pension-scandal.html

http://www.rosaltmann.com/ssp_end_of_final_salary_jan09.htm

It’s very disappointing that over a million people have signed a petition to protect someone who reportedly spent half an hour verbally abusing a subordinate and then assaulted him.

Irrespective of JCs comedy banter and jovial blokish behaviour no-one should have to put up with that sort of behaviour in the workplace.

just phone them and ask to go sim only. Or you can ask to go on their Pay as You Go tariff which is £12 a month for unlimited calls and texts.

no oil co investing = no tax revenue at all = no jobs = no income tax revenue and alot more signing on.

The above equation is wrong. The correct version is:

no oil co investing = [ reduced tax revenues + rapid loss of critical team that take years to rebuild + higher unemployment over the long term + less energy security + more UK engineers working abroad + loss of jobs in the direct supply chains. ]

JC used to be quite entertaining but of late his success seems to have gone to his head – when he’s not slagging off cyclists he’s busy offending all and sundry or reportedly throwing punches at staff who have the misfortune to work with him.

It’s time for him to be put out to pasture – the bbc needs to get rid and apply the same standard they would apply to anyone else working for them as an employee or as a sub contractor.

surfer – annuity rates are in the 3-4% range, not 6%.

http://www.sharingpensions.co.uk/annuity_rates.htm

Most of the public sector pensions that everyone thinks are so amazing require a 7% contribution, even my “best in the business” pre-crash RBS staff final salary pension cost me 6%.

This of course ignores the rather salient fact that public sector pensions are defined benefit, so the pension you receive won’t go down even if the economy tanks. Because the benefit is guaranteed, the real value of public sector pensions is equivalent to 30-45% employer contributions in an equivalent money purchase scheme.

Many people in the private sector would quite happily make much more than a 7% contribution to get the kind of defined benefit others are complaining at having to pay a negligible amount for.

drill bigger holes and if the rawplugs won’t hold the weight just glue the screws in place with this stuff – takes an awesome amount of weight before shifting

http://www.screwfix.com/p/no-nonsense-polyester-resin-175ml/53359

our local one is only contactable by web form now. They have a minimum resolve time of 10 working days for all queries / contacts from the public but all the recent interactions have required me to remind them of this at c15 working days, and then a further 10-15 days before actually getting a reply – so typically 25+ working days even when the original contact is to tell them the bin men haven’t collected our rubbish for 4 weeks.

Useless doesn’t come close.

the bloke is quite hard to like – a good few years ago he made a big deal on BBC Countryfile about driving round in a “plug in” car powered by renewables only for it to be revealed later that his main car is actually a gas guzzling Range Rover.

Every time I drive up the M4 to London I marvel at the Ecotricity wind turbine by the motorway in Reading and the fact that Ecotricity receive around £1/4m a year in payments to NOT generate electricity from it.

how can the BBC “suspend” him when he’s not a BBC employee and is in fact paid pay and rations by the production company that he himself owns?

thanks Gravity Slave – Sonos have confirmed it’s a known problem though so nowt to be done on the home setup. For some reason they can’t build software that reconnects to a stream automatically even though everyone else has managed it for years.

great unless you want to listen to bbc radio streams – they cut out every hour or so and never reconnect. It’s a known issue that Sonos and TuneIn are both saying it’s the others fault.

I think there should be a corporation tax floor for all corporations with t/o > £1m of, say 2% of t/o in the jurisdiction within which the economic activity occurs (i.e. not at a Luxembourg billing entity)

There’s an announcement later today for a 25% diverted profits tax to address exactly this point.

“It’s not broken imo.

BUT, as with teaching, policing, fire brigade, armed forces etc it needs for the politicians to **** right off out of it.”

The NHS now consumes 50% of the entire receipts from income tax. When we hold politicians accountable for how much is taken out of our pay packets in tax every month it seems quite naive to expect that the NHS can ever be put out of political debate, not least due to the £300B+ it had in extra funding in the last decade with very little to show for it.

a bit of discipline is required but credit cards are great. I’ve got around £65K of open credit at the moment and nearly all of that is invested in things that give me more than double the yield than I pay out in balance transfer fees. Same with the mortgage – currently have a base rate tracker mortgage of BOE base rate + 0.49% (0.99% in total at the moment) and rather than paying any capital off just put the capital payments into ISA accounts with the same bank where I earn 1.79% net interest. Effectively the bank are paying me 0.80% to take their money and give it back to them. Nuts!

sharing this in case it helps anyone

“!000’s of lost businesses, Vat at 20%, Tuition fees at record levels, Bank Profits restored and bonuses back to normal, front line services decimated yet managerial pay still at record levels, immigration up and rising despite a clear demand from the electorate for it to be otherwise, right wing parties now in the ascendant as a result, have I missed much?”

There were 102,000 new businesses in the first 2 years alone of this parliament, offsetting the 26,000 businesses that closed in the same period. In the years since then have continued to see a net increase in the total number of registered businesses.

ONS stats on business

Vat at 20%

Labour planned 20% VAT at last election

“Tuition fees at record levels”

Record number of students enrolling

“Bank Profits restored and bonuses back to normal”

RBS reports biggest ever loss since being rescued

Lloyds Bank profits fall 50 per cent

Front line services decimated[/b]

Record number of nurses recruited in the NHS

Yet managerial pay still at record levels

Managerial Pay Falling

I don’t think anyone is saying the country is perfect but it certainly isn’t as broken as the merchants of gloom and doom would have us believe.

“But anyway I know what you are trying to say just5minutes – you do like doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen, of course you do, but just in small numbers.

Which I guess helps to explain why you appear to like the Tories over Labour.”

With the greatest of respect, history doesn’t support your assertion that Tories only like small numbers of doctors, nurses, teachers and police.

Winston Churchill, the then Tory Prime Minister was the first PM to publicly back the movement for a National Health Service paid for by taxation. Somewhat ironically it was actually a Labour government that introduced the first charges for healthcare when they introduced a “temporary” prescription charge in 1951.

Whilst Labour have hoodwinked most people into believing that Tories want to privatise healthcare, close schools and get rid of policemen a cursory review of facts and data shows this is complete nonsense.

” Are you not a fan of doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen then?”

And my answer is ….Not unless they are all doing doctoring, teaching and policing.

The National Audit Office reported 10 straight years of reducing productivity in the NHS, so as much as more doctors and nurses is generally a good thing when it actually means the number of patients treated per doctor and nurse goes down it quite obviously isn’t.

Same with policing – whilst the numbers of staff rose, it also coincided with a reduction in the number of salaried police on the front line, so the real measure is quite rightly how many police are actually doing real policing. COntrary to what we’ve been told by the police union, the modest reduction in headcount in the police has resulted in increases in the total number of front line officers and a significant reduction in crime.

Just throwing more “people” at problems is only generally worthwhile when all the other routes to improving performance have already been exhausted.

“So how did they manage then ? I mean how did they manage despite the worse global recession since the 1930s, made particularly difficult for the UK because of its over reliance on the financial sector, to keep unemployment levels to below what it was in two previous recessions under Tory government “stewardship” ?”

The answer to this is blindingly obvious – 1/2 of all the new jobs created in the 13 years Labour were in power were in the public sector.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/labour-has-created-600000-public-sector-jobs-since-1998-528153.html

Unemployment didn’t fall as quickly as previous years because public sector job cuts were limited and in the private sector businesses reduced pay and offered reduced hours in order to avoid redundancies.

It’s also worth noting that the current government have overseen the creation of 3 x as many private sector jobs in 4 years as Labour managed in 13 and before the zero hours card gets played, 90% of these are full time.

Labour simply don’t understand how enterprise and job creation works, which is precisely why Ed Milliband’s constant attacks on business will serve to constrain future economic growth.

“If that’s true then they did what was asked of them. If the government wanted to know HMRC’s opinion of HSBC then they should have asked for it.”

But on what basis could HMRC have given a qualified opinion?

HMRC is not responsible for regulating banks in the UK, let alone UK banks with substantial overseas operations – it’s also highly debatable whether HSBCs global auditors could have given a qualified opinion either – the decisions on “black” accounts seemed to have been made locally in Switzerland.

I personally think that focussing on the super rich / bankers is a very convenient way for the rest of us to consciously ignore the fact that tax evasion (as a pose to avoidance) is rampant at all levels of our society, and that we all need to pay a fair share in order to fund high quality public services.

Just out of the people I know, there are hundreds of thousands of income that haven’t been declared in recent years, and the convenient prevailing assumption by everyone I know is that they don’t need to do self assessment for second sources of income unless HMRC asks them. The people below aren’t super rich – they are “normal” people at least two of whom work in public services.

Neighbour 1: secured a part buy / part rent social housing flat designed for key workers, lived in it for 2 years then moved out and rented it for around 5 years for around £1500 a month. Neither the rental income or the capital gain was declared – total undeclared income around £190K

Neighbour 2: secured a part buy / part rent social housing flat designed for key workers, lived in it for 2 years then moved out and rented it for around 8 years for around £1700 a month before moving back in. Total undeclared income around £142K

Sister of neighbour 1: lives on benefits but inherited £200K last year. She’s still on benefits but hasn’t ever told them about the inheritance.

Father of neighbour 2: was on Disability Benefits but working. He got caught and had to repay the £37K he defrauded, but still hasn’t declared the 10 years of income from working, or the £1500 a month for the same period he made from renting rooms out in his house. Total undeclared income: £380K

Uncle of neighbour 2: runs a building firm. He gets clients to pay final balances into the bank account of his nephew so they don’t show up in his accounts. He’s running a regular balance of undeclared income of £50K+.

Old neighbour 3: a doctor. Has rented out his penthouse flat for more than 10 years. The current rent is close to £2700 a month. Total income not declared: around £275K

Old Uni mate: generates income in excess of £50K a month through his business. For several years he cashed cheques made out to “Bob Jones Ltd” through a personal account in Jersey. He just crossed out the “ltd” and effectively hid the income. Total undeclared income: £240K.

And the above list doesn’t even reflect the majority of neighbours who are renting rooms and paying tradesmen in cash to avoid VAT – the list above represents income tax of around £4-500K that should have been paid –enough to pay for 7 teachers for a year.

Tax evasion is something most of us are aware of in our day to day lives – as much as the “super rich” make easy targets the uncomfortable truth is that many of the people in our streets / families are actively evading tax.

isn’t the problem that a “few quid over the hourly wage” is actually anything up to £5K a year in income that isn’t taxed or declared?n When 20-25% of the total income is undeclared isn’t that as much of a moral issue as someone earning £40K but failing to declare the income from their buy to let?

Although the case in the papers is the exception rather than the norm, the reality is that even lower rents of £1500 a month still require the entire net tax contribution from a hundred or more average income families. For all of the rhetoric about the nasty tories punishing the poor the benefits bill will still be higher when they left office than it was when they took over, so the problem has still yet to be addressed.