So, what do we think? If growth figures are as bad as expected, which excuse do we think the baby-chancellor will use today? We've had the "Wrong Kind of Snow" and we've had "Too Many Bank Holidays." Suggestions for today have already been posited : "The Japanese Tsunami" and "The Royal Wedding" (though I'm sure he said the Royal Wedding would be good for this quarters growth figures before....)
Here's my top ten suggestions, please vote below and we'll see how accurate we were later.
1) The dog ate my growth
2) Too many people watched The Apprentice instead of setting up their own businesses
3) The ONS refuse to include imaginary growth or money trees in their projections
4) A flock of marauding geese ate all our tax returns
5) The Cheryl Cole brand got tarnished leading to a fall in consumer confidence
6) The weather in May was particularly hot and no-one bought any woolly garments.
7) It's all Rupert Murdoch's fault. (Well, everything else is, it might work Dave?)
8) Aliens in fact landed sometime last May and took over the bodies of the entire front bench. They are secretly working against me to undermine our prosperity.
9) I told my butler to "Keep the Change"
10) I'm just really, really bad at economics and should not have control over my children's piggy banks, never mind the wealth of a nation.
Its the sick and disabled fault for not working and ploughing back the money into the economy. Of course there is no work even for the fit.
ReplyDeleteOne of the excuses we will hear is, we have had to pay out more on benefits as the lazy slackers don't want to find work.
ReplyDeleteThe draggging on of people on IB, The appeals they are lodging and the simply unsustainable DLA. Come on we must reform it or we risk stacking up problems for the future.
Helping to support the closing down of our last train maker (bombardier). Despite awarding the contract to a company that hasn't even had it's axles tested yet
The uk people are not taking responsibility for themselves. The aging population oh and of course the gold plated pensions of the civil service. I can tell you that for the lower echelons of the civil service their pensions are far from generous.
No mention of well we send money to india, china and pakistan despite all these countries having their own nuclear weapons, own space programmes and even space agencies.
**THE REAL REASONS**
The Idiots increased VAT From 17.5 to 20. This adds up.
Prpoping up the ba nks. giving the board of directors champagne dinners which are 32 courses in length.
The way they are going about changing the benefit system. The stupid rules for family allowance, The threats and intimidation being levelled on claimants by nasty unemployment bizniz people.
People being made redundant as this country has no policy of buying stuff internally. so industry is going.
No its the leaves fault they just fell off the trees at the wrong time and caused chaos for everybody, we will be setting up a quango to try and find out why this has happened, in the meantime we are sending 40 mp's on a fact finding mission to the amazon rain forest to check out the leaves there. But were not going to disclose how much this is going to cost. In the meantime Atos will be assessing various trees to see if they are fit for purpose
ReplyDeleteIt’s classic misdirection.
ReplyDeleteConservative economic terrorists know that austerity wont eliminate the deficit but that was never the real goal, it was just a smokescreen. Conservative economic terrorist cult leaders are evil but they are not stupid, like their sun reading followers.
Their real mission is the complete destruction of the welfare state and the privatisation of everything to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor. They keep misdirecting everyone by saying “our plans will soon work to lower the deficit just be patient” so everyone thinks that is their real aim when in actual fact they couldn’t care less about the deficit they just want to destroy the last vestiges of the post war settlement. They just hope they can keep the smokescreen going long enough to complete their real mission.
The sooner people understand this the better.
BBC news on Radio 4 at midday still saying that 93% of all IB claimants are fit for work.
ReplyDeleteDon't let the facts get in the way of a good headline.
Wonder how long it will be before IB / ESA costs are blamed for the 0.2% economic growth ?
I read about the govt wanting to not pay for Cataract or hip/knee replacement surgeries - Cos its a waste of money they say...
ReplyDeleteWhich is ridiculous! Where is the saving of denying somebody a hip or keeping them blind?????? Then they would need care to aid them as they cant walk or SEE
This govt are FOOLS in the way they are treating both the disabled now and the ones to be (the newly blind and neeidng hips or knees ones)
If the govt stop wasting money on their own selves (yes we know you seem to have to spend a fortune on yourselves for some ridiculus reason) They seem to forget that this country runs on the small people - The ones they are trampling upon from their pedestals. Just cos you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth cameron - Doesnt mean you will always have it - If ALL in this country went on strike - What would you do then? You dont even have the brains to run yourself or your country so god knows how you would manage without your 'people' who do all the work for you!
Pathetic totally pathetic
The country is carried by the small man - Stamp upon him to YOUR peril Cameron
Plus - If you are sellking my NHS why should I bother paying all the tax for it you take? No pension, no NHS, no decent roads. WHAT ARE WE PAYING YOU FOR?
Labour brought in the private Knee and hip operations at private hospitals, one hospital was given a £35 million contract, but the NHS picked up and did the operations them selves, meaning the private hospital was paid the money for doing nothing.
ReplyDeleteThis week my wife had a serious problem with toothache it got so bad I paid £199 to have the tooth removed by a private dentist, we do not have NHS dentist and have had none for well over twelve years.
Now before anyone says here is a Tory troll, I joined labour in 1963 at twelve years of age, and I left labour in 2008 after Brown came out with his plans for DLA.
We are going through a serious problem in which the disabled will be seen as being second class in a world which see's it self middle class.
To be honest I cannot for the life of me see a political party who has the basic interest in people with disablities, only four years ago at a fringe meeting at conference I can still go to conference because I'm a fully paid up member of the GMB, Labour discussed how serious was mental health, how bad was stress, was it enough to give benefit to people.
Go back to the conference in 1996 it was discussed by labour whether disabled people should be paid more then people on the dole or JSA, Labour felt it would be better if we had one benefit, which of course we are seeing to day, because the vast majority of people with disablities who will be transfered to JSA will have little chance of finding work.
It's not looking good is it.
The UK has been so badly run over the past 40 years because of Murdoch and co and am very grateful for the TV program dispatches for fully highlighting all of the misdemeanours and corruption that have gone on over the past 40 years not only in the UK but throughout Europe
ReplyDeleteIs their any way out of the madness of right wing conservative political ways of thinking ?
I don't think so as those that support this ideology are huge in numbers especially in the USA and UK and the Austerity measures are not going to go down well with innocent people being made to pay the price
We as a European nation are going to find the next ten years at least very difficult indeed and it's vital that all of the European leaders start to become central with all policies in going forward
Headling on Yahoo News: "Spring's 'special events' slowed growth".
ReplyDeleteWhich, as noted in the above post, is shite. Maybe if it wasn't for all those tea towels and Union Flags growth would be negative.
Dead right,Robert.It is a brilliantly devised smokescreen.For instance,much of the public think that state debt rose because of generous benefit levels,and the like.So the solution is simple:cut,cut,cut.
ReplyDeleteI have been trying to get my head around the latest'scrounger' figures,released yesterday-the 93% fitness level of sickness benefit claiments.
I understand that before ESA was started,we had
2.6m on IB.That would be 7% of the working-age population(WAP)of 38.53m.
This compares to 5.6% of the equivalent,averaged-out figure for the Eurozone countries(not to say that we should be at that level ourselves,though).
In May,I read on the UK Nat.Stat.site that 2.17m
were now on sickness benefits.That would make the UK unfit figure,5.6% of the WAP,-the same as Europe.
Now,the Express tells us 75% of IB/ESA claiments
are 'skivers'.If that is 75% of 2.6m,it means the real unfit level would be 0.65m people,or 1.68% of the WAP,once all had been processed.That seems incredibly low ,internationally.
But,in the Guardian today it says there are 2.5m on IB/ESA,of which the new system is finding that:
29.6% are fit
39% are kind of semi-fit
31.4% are unfit.
If one was to consider the fit and 'semi-fit' to be 'scivers',it gives you 68.6% of the total.Perhaps the Express saw this and rounded it up.Anyway,it would mean(by my unreliable calculations)that the UK would have an unfit-to-work level of 2.05% of WAP.Still remarkably low. Or,more sympathetically,if you saw the half-fit as part of the unfit figure(they are,after all deemed to be ill/disab. to a degree)then the figure would be 3% of the WAP-still low compared to Europe.
However,the figure I've been using for the working-age population may be wrong.In the ONS today it seemed to be 40.5m,approx.In which case,projections for the number that will be deemed unfit for work after everyone has been to atos are even lower as a proportion of the working population...
Can somebody,better than me at stats and maths,produce reliable,clear figures to campaign with?