RPI to CPI Early Day Motion 1032

Ripoff_2

RichandJ wrote: »

snip snip

The betrayal, deception & theft Ripoff were perpetrated by the Labour Party & their union masters in allowing a structural deficit to build up whereby HMG this year has had to borrow over £16 million pounds an hour to keep the bloated public sector/welfare state going.

As usual the Tories, unfortunately in coalition with an economically illiterate party this time, are now having to put this right.

I don't necessarily agree with all they're doing, but, I suspect, from a diametrically opposite political viewpoint from you.

The public sector net borrowing requirement for 2011/12 is now estimated at £122 billion. Oh well, that's only 13.9 million pounds to borrow every single hour. It has to be paid back. The annual interest on Gov't debt is estimated to approach £65 billion by the end of this Parliament. That exceeds the current defence budget by, I believe, something like £15 billion.

There is no money left.

Your march today, even before it is hijacked by the usual rent a mob crowd bent on violence and destruction, will achive precisely nothing. Except for the circling police helo currently annoying me.

Richard, you are now making this very political and that is not the nature of this issue. However I will answer just to keep you happy.

I think it must have slipped your memory that the main reason the country has a deficit is because the banks were bailed out to the tune of billions of pounds because no Government could have allowed them to fail.

The Banks failed not the labour Government.

You must have also forgotten that every European country and the USA has a massive problem with deficits because they also had to support their banks. So it must have been the Labour Government that caused the USA, Spain, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Portugal, France and Germany to have large deficits, nothing to do with the global banking collapse then?

You must have also forgotten the Public Sector includes the hard working people of this country who provide the services that people require, it's not there for fun, it's part of the society in which we live.

You give the impression that after the public sector is destroyed then everything will be alright. Lets get rid of the teachers, the firemen, the police, the hospital porter, the nurse, the doctor, the social worker, the prison officer, the bin man, the care worker, the armed forces, etc etc because we don't need these people do we? They don't matter, they are a burden on the tax payer, we don't need or want to pay for them, the fact they are tax payers seems to have slipped your notice though, put them on the street and they don't pay taxes but they can claim benefits????

I just hope one day you don't ever need these people because when you do they will not be there for you. Don't expect the private sector to be there either, well not unless you have the money to pay for them, but perhaps you have, so that will be alright for you.

There seems to be money left to give a 2% cut in corporation tax to their friends in the city. After the war we had a bigger deficit than we currently have and we built the NHS, houses and the welfare state.

There is one thing you are right about however, there definately will be no money left if more people are put on the dole as they are now not paying any taxes and the growth is falling as it is now, then yes this wonderful coalition will then be able to say that we are actually bankrupt. Before the coalition took over, growth was rising at 2.7%, unemployment was falling but now growth is falling at 1.7% and unemployment is rising, inflation is rising and the deficit is growing, good policy that? and this is after the rescession has ended?

The Tories are so economically literate as you put it that in 1980 there was 15% interest rates and high unemployment and a recession, then again in the 1990's yet another recession and high unemployment both times the Tories were in power. Look at History and you will see that we are heading exactly the same way again, a recession, high interest rates, high inflation and high unemployment from this economically illiterate TORY led Government. Must be a "price worth paying" now where have I heard that before, was it a Tory Chancellor?

They need to invest for growth, get the growth and then cut back the deficit, with out growth you can not cut any deficits.

Aberdeenangarse

Ripoff wrote: »

The Banks failed not the labour Government.

Mate - sorry to be brutal, but you've either been drinking or just appointed Village idiot!

MEY_3

chris_m wrote: »

No they are not - they are not going to use any inflation measure at all, they will increase prices to cover their costs and as much as they think they can get away with.

Inflation (whatever index) is the net result of a wide basket of prices going up - it's not a target by which those prices will go up. It is the effect, not the cause. You don't get the likes of Tesco saying "Ooh, inflation is 5%, time to put our prices up by 5%." They put the prices up and that causes inflation.

The only time company price rises will be based on inflation is if they are a regulated industry and an inflation-related cap is put on the rises they are allowed to implement. The cap may well be based on RPI rather than CPI but it's completely wrong to say that companies will use RPI rather than CPI to determine their rises.

Though technically correct the effects are the same. Tesco, for example, will look at their additional costs and pass them on by and large to the consumer as much as possible to protect shareholders. Real increases in costs for them are likely to be above the CPI measurement in inflation, I suggest, because as has been pointed out on this thread before, real increases in costs/inflation go up even above RPI. CPI is a more make believe figure in reality, when talking about the consumer's experience (and that includes businesses as consumers).
I think this issue demonstrates why the RPI/CPI switch is wrong. Costs to consumers will rise higher than that indicated by the CPI that pensioners will have their pensions uplifted by and so will will not keep pace. The idea of indexation is that those pensions should try to keep pace. If it is not why have any index? I'm still awaiting someone to explain on here why we should bother with any indexation if a less accurate measure can be substituted on a whim in defiance of rationality.

MEY_3

RichandJ wrote: »

The betrayal, deception & theft Ripoff were perpetrated by the Labour Party & their union masters in allowing a structural deficit to build up whereby HMG this year has had to borrow over £16 million pounds an hour to keep the bloated public sector/welfare state going.

Your post is going way off topic but I think it ill-behoves anyone to staunchly make claims on behalf of either of the two main parties (obviously I don't even count the arrivists who now hold the balance of power) that they have no blood on their hands in the way they have run this country.
Both sides can legitimately take aim at the other for fiscal incompentence, and more, over the years. The one thing that worries me about this argument, however, is the notion that the last two Labour leaders, have pursued policies that were that far removed from those of the previous Tories fiscally. Don't recall much divergence of view from Mr. Cameron until the crash. Probably Cameron's luck that when the iceberg was hit he wasn't in charge.

Stargazer57

MEY wrote: »

Don't recall much divergence of view from Mr. Cameron until the crash. Probably Cameron's luck that when the iceberg was hit he wasn't in charge.

Labour budgetted a deficit ever year from 2001 onwards. (Sometimes the outcome was a surplus by accident). If you think the Tories would have done the same, or did not diverge from this view, you weren't paying attention.

And while the Tories wanted less regulation of banking at the box-ticking level, it is clear that they opposed the Tripartite (as in no-one is responsible) system of big picture regulation right from when Peter Lilly spoke in Parliament on the subject in 1997.

Some people may think that too much politics has arrived in this thread. To that I say there is a reason why Opposition Front-Benchers don't normally sign EDMs (let alone sponsor them). When front-benchers get involved, politics is rarely far behind. This is a desperate move by Milliband and one that is likely to lose, rather than gain, support from other parties. This may be good for Milliband but will be bad for the cause of the pensioners affected.

MEY_3

There is generally too much politics on this thread with regard to the CPI/RPI debate. Everyone views politics through their own ideological prism so it is little value here. That said, it is hard to remove politics at some levels, I agree. I'm not sure what you mean by "a desperate move by Miliband", but I assume you are talking of EDM 1629. I cannot see that its effects will necessarily be good or bad for pensioners per se (the devil is in interpretation), but from a point of view of logic I think it is flawed for the reasons JamesU highlighted earlier in the thread.

Unfortunately, politics does have a bearing on the CPI saga because it is hard to understand by the same logic above, why any party should replace an indexation that has been in place and accepted for 38 years on the spurious and discredited pretexts of it being more appropriate. One can only see this ultimately in terms of the ideological wish to reduce the role of the state, whether or not the private sector wishes to bridge the gap in service provision that will result (part of "The Big Society?). Clear evidence of this is that the government have not made the CPI change temporary themselves, which they could have done, logical or not (but not less logical than what they have done), if they only wanted to save money while we have the deficit. If they truly believe in the merits of CPI then why haven't they pursued such a change to govt. bonds too?

And the usual murmurings were made in the budget to pretend that tackling tax avoidance is an important issue. This is something neither party has been interested in taking on with any conviction, which surfaced in yesterday's splinter activities in the West End.

I remain unconvinced that the Tories would have pursued policies hugely different to Labour in the broadest sense, if they had been in power during the "boom" years. It was the availability of cheap credit that ultimately puffed up and shattered these economies worldwide and it is very hard to see why the Conservatives would have reined that in whilst their friends and colleagues in the banking and finance sectors were making hay in the sunshine.

Ripoff_2

Aberdeenangarse wrote: »

Mate - sorry to be brutal, but you've either been drinking or just appointed Village idiot!

It's not nice to get personal and it's not nice to call people idiots.

If you have an argument and something sensible to say then fine, I have no problem with that but there is no room on this forum for people like you who revert to name calling.

JamesU

RichandJ wrote: »

snip snip
The betrayal, deception & theft Ripoff were perpetrated by the Labour Party & their union masters in allowing a structural deficit to build up whereby HMG this year has had to borrow over £16 million pounds an hour to keep the bloated public sector/welfare state going.
As usual the Tories, unfortunately in coalition with an economically illiterate party this time, are now having to put this right.
I don't necessarily agree with all they're doing, but, I suspect, from a diametrically opposite political viewpoint from you.
The public sector net borrowing requirement for 2011/12 is now estimated at £122 billion. Oh well, that's only 13.9 million pounds to borrow every single hour. It has to be paid back. The annual interest on Gov't debt is estimated to approach £65 billion by the end of this Parliament. That exceeds the current defence budget by, I believe, something like £15 billion.
There is no money left.

RichandJ, General rant understood, feel the same way. The PSNBR is high, but not quite sure what point you are trying to make when you say there is no money left.

JamesU

Goldwing1

If there's no money left, how come, as Mr Osbourne said last week, we can afford to bomb Libya "out of our reserves"?

Let's keep it simple. The Government's own advisors are not supporting the Government on this one.

When is EDM1032 going to be laid before the house (If that's the right term)?

How is the legal challenge going?

Ripoff_2

More on how the change from RPI to CPI for pension indexing is going to reduce your pension income.

This is directly from the ONS http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/budget0311.pdf in their press release today.

Budget will add 0.29% to CPI, 0.37% to RPI, on top of VAT rise.

So George Osborne clearly partly to blame for higher inflation, no doubt about it now then.


Gap between RPI and CPI inflation measures could grow to 1.2% on average experts are saying on Twitter. Funny that because the ONS have already said that the gap over the next five years will be 1.18%, seems the professionals are now tending to agree with them. People are under the impression that the gap will be between 0.5% and 0.8% but that now looks suspect. The wider the gap and the longer the gap persists, the poorer the Private and public pensioner becomes year on year.