Brexit, the economy and house prices part 5

Lornapink

Herzlos wrote: »

We should owe £0 and be in surplus.

You seem to be misunderstanding my point about spending. Say a home help visit costs the state £20 a day per patient. You can cut that service and save £20 from your home help budget, awesome. But you're often then moving someone from a £20/day home help to a £100/day care home, or a £500/day hospital ward. And Voila you're £20/day saving is actually costing you £480/day.

Or the pothole thing. You've got a pothole you could fix for £50, if you were allowed to spend money on non-essentials. Because it goes unfixed, you have to pay out 4x£100 on burst tyres, and by the time you get to the repair it costs £200. Again on paper you've saved £50, but in reality the cost saving measure has cost you £550.

Then you've got schemes like the hated PIP assessments, where the government is spending more in assessors and appeals (most of which are upheld) than they are saving in PIP payments.

Use money carefully to save costs, and don't follow a little government under the guise of austerity that's actually costing you more.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

The sort of things you can reduce spend on are things like ceremonies (christmas lights, awards), vanity projects (Boris' garden bridge, HS2) change for the sake of it (like converting the Scottish Police forces into a single super-sized force, another thing that cost a lot of money in re-branding and paperwork, but saved nothing in management costs), and stuff that's totally redundant (Trident).

I'd also sell all of the MP's 2nd homes and buy a hotel that they can stay in whilst at Parliament. That'd save a fortune and make security a lot easier to deal with.

Everyone will obviously agree that waste and inefficiency must be cut, I've heard this all my life. Always sounds so simple from us armchair experts eh.

Problem is my list of wasteful spending will be different to yours. Foreign aid achieves nothing. S Korea more or less refused most aid when it was as poor as N Korea but pulled itself-up.
Aid for me is racist & implies black people cant do without whites managing things over 7 decades, $3 trillion spent and next to nothing to show for it.


I don't think we should be ditching our nuclear deterrent we need it more than ever. I suspect if Corbyn won office he'd go back on ditching it when confronted with the responsibility of office.

Herzlos

Bringing other people up helps us as well (when spent properly, unlike Pakistan).

Trident is a useless deterent - we're never going to fire the nuclear payloads unless attacked first, in which case it didn't work. By all means have a fleet of subs with conventional warheads, but we can stop wasting time with the nuclear ones.

Corbyn has already made it clear he'd either scrap it or just not use it in the first place.

Jackmydad

Lornapink wrote: »

I don't think we should be ditching our nuclear deterrent we need it more than ever. I suspect if Corbyn won office he'd go back on ditching it when confronted with the responsibility of office.

I reckon there are one or two things he'd go back on if it came down to it.

Jackmydad

Herzlos wrote: »

Bringing other people up helps us as well (when spent properly, unlike Pakistan).

Trident is a useless deterent - we're never going to fire the nuclear payloads unless attacked first, in which case it didn't work. By all means have a fleet of subs with conventional warheads, but we can stop wasting time with the nuclear ones.

Corbyn has already made it clear he'd either scrap it or just not use it in the first place.

Trident is a deterrent. It's there to make people think twice about attacking us with nuclear missiles. Like having any weapon, if you are not actually prepared to use it to defend yourself, it becomes pointless.
As far as I'm concerned, Corbyn's stance on this makes him even more un-electable.
The real world is nasty, and has no place for idealists.

Thrugelmir

Herzlos wrote: »

Use money carefully to save costs, and don't follow a little government under the guise of austerity that's actually costing you more.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

The Government hasn't imposed austerity. It's imposed spending caps. Forcing those further down the chain to spend money better. Be more accountable for decisions that are made. Our general rates are going up by 4.9% from the 1st April. Car parking charges are set to rise to cover the cost of filling potholes. I've no objections as I'm paying for what I'm using. If the councillors fail to spend money wisely then there'll be out of office at the next election. Though you were all for decentralisation?

mrginge

Herzlos wrote: »

Bringing other people up helps us as well (when spent properly, unlike Pakistan).

Trident is a useless deterent - we're never going to fire the nuclear payloads unless attacked first, in which case it didn't work. By all means have a fleet of subs with conventional warheads, but we can stop wasting time with the nuclear ones.

Corbyn has already made it clear he'd either scrap it or just not use it in the first place.

I thought you wanted MPs to not vote on party lines but based on merit?

Corbyn let labour MPs do just that by giving them a free vote. Over half voted to renew trident and ‘waste’ all that money.

So since the result delivered was by the method you prefer, one wonders why you aren’t happy with it...

Herzlos

mrginge wrote: »

I thought you wanted MPs to not vote on party lines but based on merit?

Corbyn let labour MPs do just that by giving them a free vote. Over half voted to renew trident and ‘waste’ all that money.

So since the result delivered was by the method you prefer, one wonders why you aren’t happy with it...

If he proposes scrapping it but parliament wants to keep it then that's democratic.

Moby

cogito wrote: »

I think your memory is faulty. If Wilson was despised at all, it was because he was as slippery as an eel and couldn't be trusted to speak the truth (pound in your pocket etc). I don't recall any specific campaign against him although he did get plenty of stick for his perceived untrustworthiness but then he was a politician after all.

He was more of a social democrat and certainly not extreme socialist. Yes, he was radical but that came in his approach to modernisation. I doubt that an extreme socialist would have supported Gaitskell over Bevan in the Labour leadership contest as Wilson did.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/15/comment.labour1

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/historys-greatest-conspiracy-theories/harold-wilson-was-a-soviet-agent/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33538165

Moby

Enterprise_1701C wrote: »

As far as I am concerned prison is one of the few things that should return to the 18th century.

There should be one prison of a decent standard where people are kept until their trial.

After they have been found guilty they should be in a prison where standards are not of the holiday village kind. I would halve the sentence (apart from murder and rape) and double the discomfort. Yes, they could have TV, but it would be locked to the news channels. They could have exercise in the yard. They would have to work, no choice as to what to do. There would be no library, no games room, no gym, no free study.

The idea of drugs being flown by drone into prison is ridiculous. Best way to block it? No windows. They would have natural light, there's plenty of ways of doing it without having windows they have direct access to.

If they wanted to study it would be at a cost, they or their relatives would have to pay the whatever thousands it would cost in uni or college.

I have a few other things on my list that would cause severe discomfort to the prisoners. What I would be after is something no-one in their right mind would wish to return to.

Yes, this would mean a massive rebuilding project, but we could use the prisoners to rebuild, there must be numerous tradesmen in prison that we could use. If there is not the right ones then a quick on the job training programme wouldn't hurt, and every stage would be inspected carefully.

I am not saying it would not cost serious money, but it is one of the things I would be willing to spend on, easier than trying to keep track of what goes on within the prisons.

If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Thankfully people like you and Sapphire are pretty rare;) We are in the 21st Century now.

cogito

Moby wrote: »

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/15/comment.labour1

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/historys-greatest-conspiracy-theories/harold-wilson-was-a-soviet-agent/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33538165

I'm aware of all this stuff, Moby, but there's not much in there in the way of fact. The Guardian item is an opinion piece, the Torygraph is about conspiracy theories and the BBC item is about Wilson's paranoia. It hardly adds up to a concerted campaign.

I think it needs to be taken into the context of the time when the Cold War was at its height and there were many justifiable reasons for concern about the activities of infiltrators in the security services.