Woh, first off this is news to me, the cap I was referring too is mentioned in Reuters and the beeb link included, is the redundancy cap.Originally Posted by azrael316
A cap on pensions I can also completely understand, everyone else in the 21st century has defined contribution, with defined benefit, the tax payer takes on ALL the risk. (That said there could be reward to be had with said risk, but they shouldn't be using tax money for this at all.)
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I am sure it will get messy. A good dosage of austerity will need to be observed by all (including the civil service) Nulabour are going to have to cut back like never before to pay for their shameful running of our economy. Coco the clown.. ahem i mean Alistair Darling is going to have to find even more money faster than first thought.....
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7070583.ece
The Civil Service pension is EXACTLY the same as a normal pension, you pay in, your employer makes a contribution, you get paid when you retire.
NOW, if that should be more than £50k, if the new rules come in you will not get what you paid in for. Hardly fair is it?
Why should people who work for the Government be treated differently from Private sector pension holders?
Er, no they don't. They are government sponsored for a start. That means if its defined benefit, rather than contribution, they don't quickly become defunct like most schemes did in the private sector.
Now can you provide an independant news link, that says defined contributions are been removed?
Otherwise, its just a cap on defined benefit, in which case, that is a whole differen't kettle of fish to the issue been debated here (and worthy of its own thread, good luck explaining to the tax payer why they should foot pension pots worth often millions of pounds....)
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You can't blame Labour for a global financial crisis. You can thank them for keeping their heads and taking realistic steps to sort us out though. £10bn is nothing.
No, but you can blame nulab for cosying up to the city and relaxing some of the controls that allowed the bankers to make such disasterous decisions - such as lending to those that couldn't afford the repayments (probably justified as 'social inclusion') and wrapping those 'toxic debts' in such a way that the true nature was hidden.
You can also blame them fr the tax raid on pension funds which helped end many final salary schemes
You can blame them for selling a large part of Britains gold reserves (when gold was at an low price) and buying Euros (Euros!!!) when they were at pretty much an all time high.
You can blame them for changing the rules on Financial companies liquidity when the stock market was low, forcing copanies like Standard Life to demutualise - effectively going from ownership by the members to a PLC - diluting may people investments.
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Where did i mention the global financial crises and blaming Labour for it? I didn't, i was talking about our economy, the same economy that Brown said would be the "the best placed to weather the recession within the G7" -when we were the worst, and we would be "one of the first countries to exit recession" -when we were the last!
And you are saying that we should thank them?
Can I also thank them for an economy that bestows £22,500 of debt to every child born in Britain?
A country with the highest proportion of Children living in workless households in Europe.
One in six young people neither earning or learning and the lowest level of social mobility in the developed world.
The Millions drained from British pension funds.
That against the advice of the bank of England, selling more than half of the countrys Gold reserves at the bottom of the market at a 20 year low?
Business tax's raised to among the highest in Europe.
Over 100 tax rises from a government that promised no tax rises at all?
Please excuse me for not thanking them. Thanks.
Is there more to leadership and government other than money? I think so. Do you feel Labour has been unsuccessful across the board?
You didn't, I did. I think the crisis and our economy are inextricably linked.
You did, but you simply had no need to as i am sure everyone is aware of this. I am simply highlighting how inept we have performed in dealing with it in comparison to the other "inexticably linked" economies.
Hence browns assertions that we would be the least affected and first out of recession being even more laughable.
Just as laughable/or damn right scary as looking at our Sovereign debt change increases under Labour......
Additionally, in regard to your opening comments regarding the public sector, as much as i hate to quote the daily fail, we are really trying to break the record with 53% of the economy working for the state.... just imagine all those pensions the rest of us have to pay for..........
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ork-state.html
Last edited by Barrichello; 23-03-2010 at 11:59 PM.
The downside is you have to keep the economy afloat if your going to try and have a capitalist system at all.
Without it, we only have to look to other countries where they tried to be purely communist, such as china 30+ years ago, or Vietnam 15+ years ago.
Looking at how Vietnam went from a net importer of food (ie, the people where starving on mass) to a net exporter of food (ie, the vast majority have full bellies) with the introduction of free market farming principles.
I know i've recommend this book before on here, but http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProduct...T.mc_id=101689 is very good, its entertaining and not really any hard work at all.
If you want to improve lifes, economic theory is a great language for expressing and evaluating that performance. In Tim's book he looks at places like Argentina which had a very novel approach to a currency which would in-effect keep the distance between the rich and the poor from growing. My point is if you want to improve peoples lifes but can't explain how its going to work with economic theory, its like someone saying they are going to build a massively complex structure without any blueprints or measurements.
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That is a question you might ask Steven Byers. (It could also be asked of many MPs from across the political spectrum after the expenses debacle, but Byers/hewitt really does put the lid on it.)
Has Labour been unsuccessful across the board? It depends how you measure success. Civil liberties have certainly been eroded, and a raft of legislation has been enacted to attempt to regulate individuals freedom. If success means giving local councils the ability to use draconian powers of surveillance to combat petty crime, then that is an achievment.
The indiscriminate use of targets for policing have alienated the police from the community they are supposed to serve, not helped by the heavy handed use of anti-terror legislation.
If you think that giving access to higher education should be based on ability to pay (or means tested) rather than by ability, then tat is a success.
And again, if success is measured by taking away people's responsibility for their own actions, that is also a success.
I personally don't think that those are measures of success.
However, the government does seem to think that any problem can be solved by throwing money at it, rather than by good leadership or management, and as for spending the way out of recession and quantitative easing, these are desperate measures of a dying government that thinks it will not be called to account for the longer term problems that it will cause.
Possibly one area where thare has been genuine success (at least in my terms!) would be the NHS. Having been a long term patient for the last 10 years, I have seen an improvement - not necessarily in the quality of treatment, which has always been excellent, but in the facilities and condition of the hospitals that have treated me. However that is only a snapshotof two or three.
However, the really scary thing is that however bad Labour are, the opposition parties don't seem to be much better. The lib dems shot themselves in the foot by passing over Vince Cable as leader, and Cameron looks like a pale imitation of a young Tony Blair. But a party that has been in power for three terms starts to look tired, and bereft of ideas and policy, and it is time for a change. The problem is that the opposition appear bereft of policy - and that is before the election!
However, to go back to ypur original post, I do have some sympathy with your view. Traditionally civil servants were lower paid than the private sector in return for job security and a generous pension. To change the T&Cs of employment for existing employees seems to me to be wrong, although I could make a point that it is a degree of desperation of the curret government that it will attempt this - and it is party in a mess of its own making by the increase in size of the public sector in the last thirteen years. And that pension seems even more generous as pensions in private sector have been eroded, so it should not be a surprise that there is little sympathy for the strike by those whose pensions have been eroded, and whose job security is shaky.
And a point not always understood is that pay bands for civil servants varies across departments - partly by actual pay, and partly by grade inflation.
But - while it is the lower grades of the civil service that are taking action - it is this government that has politicised the top echelons of the civil service with 'special advisers' advising on party political matters, paid for out of taxation, rather than party funds.
Last edited by peterb; 24-03-2010 at 12:50 AM.
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Woo, we're WINNING!
You make all 'the rest' sound like true altruists; public sector workers pay for their own pensions via contributions during their working life and a lower standard of living during the same period. How you can begrudge a nurse, a police officer, a fireman etc a small pension after a lifetime's service I do not know.
I don't disagree. All I'm saying is that peterb's list of government 'failures' on finance needs to be tempered with its successes. This won't escape the electorate in a few week's time.
Stephen Byers is not in Government. Very embarrassing for him personally though.
Agreed. Harworking and caring public servants with a tiny pension after a lifetime of compassion and making a real difference in all our lives (sooner or later).
Agreed!
Oh, I don't doubt if the private sector was quids in, it wouldn't care less about the few bob paid (and owed) to public sector pensions. Those who chose public sector careers were sniggered at as the poor relations, now chickens are coming home to roost, there is envy about the small reward for their breadline contracts.
I am beginning to think that some people live in a weird alternative dimension that overlaps ours, where the decisions that Labour have made over the past 15years have actually resulted in a better place to live. Believing the tripe that the Labour party put us in a good position to ride out the recession just goes to show how spoon-fed the majority of Britain’s population have become. Losing in the process the ability to analyse facts for themselves and form logical opinions.
Obviously a significant proportion of blame can be landed square at the feet of the media, especially the BBC who may as well rebrand themselves as the LBC. It’s actually got to the point where people have complimented commentators for their backbone in daring to write balanced articles and not just the usual whitewash. You can add to that the appalling state of our education system, due to lowest common denominator politics dragging everyone down to the same level. Still anyone that has read 1984 will know about the importance of “ignorance”.
This period of Labour governance is likely to go down in history as one of the worst for economic and social mismanagement of our democracy. I could write pages of criticism (some of which have already been mentioned) but ironically it can be summed up in a few key points.
1. Eroding the need for individuals to feel responsible for their own actions
2. A deluded belief that throwing money at a problem will solve it
3. Equal rights means that we are all equal in all ways
Of course all of this has been exacerbated by the fact that despite us being an increasingly atheist nation we still hold onto irrational “religious” thought processes, most notably; “the sanctity of human life”. Obviously I expect some serious raised eyebrows at this last bit but my advice would be; check the definition of “sanctity”. In any case this misguided belief pushes to make short term human centric decisions rather than actually sitting back and looking at the wider picture. The prime example of this is in regards to the environment, but that’s an entirely different discussion. More pertinently it pushes us to believe that we have the right to dictate what people can and cannot do with their lives, as well as erroneously believing that we have to help people to the point of dependency.
I have no issue with helping people to help themselves but just giving money away so that they can live without actually giving anything back is detrimental to both them and us. In fact we are in danger of creating a generation where a significant proportion of them have no intention of doing anything but live off the state. Surely if anything we should have learned this lesson with what has happened in Africa. If you take away peoples self respect and ability to support themselves what hope do they have for the future? Moreover you create a situation where the state is “parent” and the population is “child”, rather than an interaction of adult to adult. We have been spoiled into thinking we can do what we want, including antisocial behaviour. The government has responded with increasing levels of state control and monitoring. In effect they’ve tried to ground us as well as forcing us to tell them where we are all the time. But perversely they are still giving us plenty of pocket money, with which we still go out and do we want… to show that we don’t give a hoot about what they say we should do.
Now I will admit that the other options to Labour are not wholly appetising, especially the Liberals who are so contrary that they are fighting for control of this country just so they can give it away to Europe. The Conservatives also give me cause for concern in some respects; not least their drugs policy which is the antithesis of what it should be following conservative principles, i.e. you can take drugs if you want but if you impinge on the rights of others in doing so don’t be surprised if we come down on you like a tonne of bricks. The current populist “ban before evidence” stance is just laughable… perhaps we should ban swimming because someone has drowned. However, overall they appear to be the right choice not least in terms of the economy and education. The other point I would make is based on a question; which of the political parties do you think it will be easier as a general populous to keep in line?
(a) Labour - Brown has been arrogant and self righteous when unelected, heaven knows how bad he’ll be if actually given a democratic mandate
(b) Conservatives - Cameron et al. seriously need to show that they are connecting with the population and fast, as otherwise they will be straight out on their ear again. People will still want to see an improvement in the state of the country even if cuts are being made, and they will need to be in the right places
(c) Liberals - They don’t know what they are doing so how are we going to be able to work it out in order to stop them from doing anything stupid. Plus they’ll give that much power away we won’t have an influence as it’s in the hands of unelected European bureaucrats
Ironically though I think the ideal result from the forthcoming election would be a small Conservative majority with Lib Dems second and Labour third. Part of the reason we are in such a mess is the constant bouncing back and forth between spend and save governments. It’s like yo-yo dieting, every cycle makes us unhealthier. Actually being in opposition for once may force the Liberals to actually get their act together and decide on what they are, and being relegated to third might actually make Labour think twice before going on a spending splurge every time they are in power. Added to which it will also change the dynamics in Westminster so it’s not just the same old shenanigans. Sadly with the inbuilt bias of our election system towards Labour this is unlikely to happen.
If Wisdom is the coordination of "knowledge and experience" and its deliberate use to improve well being then how come "Ignorance is bliss"
It's nice that you've been inspired by the discussion but you're ever so slightly OT.
I think you've answered your own points tbh: Labour are not perfect (government in especially complicated times was never going to be easy) but the alternatives are neither convincing or credible. Perhaps you underestimate the judgement and foresight of Britain's (actually very sophisticated) population?
In the context of this thread it could be assumed that you're referring to pensioners - but I know you don't mean that!
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