Man the floodgates! David Cameron takes to Twitter Prime Minister David Cameron opened for business on Twitter yesterday (6 October) with his first message: I'm starting Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative Leader. I promise there won't be "too many tweets..." It looks like he'll need a full-time Twitter secretary to deal with the barrage he …
There's plenty of people screwing the welfare system. So many people claiming disability benefits didn't even turn up for the tests, which says a lot.
With an annual budget of 80 billion used for other purposes we could be a lot better off.
Better education, better healthcare and better support services for the disabled who could work but don't have the right support.
Disability benefit fraud is 0.5%. Total benefit fraud is 0.8%. These are the DWP's own figures. How is that "plenty of people screwing the welfare system"? Sick, disabled and unemployed people are living on the edge and many are dying after being thrown off ESA and starving or ending up homeless. That is the reality of what the Tories are doing. Of course you'll probably applaud that.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/11/tax-avoidance-justice-network
2 year old figures have 70bn - the figure I used was introduced by Mark Serwotka and was not challenged by anyone else - not even the tory - on any questions on Saturday.
It's still available on iPlayer.
How can you put a % against something which you are being blagged on?
I know someone who has been "getting away with it" for 15+ years. He probably counts as one of your genuines :)
Trousers the disability payments, yet still manages to "stagger" to the bookies, Asda, drive a car etc.
If you think that there isn't a really high % of people taking the proverbial, you're very naïve.
Couple that with GPs who will sign people off of work for 2 weeks because they are "stressed".
(What, you mean you have kids, job, irritating boss and a sniffle? Here have 2 weeks off poor thing)
No wonder the country is not in great economic shape compared to our friends eastward who put in a shift and the older generation who just got on with it. Different times, every "deserves it". LOL
And we have people living off invalidity payments because they are alcoholics!! Why are we paying for someone not to work because they are an alcoholic?
And I know someone who has been getting away with it for 25 years! He's been investigated but plays the system very well. I bought my first house off a guy who was on invalidity benefit, yet he had a minigym in one room and the house had been done up (by him) to be the nicest one on the street! I don't think I know 5 people in total on invalidity, yet I know 2 people fiddling it.
You clearly know nothing.
So you're a doctor now eh? You can tell whether someone's disabled just by looking at them? Do you know anything about the entitlement conditions for benefits? No, of course you don't.
Here's a clue. There are no social security benefits that are excluded from people who like a flutter on the gee-gees. There, that's one more clue than you've ever had in your life before.
As for your disparaging comments on 'stress' I only hope that you have to experience mental health problems one day. If you do, please come back on here and tell me so I can visit and LAUGH MY EARS OFF AT YOU.
In the meantime, shut up pontificating about things you know absolutely nothing about, read up on what 'confirmation bias' means and stop give up on the pathetic 'poor little taxpaying me' victim status.
You really have no idea how lucky you are.
Really? And what do you know about the tests? And where do you get your £80bn from? That figure is nearer the amount spent in total on all non-pensioner benefits, not just the disabled. Oh and the amount of UK tax evasion...
And I'm glad to note your support for health and education i.e. the parts of the welfare state that you have used/see yourself using in the future. Hypocritical much?
Like the vast, vast majority of benefit claimants I worked for years, paid quite a lot of tax and when my work made me ill I claimed benefits and anybody who resents me for that can go die in a fire, along with your kids whose education I paid for, your granny whose care home fees I paid and your parents whose hospital care I helped finance.
Depends if you jokingly threaten to blow him to smithereens if some snow isn't cleared.
On reflection, I wish someone *would* bloody bury him under a few tonnes of the stuff. Preferably along with that other snake by the name of Ed Milliband.
I would post AC but due to the super-snoop powers of the British plods, it would do nothing to protect me should they wish to charge me with a 'terror' offence.
When they do the live news from the Birmingham conference in the ICC and the Hyatt hotel, have a look at those fences. I'm not sure I'd want to be inside those if anything funny happened (and I hope it won't as I go past there most days). About the only way out would be helicopter off the roof.
As regards the twitter thing, we shall just wait until something daft happens. It is a kind of custard pie joke this politicians doing social media thing...
Tramp icon because that is what I'll be by the time these jokers have robbed my pension...
@Drewc
'But Ketlan, what do you really think?'
LOL Seriously though, there are a lot of people suffering and Cameron and his cronies just carry on kicking. Benefit fraud, as Latentexistence rightly points out, is less than 1% yet the government and its media shitstirrers have successfully tarred ALL claimants with the fraud brush, scapegoating the poor and defenceless on an unheard-of scale...
I could go on (and on) but frankly, what's the point?
Well maybe if you and the other benfit scroungers, had not voted Labour in in 1997, we would have an enconomy still!
The NHSbudget is 140 Billion pounds a yeah TWAT Its hardly fecking chicken feed! So get off your arse, stop commenting on messageboards, go earn some fecking cash to pay for all your no doubt illegimate children spread out amoung your chav girlfriends!
"had not voted Labour in in 1997"
Yes it is truly amazing how quickly people forget just who it was that got us into this mess, who it was that spent too much for too many years and then wasted billions bailing out the banks (and the motor industry) for their own dumb mistakes.
have a look at this right wing rag and these dodgy figures from some suspect government mouthpiece :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/25/uk-public-spending-1963
You can see spending accelerating under the last government and dropping back to 1988 levels in 2012 (we have a way to go until the pre boom levels of 1997).
Disability benefits have risen from £26 Billion in 2007 to 32 Billion in 2012 which seems a little quick.
see tab 5.2
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/pespub_natstats_july2012.htm
if you think Britain has got 20% sicker in 5 years then fine, if not then checking if people are swinging the lead or suppliers aren't ripping us seems a sensible move. Its probably being done badly , most government initiatives are.
Note tax credits nearly doubled over a similar period.
and all those vicious NHS cuts have resulted in a 20% rise in NHS costs,
Look at the other figures for expenditure, note everything peaked in 2010 despite the fact we knew the bubble was bursting.
Call Me Dave is not a great world leader but compared to the alternatives he is probably the only choice for the squeezed middle. Can you imagine the two Ed's in charge? Why not get Nick Leeson to run the economy, oh sorry their party did deregulate so he could break the bank.
>You can see spending accelerating under the last government and dropping back to 1988 levels in 2012 (we have a way to go until the pre boom levels of 1997).<
You seem to have fallen for the traditional right-wing trap of thinking that all government spending is wrong. Many people including myself think that a high level of spending (on the 'right' things) is much to be preferred.
>Disability benefits have risen from £26 Billion in 2007 to 32 Billion in 2012 which seems a little quick. if you think Britain has got 20% sicker in 5 years then fine, if not then checking if people are swinging the lead or suppliers aren't ripping us seems a sensible move. Its probably being done badly , most government initiatives are.<
I don't remember the date that it changed, but when the previous government put a 6 month limit on basic unemployment benefit it forced a lot of people who couldn't find work that paid a living wage into claiming that they were disabled. The policy did what it was cynically intended to do (lower official unemployment figures) but did nothing to solve the underlying problem.
>Note tax credits nearly doubled over a similar period.<
Probably because most of the 'new, private sector' jobs that the current government is relying on to bring us out of recession are part-time ones that no-one can survive on - and which don't bring in the tax/NI that the government needs to pay for things. It's a vicious circle created by morons who think that an entire country can be run on the same basis as a small business.
>and all those vicious NHS cuts have resulted in a 20% rise in NHS costs,<
Cuts usually do result in higher costs elsewhere, but it's OK because that money goes to outside ' business consultants' rather than being spent on those depressing unwell plebs....
>Look at the other figures for expenditure, note everything peaked in 2010 despite the fact we knew the bubble was bursting.<
And yet borrowing has increased enormously under the Tories - how do you reconcile that?
>Call Me Dave is not a great world leader but compared to the alternatives he is probably the only choice for the squeezed middle.<
Sounds like you're suffering from Stokholm Syndrome to me.
>Can you imagine the two Ed's in charge?<
Yes, I can. And I think their sympathies for the less wealthy would have resulted in a much less unpleasant situation right now.
> Why not get Nick Leeson to run the economy, oh sorry their party did deregulate so he could break the bank.<
Hmmm... I'd be very surprised if he wasn't a Tory supporter, wouldn't you? And the Tories had consistently argued that there was still too much red tape, and that deregulation didn't go far enough.
I'm for light consistent government that helps the sick, genuine needy and promotes caring capitalism.
Yes the last government stacked the disability system, this government are trying to sort it out, they get the stick for it.
Well people are taking them, why are the wages not rising to meet needs? maybe due to an oversupply of potential employees. Not telling you where they came from (I don't need to get into that argument) but you can guess and yes the government the two ED's worked for were responsible.
Cuts are cuts, if the money is spent elsewhere its not cuts, its moving it around off the balance sheets, maybe we should look at the PFI deals done by the last lot?
Borrowing more=PFI, bailout. both New Lie driven.
no I just don't want the New Lie back they stiffed everyone and left a note saying we spent all the money.
I would prefer a statesman but CMD is the best of a bad bunch.
You can imagine the two ED's in charge ?- keep taking the tablets. Next you will tell me you trusted Tony Bliar.
Ignore the Nick Leeson comment makes a lot less sense in reflection, however the fact remains the deregulation instigated by New Labour was the reason we sank so deep.
The tories had not removed the regulation or monitoring despite being in power for years because they knew how dangerous it would have been. Probably like New Lie telling us we had 24 hours to save the NHS then selling all the hospitals off under PFI :- Say one thing to keep the voters / interested parties happy then do another.
I'd love to know how you know what 2012 expenditure on disability benefits is, especially seeing as the most recent figures released are from 2010/11.
And the figures for 'disability benefits' in 2010 was £26.2bn. That was in real terms. I suspect whover you got those figures from included all Income Support, most of which has nothing to do with disability and that is reducing all the time, being replaced by Employment Support Allowance.
One of the reasons benefit expenditure is because awareness increases so more people, who were entitled all along, put in a claim. You've also got inflationary increases which I very much doubt you took into account.
'Squeezed middle'? You don't know you're born. More pathetic middle class victim mentality from a Daily Mail reader.
"Disability benefits have risen from £26 Billion in 2007 to 32 Billion in 2012 which seems a little quick."
If these are non-inflation-adjusted numbers then it's perhaps worth noting inflation takes us from roughly £26 in 2007 to £31 in 2012: http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/
And the additional pound (or billion pounds) is an increase of 3.2% over five years. That doesn't seem excessive.
Cameron evidently believes that 'towel folding' and 'data entry' are the necessary pre-requisite commercial skills and experience to financially engineer the UK economy out of a recession.
Look for yourself under 'Early Career"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Osborne
If this isn't a sufficiently final blow to Cameron's credibility, I don't know what is.
So your early jobs were part of a relentless planned march to your current profession, were they? I worked in McDonalds, built video recorders (grand description, my job was putting 1 spring onto a board about 200 times a day), and worked in a plastic moulding factory putting stuff into boxes. Hardly career defining stuff, but now I pay enough tax to keep a couple of policeman on the streets. I'd rather we had a Chancellor who despite a priveleged upbringing, was prepared to do relatively menial jobs and has an appreciation of the value of money, rather than someone who walked straight into a position in 'daddy's company'.
Maybe next time you comment you will actually read up about the subject, particularly when there is a link the in the frickin comment.
If you did read it you will see that 'towel folding' and 'data entry' is his only 'real job' experience outside of the Conservative Party.
> I'd rather we had a Chancellor who despite a priveleged upbringing, was prepared to do relatively menial jobs
> and has an appreciation of the value of money, rather than someone who walked straight into a position in '
> daddy's company'.
You will also find out that he inherited £4m from 15% in his daddy's company. So by your own definition, you would rather have a different chancellor.
I read the wiki page, I wasn't just taking your word on the fact he'd had those jobs! He's had an 18 year career to date, so regardless of whether that was with one organisation or several, that's still relatively experienced in my book. He's held a number of advisory and shadow roles, prior to his current position, and will have a number of very experienced people advising him, as would a Chancellor from any party.
Did you read my post? I said 'despite his privileged upbringing'. So he is heir to a fortune, yet is still prepared to take on data entry and 'towel folding' jobs. Those are jobs that many people on the dole would consider beneath them. I'd rather have a Chancellor like that than one who is just lives off his wealthy parents, absolutely.
agree completely
Still could be worse we could have an ex public school guy that dresses as a NAZI at Oxford.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2198939/The-Oxbridge-student-clubs-make-David-Camerons-Bullingdon-chums-look-like-Girl-Guides.html?openGraphAuthor=%2Fhome%2Fsearch.html%3Fs%3D%26authornamef%3DJames%2BDelingpole
The issue with the Welfare system is not only fraud, but also people legitimately 'playing the system'. I can't see how anyone could object to a simplifying exercise around benefits and some due dilligence on claimants. The current invalidity system means that if you're not able to continue to do the work you used to do then you can claim benefits, surely a better system is to identify work that you could do. People need to remember that the welfare state is funded by the majority of us and it is not acceptable for people to expect that the State should provide more than they need. I believe the Chancellor is expected to make a point about child benefit today - working couples have to make a decision about whether they can afford another child. That is not a decision that couples on benefits have to consider! How is that right? People have the right to have a family, but do they have the right to have 11 kids living off the system (extreme case obviously). Obviously one benefit of addressing these flaws in the system is that is will bring the overall cost of the Welfare State but it will also mean that the people who REALLY need support get what they need. It is is everyone's benefit, apart from people currently playing the system, to get the Welfare State in order.
Yes, but what they actually do is offload the job of deciding what people need to a French business process outsourcing company, with a mandate to reduce the cost, not to make sure the process is fair. As a result, 30% of decisions get overturned by a court, and that's just the ones that have the support around them to challenge the decision.
You're talking about one aspect of the welfare state - and just as one side thinks that every person on benefit is a scrounger, the other side thinks that every person having their benefit reduced or removed is a victim of a callous system. The reality is somewhere in between. The overall Welfare system is a reasonably good one but abuses of all natures need to be cleaned up - we shouldn't be paying out more than people are genuinely entitled to, only people who need help should get it, people should pay the correct level of taxation and not be able to us tax avoidance tactics, etc.
@Man Mountain.
I love how your sensible view is down voted by the lefties. Who will disagree with anything if it doesn't fit their position. Someone once said, never argue with a socialist nor someone of religion as "they have belief on their side". The facts, or balanced opinion will evade them.
Would people rather have a system without rules/boundaries/checking/verifying?
Perhaps rather than someone with a reasonable upbringing should be replaced by Bob Crowe or some other Millwall supporter ;) Honestly, its not like the Ed's aren't silver spoon merchants either.
Hiding to nothing on twitter though, you're just gonna attract the great unwashed - even happens on El Rego comments ;)
This post has been deleted by its author
You know absolutely nothing about the benefits system, just what you want to believe.
Firstly, there hasn't been a benefit with the word 'Invalidity' in it for 18 years.
"The current invalidity system means that if you're not able to continue to do the work you used to do then you can claim benefits"
Utter nonsense. To get Employment Support Allowance you have to be assessed under a tick-box exercise run by a crooked IT company that gets 40% of the assessments wrong. Even if they get it technically right it has absolutely no relation to your ability to work and takes no account of what your normal job was or what you think you can do. It's simply a case of 'computer says no'.
"working couples have to make a decision about whether they can afford another child. That is not a decision that couples on benefits have to consider! "
You really are climbing straight to the top of BS mountain aren't you? You really think benefits are enough to bring a family up on? If so tell us all how much you'd get bringing another child into the world. And then, let's look at how much the 'squeezed middle' cost us for each of their kids in the rest of the welfare state i.e. health, education, youth services etc and I think you'll find that the family on benefits don't really cost that much more. The extra benefits expenditure of a child is only a small part of what it costs overall.
What you forget is that the welfare state is not just paid for by the majority of use but received from by the vast majority of us. The single biggest group of recipients by expenditure is pensioners, by a very long way. In total they cost around half the welfare budget, whether they've contributed anything worthwhile or not.
Be areful, you could walk out in front of a bus tomorrow and you'll very likely get old. The boot will be on the other foot then.
By the use of a simple redundancy letter my boss can turn me from a honest, tax paying, hard pressed, hard working family man to a lazy, good-for-nothing dole scrounger in a matter of moments... According to this government.
Surly there must be some people on benefit who are not lazy and would relish the prospect of working full time to provide for the needs of their dependants and to help support the country but despite their best efforts they have been unable to secure any work. I wonder if these people will be mentioned at the Tory Party conference. I'll not hold my breath.
Im sure there are many who would like to work but the cost/benefit analysis means its not worth it... especially if you have to commute or run a car to get to work, find and pay for day care etc.
Why is it there are so many foreigners doing low paid jobs when there are so many indigenous unemployed? go into any hotel or restaurant in london...
Go to any capital city and look at low paid short term jobs and you will find a lot of migrant workers, a lot of them British.
'Worked hard all your life'? Congratu-fucking-lations. Millions would like the opportunity but it is denied to them by the previous generation who pissed the country's residual wealth and oil revenue up the wall on Sangria and Ford Capris.
The world has changed and its not because of twitter or facebook. China and india have taken great chunks of the economy, but left the benefits system so regardless of whict twit tweets from the top, it doesn't change the new world order or the uk's declining position.
One reason they have taken huge chunks of the economy though is because they do not have to provide the same workers rights, or have the same costs associated with the welfare state, as the UK does. Our labour costs are so much higher than theirs that it is extremely difficult for UK companies to compete.
>I'm going to adopt a neutral stance and say I distrust all politicians and their parties. I'm suspicious of anyone who wants to be 'in power'.
To be fair anonymous, the majority of politicians really do want to make a difference and do the right thing. There is much more money to be had by these upper class types in private companies, than in public office. The fact they chose to do what they do (given the PITA the job is, and the unsociable hours) the majority must be well intentioned. Of course, it will always descend into a war of words, as they are influencing public opinion. A public who generally don't have a clue how the world works.
(I work in a office, and a bloke sat across the way thought our debt problems were over - not that our debt is increasing by billions month on month!)
Just ask some questions of people around you. What is our GDP, what % do we spend on Welfare etc.
Most people don't know. Governments are terrible at articulating this stuff. Its no wonder people don't make informed decisions. Its just personalities. I hate David. I love Boris. Its kindergarten voting.
If a white collar, company car driver from middle England can't get his noggin' round this stuff - its an uphill struggle for the rest eh!
" the majority of politicians really do want to make a difference"
Then they join a political party because only political parties make a difference. Then they make compromises with some of their lesser beliefs for the greater good of the party so that the party can make a difference. Then they find the other idealists they joined the party with have fallen by the wayside because, unlike them, they couldn't see the 'greater good'. Soon they find they have to tell themselves that 'in these difficult times the country needs a strong government' and that is why they can't make a difference.
Tragic
Commentards turning this forum into something from the money saving expert benefits forums.
Aren't we all missing the utter majesty of this new 'internet ' and 'twitter' invention... the ability to tell the prime minister to fuck off to his (electronic) face.
Surely this is the pinnacle of mankind's achievements.
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