People's Assembly Against Austerity

Nonu

Signed and spread to friends and relatives.

JessM Have signed - thanks.

44,000 people have signed, so far, in the first day. This is good going.

How did we get into this state? Or has it always been this bad and we weren't mature enough or had the time to notice.

(Signed the petition - he won't do it of course, but it makes a point)

blueskies I'm going to the People's Assembly conference - would like to meet up on the Friday with whoever else is going.

Stansgran You state that Tony Benn is a hypocrite because he is "comfortably off" and yet he still supported the introduction of comprehensive schools. In fact, Tony Benn came from a very wealthy family and was not dependent on his children passing the 11 plus to get a good education - he could easily educate them privately. In fact he removed them from private education and sent them to comprehensive schools.

You and some other gransnetters feel that the grammar school/secondary school system was a good one but there are also people who feel equally strongly that it was not. A selection process at the age of 11 determined whether young people would receive an academic focused or a trades focused education. There was a huge inequity of provision of grammar school places in different areas, far more resources allocated to grammar school, and massive gender inequality - there being, very significantly more places for boys than girls. The fact that your relatives benefited from a grammar school education does not really provide grounds for retaining a selective system.

Bedroom Tax. The "under occupation charge" is presented as restoring "fairness" - those that have a spare bedroom should make way for those who live in over-crowded accommodation. However, there is not enough one and two bedroom accommodation available for "under occupiers" to move into. So it will basically be a means by which money can be extracted from poorer people, citing "social justice", rather than cost-cutting, as the reason. Clever marketing.

Miceelf , what wonderful words ,

Had to go and look them up.

Addendum
Cogently

Love it to death .,

Ian Duncan Smith said that "he could live on £53 a week if he had to" Here is a link to a petition started today to challenge him to do just that.

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/iain-duncan-smith-iain-duncan-smith-to-live-on-53-a-week

Yes they are supposed to nfkdumpling but i understand that ministers are not keen on listening. "attention span of a gnat" is the phrase i have heard. If people who understand the issue get to speak to a minister they get about 15 minutes if they are lucky and the minister will probably talk more than listen.
Career politicians have never run anything (scary that you could get to be PM having never run anything - they don't even organise their own local elections) and most civil servants have never run anything other than bits of the civil service. Insulated from the real world I'm, afraid

Joan , have you ever thought of living in the UK ?

Aren't there supposed to be civil servants and advisors to advise the government in power what is feasible and what isn't? I despair at the lack of common sense,logic and foresight of these supposedly intelligent people running our country.

He (or one of his henchmen) said today that he believed most people in Britain agreed with what they were doing - I can only assume that they are relying on the selfishness or lack of vision of the majority to see through their concerted attacks on the most vulnerable people.

Sorry for any errors. I pressed post not preview.

i heard John Humprhys trying to get an answer out of Iain Duncan Smith this Morning about the welfare benefit cuts. IDS totally ignored the point made by JH about the lack of one bedroom rented accomodation in relation to the numbers needed.

www.scotsman.com/news/uk/bedroom-tax-iain-duncan-smith-defends-reforms-1-2870419
I quote.

" ^Labour has concentrated its fire on the so-called “bedroom tax” - and today produced figures showing there was suitable alternative housing for fewer than one in 20 of those affected.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said answers to freedom of information requests from 37 local authorities showed a huge shortfall in smaller properties.

In total 96,041 households faced losing benefit in the areas but there were only 3,688 one and two-bed homes available, they suggested.

The National Housing Federation - which represents housing associations - has warned the cut could actually increase the cost to the taxpayer if people are forced into private rented homes.^"

The conservative party are or so out of touch with reality of life on a low income.

Greatnan three cheers! Having watched Ken Loach's 'Spirit of 45' when, on times I was moved to tears, I couldn't agree with you more. My GC are due soon, I shall do what was suggested at the end of the film and tell them of our hopes (and fears) for the future. and

Thank you, Micelf - it is good to hear from someone who sees what is happening in the system.

And as an addendum to the points you make so cogently, Greatnan, the nonsense is that these so called money saving measures will in fact cost much more.

Two examples:

The bedroom tax. If people are forced out of their, for the most part, modest houses, they will be have to go to much more expensive private accommodation where the landlord will be subsidised by 'the taxpayer' (BTW according to the Condems people in social housing don't pay taxes) and in addition to that, uprooting families will certainly cause social unrest and will have economic consequences in increased illness, crime and anti social behaviour.

Legal aid. If a person appears before the court who is inarticulate or who has a poor grasp of English, or appears in the Family court without legal representation, the only consequence is poor justice with the CPS putting their case and the defendant struggling to manage the complexities of the system as well as state their case. Or becoming so emotional that family tensions become even worse with malign consequences for the children.

Court time will be doubled, appeals will increase dramatically, and family disputes will cost the state much more.

I am too angry to be tongue in cheek in my posts, BAnana. If benefits are designed to keep people just above poverty level, then presumably the minimum wage was designed to do the same, but food, petrol, fuel, etc. have risen sharply so it follows that some people will now have fallen below the level at which civilised life can be preserved.
I don't want to get into the tired old public sector versus private sector argument again but I note that all public sector salary increases are frozen for the foreseeable future at 1% while inflation is above that, so they will be sharing in the general reduction in income. (Not we pensioners, of course - we are sacrosanct.)
Please do not allow one section of society to be set against another which would play into the government's hands.

I now await the usual insults - loonie leftie, bleeding heart liberal, do gooder, etc.

I fear that some parents will now be denied legal aid in custody battles - which partner is likely to be in a better position to fund their own legal expenses? Will children simply go to the richer parent? When my daughter had to sue her surgeon for clinical neglect she was told she would not qualify for legal aid because she had some equity in her house, but she was not able to remortgage as she was not working. She was desperately ill and could not possibly have managed to sell her house and move. The surgeon had the might of the Medical Defence Union behind him. In the event, she had no option but to use a 'no win/no fee' solicitor.
I believe legal aid is not available to sue for libel, or to defend a libel accusation. Once again, the rich and powerful can ride roughshod over the poor. Surely justice should be available for all.

I just can't keep up with the number of 'initiatives' to save money, so many of which seem to have been dreamed up by an intern on the back of an envelope. The gap between the remumeration of the top earners and the lowest is one of the highest in the world and is getting greater, I believe.
Wake up, you government supporters, before all the humanitarian gains of the last 100 years are whittled away. Of course, some of you might be quite happy to see the 'undeserving poor' getting their comeuppance and feel that you are in a positon to judge who they are.

HMRC has thrown away millions by allowing some businesses to pay the minimum of tax or interest. Perhaps the new Head will be different from the last, but I am not holding my breath. This is quite separate from the subject of legal tax avoidance schemes. (And one of the men who was at the forefront of devising such schems is now a government advisor on tax avoidance - you couldn't make it up!)

I know that it will make no difference how often we give the correct statistics - they will be ignored in favour of tabloid headlines designed to scare the middle classes into accepting anything the government comes up with. Beware - you could be next. 'They came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did nothing.........'

Greatnan just read your post. I'm wondering if you were being tongue in cheek when you said "here's a revolutionary idea, why not pay the workers more?" That's kind of a blanket statement. Do you mean across the board both private and public sector. As far as the private sector goes, some firms are struggling to keep their head above water they simply wouldn't be able to pay more, probably some can't even afford to pay them at all. "Pay them all more" implies that we live in an ideal world it reminds me of when my children were young and if I said that I had run out of money they would say "get some out of the hole in the wall". You've got have the money there in the first place, can't draw what you don't have!

Agree with you about bedroom tax, the government know that there aren't enough properties to trade down to, it just comes across as punitive. London's a bit of a special case insomuch as we suffer from a dire shortage of affordable property to rent and landlords can charge what they damn well like.

Good post greatnan - 15% passed the 11 plus was it? I seem to remember it varied a bit between boroughs but I was wondering what the average was. And in some of them there were more grammar school places for boys than girls
Bedroom tax would seem to be another example of a "bright idea" that ministers think will play well with their core vote, but was not thought through in terms of "would it actually work". They are very good at coming up with these.
The last government had some of these as well - child credit for instance. Tax chaos for all those whose income changed during the tax year.

Thanks for putting it so eloquently Greatnan. I agree with you MiceElf

Well said Greatnan. I would have said the same, but you said it better.

My figures for Bedroom Tax refer to London.

To have grammar schools alongside comprehensive schools is a clear nonsense - if the comprehensive school is deprived of the most academically able it is obviously going to be disadvantaged in any league tables.
Grammar schools in most areas catered for 15% of the population, and many of the 'failures' felt it was not worth trying any more. Other countries manage with completely comprehensive systems and achieve results as least as good as the UK. I speak as someone who benefited from the grammar school system as my Catholic elementary school in Salford was appalling but that does not make me willing to exclude 85% of other children from the better staffing ratios, buildings and facilities that I enjoyed.

I wonder why the words 'communist', or 'left wing' are never defined but just used in a derogatory fashion?

I note that one of the aims of the government is to make sure that nobody is better off on benefits than in work. Here is a revolutionary suggestion - why not pay the workers more?

No, higher education is not the complete answer to all ills as there are now tens of thousands of unemployed graduates who were told that studying for three years or more and getting deeply into debt would guarantee them a successful job. And, before anybody leaps in to condemn them, they are not all insisting on high-status jobs - many would take any they could find. It is not hard to understand, is it, that in some areas, such as Hull, there are not enough vacancies for everybody to get a job. So now we will be told the unemployed should be ready to relocate, leaving families, friends and homes behind. This is simply not practical for many people with commitments - unless the whole family were able to move, the worker would have to pay rent in the new location and travel costs to see their family. If they are on the basic wage, that would not be possible.

I am heartened by the approach of many churches - they have not always been seen to be on side of the underprivileged - I believe the church of england was known as the conservative party at prayer.

It was stated on BBC news this morning that there are 180,000 people set to be have their benefits cut because they have too many bedrooms, but there are only 80,000 smaller homes available for rental. When challenged, the government spokesman waffled about how many more homes they had built than the last Labour government but avoided the issue of the extra 100,00 people who will simply be worse off. Savings will be minimal, hardship may be great.

Private Eye, which I trust, has been pointing out for months that many MPs of all shades have financial links to the companies that will receive very lucrative contracts for health care. Cynical? You bet.

The grammar school system was brilliant for those of us who went to grammar school which were very much a minority. The secondary modern schools were often extremely poor in terms of facilities, curriculum etc. And those were the schools that served the majority. And they only educated to 14.
It took a while for the comprehensive system to establish itself but there are now many brilliant comprehensives that are giving excellent education to the brightest without limiting opportunity and aspiration at the age of 11 for others. Many now go to university that would have failed the 11 plus.
I am confident that there are no comprehensives that are as awful as many secondary moderns were in the 50s and many of them are brilliant.
The school where I was governor for 10 years serves a seriously deprived area. It is now doing a really good job for its students, they have a wide range of opportunities, great facilities (much better than the tatty grammar school i went to), and harder working teachers (who would be sacked if they tried conducting all lessons by dictating a set of notes.) Every year the achievement is improving. No comparison to the meagre secondary education that would have been available in the area 50 years ago.
I regret that Benn and co did not go the whole hog and ban private schools - if they had done this we would have an even better comprehensive system as the wealthiest in society would have a vested interest in them.