GRIMLY FIENDISH

Precisely, it was "vote-catching" as opposed to necessity.....

Precisely... If Thatcher had allowed councils to use the proceeds to build replacement housing, then it may no have been so bad... But, Gezza, I am totally ideologically opposed to people buying Social Housing stock... It's a principle, and I'm not going to apologise for that, if they wanted to buy houses so badly, there were plenty of Barratt and Wimpey homes out there as I recall.... And you cannot possibly compare the noble intentions of the Labour Government of the POST WAR when people were homeless and the country was utterly wrecked after six years of destruction and Blitzkrieg warfare which had totally FLATTENED entire cities in this country, and NEEDED Social housing to be built..... CONTEXT is everything.... -_-

Yeah, Chris, you kind of missed the point of my rant...... -_-

Okay, okay, I'll admit that was a cheap joke... I hold my hand up... I frankly dont care if Fox and Werritty were getting up to extra-marital nookie.... I do care more about the fact that this is a potential problem for national security, and, indeed, one has to wonder whether or not "secret donors" were paying a wage to Werritty as well... Noxy Foxy has three advisors which cost the taxpayer almost £170,000 per year, so, does he NEED them, or does he want to put his pal on the pay-roll...?

Funny, I know plenty who WONT rent to people who are on DSS.... Seriously.. Look at Gumtree sometime, you'll see LOADS of private sector Landlords who will stipulate "No DSS"... The place where I am just now, the Landlord wont even consider you if you're on benefits, and the same for the previous two places I've rented in London....

Yeah, damn right Shelter have an agenda, they actually give a shite about the Homeless and ordinary working people who are struggling to afford rents... Pretty good "agenda" if you ask me.. Certainly better than the fukkin' Tory agenda to create tens of thousands of homeless working class families.... I mean what do YOU suggest should be done with people who are on benefits, we should just not bother to give them Social Housing..? And, by the way, I was "knocking" PLENTY that the "new Labour" government were getting up to. Just for balance's sake.... -_-

I could potentially have about three or four DIFFERENT Tory Topics every day just about... Someone else beat me to the Liam Fox *cough* affair, however..... :lol:

Not really up on the Pop-Rocker stuff these days tbh, so dunno what's out there... Paramore are a bit less offensive to my Metaller ears than most going by what I heard.. I think Ev have really hit their groove now, I'm listening to the new album quite a bit lately, and I think Amy's vocals are the best I've heard from her. Ironically I think they've gone more towards where Lacuna Coil were whereas Lacuna Coil had come more over to Ev's side with their last album... And I definitely prefer this album to Ben Moody's project We Are The Fallen...

..And on the back of this..... Housing benefit cut survives legal challenge by child poverty charity http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct...P=FBCNETTXT9038 High court throws out challenge by Child Poverty Action Group, which said allowance cap amounted to 'social cleansing' Child poverty campaigners have failed in a high court bid to overturn the government's cap on housing benefit, which they believe will result in the "social cleansing" of expensive areas of the UK. A judicial review brought by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) challenged the legality of national caps imposed on the amount of local housing allowance (LHA) for accommodation of a given size. The caps mean that LHA weekly rates cannot exceed £250 for a one-bedroom property, £290 for two bedrooms, £340 for three bedrooms and £400 for four bedrooms. Lawyers for CPAG argued the secretary of state for work and pensions, Ian Duncan Smith, had acted outside powers conferred by the 1996 Housing Act, when read with the 1992 Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act, and failed to comply with his duties under equality legislation. Referring to a report from the New Policy Institute that showed that large families were roughly twice as likely to be ethnic minority households, Martin Westgate QC said the caps would have a disproportionate impact on them. However, Mr Justice Supperstone dismissed the case, saying it was clear Duncan Smith was well aware of his equality duties, paid specific regard to them and had carried out two equality impact assessments before reaching a decision. Supperstone did not accept that the minister should have concluded that the measures were "likely" to impact on ethnic minority groups disproportionately. Rather, he was entitled on the basis of the information available to conclude that they "may" have such an impact. The ruling said: "I am satisfied that the information gathered and considered by the defendant was adequate for the purposes of performing his statutory duty." Supperstone commented that the weight to be given to the countervailing factors was a matter for the minister and it could not be argued that the regard he paid to them was unreasonable or perverse. The measures were implemented in light of what the government's lawyers described as "the strong socio-economic imperatives in play", he added. In July, Supperstone was told that changes brought in earlier this year, which CPAG likened to "social cleansing", could force thousands of poorer people out of accommodation in expensive areas, particularly in central London. Ministers say that, without reform, expenditure on housing benefit would reach £24.7bn by 2014/15 and that the new measures, amounting to £2.4bn in savings, are necessary. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AND WHO'S FAULT IS IT THAT RENTS ARE SO EXPENSIVE ANYWAY?????? :angry: :angry: :angry: £2.4 billion in savings?? Which is a TENTH of what Corporate Tax Avoidance is costing the country..... PRIORITIES....... Absolutely disgusting ruling... Dirty politics at play here more than actual law or justice....

EXACTLY.... You speak for me on this one.... It's a ROCK album for ROCK/METAL fans... Pop/Scene Kids can feck off and listen to McFly or Good Charlotte or something equally shite.... -_-

Private rents unaffordable for families in most English boroughs http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/oct/1...P=FBCNETTXT9038 Shelter reveals that families are being priced out of the 'out-of-control' rental market in 55% of English local authorities Families have been priced out of rental property in the majority of local authorities in England, according to the homeless charity Shelter. The Shelter Rent Watch found that average private rents were unaffordable for ordinary working families in 55% of local authorities in England. Typical rents charged by private landlords were more than a third of median take-home pay, the widely accepted measure of affordability. Shelter said research showed that 38% of families with children who were renting privately had cut down on food to pay their rent. Although renting has traditionally been regarded as a cheaper alternative to home ownership, the credit crunch and high house prices have forced many potential homebuyers to remain as tenants. At the same time, growing numbers of people who would normally qualify for social housing have been pushed into the private sector by an acute shortage of local authority and housing association property. The number of tenants renting privately has increased by nearly one million in the past five years. The increased demand has pushed up rents, particularly in London boroughs, which are the most expensive in England. At £1,360, an average rent for a two-bedroom home in the capital is almost two-and-a-half times the average in the rest of the country (£568). The least affordable local authority area outside London is Oxford, where typical rents account for 55% of average earnings. Tenants on benefits in these areas are already having problems finding properties to rent within the new local housing allowance limits, implemented in April for new tenants and from the beginning of next year for those in existing tenancies. Shelter said tenants in many rural areas were also bearing the brunt of high rents and low earnings. It found it is cheaper to rent in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham than in north Devon, north Dorset or Herefordshire. In Yorkshire, properties in Bradford and Sheffield are more affordable to rent than in the rural areas of Ryedale and Richmondshire. Shelter's analysis showed that in England 8% of local authorities were extremely unaffordable to rent in, with a median rent of 50% or more of median full-time take-home pay; 21% were very unaffordable with a median rent equivalent of 40% to 49% of median full-time take-home pay; and 29% were fairly unaffordable with the median rent equivalent to 35% to 39% of the median full-time take-home pay. Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: "With huge differences in affordability across the country, there are now worrying signs that families are likely to be displaced by our out-of-control rental market. "We have become depressingly familiar with first-time buyers being priced out of the housing market, but the impact of unaffordable rents is more dramatic. With no cheaper alternative, ordinary people are forced to cut their spending on essentials like food and heating, or uproot and move away from jobs, schools and families." Robb said it was time for the government to urgently consider how private renting could become a stable, affordable option for families "and not a heavy financial burden that makes parents choose between buying food for their children and paying the rent." Alice Barnard, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, said the lack of affordable housing to rent or buy was one of the most pressing issues facing rural communities. "The countryside has seen its population grow at twice the rate of urban areas, which has driven up prices, forcing families to make sacrifices to meet spiralling rental costs and pricing young families out of the communities in which they have grown up," she said. "If we want our rural communities to flourish then the government needs to urgently review the rental market in rural areas to enable rural communities to meet their housing needs." Melissa Brown, a part-time yoga teacher, and her husband David*, a college lecturer, found it impossible to rent a decent affordable property when their landlord decided to sell their existing home. The couple, who live in Brighton with their three children, had been renting a three-bedroom terrace house for £1,250 a month for two-and-a-half years but last January were told they had to move out because the landlord wanted to sell up. It took them six months to find somewhere that was still close enough to their children's school and they ended up moving in September into a three-bedroom house for £1,550 a month. The house is in a poor state of repair with damp and needs decorating and other work, but Melissa said that most of the properties they looked at was "eye-wateringly bad". "Most of the rented houses around here are not suitable for families because the lounges have been turned into bedrooms so landlords can put students in there and make more money. Even groups of professionals are living in shared houses with no lounge," she said. "We've been renting for years and it's never been as bad as this. It's all driven by greed." She added: "We did ask about repairs to this house and the landlord is paying for paint, but she has been told she could rent the house out to students for £1,650 a month and already thinks she's doing us a favour." Their couple's household income is about £2,000 a month and they are already really struggling to make ends meet. The family is planning to use the loft area as an extra bedroom for a lodger to raise money. Melissa said: "The landlord doesn't mind how we raise the rent, so we are considering becoming landlords ourselves. If you can't beat them join them." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well, sorry, but this is the inevitable consequence of an artificial Housing Price Bubble throughout the 90s and 00s, coupled with the Thatcherite bollocks of "Right To Buy" from the late 1980s which started all this crap and totally depleted the amount of affordable social housing stock... Private Landlords have been charging ever more outrageous rents for the past 20 years while the prices of property have been sky-rocketing over this same period... Just compare our property spikes to the constant and stable property market in Germany for example, where standards of living are higher and first-time buyers find it a hell of a lot easier to get on the property ladder.... And now the moron Tories who started this "Property Boom" (or should I say BUBBLE) are making the poorest and most vulnerable in society suffer by capping Housing Benefit while doing absolutely FECK ALL about the situation regarding rip-off rents in the private sector, and even those who are working are being squeezed by pay freezes, rises in VAT, the insistence that they have to pay more into pension schemes and real terms decreases in the value of wages..... Yeah, let's just see if this doesn't make tens of thousands of families homeless in the next few years..... <_<

Yeah, so apparently Noxy Foxy has been given a "clean bill of health" by Dave Snooty... Well, that's okay then, all is well... MOVE ALONG NOW, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.... GO BACK TO BED BRITAIN, YOUR GOVERNMENT IS IN CONTROL. GO BACK TO BED. CONSUME. BUY SHITE YOU DONT NEED. POLLUTE YOUR BRAIN WITH MINDLESS CRAP LIKE X-FACTOR, JEREMY KYLE AND EASTENDERS. GO BACK TO SLEEP... DONT THINK. THINKING WASTES GOOD SHOPPING TIME.......

:lol: :lol: :lol: Vodka tycoon... Nice one... Well, at least he seems to be using his millions for something useful to try and improve his country....

http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2011/10/1...p-on-a-mission/ Congratulations to Anna Grodzka! (Reuters) – The first transsexual to win a seat in Poland’s parliament said on Monday she was on a mission to help Poles in this staunchly Roman Catholic country to improve the understanding of problems facing people who have changed their gender. Anna Grodzka, 57, is from a newly formed liberal party called Palikot’s Support Movement that stunned Poland’s staid political establishment by winning 10 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election. Founded by vodka tycoon Janusz Palikot, the party has attracted many younger voters with its support for gay rights, abortion and legalization of soft drugs and with its attacks on the powerful Roman Catholic Church. “My mission is to familiarize people with transgenderism,” Grodzka told Polsat News television. “While making this decision I knew what to expect,” she added, referring to “various unpleasantnesses” she endured before and during the campaign. A graduate in psychology, Grodzka completed her sex change last year. In the election, she won 18,000 votes in a district of Krakow in southern Poland in the election. “I decided to be a candidate for Palikot’s Movement because I want the voice of people who are excluded and discriminated against in the Polish political system to be heard,” she wrote in her blog. “I believe that little by little does the trick.” Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling center-right Civic Platform won Sunday’s election and is expected to press on with cautious economic reforms and closer ties with Poland’s European Union partners. Palikot was a lawmaker in Civic Platform until, impatient with its conservatism on social issues, he broke away to set up his own party. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quite a bold step indeed from Poland, still a staunchly Catholic country.. As the story states though, the Palikot Movement has attracted many younger voters with its more libertarian agenda and attacks on the Church... I say, Keep it up..... :) Any chance Palikot could open up a UK branch....?

1Zpp3BNUgGM Changing the subject slightly here, but here we have a beginner's guide to how the Wall St traders and banksters are ripping off your pension schemes.... The guy who blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff is featured here, and basically calls the banksters "Financial Terrorists".....

Weren't PWC involved in Enron...?

Yeah, with a limit of £3000 the last time I checked. About the only way us "mere mortals" have to avoid paying any tax... -_- Besides, they're savings accounts, so I'd say they would be an exception... You notice that Tax Avoidance for the ordinary joe public is seriously limited, dont you....? There are certainly no opportunities for any of us on PAYE to "off-shore".....

Well, I think it's high time to make Tax Avoidance an illegal practice in this country, I dont see any distinction in moral terms... I'm sick of "creative accountancy" BS being used as an excuse by rich people and big companies to worm out of paying their way.. First thing I would do would be to close the Caymans and Jersey down for business, and start taxing these territories...

PWC..? Price-Waterhouse-Coopers....? Gaaaaah.... Scumbags..... :P Dude, why on earth would you want to become one of Satan's little helpers....?

FTSE 100 have big questions to answer, says Action Aid http://www.cfoworld.co.uk/news/financial-p...use-tax-havens/ All but two of the UK's top public companies use tax havens revealing for the first time just how embedded the use of tax avoidance is among the FTSE 100, as the Treasury considers plans to hand the companies £840 million tax break, a new study showed on Tuesday. Of the 34,216 subsidiary companies, joint ventures and associates that FTSE 100 companies comprise, 8,492 are located in tax havens like Jersey, the Caymans and Luxembourg. According to ActionAid, whose study 'Addicted to tax havens: The secret life of the FTSE100' revealed the explosive data, it is the banking sector - bailed out by the UK taxpayer – that makes heaviest use of tax havens with a total of 1,649 tax haven companies between the big four banks. Barclays alone has 174 companies in the Cayman islands. But it is not just banks, oil and mining companies make up the other group of tax haven users. BP and Shell have almost 1,000 tax haven companies between them, the report said, while British American Tobacco has 200 companies in tax havens. Advertising giant WPP, which relocated its tax base out of the UK to Ireland to reduce its tax bill in 2008 – was exposed as the biggest tax haven user overall, using 611 tax haven companies. FTSE 100 companies make more use of tax havens than their US multinationals, according to the report by the international development charity. In a report – The Missing Billions - by tax expert Richard Murphy he estimated that £25 billion is lost from annually tax avoidance; made up of £13 billion by individuals and £12 billion from the 700 largest corporations. Fresnillo and Hargreaves Landsdown are the only two FTSE 100 companies that do not use tax havens. ActionAid said "We believe that the FTSE 100 have big questions to answer about why they require such a massive number of companies registered in tax havens. "With both developing and developed countries continuing to suffer the effects of the global financial crisis, decisive action to tackle tax havens from both the UK government and G20 leaders is well overdue." FTSE 100's favourite tax havens - in order of most popular - include Delaware (US), Netherlands, Ireland, Jersey, Hong Kong, Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Singapore, Switerland and British Virgin Islands. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I am absolutely SICK OF THIS crap.... And, it's not as if this is anything new.. Nu Lie-bore did absolutely feck all about this situation when they were in power either, and there's a lot of these tax avoidance issues that go back over 20 years or so... The final figure for all this TAX EVASION is probably somewhere in the region of HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF POUNDS in total... The fact is, if we actually got all this tax back from these Corporate scum-sucking arseholes, we likely wouldn't even HAVE a bloody debt problem or a structural deficit (well certainly not anything LIKE the deficit we currently have that's for sure).... It's simple economics folks, the less tax revenue the Govt gets coming in, the more they have to borrow in order to actually get the money to pay for the things that we all probably want - you know, things like the NHS, free primary and secondary education, a Welfare safety net, a Police force, an armed forces, local council services, etc, etc, etc..... Danny "the Ginger rodent" Alexander said that he was going to address this issue of tax EVASION, but so far has done absolutely SOD ALL about it... No, instead, these tax-EVADING scum-bags are set to get another BILLION quid, give or take, from the tax-payer..... Brilliant.... And, hey, while we're at it, why not give all the looters and rioters free Nikers from fukkin' J D Sports as well..... You f/ucking scumbag MP arseholes..... :angry: :angry: :angry: :angry: And to think, the Daily Heil gets its panties in a bunch over the £1 bn that benefit fraud is supposed to cost the country.... Yeah, right, whatever.. PRIORITIES anyone.....??? -_-

Time and experience has proven to me that you cannot trust the people who run the State, I simply have no faith in them anymore... I see what's been going on in this country post 9/11, and frankly I just dont recognise this country anymore as the same one that I grew up in. Things like what happened in Braehead are becoming more and more commonplace, and that should really scare everyone... I grew up despising Thatcher and what the Tories were doing, but in the past decade, I've seen a lot worse than anything that Thatcher (or Reagan with regards to the US) would ever have conceived of, and, shockingly, from a LABOUR government too (well, if you can really call them that).... And it's only getting worse..... -_-

Sorry, I have to completely disagree with you there... The sheer proliferation of CCTV is testament to the fact that we are a "Surveillance Culture" and I do believe that there are ulterior motives for it... And I do think that WE should be allowed to film the Police on demos or carrying out arrests because they're filming us.... The authorities seem to think, as is exampled in this video, that all they have to do is mutter the word "terrorism" and everyone should fall into line and that "terrorism" paranoia is a justification for anything and everything.... Yeah, I mean, let's just forget the 20-odd years of IRA/Provo/UVF/UDA/Loyalist terrorism we had in this country and somehow managed to not let it affect our day to day living in the 1980s..... In fact as was proven by the farrago that happened to a parent taking a photo of their daughter in a shopping centre in Braehead, the biggest "terrorists" seem to be the authorities themselves who act like tyrants and bullies and scare the crap out of small children.... Some might say, terrorising them... As far as I am concerned, the people who made this video are heroes and they are to be commended, they represent everything that a "Free Britain" should be....

Dude, you gotta.... ;)

This is the sort of absurd situation these guys are getting at... Basically, they can film us, but we cant film them.... Which is just shite.... -_-

YGnifTXHQOs I think everyone should watch this, because, essentially, this ist the absolute truth... We are living in an absurd situation where we tolerate being filmed and living under constant surveillance, because of some vague threat of "terrorism"... The guys who did this brilliantly turn this on its head with humour, class and some genuinely thought-provoking speeches.... Watch and enjoy, but also think.....