Sign Change.org Petition To Force Ian Duncan-Smith to live on £53 PW

[Lisa O`Brien]

Hello,Sorry don`t know how to provide the link for people. There is a website called change .org where ,if people want to,they can sign a petition forcing Secretary of State for Work and Pensions ,Ian Duncan-Smith,to live on £53 a week,for the next 12 months. He recently claimed he could live quite easily on this amount of money,no problem. So let him put his money where his mouth is,if he thinks it is so easy. !!!!

[Jan McNulty]

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

 

I've signed!

[Lisa O`Brien]

Cheers for the link,Janet.!!

[Kitschqueen_1]

I've signed too, arrogant *******!

[Fiz]

So have I, the arrogant little toad

[afab]

So have I, even from France and have sent it to all my UK contacts...

[MAB]

Come on Dunc, put your money where your mouth is.

 

There have been few politicians more lacking in empathy and compassion than this one.

 

Thanks Janet and The Quays, more than happy to sign this.

[Lisa O`Brien]

Thanks,Folks. Not that any of it will make much difference,sadly. Was trying to imagine what it must  be like living on Unemployment Benefit,or whatever it`s called. Can you imagine if,God forbid,any of us were made redundant and had to survive [with a family] on £53 a week? My electricity alone costs me £20 a week.!

[Michelle_Richer]

I've signed it too. I wish my electricity was only £20 a week, my standing order for it is £156 a month.

[alison]

Was trying to imagine what it must  be like living on Unemployment Benefit,or whatever it`s called. Can you imagine if,God forbid,any of us were made redundant and had to survive [with a family] on £53 a week? My electricity alone costs me £20 a week.!

 

Some of us were.  And it's called Jobseeker's Allowance now, and is probably getting up towards the £70 per week level by now.  Plus, of course, they no longer cover the costs of your mortgage, if you have one, so ... well, you do the maths.  I don't imagine a lot of people have mortgages of less than £280 per month in this day and age, and when you start adding to that the mere cost of eating, heating and other necessities ...

[taxi4ballet]

When you take off our Council Tax, and gas & electricity, this would leave us with the princely sum of zero a week to live on.

 

Then we have to pay for food, clothes, buildings & contents insurance, water rates, telephone, vet bills, the list goes on and on - and don't get me started on the cost of running a car in order to even get to work...

 

This idiotic man is an utter disgrace and hasn't a clue what it's like living in the real world.

[John Mallinson]

> This idiotic man is an utter disgrace and hasn't a clue what it's like living in the real world.

 

We don't encourage political discussions here because they tend to degenerate into slanging matches. Further ad hominem attacks and the thread will be closed.

[Lisa O`Brien]

My fault John for starting it. I did wonder if it was appropriate or not,but then I thought what the heck,i`ll see.!!

[taxi4ballet]

Perhaps I shouldn't have said it John, but I lost my job today.

[Jan McNulty]

Oh dear Taxi, I'm so sorry to hear your news.  Dreadful times.  I hope you get something new soon.

[John Mallinson]

Perhaps I shouldn't have said it John, but I lost my job today.

 

That's awful. Enough to turn anyone against hectoring politicians.

[taxi4ballet]

We were only just keeping our heads above water as it was - now I'm not sure what's going to happen. I can't even sign on, as I was (and technically still am) self-employed, which means I'm not actually entitled to anything.

 

 

 

 

That's awful. Enough to turn anyone against hectoring politicians.

 

Hectoring I can take - it's pontificating I have trouble with - especially when it comes from someone who can easily afford to spend £53 on his lunch!

[Fiz]

I am so sorry, Taxi This blasted recession and government and now the climate seems to be conspiring against the UK

[aileen]

I'm sorry to hear this Taxi.

[Lisa O`Brien]

Taxi,like everyone else,I am so very sorry to hear this. Thinking of you.

[taxi4ballet]

Cheered up a bit - dd is on waiting list for RBS summer school - letter arrived today  - and the car has passed it's MOT too

[Lisa O`Brien]

.....Silver lining and all that !!.

[JulieW]

Always a relief when the car passes its MOT! I always feel like I'm waiting for exam results

[Guest daniel321]

Hi.  I think it is very important to REALLY understand the country that we live in.  You see that I have lived in four countries and cultures and so I am in the enviable position to understand what I am talking about.

 

Every country has its "cash cow".  Qatar has gas, and the Emir of Qatar shares this with his people.  In practice, it works like this: if a Qatari can put the interest only repayment on a mortgage in London for two or three years, the Emir comes and pays the rest with public funds.

 

Now ask yourself "what is the cash cow of Britain?"  That answer is simple.  It is called the invisible profits of the City of London.  But how does that work and why?  If you compare this culture, the British culture to ALL other cultures you find that everyone else in the world, those who are successful, people with more that 100,000 GBP or USD in a bank, they move the money to London.  They do this because the biggest problem of the guy with money is how to avoid losing it.  And what happens in London is that we take 1/2 percent of that money and the punter is glad to lose that because he knows that the money is safe with us.

 

Now ask yourself "why is the culture of Britain such that people will trust us with their savings?"  here are the two CULTURAL answers:

(1) The Anglo-saxon (and juttish and viking) peoples were too far north to have been influenced by the Roman Empire.  The Roman Empire (as the Greek city states before it, and Carthage and all the rest) was a CITY EMPIRE.  Quite literally, as in the movie "300", your city had your Gods, your ancestors, your forebearers, and you fought TILL DEATH for your city.  Such a culture is one where individual rights quite often are subservient to those of the state.  You see this in present day Argentina.  At any moment the goverment can decide to steal people's savings and pensions.  The culture is such that even the most liberal person in the culture accepts that this must sometime be so: the individual must be sacrificed for the good/"benefit" of the state.  Consider now the Germans, they too were partly Romanized but they took it to an extreme.  They had three Reichs: 1st, 2nd and 3rd (Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor; Bismark; and Hitler). All were verticalist movements following a leader and with the concept of the state above the people.  To a certain extent France is the same in spite of the French revolution, consider also that the name France comes from Charlemagne's Germans, the Frank tribe.  So this is the first reason that the rich of the world (in a western context) will stick their savings in the UK.

(2) Queen Victoria was faced with a dilemma. Britain ruled one third of the world but there were too few Brits relatively speaking to administer such an empire.  So she brain washed the youngsters at Public Schools for 50 years into the Patrician values of "not lying".  At Gordonstoun school Mr Fitzgibbon would ask a boy who lied to "walk to Elgin" but with instructions to all other kids "not to check".  So it was perfectly possible for the boy to skip the walk hiding in his room but that meant lying again and eventually his mind could not take it.  Such was the brain washing applied.  Over the decades it filtered down to the working classes whose fiddles are so so minor compared to the corruption stories of Brazil, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia, even Japan.  We live in a culture that might kick a bloke to death but if his wallet should fall out, at least a gang of native white British kids would say "dont take it cause that would be stealing!" So it is OK to kick a kid to death but it is wrong to steal his wallet.

 

In conclusion.  The invisible profits of the city of London are EASY pickings for those who work there.  They are kidding us when they say that they sweat for their salaries: NOT SO.  They might as well do nothing and the tsunami of money that comes in would keep coming and 1/2 percent of it as a fee is a HUGE FEE, an obscene amount of money.  Think of the 11 quid you pay every time you buy or sell shares on the lloyds share dealing programme?!!!

 

Someone should tell Ian Duncan Smith that this money belongs to all of the British people and that we are not a country like the United States.  We are more of a country like Qatar.

[Guest daniel321]

This which I relate is both fortunate but also sad.  Why is it sad?  The most rewarding jobs are the creative jobs, and the most creative of jobs will reside in science and engineering.  For example, say we have a person who disagrees with me and who lives for the "human story", i.e., a person who loves psychology or sociology.  Let me point out to them that back in the days of the pyramids, people were people and they all had the same problems and so essentially (other than for Sigmund Freud and the new Neuropsychoanalysis both of which in pure form are sciences not art) these artsy subjects cannot advance the state of play.

 

Consider that the mobile phone in your pocket is a wonder of technology.

Now owing to our "easy life" in honest Britain, and people from all over the world throwing all kinds of money into the City, buying up all of our land to make our third rate houses (compared say to a Scandinavian home) so so bloody extortionately expensive, owing to this "go to work, charge the 1/2 percent" we are ROBBING the young, and the young at heart, of the opportunity of making a living in a rewarding professional technical endeavour.  I saw a programme the other day of a young japanese who emulated Pierre Currie and through trial and error managed to achieve the first piezoelectric clock, the smallest one in the world, for a chip.  He did this in a firm.  20 years later he was CEO of the firm!!!  tears came to my eyes.

 

In the UK the FTSE 100 are not real firms.  Essentially, these are quangos that go to the stock market in London, this miraculous source of world savings and cash, and buy firms all over the world and call themselves a "firm".  Essentially, for a while they buy firms and make them "efficient" lowering costs, sell them and take a fortune, and shortly after those companies devoid of any innovation or brain power simply collapse or are reduced to a low take firm.

 

The Germans do no operate in this way.  Most of their firms are owned by families.  It is called the Mittelstadt.  They do not go to any stock market to get investment money. Usually, the system encourages reserves and savings.  When they need to innovate they go take a few million from the bank.  Many are owned by banks.

 

In the Far East companies own banks and countries. Samsung is 1/3 of the GDP of South Korea.  If you go into a Korean firm there is ZERO OUTSOURCING.  A Korean firm such as LG does not just make screens, they make chemicals, they make batteries, they make fuel cells, anything you can imagine. I walked into one firm Cuchen, they made kitchen cookers AND massage chairs!!!  On the third floor of the factory in Incheon they have a banner that reads RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT and the guys working there are Koreans with PhDs in engineering from Stanford.  They are extremely well paid.

 

In this country our "financial success" is robbing a future, an interesting career and future, from our kids.  We live BANAL lives. We are not moving the world forwards in any way.  We are concerned with the human and the vulgar.  We are concerned simply with money, with the image of David Beckham and with the service culture of Waitrose.

 

It is all rather unfortunate!!!  And the government talks a good shop but they are just biding their time until world trade picks up and London will become extremely rich again.  Such parasites as Cameron, Clegg, Gordon Brown, and people from all walks of politics with their Classics and History and PPE degrees are simply that: parasites.  We are a nation of so called "managers" and people working in the noisy open plan, with no power to concentrate to create any product or advance.  It is sad but it is true.

[MAB]

Personally I'm pretty indifferent to David Beckham, my youngest sister on the other hand.................

[taxi4ballet]

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. 

 

I do have a reasonable grasp of economics, but that's the best I can manage at this time in the morning!

[LinMM]

What do you mean when you say "we are concerned with the human and the vulgar" have you deliberately put these words together?

Eg: humanity and vulgarity go together?

 

And just WHO is concerned simply with money and the image of David Beckham.......certainly not me!

My only concern with money even is to make sure I actually have enough to live on and not to waste what I do manage to save......though I can admit still have NO stocks and shares!! Though for the first time in my life may be considering this as the savings I do have are decreasingly rapidly!!

I'm not bright enough to understand if this decrease in the value of money for the average Jo is anything to do with the "invisible City profits" scenario(from your first post) or not.....I am not that good on economics as it seems so complicated.

 

When I was investigating whether or not to invest a few months back I wanted to be a very ethical investor HOWEVER I discovered that to be a truly ETHICAL investor you already have to be loaded!! Because everything is high risk in this area and I don't have enough to risk losing ALL my money. I did not act then and left feeling very disappointed with this bit of reality.

 

Your posts are very far reaching and a lot to take in but particularly in the second post am not sure what you are trying to say! What do you mean by we live "banal" lives....in what sense.....as I don't consider mine to be!!

 

To some extent one has to manoeuvre within the system we have. It's up to much younger people now to get together to create any new system(I am a youngish probably going on 20 something OAP)......is this what you are meaning?

Each Country has its own timespan within its development potential as I see it and its impossible to compare the culture within Korea with UK! There are ups and downs with imaginative thinking, working conditions, working rights, management rights all the time and its not a straight line most are travelling on.

 

Anyway I think this thread was originally started before I joined or before I discovered the fantastic breadth of this Forum ....but I would have signed that petition if I had seen it.

Perhaps Mr Duncan Smith could have survived on £53 or whatever for ONE week but not day in and day out.

 

It's strange isn't it that I have a friend who teaches violin and piano in London. The people she can least rely on to pay her on time are the people living in some of the richest houses in Hampstead!!! They don't seem to realise she actually has to LIVE on this money. Now that's being "out of touch"

[bangorballetboy]

DON'T FEED THE TROLL.

[LinMM]

Well showing my Internet lack of savvy here!! Especially as this is the only Forum I post messages on.

 

Have just looked up current meaning of "troll"

 

So looks like Ive been had!!!

Thanks for the warning then bbb

[Guest daniel321]

To the member from East Sussex.  I am a guy with three degrees in Engineering, and have spent the past 25 years leading research and development in various government agencies, universities.  In some sense I want to apologize for my view is rather biased.  I would say that the average Brit sees such topics as boring, and sees the Arts as exciting and interesting.  Nothing gave me more pleasure than fixing a girl's bike chain outside the tube station in Incheon south korea (they have a beautiful futuristic city there) and as we walked and talked I asked this beautiful 20 something girl: "what are you studying in university?" and her reply was "Chemical Engineering".  Also, once I was in Chalmers University in Gothenburg and half the mathematics graduates were women (beautiful Swedish girls).  These countries, cultures and economies are quite different from our own.

 

I must tell you that I have a friend here in England with two equally intelligent and studious children.  The girl went to do Medicine in Birmingham and did very well while the boy went to Aston to do Chemical Engineering and failed and dropped out in the second year.  The subjects were just too mathematical and difficult for him: mass transfer; organic chemistry; and so on.

 

In South Korea I went to a university department which had 1000 professors of Engineering and 15,000 students of engineering!!! That was in 2008.  At the same time Reading university was chucking the Physics degree from the curriculum over some accountant issue of the cost of some lightbulbs or something.  Anyway, continuing with the story, at that Korean university the professors looked depressed.  I asked them "why?" and their reply was "this year, the intake of engineering students is down by 15 percent" and I again asked "why?" and they said to me: "for the first time, the interim chairman of Samsung is a NON engineering graduate".

 

Which takes me back to a CRUCIAL point.  These topics of engineering and science are paradoxically much harder degrees than the Arts degrees.  Why do I say "paradoxically".  In general, science and engineering should be easier because science consists of a few number of very powerful principles: causality; action-reaction; consistency; complexity; evolution (which is losely speaking a self-perpetuating computer program running) etc.  However, and in practice, these subjects are much harder than the liberal arts ones.  Hence, the young kids of a country are not stupid.  Most will not study because they are in love with the subject, most will study because they aspire to money, to high position etc.  Hence, if the new chairman of Samsung is say a History graduate or an Accountant or something, then why study the hard sciences? and so they will all go and study business studies, international affairs or whatever easy course sets their fancy, it is easier.

 

For that reason some of these governments have specific campaigns to put engineering ABOVE other pursuits. Say on the KTX in Korea early in the morning, the train had a TV (it is a very fast train) and I wondered what they were showing the people? was it the latest achievement of some tattooed sportsman? NO.  It was a documentary.  A story of a Korean guy who graduated in Seoul and then went to University of Michigan to get his PhD in Mechatronics, and now inventing at Samsung.

[controversially, I will state that my impression is that such a country is run by PhDs in science and engineering at all levels of government, and for this reason the USA fears these tiger economies, that is the way that nazi germany was run with the best brains in charge of everything, unlike our UK run by clever oxbridge liberal arts graduates but graduates who are not very familiar with the workings of science and technology. For example, look at the fastest growing economy in the world, the Chinese, and look in Wikipedia at the qualification of their leaders, you will not see a lawyer or accountant or economist amongst them, Beijing leadership are all engineers and geologists, and engineers run the entire country and that is one reason why the place is so successful - of course it is not a liberal democracy and I am not therefore saying it is in any way a system that I fully support].

 

However, as the example reflects, the most powerful way of encouraging our youngsters to study science and engineering is for the government to arbitrarily create 100 positions in government reserved for PhDs in science and engineering, positions with NOTHING TO DO but which pay 1 million GBP each in salary!!!  It would cost the tax payer 100 million GBP per year, an absolute drop in the ocean in tax revenue easily wasted presently in councils etc.  What would be the effect of this?  Once the papers and the media get a hold of that and discuss the rights and wrongs of these jobs, wonder what such guys are doing, talk about their achievements, qualifications, 9 out of 10 intelligent youngsters would enroll to study engineering.  It would certainly be a good method to kick start the economy to catch up with the powerhouse that is Germany.

 

The point is that in this country the guys in charge are all history graduates.  Nobody would ever promote such a thing. It is nothing to do with cycles as a previous contributor mentioned.  We are an old country surviving on the reputation of our honest culture.  We are the home, the last refuge, of the money of the rich of the entire world.  We do not need to work, we do not need engineering.  Sad (or fortunate depending on your perspective) as this fact is, we are in fact just one step from electing a Museum Curator as PM! Thinking about it, we are already technically there because Gordon Brown had a PhD in History.

 

Think about it.

Edited November 2, 2013 by daniel321

[Guest daniel321]

Dear LinMM, when one writes a post as I did with some complex ideas (or novel ideas) or side perspectives to the usual, one makes slight mistakes.  When I connected "human" and "vulgar" I made a mistake. What i was trying to convey is this: we seem so concerned with human stories at the expense of moving technology and the world forward.  What I was trying to say is that any action human, noble as it may be, is an action that any person in any past history, may have undertaken.  I would make some exceptions to this rule.  Charles Dickens in his literary work: Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Caroll,  Sigmund Freud, and people such as Jesus Christ, the American Constitution, Mother Theresa, Abraham Lincoln perhaps, and even I would argue people such as Nelson Mandela, have advanced the world.  However, and in general, Human Nature does not change.  It may change with Genetic Engineering but it wont easily change on its own.  Hence, I mistakenly used the term "vulgar" when what I meant was "run of the mill", "ineffective", "Boring".

 

Just think of the miracle of technology that is your mobile phone.  People in the UK have great mistrust of technological progress.  However, it is this progress that will deliver mankind, perhaps extending life (the only real thing that we have got), giving us insight as to the universe, and some of the fundamental questions.  Are you happy to die not understanding what consciousness is?  There are conferences, scientific conferences exploring the subject.  There are many scientific minds working on extending life.  Eventually we will become transhuman (genetically); bionic cyborg (robotically); and this may be the only way to get out of this planet when the sun explodes.  We will need to move life to some other place and for this we need technological progress.

Edited November 2, 2013 by daniel321

[Guest daniel321]

To the member of East Sussex on the topic of shares:

The rule about shares is simple.  In the long run, the appreciation of the share value can never outdo the growth of the economy (unless of course that company has activities or is based in a fast growing economy).  So if an economy grows at 1 percent, the stock market cannot consistently grow at 4 percent.  At some point there will be a correction (as we had in 2008).  The smart investor is the guy who has his money in the building society.  At the end of the day, the stock market for the likes of you and I is a lottery.

Even investments that cannot go wrong can.  One strategy in the old days was to find a very stable share and every month buy the same number of pounds. So for example, you could buy 100 GBP of these shares every month on the same day of the month.  If the share value is comparatively low that month, then you buy more shares, e.g. 110 shares, but if the shares went up in value then you might only be able with your 100 GBP to buy less, e.g. 90 shares.  After several years when you count your shares you will notice that you bought more of them when they were cheap and less of them when they were expensive, so, provided this is a very very stable share, you will have taken advantage of the volatility to buy at an average lower price overall and if you sell you will have made a profit.

In general, however, the rule is that you cannot make money on shares.

But what happens? the guys with the most money have the least control over it. When you have too much money, then the money is in the bank being lent to someone, or in the stock market at risk.  The rich guy, paradoxically, has little control about where his money is unless he hides it under a pillow.