And loads of other industries too!

God bless the world eCONoMY.... :lol:

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Gordon Brown isn't the only "non elected" PM we have had! It is a fairly common occurrence.

As for the hag with the bag, I had better not get started!

What? Auntie Magie was a wonderfull person!!

Has your doctor given you some new pills to try? :lol: :lol: :lol:

Auntie Maggie and Ian McGreggor were the executioners of the coal industry. Now coal is imported from whatyoucallthatplace.

I suspect that raving lunatic Scargill thinking he had the right to decide who governed Britain might have had something to do with it too 😉

What is the real cost of keeping someone on the dole, or as is more the case incapacity/DLA and all of the benefits that come with that. The reality is it costs more than is paid to most that work in the public sector, we aren't talking £100,000 pa whitehall jobs, we're talking £12-15k jobs before tax and NI.

Once in the benefits system its not £60 per week JSA, theres incomse support, Disability (The majority of long term unemployed are farmed off onto some disability allowance so as not to distort the jobless figures!), housing benefit, free prescriptions, bus passes (If classed as disabled), council tax benefit and the list goes on.

If you want to advocate the removal of these benefits fair enough, but now we are going back to thatcher policies.

With little private employment in the far South West and considerable reluctance to invest here even with the swathes of grant funding available how can anyone consider slashing these jobs?

Before anyone says anything I work in the private sector and recieve no benefits.

I would love too see a drift away from reliance on the public sector for jobs, but it can't be done while there is nothing to replace the jobs.

The whole reason why there are a disproportionate number of public sector jobs in Labour areas is because these were the areas that were decimated during the 80's! And as such were where the jobs were needed most.

I find it amazing the number of people that decry thatcherite policies in one breath and support them in the next! There is such a thing as society, this relies on mutual support, on a simillar basis as we used to have mutual building socieities, then they became banks and look at the mess that has caused!

Bear in mind a certain county in the UK where 40 % are employed by the state also has real (Ie economically inactive) unemployment running at 28% v the stated 2.5%. To me unemployment is a very simple statistic - Unemployed = Not employed. To the Government Unemployment - Claiming Job Seekers Allowance

I think it would be better for Simon and Vanoord's blood pressure if I gracefully bow out of this debate without launching off into political tirades 😉

It's going to be difficult to turn the clock back in many areas of peoples aspirations 😞

A perceptive comment. Many in this thread have written a subjective analasyis of of what has been wrong with policies but I've yet to see a cogent argument how this can be corrected. Free trade and protectionism is a rehash from years ago, I won't mention Adam Smith. Damn I have.

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Carnkie it cannot be corrected.... Why can't people see this? If it could be corrected then people would be doing it but no government in its self seeking right mind is going to say that... Economics 101 ... we have zero to sell!

Unemployed people and direct/indirect employees of the state all amount to the same thing as stated before... the re-cycling of money thru the economy. The only difference being that the public employees do provide a service hence my comment this was not a criticism of public servants at all.

But it still comes down to the same point.. there is nothing like sufficient numbers of productive jobs to balance import versus export to balance the deficit of trade and the subsequent borrowing needed to balance the books by the government!

Do the math... it was bad enough before but we were always told we had the banking sector to rely on (like Iceland!!!) cos everyone knows that we're great at that... except we weren't and we got screwed over stuff that certain independant finance people in the world were predicting two years before it happened... I was personally told by a KPMG employee a year before Lehmans went bang that the whole western economy would imminently get screwed by toxic property debt, but our so called banking sector carried on with unabated zealous abandon buying this debt up whilst the governments of the west encouraged more and more borrowing as that creates the false growth effect...
(I was sat in my hotel room at 3 am suffering with jet lag in Singapore when the dam finally broke and it played out exactly as my friend in KPMG had said it would... I remember saying to my self "We are so f**ked" and phoning my boss in the uk as I watched the stack of cards start to come apart!!!)

It still comes back to one thing and one thing only. Borrowing more money to pay of debt does not work when you are not earning enough as a nation to pay the interest let alone the original debt... Greece is just the start!

Party political politics is just the same people putting a different slant on the same problem to make us think it will all be ok... and whilst you can all look back and say well we got thru recession before... yes we did ... but wages and quality employement reduced and debt exploded to fill the gap... its even been said by certain politicians... "we need to spend our way out of recession"... how?... by taking on more debt that eventually has to be paid back?
The only way out is by trading our way out which we cant do as we dont have the industry..

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Gordon Brown isn't the only "non elected" PM we have had! It is a fairly common occurrence.

As for the hag with the bag, I had better not get started!

What? Auntie Magie was a wonderfull person!!

Has your doctor given you some new pills to try? :lol: :lol: :lol:

Auntie Maggie and Ian McGreggor were the executioners of the coal industry. Now coal is imported from whatyoucallthatplace.

I suspect that raving lunatic Scargill thinking he had the right to decide who governed Britain might have had something to do with it too 😉

No doubt Maggie and Scargill were the 'extremists' of both sides, perhaps if there was someone more moderate and with some common sense in the middle then perhaps things might have been better for everyone. And there might have been a coal industry of some sort left.
The car industry was in a similar state in the 1970's. Now there is nothing left of it.
What can this country now produce to export so as to bring in the revenue? With much of the production machinery scrapped or sold to China etc.
Skilled craftsmen have been laid off and a younger generation are losing out as they are not tought skills and trades.
It would take a miracle to get us out of where we are now!

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Morlock, as we see already in Greece, the minor changes in circumstance suggested in a not overly rich country has got everyone foaming at the mouth and on the streets... when this comes to the UK in full (leader in Europe for anti social behaviour) imagine for a second a world when-

When mum and dad tell their feckless 23 year old unemployed son/daughter living at home that they cant get any more credit cos mums only working part time & creditors are banging on the door, dads lost his job -so NO he cant have a fiver for drugs or a contract I Phone!

When Mr and Mrs Posh Socks suddenly realise they cant afford the 4 bedroom home and 2 nice cars as well as the 2 kids (1 at a paid school) as they already owe £300,000 in mortgage and credit cards!

When the government having drained every other source of tax revenue that it can get away with, then starts taxing savings at the full rate, taxing alcohol at a massive rate, taxing pretty much anything thats left but most of all attacking those who (like myself) have stayed in the black, are not up to their elbows in debt by making us work much harder for much much less... thats already happening

Thats when you will see the penny drop and it will get very nasty, the poll tax riots will be minor! Until then everybody, don't challenge, don't question and go shop... you're saving the country 😉

Heres some numbers to play with-

9,300
Number of new debt problems dealt with by CAB each day

£57,937
average household debt

£181m
personal interest paid in UK daily

every 11.2 minutes a property is repossessed

1,995 people made redundant every day

1000 people seek some form of formal debt rescheduling plan every day

£4,316 a second increase in Government national debt

And to top it off our borrowing on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans (NOT government) now exceeds our GDP of approx £1.4 trillion this year, throw in the £.75 trillion to bail out the banks it not looking so good is it 😮

Anybody with half a brain should by now be banging on their MPs door asking why this has been allowed to happen but also asking themselves did I really need that new lap top and car perhaps ?
Meanwhile the political parties keep churning out these amazing but fiscally impossible schemes for debt reduction whilst skirting around the truth.. There has to be massive tax hikes and massive cuts! Payback time is coming soon!

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At the risk of being too blunt, wasn't Germany in this sort of situation prior to WW2, this in turn leading to a rapid growth of National Socialism?

At the risk of being too blunt, wasn't Germany in this sort of situation prior to WW2, this in turn leading to a rapid growth of National Socialism?

Yes.
Funnily enough, if you add in the immigrtion issues the country currently faces then we are not facing a hapy future politically.

An astute observation... are we not seeing a rise of the far right already? There are more than just the BNP marching in protest against certain parties. And whilst I don't condone far right politics I certainly don't recognise my country anymore, seems nobody is bothered about my rights to be a western european christian and to be loudly in favour of being so is to be racist. As I'm moderately intelligent I would hope this does not lead to far right violence and death but moderately intelligent in this country is now seemingly rare, somehow I don't think moderation would come into it... plenty of displaced youth thugs out there.

I think it will take just one big political figure (party) to come forwards with the Charisma to appeal to the masses and we will be in real danger of seeing Nazism under another name as we are aready conditioned under totallitarian Labour to not question a government that promises nothing, so why would we question a a totalitarian movement that made all the right promises of returning Britain back to being Great and curing all our ills by whatever means!
I think you are very right and I think its a scary prospect that has been overlooked by Bliar and Broon!

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Anybody with half a brain should by now be banging on their MPs door .....

Anyone with more than half a brain can knuckle down to doing something more enjoyable like exploring mines and writing up mining history.

Thats right lets just pretend none it exists, read afew books and go down a few mines and it should all be OK. 😉

I actually find I can do both, have a debate like this with my (hopefully) friends and also be into mining and railways as a hobby. Its nice to hear peoples views and to debate on non mining things aswell. :thumbup:

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Once in the benefits system its not £60 per week JSA, theres incomse support, Disability (The majority of long term unemployed are farmed off onto some disability allowance so as not to distort the jobless figures!), housing benefit, free prescriptions, bus passes (If classed as disabled), council tax benefit and the list goes on.

Not quite so simple. As I found out when made redundant a few years back, it is a two tier system.

Yes, if you have never contributed (i,e, worked) then you do enjoy all those benefits.

However you are penalised if you have been regularly paying tax and NI. In that case you do get £60 a week (£50 back then, for me) and are expected to pay mortgage, council tax etc etc and feed yourself from that.

In fact when I was redundant, I realised I was receiving less in 'job seeker's allowance' per week than I had been paying NI per week (never mind any other kind of tax).

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Thats right lets just pretend none it exists, read a few books and go down a few mines and it should all be OK. 😉

That's not what I said, is it?

we are, in point of fact, already living in a fascist country.

I don't mean "fascist" in the value-free sense of a universal pejorative as it is currently used by the multi-culti, ultra-liberal left, or the marxist theorists who are their fellow-travellers.

I mean "fascist" in the sense of a government which deliberately stifles free debate in the Commons by habitual use of the three-line whip plus time-wasting fillibustering like the fox-hunting bill; "fascist" in the sense of a government which increasingly flagrantly, seeks to change the constitutional process as they see fit, for their own ends; "fascist" in the sense of a government which has actively pursued major social engineering experiments in the full knowledge that these could not possibly be put before the electorate, because they would be conclusively rejected; "fascist" in the sense that the government has politicised the police and judiciary so that freedom of speech, which is to say freedom to criticise and oppose these experiments, has been systematically suppressed and intimidated.

read 1984, it's all there

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This country started to go down hill years ago, when all of a sudden it became the fashion to despise genius and reward failure. The sooner the complete opposite to this attitude happens the better.
What I mean by genius is not some idiot throwing,batting ,cueing, or heading some ball around, or a brain dead floozie walking down the aptly named Catwalk.
Knocker, meanwhile, had it spot on when he described the South West.
We now have the bizarre situation of thousands of houses being planned for the St Austell district. Where on Earth are these people going to work? The simple answer is they wont.
These houses will be filled with retired or just tired people who in another ten to fifteen years will need looking after.
So up goes the public sector ratio again, it's a never ending spiral we just cannot afford.

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What we are experiencing is the last few phases of a plan started decades ago where the only 'way out' is a Global Government.

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I think the Kipling poem "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" sums up our present sorry state pretty well....http://www.igreens.org.uk/gods_of_the_copybook_headings.htm 

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