2015 Election season ..........stuff it in here.

[RobHawk]

The CAB are a joke.

Financial advice which denotes to "offer to pay back £1 a month", no wonder the country was in the pits.

The sooner they cease to exist, the better IMO.

It's only £1 per month if they can't afford any more. The idea being that the person responsible accepts the debt but can't pay anymore off at that time. It then gets reviewed every 6 months. Given their advice is free and is there to help people get of the trouble they find themselves in, I don't see how you can class them as a joke? It's not about paying as little as possible it's about free advice to create a LAN to pay off the debts and help those that need it!

[Rincewind]

I gave up watching after 6 minutes.

 

[Benji]

That's a shame, you missed a good six minutes.

[Rincewind]

That's a shame, you missed a good six minutes.

I thought the video had stuck. All I was hearing was  something like 'We have a good  plan'

[MooseBreath]

Shot themselves in the foot a bit there, though I do think the interviewing was poor. Don't know why they're trying to compete with labour on pure funding of the NHS, when it's clear as day that labour can't manage the NHS with any budget.

[SMX11]

Yes the Conservative campaign has appeared to have cracked. Silly to claim fiscal responsibility one day then pledge 8 billion per year the next. Smacks of desperation.

[MooseBreath]

Labour manifesto is out and unbelievably they've stuck with their promise to freeze energy prices. If Osborne shot himself in the foot then this is like chopping your foot off and feeding it to some pigs. What an utterly idiotic policy in the current climate. Defies belief.

[Rincewind]

Well personally I would rather my fuel bills did not rise but hey, each to their own.

[Alf Bentley]

Labour manifesto is out and unbelievably they've stuck with their promise to freeze energy prices. If Osborne shot himself in the foot then this is like chopping your foot off and feeding it to some pigs. What an utterly idiotic policy in the current climate. Defies belief.

 

The policy is now to freeze energy prices, but allow the regulator to cut them. There are arguments for and against that, but it's not "utterly idiotic" (as a policy to freeze prices when they were falling would be, admittedly). If, say, the whole of Surrey and Sussex is turned into a massive oil field (local Tory voters would love that, I'm sure!) and energy prices continue to fall, a further cut could be imposed, in theory. If they start to rise again (entirely possible given the historic volatility of oil prices), the freeze could take effect.

 

The Tories starting a campaign with an (unjustified) reputation  for fiscal responsibility and proceeding to announce £8bn of NHS spending with no explanation of its funding seems pretty idiotic. Likewise, starting off with concerns that they're soft on tax avoidance and serve the needs of a rich elite....and proceeding to argue the case for non-doms and an inheritance tax exemption above £1m also seems like crazy tactics to me.

[MooseBreath]

The whole issue with energy prices is based on the suspicion that the energy companies are in cahoots and that the regulator is doing nothing to prevent it. Miliband responds to that by giving the same regulator more power?

If anyone wants my vote on energy prices then all they need to deliver is a transparent stream of evidence which shows how and why movements in the wholesale price affects my bills in both directions.

[Alf Bentley]

The whole issue with energy prices is based on the suspicion that the energy companies are in cahoots and that the regulator is doing nothing to prevent it. Miliband responds to that by giving the same regulator more power?

If anyone wants my vote on energy prices then all they need to deliver is a transparent stream of evidence which shows how and why movements in the wholesale price affects my bills in both directions.

 

 

Presumably there are mechanisms for encouraging regulators to use the powers at their disposal. I'm not knowledgeable in this field, but things like the terms and conditions for their mission, oversight, reporting etc.?

 

You and I would be in a tiny minority who might bother to study the stream of evidence about wholesale prices that you describe; most people want to do something else with their time - and want someone else to deal with the pricing problem for them.

There are complications, too, with stuff like the buying of energy futures, which can distort the gap between wholesale and retail prices in either direction,

 

I'm pretty sure, though, that I've seen graphs showing the gap consistently growing between wholesale prices and customer prices, so there is an issue there. There could be other explanations for this (free-marketeers usually cite extra costs incurred through red tape connected with environmental legislation....but they would, wouldn't they?). There's certainly a case for better energy regulation, though, whether or not Labour are going about it the right way.

[Strokes]

Well personally I would rather my fuel bills did not rise but hey, each to their own.

A freeze also means they won't go down, which they have been doing but hey ho.

[Finnegan]

Loving the Sky election campaign boy band lip sync advert. Childish I know but made me giggle.

[MooseBreath]

Not keen on this right to buy extension. It's not the 1980s anymore, the main problems with housing are supply and that even relatively well off workers can't afford to get on the ladder. This is like rewarding people who cant be bothered to get a proper career, paid for by people who work hard. Socialist muck. The Tories will lose my vote if they carry on like this.

[Guest MattP]

Not keen on this right to buy extension. It's not the 1980s anymore, the main problems with housing are supply and that even relatively well off workers can't afford to get on the ladder. This is like rewarding people who cant be bothered to get a proper career, paid for by people who work hard. Socialist muck. The Tories will lose my vote if they carry on like this.

 

It's never a bad thing to get people owning their own homes.

 

As long as the money is re-invested and the mistakes of now rebuilding aren't repeated I don't really see a problem with this. We do need to do more though to get affordable housing into the hands of low paid workers though. It must be demoralising for a man working 35 hours a week struggling to pay his rent to still be seeing houses given for little or nothing to people who just churn out kid after kid.

 

(Yes I have just seen a story about one of my 'mates' on FB now having his sixth kid having never done a thing in his life)

[Rincewind]

If everyone 'bothered to get a career' who would do the shit jobs? Not everyone is cut out to be an accountant or an estate agent unfortunately regardless as to how hard they try. As to the housing someone on minimum wage is unlikely to be able to get on the step ladder and I agree that the prices will hit more people. Fall behind with a mortgage and you are up shit creek.

 

BTW when are the voting forms sent out? Not had mine yet.Went to check the register but they need my NI number which I did not have at hand. Found it now.

[ramboacdc]

Not keen on this right to buy extension. It's not the 1980s anymore, the main problems with housing are supply and that even relatively well off workers can't afford to get on the ladder. This is like rewarding people who cant be bothered to get a proper career, paid for by people who work hard. Socialist muck. The Tories will lose my vote if they carry on like this.

with all due respect the tories are not looking for your vote with this policy. they are looking at people like me who live in housing association properties who have ok paying jobs but cannot afford a deposit for a house or a privately rented property.  I agree it is a step in the wrong direction for them. My girlfriend made the point of saying "what is the point in this when it means there will be less housing association properties because of this in the long run?"

[Alf Bentley]

Not keen on this right to buy extension. It's not the 1980s anymore, the main problems with housing are supply and that even relatively well off workers can't afford to get on the ladder. This is like rewarding people who cant be bothered to get a proper career, paid for by people who work hard. Socialist muck. The Tories will lose my vote if they carry on like this.

 

Surprised at the vehemence of your response, though I know housing supply is one of the few areas we broadly agree on.

 

To be scrupulously fair to the Tories (as I love to be), the policy also includes some new spending on house building, in theory. Of course, as with the £8bn promise for the NHS, Labour are immediately asking where the funds will come from, so it again risks squandering one of the Tories' advantages, namely their reputation for economic responsibility (cough! cough!).

 

A difficult one for Labour, too, though. That initial response is a sensible one, but they're bound to be pressed on whether they would offer housing association tenants this discounted "right to buy". How will they respond, I wonder?

 

Will this policy be popular? With housing association tenants who want to buy, it presumably will....but will it be popular with people seeking housing association tenancies or those seeking to buy in the open market? Will they feel that others are getting an unfair discount to buy, while they're not - or will they think that it might help reduce house prices in the private sector by syphoning off some of the demand? Or will a lot of voters just see it as a desperate vote-seeking bribe that undermines the Tories' reputation for fiscal caution....I mean, that's a lot of unexplained spending that they've announced in the last week, for a governing party that has announced its intention to make wide-ranging, if unspecified cuts to balance the budget. It also begs the usual question (for any governing party): if it's such a good idea, why are you only promising it now; why didn't you do it in the last 5 years?

[Guest MattP]

As an aside I'm getting very annoyed with this whole campaign now. Just ridiclous promise after ridiculous promise from everyone, totally unaffordable nonsense from all sides trying to buy votes.

 

I'm not even sure I blame the political parties anymore, the electorate appear to be so stupid they simply have no chance of being elected unless they promise these things, as a collective we seem to want Scandanavian levels of public spending combined with American tax rates, increased spending on everything from foreign aid to the miltary all while making sure every single thing we spend money on is ringfenced.

 

It's crazy. Labour promise a load of ridiculous things and they shoot ahead in the polls, so the Tories come out with a bizarre unfunded 8billion pledge on the NHS to level it up, I dread to think what this will end up as by the start of May.

 

Hats off to the Green party for the best piece of fantasy today, the've costed 'the earth' (a snip at 1.6billion) in thier manifesto and despite implementing the citizens income (280billion a year) they have somehow managed to bring the deficit down to 21million a year by 2020. I can't wait for the Andrew Neil interview to see how they got to that.

[Finnegan]

Just a reflection of how ridiculously close it's going to be and how blandly similar our political partiesall are, Matt.

[MooseBreath]

It's never a bad thing to get people owning their own homes.

As long as the money is re-invested and the mistakes of now rebuilding aren't repeated I don't really see a problem with this. We do need to do more though to get affordable housing into the hands of low paid workers though. It must be demoralising for a man working 35 hours a week struggling to pay his rent to still be seeing houses given for little or nothing to people who just churn out kid after kid.

(Yes I have just seen a story about one of my 'mates' on FB now having his sixth kid having never done a thing in his life)

That's the problem. We'll have situations where you have two very similar people, one is working hard to get on while the other can't be arsed, the hard worker's tax will then be used to fund a heavily discounted house purchase for the shirker. It's perverse, there's no justification for it. The Tories shouldn't be touching anything like it.

[Rincewind]

I remember back in the 70's our family were living in a council house of about 15 years. We were offered the chance to buy. Before that we had improved it CH rewired decorated etc.The price quoted was more than our neighbour's who had done sod all to theirs. We considered this to be unfair so did not bother. Of course the value was more but we had already spent the extra of improving it.

[Alf Bentley]

I'm not even sure I blame the political parties anymore, the electorate appear to be so stupid they simply have no chance of being elected unless they promise these things, as a collective we seem to want Scandanavian levels of public spending combined with American tax rates, increased spending on everything from foreign aid to the miltary all while making sure every single thing we spend money on is ringfenced.

 

Strongly agree with that bit. In 1997, as part of my studies, I spent 4 weeks working with the Labour campaign - though I was drifting away from them by then. A phrase I heard a lot was "crucial swing voters in marginal seats", which I took to mean "clueless, blow-in-the-wind fvckwits in the suburbs and small towns". I'm sure that you'd hear similar phrases at Tory HQ.

 

That's unfair to some people, obviously. There are some people who are well-informed but genuinely torn about who to vote for....and the parties do have to motivate their core vote to go and vote. But a large proportion of the parties' campaigns is directed at people who don't have a clue about politics and make no effort to find out (easier than ever now - all you need is internet access, a brain and a little time). If the parties can win such people over with unaffordable goodies, promise good public services AND low tax, or scare them off "the other lot" with lies and smears, they'll do so.....and if they don't, the other lot will.

 

This problem of a lot of people lacking even a basic understanding of politics is getting worse, now that tribal allegiances are fading. It would be controversial and would have to be carefully balanced, but I think some education in democracy and politics should be compulsory throughout secondary school, so that most people understand the system and the basic arguments on all sides by the age of 18.

[Guest MattP]

This problem of a lot of people lacking even a basic understanding of politics is getting worse, now that tribal allegiances are fading. It would be controversial and would have to be carefully balanced, but I think some education in democracy and politics should be compulsory throughout secondary school, so that most people understand the system and the basic arguments on all sides by the age of 18.

 

It's a tough thing to address and I'm not sure how we can do it.

 

Obviously given what I remember of school (and from reading a few others on here who said the same) there is no way I could justified allowing this to happen in secondary school given the overwhelming political position of teachers and the bias that it would bring.

 

I'm getting a bit sick of the 'we need to engage' people lark, when you think about it, why do we need to? We don't need to get people involved in football, we don't need to get them walking or travelling, if they can't be bothered to take an interest in where their tax goes then so be it, I certainly don't want to see politics dumbed down to the levels it seems to be going to just so people like Joey Essex can swan around with Miliband and Farage and give his view on This Week.

[pSinatra]

Would a 'shirker' be able to buy a house if all the money they receive is through benefits?  I would expect it's workers who are on a low income & living in social housing that this applies to.

 

Not that I agree with it, as it will only be available to people already living in social housing who will be able to purchase the house at a vastly reduced price.  I'm on a below average income & I struggle each month to pay the mortgage on my privately owned house.  Where's my discount?

 

I also don't trust the relevant authorities to re-invest in new housing schemes, as was the case many years ago & part of the reason we are in the shit now.