Another MP in Internet history fail

Another MP in Internet history fail

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Discussion

Dindoit

1,645 posts

93 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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Moonhawk said:
If he'd suggested "condoms" instead of "vasectomies" - would people be equally outraged?

The end results is the same (i.e. fewer kids).
Selective eugenics via sterilisation is a little bit different to wearing a condom.

Smiler.

11,752 posts

229 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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I see this thread has (predictably) gathered momentum.

smile

wiggy001

6,542 posts

270 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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He said nothing wrong originally and should not have apologised.

£11m or so isn't the issue. It's the fact that we live in a society where everyone knows their rights but ignores their responsibilities. Where nothing is your fault. Where there's blame there's a claim. Where your kids have a disorder rather than just being little sts, and responsibility for their upbringing starts and ends at school. And where, for some, benefits are a lifestyle choice.

For each of the 100 or so families on mega benefits, there will be another 100 who could work but choose not to. Or take the benefits and cash in hand work.

It's not about the money. It's about the attitude. And if we want a decent society everyone must work towards it, not just those stupid enough to play by the rules (legal and moral).

lord trumpton

7,321 posts

125 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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Douglas Quaid said:
I completely agree with him.
Wot he sed.


sidicks

25,218 posts

220 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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Dindoit said:
Selective eugenics via sterilisation is a little bit different to wearing a condom.
That's not what he proposed. HTH

grumbledoak

31,499 posts

232 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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BlackLabel said:
What he actually said.

Ben Bradley in 2012 said:
No sector of the government spends more of taxpayers money than the Department of Work and Pensions, and as the House of Lords debates the proposed changes to the Welfare Programme it’s important to make it clear that cuts are necessary and vital to not only our economy but to British Culture; benefits must become ‘a hand up, not a hand out’.
In terms of unemployment benefit the best proposal I’ve heard in a long time is the idea of an ‘allowance cap’ for families, so that total benefits would be limited to around £500 per week for families with children. It’s horrendous that there are families out there that can make vastly more than the average wage, (or in some cases more than a bloody good wage) just because they have 10 kids. Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can’t afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free.

There are hundreds of families in the UK who earn over £60,000 in benefits without lifting a finger because they have so many kids (and for the rest of us that’s a wage of over £90,000 before tax!) Take the example of the Smiths (actual name, not a cover story), who earn around £95 grand a year for their 10 kids under 15 years old, live for free in a council house and even have their meals delivered to them. It’s a tough life when, as Mrs Smith put it "we are so hard up that we can only afford one Nintendo Wii between all the kids”. The family receive benefits totaling £44,954 a year. They also have a £950-a-week bed-and-breakfast deal where the council pays for breakfasts delivered to their home. This comes to £49,400, making a grand total of £94,354 a year. All in all around 190 families like this cost the taxpayer over £11 million a year!

People have to take responsibility for their own lives, and if they are struggling but working hard to help themselves then they should get help. But if they choose to have 10 kids they should take responsibility for that choice and look after them, not expect everyone else to foot the bill! Families who have never worked a day in their lives having 4 or 5 kids and the rest of us having 1 or 2 means its not long before we’re drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters that we pay to keep! Iain Duncan Smith’s cap proposal is spot on!
I doubt most real people, from any walk of life, would see anything wrong with that. Having kids purely to get a council house and some benefits cash has been a (sick) joke on the rest of us since I was a kid.


vsonix

3,858 posts

162 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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Cupramax said:
Indeed, if you want lots of kids, fund them yourself like the rest have to. State funded breeding while on benefits should not be an option.
Yeah but you need them for the army and to be traffic wardens and bailiffs

Tankrizzo

7,247 posts

192 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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Brave Fart said:
Excellent post Mark. We are at a point where The Left have decided to use social media to discredit anyone with whom they disagree - even if comments like Ben Bradley's are entirely legitimate. The Left wish to shut down discussion; whether it is Momentum, certain universities, Labour MP's like Angela Rayner, or the likes of Paul Mason (Momentum, again). Their tactics not only stink of censorship, they also remind me of the old Soviet Union and that should worry anyone that believes in free speech.
The irony is that today's Tory party has more in common with Blair's centrist Labour than with a genuinely "nasty" party.
I wouldn't even class most of these people from "The Left" - the lefties I know are reasonably intelligent and are able argue a point eruditely (even if I don't agree with them, I appreciate the way the argument is made). These people are just deluded,thick dheads in the same way that the EDL don't represent "The Right".

Zarco

17,705 posts

208 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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BlackLabel said:
What he actually said.

Ben Bradley in 2012 said:
No sector of the government spends more of taxpayers money than the Department of Work and Pensions, and as the House of Lords debates the proposed changes to the Welfare Programme it’s important to make it clear that cuts are necessary and vital to not only our economy but to British Culture; benefits must become ‘a hand up, not a hand out’.
In terms of unemployment benefit the best proposal I’ve heard in a long time is the idea of an ‘allowance cap’ for families, so that total benefits would be limited to around £500 per week for families with children. It’s horrendous that there are families out there that can make vastly more than the average wage, (or in some cases more than a bloody good wage) just because they have 10 kids. Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can’t afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free.

There are hundreds of families in the UK who earn over £60,000 in benefits without lifting a finger because they have so many kids (and for the rest of us that’s a wage of over £90,000 before tax!) Take the example of the Smiths (actual name, not a cover story), who earn around £95 grand a year for their 10 kids under 15 years old, live for free in a council house and even have their meals delivered to them. It’s a tough life when, as Mrs Smith put it "we are so hard up that we can only afford one Nintendo Wii between all the kids”. The family receive benefits totaling £44,954 a year. They also have a £950-a-week bed-and-breakfast deal where the council pays for breakfasts delivered to their home. This comes to £49,400, making a grand total of £94,354 a year. All in all around 190 families like this cost the taxpayer over £11 million a year!

People have to take responsibility for their own lives, and if they are struggling but working hard to help themselves then they should get help. But if they choose to have 10 kids they should take responsibility for that choice and look after them, not expect everyone else to foot the bill! Families who have never worked a day in their lives having 4 or 5 kids and the rest of us having 1 or 2 means its not long before we’re drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters that we pay to keep! Iain Duncan Smith’s cap proposal is spot on!
Hear hear!

havoc

29,928 posts

234 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
quotequote all
Dindoit said:
Moonhawk said:
If he'd suggested "condoms" instead of "vasectomies" - would people be equally outraged?

The end results is the same (i.e. fewer kids).
Selective eugenics via sterilisation is a little bit different to wearing a condom.
Vasectomies are reversible.

No sterilisation involved.

Rovinghawk

13,300 posts

157 months

Wednesday 17th January 2018
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Dindoit said:
Selective eugenics via sterilisation is a little bit different to wearing a condom.
Could you please show the bit where anyone has suggested selective eugenics? I had a good look but can't actually see it proposed.

oyster

12,577 posts

247 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
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Derek Smith said:
oyster said:
He's obviously not particularly numerate.

To spout all the venom for 0.005% of the total welfare budget. Why isn't his focus on the other 99.995%?

Within that 99.995% spend is heating allowances and bus passes for my parents generation. People who have profited from £500,000+ of tax free gains on their home. People who can afford to take 7 or 8 cruises a year. People who were able to retire at the same age as people 40 years ago, even though they will live 10 years longer.


Is that enough for them? Hell no.
How about we promise that their incomes are guaranteed to go up by inflation?

Not enough.... what if wage growth is higher than inflation?
Oh you can have that too.

And what if wage growth and inflation are very low?
OK, here's 2.5% increase then.

But what about those low interest rates? Please can we have some more......
OK, well since you don't get much for free already - here's some pensioner bonds.
So how much do bus passes - or to put it another way, subsidies for public transport - cost the government?

You seem to suggest that income from homes should be taxed, yet suggest that death duties are a good thing brings your generation out in hives (see fairly recent thread on the subject). How about those who bought shares? Or, perhaps, classic cars? Should their good sense be taxed?

Taking holidays, now there's a massive crime just waiting to be punished. I might well be of the same generation as your parents. If so then they, like me, might have had to forgo holidays, other than camping in the UK, for years. They, like me, might have had their first foreign holiday when in their 30s. When did you take your first?

Did they save up for the deposit on their house, like I did? Spending two years not spending my fiance's income? Cutting back on socialising that didn't including going around to someone's house?

There's lots of other whatabouts one could quote. I don't begrudge my kids' holidays in foreign climes I've only read about, their iPhones, iPads, games consoles, nights out and such. Perhaps I'm just not the jealous type.

Retiring at the same age as 40 years ago, eh? Neither of my grandfathers reached retirement age. My father died at 64, looking forward to spending time with his grandchildren, something denied him by the hours he had to work. I'm grateful to him and only wish that he had a few more years left when he could, perhaps, indulge in cruises, spending my inheritance.

If one should suggest that kids today should do what I did when I wanted to buy a house: spend nothing, go nowhere, walk to work, walking through a local park as an afternoon out with my fiance, for two years and it is suggested, with some justification, that it should be better for them than it was for me.

I was employed all but two weeks from the age of 16. I've paid taxes and without complaint. I knew they were there to support my parents' generation. I only wish my father could have gone on cruises after working from the age of 14, for fighting in a war for six years, for enduring booms and busts.

Try not being quite so jealous. If you want to improve your lot, then do so. Don't moan that you want to lower other people's.
Derek it's not about jealousy. It's about a sense of proportion.

The government spends an extraordinary amount of money on older people. They have to because old people vote in droves.

The proportion I'm talking about is why so much fuss is made of a few thousand edge cases for benefits, when there are millions of mainstream pensioners costing a hundred, perhaps a thousand times the amount.

zygalski

7,759 posts

144 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
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Elderly people who don't have private health care and are living in government subsidized accommodation should be humanely disposed of.
They are an insult to tax payers like myself and should have taken better precautions during their life so they could afford not to sponge off the state. They only have themselves to blame.
Just imagine the budget savings that could be made if anyone over 65 who is not funding their lifestyle privately is euthanised!
I tell you, some of these state pensioners in sheltered accommodation are living pretty lavish lifestyles.

FN2TypeR

7,091 posts

92 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
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zygalski said:
Elderly people who don't have private health care and are living in government subsidized accommodation should be humanely disposed of.
They are an insult to tax payers like myself and should have taken better precautions during their life so they could afford not to sponge off the state. They only have themselves to blame.
Just imagine the budget savings that could be made if anyone over 65 who is not funding their lifestyle privately is euthanised!
I tell you, some of these state pensioners in sheltered accommodation are living pretty lavish lifestyles.
Cripples too, if you can't dance then it should be game over IMO

BlackLabel

13,251 posts

122 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
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amusingduck

9,396 posts

135 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
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hairykrishna said:
Banging on about freak edge cases where a couple 'earns' a lot of benefits is an appeal to simpletons. The 190 families with 10+ kids cost 11 million, the Dept. of Work and Pensions budget is ~170 billion. It basically amounts to a rounding error. Rather than focusing on families in Daily Mail clickbait articles it's probably more sensible to worry about how we pay for all of our old people.

I wonder if we'll reach a peak of these 'public figure said something stupid on the internet a while back' stories? I can't help but think that as we get more and more people who had their teen years in the age of social media then basically everyone will have a questionable public statement attributable to them with enough digging.
11 million here, 11 million there, soon you're talking serious money!

If all of these freak edge cases were removed, I think you'd see an appreciable effect on the overall numbers. It works well for Mazda - attempting to save 1g on every single part adds up to appreciable weight savings across the whole car. More than could be achieved by focusing on the heaviest areas alone.


Guybrush

4,330 posts

205 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
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FN2TypeR said:
zygalski said:
Elderly people who don't have private health care and are living in government subsidized accommodation should be humanely disposed of.
They are an insult to tax payers like myself and should have taken better precautions during their life so they could afford not to sponge off the state. They only have themselves to blame.
Just imagine the budget savings that could be made if anyone over 65 who is not funding their lifestyle privately is euthanised!
I tell you, some of these state pensioners in sheltered accommodation are living pretty lavish lifestyles.
Cripples too, if you can't dance then it should be game over IMO
Creating a fictitious and extreme scenario to make a point is not really the mark of a mature argument.

zygalski

7,759 posts

144 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
quotequote all
Guybrush said:
FN2TypeR said:
zygalski said:
Elderly people who don't have private health care and are living in government subsidized accommodation should be humanely disposed of.
They are an insult to tax payers like myself and should have taken better precautions during their life so they could afford not to sponge off the state. They only have themselves to blame.
Just imagine the budget savings that could be made if anyone over 65 who is not funding their lifestyle privately is euthanised!
I tell you, some of these state pensioners in sheltered accommodation are living pretty lavish lifestyles.
Cripples too, if you can't dance then it should be game over IMO
Creating a fictitious and extreme scenario to make a point is not really the mark of a mature argument.
You really think that pensioners who take from the state should be allowed to live?

Harry Biscuit

11,752 posts

229 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
quotequote all
zygalski said:
Guybrush said:
FN2TypeR said:
zygalski said:
Elderly people who don't have private health care and are living in government subsidized accommodation should be humanely disposed of.
They are an insult to tax payers like myself and should have taken better precautions during their life so they could afford not to sponge off the state. They only have themselves to blame.
Just imagine the budget savings that could be made if anyone over 65 who is not funding their lifestyle privately is euthanised!
I tell you, some of these state pensioners in sheltered accommodation are living pretty lavish lifestyles.
Cripples too, if you can't dance then it should be game over IMO
Creating a fictitious and extreme scenario to make a point is not really the mark of a mature argument.
You really think that pensioners who take from the state should be allowed to live?
Are you one?

Dindoit

1,645 posts

93 months

Thursday 18th January 2018
quotequote all
Rovinghawk said:
Dindoit said:
Selective eugenics via sterilisation is a little bit different to wearing a condom.
Could you please show the bit where anyone has suggested selective eugenics? I had a good look but can't actually see it proposed.
"if you can’t afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free." Whether you agree with the sentiment or not it's proposing eugenics. Only people with enough money should be allowed children.

The state interfering with how many kids people are allowed to have is not something that sits comfortably with me. Whether the state is obliged to fund the decision is another matter entirely and that's the topic he should have stuck to. He was naive to write something using such emotive and controversial terms.

When you're planning a career in politics there surely must be a list of things to avoid. Maybe Ken Livingston can help write it?