Will the chancellor cane house owners in the budget?

[Sausage King]

You clearly have no idea about how the world works.

A tax break would reduce strain but would not be attractive enough for everyone to leave the NHS.

[Sausage King]

This is a school boy error.

You do not train Midwives overnight but overnight you do persuade them back into the profession by offering market levels of remuneration.

[Sausage King]

Rubbish. 99% of the time the standards are enhanced.

Lovely leftie notion.

No you don't, you pay the standard prescription charge. If the NHS happens to have badly organised the prescription proceedures than its down to them. Occassionally in the past I've had a private prescription and it's been cheaper.

[Sausage King]

Presumably when you realise that your left rubbish doesn't hold any water you decide to "snip drivel" because you have no counter arguement.

[IMM]

I have a relative who is a midwife fro the NHS, and she is paid fine. Never appears short of money and take very expensive hols, etc. If the private sector expanded and required midwives they would temp the existing widwives, who are not in a free market of pay. You don't get it do you?

[IMM]

< snip drivel >

Please use some logic.

[IMM]

Brainwashed illogical drivel, is drivel and worth of taking stock of. Just like what you come out with.

[IMM]

< snip drivel, when there is firm evidence to prove otherwise. >

[IMM]

You clearly have no objectivity, being brainwashed by right wing views that all private is brill, when that clearly is not the case.

Look at the big picture. Find out who own and runs the Uk, and for whose benefit, which is not you and me. Read Who Runs Britain by Paxman and Who Own Britain by Cahill. Understand them and then you will see a ruling class of people who think they have the almighty right to rule, or heavily influence matters and live the life of Riley to boot, while excluding others (you and me). Voting Tory is shafting yourself, your family and friends.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yo sausage. You wandered in here from UK-lea?

[IMM]

Drivel is just that! Plain drivel with no brain attached to it.

[Mike Mitchell]

Obviously not enough to entice more into the profession.

Private medical care is a misnomer. The correct term is: Let us balls up the simplest operation because we know the NHS will bail us out as the hozzie of last resort.

Because that is what striking is all about - to improve one's lot when all other negotiations have failed. Would you make strikes illegal? Maggie Thatcher tried very hard to do so and look where it got her! If you don't want to make strikes illegal, then logically you must support striking workers.

Good. That includes the freedom NOT to work, yes?

Well, stap me if I don't roll about laughing, but could that be because they were not being offered high-paid jobs at higher pay?

Big of you!

...ah, slavery! Let's shed a tear.

Can you spell g-r-e-e-d? Can you understand f-a-i-r p-l-a-y? Just what added value does one man bring to the business by earning fifty, yes FIFTY times the rate of the low-paid worker? Doesn't that strike you as a massive imbalance which is completely unfair and foments digust and loathing in the workforce, which inevitably will eventually go out on strike to get the fair play it deserves? And who picks up the tab for the income support which helps low-paid families to get by when they are faced with the excessive rises in stealth taxes? That's right, the people earning just a bit more. Certainly not upper management. Do you think that people like Crozier would leave the country if they had to pay just a little bit more tax on their vast earnings? Do you think if they did that Britain would have no other fairer-minded managers willing to occupy key posts for less?

So if it's not wrong, why the pejorative "typical"? Sounds like you're on the right, but I won't hold that against you.

It's not a free market! It is rigged in favour of the big corporations. What is free about Tesco, ADSA, and Sainsbury's to decimate the High Streets of Britain, force nearly all food shopping to be undertaken by car, lobby for Sunday opening and ruin the one day off a week, and turn Britain into a 24/7 consumer society? Anyone in their right mind would see that British society has become more hectic and less caring over the past ten years, and that is because we work the longest hours in Europe often for a pittance. The corporations, aided and abetted by their Government lackeys, are to blame for the sorry state in which we live.

I'm not anything except an ordinary member of the public who likes some things from Labour, others from the Tories, but will vote Liberal Democrat. If you had a referendum tomorrow, what do you think the proportion would be of those supporting a reduction in high earnings to benefit low-paid workers or employ more midwives?

How else will any advance be achieved? You must think that employers, the Government, big corporations will suddenly be assailed by an attack of guilt! How do you negotiate an advance from £9,000 to, say, £12,000 (a minmally reasonable wage) if the employer simply tells you to eff off? Employers are cheating the better paid by relying on their tax take to pay for income support, whereas if the employers could only, just possibly, stop feathering their own nests quite so luxuriously, there'd be more to pay the low-paid workers and less income support required. So it comes down to greed, pure and simple, on the part of corporations, mainly the larger ones. Family businesses are somewhat different because the boss knows the workers personally and he, the boss, has a local reputation to maintain. But once coporations get so large that the management starts occupying the ivory towers, any connection to the actual workforce, without which the whole business would be screwed, is lost.

Well, I do. I am 58 and I'm still waiting for Britain to become anything like a decent country, having lived for many years abroad.

Apathy. Wait until the vast mountains of personal debt, encouraged by the big four banks, come crashing down and you will see the public in revolt that will make the poll tax seem like a vicar's tea party. Ordinary people don't seem to realise that they are going to LOSE THEIR HOUSES! In their thousands. But that's okay if one's been "earning" £500 grand and managed to save a few bob.

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

That is a thoroughly obnoxious suggestion as it is tantamount to supporting theft. The third world, mainly, will have sacrificed a good deal in order to train nurses presumably for their own needs, and Britain, that once great colonial paragon, then poaches them! This is fair? No, it bloody well is not! Anyone who suggests this course of action needs a lesson in removing the beam from his own eye first.

Them, and low wages. But also a lack of any will to achieve in the way we in Britain stumble from one year to the next, from one decade to the next. We have been stumbling along, almost since the end of World War II. I think we are a nation which does not like thinking. We are too content to wallow in an inferior quality of life and make it seem better by buying lots of booze and drugs. We probably don't want to become midwives, because, well, babies are messy little things, aren't they? All covered in blood and gore when they pop out! Who wants to do something useful when it's far easier to work in a call centre or stack tins of beans in Tesco's? It's our attitude to life that is the problem. We are without ambition. And all the while we have the "insurance policy" of the third world to call upon to do the jobs don't want to do, we'll be okay, won't we, won't we...?

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

At least you didn't snip it!

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

And do you really believe that everyone in an organisation that makes thousands of pounds a minute is being handsomely rewarded? If not, why not? They all contribute, don't they? At least Bill Gates made millionaires out of tea ladies, even though his software is full of holes.

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

What is the justification for this? Do shareholders plant wheat or rice? Do shareholders weld or build? No, they prefer to exploit the workers, and then pay them a pittance, and then have the gall to grumble when the workers revolt.

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

The self-employed? How come thousands of small businesses can provide a useful service, both to their customers and themselves, with no shareholders involved?

MM

[Mal]

So it's fair and reasonable for the workers of Britain to want to improve their lot, by striking or whatever, and but unfair for a foreigner to do the same by moving to somewhere they can get better pay and conditions?

I suggest you take a long hard look at the rest of your series of ridiculous posts too, hypocrite.

Mal

[Tony Bryer]

But Labour are. The problem is in ensuring that the money goes into "front line services" rather than non or inessential jobs. I suspect that Gordon Brown is as outraged as the Daily Mail by some of the jobs that appear in the Guardian public sector ads. When I worked for a LA BCO jobs would be kept empty for months at a time whilst Personnel and Management Services relentlessly grew.

[Mike Mitchell]

Correct. The people will decide. And then the politicians will take note, as did the Tories in 1997, even though they were well past their best before date in 1992.

Okay, then. Try t-h-e-f-t. Understand that? Taking something that is not rightfully yours. With six slices in a pie, the greedy person always wants TWO slices, even if it means that someone gets NO slice. It's all the same to the greedy person. Two slices seem totally fair. Of course, most of us know different, as did our mothers if we had had the benefit of a good and decent upbringing.

You don't pay wages and salaries from profit! Profit is what you have left after all your other outgoings! Goodness me, no wonder the UK has so much personal debt! No wonder the managers pull the wool over our eyes!

What, then, is the point of advertising if not to influence consumers? Advertisers obviously feel they have the right to persuade people to run their lives differently, don't they? Curiously, the difference sought always involves money passing one way - from the consumer to the company doing the advertising! Funny, that.

If it's in Gordon's swag bag, then there's more chance of it being used to benefit those in society who need it more. As long as the avaricious keep it all to themselves, there's NO chance! Also, it sends a valuable lesson to the greedy bastards around us: Stop it and we will not be so hard on you next time!

Oh, dear! Nothing left in the box marked "adult debate", then! Of course, if your ammunition's got wet or you've run out, the best thing you could do is get it over with and succumb to the stronger argument. The fair-minded will always understand the cross you had to bear before you ran out of ideas!

MM