Gripe of the day - What is yours?

[svenrico]

Originally Posted by MrMessy

Down at my Daughters in London and cannot believe the amount of people that openly smoke cannabis including car drivers! Also cyclists and scooter riders that run red lights at crossings and nearly run you over, must be terrible for visually impaired people.

We can only hope they get caught and banned from driving then.

[Sir Trev]

Originally Posted by Kenzie

What car was it Trev? Trim can be a pain sometimes.

Sent from my F5321 using Tapatalk

Focus estate. Called the garage today and they're going to get the fitter they outsourced the job to to come take a look as he's local to me. Fingers crossed.


As to the ever present stink of Devil's Lettuce - try walking around Brighton. Not just the more bohemian student-y areas either. A kid cycled past me the other day here in Wycombe too with a very pungent spliff on the go, just glaring at me as if daring me to say something, unless he had paranoia kicking in and I misread it...

[Seeker]

Social Care. I'm at an age where I have to think about future Social Care, my kids are in the US and my Dad died from dementia. I was following how my MP voted last night bearing in mind that the average Cleethorpes house price is £145k. I doubt that many meggies (weird name that Cleethorpes people call themselves) have £86k of savings which means they will have to sell their houses if social care is needed. This new Bill was supposed to prevent that but the Tories changed it at the last minute.

Naturally, I would expect Martin Vickers (MP-Con), my MP, to vote against or at least abstain. Nope, true to form, my yes-man representive voted with the party. I emailed him to let him know how I felt and asked him how he felt he was representing his constituents. He won't answer, he never does, he has a 10k vote majority why should he care?

[Craig380]

Nye Bevan proved correct, yet again.

[embee]

Originally Posted by Seeker

..... This new Bill was supposed to prevent that but the Tories changed it at the last minute.
......

I know it is a difficult issue, and there is a wide inequality in the country.

However, at the risk of being controversial, I don't believe that the amount someone is charged for a service should have any direct link to their capital or savings amount. The idea of having to pay a certain percentage of your wealth is a bit odd. When you go into the supermarket they don't ask you what your house is worth and what your savings are before working out the bill.
The total amount someone is expected to pay for care over their lifetime may well be a reasonable approach, I don't really know, but wealth taxes are highly contentious.
If I have savings, should HMRC be able to just take as much of it as they want? Taxing income of whatever source is fine in principle, but ownership tax is iniquitous IMO.
You'll probably find that few people in £500k houses actually have the odd £86k sitting around, so they'd probably also have to sell up. Much of this tied up capital has come from property price inflation, my house is worth about 10x what I paid for it 35yrs ago, that doesn't mean I have loads of cash sitting about, property valuation is just a number on paper until you actually realise it. That's the stupidity of proposals to re-band property for council tax because values have gone up, it was a band D in 1991 and it still is the same band D house.

[Luckypants]

Its a decent argument that I agree with broadly. I don't see what the monetary value of your home has to do with ability to pay. Ask any poor pensioner still living in the family home they brought the family up in, now trying to pay council tax on it because they are deemed 'wealthy'. The caveat I would place on this is that if someone with a valuable home needs to pay for care, taking a 'Lifetime mortgage' on the property will easily pay the care cost of £80000 and leave a lot left for a bequest or providing further income. The 'poor person' whose home is worth much less will lose all the value they have in their home, leaving nothing to bequeath or gain an income. Of course, those able to will pass property along to their heirs long before it will be used in calculations for 'wealth', so it will be the 'poor people' who pay for care and not the wealthy.

I do see this as another way for their rich chums to benefit and the rest of us to pay for it.

[Seeker]

Originally Posted by embee

I know it is a difficult issue, and there is a wide inequality in the country.

This is the nub of the issue. Following swiftly along from Northern Powerhouse we have Levelling Up which leads us on to the Red Wall - the once safe Labour seats that switched to Conservative.

The Red Wall Tories want to maintain their seats so when Social Care means many northern people will have to sell their homes, bearing in mind that life expectancy is lower in the north too, constituents will question their voting choices.

On top of this was yet another promise that no one will have to sell their homes to pay for social care. As we have seen several times recently a Conservative Party promise doesn't seem very durable.

The CBI questioned yesterday the reliance of this government for private industry to fix everything (levelling up and climate change) and, as they pointed out - government is still needed because industry cannot do it alone.

To balance the UK North/South economy would cost a similar amount to the re-unification of Germany (one economist predicted), plainly, that is not going to happen, it's taken 30 or 40 years to reach this point.

However, if the Red Wall Tories could turn around an say: "we've saved your homes from being sold for social care!", we'd all sing Kum ba Yah around the campfire (since the gas has been shut off ) in the north.

Is it fair? No. But take transport; the south has more money spent on it per head now which isn't fair either (£903 versus £376 in 2019). The problem is that London generates most of the UK income and who wants to risk damaging the cash cow?

I think Levelling Up will just prove to be another meaningless slogan. The Social Care bill will, perhaps, be amended by the House of Lords to include its original protections, go back to the Commons where their amendments will be stripped out and that will be that. The Bill passed by 26 votes, bearing in mind that Boris has an 80 seat majority.

[embee]

As long as it doesn't degenerate into an argument based on envy, that no-one should be allowed to have more than anyone else, which is what it boils down to. That's essentially an argument for communism.
If one person works, invests, saves, and ends up with capital or money, we shouldn't argue that they can't be allowed to have it and even pass it on to their children just because someone else doesn't have the wealth.
Welfare and benefits already mean that folk with little resource and income get supported/subsidised (in effect) by those who do have resources, it's not as if there isn't some degree of redistribution via taxes and benefits. It may not be ideal nor working fairly, but the system is there in principle.

There is also a danger that this £86k issue is used to hide the real problem, which is the funding and management of social care.

[Bibio]

owning a home is an asset and assets are wealth.

its a known fact that if you live on your own you are put in a care home then the council (social work) sell your house to pay for the care. the care prices vary widely and an average is £1500 a week... yes you read right. in Scotland it all started when holyrood said they had found an extra few hundred million to pump into the NHS. what they actually done was turned the care into private sector.

the local councils now have to foot the bill for those that dont have any assets. this in turn is driving council tax up.

the other thing is is you do have a lot of assets that put you in a swanky care home at £3000 a week until the money runs out then transfer you to a shizz hole to rot away.

my advice is spend spend spend before you retire. if you have already retired then spend even more.

if your poor your feked........ and its off to the scumbox along side all the shizz a pizz residents.

[Craig380]

Bloody awful SV 'mudguards.' Roads were wet for 10 miles out of my 90-odd mile ride today and the bike was plastered with crud afterwards.

It's at times like this I think of Seeker's Biggest Mudflap In The World.