THE BUDGET

[instant-classic]

Well i'm single no kids self employed and drive a gas guzzeling car and this budget is actually ok for me it's the first time ever but there you go, i know the VAT thing hits everybody and will drive prices on everything up but to be honest as soon as Labour dropped it you always knew it was going to go the other way to make up for it sometime.

As far as people coming into the country go well the illegal ones don't get houses etc but i do think we need to watch how many people we do let into the country just because well team UK is full and ran out of cash, Now my mum works at a school she is head of cleaning and has to make sure it's fully staffed sort out hours holidays make sure they have everything they need etc anyway my point is she should have 20 people, cleaners working between 2-8 hours a day she currently has 16 and 11 of them are foreign and a lot of those are working 2 jobs and paying a lot of tax because of it, she has been trying to fill the other 4 jobs for the last 8 weeks and can't, it ISN'T minimum wage the hours are slightly flexible if you want to say do 4 hours or 6 hours or if you want full time thats there too , if you talk to her English people just don't want to do it they would rather sign on or go on sick pay than clean up after kids and clean loo's

I also see the other point of view as i have a friend who's wife had to go into hospital for an operation, she waited around 16 months in pain, when i visited her they told me about the woman in the bed next to her who basically had the same op, only she was foreign and had only been in the country 3 months and none of her family worked, this drove my friend mad especially because he was trying to work look after the kids and visit his sick wife while the other ladies husband was just there all the time because he was on benefits.

My point is people who want to work and pay there way will we just have too many English and Foreign wasters that are happy to sit back and bleed the country dry and the way things are it's easy for them to do that hopefully this government will change all of that but i think it will come down to they have to because we have no money to support them now

[Lyn]

Well the Condem party done me no favours!

I'm a public sector worker, so pay freeze for 2 years despite increasing responsability, expectations and increased (and increasing) workload: unemployent going up = Increase in violent crime .Both increase our workload, not always in a way it should. Oh, and despite the fact we are a 'ringfenced' public service, we're still expected to economise, so no new staff, no training for current staff, no new equipment, no staff on overtime, so also increased stress and sickness for what understaffed, underequipped staff there are.

VAT rise affects us all, fuels not gone up, but you'll still pay an extra 3p a litre in VAT come January anyway.

I work full time, don't claim any benefits (never have), all I get is Family allowence for 2 kids....oh yes! That's frozen too!

Have to say I REALLY resent being made to pay for the mess the banks made! I don't have debts, don't own a credit card and live by the philosophy of 'If I want something, I save up for it'.... But I'm still paying for the National debt!

I'll carry on working (assuming they don't decide to start making frontline NHS staff redundant, because god-forbid they should prune out some overpaid, unecessary managers) and have to deal with being worse-off, but can't help thinking If I was. Single, immigrant mother with 6 kids, who refuses to work and take any responsibility for my own life, I'd be far better off than working for a living

[Sqwidge]

Lyn, you hit the nail on the head with your last sentence. I have nothing against single mothers, believe me, some of my friends are, and they work for a living. But my brother in laws ex girlfriend has 5 kids by 5 different fathers (the most recent one from my brother in law, don't ask, we're not happy!) he hasn't got to see his son yet and all her kids are approx 5 years apart, to ensure she is always receiving max income from the kids...she hasn't worked a day in her life and has lived off benefits the whole time. It bl**dy p*sses me off.

[Zion]

Totally agree...

Jett didn't understand when I asked who remembered the 70's when the country as a whole was going to rack and ruin

I never understood? I never even knew your statement was being aimed at me inparticular.

Could be worse....

who remembers the 70's!!!!!!!

sorry, but that gives me no indication thats aimed at me lol.. but to answer i don't remember the 70s i wasn't born, however i did learn about Margaret Thatcher during geography as what she done affected the trade industry.

[Lyn]

I remember the Thatcher era. My dad lost his job and spent years unemployed between sporadic and poorly-paid jobs. He was a steelworker you see, skilled in what he did from leaving school, but skills that didn't traslate to any other profession. My mum was a full-time mum to three of us, as mums were back in the 70's and we grew up skint! The humiliation of accompanying my dad to the DHSS to sign on made me swear I would never willingly put myself in that situation. I went to uni full time when I had kids and also worked as a bank-nurse to pay my way through it. My hubby got made redundant after 18 years in the steelworks when our son was born. Fortunately, he was a skilled driver of cranes, forklifts etc, so after a couple of false starts, he's now in a fairly secure and reasonably paid job with ASDA (US owned and bouyant so far). Certainly that little lot taught me a lot about work, self-respect and being careful. I know there are genuine people out there in bad situations through no fault of there own, but there's a whole lot more happy to sit on their lazy backsides letting the rest of us keep them in special-brew and bensons whilst simultaniously paying off the nations debt!

[Lil Miss Bump]

know there are genuine people out there in bad situations through no fault of there own, but there's a whole lot more happy to sit on their lazy backsides letting the rest of us keep them in special-brew and bensons whilst simultaniously paying off the nations debt!

well said lyn xxx

[raindog]

I'll carry on working (assuming they don't decide to start making frontline NHS staff redundant, because god-forbid they should prune out some overpaid, unecessary managers)

I know exactly what you mean Lyn. I worked for 40 years as a local authority youth worker working with young drug users, gang members, criminals etc etc. and I would often have to attend meetings where 15-20 middle-class managers from a variety of different departments would make decisions about my work. These pratts all earned twice as much as me and none of them actually had a clue about the work I did, none of them lived in the area and none of them understood the people who lived there. Without those managers, the only difference would have been that more work got done as I wouldn't have had to fill in constant monitoring forms and write monthly reports.

A good example of their cluelessness was when one of my projects was berated for not making contact with enough Pakistani muslim young people. The area I was working in was 80% white, 19% black and 1% Asian (primarily Indian). Because my project was focussed on gang membership in the area (the only gangs were black), the majority of young people I worked with were black. To work with muslim kids I would have had to bus them in to the area, but because we weren't reaching our "targets" we got criticised.

I imagine the NHS and other public services are similarly overloaded with useless tiers of management. Mind you, I don't know if things have changed much, but back in the '60's before I went to Uni, I worked in private industry and the situation was exactly the same there. Loads of managers doing nothing and a few workers slogging their guts out. Nothing really changes!

Mick

[Lyn]

Not changed at all Mick. Huge workload and a call handling system brought in a couple of years ago that means a MASSIVE amount of calls that an ambulance crew should not be sent to and don't have the training to deal with, done by the same amount of frontline staff. Because it's all target driven and we just can't meet those targets, those multiple tiers of managment spend their time beating us with sticks for 'our' failure.

We're by no means alone. It goes right across the board and every agency we have any involvement with is in the same boat: Police are way overstretched, you can't get a crisis team to visit s mental health patient unless they agree to go and sit on A&E for several hrs (and we can't MAKE them go), you can't find a respite bed for the poor old girl who's struggling to cope at home, or arrange for carers to come in, so she gets taken off to A&E, wrong and unfair. We have one person at the moment who's had 42 ambulances at his door in a space of 7 weeks, because he wants drugs and we can do nothing about it. If he requests an ambulance, we have to send one! Not one of those managers has the guts to override the system and tell him 'NO' (he's banned from A&E). The trouble is that him and many more like him know how to work the system. They know the 'magic words' that trigger the highest grade response, so each time they call, it's potentially another tick in the 'fail' box because we didn't get there in 8 minutes, despite our protests that it's not a job where we should be risking life and limb to get there and actually shouldn't be going at all!.......Frustrating? You bet!!

[Sqwidge]

Lyn, i'm always hearing from mike about the overstretching in the police/ambulance...and the people who always ring up know the trigger words and it's sick...someone died recently because this girl said she had taken an overdose and wouldn't fess up to the fact she hadn't, she had wasted time that they could have spent getting to the guy who died - both the police and ambulance.

[Lyn]

It's a game they play . They get us and/or the police there and their sole aim is to keep us there for as long as possible. It's all about attention and some will even say "oh you shouldn't be here, you should be going to someone who needs you".....takes a LOT of self-control not to say "your bang right!". Yet, you say your leaving, because your having your time wasted, and then you get " I'll kill myself" (or the really nice ones get nasty at this point!)

I'm doing a lot of my work single-handed on a response car now. One of the reasons is that after what I've gone through personally over the last few months, I'm really struggling to deal with this type of job and I've lost the ability to leave it at work at the end of the shift. It cuts me to the quick! It's filtered out to some extent for lone workers. Downside is I now see the flipside. I'm the car responder with the really poorly patient who can't get a crew to take them to hospital, maybe because they are spending an hour, two hrs, with just that type of call (and all it's associated form-filling)

[Sqwidge]

it's ridic Lyn...i think the ambulance driver turned round and said to her "someone has died because you kept us here wasting our time" (she's a 'known' person - like you i wonder why they don't just say f it and not send anyone...) and i don't blame the guy, they were all furious...

[Alex T]

We had some kid ran over outside our house during half term, took the responder 30 mins to get here - he admitted he was else where having his time wasted! But then the same thing happened when the ambulance eventually arrived 53 minutes after the initial call.

To be fair they did a cracking job once they arrived, but some people ( the nosey ones) were very abusive to them, I was gob smacked! I can now see why my dad decided to reture early from the ambulances!

[katie mc]

well this is obviously a touchy subject for everyone.

***content removed***

hopefully with a bit of luck conservatives should sort this country out but i very much doubt it its a right bloody mess lol.