Tuesday, Apr 13, 2010
Recession? What recession?
Mail: Race relations chief Trevor Phillips spent over £6,000 on state credit card
No doubt we'll have the usual holier than thou "its the Mail" comments but this exemplifies how we are being pooped on by the elite.
Posted by mr g @ 07:12 PM (918 views) Add Comment
36 Comments
- If you do not have an admin password leave the password field blank.
- If you would like to request a password allowing you to add comments and blog news articles without needing each one approved manually, send an e-mail to the webmaster.
- Your email address is required so we can verify that the comment is genuine. It will not be posted anywhere on the site, will be stored confidentially by us and never given out to any third party.
- Please note that any viewpoints published here as comments are user's views and not the views of HousePriceCrash.co.uk.
- Please adhere to the Guidelines
1. mr g said...
Before some smart ar*e says it happens in the private sector, of course it does but not at the expense of the taxpayer.
2. mark wadsworth said...
What Mr G says.
TP heads up another completely pointless, hugely expensive and counter-productive quango. Shut 'em all down, say I.
3. braindeed said...
Major Whine @2 said....
TP heads up another completely pointless, hugely expensive and counter-productive quango. Shut 'em all down, say I
Quangos are cheaper than real civil servants, and notwithstanding the Daily hateMail, I know of several that are good value for money.
Not a popular opinion though, I know.
4. letthemfall said...
Spoken like a true Ukipper candidate mark wadsworth. Are you going to be on telly?
If it happens in the private sector, mr g, it's still at somebody's expense, and not the non-taxpayer's in particular.
5. Aunt Flo said...
"Mr Phillips' biggest expenses claim was for £253.57,....."
Scandalous!!
6. Fraccy said...
Why does the government use credit rather than debit cards?
7. enuii said...
I spend money on mine but I pay it off with money thats earned, simples.
8. Crunchy said...
Did someone mention UKIP? :)
Someone needs to keep things in check.
9. tom101 said...
Good on him. UK taxpayers can't be a*sed to demonstrate so they deserve what they get.
British apathy sickens me now more than ever. Put simply if you have kids, (and give a s*it about them in any way) sacrifices need to be made.
UKIP = Legitimate version of BNP
10. timmy t said...
mr g said...Before some smart ar*e says it happens in the private sector, of course it does but not at the expense of the taxpayer.
What about all the irresponsible borrowers defaulting on their credit cards, knowing the banks will write it off, and pass the costs on to the prudent, aka taxpayers. No doubt they are reading this and cursing. They want to take a look in the mirror.
11. tenant super said...
I am sure the race relations people do lots of good work like extending the ethnic categories in ethnic monitering forms to include "any other mixed background" category only for horrid potential UKIP voters like me to either ignore the question or just describe myself as a half-caste (a term I happily grew up with not realising its historic pejorative context) to wind them up.
Truth is, many of us from ethnic minorities/ dual heritage are fed up with positive discrimination in large organisations even though we do take advantage sometimes. It makes a person wonder if their achievements such as earning a place at a prestigious university are really through their own endeavours or did positive discrimination play a part. Smaller companies may shy away from employing you because you're seen as a potential tribunal, best avoided in the first place. Some ethnic minorities are genuinely disadvantaged but much of this is correlation with other indicators of deprivation and the way we go about dealing with this is ineffective and often unfair.
Then you have high profile people from black or asian backgrounds like this guy or expense fiddling Pola Uddin who chairs the ethnic minority women's taskforce who do not represent the mainstream views of most ethnic minorities and are just on the make. Of course race is irrelevant in setting the moral bar... I am not suggesting they are any worse than white expense-fiddling public servants.
But I agree with MW... shut the commission down and clamp down on all abuses of expenses.
12. mr g said...
@TT "What about all the irresponsible borrowers defaulting on their credit cards, knowing the banks will write it off, and pass the costs on to the prudent, aka taxpayers"
IMO these people are no different to Phillips but as Tom101 says "UK taxpayers can't be a*sed to demonstrate so they deserve what they get." and if they do complain, they're branded as right wing Mail /Express reading cranks.
Also @Tom101: "UKIP = Legitimate version of BNP"
So what's wrong with having an open debate about immigration instead of sweeping it under the carpet or burying our heads in the sand like the political elites do?
I couldn't care less about whether immigration is from Eastern Europe, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent or about an immigrant's race, colour or creed, it should be stopped.
Enough is enough, we simply have too many people in this small island to house, feed, educate and employ.
Add to this, the destruction of British culture and it's time to say stop. If you want proof of the latter, come to West Yorkshire and see places like Bradford, Dewsbury and Batley.
And the relevance to HPC? I hear you ask.
Many contributors to HPC moan about the shortage of housing, well uncontrolled immigration is a major reason.
13. tenant super said...
Ultimately, linking MWs UKIP sympathies with his suggestion that an ineffective and expensive quango should close is an obvious post hoc logical fallacy. Most here would no that beyond reasonable doubt, his comment would have been the same if it were the Lacor Labeling quango or a sports quango.
Whilst I agree with you Mr G, perhaps our forays into this distraction about race relations, immigration and UKIP are giving this non-sequitur traction it does not deserve. There is no point engaging with faulty reasoning as though it were not faulty.
14. mark wadsworth said...
Re what TS says, the wife (distinctly non-white) and I took our little boy to the hospital when he was small because he had a rash or something, and before they started asking about the symptoms etc they made us fill in this long form explaining where we lived and whether we were married and so on, even the receptionist got bored and when it got to the 'Ethnicity' box she just looked at me and looked at the little boy (quite pale, apart from the rash) and just ticked "White British".
Idiot.
The little boy was sitting on his mum's knee at the time, or did the receptionist assume that my wife was an au pair or something? I had form fatigue as well so I let is pass.
15. tenant super said...
* I did of course mean, "Most here would know (not no) that beyond reasonable doubt..." My concentration is suffering severely today from lack of sleep last night!
16. tenant super said...
I understand when ethnic monitoring is essential for medical reasons like screening for Tay Sachs or sickle cell but a lot of the time I just don't see the point and most people find this irritating. I know a guy who called his local NHS helpline to locate an emergency dentist. Halfway through being subjected to a list of questions whilst in severe pain, when asked his ethnic group he snapped "does it really matter if I am a pygmy or a negroid with a disgorged molar, is there a local dentist open on a bank holiday or not?'
Another friend when heavily pregnant opened her door to the midwife who had called for a blood sample to carry out some antenatal tests. When she complained that she had already had samples taken, the midwife said they now wanted to screen for sickle cell. When she protested that she was a caucasian woman so this should not be necessary the reply was "But you may have had sexual intercourse with a man of black african or carribean origin who is the father of your baby".
"But I haven't"
"But you might have"
"But I really haven't"
and so the conversation went on until she relented!
17. tom101 said...
I think immigration is just a distraction used often by the media. It sells brilliantly. I don't have many good things to say about the UK anymore but London is a very good example of where people from different backgrounds get on. I guess the north is different.
Debate is definitely essential on this topic. However, these issues can so easily be hijacked by the Ministry of Information (aka our every day press) and political parties and twisted to gain votes and make £$£$ respectively. Statistical wizzardry mean that 'facts' are taken as gospel. Remember your average sheeple believes everything it reads.
18. rumble said...
"If it happens in the private sector, mr g, it's still at somebody's expense"
But it is that somebody's choice.
19. tom101 said...
I think immigration is just a distraction used often by the media. It sells brilliantly. I don't have many good things to say about the UK anymore but London is a very good example of where people from different backgrounds get on. I guess the north is different.
Debate is definitely essential on this topic. However, these issues can so easily be hijacked by the Ministry of Information (aka our every day press) and political parties and twisted to gain votes and make £$£$ respectively. Statistical wizzardry mean that 'facts' are taken as gospel. Remember your average sheeple believes everything it reads.
20. letthemfall said...
rumble: "But it is that somebody's choice."
That is the fallacy at the heart of the private good/public bad argument. We have to pay our taxes and in general we have to buy goods from the private sector (food, furniture, consumables, etc) with no idea of profit margins or production costs. How much does expensive advertising add to the cost of an item, the first-class subsidised train travel of certain staff, the fancy company headquarters. We pay for all that through prices; the only way you can avoid it is to buy nothing, which is a daft proposition.
21. mr g said...
@Tom101 "I don't have many good things to say about the UK anymore but London is a very good example of where people from different backgrounds get on. I guess the north is different."
That is exactly the point I am trying to get across.
The political elites are all London centric and therefore base their theories on what they see in the capital.
The foot soldiers (MP's) representing the places I referred to earlier, merely toe the party line and keep quiet in order to keep their lucrative jobs or in some cases, including Jack Straw in Blackburn, depend heavily on the ethnic vote to retain their seat therefore they are bound to paint a picture of everything being fine when in fact it's anything but.
It's time that our lords and masters woke up to this problem and instigated a honest, open debate about the subject.
No one has challenged my comment, "Enough is enough, we simply have too many people in this small island to house, feed, educate and employ"
This is an inescapable fact which anyone with the slightest modicum of intelligence should be capable of understanding.
22. rumble said...
"That is the fallacy at the heart of the private good/public bad argument.....the only way you can avoid it is to buy nothing, which is a daft proposition."
-- You don't buy nothing, you buy what you want, you spend your money on services you use, and others spend their money on the services they use.
Choice is not equal to nothing.
23. rumble said...
No one has challenged my comment, "Enough is enough, we simply have too many people in this small island to house, feed, educate and employ"
Righty ho... There is no housing shortage, approximately half a million empty homes, and plenty of land to build on (ref Wadsworths past comments), the food is mostly imported from abroad, the education is already cr'p, and you don't need a job if you own a house.
24. rumble said...
Actually, the last two points fix each other - employ more teachers to do more educating.
25. letthemfall said...
Except you will not usually know which choice to make.
26. mr g said...
@Rumble
Do you or don't you accept that the UK is overcrowded?
I'm not pushing a racist agenda here by the way, I couldn't give a tinker's f*rt about a person's race, colour or creed.
27. rumble said...
London's hell. Scotland's great. The UK is 51st, there's a way to go yet.
Racist agendas are acceptable as long as they're Orwellian double-speak positive discrimination.
28. rumble said...
"Except you will not usually know which choice to make."
Maybe you could phone a friend?
29. tenant super said...
Mr G, It depends on how you define overcrowded. With all the empty properties, it isn't clear cut. In terms of land, I heard recently that only 0.4% of the greenbelt is needed to build a million new homes!
The tube is overcrowded in rush hour. In my borough, overall, the schools are not overcrowded but the popular schools are. Why are Dulwich schools overcrowded? Cos people like me don't want to send our children to the school half a mile down the road to Peckham where all the kids are from deprived backgrounds and half do not have English as their first language. So it would be disingenous of me to claim I don't care about race. I don't care about race in itself but I want my children to go to school with other children who speak English well and who are well-behaved because they come from homes with boundaries and stability. To be honest with you though, the Dulwich yummy mummies annoy me just as much with their homogeneous cosseted offsping so we're opting for Irish boarding schools at secondary level.
Anyway, I don't think the UK is overcrowded in a strict sense but services are overcrowded and are being compromised by the type of immigration we're seeing.
30. tom101 said...
Its not possible to prevent migration into UK or around the World for that matter. Not without shutting off trade entirely. Even if UKIP or a more moderate party like the BNP got into power and said "Right thats enough" how would they enforce this without the result being genocide?
Country boarders are becomming less and less relevant. Perhaps, we should aknowledge that an Indian, chinese, african or eastern european person / human (i.e just the same as us) has a right to live in the UK just as much as a 'national' of that country? No strings.
If this is to much to bear and hard to stomach as i suspect it is, we will have to make their countries of origin safer and appealing so they will remain there.
I'm guessing the next argument will be...... "but it's not our responsibility to fix their problems...." .......No course it isn't.....
31. mr g said...
"I'm guessing the next argument will be" etc
Good, at least we agree that charity should begin at home.
"Right thats enough" how would they enforce this without the result being genocide?"
I'm not advocating kicking people out of the UK, simply stop further immigration.
This country is overcrowded in the urban areas and where there is space it is usually far removed from the centres of employment, what's the point in building in say Devon when there are insufficient jobs?
32. tenant super said...
If you fly out of England towards Continental Europe you will see that there is plenty of space in the London suburbs and SE beyond but of course we would need to build associated infrastructure.
My take on immigration is that you enforce the 'first safe country' rule for asylum seekers and the 'three months with no work and you're out' rule for those in the EU, and put harsh restrictions on welfare, the problem will start to lessen. Qualifying residency in a borough for social housing residency should be a minimum of 3 years with a minimum residency period in the UK of 16 years. This would mean that we would need to scrap the Human Rights Act (currently, immigrants with children are often given housing under human rights laws with human rights lawyers happily riding the legal aid gravy train). I would also have long term work visas and make the qualifying criteria for citizenship much higher. One of the problems is that anyone who works here for a few years is almost always able to aquire citizenship.
For those outside the EU I wouldn't want a total stop on immigration. Five years ago I had a ruptured cerebral aneurysm which is a medical emergency which kills half of its victims and leaves a significant proportion of the survivors disabled. The extent of my recovery is down in part to the fact that I was treated by the world's best neuroradiologist who is South African but performs pioneering keyhole surgery all over the UK on the NHS and in private hospitals. The problem is when immigration rules state you can only fill a job like his when there is no suitable candidate here. But I would rather have the best candidate from a global pool of specialists rather than the best from the limited pool of UK or European specialists.
So for highly specialised science, medical, academic and tech roles I would give the companies the freedom to recruit globally.
33. mark wadsworth said...
What Rumble says at 23 and 24. This whole mass immigration is a cultural issue, not a space or resources issue. I'm all in favour of letting the nice ones in who work and fit in and contribute and not the others (you know who I mean).
34. tenant super said...
... of course. I would have little trouble sending my children to a school with 80% immigrant children if they were South Africans, Aussies & Kiwis, Irish, Swedes...
35. mr g said...
TS@34 "I would have little trouble sending my children to a school with 80% immigrant children if they were South Africans, Aussies & Kiwis, Irish, Swedes..."
That sounds like a form of "nimbyism" to me.
Be honest, you wouldn't want your children in some of the schools in Bradford or Dewsbury where 80% plus of the pupils are Muslim and don't have English as their first language.
There, I've used the "M" word and I'll be accused of Islamophobia.
36. tenant super said...
Yes it is a form of Nimbyism. That's what I'm saying ... it isn't race or nationality that I have an issue with but background and language therefore certain nationalities being culturally and linguistically close to ours integrate seamlessly.
You are absolutely right I would not send my children to schools in Bradford, Dewsbury, Peckam... If that were the only option I'd sooner give up work and home educate them and I have no difficulty being honest about that because unlike a politician sending their children to good schools, I have no reason to lie... I don't care what other people think about me, never have and more than likely never will!