iamnumerate

True it can hurt people. I am not an apologist for Amazon, I am just pointing out that if Amazon pays more tax then the money has to come from a real person's pocket.

It isn't semantic games. If company x pays more tax then either its shareholders will get less money, or its staff will or its customers. For example perhaps Amazon should pay more corporation tax and pay its staff less (or raise its prices or pay less dividends). However it is not possible for Amazon to pay more tax without hurting someone (maybe someone who should get hurt).

It is true. I don't mind people saying that companies should pay more tax, providing they a) admit that this will come from people and say whom will pay (investors, workers or customers).

I think you are assuming a degree of ability that our Government doesn't have.

You do get free children so it is not that bad and before the spare room subsidy you often got a council house for cheap rent which would last for ever. It is not a myth that some do it as a career - I have met them. FWIW I don't have anything against single parents - just those who go into as a career. The fact that single parents in the UK get the most money. One thing I really don't understand this obsession about teenagers. Suppose a 17year gets pregnant, gives birth at 18 and when she is 20 several friends of hers (who also 20) think why work when she gets more as a single mum. Would her friends somehow not count?? I have known at 3 least 3 pro single parents - none were teenagers when they started, does it make ok that they worked a little before living off the taxpayer for years? (In ones case she was in Spain before she came to be pro).

A good idea. My nephew my marriage is a Spanish citizen he came here looking for work and after a few weeks tried to get his girlfriend to become a pro bogus single mum. (Not because of anything I had said - I kept very quite about single mums in front of him). Fortunately she said no, which was good for the taxpayer.

I half agree with that. However do you think it is practical that we could have enough for every 16 year old to have a rent free council flat or house for a few years? Or that every person who arrives from another country gets a free flat in Camden? (Happened to a Spanish pro single mum I know of course in Spain she got very little from the system). Also people like Heather Frost would still be a drain on the system.

That is a really weird statistic. The important thing is what percentage became single mums when teenagers. After all Heather Frost is not a teenage single mum but she started her "career" as a teenager (and she has very nice houses). A typical exam of using statistics to confuse rather than bring clarification to the debate. I am amazed that Gingerbread would think that people would be fooled by that one - although I suppose there are lots of people who want to be fooled - no offence, I guess you didn't have time to read it correctly. Sorry I don't have time to reply to the rest of your post

Actually more than one, in fact all pro single mums I have ever met have more expensive homes than me, btw I only have problems with professional single parents i.e those who decide to become a single mum to get benefits. I actually know someone who was a single mum in Spain but came here.

Yes it is quite expensive now £300k for a very simple house. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-43299190.html It is madness.

Reduce what single parents get by half and then we have a 10% saving result!

She is dead and lost power in 1990. TBH I don't think she would have made things better but the mess is more Blair/Brown/Cameroon (mostly Brown IHMO) than her.

A) The study is an estimate - unless you can tell me how NI numbers record if someone is an immigrant or not and from where and how the Government can therefore calculate exactly how much immigrants from country x, people whose parents were born here etc pay/receive in taxes/benefits. Rather unusually it has been attacked by academics from UCL the university that created the original study. http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/PRimmigration.html

If you only earn one house it doesn't really earn money for you unless you plan to downsize or emigrate. It is that kind of thinking that makes home owners think that HPI is good for them. I would rather get £15k unearned in cash or something liquid like shares than have my house rise by £150 K (unless of course only houses in my road got more expensive, in which case I would move).

Honest statistics would compare like for like. Sadly honesty is not a major strong point for those who support mass uncontrolled immigration.

That is not a fact it is an estimate. When someone claims benefits there is not a system to capture if they are a migrant or not or if their parents were. (A great idea if they were but difficult to clarify). There are estimates that say the reverse.

Makes houses look good value

Sorry to hear that. When I was buying my flat in 2001 I got so fed up with seeing flats on rightmove that had already sold that I started to only look at new instructions. When I couldn't see it in 2006 I reduced the price by £250 so it came as a new instruction. It got 2 people in a week.

I don't and probably never will work in the city. However I think that that a lot of money the city earns is from dealing with people in other countries, so saying that it is stolen from the rest of the country is very simplistic.

My house was built in the 1890's and that sounds high to me, particularly as they might have economies of scale for some things like insurance.

What still amazes me is that woman who was called a bigot but will still vote Labour. What would make her change her mind? Ed Milliband murdering her family?

Do they do all maintenance in house?

I agree. £60K is a good salary and a good salary should be able to buy a good house - which this isn't.

I used to commute to Woking and the service to London was very unreliable. You could live in Orpington for half the cost of the train ticket, 60% of the house price and have a much better journey to work. Every day I was there I was trying to work out why pay £100K more than for the same property in South East London.

A lot of people in London think rising house prices is wonderful so the fact that they did not vote for UKIP could mean that they think voting for UKIP would make prices cheaper. I think if UKIP had said vote for us and get cheaper housing they would have got less votes.