UK General Election 2015

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Who are you voting for?

Conservative
34
22%
Labour
52
33%
Lib Dem
12
8%
UKIP
7
4%
Green
23
15%
SNP
18
11%
Plaid Cymru
1
1%
DUP
1
1%
Sinn Fein
3
2%
Independent
1
1%
Other (please state)
6
4%
 
Total votes: 158
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Fatal Exception
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Fatal Exception » Sun May 10, 2015 1:26 pm

Also ianf, both you and Denster can be right at the same time here. We can still have one of the most cost effective health services in the world whilst still wasting a fair amount of cash.

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KK
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by KK » Sun May 10, 2015 1:31 pm

There are schemes in the NHS that I would like to start seeing implemented - billing people that book appointments that then don't show up for a start. My Mum works as a receptionist for the NHS and the amount of people recently that don't cancel & then just don't show up is a bit ridiculous. Fine them for goodness sakes.

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Skarjo
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Skarjo » Sun May 10, 2015 1:56 pm

Eighthours wrote:Mate, the wealthy already provide. The top 1% pay nearly 30% of all tax in this country. The top 10% pay 55% of all tax. And here's a really good one for you: the top 0.1% pay 11.3% of all tax.

It's a complete and total myth that the rich don't 'provide for those who would otherwise go without'.


But, that's not completely relevant if we still can't afford the public services that the public need.

Now, I personally think that corporate tax avoidance is a better first port of call than further taxation on rich individuals when it comes to collecting the funds needed for functioning public services, but regardless of what %'age you put on it, I don't see how the argument can be made that the rich are adequately providing towards the public services that take care of the workers that generate such huge profits for them, if the public services are not coping.

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Moggy
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Moggy » Sun May 10, 2015 1:57 pm

KKLEIN wrote:There are schemes in the NHS that I would like to start seeing implemented - billing people that book appointments that then don't show up for a start. My Mum works as a receptionist for the NHS and the amount of people recently that don't cancel & then just don't show up is a bit ridiculous. Fine them for goodness sakes.


My dentist (one of the few NHS ones around!) will charge you if you don't cancel an appointment with 24 hours notice. If have no problem with doctors doing the same thing. It's not hard to remember an appointment or give notice if you need to cancel.

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Lex-Man
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Lex-Man » Sun May 10, 2015 1:57 pm

Having worked for the NHS I can back up the underpaid thing. We had staff looking after medical records working 7am to 10pm five days a week with no overtime. I was a band four and had to run the choice and book system which meant meeting local GPs and meeting all the senior doctors. By law it should be at least band 7 at least I got over time.

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Dowbocop
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Dowbocop » Sun May 10, 2015 2:04 pm

KKLEIN wrote:As Nick Hewer & Margaret Mountford found out when they did their railway documentary a few weeks ago on BBC2, the reason the rail network doesn't work properly is mostly down to the government (who still control the most important aspect of it) rather than privatisation. But it's easier to pass the buck and blame those big bad companies being strawberry floating useless.

It wouldn't surprise me at all that there were problems with Network Rail - like I said, the public sector shouldn't stand stock still and resist change, and efficiency/best practice should be championed.

I didn't watch the documentary, and probably won't watch an hour of telly I wasn't planning to just to rebut a message on GR! I did look at a few reviews of it though and it seems that, in particular with the story of the peacock getting hit, Network Rail's bureaucracy problems are to do with contracts with private companies and who is responsible for paying, depending on the size of bird. That doesn't sound efficient to me, and it is, really, a direct result of privatisation. I read Signal Failures in Private Eye, and it too provides various examples of fragmentation between providers (and government) that leads to the system being a mess.

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Rocsteady
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Rocsteady » Sun May 10, 2015 2:05 pm

Fatal Exception wrote:Also ianf, both you and Denster can be right at the same time here. We can still have one of the most cost effective health services in the world whilst still wasting a fair amount of cash.

Of course money is wasted but to say no other nation would accept the NHS's level of wastage is quite simply a lie.

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Squinty
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Squinty » Sun May 10, 2015 3:10 pm

Moggy wrote:
KKLEIN wrote:There are schemes in the NHS that I would like to start seeing implemented - billing people that book appointments that then don't show up for a start. My Mum works as a receptionist for the NHS and the amount of people recently that don't cancel & then just don't show up is a bit ridiculous. Fine them for goodness sakes.


My dentist (one of the few NHS ones around!) will charge you if you don't cancel an appointment with 24 hours notice. If have no problem with doctors doing the same thing. It's not hard to remember an appointment or give notice if you need to cancel.


My dentist does this as well.

Every time I go to my GP, they have stats up of the missed appointments in a three month period. There was something like 160 appointments missed from the start of October to the end of December. People don't give a gooseberry fool.

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Dowbocop
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Dowbocop » Sun May 10, 2015 3:21 pm

KKLEIN wrote:There are schemes in the NHS that I would like to start seeing implemented - billing people that book appointments that then don't show up for a start. My Mum works as a receptionist for the NHS and the amount of people recently that don't cancel & then just don't show up is a bit ridiculous. Fine them for goodness sakes.

This sounds like a very logical and fair policy.

However, for me it very quickly starts to fall apart once you look a bit deeper. For one, it would be very difficult to implement fairly. I'm sure you would quite happily charge a feckless stoner who missed an appointment, but an A&E nurse who had a car crash come in ten minutes before their shift ended should be cut some slack, yeah? But who decides where the line is? Bus late - leave earlier, or blame Arriva? Get arrested - tough luck crim, or innocent until proven guilty? Who has an important enough job to miss an appointment?

The obvious answer to this is to have some form of appeals process, where someone can collect all the bus tickets and other excusing paraphernalia and decide who has a good enough excuse to be let off. But can you imagine the cost of checking up all these (potentially) shaggy dog stories? Would you want to be the member of the admin team who had to tell a patient they weren't depressed enough to miss their appointment, or that they could have rung before the panic attack happened? There would also have to be an appeals process for the appeals process (or it could go to PALS). My GP surgery has a 95%+ attendance rate, and a fair penalty charge is generally thought to be about a tenner from most things I've read about the idea. How much money would you actually get, once you deducted the cost of actually extracting it from patients? Taking Squinty's 160 DNAs a quarter message - if you extrapolate that up to 640 DNAs a year and divide it by 250 (for a rounded approximation of working days in the year), you work out with, on average, around 2.5 missed appointments a day. That's £25 a day in £10 fines (assuming they're all eligible to be fined, less the administration of collecting it). Would that even keep the lights on in the surgery? :lol:

It could also lead to further disenfranchisement of society's most vulnerable. If you're living on JSA (or whatever it's called now...), where are you going to find the money for a fine from? Is the best way to promote healthy lifestyles to further demonise (and to all intents and purposes criminalise) people who are most on the edge of society? The people who are most engaged and most able will either pay their fine or kick up enough of a stink to get off (that includes all the naughty Jeremy Kyle Benefits Street dolescum lot that everyone hates). The patients who are less able to pay, cannot work the system as well, or have long term health conditions (reducing ability to attend whilst also increasing their need to do so), will either need to pay money they cannot afford to access the NHS, or they will not bother going until they have a much more serious complaint which costs much more to treat in A&E, and could cost them their livelihood (probably putting them into the welfare system) or even their life.

I work in a screening programme. This means we see patients who are in an at risk group for a certain illness, but have not developed any symptoms that would make them seek help off their own back. The earlier you catch these problems, the better (and cheaper) it is for everyone. Our DNA rate is probably a little bit higher than a GP (obviously we'd like as many people to show as possible!) - as you may expect, people with no symptoms are less likely to turn up than those receiving effective treatment for a problem impinging on their life. We're all guilty of it - I was a bit lax booking my dental check up this year until my tooth started hurting! If we started charging patients who did not turn up, it would be the oldest, the frailest, the least engaged with their treatment - and therefore the most likely to need early detection and care - that would suffer.

That doesn't sound logical and fair to me.

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Lex-Man
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Lex-Man » Sun May 10, 2015 3:56 pm

Any checking system would amount to the administration staff making an on the spot decision regardless of the system in place. Imo

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Denster
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Denster » Sun May 10, 2015 4:29 pm

Fatal Exception wrote:Also ianf, both you and Denster can be right at the same time here. We can still have one of the most cost effective health services in the world whilst still wasting a fair amount of cash.



True.

I never said it wasn't a fantastic service. It is and i'm immensely proud to be part of it. It is still incredibly wasteful though. I know that for a fact.

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Denster
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Denster » Sun May 10, 2015 4:42 pm

I wore a blue T shirt in work on friday. I got a lot of stick for being so jubilant.

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Meep
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Location: Belfast

PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Meep » Sun May 10, 2015 4:54 pm

KKLEIN wrote:Personally I happen to think the tax rate for the richest in this country is/was high enough already at 45/50%.

The problem is that income tax is not the only tax. There are a host of other taxes and most of them are nowhere near as progressive as income tax to the affect that the poorer you are the more of your income you pay in them. Council tax is one example.

So overall...
Poorest ten percent of the population: 47% income paid out in taxes.
Richest ten percent of the population: 35% of income paid out in taxes.

Oh, and these figures are from that bastion of left wing thought; the Taxpayers Alliance.

Source: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/t ... 1419248480

The Equality Trust come up with similar figures: http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/d ... lear_0.pdf

My solution would be to have bonfire of less progressive taxes and hike up income tax, which is far fairer, in their place.

Last edited by Meep on Sun May 10, 2015 5:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Dowbocop
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Dowbocop » Sun May 10, 2015 4:55 pm

Denster wrote:I wore a blue T shirt in work on friday. I got a lot of stick for being so jubilant.

I'm surprised they didn't try to put you back in your room ;)

I wore red so everyone thought I'd voted Labour :roll:

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Denster
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Denster » Sun May 10, 2015 4:55 pm

How is that broken down?

NickSCFC

PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by NickSCFC » Sun May 10, 2015 7:42 pm

I feel I must apologise for my abhorrent levels of cuntishness to certain people in this thread over the last couple of days.

I've come to realise that I've been treating GRcade as a punching bag whenever I've been in a mood lately and, for whatever reason, seem to need to feast on the salt of others in order to replenish my own salt levels.

Hopefully this whole affair hasn't tarnished my unblemished reputation on this forum.

Edit: I still maintain that Russell Brand is a self serving twat.

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KK
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by KK » Sun May 10, 2015 9:39 pm

The amount of swipes at the government tonight at the Baftas...

The BBC cut one of the speeches because of it.

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TigaSefi
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PostUK General Election 2015
by TigaSefi » Sun May 10, 2015 9:45 pm

George Galloway going to launch a legal process into why he lost by 10,000 votes in his area. :lol:

Why are the left socialist twats blaming the public? Blame labour for being utterly useless. It not a legal requirement to only vote for them no matter how gooseberry fool they are. That's not what free will is all about.

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Irene Demova
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Irene Demova » Sun May 10, 2015 10:10 pm

Yeah those twats caring about the poor and stuff

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Tafdolphin
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PostRe: UK General Election 2015
by Tafdolphin » Sun May 10, 2015 10:17 pm

So, literally no one's going to answer my question? Eight countered my tax assertion, or tried (see Skarjo's reply at the top of this page) but it seems not a single Tory voter here can, or will, tell me why they voted for the right except "Labour are gooseberry fool."

Also, happy Monday everyone!

http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/5925540

Daily Express And Mail Celebrate The End Of Human Rights, A Horrified Twitter Despairs

Two of Britain's tabloids have enthusiastically responded to Tory plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and renegotiate the terms of our human rights agreement with Strasbourg.

The party has announced a manifesto commitment to scrap the Human Rights Act introduced by Labour in 1998 to enshrine the European Convention on Human Rights in domestic law, laws first set up in the 1950s in the wake of the Second World War to ensure such atrocities never reoccured in Europe.

The move would bleakly leave us standing alone with Belarus and Kazakhstan - the only other countries in Europe that have chosen to forsake similar laws. Belarus "suppresses virtually all forms of dissent and uses restrictive legislation and abusive practices to impede freedoms of association and assembly", while in Kazakhstan freedom of assembly is strictly controlled and a restrictive law on religious freedoms remains in force, according to Human Rights Watch.

Whereas it is often recognised that human rights are intrinsic in the preservation of equal rights and are the very foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, The Daily Mail and The Express have dismissed them as a "farce" and "madness" - focusing instead on cases where "criminals have made a mockery of justice." Amnesty International’s UK Legal Adviser Rachel Logan told the Huffington Post UK that such media coverage "needs to stop." “There is indeed a lot of madness and hysteria surrounding the discussion of human rights and that needs to stop. "It’s a shame that scaremongering and untruths surrounding the Human Rights Act have tarnished what is an essential piece of law for protecting and defending all of our rights.”

Last edited by Tafdolphin on Sun May 10, 2015 10:26 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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