Lee Anderson - what a guy!

[donkey22]

'....it was reported...' So 2500 Foodbanks are all reporting that people did not want potatoes because 'they could not afford to cook them' You have to give it to those reporters, they have managed to add to the fuel crisis without blinking. Are we to understand then, that these people were requesting Ready Made hot meals? Why are they at a food bank at all - they cannot afford to cook anything if the report is correct.

Please people - don't just read a report and accept it on face value, think about it, otherwise you are being pulled in, hook, line and sinker.

Your ignorance and complete lack of compassion to the hardships faced by so many families in this country is shameful as well as astounding. Shame on you.

[said]

My gas & electric has risen to £3000 a year for a two bed flat. Taking that as a baseline, if a family of 4 have £14k for food and clothing, they are paying less than £100 a week rent.

You haven't got the first clue.[/QUOTE]

1. Get to know the farm workers. Learn how to cut the black oxydised areas out of potatoes. Learn how to blanche and freeze vegetables while they are still fresh.
2. Get a Gas and Electricity Meter - in a flat you should have one (not a smart meter) and can read how much you use and work out what it costs.
3. A Large block of cheese from Farmfoods cost £3.
4. If kids don't want milk then a bottle of cordial 50p and add tap water.
5.Marks and Spencers large Cauliflowers are 86p as are those from Lidl. Few people buy large Cauliflowers because they go off quickly (they are fast grown) But they can go in the deep freeze to keep.
6. Your electricity bill is extremely high. I live in a large four bedroomed, low ceilings, well insulated house, no solar panels, windows open all year round and pay around £600 per year.

Get yours checked out! Take a meter reading, note it down in a notebook - Time everything you use and make list of ITEM and TIME USED in that notebook. You can find out the cost for the item you have used over a time online. It is a pain - but it should be well worth it.

Several of my friends live in flats and have meters - they are great if you want to save money, even with a standing charge! And I know my food.

[said]

Your ignorance and complete lack of compassion to the hardships faced by so many families in this country is shameful as well as astounding. Shame on you.

An unemployed couple with two children, paying £500 a month rent are paid minimum benefits of £22,500 per year. The average wage in Southport for a single worker is under £15,000 a year. If one parent works they get more money. If parents have more than two children -they get more money. A pensioner is paid about £8,500 per year.

How much money should these people be given in benefits to stop them being in poverty? A graduate teacher gets paid £22,000 to start with, an accountant is paid £29,000 after four years of study, a new graduate nurse is paid £22,000. A fireman is paid £29,000 for risking his life everyday. So how much should untrained, unemployed people get paid? Twice as much? Four times as much? And if so, would you be willing to pay twice as much or four times as much in taxes?

[said]

Can you tell us how you know he has more supporters than critics?
Apparently you agree with him but that doesn't mean you are in a majority.
It seems unlikely to me.
Yes of course more education would be a good thing.
But put his remarks in context.
We are the fifth wealthiest country in the world ( although when the Tories have finished perhaps not).
We now have more foodbanks than branches of McDonalds.
A few days ago a Tory MP and the local Tory Mayor had themselves photo'd cutting the ribbon to open a new foodbank. There was even, irony on ironies, a buffet...
There is no way we should need them. And foodbanks are not giving out ready meals.

This report came up on every media site. For everyone who criticised the guy there were eight who agreed with him, without fail!

Do you know why we have foodbanks? Do you know why and where they started? - clue: It was not to feed the poor. Check out the Trussell Trust.

Have you ever stood in a queue for a Food Bank? I did a few times for a report that I was writing. I went to about five - but since there are 2500 foodbanks in the UK, my findings were as I expected them to be but different to how you imagine them, but my findings cannot be said to be definitive on such a small sample.

[local]

I have just seen a recording of Lee Anderson offering the Labour and Union man Paul Embery a visit to the foodbank Evans works at, Embery refused.

He should go.

Its on youtube.

[Dirac]

Here's a contender for both Lee and said's crown of no brain AND no heart (I know it's a high bar, but...)

[Little Londoner]

Here's an idea why not exchange the budget for catering at every prison with a 30p allowance per prisoner and the excess used to ensure eligible people can feed their family.

I'm not defending the remarks of the Tory MP but there are obviously people out there who choose not to work (legally) who drink smoke run cars have Sky etc etc who seem to be first in the queue when there is something for nothing whilst the genuine struggle and worry themselves to death because of the rapid rise in prices. But that is the Tory way always start change from the bottom up instead of those that can afford it. Let's start with the disabled was the Duncan-Smith/McVey way.

[bensherman]

In passing there Said mentions housing benefit and it reminds me of what a scandal that is.

When council housing was effectively stopped in the 80s, and then council house stock lost through the Right to Buy scheme, the net effect was to push millions to need to rent privately.

At a stroke damage was done in many ways.

There was no way ( and still isn't really) of regulating the quality and safety of private property as there had been with council housing.

The rush of people to rent switched on the buy to let market, and gave house prices a real surge, ironically creating a vicious circle which made even more people have to seek rented accommodation.

Rents rocketed and we had to introduce housing benefit to prevent large-scale poverty and homelessness. Now housing benefit costs us close to £20bn a year, and effectively we give taxpayers' money to private landlords.

The net effect was to transfer funds used to create publicly-owned assets to speculators.

To this day millions suffer because finding first-step housing is such a problem.

[Dirac]

Here's an idea why not exchange the budget for catering at every prison with a 30p allowance per prisoner and the excess used to ensure eligible people can feed their family.

I'm not defending the remarks of the Tory MP but there are obviously people out there who choose not to work (legally) who drink smoke run cars have Sky etc etc who seem to be first in the queue when there is something for nothing whilst the genuine struggle and worry themselves to death because of the rapid rise in prices. But that is the Tory way always start change from the bottom up instead of those that can afford it. Let's start with the disabled was the Duncan-Smith/McVey way.

This is exactly the sort of reply that plays into the "benefit scroungers" idea happily trotted out by Tory after Tory.

Data are good, they can make sense of some of the current problems -

1 - £9,000 million scrounged by dodgy PPE firms, many were Tory donors fast-tracked through the illegal VIP lane (Tories denied the VIP lane existed, for a while)

2 - £35,000 million lost tax with about half being down to fraud

3 - £15,000 million of benefits are unclaimed... How odd, where are all those scroungers?

4 - £37,000 million over 2 years for Test and Trace - the Public Accounts Committee said "despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic"

You might imagine benefit fraud must be massive in comparison, after all, the Government reminds us about it regularly.

£900 million a year is the latest DWP estimate. 10% of the PPE fraud.
That's about £17.5 million a week.
We are paying £3.3 million a week to store all the PPE the government bought that was unfit for use.
Brexit costs us over £170 million a week, by the way.......but SOVEREIGNTY!

So, I reckon there are some massive systemic problems in our society that cost us all a lot of money and blight our future.

People claiming benefits is not one of them.

[Toodles McGinty]

1. Get to know the farm workers. Learn how to cut the black oxydised areas out of potatoes. Learn how to blanche and freeze vegetables while they are still fresh...
...3. A Large block of cheese from Farmfoods cost £3.
4. If kids don't want milk then a bottle of cordial 50p and add tap water.
5.Marks and Spencers large Cauliflowers are 86p as are those from Lidl. Few people buy large Cauliflowers because they go off quickly (they are fast grown) But they can go in the deep freeze to keep.

Oh I see, for this masterplan to work, this family have to hang around farms for a while. So they have to live in walking distance of the countryside. And spend time wandering around a farm to become familiar with the workers. I'm sure the farmer in question won't mind at all.

Is it one family per farm, or can several families trek over agricultural land daily to buddy up with the employees?

Then after walking miles and miles to the nearest farm, they then have to find a branch of Farmfoods. Then a branch of Lidl. So with over a million families on poverty, how many live within walking distance of a farm, a Lidl and a Farmfoods to come up with a paltry offering of a dry baked spud, with 6 beans and a sliver of cheese?

And in this masterplan, they've also got to use the energy to blanche veg and freeze them?

6. Your electricity bill is extremely high. I live in a large four bedroomed, low ceilings, well insulated house, no solar panels, windows open all year round and pay around £600 per year.

Do you know what else you find on a farm? Bull$h!t. So before April, you were paying £400 for combined gas and electricity for a 4 bed house? Bigger bull$h!t than one of your half baked conspiracy theories.

Get yours checked out! Take a meter reading, note it down in a notebook - Time everything you use and make list of ITEM and TIME USED in that notebook. You can find out the cost for the item you have used over a time online. It is a pain - but it should be well worth it.

I'm not in poverty. I can afford my bills. And if I had to spend my days staring at an electric meter, I'd lose the will to live. I'm not asking for tips of budgeting from a lying conspiracy theorist with obvious MH problems. We're talking about families on poverty who simply cannot afford the cost of living.

[Toodles McGinty]

This is exactly the sort of reply that plays into the "benefit scroungers" idea happily trotted out by Tory after Tory.

Data are good, they can make sense of some of the current problems -

1 - £9,000 million scrounged by dodgy PPE firms, many were Tory donors fast-tracked through the illegal VIP lane (Tories denied the VIP lane existed, for a while)

2 - £35,000 million lost tax with about half being down to fraud

3 - £15,000 million of benefits are unclaimed... How odd, where are all those scroungers?

4 - £37,000 million over 2 years for Test and Trace - the Public Accounts Committee said "despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic"

You might imagine benefit fraud must be massive in comparison, after all, the Government reminds us about it regularly.

£900 million a year is the latest DWP estimate. 10% of the PPE fraud.
That's about £17.5 million a week.
We are paying £3.3 million a week to store all the PPE the government bought that was unfit for use.
Brexit costs us over £170 million a week, by the way.......but SOVEREIGNTY!

So, I reckon there are some massive systemic problems in our society that cost us all a lot of money and blight our future.

People claiming benefits is not one of them.

Agree 100%

Exactly the kind of crap this government wants people to think. Demonise the poor, make them other. Make poor people the problem.

All these families on the breadline drink, smoke, pay for Sky TV, drive cars. I thought Said's posts were bizarre, but the amount of idiots on this site playing right into the hands of the government's propaganda is astounding.

Right up there with 'immigrants are stealing our jobs'.

[local]

Interesting aside but right to buy was a left wing redistributive idea postulated by an economist called Moor or Moore or was it Meade can't remember to be frank which one (so long ago)


Problem is, every buyer is a more likely invested member of a growing nimby army.

[seivad]

Your electricity bill is extremely high. I live in a large four bedroomed, low ceilings, well insulated house, no solar panels, windows open all year round and pay around £600 per year.

Did you move? Marvin's house certainly doesn't match your description.

It's counter intuitive to install energy saving insulation, then keep your windows open in cold weather. And to keep the heating on when the open windows are bringing in cold air defies all logic. If, as common sense dictates, you turn the heating off, I'm not surprised your energy costs are low. If you don't, you are literally throwing money out of the window.

[local]

Did you move? Marvin's house certainly doesn't match your description.

It's counter intuitive to install energy saving insulation, then keep your windows open in cold weather. And to keep the heating on when the open windows are bringing in cold air defies all logic. If, as common sense dictates, you turn the heating off, I'm not surprised your energy costs are low. If you don't, you are literally throwing money out of the window.

They used to do that at Greaves Hall in Banks out of interest, instead of turning the heating down, they opened the windows.

just saying...........

[seivad]

They used to do that at Greaves Hall in Banks out of interest, instead of turning the heating down, they opened the windows.

just saying...........

I'll keep that in mind for next Winter