Be glad you are not retiring today
October 10th, 2008
How are the pension funds going to cope?
Just trying to think through the consequences of the massive global crash that we have seen in the past few days is awesome.
One group of many that come immediately to mind, as several remarked on the previous thread, are those for whom today marks the end of their working life and the start of their pension. For thirty or forty years they will have been ploughing money into their pension pot so that on the day of their retirement they can purchase an annuity which will then form their basic income for the rest of their lives.
The actual income level that they will get will be substantially smaller than if they had left last week or before the start of the summer. A planned retirement that could have been relatively comfortable could now be very grim indeed.
And what about the pension funds? What about those who thought they were going to get a defined benefit based on their final earnings? With the massive collapse in fund values it’s going to be very hard seeing how those can go on.
What’s going to be the political impact? Who will get the blame? It’s all very hard to call.
Welcome to a very difficult new grey world.
Mike Smithson
MessageSpace Advertising
First
“”What am I going to do with my pension slashed?! I know — I’ll VOTE LABOUR!!!”
from last thread: 265- The resiliency of Labour is really amazing to me, though. Granted, they aren’t exactly doing well in polls, but they are still within shouting distance of the Tories. How that can be the case given the virtually unbroken string of bad news for the past few years is a bit of a mystery to me. Also, they are tarred with the Iraq intervention, which I believe is even less popular in the UK than it is in the U.S. Why aren’t the Tories enjoying poll leads comparable to those Labour enjoyed during the last Tory administration, a time when things in many ways seemed less gloomy (correct me if appropriate) than they are now?
My parents will probably retire quite soon.
I hope they get a decent deal.
Welcome to the bad times.
There are very few people who have final salary pensions who aren’t in the public sector.
The public sector liabilities on these now are eyewatering - the will not be able to be continued indefinitely.
On topic - anyone retiring in next 5-10 yrs should have been selling shares to buy bonds and other safer investments..
Gordon’s gold plated ex PM’S pension is safe though isn’t it – while my private pension goes down the plughole.
3, they’re a double-digit lead behind even given their party conference, which was the only one to be almost untroubled by financial disaster.
No polling since has been valid, and the last valid polls are too old really now. We need this to calm down, and then wait a bit to probably gauge public opinion.
As much sympathy I have for people in this situation, come back to me in 40 years time and see who had it worse.
3: ‘Why aren’t the Tories enjoying poll leads comparable to those Labour enjoyed during the last Tory administration’
An old chestnut on this site. Answer: pollsters then used vastly different methodolgies than to today’s.
Sorry about the hideous last sentence in 9) but you get the point.
3. One poll appeared which had the calls made during their conference which showed they had narrowed the gap to twelve points (wow). The last poll had the gap at fifteen points. They are deluded. Clearly some of their core vote has drifted back, but that’s all. They are going to get hammered.
http://www.dinl.net/chartOfTheWeek.php5?m=y&id=54
Worth reading..
3 “How that can be the case given the virtually unbroken string of bad news for the past few years is a bit of a mystery to me”
Labour have imported literally millions of immigrants in exchange for votes. Also, read the stories about how immigrants benefit from milking the system. The Afghan woman receiving 170,000GBP (340,000 dollars) per year in benefits. Her immigrant landlord was charging 12,000GBP per month instead of the going rate of 2000.
Not only do these immigrants look to Labour for free cash and open door invasion immigration, many of them dont even have the right to vote.
So the picture is distorted. The media (mainly BBC) reports in Labour’s favour and the polls are distorted by partisan immigrant votes.
3. I also think the row over the 10p tax ate into their core vote in a way that was unlikely to be long-lasting or to get worse, especially after a partial climbdown. They were down to 22 per cent at one point.
New Coffee House article may be of interest:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2211921/browns-getout-plan.thtml
Summary is that Brown may be shifting to say that the £500bn package only works if similar action occurs in other major economies.
Downside, as pointed out in the article, is that if that doesn’t occur the public won’t be chuffed with him having risked so much without getting a global agreement sorted first.
The pain is going to be vast and widespread as a result of share prices.
For some people this will be twice in a lifetime. In the first stockmarket slum of this millennium I know people who had to put off retiring because their pension was bust. One chap had to sign on to his job for another five years. I hope he got out in time.
Fourteenth!
3. I also think the row over the 10p tax ate into their core vote in a way that was unlikely to be long-lasting or to get worse, especially after a partial climbdown. They were down to 22 per cent at one point. That makes their situation seem better by comparison, but artificially in my view.
If the forecast in 12 is correct, Labour are only going one way: out of office probably for my lifetime.
The Conservatives will be not very popular but Labour will be even less popular.
As for the GOP.. think oblivion for 20 years.
15. That is called getting your excuses in early.
7- Fair enough, but the political effects have been clear and immediate in the U.S. and Canada, without need for any period of calm evaluation. It would indeed be helpful and interesting, though, to see some standard voting intention polls to clarify which way the wind is blowing.
9- Do polling methodologies provide the whole explanation for the relative party standings in, say, 1995 vs. 2008?
Seems odd to me that people bet on the stock market to create a pension for their retirement with little thought that the bet will go bad.
G7 meet later, UK proposed govts guarantee interbank.
I think Horsie has it. If anyone is blamed, it will be Labour. The most they can hope for is that people decide no one could have done anything about it.
I think it’s fair to say that if the public back the government when their pensions are going down the tubes, they deserve what they get. After all, it was Brown that in part helped set this up by raiding the pension funds as chancellor.
“Be glad you are not retiring today”
…. unless of course, you work in the Public Sector, in which case the market gyrations don’t make a scrap of difference.
16 ’slum’ should be ’slump’, of course, but ’slum stockmarket’ seems to fit today.
20, yes but it’s a strange move as it opens him up to the rather obvious criticism: If this £500bn plan required other nations to do likewise to work, why did you jump in with both feet before getting an international agreement?
Anyone that was hoping to retire this year,would have hopefully been advised 2/3 years ago to switch their funds from the stock market to gilts/cash deposits.Assuming that they are in control of their plan.
The last 11 years of course will be remembered as the implementation of pensions apartheid,final salary public sector pensions guaranteed by the taxpayer with retirement at 60 versus £5 billion per year stolen from private sector pensions and the individuals now expected to work until they drop.
3.
There’s the high-information, paper battleground of the people that read a lot and find out stuff. Zanu Labour have lost that completely.
Then there’s the low-information, high emotion battleground of TV and to a lesser extent radio. The BBC has a massive impact on this imo.
@3
“Why aren’t the Tories enjoying poll leads comparable to those Labour enjoyed during the last Tory administration, a time when things in many ways seemed less gloomy (correct me if appropriate) than they are now?”
Because we now know that the polls were heavily biased in Labour’s favour and didn’t reflect the true situation on the ground.
hey i got in first
UK better placed for this? Hmm well US O/N Libor fell 242 bps, UK O/N Libor rose by 39 bps!!
Re 21. The only valid polling comparisons are with ICM and Labour have been doing worse than the Tories at the same stage in 1995.
Non voting intention polls tell us almost nothing.
13
Where did you get the story of the Afghan immigrant ripping off the system for £170,000 in benefits?
Surely unbelievable?
29- Maybe the impact of the BBC and various satellite Labour supporters in the media is greater than some would like to believe, leading a surprising number of people to conclude that Labour is both the cause of and solution to the country’s problems.
Regarding 12: When I got to:
“We have entered a Pluto-Capricorn cycle having just passed out of the Sagittarius. Capricorn house is for the next 16 years and is indicative of deflation, fear, panic, less freedoms, low returns. Both Kondratieff and Pluto in Capricorn point to investment in commodities, food, agriculture.”
I took the rest with a large pinch of salt.
I’m sorry Mike but this thread is just totally misleading. Most people have managed pension funds that in the last years are not linked to the stock market at all.
Only a fool would leave their whole retirement plan to rest on just one day’s trading.
The BBC report shows Brown still not recognising his part in the pain, this time on fuel costs. As the price of oil has fallen in dollars so has the value of the pound in dollars.
The pound was falling well before this current crisis and his economic policies are largely to blame. But still he says, blithely:
“I want these price cuts passed onto the consumer, and passed on as quickly as possible.”
In addition, my grey and soon to be retiring relatives are now unable to downsize due to the stagnation of the housing market. This means those planning to release equity from their homes, to live in smaller properties and enjoy life more, have the double impact of (1) still having to pay (higher) running costs on a large property they no longer need plus (2) having less in the way of pension benefits to support their income.
As with other things, this will probably not become apparent for a year or so when the full impact of this crash is factored into pension payments. Today would be a good day to retire; next year could be dreadful.
33- Thank you, I appreciate the information. My inquiries on this are semi-argumentative and also semi-inquisitive.
34. It was in yesterday’s evening standard. Note that the 170K figure must include 144K+ for housing benefit. Still silly. They fired three workers (temp agency) who had done this. Their defence was it was in line with guidelines. I suspect more is afoot - the ES managed to find similar houses for about 2-4K a month. Hopefully Knacker will be called.
29. They minimize the negatives and maximize the positives for Zanu Labour.
Vice versa for the Tories. Maximizing the negatives being the most critical for the Tories hence Cameron’s tactics working.
imo
34
It’s true
Council housing officers fire. Daily telegraph.
It’s interesting to note that the Afghan benefit single mother living in the DSS mansion has not bee defended by the left. A few years ago the Nick Palmers and Rogers of this world would be screaming ‘racism’. Now peeps just want their money back but its too late, Gordon & Co imported millions of benefit scrounge migrants from literally across the world.
3. Once the banking crisis & credit crunch dust has settled & the attention then goes back onto the domestic economy, the public finance debt & all the crap that Labour have inflicted onto this country will then firmly be back in the spotlight - hence the Tory 20 point+ leads before the banking & credit crunch crises kicked off big time. The point is that there is a mood for change in the country & the feeling seems to be now ‘anything but Labour’. Gordon’s perceived good handling off the banking & credit crunch crises will wear off in time & when house repo’s & unemployment start to rise with the recession kicking in then as history shows the incumbent government will well & truly get it in the ballot box at the next GE as they truly deserve for what they have done to this once great country.
12 This rather gets your attention:
“We should realize that the total amount of OTC derivatives are on a magnitude of 16x the world’s entire GDP, or approximately 650 trillion dollars in June 2008.”
29. Also, I think 90% of it is subconcious.
41 - This use of ‘Zanu Labour’ is offensive and puerile. Whatever you think of this Labour government it cannot be compared with that thuggish regime.
Weren’t there ex-members of the Taliban who were granted UK asylum and benefits a few years ago, or was that a Daily Mail-style ‘eating our swans’ story?
http://www.kentucky.com/329/story/551094.html
Apologies if this has already been posted but Sarah Palin has been cleared of any wrongdoing in the Troopergate report – by the, erm, GOP!!!
Is GOP no longer a suitable initialism by the way?
36
Ignore it at your peril.
Cycles WORK… (not necessarily Cancer etc.. but time cycles move in periods roughly the same as some planetary cycles.. ege commodities 15 years)
*see my prior posts on markets and FTSE and Dow - all based on cycles…”
Of course we know GB has abolished the economic cycle
15- Weathercock
Indeed you’re right.
My only defense is that they gave this quote to Galadriel in the movie…
by Chris(from Bethesda) October 10th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I forgive you Chris especially if you’ve come all the way from Oblivion.
46 - Could there be a cyber landfill site in which “Zanu Labour”, “Blue Labour”, “Camera on”, “Gordoom”, “Cleggover”, “Harriet Harperson” and all other supposedly witty manglings of names could be dumped?
Commentisfree would do nicely.
46. Yes it can.
If every english person stabbed, raped or killed as a direct result of your immigration policy over the last 11 years was reported by the BBC then your party would have zero MPs outside of ethnic majority areas.
Lib Dems think they have a chance in Glenrothes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7663933.stm
http://www.mlive.com/grpress/news/index.ssf/2008/10/former_governor_milliken_backs.html
Another GOP greybeard refuses to endorse Macca.
DOW now dipping again.
QUOTE
Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world’s financial markets while they “rewrite the rules of international finance.”
“The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,” Berlusconi said today after a Cabinet meeting in Naples, Italy. A solution to the financial crisis “can’t just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell as much 8.1 percent in early trading and pared most of those losses after Berlusconi’s remarks. The Dow was down 0.5 percent to 8540.52 at 10:10 in New York.
Group of Seven finance ministers and central bankers are meeting in Washington today, and will stay in town for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings this weekend. European Union leaders may gather in Paris on Oct. 12, three days before a scheduled summit in Brussels, Berlusconi said today, while Group of Eight leaders may hold a meeting on the crisis “in coming days,” he said.
Berlusconi didn’t give any details about what kind of rules leaders were looking to change, except to say that leaders are “talking about a new Bretton Woods.”
The Bretton Woods Agreements were adopted to rebuild the international economic system after World War II in a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The aim of the agreements was to establish a monetary management system, initially by pegging currencies to gold. The IMF was set up later to help manage the international financial system.
World may look very different next week.
53 - They always think they have a chance! Unfortunately they are increasingly wrong!
51 Use of them does provide a good guide on posts to ignore.
27. ‘why did you jump in with both feet before getting an international agreement’
Perhaps Brown was forced into it by the hurricane of criticism he received on this site.
25…if that is not stopped soon,i think that we shall have a 2nd civil war in this country.
Yet another appalling poll for the Scottish Liberal Democrats. One begins to wonder where Mike Smithson’s (ahem) “clear trend” is now…
Latest Scottish sub-sample from Populus/The Times. Usual caveats regarding sub-samples of GB-wide polls apply.
(% change UK GE 2005)
1. SNP 42% (+24%)
2. Lab 28% (-11%)
3. Con 20% (+4%)
4. LD 9% (-14%)
Electoral Calculus:
1. SNP 45 seats (+39 seats)
2. Lab 7 seats (-33 seats)
3= Con 3 seats (+2 seats)
3= LD 3 seats (-8 seats)
5. Speaker (M Martin) 1 seat (n/c)
http://populuslimited.com/uploads/download_pdf-051008-The-Times-The-Times-Poll—October-2008.pdf
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/scotland.html
56. What a fool that man is.
61. M.Martin is standing again ? God help us.
58 - Wise words indeed.
40
Has the Afghan woman and her immigrant landlord been put in prison with deportation to follow?
63. No-one knows yet.
The Spectator has called this “The Mandy Meltdown”. Do they really think his kidney stones are worth that much?
56 looks like the end of the Euro if Silvio is really saying this
Socialist workers pary staging a colourful demonstatrion outside the Bank of England which will liven up a Friday night in the city
61. So a chance in Glenrothes is more about saving their deposit.
FTSE now down 421
56. I think Berlusconi was taking the piss.
52 - And with that comment you lose any credibility you ever had.
Anyone with half a brain can see the huge differences between the Mugabe regime and the British government. You are obviously not one of these people.
70 - No it isn’t!
53. LOL. LDs in never never land and gordon thinks the whole world has got it wrong and we need to melt iceland!!
70. Thanks for that. Nice one. Cheers. Please be sure to keep updating us.
DOW below -500
72.
Zanu Labour only survives because the media don’t report the blood price that’s been paid for your immigration policy.
73 it was when i typed it if i am reading the IG index correctly, its very volatile it now says down 403
http://www.igindex.co.uk/
50- ACtually Bethesda softworks is now longer located in Bethesda but in Rockville, Md…
Good game anyway
65 No doubt the NoW will report she was too busy getting stoned.
Or was that Squeaky & Cam?
Did the FTSE close <4k ?
81 - Under Sharia law, do you get stoned for getting stoned…?
81 = 80
81 - Yes it closed at 3947 ish… biggest drop in 21 years!
52. That is a joke right?
61.
Your posting might have had some validity till you mentioned…
“Electoral Calculus:”
What do Pinky and Perky.com say? likely to be more relevent.
28
Didn’t the BBC talk up a big Hoopla about how the £500 billion was co-ordinated with other measures throughout Europe - or is that now being airbrushed and edited away?
85. Your internal polling tells you it isn’t. Internal polling in areas where people don’t need the media to tell them what is actually happening.
3. Maybe, and this is a long shot, some people think differently to the posters on here?
For instance the mentioned women in 13. was, technically receiving £170,000 and the landlord was playing the system that allowed him to charge almost £150,000 in rent (The councillors responsibly were sacked) which is of course due to the astronomically house prices in the area (the house was worth £1.2m). Leaving the women with £20,000 benefits a year; The council tax for the property would be £3,000 as it’s in band H. Considering she had 7 children, 6 of whom were at school meaning that school meals, transport to school and help for uniform would have been included in that sum leaving them with say £15,000 a year to be split between 8 at a total of £288 a week. I’d imagine that they aren’t able to work in this country either.
Could the children have shared, should the council have used some brain cells, should they be here are all perfectly reasonable questions but the women wasn’t handed a cheque for £170,000 she wasn’t ripping anyone off personally, what’s she meant to do turn it down as a burden to the tax payer or go back to the Taliban?
Of course had the landlord not been an immigrant I’m sure the Daily Mail would have reported the story in the exact same way.
79. Yes. When are they coming out with The Elder scrolls 5?
88. Alright then, let’s do this.
Can you provide statistical proof that immigrants are responsible for a higher proportion of crime than UK citizens?
89- In this kind of scam the tenant usually gets a cut of the supposed rent (there’s an episode in The Sopranos with this kind of scam)
91
IIRC approx 10% of the jail population are foreign nationals…
91. They are responsible for crimes that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That’s the point.
Where I live, most murders, and there’s a lot, you could stick a pin in a world atlas to get where the killer came from.
94. Put up or shut up. Let’s see your stats not anecdotes to show what you claim.
afternoon all. Brown appears to have managed to kill off almost all Private sector final salary pension schemes which have survived his appalling regulatory scheme. 3932 is closing for FTSE lowest since 1987 another statistics Gordon can be proud of.
69. Fitaloon - “So a chance in Glenrothes is more about saving their deposit.”
They should be so lucky!
I knew that the Scottish Lib Dems were in profound trouble when I saw Dan posting his voodoo Focus poll a couple of days ago ’showing’ the Lib Dems in the lead in Glenrothes.
They clearly learnt nothing from the Moray by-election in 2006. When the Lib Dems start their idiotic ramping then you know that they are in deep panic mode.
95 - Let me guess. He doesn’t believe any statistics so just ignores them in favour of his own prejudice.
61. Stuart, did you ever have a seat-by-seat guide to the Scottish Westminster constituencies displayed on this site or elsewhere?
91 - Alright, it’s from the Telegraph, but:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584943/One-murder-in-five-is-committed-by-a-foreigner.html
I know of a scam similar to the one described above where one lady receives housing benefit several times for the same property and child benefit for several children, most of whom do not live with her. She does this becuase she knows you can drive a bus through the controls in teh benefits system. She is not an immigrant.
If she has been caught by now, it would not have made the papers, not because she is not an immigrant, but because the amounts involved were small.
This story makes the news because of the amounts involved, not because of the racial content. However, in these politically correct times, any story involving an immigrant is branded racist.
93. Does this include people detained? Yarl’s Wood etc.
97. Yes - betting on Lib Dem undeperformance in byelections is becoming almost as much a banker as betting on Labour defeats.
What right does Brown have to demand that the Icelandic banks release the money they owe British depositers? How can there ever be a real guarantee? If the banks are bust, they are bust. And to use anti-terror legislation to freeze the funds of Icelandic companies is an appauling abuse of power for which Brown should be deeply ashamed. We accused the Russians of bullying over Georgia and now we find that they were ready to help Iceland with a financial package whilst we made brazen demands to Rejkavick as if they were holding British hostages. Who looks like the bully now?
This crisis has totally changed my view of banking. My financial strategy from now on will be to invest in a house at the bottom of the market and then I’ll build into it a safe in which I’ll store some gold and a variety of world currencies.
No stats. No media reports. Only personal experience.
And your internal polling of how your support in once solid Labour areas is crumbling away.
104 couldnt have said it better myself.
91 - From 2003: “One in seven of the record 74,000 jail population is now a foreign citizen”:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article858770.ece
89. This whole mess and hunreds of others like it, comes from unregulated immigration.
Now that OLD GORDY is to regulate the financial sector, pehaps he will now put checks and balances on the immigration front. Somehow though, I dont think so.
90- No idea.
Closed <4000… worst weekly fall since ‘87
94. Hardly a syllogism is it?
I’ve only ever been mugged by a white British chav. But that doesn’t make all muggers white.
91 - “Foreign nationals are now responsible for more than one in five crimes committed in London, police figures revealed yesterday.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483450/A-fifth-crimes-committed-immigrants.html
107. Ah but doesn’t that just prove the courts are xenophobic/racist? I’m sure they were all innocent, really.
104. Absoloutely, and the Icelandic PM was certainly irritated by the British action.
The stock market collapse, and the likely steep fall in dividend payments yet to come, will create further large liabilities for companies still running final salary schemes.
antifrank, I see the logic, but it overlooks the obvious problems:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/hundreds-of-foreign-inmates-still-awaiting-deportation-months-after-end-of-jail-terms-426558.html
114. Brown is just posturing in a pathetic attempt to look like a ’strong leader’. Perhaps his advisors will have him in uniform next, with a neat moustache.
93 IIRC, it’s more like 20%, but (aside from the prison population) I don’t think any hard figures exist for the proportion of crimes committed by foreign nationals.
112.
Since police in London don’t even know about most crimes committed there, how can they know the nationality of the perpetrators?
Were the coppers who shot Mr Menendez of foreign extraction?
97 - it wasn’t a ‘Focus’ poll it was a readers poll from the local newspaper -
http://www.dunfermlinepress.com/pollresults.php
It’s about as relevant as your ridiculous extrapolations of tiny sub-samples of national polls using Martin Baxter.
And for whatit’s worth I don’t recall anyone saying the Lib Dems would win Moray - but that they would do well and had a chance of second place. I was wrong they came third.
I do however remember very well respected commentators predicting the SNP winning the Dunfermline by-election. And we know what happened there…
Dow tanking now.
If UK does not get Gen Elect soon, I fear civil disorder, seriously.
113 - Now who’s being prejudiced?
93, 118. Presumably some of those were here illegally in the first place.
#110 Closed <4000… worst weekly fall since ‘87
PLP and Labour pollsters will be rubbing their hands with glee
Whether immigrants commit more crime per head of population is moot. Though the Home Office deliberately (I think) does not compile crime stats by race (unlike America, say) it is indisputable that black people commit more muggings, rapes, street violence etc than the average Briton.
But Muslim immigrants, especially from the subcontinent, possibly commit less crime than the average Briton. Though they are more likely to blow you up on a bus.
91
‘Can you provide statistical proof’
Difficult because the government goes out of it’s way to ensure that the figures are not seperated out.
However,have a look at crimewatch or maybe checkout the youths arrested for the almost weekly knife murders in London or perhaps the man who was sent to prison yesterday for shooting the bouncer who asked him to stop smoking or just read the daily papers?
3. “Also, they are tarred with the Iraq intervention, which I believe is even less popular in the UK than it is in the U.S.”
If the Tories hadn’t been Tony Blair’s most gung-ho cheerleaders for the Iraq adventure, you’d have a point. There were a few honourable exceptions (I recall an impressive anti-war speech by John Randall) but there can’t be very many of them on the Tory front bench.
Plus the anger is not to do with proportions or if they’re worse than the natives or not. The point is they wouldn’t have happened if the attacker hadn’t been in the country. People have a stabbed son or a raped daughter that *wouldn’t* have happened.
120. Dunfermline seems a very long time ago, though, doesn’t it?
116 - Current prison population - C80,000. Number awaiting deportation less than 1,000. Impact of delays in deportation on percentage locked up who are foreign nationals - marginal.
Is Mr Jones in fact Derek Draper, tryng to distract everyone from the economic meltdown with his ramblings?
DON’T FEED THE TROLL
Next appointment with doom in the great meltdown is 2.00 EST, when the results of the Lehman CDS auction will be known.
89. There is indeed but Tony Soprano was only able to implement that defrauding of the HUD scheme with the help of Assemblyman Zellman and clearing all the cr*ck dens out in order to push the prices back up again. [/sopranos nerd]
108. I don’t think you’d find anyone who’d describe it much different from a ‘mess’. I don’t think the take that the Mail and Richard Littlejohn had on it was accurate, unsurprisingly.
121. After Brown speaks The Footsy tanks.
After Bush speaks the DOW tanks. So what’s new?
I’m a lot better looking than Mr Draper.
128 apparently we are in year Zero so Dunfermiline is pre-history now. All past actions wiped out, just a gloomy future to look forward to.
Roger will be happy, BBC showing Barclays up 103%!!
125. Are you talking about black people, and people with names you can’t pronounce, or foreign people? Can you tell the difference?
The “fear index” is going into unchartered territory today: record highs.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EVIX&t=1d&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=
129. Or at least 1.25% of total detainees.
136. Your own voters are getting killed as a direct result of your governement’s policy. Can you tell why they don’t want to vote for you any more?
Gonna close my shorts and call it a day, nine hours at a screen is not good for my flabby failing physic.
Next week we stabilize but no rally.
Whelan - where are your statistics that immigrants commit less crime than UK nationals from?
125. On a side note, the bouncer was born in Nigeria. So surely he doesn’t matter to you, right?
Panic has now gripped the BBC web site:
FTSE 100 3932.06down -8.85 -381.74%
126. When people mention the ‘new’ Conservative (Cammy, Osborne, Vaizey etc) I always remind myself of how most of them were Iraq War supporters. Michael Gove was proud to call himself a neo-conservative - he even wrote a chapter for a book on how it was a very British concept. The Tories who voted against were largely from the older, pragmatic generation led by Ken Clarke.
142.
Bored of this now. Always puts me in a temper.
I am pretty sure you *know* what is happening in once solid Labour areas with regard to crumbling support.
That’s with the media, especially the BBC, trying to report as little of this as possible.
If they reported it all, *Zanu* Labour would be destroyed. You know it.
95,98 & 119
How about the Chief Constable of Kent Mike Fuller.
‘Migration surges have contributed to an increase of more than a third in violent crime over five years to 7,800 incidents in 2007′
124- I did a data review some years back seanT on youth crime in Kent- looked at conviction rates for under 21’s, and showed that blacks in Kent were something like 15 times more likely to be convicted than Whites, but Asian’s in Kent were something like 12 less likely to be convicted than whites.
Kind of showed Kent young Asians 160 times less likely to receive a conviction than their black peers.
If you drilled even lower and look at say Chinese conviction rates the results would have been even more dramatic, and drilled too into the black populations comparing African black populations less likely/ to West Indian black populations more likely. Factor in gender differences too.
In conclusion the difference between a Chinese young woman being convicted of a criminal offence compared to a West Indian young male is very large indeed.
146. Clearly an obvious example of racism in the force
Is anyone else playing ‘wingnut bingo’ with this thread?
Off to a strong start with ‘Zanu Labour’, ‘unregulated immigration’, benefit scroungers and ‘pensions apartheid’. I just need ‘bring back the death penalty’ and ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ to complete my set, pls tks.
120. I actually agree that Stuart’s emphasis on small Scottish sub-samples of UK-wide polls is a bit silly, but to be fair Mike Smithson himself went down that road in a big way the other day. In this case it was important for Stuart to flag up Labour’s big deficit in the Populus sub-sample because it constitutes strong evidence against Mike’s contention - based essentially on two YouGov sub-samples - that there is a ‘clear trend’ of Labour ‘doing very well’ in Scotland. I hope that we can all now agree that we don’t have a clue what the true position is, and that poring over sub-samples of 90 or 150 people isn’t going to provide the answer.
Of course, it’s also worth pointing out that all manner of things have occurred since the last batch of polls were carried out, so that makes the current position even more uncertain.
145. No doubt you find affluent, white immigrants acceptable…
William Milliken, the former Republican Govenor of Michigan, has backed away from his endorsement of John McCain citing the lowering of the tone of his campaign. The news comes in the wake of former GOP Senator Lincoln Chafee endorsing Obama yesterday :
http://www.mlive.com/grpress/news/index.ssf/2008/10/former_governor_milliken_backs.html
148. You beat me to it…
Sorry but immigrants are not responsible for a disproportionate level of crime. There have been numerous studies carried out by some of the most respected criminologists in the UK’s leading universities. Indeed immigrants are more likely to be the victims of crime.
Most immigrants either come here to work and earn as much as possible to support their families, usually back home in their own countries or they are escaping from persecution or poverty in their own countries. British born citizens are more likely to fraudulently rip-off the state as has been seen recently with no less than 3 leading councillors all claiming disability benefits when they are well enough to participate in sport.
Where there is a problem is with the children and grandchildren of immigrants who have not fully integrated into British society and as they feel alientated, they become more involved in gang culture etc. All the young black lads shot or stabbed in London in the past year and the young Asian lads sucked into the various terror plots are perfect examples of this problem. They cannot be expelled from the country because being British born, whether anyone likes it or not, they are as much British citizens as those of us who can trace 25 generations of direct ancestry in the UK from the Norman Conquest and before.
All press like to headline outrageous examples but perhaps before we start throwing allegations, we should just consider how miserable life would be, especially in cities like London if there weren’t immigrants or their descendants to drive the buses and trains, sweep the streets, serve in the restaurants, bars and hotels, do the unpleasant jobs in our workplaces like abbatoirs etc. Nor should we forget the many Asians who came here in the early 1970s fleeing persecution in Uganda who now run many of the largest and most successful companies in the UK and without whom many hundreds of thousands of “white” British citizens would have no jobs.
Also spare a thought for the Spanish, Greeks, Turks and others who each year have to put up with totally thuggish behaviour from so called British tourists who think they can get drunk, become violent and then simply leave.
We treated the Irish and Eastern European Jews like shit throughout the 19th century, Enoch Powell as Colonial Secretary toured the West Indies in the 1950s begging tens of thousands of them to come and work in the UK and then 20 years later gave his “Rivers of Blood” speech even though we didnt hesitate to let thousands of those same West Indian men fight and in many cases die in France, North Africa, Italy etc between 1939 and 1945.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the Asians and in the 1990s and 2000s it has been the Central and Eastern Europeans.
Let’s not be hypocritical. Around 90% of the prison population comprises white anglo-saxon males!
138 - Prisoners will have differential length sentences anyway (and only longer term detainees will ordinarily get deported, unless they’re convicted of immigration offences). Moreover, you have not established what you regard as an appropriate length of time between end of sentence and deportation. So you can’t just derive 1.25% - by the way, I assume you meant to write “at most” when you wrote “at least”.
Besides, do you really think that well over 10% of prisoners being foreign nationals doesn’t go a long way towards proving the point? Or are you just playing devil’s advocate?
153. ..and we should also note that victims of crime might also be racist and thus misreport the ethnic identity of their assailants/robbers etc.
Perhaps the compilers of the statistics are racist as well.
124. Lot’s of Muslims in jail I’m afraid. Although they may not have been Muslim when they entered of course. It’s surprising to hear that figures aren’t kept on these matters. I assumed it just wasn’t talked about.
99 Shadsy, I gave Mike one in June in 8 sections covering the 8 regions of Scotland but to date he has only used Highland and Islands
124- seanT
One very dispiriting experience for me was a visit to the biggest youth prison in France (around 1000 prisoners). The ethnic repartition was shocking: very few south east asians or whites, all the rest black, arab or rom.
That day I finally understood that something was very very wrong in the supposed “model” of French integration (this was some years before the 2005 riots).
One huge challenge is for governments to try to reduce criminality in these segments of population without antagonizing them as a group.
148
‘Clearly an obvious example of racism in the force’
Yes,but Mike Fuller the Chief Constable of Kent is black.
Looks like the Queen will now have to dress at Primark:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7664113.stm
Muslims are doing our prisons the world of good.
Muslim prison gangs are trying to force other inmates to sign up to Islamic radicalism, prison officers said.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23570895-details/Concern+over+Muslim+prison+gangs/article.do
147. Propensity to commit crime, by race, is - I would guess - inversely proportionate to average IQ levels and tendency to religiosity.
i.e. A high IQ Jew or devout Muslim Bangladeshi is fairly unlikely to mug you - the first cause he doesn’t have to, the second cause Allah tells him not to.
Etc etc.
Ideally we should restrict immigration to people from Utah, China, Japan and Ashkenazim communities in Israel. And Poland cause of the girls.
160. Sounds like he must be an Uncle Tom then, or perhaps just suffering from false conciousness.
160. We know, hence the wink.gif
164. Like Palin. A traitor to women she is!!!!
99. Shadsy - “… did you ever have a seat-by-seat guide to the Scottish Westminster constituencies displayed on this site or elsewhere?”
Nope. Easterross is your man there.
This is Esterross’s Scottish seat prediction from 17 May 2008. I don’t know if he has revised his opinion since then.
Scotland is going to be the most interesting part of the country on GE day. The Tories have been creeping back up in the polls for some months and are now pushing through 20% which hasnt happened since we bucked the trend in 1992 and gained from Labour (Aberdeen South). The SNP will do well but because of the polarised votes, so will the Tories. Labour will suffer but proportionately the LibDems should be the biggest losers.
Argyll: SNP/Tory gain from LibDem
West Aberdeenshire Tory gain from LibDem
Gordon: SNP gain from LibDem
Berwick etc: SNP/Tory gain from LibDem
South Aberdeen: SNP gain from Labour
Ochil: SNP gain from Labour
Edinburgh + Musselburgh: SNP gain from Labour
Edinburgh South: Tory gain from Labour
Edinburgh SW: Tory gain Alistair Darling P45
North East Fife: Tory push LibDem hard
Stirling: SNP/Tory gain from Labour
one of Monklands goes SNP from Labour
Dundee West: SNP gain from Labour
Linlithgow or Livingston: SNP gain from Labour
one Glasgow seat possibly Glasgow North: SNP gain from Labour
Dumfries: Tory gain from Labour
and if polls really bad for Labour
South Ayrshire and Carrick etc: Tory gain from Labour
North Ayrshire: SNP gain from Labour.
He published a detailed Highlands and Islands seat guide here at pb.com. Sorry no link.
Otherwise try Vote 2007 or whatever it is called now. And also the Scottish Politics website:
http://www.alba.org.uk/
Poor pensioners.
(The stock market has fallen 11.75% during the tenure of this Labour Government, from 4455.6 to 3932.1.)
As Mr Smithson rightly says: “For thirty or forty years they will have been ploughing money into their pension pot so that on the day of their retirement they can purchase an annuity which will then form their basic income for the rest of their lives.The actual income level that they will get will be substantially smaller than if they had left last week or before the start of the summer.”
However, the direction of the stock market is important for savers and pension funds over the long term, but not the main concern at the moment.
Let them eat cake.
158. Look forward to seeing the rest of it, Easterross. I have been pondering the issue of how many seats the Tories might win next time. I think I’d put the spread at around 4.5.
159- Chris- go to any youth offender institution in the UK and you will see the same. In Huntercombe- heart of leafy Oxfordshire, go inside there and you just see young, black male faces staring back at you.