Both major parties are concerned more with votes than with morality

It all depends on your Priorities

Tales from The House of Horrors

The Farewell State

After WWII, the Atlee government, true to its socialist principles, introduced the Welfare State. One of the founding principles was universal benefit irrespective of needs. The benefit level was set to reduce to a minimum the need for supplemental assistance from outside the NIF. All citizens were encouraged to provide their own voluntary supplement to the benefits arising from the NIF.

The Tory Government in 1954 set out to undermine these principles so far as expatriate pensioners were concerned. The Welfare State became the Unfair State, or perhaps we should call it the "Farewell State." It used the same principles that UK governments followed in the original colonisation of Australia - transport them and forget them. Only this time instead of forcibly transporting the scum of its prison system, it offered blandishments for the best and brightest of its young citizens to emigrate under the £10 assisted passage scheme.

What it never did was tell the emigrants that their parents would become frozen people in the land of promise if they ever dared to spend the last years of their lives in Australia.

And subsequent governments of both colours have continued to pursue the same policies.

Now the mauve (blue with a slight touch of red) government of Tory Blair perpetuates the same obscene practices, offers the same tired excuses, and refuses to honour the dictates of conscience.

Building Better Offices for the Needy at Westminster

New offices are being built for 205 MP's at an estimated cost of almost £1 million per MP!

According to a report in the Sunday Times, the total cost of the new building is apparently now estimated at £250 million (up from the original 1992 Commons approved estimate of £130 million). The same report states that the increased estimate was quietly approved by a committee of the House in December.It quotes a senior backbencher who compared the cost per office to what most people pay for an entire house. (The price per MP will be nearly 20 times the£62,000 price tag for the average house.)

The cost to end pension benefit discrimination, worldwide, is £255 million. (DSS estimate for 1996).

Part of the standard Westminster script, used by the Government to rationalize its inactivity, in virtually all replies to correspondence from angry pensioners includes the sentence: "There continue to be competing demands and constraints on Social Security spending ..."

Obviously, uprating costs need to be moved to the building budget!!

Jim Hacker Rides Again

New Labour and the Tories are set to extend concessionary TV licences to all UK resident pensioners at an estimated annual cost of £470 million.

Abolition of the discrimination depriving half Britain's expatriate pensioners of the annual uprating they have already paid for by a lifetime of contributions would cost £275million.

It seems that both major parties are concerned more with votes than with morality. Michael Prescott quotes a minister on the £470million price of extending the TV licence subsidy to all 10 million UK resident pensioners - "cheap, given the number of voters who benefit".

Statue of Lloyd George

In November 1998, 60 MPs signed an Early Day Motion in support of the campaign to place a statue of David Lloyd George on a plinth in Parliament Square, acknowledging the enormous contribution that he made as Chancellor in initiating the creation of the welfare state through the introduction of old age pensions and other radical social reforms in the interests of the welfare of the people of Great Britain; etc.

We need another Lloyd George now.

A special plinth should be reserved in Parliament Square for the Prime Minister, or Chancellor, or even the Private Member who brings to an end the unfair discrimination against pensioners residing overseas.

Man of Straw

British Lawmakers Set to Approve Gay Sex at 16 (Reuters 25-JAN-99)

LONDON, Jan 25 (Reuters): Britain's parliament, with one eye on European human rights law and the other on the danger of child abuse, prepared on Monday to approve a cut in the age of consent for gay sex from 18 to 16.

......

Home Secretary Jack Straw, introducing the Sexual Offences (Amendment) bill, said the current British law was subject to challenge in Europe and had to be changed.

We also found this comment from CNS

Britain's House of Commons voted Monday in favor of a bill lowering the age of consent for homosexual sex from 18 to 16 - a bill one Conservative Party Member of Parliament slammed as a "predator's charter".

The Commons initiative follows a European Court of Human Rights ruling that current British law contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.

Cynical Comment on a Cynical Government

If the UK Government is so anxious to comply with European law in the matter of gay sex, why do they resist pressure to comply with European law on the matter of pension uprating and equality? Do they still say: "The payment of pensions in EC countries is covered by EC regulations rather than our domestic legislation" ?

Or is it just that overseas pensioners have no vote, and don't sit at the Cabinet table?

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