Get your rotten eggs ready for Ian,..

Ian Duncan Smith (Tory) has been put in charge of sorting out the benefits fiasco which affects an estimated 5.9 Million people in the UK including me, I suggest we all get our rotten eggs ready in case Mr Smith gets it wrong!

The important thing to realise here is that people on benefits are living on a knife edge, one miscalculation can ruin the family budget and leave you eating mush and smoking ‘dimps’ for a couple of weeks, or worse in hoc to a loan shark. Most people on benefits would like to work if it were financially practical to do so, unfortunately in most cases it’s simply NOT practical and taking what work is available would leave them even worse off. For example a person on Job seeker's allowance cannot take part time work for the simple reason that they are only allowed to keep £5 per week of earned income while claiming, this in most cases will not even pay their bus fares to their job. So its full time permanent employment for them or nothing.

A similar situation exists for those of us on Incapacity Benefit, we are allowed to keep £12 per week of what we can earn part time. However for the vast majority of Incapacity Benefit claimants full time permanent employment is physically impossible.

Clearly New Labours approach, i.e. bullying claimants into taking whatever work is offered even if it makes their situation worse rather than better is not acceptable, but considering the huge deficit which is New Labours legacy to the UK what can Mr Smith do that will not hurt claimants, the sick, disabled and impoverished?

UK Election : No Overall Control WINS !!!

So we have a hung parliament here in the UK as a result of Thursdays general election. Its now been 5 days and negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are still underway however talks between Labour and the Liberals have clearly failed.

Personally I have been waiting for this particular circumstance to come about for over 20 years, in fact ever since I became old enough to vote. As a life long Liberal I have always know that this is THE chance for liberals to make a lasting impact in British politics. I am keeping my fingers crossed right now in the sincere hope that this chance is NOT wasted. It has to be the case that Proportional Representation has to be the price for Liberal cooperation in any coalition government, anything less would be a betrayal of the 23% of our population who voted Liberal.

Gordon Brown must go! Mr Brown was not elected to be the British PM, he got in by default when Tony Blair left, and in this General Election the British people have decidedly NOT voted for Gordon Brown to continue running this country. In my view there is no circumstance where Gordon Brown remaining PM could be acceptable to the British People. Even if talk between the conservative and liberal parties should fail Gordon Brown personally has lost the mandate to govern, in fact he never had any such mandate from the people of this country.

So we are living in interesting times, the Conservatives look set to lead the next government, whether in a full coalition with the Liberal Democrats  or as a minority government remains to be seen. At present there is still much horse trading being done behind closed doors and hopefully the long term result will not only be electoral reform but also long term stable consensus government of this country.