This thread exists to discuss British politics.
Political issues related to Northern Ireland and the Crown Dependencies (the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) are also considered on-topic here if there's no more appropriate OTC thread for them.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
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As with other OTC threads, off-topic posts may be thumped or edited by the moderators.
- There is a dedicated thread to discuss LGBTQ+ rights in the United Kingdom. That doesn't mean it's always off-topic here, but unless something's directly linked to political events, that's probably a better thread for it.
- There's also a separate thread to talk about your favourite British Prime Ministers.
Recent political stuff:
- The vote to see if Britain should adopt Alternative Voting has failed.
- Lib Dems lose lots of councils and councillors, whilst Labour make the majority of the gains in England.
- The Scottish National Party do really well in the elections.
A link to the BBC politics page containing relevant information.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 3rd 2023 at 11:15:30 AM
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![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Prescriptions can be free if you're on certain benefits, and there's the Prescription Prepayment Certificate (PPC) for longer-term conditions.
BBC: 'New UKIP' will take votes from Labour, says Nigel Farage
"New UKIP is a lot more professional, a lot more smiley, a lot less angry, and it's going places," he told BBC One's Sunday Politics programme.
I thought they were going after the Conservatives? Make up your bloody mind, Nigel.
"Yup. That tasted purple."
They're taking votes from both.
HGW XX/7
15,000-home garden city to be built at Ebbsfleet.
Well, at least we're finally building homes. Perhaps they're worried about a housing bubble.
Schild und Schwert der Partei
Ebbsfleet at least has the advantage of being able to benefit from HS 1.
"Yup. That tasted purple."
About damn time. It probably wont cure it, but it's a start.
House Lewis: Sanity is Relative
Greenmantle - Prescription are always free in Scotland (your link is for NHS England). Which is as it should be, but the idiot Tories want to change that. They don't seem to realise that it's cheaper to give people free prescriptions than it is to fund the much more expensive treatments people require if they don't take their prescriptions - and if it costs them, they don't take them. Studies have shown that. The poor find themselves forced to choose between food and medicine, which invariably means they end up with more serious and expensive conditions.
The numbers don't add up, and there won't be any cash for extra nurses. If anything, they might have to lay off a few to cover the extra costs of adding those charges.
edited 16th Mar '14 12:08:36 PM by CaissasDeathAngel
My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.
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@ UKIP: Farage is right — UKIP are going after disaffected Conservative, Labour and plain disillusioned voters — and they're succeeding.
Keep Rolling On
Yes indeed.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
About damn time. It probably wont cure it, but it's a start.
True - we need ten times that number (exactly ten times that number, in fact), and it's increasing all the time. Even trickier, our worsening climate situation narrows the number of places in which we can build houses unless you like being woken up with an enforced morning swim half they year round. The fact that Osborne plans to extend Help to Buy for another decade is unlikely to help either, given that the evidence so far seems to suggest that it's achieving the precise opposite of its mission to keep house prices more affordable.
In other news, leaked documents show the government is planning to scrap its jobsearch website due to rampant fraud and corruption. Personally, I could have gone for the courier job with Cosa Nostra Holdings.
A cache of documents seen by the Guardian details how the government's main website for job hunters – which tens of thousands of unemployed people have been required by the DWP to sign up to – is likely to be jettisoned when the contract for the service comes up for renewal in two years.
A year and a half after its launch, Universal Jobmatch has been ridiculed for hosting numerous fake jobs, including one for an MI 6 "target elimination specialist" and "international couriers" for Cosa Nostra Holdings, as well as listings for pornographic websites.
More recently very serious problems have emerged. Separate investigations by Channel 4 News and the Labour MP Frank Field have uncovered hundreds of thousands of fake, repeat or, in a minority of cases, fraudulent job postings that enticed jobseekers to spend money needlessly – for example on fake criminal records checks – or were a means of harvesting personal information for identity fraud.
At the start of March, the DWP removed more than 120,000, or one-fifth, of all job adverts from over 180 employer accounts,because the ads did not abide by the site's terms and conditions.
Field is now pressing the National Audit Office to investigate the site which he described as "bedevilled with fraud".
The DWP said they regularly monitor Universal Jobmatch to remove jobs that do not meet their rules and that of 524,640 employer accounts only a tiny minority have proven to be in breach of them. The leaked information about Universal Jobmatch contained in the leaked documents became public after the chair of the public accounts committee said last week that the DWP was on the verge of a "meltdown" over its relationship with private companies and welfare reform.
They say that some of the website's problems have partly stemmed from the decision by ministers that the site – which is run by the international online recruitment company Monster – be as "open" as possible to all types of employers. Recruitment agencies have taken advantage of this openness by uploading repeat adverts on the site.
The effect, the documents go on to say, has been that civil servants have been unable to determine how many genuine employment vacancies are listed on the site. According to one email, the data simply is not "robust" and rectifying the issue will be expensive.
Other internal communications suggest that civil servants have asked for more than one hundred changes to the service. However senior managers have decided to pass on only a handful of them to Monster because they have given up on improving the current site and expect to start afresh after April 2016.
In light of the high possibility that Universal Jobmatch will be cancelled in its current form, a communique to project heads said that the relationship with Monster now had to be managed "very carefully".
A paper detailing options for overhauling the site includes:
• Getting an outside company to create a new service that would "learn the lessons" from Universal Jobmatch.
• Designing a site that would only cater for small employers. Jobseekers would be expected to use other sites to find work that was with larger employers.
• Coming to some contractual agreement with other major jobs sites to cross-post adverts and merge them into one larger DWP-run database. It is understood that ministers have not been involved in discussions about the new options.
The project to digitise job-searching activity for millions of unemployed people has been beset with problems from its start. The DWP was forced to rerun the bidding process for the contract and previously leaked documents detail how the department had to pay compensation to one of the failed bidders.
The multimillion-pound contract was won by Monster but Iain Duncan Smith's department has been struggling to justify its rapidly rising expenditure. Civil servants say that the US company that pioneered online recruitment two decades ago, has demanded an extra £975,000 to clear Universal Jobmatch of fraudulent employment ads.
Stephen O'Donnell, who runs the National Online Recruitment Awards, said that Monster was "quite exercised". He said that while the company had made "very good money" on the contract, the DWP was to blame for creating a "real mongrel of a website". "Monster … have real expertise worldwide in building spectacular job boards. They more or less invented the industry. So you do think 'how come it's so bad'? The reason for that is the civil servants basically told Monster 'forget everything you know about job boards, this is what we want'."
O'Donnell said: job centres used to have good checks before the site was launched. It used to be, to put a job in a job centre, a recruitment agency had to call and identify themselves, go through various checks and identify the employer." However without those checks he said many more anonymous postings were being hosted under the DWP's logo. "Anonymous job adverts are terrible. [The job] may or may not exist. It might just be a fishing trip for other information."
" I do not hold Monster at fault: they have been directed by the DWP to do what they are told."
"I think it's criminally unfair to sanction jobseekers for not using such a clumsily built website, rife with spammers … identity thieves and anonymous job ads."
A spokesman for the DWP said that the search for work had become increasingly digital in the last decade and that over the next six months, wifi and 6,000 extra terminals would be installed into jobcentres across the country so jobseekers had access to the latest technology.
Responding to the leak the department said: "Universal Jobmatch revolutionises the way jobseekers find work and ithas already helped many jobseekers find the jobs they want since it was launched in 2012.
"How people find work has become increasingly digital so it's right - and responsible - that DWP should continually look to ensure we are making the best offer to jobseekers.
"The current Universal Jobmatch contract comes to an end in 2016 so any speculation on what will happen after that is premature."
Monster declined to comment.
Wait for the screw up caused by the dismantling and privatisation of Probation.
Good riddance.
And, the moral of the story is: if you bring an outside contractor in because they can actually do something better than you when you don't know where to start: listen to them. 
And, "open" doesn't always mean "honest". <_<
edited 16th Mar '14 6:26:06 PM by Euodiachloris
Budget's coming soon. Prepare the BS detectors.
Not budget-related, but funny.
◊
Big news about the budget. The current £1 coin is to be replaced with a new 12 sided version to tackle counterfeiting.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
Well, I guess they were going to catch up with the present design eventually. Coin shapes usually have a certain lifespan before a sufficiently troublesome number of people figures them out.
It will have had a 34 year run by the time they phase it out which is a long time. Vending machines etc will need changed, but they changed the 50p a while back and it all seemed ok.
In other news 150 M Ps are backing moves to change non payment of the licence fee from a criminal to a civil dispute. I 100% support this. Honestly I would want the licence fee scrapped altogether. There is so many ways around it now anyway it's lost all meaning.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
Not that I object to making it a bit easier for poorer folks to sit back and relax in front of the TV, but where does the Beeb get its budget from these days? Would reduced/zero enforcement of licence fees seriously harm it?
They say this move would cost them millions because it would make evasion easier. Frankly I don't care. The licence fee is a horribly outdated concept in this day and age. It should be scrapped and made to stand on its own two feet like every other company. It might certainly put to an end the bloated executive pay and sense of entitlement.
No because "bloated executive pay and sense of entitlement" comes from every other company.
At least I'm not facing threat of the jail for not paying their wages.
edited 19th Mar '14 2:30:30 AM by BigDannyC
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
Yeah, if you think that making a media organisation go private is going to reduce corruption and result in more egalitarian salaries, boy do I have a surprise for you.
I can see how licence fees, being a regressive tax (one that primarily stomps on those least able to pay them), may need revision, but privatising the Beeb isn't likely to help much with anything, and would likely hurt its quality. Maybe give it a ring-fenced section of the tax budget?
edited 19th Mar '14 2:34:09 AM by Iaculus
What's precedent ever done for us?
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@ BBC: Interesting, funding of the BBC's activities is now coming more and more from the Licence Fee — direct Government funding for BBC Monitoring has been reduced and has been stopped completely for the World Service is stopping from this year.
edited 19th Mar '14 2:38:59 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
I don't know what the alternative should be. All I know is people shouldn't be forced to pay for one corp with a fear of punishment for not doing so. It's like being forced to pay for an Xbox live account or subscription to the guardian before you can enjoy your wii or read the telegraph. It's ridiculous.
And then there's the actual cost of punishing licence fee evaders. It ties up so much time in magistrate courts and must cost more than it makes back. End it.
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...and just before the budget, something from and about The BBC: The modern BBC according to W1A: a world where bizarre things are allowed to happen
Scottish Tories prove they don't understand how basic economics work by saying they want to restore prescription charges.
Free prescriptions cost less because it means people actually take them (since they don't need to choose between their medicine and something like food or heating), meaning they don't get the more serious (-ly expensive) health problems that really screw up their lives and the healthcare system.
My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.