Bob Arctor

There may be some truth in this, but if the system were fundamentally changed to benefit the few who could afford to pay for their treatment, the options available to everyone else would be much worse than they are now. This is why most people prefer the NHS model over private insurance, although there are benefits to the French model. As other people have said though, mental health services are woefully underfunded. They always were, and it got worse with the recent cuts, not least because in Sheffield it is funded jointly by the NHS and the Council and the latter have had terrible cuts made to their budgets - as a consequence lots of people no longer get a service. But if we want better mental health services, and I guess we all do, they need paying for, so there needs to be grown up discussion between government and the public about how this will be done, but given that most British peoples' views and attitudes to mental health are still infantile and ignorant we will be waiting a long time for that. By the way, I'd be interested to know why you think you've now got the right diagnosis. Lots of psychiatric diagnoses have little basis in actual science. ---------- Post added 31-10-2015 at 20:43 ---------- Are you aware that with talking therapy there is no research that gives finds any significant evidence of one type of therapy's effectiveness over another? It seems to be largely about whether the relationship between client and practitioner is therapeutic or not, and this seems to be largely about personality, not modality of therapy. I do find it frustrating that the NHS is so hung up on CBT, with a little bit of DBT or CAT thrown in at the fringes, not everyone finds CBT useful by any means, but whichever modality of therapy you prefer you are not going to find any clinical evidence for its effectiveness with which to argue your case.

Thanks for the replies, they're helpful

About 5 years ago we bought an HP G72 17" laptop for £500. It was a decent laptop for the time, not top end but not budget either - 2.13 GHZ processor, 3GB memory, 320GB hard drive. I'm looking for a replacement and although I would expect the specs to be higher I wouldn't expect the prices to be that much higher, I understood that the technology would get relatively cheaper as time went by and production costs reduced. But looking at HP ProBook 470: 4GB memory, 1TB hard drive, 2.2 GHZ processor, £673 on eBuyer. Not that I'm particularly looking for another HP, but what is happening here? Have the production costs hit their floor?

Legalising them would probably work better because once you lock one gang up it just creates a business opportunity for another and it then takes the police about another year to get the intelligence on the new one to be able to lock them up, and so on.

Me neither, and I go quite a bit.

There was a report on the radio recently about someone driving the wrong way down the motorway and I was thinking "Honda Jazz" and the announcer then said "the driver of the Honda Jazz...".

It was far worse in the US. There lenders made mortgages to people whose only income was benefits. They gave them "teaser" rates that were affordable but the lender knew that once the teaser rate expired it would be unaffordable. But since they'd planned on selling the debt to be collateralized and resold before that happened they didn't care. That was a significant aspect of the subprime scandal that led to the financial crash of 2008.

I started off thinking you were being genuinely objective but I'm afraid it's now clear that you are not. What Cyclone has given are not "meaningless media anecdotes" but examples of malpractice that should give anyone cause for concern even if they don't want to jump to any conclusions about how widespread the malpractice is. I don't think there is anything that is possible of giving you any cause for concern, however compelling the evidence, because I don't believe you care.

You're right. What is needed is an independent review of at least some of these cases so that we know more conclusively whether the DWP was at fault. The government needs to commission this. We only know of the need for this because the information has finally been released. The DWP clearly think there is something to hide or they wouldn't have tried to keep the information from us for so long. You and I are paying for these assessments, we should know whether they are being done properly.

2,380 people died within 14 days of an assessment that found them fit for work - that's a very specific time frame, not 'sometime' after. And these are not previously fit and well people, these are people who have been signed off repeatedly, sometimes for up to a year, by their GP (a fully trained health professional) as having limited capability for work due to illness or disability while waiting for their assessment. I work with this system, GPs do not just hand out sick notes like sweets, they use their fully professional judgement to decide whether they think someone in all likelihood is not at that time able to work. For ATOS and the others to get it so wrong so repeatedly suggests either terrible incompetence or outright dishonesty. I always find it interesting, given that it's possible to score various points between 0 and 15 on the Work Capability Assessment, how it's nearly always 0 or 15. That in itself says that something is not right.

Unless we know how many people on tax credits got a mortgage and wouldn't have without those tax credits, I doubt we can say with any certainty that they have inflated house prices. We weren't getting any tax credits when we got our mortgage - it was a self-cert which to me seems more reckless by the lender. They may have asked for work histories, I can't remember, but they knew my other half was on a fixed contract with no guarantee of further work. As it is, it's always been affordable and we don't get tax credits. We'll have to see if a significant amount of people get repossessed after losing tax credits - until then we won't know how much of a factor they have been in the housing market.

If you want a bailout you need to screw up on an enormous scale and put the whole global economy at risk. You also need to spend your time doing something that is useless to most people such as busying yourself with collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, sub-prime lending and convergence trades, not doing something useful like making steel. If you do the former you will be bailed out and basically let off so that you can carry on as you were. If you make steel, jog on.

Is it true though that this helped inflate the housing bubble? I'm not sure it is, the bubble was created not by growth in earnings but by growth in borrowing regardless of earnings, i.e. the availability of cheap credit (low interest rates) and reckless behaviour by lenders in checking whether people could actually pay it back. Taking tax credits into account as income is not in itself reckless, lending excessively against income of whatever type is.

And yet, as soon as the markets are opened up to western businesses, Communist regimes are apparently completely fine with Conservatives. Totally, utterly fine. All that criticism of the Eastern Bloc and Chinese governments during the 1970s and 1980s, all that highlighting of their terrible human rights records, thought control, lack of individual freedoms, all of which would have been completely valid had they meant it; all of that was really a complaint about a lack of access to those markets. As soon as that access was opened all those criticisms fell away. ---------- Post added 20-10-2015 at 21:17 ---------- Systematically suppressing peoples' rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of association is also 'disrespectful' to say the very least.

I think I'd want to negotiate on those fees first! Bloody hell! I'm not saying that no-one on NMW can't survive without tax credits, but in the example I gave the people who would qualify for tax credits would be someone with children. That is not a living wage for those people, bearing in mind not everyone can get 40 hours a week or even guaranteed hours at all. ---------- Post added 19-10-2015 at 21:50 ---------- George Osborne agrees with you. He says that for tax credits to reduce wages have to rise. Some employers say that tax credits have to stay the same or they will have to pay more. Seems fairly clear.

It's worse than that. The employer can pay NMW, not less than it, and the government will pay the balance. A 40 hour week on NMW nets you £1161 pcm. The average monthly rent is now £663 pcm in the north of England and although obviously some people will pay less than that you don't get housing benefit or council tax support on the salary quoted. So you've got to pay maybe £500 pcm rent, £120 council tax, gas, electric, water, food, possibly petrol to get to work plus insurance etc. It often doesn't add up. Lots of people on that wage will get Working Tax Credit - for now. And remember that many businesses say they 'can't afford' to pay more than NMW. Now, they may be lying; the alternative is that our economic system is so broken that people in low grade jobs can't afford to live without government assistance. Which is madness. The context to this is that over the last 20 - 30 years a greater proportion of the national income has gone to profits and a lower proportion to wages, which along with asset inflation (mainly property) has made wages non-livable for many.

Are there? Can you supply their names and addresses? I think what happens with all of this is that the Tory-aligned media puts up the most egregious examples to soften public opinion on attacks on benefits generally. When the first Welfare Reform Bill was going through the previous parliament, the right wing press was full of stories of 'benefit scroungers' and it all died down again after its safe passage through the Commons, which seemed rather too much of a coincidence.

Have you noticed that despite their talk of smaller government, the Tories seem very keen to whittle away at the rights of the population to challenge the government? They have consistently attacked the right of citizens to take out a judicial review of government policy, removed legal aid that allows people to challenge the state at local and national levels, have gagged charities, are gagging trade unions and overriding local planning decisions if they don't fit with central government policy, e.g. over fracking. Even people who voted for them should be worried about this, because they won't have their choice of party in government for ever, whatever Cameron thinks, and the boot will on the other foot at some point. This is bad for democracy, bad for citizens and only good for governments who want to squash dissent and exert control over the population.

I think most people are tired of the name-calling style of politics. It's peoples ideas and policies that matter.

I started to Google "Who is..." Guess which auto-fill option came top!!!

Is this the same Taxpayer's Alliance that set up a 'charitable' arm so that they could funnel funds to the Taxpayer's Alliance without... paying tax?

Living in one of the areas mentioned I would say that this comment is the closest to the truth on this thread. I'm sure there is more than one factor but (and please, I say this as someone with a lifetime of anti-racist activism behind me so understand where I'm coming from when I say this): young men are the worst drivers and we have a younger demographic in Burngreave than, say, Ranmoor. Also, there tends to be a fascination with cars among Asian and Yemeni young men that I don't think you would find in Fulwood, but is mirrored to a large extent by white British young men in, say, Parson Cross. And a significant proportion drive very fast. Coupled with somewhat lax approaches to road safety among south Asian and Roma populations and that is not a good mix. It is quite common to see a group of 5 or more Roma kids just wandering about in the road, with the oldest being maybe 10 years old. That is not good road safety. But essentially the best way to avoid children being killed or injured is for all of us to drive carefully and not to tell ourselves that it's all someone else's fault. So please slow down, wherever you live and whoever you are. And to the person who thinks my kids are out causing trouble and vandalising stuff, stop stigmatising them based on where they live. They are lovely kids as are most of the kids round my way, so shut up.

Do you mean this? https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/in-your-area/housing-services/environmental-sustainability/big-sheffield-switch.html SCC don't supply the energy, they just get a load of people together which makes it more attractive to energy companies to offer lower tariffs so they can get lots of new customers. Also check out Utilita and Ebico, I think both have tariffs with no standing charge and Ebico have the same tariff for pre-pay as they do for a billing meter - they are a not for profit company.

This was made with children in mind http://www.discogs.com/Tom-Green-Music-For-MRI-Scanners/release/2203945 Not sure if it works for adults too. I only got this after my MRI so I can't report on it's effectiveness, but if you like ambient music it's very good on its own.

I think you need to do your research and explain to them that some drugs are more harmful than others. I would explain that the substances to be most wary of are those that are dependency-forming (heroin, cocaine, alcohol) because it's possible for them to take over your life which defeats the point of taking them in the first place, which is to have fun. And also those about which the least is known, currently known as 'legal highs' or 'research drugs'. This is because the composition keeps changing to stay ahead of the law so it's really hard to know what you are taking and what the risks are. Generally I would encourage people who are going to take drugs to do their own research so that they are not relying on friends for information, who may not know what they are talking about. This also fosters a sense of responsibility which is important. "Everything in moderation" is not bad advice; lots of kids smoke loads of weed at around age 16 and while smoking lots of weed can be very enjoyable it's important that the other things in life still happen, such as relationships, school work, sports and other interests. Where a lot of teenagers come unstuck is that they spend way too much time out of it on weed and their lives become one-dimensional and that's bad for their mental health. Drugs are psychoactive, which means they affect your brain function and how you feel. Therefore it's important that people, especially the young, think about whether they are emotionally in the right place to take drugs. If you already feel insecure and worry that your friends are talking about you behind your back, don't take acid and don't smoke lots of skunk. Don't take drugs with people you don't trust and think about why you are taking them - is it because you want to and think you will have fun, or is it just to fit in with others or is it because you want an escape from something that's distressing you. I would say, if it's not solely for enjoyment don't do it, at least not now. ---------- Post added 24-09-2015 at 09:58 ---------- I'm not sure this is still totally accurate. There is a lot of ecstasy on the market now which has a lot of MDMA in it. Chemists in the Netherlands seem to have found a reliable way to synthesise a replacement to safrole oil and purity of pills is higher than it was in my day http://www.mixmag.net/read/drug-welfare-groups-advise-mdma-users-to-crush-dab-wait-news