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Hold on a second Reggie the other day you were saying you was voting tory.

People, let's face facts: the country is in a huge stinking financial hole, and whoever wins the next election, there will have to be huge cuts in public spending, because the money is just not there to pay for it any more. Labour have pencilled these cuts in for after the election (how convenient), but not specified where they will fall.

We can now see that the so-called prosperity of the 1997-2007 period was a lie. Cheap money created a boom in house prices and the financial sector, taxes on the City of London and stamp duty brought in huge amounts of money which was pissed away on unreformed public services. They were unreformed because Gordon Brown would never allow Tony Blair to do it, you may remember TB's comment that he had the "scars on his back" from trying to reform the public sector.

Anyway, the financial and housing sectors are now ruined, there's no more tax coming in from them, and suddenly, to pay for our bloated public sector, we are faced with borrowing ?606 billion over the next four years. This is insane. We need to cut our coat according to our cloth. We can't afford ID cards at ?20 billion, the NHS IT fiasco at ?12 billion, regional governments, quangoes, and hundreds of thousands of five a day advisers, real nappy coordinators and diversity awareness facilitators, all on index linked pensions. It's all got to go. The party is over. The head of Ofcom is on ?400k a year, the fucking Prime Minister is only on ?190k. These parasites have had ten good years of taking the piss at our expense, but now it has to stop. It simply has to, because there is no more fucking money.

Pensioners get enough money for fuel. Full stop.

A friend of mine, who's 68 worked out his fuel bill for the year and took off all the winter fuel allowances and 'cold weather payments' and realised his annual fuel bill, net, was about ?500 (gas and electric). 200/52 = less than ?10 per week out of an average pension of (?120pw??).

Any pensioner dying of cold is more due to them giving the money out to grand kids (don't they get these winter allowances a month before xmas or something) or stuffing the money under the matress. That money never goes on fuel and to be honest the government knows it. It's a sweetener because an ever increasing percentage of the population are of pension age and could make the difference between getting into no10 or not. It's a vote catcher.

Anyone who has bills knows the most expensive ones are in spring, after 3 months of the cold winter, not in October/November when the 3 months previous were pretty mild. These winter allowances go on Nintendo DS's for the grandkids and other gifts so let's not pretend otherwise, eh?

Evidence, Sam?

Figures?

Or are you just assuming that?

- Eric

... about the Nintendos I mean.