Cameron's finally grown a pair.

[likalixer]

Think I'll vote Conservative.
Sorted! after days of indecision

Hillingdon, if I were voting purely selfishly, I would go for the party promising no tax rises and further benefit cuts. It would hurt our family to see taxes rise. But not as much as it would hurt those who already have very little to live on. I don't want my children to have an "I'm all right, so that's okay" approach. And I also believe that it's only a couple of bouts of bad luck before we could any of us be needing the help that DC would cut.

Sadly, my vote is unlikely to help get the government I would most like.

No idea, grimble because ours didn't. Nor did those of anyone else I know or have advocated for.

Grumble

The only way your disabled relative's benefits doubled under the last govt was if they were wrongly awarded in the first place.

The govt's goal was to save money by reducing the number of people receiving disability benefits.
That means even if they found every person to be at a high level of need they would set the bar higher until they met the money saving quota.

Disability benefits are found to have negligible rates of fraud and yet they hounded people with disabilities on the pretext they would be helping them.
The ATOS testing system which cost millions was found not fit for purpose but only after 100,000s of people had had their benefits cut and their mobility vehicles/scooters removed. On appeal a huge number of these people has their benefits reinstated but this took many months. For those months they lived in poverty and often had no way of getting around or in many cases to work.

They removed respite care sessions and nursing sessions. They closed day centres. They increased the burden on disabled people and their families without care for the impossibility and hardship of it all

Is this life of fear and uncertainty what Cameron would have wanted for Ivan?
What a silly question - none of these facts would have ever affected him or Cameron's family.

We should all vote against anyone who backed these policies. Is this the sort of thing we want to be part of? Bullying those who have least?

Indeed Dawn: me neither...that's why I'm wondering. He is an incredibly disabled child, so maybe he was wrongly assessed before.

I actually think Christian foodbanks are a good thing, compared to official govt hardship or emergency funds.

Those who need foodbanks also get an opportunity for pastoral care and debt counselling. The vast majority of food bank clients can benefit from these extra services, that cannot be provided by central or government because of political correctness. Their lives can be transformed thanks to their encounter with a foodbank.

dawn you have described your own family challenges and what you need to confront in your life, which sounds incredibly difficult. I am not detracting from your circumstances far from it, I can't begin to imagine it.

I know people feel frustrated with the cuts, but conflating Cameron's financial decisions with his family loss seems wrong. Agreed he can't personally experience all our challenges, but then I could be accused of not understanding his, as I can't imagine the pain of losing a child.

So I did feel a lot of empathy for him describing his situation yesterday and yes, he will be on a hiding to nothing. Damned if he talks about it to show he is a family man who understands human tragedy, damned if he says nothing and appears a hard-nosed politician immune from life's ills. I personally don't see him as a figure of hate, but I know I'm possibly in the minority on here.

Cameron cares more about himself than the country:

For those that question DC's involvement with the NHS with Ivan. No doubt he was able to adapt his house to accommodate a profoundly disabled child, but his time commitment was no different to any other working parent.

He spent many hours in A&E and in wards. If you think about it, this would be hard, emotioanally, to delegate. He would use any down time in the House of Commons to go to GOSH to sit with his son.

Ivan passed away on 25/02/09. Do a Mumsnet advanced search for that date + Ivan. Click on the links to newspapers, such as The Guardian. You will see that the Camerons were quite amazing parents, who really, genuinely appreciated the NHS. They looked after Ivan themselves, with the support of the NHS. They did not delegate their parental duty by throwing money at it.

This is bullshit. The Camerons could afford two nannies for Ivan. How many average people with a profoundly disabled child are able to afford this?

I appreciate that they must have been through hell as parents but to say that they are the same as everyone else is simply not true.

And right now, DC is planning to cut funding to carers, to people who don't have the luck of being very wealthy and able to afford private care.

This is why David Cameron should stop using Ivan's death to say how much he loves the NHS

He's selling the very hospital that Ivan died in.

They maybe could afford two nannies, but did the hospital stuff themselves.

Nobody is accusing them of "delegating their parental duty" by throwing money at it. But having great wealth does make caring for someone with a disability a lot easier in practical terms. It'd ridiculous to claim that it doesn't.

My time as a working parent, looking after a family member who was disabled and dying, was constrained very heavily by all sorts of things that Cameron just did not have to deal with, because I had no money and he does. It isn't making baseless or unfair accusations to say so, and it isn't claiming he's a bad person for that. It's a practical reality.

(Where I think he is a bad person is in leading the charge to make things more difficult for other people caring for disabled and/or dying family members, and for many disabled people in general.)

So why they should be applauded for what every parent would do if they were in that position? AND they had extra help.

I have no respect for the leader of a party who tried to close down my local hospital for no good reason. They listed a criteria of what what a failing hospital could be closed for and it met none of them. It went to the High Court and it decided that the Government was acting illegally. So what did they do after this ruling? They changed the law to suit them.

Labour good for the poor

Conservative better at managing Money

Tough call

The Conservatives are only good at managing money if you have it in the first place. They are the party for big business and screw everyone else.

Well I can guess your vote cunt

Oops I really did not mean to call you the c bomb

I'm unsure that either would have handled the lead up to the crash or spending differently pre the crash. We know they wanted fewer bank regulations than Labour and Gideon had pledged to the BBC to spend more than Labour in 2007
Easy to now rewrite the narrative

Whilst we have the Tories constantly tell us that they are better with money I am unsure that this is true
They are unwilling to chase those down who refuse to pay an adequate amount of tax
They are unwilling to require businesses to pay a fair wage to their staff. If they did so we wouldn't spend billions propping up people working full time whilst being on the breadline as the minimum wage is so low

It isn't the conservative party for the rich and the Labour party for the poor. The actual rich pay little to no tax and do as they please and who governs makes little odds to them
It is the middle really that they all try to appeal to and the conservative pretend we can all be in the middle under them.
Strivers strivers strivers....like the GOP in America being supported by poor working Americans...one day we could all be millionaires....

Thank you, Daisy.

Labour have a particular knack at keeping people poor. It's how they hang onto their core vote and why they hate the notion of lifting people out of poverty.

Good grief, NonDom you do talk some nonsense. That or you have your parties muddled and I'm not even a Labour voter.

I was thinking the same about you

Except that I have been a councillor, and there is no empirical evidence to support your theories, and yet, if we look at the way taxes and benefits have been administered over the last five years, empirical evidence does rather confirm that the rich have gained and the poor have lost. I suggest you take a look at some of the studies, JRF and UEA for example, both proving that the poor have in fact had it worse over period of tenure of this government. In other words, I'm able to back up my assertions with evidence.
Oh, and I don't think foodbanks, Christian or otherwise are a good thing. That's partly because I don't think that all those attending are in need of debt counselling etc. It's mainly though because I don't believe in punishing people for the enjoyment of job centre staff, or targets set for the most puerile reasons, oh, and because I think that people need to be paid a living wage.