| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage 13:12 - Oct 15 with 5118 views | epaul |
Charmimg person to have in govt
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/15/lord-freud-minimum-wage_n_5988374.htm
Lord Freud Urged To Resign For Saying Disabled 'Not Worth' Minimum Wage
Tory welfare minister Lord Freud has been urged to resign after he suggested that disabled people are "not worth" being paid the full minimum wage.
In response to a question about the disabled and the national minimum wage at a Tory party conference fringe meeting, the peer was recorded saying: "Now, there is a small…there is a group, and I know exactly who you mean, where actually as you say they’re not worth the full wage and actually I’m going to go and think about that particular issue, whether there is something we can do nationally, and without distorting the whole thing, which actually if someone wants to work for £2 an hour, and it’s working can we actually ... "
Labour leader Ed Miliband confronted David Cameron at Prime Minister's Questions over the Tory peer's "very serious" remarks, asking if he agreed that "disabled people should not be paid the minimum wage".
"Surely if someone holds those views, they can't stay in government?," he said, concluding: "In the dog days of this government the Conservative party is going back to its worst intincts - unfunded tax cuts, hitting the poorest - the nasty part is back."
The Prime Minister shot back, referring to his late disabled son: "I don't need lectures from anyone about looking after disabled people ... instead of casting aspersions why doesn't he get back to talking about the economy?"
He also distanced himself from Lord Freud's comments, saying: "Those are not the views of the government ,those are not the view of anyone in this government."
Speaking on the BBC's Daily Politics, welfare minister Esther McVey distanced herself from Lord Freud's remarks, saying that "those words will haunt him". She made clear that her fellow ministerial colleague would "have to explain himself".
The Prime Minister's spokesman later said: "I'm sure that Lord Freud will explain how he shares the Prime Minister's view."
Shadow leader of the Commons Angela Eagle wrote on Twitter that the Prime Minister should sack Lord Freud "if he had the guts" for his "disgraceful comments" about the disabled.
Shadow communities secretary Hilary Benn said: "Having just been disowned by the Prime Minister, why is Lord Freud still in his job?"
Tory councillor James Scott, whose question to Lord Freud resulted in the controversial answer, reportedly asked: "I have a number of mentally damaged individuals, who to be quite frank aren’t worth the Minimum Wage, but want to work. And we have been trying to support them in work, but you can’t find people who are willing to pay the Minimum Wage.
"We had a young man who was keen to do gardening; now the only way we managed to get him to work was actually setting up a company for him, because as a director in a company we didn’t have to pay the Minimum Wage, we could actually give him the earnings from that. How do you deal with those sort of cases?"
Lord Freud once worked as an adviser to James Purnell as work and pensions secretary in the last Labour government, before going on to join the Tories as a life peer. He previously admitted that he "didn’t know anything about welfare at all".
The Tory peer has caused his own share of controversies as a coalition minister, after attacking people for pursuing a "lifestyle" on benefits,, insisting there was no link between benefit cuts and an increased use of food banks, telling families hit by the bedroom tax can "go out to work or use a sofa bed", and likening benefit claimants to corpses. |  |
| The hair and the beard have gone I am now conforming to society, tis a sad day
The b*stards are coming back though |
| |  |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 22:16 - Oct 17 with 1188 views | Dr_Winston |
There are lots of people who aren't worth NMW. Hardly any of them disabled. |  |
| Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or f*cking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back. |
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| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 23:07 - Oct 18 with 1110 views | jackrabbit |
"Lord Freud was speaking two weeks ago at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. The discussion concerned ways of helping disabled people back into work, not how to punish them financially. Lord Freud was responding to a question about whether pay top-ups were the answer. As he said, perhaps he should have rejected the premise of the question; but such fringe meetings are supposed to involve a free and frank exchange of views.
Labour must have had the transcript of this meeting for some time — yet chose to wait until midday on Wednesday to disclose it. If it was so revealing of the Government’s callousness, why was it not brought to the public’s attention sooner?
The reason, of course, was to draw attention away from two other matters. One was the publication of the latest employment figures, showing near-record levels of people in work and the largest ever annual fall in unemployment — down 538,000 in the last 12 months, which is itself partly due to the welfare reforms engineered by Lord Freud. The second was the mounting criticism of Ed Miliband’s leadership."
Sorry to get in the way of a good Lefty hate campaign. The OP is hilarious - 'you are Dave Spart and I claim my £5'! The truth is rather more innocuous - a poor choice of words yes, but the context is everything. The guy was trying to address the problem of why disabled people find it hard to get into work. |  | | |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 09:01 - Oct 19 with 1075 views | quiff |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 23:07 - Oct 18 by jackrabbit |
"Lord Freud was speaking two weeks ago at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. The discussion concerned ways of helping disabled people back into work, not how to punish them financially. Lord Freud was responding to a question about whether pay top-ups were the answer. As he said, perhaps he should have rejected the premise of the question; but such fringe meetings are supposed to involve a free and frank exchange of views.
Labour must have had the transcript of this meeting for some time — yet chose to wait until midday on Wednesday to disclose it. If it was so revealing of the Government’s callousness, why was it not brought to the public’s attention sooner?
The reason, of course, was to draw attention away from two other matters. One was the publication of the latest employment figures, showing near-record levels of people in work and the largest ever annual fall in unemployment — down 538,000 in the last 12 months, which is itself partly due to the welfare reforms engineered by Lord Freud. The second was the mounting criticism of Ed Miliband’s leadership."
Sorry to get in the way of a good Lefty hate campaign. The OP is hilarious - 'you are Dave Spart and I claim my £5'! The truth is rather more innocuous - a poor choice of words yes, but the context is everything. The guy was trying to address the problem of why disabled people find it hard to get into work. |
Yeah the unemployment figures fiddled more than ever - anyone on the workfare schemes etc isn't counted as unemployed, over a million on zero hour contracts and a growing trend for bogus self employment... |  |
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| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 10:37 - Oct 19 with 1060 views | jackrabbit |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 09:01 - Oct 19 by quiff |
Yeah the unemployment figures fiddled more than ever - anyone on the workfare schemes etc isn't counted as unemployed, over a million on zero hour contracts and a growing trend for bogus self employment... |
Spoken like a true glass-half-empty socialist .." .a growing trend for bogus self-employment". I was forced into self-employment in my 50s. Best thing that ever happened to me. Wish I'd done it earlier. Perhaps you should try it - it might make you a bit more positive. | | | |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 13:39 - Oct 19 with 1034 views | Banosswan |
Lord Freud’s slip I don’t mind, but the confected outrage disgusts me
Dominic Lawson Published: 19 October 2014
Comment (34) Print
MY 19-year-old younger daughter works for two hours one night a week pulling pints in a pub. She is not paid. And she loves it. To be specific, she loves the sense of performing a task appreciated by others that requires concentration on her part and yet is immensely sociable. For many millions of Britons these are the attributes that make employment psychologically essential, quite apart from any financial rewards: this is why Sigmund Freud observed that the principal ingredients of happiness were love and work.
Unfortunately, not much more than 10% of those with mental disabilities are in employment, so my daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, is statistically most unlikely to have the good life, as set out by the founder of psychoanalysis.
Yet last week one of Freud’s great-grandsons, the government minister Lord Freud, was depicted as a monster for applying his own fertile mind to dealing with precisely this problem. In a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference two weeks ago he was challenged by a Tory councillor, David Scott, whose own daughter had been mentally disabled: “I have a number of mentally damaged individuals, who to be quite frank aren’t worth the minimum wage but want to work. We have been trying to support them in work, but you can’t find people who are willing to pay the minimum wage . . . how do you deal with those sorts of cases?”
Freud replied that the government’s universal credit scheme might help top up their wages, and added: “I know exactly who you mean, where actually as you say they’re not worth the full wage, and I’m going to go and think about that particular issue, whether there is something we can do nationally.”
Unknown to Freud, there was a Labour party researcher present who was taping that discussion and passed the recording to his leader’s office. Two weeks later, during a prime minister’s questions that might otherwise have been tricky for Labour on the day record employment figures were announced, Ed Miliband ambushed the PM with Freud’s comments (minus the context) and declared they showed that “the nasty party is back”.
Following Miliband’s line of attack, various disability charities, such as Mencap and Sense, waded in to denounce Freud. Even Esther McVey, his ministerial colleague at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), remarked on BBC2’s Daily Politics: “Those words will haunt him . . . He will have to explain himself.” Oddly enough, just before McVey’s contribution, Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, had conscientiously explained the context of Freud’s remarks.
I gather there was consternation at the DWP over McVey’s apparent willingness to join in the group hate of the by-now- distraught Freud, but fortunately Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state, prevailed on him not to resign. I say fortunately because the day a minister loses his job as a result of an afternoon’s confected outrage in the 24-hour news cycle is the day many other people with a sense of public service would vow never to go into politics themselves.
Freud is a natural target for such abuse, given that he made a lot of money in the City, principally as an adviser on the stock market flotation of large companies. Yet he is far from your typical pinstriped plutocrat, as I know, having worked with him at the Financial Times back in the early 1980s.
When David left the FT for the Square Mile, stock-market analysts were paid no better than senior financial journalists; it was the desire to be making deals rather than opining on them, not the prospect of big money, that lured him away. He still lives in the same unpretentious north London house as he did 30 years ago – and refuses to take any pay for his government work (which he began as an adviser to the last Labour administration).
Indeed, Freud’s semi-public rumination on exempting employment of the mentally disabled from minimum-wage regulations might have stemmed from knowing that Labour had at one point considered precisely this policy: in 2003 it suggested that so-called therapeutic work should not qualify for the minimum wage. It envisaged such work as “packing and assembly . . . for mental health outpatients” to be paid “varying amounts up to £20 per week”.
This document was drawn up after discussions with the very charities that last week were treating Freud as some sort of vermin. They included Mencap, which, when Labour floated this idea, declared that an exemption from minimum-wage regulations should be allowed for those employing the mentally disabled, because “most people with a learning disability want to work and we urge the government to give them that chance”.
Such anger as was genuine stemmed from Freud’s phrase, echoing that of his questioner, that many mentally disabled people “aren’t worth the minimum wage”. On the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday, Ming Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader, thundered: “It is a question of dignity – that every citizen is worth as much as every other citizen.” Leaving aside the fact that a person has more dignity in work than out of it, Campbell – along with many others, including his successor, Nick Clegg – was wilfully misunderstanding the point.
Freud was not arguing that some mentally disabled people were worth less in an intrinsic moral sense – merely that their economic value to an employer might be less than the £6.50-an-hour minimum wage, and there are not many bosses who will deliberately hire people at a loss.
Interestingly, the audience showed themselves far more perceptive than the politicians – and very alert to the cheapness of the attacks on Freud’s character and motives. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, after referring to Freud’s words as “utterly appalling”, nervously suggested, “This won’t be popular, but he should be given a second chance” – and, clearly to his surprise, was roundly applauded. Yet Hunt was not as startled as Angela Eagle, the shadow leader of the House of Commons, whose claim that Freud had caused “a great deal of offence to disabled people” and should resign was greeted with boos; to more applause, a member of the audience declared that this was “hypocritical point-scoring, disgusting”.
The flushed look of shock on Eagle’s face was neatly captured by the cameras: she can never have imagined that a cross-section of the public would take the side of a multimillionaire former banker against Labour and a host of disability charities. But while the British people may have no natural affection for pointy-headed policy wonks from the House of Lords, they have a finely tuned hatred of hypocrisy and cant from the House of Commons.
In that context, it is a pity that David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and other Conservatives did not have the courage to explain what Freud was (clumsily) trying to say, rather than just depict him as a sinner who should be forgiven. As we head towards a general election, politicians are becoming ever more nervous of saying anything that might cause the slightest offence to anyone at all.
But, believe me, parents of those with mental disabilities are not particularly offended by Freud’s remarks. The people we can’t forgive are those who would use our children as political chaff. |  |
| Ever since my son was... never conceived, because I've never had consensual sex without money involved... I've always kind of looked at you as... a thing, that I could live next to... in accordance with state laws. | | Poll: | How do you like your steak? |
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| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 20:38 - Oct 19 with 1003 views | quiff |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 10:37 - Oct 19 by jackrabbit |
Spoken like a true glass-half-empty socialist .." .a growing trend for bogus self-employment". I was forced into self-employment in my 50s. Best thing that ever happened to me. Wish I'd done it earlier. Perhaps you should try it - it might make you a bit more positive. |
Or spoken as someone who worked in the employment sector until recently, it's companies like supermarkets employing you, but you are self employed - meaning you are on zero hours and have to work out your own taxes etc.. | |
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| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 21:47 - Oct 19 with 984 views | jackrabbit |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 13:39 - Oct 19 by Banosswan |
Lord Freud’s slip I don’t mind, but the confected outrage disgusts me
Dominic Lawson Published: 19 October 2014
Comment (34) Print
MY 19-year-old younger daughter works for two hours one night a week pulling pints in a pub. She is not paid. And she loves it. To be specific, she loves the sense of performing a task appreciated by others that requires concentration on her part and yet is immensely sociable. For many millions of Britons these are the attributes that make employment psychologically essential, quite apart from any financial rewards: this is why Sigmund Freud observed that the principal ingredients of happiness were love and work.
Unfortunately, not much more than 10% of those with mental disabilities are in employment, so my daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, is statistically most unlikely to have the good life, as set out by the founder of psychoanalysis.
Yet last week one of Freud’s great-grandsons, the government minister Lord Freud, was depicted as a monster for applying his own fertile mind to dealing with precisely this problem. In a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference two weeks ago he was challenged by a Tory councillor, David Scott, whose own daughter had been mentally disabled: “I have a number of mentally damaged individuals, who to be quite frank aren’t worth the minimum wage but want to work. We have been trying to support them in work, but you can’t find people who are willing to pay the minimum wage . . . how do you deal with those sorts of cases?”
Freud replied that the government’s universal credit scheme might help top up their wages, and added: “I know exactly who you mean, where actually as you say they’re not worth the full wage, and I’m going to go and think about that particular issue, whether there is something we can do nationally.”
Unknown to Freud, there was a Labour party researcher present who was taping that discussion and passed the recording to his leader’s office. Two weeks later, during a prime minister’s questions that might otherwise have been tricky for Labour on the day record employment figures were announced, Ed Miliband ambushed the PM with Freud’s comments (minus the context) and declared they showed that “the nasty party is back”.
Following Miliband’s line of attack, various disability charities, such as Mencap and Sense, waded in to denounce Freud. Even Esther McVey, his ministerial colleague at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), remarked on BBC2’s Daily Politics: “Those words will haunt him . . . He will have to explain himself.” Oddly enough, just before McVey’s contribution, Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, had conscientiously explained the context of Freud’s remarks.
I gather there was consternation at the DWP over McVey’s apparent willingness to join in the group hate of the by-now- distraught Freud, but fortunately Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state, prevailed on him not to resign. I say fortunately because the day a minister loses his job as a result of an afternoon’s confected outrage in the 24-hour news cycle is the day many other people with a sense of public service would vow never to go into politics themselves.
Freud is a natural target for such abuse, given that he made a lot of money in the City, principally as an adviser on the stock market flotation of large companies. Yet he is far from your typical pinstriped plutocrat, as I know, having worked with him at the Financial Times back in the early 1980s.
When David left the FT for the Square Mile, stock-market analysts were paid no better than senior financial journalists; it was the desire to be making deals rather than opining on them, not the prospect of big money, that lured him away. He still lives in the same unpretentious north London house as he did 30 years ago – and refuses to take any pay for his government work (which he began as an adviser to the last Labour administration).
Indeed, Freud’s semi-public rumination on exempting employment of the mentally disabled from minimum-wage regulations might have stemmed from knowing that Labour had at one point considered precisely this policy: in 2003 it suggested that so-called therapeutic work should not qualify for the minimum wage. It envisaged such work as “packing and assembly . . . for mental health outpatients” to be paid “varying amounts up to £20 per week”.
This document was drawn up after discussions with the very charities that last week were treating Freud as some sort of vermin. They included Mencap, which, when Labour floated this idea, declared that an exemption from minimum-wage regulations should be allowed for those employing the mentally disabled, because “most people with a learning disability want to work and we urge the government to give them that chance”.
Such anger as was genuine stemmed from Freud’s phrase, echoing that of his questioner, that many mentally disabled people “aren’t worth the minimum wage”. On the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday, Ming Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader, thundered: “It is a question of dignity – that every citizen is worth as much as every other citizen.” Leaving aside the fact that a person has more dignity in work than out of it, Campbell – along with many others, including his successor, Nick Clegg – was wilfully misunderstanding the point.
Freud was not arguing that some mentally disabled people were worth less in an intrinsic moral sense – merely that their economic value to an employer might be less than the £6.50-an-hour minimum wage, and there are not many bosses who will deliberately hire people at a loss.
Interestingly, the audience showed themselves far more perceptive than the politicians – and very alert to the cheapness of the attacks on Freud’s character and motives. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, after referring to Freud’s words as “utterly appalling”, nervously suggested, “This won’t be popular, but he should be given a second chance” – and, clearly to his surprise, was roundly applauded. Yet Hunt was not as startled as Angela Eagle, the shadow leader of the House of Commons, whose claim that Freud had caused “a great deal of offence to disabled people” and should resign was greeted with boos; to more applause, a member of the audience declared that this was “hypocritical point-scoring, disgusting”.
The flushed look of shock on Eagle’s face was neatly captured by the cameras: she can never have imagined that a cross-section of the public would take the side of a multimillionaire former banker against Labour and a host of disability charities. But while the British people may have no natural affection for pointy-headed policy wonks from the House of Lords, they have a finely tuned hatred of hypocrisy and cant from the House of Commons.
In that context, it is a pity that David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and other Conservatives did not have the courage to explain what Freud was (clumsily) trying to say, rather than just depict him as a sinner who should be forgiven. As we head towards a general election, politicians are becoming ever more nervous of saying anything that might cause the slightest offence to anyone at all.
But, believe me, parents of those with mental disabilities are not particularly offended by Freud’s remarks. The people we can’t forgive are those who would use our children as political chaff. |
Well put and a welcome bit of sanity amongst the usual Leftist hysteria. The Freud affair was a classic example of the all too prevalent recent habit of not making any effort whatsoever to understand a point that has been made, but instead wade in shouting 'Tory injustice!' and 'typical unfeeling Tories ' irrespective of the facts. In fact the facts tend to get in the way of a good prejudice. It affects the BBC in particular and manifests itself on programs like Question Time. It's almost Orwellian in its scope and intensity. Never mind what was said and in what context, just hear what you want to hear. It's easier to display your outrage that way. | | | |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 06:41 - Oct 20 with 931 views | epaul |
For all the Tory apologists
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| The hair and the beard have gone I am now conforming to society, tis a sad day
The b*stards are coming back though |
| |
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| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 22:31 - Oct 21 with 863 views | jackrabbit |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 06:41 - Oct 20 by epaul |
For all the Tory apologists
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Here's my to-do list:
. Pick up dry cleaning
. Book Miss Saigon, Prince Edward Theatre
. File income tax return
. Arrange car insurance
. Book restaurant for Saturday
. Contact golf club re autumn medal
. Plan next visit to Liberty
It's about as interesting as yours but slightly more accurate and connected to reality. | | | |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 23:17 - Oct 21 with 848 views | the_oracle |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 22:31 - Oct 21 by jackrabbit |
Here's my to-do list:
. Pick up dry cleaning
. Book Miss Saigon, Prince Edward Theatre
. File income tax return
. Arrange car insurance
. Book restaurant for Saturday
. Contact golf club re autumn medal
. Plan next visit to Liberty
It's about as interesting as yours but slightly more accurate and connected to reality. |
Could you point out the inaccuracies for me please? | | | |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 12:23 - Oct 23 with 793 views | jackrabbit |
| Tory minister says disabled not worth minimum wage on 23:17 - Oct 21 by the_oracle |
Could you point out the inaccuracies for me please? |
Bedroom tax - it's not a tax, it's the withdrawing of an unfair ( in some cases) subsidy.
Sell-off of the NHS - eh? In your imagination. Let's hope the gross waste and inefficiencies inherent in the NHS will one day be addressed.
Fracking - yeah exploiting billions of pounds worth of shale gas and making us energy self-sufficient with a fraction of the damaging footprint of useless windfarms is a typical Tory plot.
Pensions sell off - eh? Having your fund available to use and not forced into an annuity? Disgraceful?
Pensions age rising - fact of life. Growing older population and increasing burden on the young to fund it.
Zero hour contracts - a job is better than no job. We've all been there and done it that's life.
That'll do for starters. I can't be arsed to answer every dubious claim on your ludicrous list.
You talk about 'Tory apologists' - how about ''Labour apologists'? Where's the apology for the last disastrous over-spending Brown government that dumped us firmly in the shit?
Let's agree to differ. | | | |
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