May has been home secratary/PM for the last 7 years - all she's done is cut back police, armed services and security services and now look where we are!

At least Corbyn would stop selling arms to Saudi who are heavily implicated in the spread of extremist Islam and enable their goals. That would be a good start.

Yeah these guys would never get their hands on a white van and some blades too if Corbyn was in charge.

I have what I don't have empathy for are those that don't maximise their potential

I don't know or care who you vote for! But I 100% agree with this!

We may have detected them earlier or we may have prevented them becoming radicalised in the first place. We are under attack and our security forces are at breaking point. May is a menace.

We may not either - you will not stop those who are vulnerable to radicalisation - those doing the brain washing are far more convincing than a few social workers

Yes possibly so.....and nothing would've been done about it along with the other numerous terrorists acts where the perpetrators are "known to the government"

Well since 7/7 they've prevented about 50 terror attacks and there have been, what, four or something like that? So they do a pretty good job on the whole considering police numbers have been cut massively in the last few years. I suppose there is an argument that they should be more proactive in arresting people who they believe to have terrorist links but a lot of the time they won't have actually committed any crime. They thought the Manchester bomber was just a peripheral figure and not someone particularly involved.

And what of those who are at full potential but still need state help? As i've said previously, someone needs to do the minimum wage jobs to keep your food cheap.

And if someones maximum potential is to stack shelves or, perhaps they have a disability and are not able to manage the most menial of work, would you want them to starve or, live under a park bench.

You are a cracking advert for the Tory party though.
Take benefits from the disabled, freeze public sector pay indefinitely oh yeah and cut tax for the better off.
People should be encouraged to be the best that they can but, not vilified for not achieving the same as certain others.

Whilst at the same time not heavily taxing the 'over achievers' so that we all earn the same as per Labour policy.

If people "genuinely" cannot work - probably about 1m through mental health or disability the state needs to provide for them. That doesn't include those who don't want to work and use disability as an means to an end.

With regards to what the minimum wage needs to be this is trade off between paying benefits and receipts from business in the form of CT and employers NI. What you could do is increase minimum wage to £10/hr and personal allowance to £20k and take all those on minimum wage completely out of the tax picture. Then you wouldn't need to pay benefits - much more efficient - but then you would have a load of civil servants with no job?

So your solution is what? To raise minimum wage and the personal allowance? That requires funding. How about raising CT and 45p tax rate to pay for it all?

"According to figures quoted in a parliamentary report, there are major misconceptions among the general public about the scale of benefits fraud in particular. It says a 2013 survey found Britons believe almost a quarter, 24 per cent, of all benefits were claimed fraudulently, 34 times greater than the official 0.7 per cent estimate."

When you slavishly follow a particular dogma, I imagine facts are really annoying?

It's also smaller than the amount of money underpaid to those entitled to it. And a fraction of the amount of tax avoidance.

Exactly, the Tories peddle this Striver vs Skiver narrative is nonsense to set the lower orders fighting amongst themselves for the crumbs off their table, while they carve up the hog roast amongst themselves and their friends.

Indeed:

"According to figures published by the government in October, the tax "gap" for 2013/2014 stood at £34bn, or 6.4 per cent. This is the shortfall between what is estimated by HMRC to be due in tax and what is actually collected.

This eye-watering figure includes as much as £14bn in uncollected income tax, national insurance and capital gains tax and £13.1bn in uncollected VAT.

It should be noted, however, that these estimates are based on a lot of assumptions about what was due in the first place and that deliberate and illegal evasion is only a small part of the problem. This was deemed to account for £4.4bn of the lost duties, while legal but dubious avoidance accounted for £2.7bn. The rest is spread across various issues such as duties not paid on smuggled goods, non-payment because of bankruptcy or hardship, or simple errors.

It's also only fair to note that the percentage uncollected each year is one of the lowest in the world, although some argue the HMRC figures underestimate the scale of the problem and the gap is more likely to be in the region of £120bn."

I never quoted a figure - so your quote is of no relevance in this argument.

Surely you wouldn't want anyone to pay more tax than they are legally obliged - or is just the well off that its ok for?

Because rather than having huge departments to calculate and pay out who is owed what benefit you sort it out at the first stage.

It doesn't require anymore funding as the businesses would fund it through lower CT - why pay over the CT to pay it out again?

Its called working smarter more efficiently.

The quote is very relevant; you decided arbitrarily that a million people make legitimate claims because they can't work, and that the rest are slackers who are making a choice not to work. You're wrong, and that quote is a factual rebuttal, which illustrates the misconceptions of the general public - misconceptions which I'd argue are created and fuelled by the right wing media, and those who repeat as facts what they read in the Daily Mail and The Sun.

There is no argument here - you were just wrong.

No i'm not how many people would you say are mentally physically unable to work 20 years ago when we had far more manual labour jobs the total was 1.1m - so despite advances in medical science, better H&S at work and far less manual labour the number has trebled!!

So in a reasonable well off country 10% of the workforce are unable to work due to disability really?

Yes. Presumably you are in favour of owners of rabid right wing newspapers living in off-shore tax havens while persecuting the poorest in society?You are in favour of 4 out of the top 10 FTSE companies paying no tax? The Sun 'newspaper' paying £1 tax?

That's a global issue and not so easy to resolve. What these companies do do is produce well paid employment. Jezzas targeted 5%

[url=http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+disabled+people+are+there+in+the+UK%3FWarning - may contain facts![/url