"Roger Dewhurst" <dewhurst@wave.co.nz> wrote in message

"kathryn" <bob@bob.com> wrote in message
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"Roger Dewhurst" <dewhurst@wave.co.nz> wrote in message
news:cjv42f$tn1$1@lust.ihug.co.nz...

"kathryn" <bob@bob.com> wrote in message
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"jackkincaid" <theovermind@another.com> wrote in message
news:eb35fbed.0410050953.6f7f74ec@posting.google.com...

While ready to accept at your day is filled shuffling bits of paper

around

can you, truthfully, say that Britain would be a tiny bit worse off

you

sat at home collecting the dole?

R

Kathryn

Well yes actually - I work in state Retirement Pension. Im not saying

that

individually I'm irreplacable but if you don't have the staff to do

work, it simply doesn't get done. Do you want to tell me that over

200,000

people (which is roughly the amount of customers my office has) not

getting

paid the money they rely on won't be a bad thing?

Would it not be better if the payments were made directly by IRD (or
whatever you call them there)?

R

IRD?

which is why the government is making people change to that method of
payment, but you still need people to make sure the system keeps
running, people change their accounts, there can be problems that
require a person to sort it out. Plus it's not all I do, I process
new claims to retirement pension which can involve a lot of work if
there are any problems with the persons contribution record, also a
bit more complicated if they are divorced or widowed. We also
regularily recieve information revising the amount of retirement
pension due - is the person due arrears, has there been an
overpayment. Are they due an increase for their spouse?

Then of course we have people dying, possibly an overpayment of
benefit has happened and they may have a spouse who needs their
pension increased. Or a womans husband has retired and her pension
needs to be increased. There are millions of little day to day things
required and that's retirement pension we're slightly less complicated
than any other benefit and I haven't even mention the endless
phonecalls we get. There isn't some computer system which just starts
automatically paying people money.

Kathryn

H. Wake wrote:

Stephen Glynn <stephen.glynn@ntlworld.com> wrote in message news:<2si4cpF1kpskhU1@uni-berlin.de>...

H. Wake wrote:

Stephen Glynn <stephen.glynn@ntlworld.com> wrote in message news:<2sgff5F1kgafuU1@uni-berlin.de>...

jackkincaid wrote:

The Conservative Party announced today that, if elected to power, it
would scrap all the restrictions currently preventing the widespread
establishment of Islamic schools in Britain.

The Muslim Association of Britain and others have demandeed that 100
new Islamic schools be created immediately; under its current
proposals, the Tories would oversee far more - every school in which
the majoritry of children have parents nominally of the Muslim faith
would be liable to Islamification, even overnight.

When did they say that? All I can find is an interview in the Evening
Standard where Tim Collins (Tory education spokesman):

'Education spokesman Tim Collins told the Evening Standard the aim was
to encourage more religious based schools, with Muslim communities in
London expected to take up the chance.

The move comes after a report saying Muslim youngsters are often failed
by the state sector but would thrive if they were allowed more
faith-based schools. The Muslims in Education study, by a group of
academics and teachers, said there were "major populations" without
suitable schools.

Although Muslims are the largest minority community in the UK they
currently have only five state schools compared with 80 in the
independent sector.

"Only"? There are NO "English" schools!

Really? I suppose the schools in my town must be French or something!

There are no schools with a declared English identity inculcating
English culture and no one else's, which is what moslem schools would
do, see below.

Sorry, I don't follow this. If they're grant-maintained schools
they've got to follow the national curriculum.

You seem to think that
they'd be the equivalent of something like the French Lysee in London,
which is, to all intents and purposes, a school transplanted from France
to London (though it can hardly ignore the fact all its pupils live in
London, of course) but I don't see how they could so do within the state
system. Are you saying that's what the school in Leicester that the
Tory education spokesman was praising does?

I'd be very interested to know, btw, what you think a school that
inculcated 'English culture and no one else's' would be like. How
would it differ from a state school at the moment?

You seem to be confusing yourself between nationality and religious
affiliation.

The moslems do this! They have said that what they believe is a lack
of provision of islamic education in schools is due to racism. You
mustn't believe that islam is just a religion, or even a religion at
all. Just because the word god is thrown around doesn't make
someone's opinions a religion. Islam is a militarist imperialist
political ideology. For them, there is no separation of what they call
their "religion" and the state.

Eh? That's roughly like saying Judaism isn't a religion because
there's a political ideology called Zionism. And where do you get this
idea that for Muslims there's no separation between religion and the
state?

Maybe some Muslims think there isn't, or shouldn't be, just as
some Christians doubtless think there shouldn't be any such division but

what makes you say that all, or even most, Muslims think that way?

There is, for example, a state-supported Roman Catholic
secondary school in my town, at which the majority of pupils are Roman
Catholics. Most of them are, also, coincidentally, English. It seems
to differ in no major way from any of the other secondary schools in the
area except that it usually has better exam results than most.

"We want more Islamic schools set up by Muslim
religious leaders," said Mr Collins. "Faith schools have a very
successful track record but there are so many constraints at present
that Muslim communities have found their schools driven into the
independent sector or kept under the thumb of education authorities."'

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/13594766?source=Evening%20Standard

He appears to be talking about encouraging people to set up schools,
presumably on the lines of the one in Leicester he praised in his
conference speech, rather than changing the character of existing ones.

Steve

Seems like "multiculturalism" (now called "diversity") is turning out
to be just a polite word for apartheid.

In what way? Do you regard the existence of C of E, Roman Catholic and
Jewish schools in the state system and subject to the same rules as
all other schools as evidence of apartheid? Why do you think that a
Muslim school subject to the same constraints should be any different?

Yes, they are evidence of multiculturalism, a type of apartheid. A
moslem school would be different for the reasons stated above. And
moslems are separatist. They have a moslem parliament, moslem
mortgages, and given half a chance (as in Canada) will demand sharia
law. They cannot be relied upon in time of war, the ultimate test.
See recent case of RAF reservist, who objected to being expected to
fight for what the useful idiots imagine is "his" country against an
islamic country - his true allegiance.

Let's try to take this bit by bit. First, this 'Muslim Parliament'
never was a 'Parliament'. It was a self-selecting forum for people
wanted to sound off, as far as I could make out, and, anyway, it's now
apparently collapsed.

It was no more a 'Parliament' than is the
General Assembly of the C of E and 'Anglican Parliament'; less so, in
fact, since at least (AIUI) there's some sort of formal procedure to
select people for that and the results of its deliberations have some
formal role in Anglicanism.

Sharia mortgages. So what? The HSBC and a couple of other banks have
introduced mortgage products that are acceptable to strict Muslims --
products for which you could apply if you wanted to switch your
mortgage. Well done their marketing people. Complaining 'they've got
Sharia mortgages' is like complaining 'Jews have got kosher butchers'.

Demanding Sharia law, given half the chance. Well, not that many
Muslims in the UK do seem to be demanding it,

but anyway .... People
can demand what they want, and frequently do. Doesn't mean there's a
cat in hell's chance they'll get it, though.

'They cannot be relied upon in time of war'. What I think you mean is
'one RAF reservist demonstrated he couldn't be relied on...' Your
trying to draw general conclusions from the actions of one individual

about as sensible as concluding 'Muslims must all be very brave and
loyal soldiers because several of the were awarded the VC in WW2'.


By contrast, Christians and

Jews (usually) can be relied on in time of war, or at least their
objections would not be because they feel a higher allegiance to
another country, although we haven't tried going to war with Israel
yet. A stupid woman Labour MP said England must be abolished by being
broken up into regions because ethnic minorities don't want to be
considered to be English. She said this in the West Midlands and I
think it is a safe bet that most of the people she had in mind - as
far as she has a mind at all - were moslems. Which leads us on to ask
that if they don't want to be considered to be English, why are they
in England? They've got their own homelands, so why are they so
selfish as to insist on having ours as well, and why are some English
- that stupid woman MP for one - letting them have it?

Again, if she said that, she's clearly very stupid, but why do you take
the views of a stupid Labour MP to be particularly representative of
anyone? Is she a Muslim?

How do you think that a Muslim school in the state sector would differ
markedly from a Catholic school? My late wife attended a Convent
school. Apart from the fact most of the teachers were nuns, most (but
by no means all*) the girls there were Catholics and the religious bits
of morning assembly were specifically RC it sounds to have been very
similar to any girl's grammer school at the time. How, apart from the
religious bits, do you think a Muslim school would be different from any
other?