sadoldgit

Feck! Found out today that my wife is entitled to £0. They don’t take into account your outgoings including mortgage repayments. They only help with rent payments. WTF? No one called us to explain we just found out through the online journal. What is the point of NI payments when you can’t get anything back when you need it? I get a pension but it is not enough to cover the mortgage and the bills. UC is a f***ing disgrace.

Thank you. We did consider it briefly but decided it was best to put it behind us and move on. My wife had a nasty accident a couple of months ago which left her with a bad case of concussion which has only just sorted itself out so didn’t want any extra grief. The situation was made worse by the fact that there were only two other people in the business and they were in a relationship together. They also use our local and we have a number of mutual friends so it’s all been a bit messy. I took what is hopefully the last bit of paperwork into the office yesterday. The lady I saw was very helpful and sympathetic but once again was a barrier between us and my wife’s caseworker who works in another office miles away and who we can only communicate with via our online journal page. I know we hear lots of stories about people abusing the benefits system but given our experience so far it seems a miracle if anyone gets anything out of UC. I do have sympathy for those who have to deal with the public face to face though. Whilst most people have been well behaved during our visits to the UC office there have been a few who have kicked off. There are always two or three burly guys wondering around the office just in case, which makes for a slightly oppressive atmosphere. Hopefully we are nearly done now!

And yet when you posted the same info on TUI you showed the tweet and it said £32.5m? Losing your grip Cabbage?

I have just renewed my passport online and it worked brilliantly. I received a number of updates by text and it arrived exactly when they said it would. Mind you, for £75 you expect a good service, but they clearly have got this and as you say, others things right too. We are still getting nowhere fast. I am still receiving messages to log onto my page and look at messages in my “journal” even though I am not applying. Why they can’t ask my wife to provide any info they need about me I don’t know. If I don’t comply we are told that it could affect the outcome. They are doubling the amount of bureaucracy in all cases where one of the claimants is in a relationship. Fortunately my wife has now found another job but we had 5 months without a second income (she left her previous job during sick leave after being bullied by her boss and being advised to get out by her doctor) and during that time we have racked up a lot of debt. It seems the quickest you can get some money is 5 weeks. We have been waiting much longer. I don’t know how one parent families cope. The people in the centre are pleasant and try to be helpful, but the caseworkers are in other offices and you can’t get to communicate with them other than through your journal online. And what does Universal Credit even mean? At least Jobseekers Allowance did what it said on the tin.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I thought I had stumbled in to Kafkaesque world but it is helpful to know that we are not the only ones struggling with the system. The film I, Daniel Blake was spot on!

Has anyone been through this process successfully? My wife applied for credit at the beginning of May and we are still trying to get her payments sorted. It has been the most unbelievable bureaucratic phaff so far. I am not claiming myself but keep getting called in to meetings. They have all my income details but still I get asked for more documents. They won’t let me email stuff to them. They seem to make it as difficult as possible in the hope that we will just give up. My wife has to keep an online journal of everything she does, which showed she applied for 80 jobs, but still we are waiting. We don’t even know how much we are likely to get. I have to log on to my own page too even though I am not claiming. As she was in college we were given a £490 loan to help out but the bills are racking up and my pension doesn’t go anywhere near covering them. The system sucks. God knows how people cope who don’t have internet access. I’d be interested to know if anyone has been able to navigate the system successfully.

I don’t think he has been treated badly. He clearly doesn’t fit in with the current regime and it is obvious that a move is in the best interests of both parties. He is still being paid (handsomely). He is within his rights to see out his contract but at his age and experience you would think he would rather go somewhere where he will get a game every week. If he is struggling to find a Premier club to take him now it will be more of a struggle next year. We aren’t asking for a Kings Ransom for him. Where we have gone wrong is to pay him a massive wage. What bastards eh?

Nail on head.

Giving an honest answer to the question “does my bum look big in this” is not a good idea.

I don’t know Micky. I have no idea how women’s football is funded but those who work in that area say there is an issue so I have no reason to disbelieve them. As for men’s football, the FA is there to support football and as far as I know, is not gender specific. I don’t know how much the F A spend on the development of women’s football in comparison to men’s football but am willing to assume that it is a great deal less.

Very interesting figures, but do we know how much makes it’s way to funding women’s football below WC level down to the grass roots? I have not seen anyone refute claims that women’s football is relatively underfunded.

I was just making a flippant point about discrimination. I am aware that tennis is not similar but do women get paid proportionally for their 3 sets against the men’s 5? Is women’s football getting reasonable funding from the FA? Do young girls have equal opportunities to play football at school or through local clubs? Whether you care about women’s football or not there is clearly an appetite for those wanting to play and those wanting to watch it. The current debate is about getting the funding required to support women’s football. It seems to me a reasonable thing for those interested in it to fight for better funding and in doing so you cannot ignore “gender politics” given the historic issues that women have faced over inequality.

I agree. But at least things are moving in the right direction for women’s football. I don’t believe that people have watched this WC because of the hype. I believe they have watched because they are genuinely interested. Now that needs to be built on. It needs more investment and more support financially from the FA but ultimately it needs to generate more cash itself which means more bums on seats, more people watching on tv and more sponsorship. The USA have shown what can be done if you support the sports at grass roots financially. I hope that this WC will provide the impetus for other countries to follow suit. Hopefully we are moving away from calling women footballers “9 pinters” and closer towards referring to their sporting abilities. Going into this WC I heard that women goal keepers were a joke. True, some have been poor, but I have seen a number of quality performances, not least from the Netherlands keeper last night. There has also been some comical defending but also some brilliant defending, not to mention a number of cracking goals. Women’s football is still seen as a poor relation to men’s football so I don’t see the problem in highlighting the financial issues. They do need to be addressed if the momentum from this WC is to continue.

Those pesky women still don’t know their place eh hypo? It seems to completely pass you by that gender politics is there for a reason. The patronisation if women’s football has been unreal. Give them smaller goals, smaller pitches and lighter balls. They don’t want them. They want their game to be given the same level of respect as men’s football. It is not as if the matches are finishing 21-17. Mostly the games has been as closely contested as the men’s game despite the huge handicap of having to play on full size pitches with full size goals and the same weight of ball. Who’d have thunk it? As in the men’s game, there were some excellent games, some average games and some poor games. Women’s football still has a way to go, but I have really enjoyed the World Cup A’s has everyone I have spoken to. Women’s football is coming on in leaps and bounds and of course there are going to be issues about funding, pay etc as long as there is such a huge disparity between the men’s game and the women’s game. If you hadn’t noticed it has been going on in professional tennis for years. Most sane people would say that men are overpaid for what they do in football. It is not unreasonable for women to argue that they are being underpaid. You don’t like the “gender politics?” I wonder how you felt when that uppity Rosa Parks refused to get off the bus?

Sky sports reporting that both FF and McCarthy are up for sale.

Quality player. So sad he got a lot of stick and was labelled ‘sick note.” He clearly loved the club.

Following in the men’s footsteps, plucky losers and can’t put a penalty away. Still, they gave the Yanks a better game in the second half.

Can’t see us winning this. Every time the ball is played into our box they look like getting a goal. We are going to have to play a lot better in the second half.

Sky sports reporting that the deal is worth £11m. Sounds more realistic than the £17m previously reported.

I’m not sure why this sale should “come back to haunt us.” The club have had long enough to access his potential and it looks like that is Championship level. Nothing wrong with that as long as you are a Championship club. He looks like he will do ok at that level but the fact that Premiership clubs aren’t queuing up for his services tells you all you need to know. He doesn’t look like the type of striker who is now going to massively improve, which he would need to if he was going to play at the highest level.

Nobody reads The Guardian? Apparently you do Ducky.

It is odd isn’t it? I don’t know why the mods don’t deal with this kind of cr ap. People have been banned for less than this in the past, now the worst you can expect is to be moved to the Kindergarten thread.

David Okereke

Why would I need to plead with anyone not to rape somebody on a football forum? You right wing types have strange values.

The only thing I would plead with you for is not to have children.