Comments by "Banana" (@439bananas) on "Channel 4 News" channel.

  1. Completely agree, but the state, even the courts are useless at making feckless fathers pay.
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  2.  @hh-ck3yw  But you have to pay leisure centre fees.
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  3.  @hh-ck3yw  Well the leisure centres at Tenbury Wells and Malvern, Worcestershire, you have to pay for a swimming session to be able to use the shower facilities, whether you swim or not.
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  4. @Skunky Monk The problem is that many people do not have the stable job that the bank requires to allow you to buy a house, that plus the rent gobbles up money that should be being saved for a deposit. The problem does not end with owning a house either. I own my own property, but my child is disabled and his father just dicks us around for child maintenance. The list of currently needed repairs looks like this: toilet the diaphragm in the flush is shot and the soil pipe joint is leaking; the bath is completely blocked (plunging and caustic soda not clearing it); the central heating is not working (last time it did not work the problem wound up costing us more than £1,000 to sort out); the porch is leaking too. If you are dependent upon benefits, there is no landlord to fix these problems and there are no extra benefits in lieu of housing benefit to sort repairs.
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  5. Because you have to own a washer and dryer or have money for central heating to get them hygenically clean. So they probably work out just as expensive.
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  6. Not to mention the bankers who had to be bailed out by the taxpayer due to their investing in the subprime sector
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  7.  @europeancitizen6375  The guy was desperate to resolve his issues. Sadly things that should be being dealt with by counselling, rehab, courts, DNA testing have become too expensive for ordinary people to do and so they have resorted to this. If a show is going to set itself up to do this sort of thing then they have a duty of care to the vulnerable to do so in a productive way, but of course, that is not entertaining.
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  8.  @aubasanchez1566  What you mean some poor sap who has not cheated, who goes on the show to prove this and fails a dodgy polygraph and now has everyone who knows him thinking that he is a cheating liar, hasn't been driven to suicide?
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  9. People who are poor eat whatever is cheap and filling, add in the fact that many cannot afford electricity and you quickly have people living off chips and takeaway pasties from Greggs.
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  10.  @Gooburst4771  no no no
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  11. I completely agree, everyone castigates the mothers, but it takes two to tango.
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  12. Sadly, now all too common in work.
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  13. It is the perpetrator's schedule that should have been moved around.
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  14. Because it did not amount to murder, because he chose to go and it could not be proved that her intention was to kill. It could reasonably be proved that it was her intention to disfigure.
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  15. I know exactly what you mean. I have a disabled son and my husband walked off, but prior to that I worked and lived in a far more middle-class area. The area that I moved to has far more of these types. One mother lives on the council estate and was reckoned to be cleaning for an old couple and the next thing you know she was arrested for defrauding them of £8k over 12 months. She tells everyone that she was innocent, but frightened so she plead guilty. The only thing we can think if she is not guilty is that she must have been defrauding the DWP or something. What gets me is that she still keeps plastering pictures of her and the kids on holiday in exotic locations over facebook. Another child that lived with her grandmother was appallingly behaved at primary school, she moves off to live with the mother and does not start the local secondary school. The mother was allegedly involved with drink and drugs and the child is then taken into council care. The child is now 15/16 and last month the mother committed suicide aged 33. Another child that happened to be in my son's class this time. The mother has 8 kids by various different blokes, she has never worked, lives in a council house, kids have been in care. Her oldest kid she had at the age of 19 and dumped him to live with the grandmother. The kid had Aspergers, but they still let him run the streets where he was getting into trouble, but despite being charged with crimes they were never tried because of his mental state, this kid winds up being killed and the circumstances around this means that there was a massive Independent Police Commission inquiry. Another of her kids that was in my son's class continually bullied my son in the final year of primary and despite going in regularly and telling the school to keep them apart they chose to blame my son, because of course I am the decent person that does not show up and shout my mouth. This child was expelled within a week of starting high school. He went onto another school where other parents I knew had children and was a nightmare there too and we believe he was expelled from there too. There were rumours all around the primary that the kid had behaved in an inappropriate way with younger children and the next thing you know his uncle was convicted for child porn. That family are a Jeremy Kyle show in themselves.
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  16.  charlie cheeseface  In the end I had to have a drainage company fix it. They dismantled the pipe and discovered that it was actually limescale that had totally blocked the pipe. The drainage pipe is particularly narrow and is fifty years old. I got a grant for a free boiler, but a lot of people are nor aware that it is available.
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  17.  charlie cheeseface  The house is about 50 years old and the pipes have a narrow diameter. Problem with benefits system is that it is not set up for people who own their own homes. If I had not worked hard and bought my own home the state would pay housing benefit and these sorts of problems would be sorted out by the landlord.
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  18. To get the same calorific value from 'healthy' food costs 3 times the amount that it does to get from 'unhealthy foods. My husband walked out on our son and I, we manage because my son is disabled, so we are entitled to more money. But if we weren't we would be in a very difficult position. I don't pay rent because I own my own property, but house insurance if you are unemployed tops £20 per week, gas and electricity around £24 per week, water around £6 per week and that is before we talk about the internet connectivity that seems pretty much mandatory for kids at school these days. There would not be a lot left over once clothes and shoes are bought for children. Most people that I know that are unemployed are dependent upon the local food bank so their choice of food is not great. And it does not matter how cheap the food is if your cooker breaks, because there will be no way to cook it anyway.
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  19.  @BossySwan  Sorry, but life happens, frequently not in the way we would like it to. Jobs come to an end, people get ill, children and elderly parents need carers. folk get ill and have accidents and are no longer able to work. That is what we pay our taxes and National Insurance for, to act as a safety net so no one should be left destitute by the state.
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  20. The problem is not anything to do with dorms. In Cambridge, there is a system called supervision, this occurs in small groups and is frequently one to one and is likely to be the source of the problem.
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  21. Because their diets are filled with fat and carbohydrates, they eat these because they are cheap and filling. Lots of dripping on toast and porridge and chips, cheap and filling.
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  22. Sometimes people could get by when they planned to have kids, but circumstances change.
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  23.  @riggedforyourpleasure2546  Apparently, he was texting her up to 50 times a day and many of the texts contained sexual innuendo. The correct thing to do would have been for her to text him and say that the frequency of the texts was uncalled for and that she did not appreciate their sexual content. I do not know if she took this step, but upon knowing this was going on, as it was a fellow student, then he should have been put on a year's sabbatical and threatened with being sent down, so that their lectures could be arranged at none mutual times and so that a time table could be drawn up for meal times so that they would not meet, additionally, counselling should have been arranged for the affected student.
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  24.  @TheFirstWhiteRanger  Not sure if you are replying to my comment. But here goes: First lady received a suspended sentence. Second parent had dumped her child with the grandparent, before taking back control of the child and moving the child 25 miles away, for some reason that child wound up in care and the mother has committed suicide. Third situation oldest kid was murdered, youngest rumoured to have behaved inappropriately with younger children and his uncle was convicted for indecent images of children. Had been to the school on numerous occasions to complain that her child was bullying mine, but the school did nothing about it as I am not as aggressive as the other mother and they seemed to find it more convenient to blame my son. The teacher gave my son a rotten report, despite the fact that my son has autism and had worked extremely hard and passed ALL his SATS tests scoring in the top 0.5% for spellings, punctuation and grammar. It was not until some of this child's other misbehaviour came out 2 years later that I actually received an apology from the particular teacher. I was not happy as those reports follow the children into secondary education and it could have potentially blighted my son's school days. It is now 3 years on and my 14 year old son has been invited to speak at a conference at Cambridge University about computer programming and he has just won an award at school for his overwhelming positivity and achievement in the face of adversity. The problem with these sorts of people, their bad behaviour is very deeply entrenched and it seems to pay dividends, so they simply will not change.
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  25. Such a bypass procedure would be absolute last resort, it requires surgical intervention and the administration of anti-clotting drugs. ECMOs are usually used for relatively short periods during surgery to maintain circulation, it is not likely that they have been tested as a longer term treatment. The manpower to perform such a procedure is also likely to be under extreme pressure.
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  26. @Mateus Marini absolutely not
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  27. Problem is some people have little choice. If your guy thinks the grass is greener on the other side it is nigh on impossible to stop him from leaving no matter how long you have been together or how good things are in reality.
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  28.  Brighton  But the thing is they do not behave towards their own kind in the same mean spirited way.
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  29.  charlie cheeseface  If you live in Cambridge, that would be the case, other parts of the country are cheaper.
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  30.  charlie cheeseface  I borrowed a flexible rod, but it did not work, the limescale was solid had to have a plumber with specialist equipment to fix it.
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  31.  charlie cheeseface  Some areas have something called care and repair, I tried them, I can not remember whether they operated or not in our area or if it was the usual case of you own your own house so no go.
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  32.  charlie cheeseface  I tried them the answer was no. I live in a small town and I don't know anyone else that both do not work and own their own home, but not be loaded. There is a loan scheme where we live, you can borrow money with no interest, but my income was deemed to be too low for this. My son has damaged a piece of kit that he needs for school, I am hoping to be able to get a grant to repair it. Some people in our community have had flood grants, but we did not flood.
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  33.  charlie cheeseface  Problems with that: I receive income support and that benefit would stop and my son has autism it means that our home is his refuge, if he does not have that refuge he becomes overstimulated easily and can go into meltdown. I have to go to quite long lengths to keep him happy and calm. He is very sensitive to light and sound, if he senses any disturbance he can be up at 4am. He is very dependent upon routines and if those routines are disturbed it is then very difficult to get him back on track. Because of this it is not worthwhile taking respite care, on the few occasions where I have been ill he has had to go to my parents overnight, my parents response is that they do not know how I have managed to cope. Our situation is not conducive to having lodgers, I have not even had a boyfriend over the last 14years, it is just too much hassle. My ex did not get that with our son's condition he had to be consistent. He messed us about repeatedly with contact and our son started to scream the place down so much when he kept showing up that the neighbours called the police and CAFCASS put an end to child contact because they felt that he was unable to understand his son's condition and act in his best interests. Also at the moment because my son is at home because of corona I am unable to go to the food bank because it is open when he is doing lessons at home. Last time I was able to go was in the half term holiday and before that it was Easter.
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  34. @Greg Hallanan It depends on where you live in the UK London/Cambridge sky high rent, so if you are a hospital porter you're going to struggle. Preston dirt cheap, but high unemployment.
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  35. I am terribly sorry to hear this. So many people fail to wear masks, that as an asthmatic, I have now bought a FFP3 respirator and for all of those that say it is selfish because it does not filter exhaled air, my answer is that those that do not wear masks do not care about my health, at least by not catching the damned virus, I can not be passing it on to other people.
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  36.  @garycooper9207  I completely agree. It is now so bad that there are not just food banks, but hygiene banks too. Because of course where there is a lack of money for food then inevitably hygiene has been restricted beforehand. I agree that benefits should not be so generous that people can afford luxuries such as drinking and smoking, but it has gone way beyond that now. Even the working are poor. My son was 16 in February and they were originally going to be paying DLA until he was 17, but then Christmas time they moved the goal posts and his DLA has come to an end and I have to apply for PIP. I am bricking it and hoping that we get past first time and don't have to appeal. We are lucky here because the food bank is run by the local church and so they don't have the usual 'must be referred by a social worker, can only receive 3 food packages per year' type proviso that many food banks have. They realise that people are poor and that there are enough stigma with being so poor as to need a food bank without putting barriers in people's way. Thankfully, they are still paying me income support and have not tipped me on to universal credit. The job centre that administers our rural market town is 23 miles away and a real pain to get to, so at least I have been spared that.
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  37. Cambridge University has a legal duty of care to its employees and students. This means that if an employee is behaving in a questionable manner then it should be investigated, because quite frequently, as you point out people who get away behaving badly towards one person, will go on to behave badly towards others. As for the police, forget any idea that they will want to be involved unless it is on the very severe end of the scale of bad behaviour. We can all agree that male or female, when our kids enter tertiary education, they will meet lecturers; supervisors; demonstrators who may well try it on with our kids. That is fine, what is not fine is when someone is unwilling and gets groped or worse or they are bullied or disadvantaged for rejecting someone's advances.
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  38. Nightingale hospitals should have been used to treat all COVID patients and should have been staffed with military medics and auxillary jobs like cooking meals, cleaning floors making beds, laundry, washing people, feeding people and toileting people should have been done by the army. Hotels and university accommodation should have been requisitionned for the purposes of housing personnel or for the forced isolation of people coming in from other countries.
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  39. The relevant question is: where are the fathers of her children and why are they not paying for their kids?
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  40. If one person was infected, then they would further isolate that individual and the remaining people would be subject to further testing using a very sensitive technique called PCR to establish whether anyone had contracted it. Given that there are people in the video wearing surgical masks, that would reduce the risk of transmission.
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  41. This is already happening in Bristol where large numbers of people live in vans on the streets.
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  42. Gave themselves a massive pay rise, have a nice tax payer subsidised dining room, but can not give the nurses that we all relied on so much during all of this, who put their lives on the line a pay rise. And don't want to know about the poor. Pigs at the trough comes to mind
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  43.  @davelong9055  Please be so kind as not to stereotype all claimants. You do not know their backstories and most of us are only an accident or serious illness away from the merciless state.
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  44. It is crazy to expect disabled people to vacate specially adapted properties. Where children have disabilities they frequently need attention during the night which is going to disturb any sibling sharing a room.
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  45. I believe that she is a lecturer at Cambridge University and a writer too.
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  46. It was not rape, apparently, the guy was sending the woman up to 50 texts a day, many containing sexual innuendo. If she has texted him back and has proof that she has made clear that his attentions were unwanted, then the University should act in an appropriate manner to resolve the matter.
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  47.  @samrowbotham8914  Unfortunately, the university is simply not supportive towards victims and are probably more likely to view them as bringing the university into disrepute by taking such a matter to the police then they are the perpetrator. To be fair it can be very difficult to prosecute such cases where victim and perpetrator are known to one another before the attack, in normal cases, but where you have the possibility of wrecking your education too, it becomes unlikely that such victims would press ahead with such a case.
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  48.  @samrowbotham8914  OK I see what you are saying, but when you are talking about students that are the best of the best and have worked extremely hard to get there or their parents have paid exorbitant public school fees, you can see the imperative not to rock the boat with the university.
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  49.  @samrowbotham8914  I don't, the problem is the way the institute behaves towards the victim. As seen here, even where the victim has absolute proof, it is the victim that suffered and could not go to certain lectures. Can you imagine how bad it would have got if she had involved the police, I can not imagine that they would be at all sympathetic to any time lost to a trial, can you?
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  50.  @samrowbotham8914  Completely agree, but where it is an institute, there are ways of applying implicit pressure. So for instance, a tutor might say that the victim should carefully consider the negative effects of stress and time off attending court upon final grades or assessments and they are likely to point out that such claims where it is one person's word against another's are difficult to prove and they will question whether in that light that such a course of action is worth sacrificing grades for. To gain a conviction for perverting the course of justice, then the police would have to have very good evidence that there was a direct threat against the victim, rather than simply saying that the stress of a court case together with time off could negatively affect grades.
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