Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

No!

Waiting for Godot!


8-)

Mostly southern seats up for voting doodles.

No vote here in W Yorkshire, just N Yorkshire.

Dont expect labour to do brilliant today.

Just voted and if the rest of the "Con" party candidates are as unconvincing as the one standing here then they won't get a single seat.. hopefully.

Bad weather and rain is best for Conservatives as they are more committed to voting.

On that basis it looks like curtains for the one standing here (again hopefully) as it must be one of the hottest and sunniest days of the year so far.

UKIP supporters may think it is a walk over and not necessary for them to vote, but when the General election comes, they may vote in their hordes.
a very leaky argument i'm afraid ..... as for the last phrase (i think technically it's a clause), many/most are at least as likely to decide that voting for ukip in a "serious" election would be very silly indeed ..... the arrogant petit bourgeois such as yourself, will think it's all a big yawn anyway and not vote at all as is their custom

The truth now coming out about this government and the Disabled and Seriously Sick...............

https://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/claimants-on-new-sickness-benefit-at-all-time-high-mark-hoban/

"They make for depressing reading. Almost 5000 people with cancer were found ‘fit for work’ between 2008 and 2011, including ten people with malignant brain tumours. Over 1000 people diagnosed with schizophrenia were also deemed scroungers and had benefits stopped.

Two and a half thousand people with MS were found fit for workfare if not paid work and placed in the Work Related Activity Group. A further 800 MS sufferers were thrown off sickness benefits altogether"

http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/5000-people-with-cancer-declared-fit-for-work-boasts-grant-shapps/

Just a few months ago eleven countries in Europe pledged to introduce Robin Hood Taxes -- netting a combined whopping £30 billion. It's hard to believe, but those taxes are now under threat from our government.
These taxes were the result of European leaders listening to the millions of ordinary people demanding the banks pay their fair share. Osborne tried to block progress at every turn but European leaders fought on and we got the right result. But after losing the moral and practical arguments Osborne is resorting to a desperate legal challenge to try and block these countries from introducing their own taxes.

The Tobin Tax is a hare-brained idea. If Europe wants to introduce it and reduce the competitiveness of their own financial centres, then it's their loss and so be it, but the legislation as it stands will impact UK banks and financial institutions.

Osborne is right to try to get the FTT legislation amended. He's not trying to outlaw it.

goldplunger
The article above is just more of the lefty propaganda. Not to be taken seriously.

The robin hood tax (tax on financial transactions) is stupid and Osborne is right to fight it. We ought to opt out. There is no moral argument for it.

This is not about defending British interests in Europe -- it's about defending the interests of this Government's friends in the City of London. This legal challenge should be seen for what it is: a desperate last-ditch effort to protect the obscene profitability of our bloated financial sector.

hilary - you really can't expect a sensible and balanced post from a number of the guys here .... anyway, you have just answered the Q i was going to ask about the counter-argument

the post about being denied benefits is also suspect ..... there's no doubt that some decisions not to grant benefits can be harsh, but the squawking from the other side about the rules being too lax or being flouted etc has just as much (in)validity

Our financial sector makes a huge amount of money for the UK. This robin hood tax (a stupid name) will just damage our interests.

Cyners,

My expectation levels are low. :o)

Re the Tobin Tax, although most of the trading that will be taxed is done by institutional investors, it is the individual investor who will pay for it. Why? Because the greatest pools of capital are retirement savings holdings for teachers, firemen, police officers, government workers and similar category of individual investors. These are the ones who make up a mutual fund or a pension fund. These are also the investors who finance hedge funds that often come under attack by regulators.

So, it seems that it will be individual investors' money being taxed and they will be paying higher taxes.

A tax on financial transactions will also be very difficult to enforce and administer. There are multinational organisations involved in almost all major financial transactions. For example, if a British firm is taking over a French company while being advised by a German financial house, who is responsible for the tariff? Equally important, how will the taxes be distributed?

Moreover, as governments and others shift from defined benefit retirement plans to defined contribution retirement plans to relieve pressures on budgets from soaring pension costs, Tobin Tax will make a defined benefit retirement less attractive due to the higher costs for investing in the securities markets. This could become yet another labour-management issue to create even more difficulties for economies in the EZ.

Finally, more trades in a securities market, the more liquidity that is provided. It is liquidity, after all, that prevents a financial market from imploding. And higher taxes on financial taxes will require additional capital to pay the new tariff instead of providing much needed funds for investing.

The nice thing about Labour not being in government is that we can ignore them and their silly left wing supporters.

'Stats error' means recession just DIDN'T happen!

There might not have ever been a double dip recession, new figures suggest, just a mistake with the stats.

The double dip may never have been more than a miscalculation, researchers have found.

Just days after official figures showed Britain avoided an unprecedented "triple-dip", figures from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) show it is "increasingly unclear" whether the second recession ever took place at all.

The official definition of a recession is six months when the economy is smaller than it was the year before. While this is a technical point, and a 0.1 percentage point of gross domestic product (GDP) either way might not matter much to the man on the street, it can have big impacts on how Britain is seen as well as how the markets react and the pound’s performance against other currencies.

For example, in the third quarter of 2009 the initial figures suggested that the UK was still mired in recession even though France, Germany and the US were all growing again. At the time that meant Britain looked like it was worse off than other major economies making traders treat us with caution and hurting the pound.

But later on GDP was revised up into positive territory, suggesting that the UK exited recession in the first quarter of 2009 along with some of its European neighbours. Of course, by then the damage was done.

So what really happened in 2011 then?
After briefly recovering from the recession of 2008-2009, Britain fell into a second trough at the end of 2011 that lasted for nine months and was far less severe than the first dip. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) at least.

But NIESR points out that the latest revisions to the official figures show gross domestic product only dropped by a tiny 0.1% in the last quarter of 2011, followed by the same small figure for the start of 2012, though in the second quarter it was a fall of 0.4%.

That means only a slight error in either of the first two periods would mean there was never a second recession at all – at least officially. Considering these figures are frequently revised by far more than that as new data comes in, there’s no way to say for certain if there was a second recession.

And revisions are common. Since the first quarter of 2005 the average revision to UK GDP statistics has been 0.4%, which is actually higher than the UK’s current growth rate.

Hils.

That is one way of considering the Robin Hood Tax.

"The recent changes and exposure of across tax evasion and avoidance will never come into effect."

It will and has. There is a convergence in opinions in Europe and America.

Also, be interesting to see the changes which are occurring in the other areas, China and India.

Traceability of funds wandering off to Austria, Switzerland, Cayman Isle etc. is becoming more and more easy to track and traceable.

Whether the UK is in the EU or outside it they will fall more and more under the regulations.

With a bit of luck, preceding years will be taken into consideration.


-----------------
Hays,

The robin hood tax (tax on financial transactions) is stupid and Osborne is right to fight it. We ought to opt out. There is no moral argument for it.


Good to see you are considering moral argument, even if your use of it is dubious.

===========================

Manuel,

How many times have you voted to-day?


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Beautiful day for gardening, but I wish they could put the ground nearer to my hand and arms.






==========

Hays,

Every body is better off.

Can't understand what all the moaning is about.

Those boarded up shops and bankruptcy cases are rubbish.

WHITE WASH!