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.

Here we are........

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/03/thatcher-mandela-release?CMP=twt_gu

From Maguire lefty on twitter......

Kevin Maguire ‏@Kevin_Maguire 38m
So Cons rewrote history when Mandela died. Thatcher didn't press for his release http://gu.com/p/3yhh3/tw

why would keynes theory be correct in today's world?
it seems to me that if these economists were so damn good, they'ld actually be pretty much unanimous in their appraisals and we'ld all live in clover
patently, they are not!
however, even the "rest of the world" is now in accord that the uk economy is growing far more strongly than any other in the eurozone, and indeed across most of the rest of the world
that living standards are indeed lagging is also self-apparent

Ohhhhh you just dont get it, never mind I couldnt tell you your job either.

Margaret Thatcher barely mentioned the plight of Nelson Mandela when she controversially invited the hardline South African president PW Botha to talks at Chequers on 2 June 1984, newly released Downing Street files show, throwing into doubt claims made after Mandela's death last month.

Two of Thatcher's closest supporters, Norman Tebbit and Charles Moore, claimed on Mandela's death that as prime minister, she had put persistent pressure on Botha to release Mandela. Moore claimed that "the release of Mandela was the strongest and most specific of all her demands".

But there is little evidence in official papers to back this up. The Downing Street file on the visit shows Thatcher did not raise Mandela's case at all during the four-hour official meeting at Chequers.

The "Con" Party/Government caught lying yet again.

I wonder what Carney at the BOE is going to make of this housing inflation????????????????????????.

brings an increase in interest rates ever nearer imo.

Indeed Stan lie after lie, but Camoron is the champion of them all at that and misrepresentation of statistics.

sticky - leave the political crap to one side, and have a look at HG+HC (NMX3720) and C+M (NMX2350) ..... they tell you quite a lot, not least because you like charts and the like

Cyners well well well here we are we have it in the T Graph, I couldnt have written it better myself..............

Morning papers: IMF warning as debts hit 200-year high
The morning headlines brought to you by FTAdviser: 3 January 2014.

By Donia O'Loughlin | Published 08:52 |


Western leaders are clinging to an illusion that the cure for the parlous state of their national finances is to be found in modest cuts and monetary ‘tinkering’, according to the International Monetary Fund, which has demanded a more robust response to tackle 200-year high debts.


A new IMF policy working paper has revealed that much of the Western world will be forced to seek orderly debt defaults and should seek to impose more extreme measures such as savings taxes or initiatives to significantly boost inflation to clear the way for recovery, The Telegraph reports.

The paper states that debt burdens in developed nations have become extreme by any historical measure and argues Western policymakers are mistaken in their belief that rich countries are different from poorer peers and can chip away at their debts with a blend of austerity and growth.........................ends.

Keynes theory proved correct. I rest my case.

i would certainly have liked to see C+M looking stronger, but that too is a reflection of economic activity - i.e. uncertainty over HS2 and the like and also a lack of (other) confirmed major structural contracts .... nevertheless, its trend is still northwards

sticky - i'm sure you and fossy enjoy your little political nonsenses ..... personally, i have little interest in them and by and large ignore them, and would rather believe my eyes and our own chemical-related business activity as to what is genuinely happening with economies in the big bad world

Cyners OK move topic then.............

MAGGIE OUTED YET AGAIN................ Unbelievable......

The sight of a British prime minister calculating ferry numbers, lorry numbers and tonnages to defeat a strike will certainly surprise anybody who took at face value her claim to be simply a bystander.


Paul Mason
Journalist, novelist.


JAN
03
Miners Strike 1984. NCB was “crumbling” say Cabinet minutes

This blog now online at http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/thatcher-miners-official-papers-confirm-strikers-worst-suspicions/265

Amid the cooled air of a vault at the National Archive I trace my finger across Maggie Thatcher’s handwriting, in the margin of a typewritten note marked Secret. She’s scribbled: “13 RoRo, 1,000 tons a day, 50 lorries a day…”

If you think destroying some of Britain’s most cohesive communities was a great achievement, then these jottings are a token of genius. They reveal Mrs Thatcher engaged in battle micromanagement worthy of a Monty or Wellington.

The documents show the Conservative government was, in the middle of the miners’ strike, facing defeat.
Coal stocks were plummeting and – alongside the miners – the dockers had gone out on strike. So in July 1984, Cabinet documents released today show, the government seriously considered calling in troops to move coal.

They thought, as Conservative policy chief John Redwood put it, the National Coal Board was “crumbling”. In a powerfully worded, single-copy letter Redwood warned Thatcher that the far left was engaged in a revolutionary strategy to “destroy” the government.

The Cabinet had, the minutes show, from the very beginning, pressured police to get tough on the pickets, and complained that local courts were dragging their feet in the process of those arrested.

So what’s new? The miners strike is today depicted as one of those “inevitable” events that history is littered with: a doomed workforce staging a last ditch battle in the face of progress. If you were there – I was – it was more complicated.

At the time the government depicted the conflict as one between miners and the National Coal Board, with the state neutral, simply enforcing the law.

“Violence will not succeed for the police and courts will not bow to it. They are the servants not of government but of the law itself,” Mrs Thatcher said in her Mansion House speech that year.

The documents reveal this was a fiction.

During the first few days of the strike, on 14 March 1984, ministers pressed Home Secretary Leon Brittan to seek Chief Constables to adopt a “more vigorous interpretation of their duties”. A clampdown followed that prevented pickets reaching the working coalfields of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire in large numbers.

The miners at the time claimed the policing was politicised. The records show it was.

Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was criticised afterwards for beginning a conflict he could never win. So the revelation that he was on the point of winning – or at least achieving a messy compromise – in July 1984 is an important addition to the record.

With the dockers on strike, and the NCB “crumbling”, it took Mr Redwood’s intervention to stiffen the Cabinet’s position. As Mr Redwood put it: you can’t offer a fudged ending by negotiations and at the same time pursue a strategy of defeating the miners through a “war of attrition”.

The Redwood memo frames the dispute in a whole new way: he says the extreme left is mounting an extra-parliamentary challenge, with a “revolutionary strategy”. I asked Mr Redwood whether this language was justified in secret, official advice from the Downing Street policy unit. He said:

“I think that language captured how the government felt about it at the time. It was certainly what the Prime Minister herself believed. And in some of the other documentation I demonstrated there were groups involved in the miners’ strike who had a wider political purpose.

“Of course quite a lot of them decent mineworkers very worried about their jobs, and I understand that but there was another element in this strike as well.”

Everybody knew the stakes were political – miners had effectively brought down Ted Heath’s government ten years before, and union militancy had crippled the Callaghan Labour government in its last months.

The use of troops to move essential goods was seriously considered, as was the declaration of a state of emergency – and changing the law to enable this. That would have seriously escalated the conflict.

As they mulled what to do the Cabinet was shown an opinion poll, which had been done in secret. There is no evidence as to who had commissioned the poll.

It asked not whether troops should move “essential goods”, but whether they should be deployed “to see the coal moved” to steelworks and power stations. Though the poll showed majority support for the government’s line, it was strongly – 71% - against the use of troops.

Mr Redwood told me: “I was very much against using the army. I was trying to calm things down – I said it’s not that extreme.”

In the end, the dockers were persuaded to call off their strike. Mrs Thatcher’s annotation of the documents shows her considering a payment of £35,000 per man for those who would take redundancy. This is the point at which she is enumerating RoRo ferry and lorry numbers, and tonnages, scribbling the names of “moderates” in the transport union who would presumably be contacted to cool things down.

None of those I’ve spoken to who were involved in the strike are surprised at the revelations. It is what they suspected, in the face of denials at the time.

Mike Simons, a film-maker working on an oral history of the strike, entitled (Still) The Enemy Within, says:

“None of it surprises me. Anyone in the government’s position would do exactly the same. What surprises me is that they wrote it down so clearly and I think future governments probably won’t write down what they’re doing in such a clear manner.”

http://the-enemy-within.org.uk

Paul Symonds, a miner at Frickley Colliery during the strike, says:

“One lesson is this: they were much better organised than we were. Don’t trust them is the lesson. Don’t trust anything that they say.”

It’s an attitude towards government that is common now but was not common then. The strike was a turning point in post-war British politics. It divided not only the labour movement and the mining communities, but the Conservative party as well.

Much of the story has come out in memoirs. But the truth on paper still has the power to shock.

The sight of a British prime minister calculating ferry numbers, lorry numbers and tonnages to defeat a strike will certainly surprise anybody who took at face value her claim to be simply a bystander.

sticky - like i said, i generally (like now!) just ignore fossy's and your political nonsenses, historical or otherwise .... if hays wants to waste his time and rise to almost any bait proffered, then good luck to him

= lost the debate.

Seems the little sinner is a little Englander and only looks inward.

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

I guess a economic recovery is starting.

But what stinks to me is that it could have been earlier and stronger and deliberately delayed for ideological and political reasons in the hope of being able to feed their own greed.

(Some of the recovery, is due to relaxation of its "austerity policies" in the last 12-18 months, but even this "stimulus" could have been better directed.)

Also, adding to increased divisions in society and possible discontent. (I am surprised at the crime figures, but from recent discussion think that the quoted figures are a misrepresentation of what is actual.)

Again, I think the majority of arguments against "immigration" and European "human rights charter" are driven primarily by "racial" primitive motivations and utilised by the present political leadership, ie Cameron and his crew and Fauxpage and his misleds for political purposes.

=====

Again, due to media circumstances driving the direction of the government in any direction it seems fit any challenge seems worthwhile. But, I am surprised how much of the media cover seems to be derogatory "governing crew".

That is why I continue to bitch, or attempt to mock the present motley crew who are supposed to be in charge.

And Thatcher won against all the odd's , Labour's recent Prime Ministers are pigmy's by comparison.

quite so aldo, and indeed all other PM's from either side of the house

however, as i said previously, i really can't be bothered to read the political and patronising polemic posted by supercilious fossy, into which sticky sometime likes to get dragged, though in the latter case, probably more to tease hays than anything else

Thatcher won because she sunk the Belgrano (sailing away) and went on to win the Falklands War.

Before this occurrence she was the most unpopular PM on record even less popular than Gordon Brown.

Fred, they dont like it the rightys when all the dirt comes out in the washing .

Thatcher has been proved to be a myth which most of us up North knew anyway.

The opening of these secret papers have just confirmed what we already knew.

goldfinger

It was in answer to the miner's strike. We have been over the Belgrano sinking b4

even less popular than Gordon Brown . Now you have gone and upset Fred .

don't rise to the bait aldo :-)