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.

It does Camoron ballsed up in PMqs and looked a donkey.

Plus labours party political broadcast.

This sat/sunday will be interesting Hays.

hays - when will you learn that none of these "silly" polls have much meaning anyway, for they're just random samples of perhaps 1,000 people

The polls do have some meaning as there has been a trend of closer polls week after week. You can ignore the outliers of 1 and 10, but the trend is there.

the trend, except in the last week, has been a gap of 6/7% ..... for that to have narrowed, you'ld need to see similar results for at least a further week and perhaps longer

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/

The Sun have tweeted out tonight’s YouGov poll – topline figures are CON 32%, LAB 42%, LD 8%, UKIP 12%. This is somewhat at odds with the Labour leads of two, three and three points so far this week, though for what it’s worth all four polls would be within the normal margin of error of CON 34, LAB 39, LD 9, UKIP 12, the average of this week’s figures.

70 seat majority for labour at the least.

Wonder what they will do with it?

What they usually do, ruin the country.
2517

The thought of having Ed Balls as our Chancellor of the Exchequer is too frightening to contemplate!:-)

Especially as he has dirty hands from his time on Brown's team.

I think he would say "bring it on"!


6-))

Cameroon is losing it....



Anne McIntosh deselected by local Tories in blow to David Cameron’s power


One of only three women to represent the Conservatives in the north of England, lost an acrimonious campaign


Jonathan Brown Author Biography


Friday 31 January 2014


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/anne-mcintosh-deselected-by-local-tories-in-blow-to-david-camerons-power-9100344.html


David Cameron’s authority received an embarrassing blow last night as Tory grassroots activists voted to oust a sitting female MP at the end of a bitter reselection battle.


Anne McIntosh, one of only three women to represent the Conservatives in the north of England, lost an acrimonious campaign which saw allegations of misogyny, dirty tricks and cronyism fly between warring groups in the affluent rural constituency of Thirsk and Malton in North Yorkshire.

Ms McIntosh said she would fight to keep her seat. “I do not intend to be thrown aside by a small group. It is for my constituents as a whole to dismiss me if they wish to do so,” she said as left the vote at Conservative HQ in London. Despite her determination to continue, the result of the secret ballot of 560 members means Mr Cameron faces losing a fifth female MP who will not now be standing in 2015.

The chair of the Environment and Rural Affair Select Committee, who has been highly visible in the media during the recent floods, has previously fought off three attempts to unseat her in the Tory rural heartland. She won at the 2010 general election with an 11,000 majority, making her the only female Conservative in the whole of Yorkshire and Humberside.

Among those tipped to replace her is Edward Legard, an Old Etonian barrister and part-time judge. Critics within the local party claimed Ms McIntosh had demonstrated a “consistent pattern of non-co-operation, non-communication, bad manners and divisive behaviour”.

Her supporters allege she was the victim of an old boys’ network that refused to tolerate a woman as its MP.

One senior local party figure reportedly described the MP – a former advocate who speaks five languages – as a “silly girl”, and suggested the constituency needed someone like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage to represent it.

The ill-tempered contest has been rumbling on for a year since Ms McIntosh refused to accept the decision of the association’s executive committee to deselect her last January. The saga has been described as the “Tory Falkirk”, after the Scottish seat where Labour faced allegations of trade union vote-rigging.

A Conservative inquiry ordered by central office found the make-up of the committee had broken party rules – although opponents, including the local party chairman, said that the reconfiguration of the governing body had only been deemed unconstitutional when it voted to drop Ms McIntosh.

The MP is often seen sitting behind Mr Cameron during Prime Minister’s Questions. He wrote to her describing her as “one of our most assiduous MPs” and praising her appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today.

But Labour criticised the Prime Minister for not doing enough to save her. The shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Ashworth said: “Already one in 10 of the Conservative women MPs elected in 2010 have announced that they are standing down at the next election. David Cameron has done nothing to stand up for one of his most senior women MPs.”

The former environment minister Tim Yeo is also facing deselection in his South Suffolk constituency. The result of a secret ballot of members is due next week. Last September grassroots activists failed to unseat the former prisons minister Crispin Blunt.

Perfectly reasonable for her local constituency to deselect her. Certainly better than the way the unions pick Labour candidates. She will stand at election with no specific party and should lost.

Haystack

P36135 of 36135

Perfectly reasonable for her local constituency to deselect her. Certainly better than the way the unions pick Labour candidates. She will stand at election with no specific party and should lost.

======

Are you on the bottle?

LOL.

That's the democratic way. The local constituency select and deselect candidates. She seems to have lost the confidence of her constituency party. She is still the Conservative MP, but will not represent the constituency at the next election. I gather she was not liked. You cannot fall foul of your local constituency association.

you can if it's bullied by Unite or similar!

Just completed a telephone survey with MPM.
2517

What was it about?

Somerset Levels floods: Cut off - and furious

With parts of Somerset still under water after a month, locals want answers from the Environment Agency


By Philip Johnston

10:35PM GMT 27 Jan 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10599445/Somerset-Levels-floods-Cut-off-and-furious.html



Yes, I remember Muchelney – the name. For the best part of two decades we would stop for family picnics by the ruins of the old abbey as we headed down to the far-flung reaches of Devon.


The ancient landscape of the Somerset Levels was always bewitching, though in winter and early spring we would tend to drive on by as the area was often waterlogged or flooded, a reality not lost on previous inhabitants. One possible derivation of the county’s name is that Somerset means land of the summer people – because that was the only time of the year when it did not flood.


Over the centuries, from the foundation of the monasteries at Muchelney, Athelney and Glastonbury in Saxon times, the land has been drained, reclaimed and maintained. It needs to be: the rivers running through the Levels flow above much of the farmland, hemmed in, like the Parrett, by ancient embankments that are occasionally breached by heavy rains or high tides.


So there is nothing new about floods in the Levels. What is unusual this year is the scale and disruption of the inundation that has kept 20,000 acres of farmland under water for a month or more. It has officially been declared a “major incident” by the county council. Muchelney is cut off and reachable only by boat; the nearby village of Thorney has been abandoned; even sizeable towns like Langport are hard to get to.






This is the second time in three years that the area has been flooded to this extent, if not for such an extended period. Of course, there have been weeks of relentless rain, but it is hard to believe there have not been similar deluges before. Why, then, is the flooding so much worse now than in the past? Local people have no doubt who is to blame: the Environment Agency.

On Monday, Ian Liddell-Grainger, the Tory MP for Bridgwater, fulminated on behalf of his beleaguered constituents, angrily denouncing the “pathetic” quango’s failure to keep the waterways clear. “It is not acceptable that the people… in that entire area of the Levels are yet again facing more problems,” he said. “The Government needs to act, and pretty damn quickly.

“We really are in a dreadful position and the Environment Agency is responsible. They cannot walk away from this – they have got to do the job they were set up to do, which is keep people safe.”

Inevitably, the Environment Agency took issue with this. Its spokesman, Robbie Williams, said: “If you lower the beds you increase storage in the river – [but] that’s tiny compared to the floodplain, so lowering the bed often does little. With the rivers so full and high, the vast majority of our pumps are not able to pump.”

Mr Williams said a great deal had been done to improve flood defences and David Cameron praised the work of the Environment Agency’s staff. But this misses the point. Of course the workforce has made huge efforts to deal with the consequences of flooding; what local people are angry about are the years of apparent neglect by the Environment Agency since it took over responsibility in 1990 for cleaning and clearing the drainage ditches and canals, known locally as rhynes.

On his visit to the Levels on Monday, Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, felt the full force of local anger. He has asked the Environment Agency and other interested organisations, including the local council, to produce a plan within six weeks for its long-term protection, which could include dredging rivers.

Mr Paterson made the perfectly valid point that the Levels are an artificial system needing careful management. There were, he averred, no wider policy implications for national guidelines. Many would question that assertion. The Environment Agency has been accused before of failing properly to carry out the basic measures needed to ensure floodwater drains away. Nor is this the first time that its long-term planning has been called into question.

After widespread floods in 2007, when a third of a million people were left without tap water and the bill for repairing the devastation topped £6 billion, an official inquiry chaired by Sir Michael Pitt found an alarming level of complacency in government, national and local, over the continuing threat from exceptional weather. The Pitt report called for an “urgent and fundamental change” to the way we defend against flooding, with a 25-year master plan supervised by a dedicated Cabinet committee. What happened to that?

While people expect the Somerset Levels to flood, much of the damage in recent years has been inflicted upon homes built on land that is also prone to inundation but which has had to be released because of the demand for housing. Planning controls were relaxed in the 1980s to allow building on floodplains. Even here, though, the Environment Agency has faced criticism over the failure to clear out culverts and other rain run-offs that might reduce the risk.

There was a time when much of this routine maintenance was carried out by local people. In the Levels, the ditches and sluice gates were built by the monks who managed the land until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Subsequently, farmers did the job.

But once the state assumes responsibility for these tasks, it has a duty to ensure that the work gets done. As Liddell-Grainger said on Monday, if the Environment Agency did the big jobs, such as dredging the rivers, local people would ensure the routine maintenance was carried out.

The MP thinks the agency has its priorities all wrong and is neglecting its principal function of protecting farmland in favour of wildlife and conservation projects. It was happy to spend £31 million on a bird sanctuary, the MP said accusingly, but not the £4.5 million needed to dredge the rivers.

He derides the agency’s bosses as “a bunch of townie do-gooders and twitchers”, adding: “They think the Levels should be allowed to return to the swampy wilderness they were in the Middle Ages – and all in the name of managed flood risk.”

This anger is understandable and has been heard before from other parts of the country. After the 2007 floods, leaked minutes showed breathtaking incompetence and complacency in Whitehall. The Labour government was warned that flood defences were inadequate and that spending cuts would make matters worse.

The Coalition faces the same charges – that it has reduced central spending on flood defences and in order to impose the financial burden more directly on the areas affected. It has a point: why should taxpayers living in areas that are not flooded have to fork out for people who have chosen to live by a river or bought a house on a floodplain?

Yet that still does not answer the question that the people of Muchelney have been asking these past few wretched months: why has the flooding got worse (and not just in the Levels) in the years since the Environment Agency took overall responsibility for dredging and clearing?

As huge pumps at Bridgwater and elsewhere struggle to siphon the floods back into the rivers, the people of Somerset want to know why the agency, alerted by the inundation of 2012, did not use the last couple of summers to get the defences into a state of readiness.

Ian Liddell-Grainger is adamant: “This is not a freak act of nature, it is unforgivable negligence,” he says. Worst of all, it’s still raining.

There are now local environmentalists saying that dredging would make things worse due to in creasing the flow rates in the rivers causing bigger problems downstream and increasing the risk of rivers breaking their banks.

that is why they are now asking the dutch to give their unparallelled expertise