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.

Millibandus is in the doo doo, the consensus is for a real referendum.

MaX do me a favour and pass on the result to Hays.

I will if I see him gf, but I suspect he will have the vapours after that little show.

If Labour win the 2015 election which looks likely 2017 will just be an idea on a memo.

LOL yep max. Hes probably hiding under the bed.

SKY News viewers also give Farage the victory by at least 2-1.

Tories beware.

Manuel.

You wrote:

"i have no problem at all in apologising",


With all your problems, I am sure you have got used to apologising!

Could be water of a ducky's back!

8-)

Thought Clegg to be a Liberal Democrat, hey ho

The poll shown on Sky had Farage winning the debate. That doesn't mean that much. Firstly, you are only counting people who watched the debate. That group is a self selected group and not necessarily representative of the general population's view on the EU. Recent polls show a clear majority for a vote for IN after getting a better deal with a looser connection to Europe.

It is likely that the dominant group watching the debate was UKIP supporters. That will skew the results. What the poll says is that of the people who watched the debate, there was a slight majority who want to leave the EU.

But there is no "better deal with a looser connection to Europe"


That's been squashed by any number of €uroburgers, there is simply no other option available than to leave, there is no renegotiation possible.


Cast Iron Dave is trying to blow smoke up everyones ass, and he is failing, cos we've heard it all before.

Millibum is ducking the question as well, and even nooer labour will pay for it.

Nick at least, to his credit, is honest about the €uro question, he's all for IN But he'll be off to €uroland after the next election anyway.

There is quite a bit of pressure for renegotiation from other countries such as Denmark. I think there will be room for changes to the rules. If not then the vote would go against staying in. The reality is that voting for UKIP cannot get us out of Europe whatever Farage may say. The whole idea of voting for UKIP is absurd. What would be the point? Labour won't give anyone a vote. The Conservatives will.

Beware house price bubble: Treasury watchdog sounds alarm over runaway property market

Office for Budget Responsibility says speculators are inflating rising prices
Watchdog head Robert Chote warns of 'bubbly activity' in some areas
Prince Charles expresses fears that prices will drive workers out of London
Says home ownership for young people is 'becoming further out of reach'
Average price of a London home is expected to jump from £458,000 to £650,000 by 2020
Figures show average price of a UK home hit £254,000 in January
First-time buyers paid a record £190,000 to get on the housing ladder

By HUGE DUNCAN ECONOMICS CORRESPONDENT
PUBLISHED: 23:04, 26 March 2014 | UPDATED: 00:30, 27 March 2014

Britain is on the verge of a dangerous housing bubble, the Treasury’s chief watchdog warned yesterday.
Soaring property prices are being inflated by speculators banking on further gains, according to Robert Chote, who heads the Office for Budget Responsibility.
‘With very rapid house price increases in some parts of the country you might see bubbly activity where people are willing to buy stuff off plan or not intend to live in it,’ Mr Chote told MPs.
Prince Charles gave a separate warning yesterday that soaring prices in London will drive a generation of young people out of the capital. He said the dream of home ownership was becoming further and further out of reach for swathes of workers.
The average price of a home in London is expected to jump from £458,000 to £650,000 over the next six years.
‘This isn’t sustainable and risks driving away talented young individuals who are starting their careers in London and spending most of their income on rent,’ said the prince. ‘Home ownership for this generation is seemingly becoming further and further out of reach.’
Official figures show the price of the average UK home hit £254,000 in January – a rise of 6.8 per cent in a year. Prices were up 13.2 per cent in London, 7.1 per cent in the South East and 6.9 per cent in Wales.

First-time buyers paid a record £190,000 to get on the housing ladder in January. Estate agents are now organising open days in some hotspots to meet demand and many homes go to auction-style sealed bids.
‘Open days are necessary with the feeding frenzy out there,’ said Peter Rollings of estate agents Marsh & Parsons.



Ed Mead, of Douglas & Gordon, another London agency, said: ‘Any estate agent in London has buyers coming out of their ears. What they are all fighting for is sellers.’
Mr Chote told the Treasury select committee the surge in prices was partly down to soaring demand, driven by rising confidence, increased lending, and government schemes such as Help to Buy – all combined with lack of supply.
He added: ‘You can explain the increase in house prices by fundamentals without having to resort to saying there is a bubble going on

‘That doesn’t mean to say there may not be some bubbly components to what is going on in the housing market in particular parts of the country.’
A report from the Home Builders Federation this week showed that Britain is now one million homes short of meeting its housing needs.
The independent OBR expects house prices to rise by more than 30 per cent in the next five years.
Mr Chote insisted it was not ‘taking a view that house prices are over or undervalued’ and said house price inflation should cool from 8.5 per cent this year to 3.7 per cent in 2017 and 2018.

Steve Nickell, an economist who sits on the OBR with Mr Chote, said: ‘A bubble arises when demand is being driven by people wanting to get in because of expectations of price growth rather than for somewhere to live.
‘The house price to income ratio has been growing for the last 40 years but that cannot go on forever because everything you consume would become housing and there would be nothing else left.’
But David Ruffley, a Tory MP on the Treasury committee, said forecasters always expect a ‘benign return to equilibrium’ and fail to predict the cycle of boom and bust.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2590306/Beware-house-price-bubble-Treasury-watchdog-sounds-alarm-runaway-property-market.html#ixzz2x7Tunnim
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Interest rates rises on the way come November.

Lets not forget these new pension lump sums will lead to a lot sinking their money in BUY TO LET. This will just make the bubble far worse.

Cameron and Osbourne out of their depth like former BoE boss Mervyn King said they were.

electionista ‏@electionista 3h
UK - YouGov/Sun poll:

CON 35%
LAB 37%
LDEM 9%
UKIP 11%

fred - apologising when you're wrong was taught in childhood as was saying please and thank you, and opening doors for ladies .... i know such things are pretty alien to many today

pdate - Labour lead at 2
by YouGov in Politics
Thu March 27, 2014 6 a.m. GMT

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 26th March - Con 35%, Lab 37%, LD 9%, UKIP 11%;

Tory vice chair – unqualified teachers hired “on the cheap” in UK schools
26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Tom Pride in cynicism

The education secretary Michael Gove has decided that unqualified teachers can teach our children.

And now even senior Tories are questioning the decision.

According to the Times Educational Supplement, Tory vice-chairman Richard Harrington has written to Gove expressing his “worry” that the policy will be used to ‘hire on the cheap’ and fill classrooms with unqualified teachers not because they have valuable experience but because they are lower cost.

Of course, this is all being said in private – in public Harrington supports Gove’s policy of dumbing down teaching and we only know about Harrington’s concerns because someone leaked his letter.

God forbid that actual parents of actual children should be involved in the discussions.

Manuel,

I was also taught to try not to make mistakes, or at least not repeating them.

That meant thinking more and saying less, rather than being blasé and tossing out excuses for being indifferent to reasoning.

The real winners, if they play it right, could be Cameron and Miliband


By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: March 26th, 2014

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100265160/the-real-winners-if-they-play-it-right-could-be-cameron-and-miliband/



The fact of holding the debate will have bolstered both participants



Who won? They both did – simply by holding their debate à deux. Ukip are used to being a small party that must fight for every second of airtime; but it's the Lib Dems who, according to the every poll, need the oxygen most.

Nick Clegg's strategy of playing up his party's pro-EU credentials may seem insane: why go on and on about the single policy area where you are most at odds with the electorate? The answer has to do with niche marketing. Say the committed Euro-enthusiast vote out there is 20 per cent. Twenty per cent is still well above the 8 per cent that Cleggie is polling now. If he can persuade just a few soggy Blairites, just a few hoary-headed Tory grandees, to come over to "the party of in", he may yet rescue some Lib Dem MEPs.

Conversely, Nigel Farage wants Eurosceptic voters to back him on 22 May even if, as he knows most of them will, they return to their traditional allegiances for the general election. The two big parties want to talk about the economy, but the third and fourth are quite happy to bang on about Europe. Both leaders used their closing addresses quite nakedly to appeal for support in the Euro-elections.

Who had the edge? I'd be surprised if many people changed their position after listening to the arguments. Twitter saw an hour of uncomplicated cheerleading: "Another devastating point by my man! The other man is a hopeless imbecile! This is a walkover!" And, in truth, we are all primed to note the facts that sustain our starting assumptions, and to screen out those that don't. A snap poll afterwards by YouGov showed that 57 per cent of viewers gave the victory to Nigel, though I suspect that that's fairly close to the number who preferred him all along.

Cleggie's tactic, predictably enough, was to try to be tempered, measured and cool, in the hope of showing up Nigel as bombastic. Actually, the Ukip leader trotted out some impressive statistics on trade and investment but, as I say, people tend only to hear the data that accord with their prejudices.

How should the leaders of the two larger parties react? Well, the immigration officer at the Eurostar yesterday had rather a good idea. Having very discreetly wished me luck – there are still a few Conservative voters in the public sector – he suggested that David Cameron and Ed Miliband could now plausibly argue that Clegg and Farage had had their debate, and that the general election debate should be only between the potential prime ministers. "Or if they really wanted, sir, the other two could have a separate two-way debate again in a year's time, a sort of third-fourth play-off".

The temptation must be overwhelming. They could hardly, on the basis of the current polls, have included Clegg but not Farage. Now they have an excuse to exclude both.

fred - i forgot that you think you think you're always right