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.

The longer Maria hangs around the less and less Street Cred call me Dave as.

Milliband must be rubbing his hands in glee that Camoron is set in keeping her when 80% plus of the public and big named back benches in the Tory Party wont her out.

The best thing about it though is that the Press arent going to let this one go to sleep, so as long as she stays the more damaging and damaging for Camoron.

HS2 looks like a good idea, especially now the new report said it should terminate in Camden Town and not in west London at Wormwood Scrubs. HS is a trend that cannot be ignored.

Max same thing can be said about the ATOS contract on welfare.

IDS was there yesterday morning on BBC saying it was Labours fault because it was a badly drawn up contract, what he didnt say was that he had in 2010 signed up to keeping the contract and extending it without making any changes.

Are this lot really GOVERNING!!!!!

NO

GF - FFS google as and has, please mate!

Sorry chris dyslexia.

Cant help it.

Right, that explains it, I'm sorry.

No probs mate. For some reason you cant focus on certain easy words there and thier is another one, always getting them wrong and dont realise it.

7 April 2014 Last updated at 13:31

Maria Miller's expenses: The mood among Tory MPs
By Ross Hawkins
Political correspondent


Some MPs are frustrated that the row is dominating the headlines

Mention Maria Miller to Tory MPs and many turn gloomy. Some sound rather angry.

"She's pretty low grade," says one. "But she is slavishly loyal to Dave."

The prime minister's defence of his culture secretary has caused frustration.

Returning from their constituencies, a number of Conservatives have spent the weekend campaigning ahead of the coming local and European elections.

The story about Mrs Miller's expenses has been unhelpful.

"It's not going down well on the doorstep," says one Conservative MP. "It's blown away the positive economic message."

Those close to Cameron get looked after, he says, while others are more easily discarded.

'Embarrassment'
Another backbencher is more strident.

"She's becoming an embarrassment for No 10," he says.

Her future is in the balance, he adds, and events are moving against her.

Oxford West MP Nicola Blackwood told the BBC: "Clearly it's very unhelpful for this to drag on in the way that it is."

Mrs Miller's colleagues do not need to know all the details of a complicated story to fear that its presence on the front pages of newspapers day in, day out is harming the party.

Her 32 second apology to the House of Commons did not help, according to her detractors. It was - says one MP - pretty appalling.

The hostility does not surprise those close to the minister.

'Newspaper scalp'
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has suggested that her role in pushing through same sex marriage proposals and negotiating a new system of press regulation has won her plenty of Tory critics.

His view is shared by her supporters.

One Tory MP says plenty of people believe the newspapers' coverage is driven by Mrs Miller's role in the aftermath of the Leveson inquiry into press standards.

No close friend of the minister, who he says does not have a huge amount of personal support, he is loath to hand the newspapers a scalp.

"We don't want the Daily Mail driving her out," he says. "If she goes they'll think they can choose the cabinet."

Asked about Mrs Miller's future, another Tory MP hangs his head, and looks thoroughly weary.

Mrs Miller is decent, he says, and has his sympathy, but rows about MPs' expenses just "go on and on and on".

Whether the minister's actions, her brief apology or an angry press is to blame, his conclusion is difficult to dispute.

:-))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyfTclIt0kg

:-))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJPrNQxPNA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dii2T8x7iTY

I thought you would be asleep with the bottle in your hand by now!!

Feel sorry for Geldof.......bad luck running in the family...

Maria Miller: Another Rotten Apple in Cameron’s Cabinet of Crooks
Scriptonite Daily / 18 hours ago



As Maria Miller is rightly hounded out of office and hopefully into the courts for her egregious abuse of privilege, many are pointing out that she is but one rotten cog in a thoroughly rotten machine. So if we want real change – the prosecution of Maria Miller is where we start, not where we stop.

A Hideous Double Standard


Maria Miller is Culture Secretary and Equalities Minister for the UK government. Between 2005 and 2009 she claimed £46,000 in fraudulent expenses on the mortgage on a family home that she later sold for £1.2m – and used her position to bully a commissioner in efforts to keep the whole thing quiet. Her punishment? Giving back £5,000 and a 32 second apology in the House of Commons.

Despite abusing the expenses system for four long years, only ending her scam when the MP Expenses Scandal broke in 2009, and her evasion of the ombudsman reviewing her expenses ever since – she has been backed by Prime Minister David Cameron and cabinet colleagues. Cameron says of her:

“Maria Miller is in her job and she is doing a good job as culture secretary.

“Also, she went through this process and the committee found that she had made a mistake in her mortgage claims. She paid back money. She made an apology and that’s the right thing to do.”

Were it not for the relentless pressure of the news media and public campaigns – that would have been the end of the matter for Maria Miller. She cheated, she tried to cover it up, and she kept her job and her profits. For Maria Miller, crime paid.

In contrast, when 22 year old Sacha Hall helped herself to several bags of waste food left out by Tesco after its refrigerators failed – she was immediately arrested, charged with handling stolen goods, and taken to court and given a 12 month conditional discharge. Tesco even admitted there was no value to the food as it was heading to the landfill.

There is truly one rule for them, and one for everyone else.



But Miller is unlikely to be held to account by her cabinet colleagues when we have one of the most corrupt cabinets in UK history.

The Prime Minister

Prime Minister David Cameron is a lineal descendant of King William IV, great grandson of a 1st Baronet, grandson of a 2nd baronet, son of a stockbroker and an aristocrat. He was gifted with an Eton and Oxford education, and one might argue his career in politics, through sheer privilege of birth. He enjoys the benefits of a family fortune made in tax havens.

The Chancellor

Chancellor George Osborne is heir apparent to the Osborne baronetcy, educated at St Paul’s School and Magdalen College Oxford and recipient of a £4m trust fund.

On becoming Chancellor in 2010, he quickly ‘flipped’ his first and second homes to claim over £100k of taxpayer money for interest payments on a mortgage for his £455k Cheshire pad. He later sold the home for over £1m having made improvements partly funded by taxes. He also claimed taxpayer money to cover payments on a horse paddock for the property.

When Osborne undersold the Royal Mail for less than half its value, meaning investors could buy the stock at knock down prices and sell it on almost immediately at a profit, one of the chief beneficiaries was his Best Man Peter Davies – who made £18m in a few short days.

The Work and Pensions Secretary

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith lives rent free in a £2m country estate owned by his aristocratic father in law. Whilst claiming he could live happily on the £53 a week some unemployed job seekers receive, he has claimed £39 on expenses for his breakfast.

In the Betsy Gate scandal of 2001, it was revealed that the tax payer was paying £15,000 a year for Duncan-Smith’s wife to become his ‘diary secretary’. There is ample evidence that Betsy didn’t perform any such role worthy of the salary, which was hardly likely to register in the bank accounts of the daughter of the moneyed 5th Baron Cottesloe of Swanbourne and Harwick.

Duncan Smith currently costs the tax payer a whopping £134, 565 in salary and expenses.

The Health Secretary

Jeremy Hunt, busy dismantling and flogging off the NHS, is also up to his eyes in corruption. Despite calls for his resignation after colluding with the Murdochs to give them a monopoly TV and Press in the UK in 2012, Cameron chose instead to promote him to Secretary of State for Health. And who has Hunt appointed as the new Chief of NHS England? Simon Stevens – former Chief of US private healthcare giant United Health and the man who started the NHS down the road of ‘competition’ under New Labour.

The Business Secretary

Vince Cable, sold to the nation as the lovable granddad that would put compassion back into the government’s economic strategy is nothing of the sort. Cable is being hauled before MPs for questioning after dramatically undervaluing the Royal Mail at privatisation – resulting in a £750m loss to the taxpayer, thanks to a deal he cooked up with the Banks keen to profit from it. Mark my words, when this parliament is through – Vince will be consulting for one of those Banks.

The Home Secretary

Theresa May’s husband is a director/shareholder in G4S. May has faced several conflict of interest allegations during her tenure. One of the worst was the case of G4S winning a £200m contract to run Lincolnshire police operations. G4S had recruited law firm White and Cade to support their bid. In a stunning coincidence, May invited Tom Winsor, a lawyer from the same firm, to conduct ‘an independent review of police reform’ in the run up to the bid – giving the lawyer access to privy information and contacts.

This list isn’t even exhaustive. Gove, Shapps and other cabinet members are on the fiddle too. But space requires I move on.

They’re All in it Together

They Won’t Stop Until We Stop Them



We have a political system which helps those who help themselves to public money. Corporations and Cabinet members are in cahoots to asset strip the state – the schools, the hospitals, the libraries, the community centres, the playgrounds, the parks, the housing, even the roads and bridges. They want to commercialise the whole lot – all those things that we built and paid for as a nation, they want to sell and profit from as a tiny elite. We build it, we pay for it, they sell it to their mates at knock down prices and rent it back to us at exorbitant rates.

In light of the scale of corruption around us, some argue holding Maria Miller to account is a waste of time,. The opposite is true. It is precisely because parliament is so crooked that we need to be utterly relentless in chasing down every last crooked one of them – and as their numbers deplete, we have a better chance of changing the whole shoddy system itself.

Don’t get angry, get involved!

Sign the 38 Degrees petition for Maria Miller to face criminal charges.

Please sign the petition, Maria Miller To Face Crimminal Charges...........

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/maria-miller-to-face-criminal-proceedings

Update - Labour lead at 3
by YouGov in Politics
Tue April 8, 2014 6 a.m. BST

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 7th April - Con 33%, Lab 36%, LD 10%, UKIP 14%

It's about the money, stupid... RICHARD LITTLEJOHN on the Maria Miller scandal

By Richard Littlejohn

PUBLISHED: 01:54, 8 April 2014 | UPDATED: 01:59, 8 April 2014





Put aside the politics. Forget the fact that Maria Miller is the minister responsible for imposing the Leveson controls on the Press, yet treats Parliament’s own independent expenses regulator with undisguised contempt.


What does her continuing presence in Cabinet tell us about the Prime Minister’s judgment? Frankly, other than within the hermetically sealed Westminster bubble, who cares?


Does it really matter, to anyone outside Fleet Street, whether her special adviser tried to put the frighteners on the Daily Telegraph?


Not that these aspects are unimportant. They are as pertinent as they are disgraceful, even if they don’t excite the wider public.


The Miller affair is further evidence that our so-called democracy is rotten to the core, a game played by a professional political class which appears to have learned nothing from the expenses scandal.

At heart, though, this isn’t about process, precedent or perception. It’s about the money, stupid.


If you’re reading this sitting in a pub in Miller’s Basingstoke constituency, with a damp labrador and a cold bottle of Guinness, I doubt you’re that bothered about the political ramifications.


What you will almost certainly be wondering is: what did she do with all that money and how has she managed to get away with it?


I keep returning to the point I made here last Tuesday, before the official report into Miller’s exes was published. She bought her house in Wimbledon for £234,000. Over the years, the mortgage on the property was increased to £575,000.



The overriding questions are: What did she do with all that money and how has she managed to get away with it?



As I wrote last week, most of us have taken on an extra loan against the value of our house, for a new kitchen or a holiday. But how many people do you know who have borrowed more than twice the original price?


A quarter of a million pounds is an awful lot to spend on home improvements, even for an upwardly-mobile Tory MP with an exaggerated sense of entitlement.


According to Which? magazine, the average price of a new kitchen is £8,000. Updating a bathroom can cost between £2,000 and £6,000, depending on your choice of fittings.


Maybe Miller went for the full Smallbone and a hotel spa-style wet room. If she was spending her own money, fair enough. But when she became an MP, she put the bill in to the taxpayer.


After she was elected, she immediately took out an extra £150,000 on her mortgage and claimed the entire interest on her parliamentary expenses by pretending that the Wimbledon house was her ‘second’ home.


How many jobs do you know which give you an instant six-figure, interest-free loan, on top of your salary?


Miller obviously saw the money as some kind of signing-on fee. Why did she need that £150,000? Out in the real world, that’s a shed-load of money, more than most people can dream about. What did she spend it on?


More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2599367/Maria-Miller-Its-money-stupid-RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Culture-Secretarys-scandal.html