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.

Manuel.

You mentioned Ukraine earlier.

Russia asking for a "recall" of UN.

I wonder if Putin has overplayed his hand and realises it, or is he another psychopath and does not care damn?

Just wondering,!!

I think that the Ukraine will split in two....a bit like West and East Germany in 1945 !.

germany did not split itself in two; the east was annexed by russia

in ukraine, there can be little doubt that russia is fomenting unrest in eastern ukraine .... it would not surprise me if putin disingenuously asks un to support a move to allow east ukraine to determine its own future - i.e. to allow it to vote to join russia like crimea

Putin's current strategy is to suggest that Ukraine moves to a federal structure with parts of it having some autonomy similar to Crimea before it joined Russia. This Putin's last chance to get all or some of Ukraine. He knows that it won't be long before Ukraine is part of the EU and then NATO. Either one of those associations would generate a response if he tried to annrxe it later.

That's not my read on this, but I might be (probably) wrong.


Putin will have the last laugh on this, he holds all the cards. (winter is coming)

certainly the markets don't like it ..... both cash dow (15992) and ftse (6504) tumbling afresh

Pixel fault: Nigel Farage was given an unfortunate Hitler moustache

I think Putin would make it through the Bond villain auditions.....I can see it now...Meestur Vond...you shalz not ezcape...

Nice to see the price of crude rising once again....

If Osborne’s critics are wrong, why did the economy do exactly what we said?,
12th April 2014.


What an embarrassment: George Osborne should be ashamed of the rubbish he spouted in his speech yesterday (Friday).

George Osborne is flailing.

He’s a desperate man, trying vainly to convince us that the current state of the British economy was his plan all along when anybody with half a brain can see it wasn’t.

Yesterday he was in Washington, trying to convince Americans that he knows what he is doing, but US economists are far too canny to accept anything he says at face value.

His principal claim was that critics of what he and the ConDem inner circle still laughably call “the government’s long-term economic plan” have been proved “comprehensively wrong”. Some of us would like to see his proof of that.

Back in 2010, when Osborne took over at the Treasury, trashed a perfectly good Labour-stimulated recovery and sent the economy into freefall, those of us with any sense said the situation would worsen until it hit the point at which the economy would stabilise of its own accord, without any interference from politicians. Then it would start to improve because demand would start to rise again.

We reached the lowest point possible in the British economic cycle; from there, the only way was up. That is why there is a recovery – and a mean, meagre little thing it is, too. We should be 20-25 percentage points above where we are. Instead, we’re 1.4 per cent behind our pre-recession peak and the money is going to the wrong people.

The only question you should be asking is why this Tory illiterate has held us back.

Osborne told America that the British economy was growing faster than any other in the G7 – which means nothing. When an economy has shrunk more than any other, it is easier for it to grow. It doesn’t mean that our economy will be bigger than the others, although that is certainly the impression that Osborne wants to convey.

He said the growth was “despite warnings from some that our determined pursuit of our economic plan made that [economic growth] impossible”. This was a lie.

Osborne knows perfectly well that nobody said growth was impossible. They said Osborne’s policy would delay any recovery, causing misery for millions of medium- and low-waged people and providing a spurious justification for his colleague Iain Duncan Smith’s purges of benefit claimants – actions that have caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Apparently, to quote members of a previous Tory government, that is “a price worth paying”. For what?

He said: “Fiscal consolidation [austerity] and economic recovery go together, and [the economic turnaround in the UK] undermines the pessimistic prognosis that only further fiscal stimulus can drive sustainable growth.” This is not what the data shows. It shows, as already stated, that the British economy hit rock-bottom under Osborne’s guidance and has now started the long climb upward of its own accord. That is not an endorsement of his policy; fiscal stimulus along Keynesian lines would have arrested the decline and boosted the economy back into growth – as evidenced four years ago, when Osborne inherited an economy that had been growing for five consecutive quarters and sent it right back into decline.

Osborne claimed, yet again, that a Keynesian scheme would create more debt – denying the simple economic fact that the boost it would have provided would have put more money into the Treasury and cancelled the debt far more quickly than his cuts.

It’s obvious, really. Any growth is despite austerity, not because of it. If you take money out of a system, it’s harder for anybody to make a profit on which tax can be paid. Economics 101, George. But you studied history, didn’t you? And towel-folding.

We should also remember that in Osborne’s first Budget he promised – promised – a “steady and sustained” economic recovery. Instead, we had three years in which the economy flatlined. Then he brought in ‘Help to Buy’ – a very crude fiscal stimulus scheme that has created a housing price bubble that is hugely damaging for low earners while putting money into the pockets of people who don’t need it. The economy picked up, because housing relies on other industries, but the crash that is to come might create a worse situation than before.

Osborne wants us to believe that wages will start to rise above inflation, even though the experience of the Americans to whom he delivered his speech is that 95 per cent of post-recession growth went to the richest one per cent of the population. He wants us to believe living standards will improve, but there is no evidence for this at all.

It’s all just another big lie.

Just take a look around you and you’ll see the facts. Osborne was charged with keeping the economy on its knees because that is what the Tories needed, in order to suck the cash from the middle-class, working-class and unemployed people of the UK.

Tories need mass unemployment to maintain the UK as a low-wage economy, creating more profit for bosses while keeping the workers under the cosh.

They need stagnation in much of the economy in order to ensure that the deficit does not go away and the national debt rises, thereby making it possible from them to continue selling off the National Health Service and dismantling the welfare state.

They need a housing bubble in places like London, to ensure that it is too expensive for undesirable poor and middle-income people, ship them out to other towns that have suffered the planned decimation of their economic bases (in order to ensure that they could not make a better living there), and make the capital city a playground for the rich.

And they have done it all by manipulating the media into telling you the worst lies about your own well-being – lies like those in George Osborne’s speech yesterday.

The last 40 years of British history represent the worst decline in living standards for the British people in the entire history of our nation. Never before did we have as much as when the Conservatives came to office in 1979; never before did we have so much to lose.

And we gave it away to liars like George Osborne, just because they had honey on their forked tongues.

electionista ‏@electionista Apr 13
UK - YouGov/Sunday Times poll:

CON 32%
LAB 38%
LDEM 8%
UKIP 14%

I don't know who wrote that article gf, but they have a very serious eyesight problem, and their memories are none to good either.

i really can't bothered to read such polemics .... you know where it's starting and the routing to the finish is so blatantly obvious with no attempt at all to create a sensible argument

thank goodness radio 4 and the like generally have balanced discussion

You are making me wonder what I am missing.

Euan Blair for Parliament? Labour is more inbred than the North Korean politburo


By Tim Stanley Politics Last updated: April 14th, 2014


All hail! We are not worthy! (Photo: EDDIE MULHOLLAND)


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100267488/euan-blair-for-parliament-labour-is-more-inbred-than-the-north-korean-politburo/


Can you guess what became of the son of Harold Wilson? He became a train driver. The boy who grew up in Number 10 – child of the 123rd most powerful politician in the entire world – chose a life of leaves-on-the-line over politics. Good for him. It feels right; it feels democratic. It feels very … Labour.

But none of that proletarian nonsense for Euan Blair, son of Tony. He wants to become an MP and is tipped to get his wish. Young Euan is trying to get nominated to run for Bootle, and the local party says that it is looking enthusiastically for a candidate who will “put Bootle on the map”. If fame is all they want, they could just build a giant golden statue of the boy and declare him to be the Second Coming. Or they could nominate Katie Hopkins in his place. But I suspect they don’t have the requisite sense of humour…

I first thought I’d write this blog as a piece of satire. I imagined a scene from the movie Les Labours Dangereuses, in which socialist aristocrats plot who will become the next Prime Minister behind ornate fans. But it's too sad a moment for levity. The elevation of Euan Blair represents the death of Labour as a party designed to uplift the working-classes – a democratic movement that tried to give ordinary folk a stake in the system. The party of Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, John Smith, Barbara Castle etc. Sadly, it has morphed into a middle-class vanguard that provides jobs for middle-class boys. David Prescott has also tried to get a seat; Stephen Kinnock is running for a nice, safe Welsh one; Will Straw stands a pretty good chance of entering the House in 2015, too. I suppose one of the benefits of electing these sons of the powerful to Parliament is that no one will have to show them where everything is. They can find their way to the bar without having to ask for directions.

Labour's front bench is so inbred that it's starting to resemble the North Korean politburo. The last Labour leadership challenge was a battle between brothers. The shadow chancellor is married to the shadow home secretary – a former leadership candidate wedded to a future one. The deputy leader is married to the shadow minister for communities and local government. The shadow secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs is the twin sister (!!!) of the shadow leader of the House of Commons. Having dropped the “socialist” part of its commitment to “democratic socialism”, Labour is in the process of dropping the “democratic” bit, too. Perhaps the party should rebrand itself as the Workers Party in the style of the equally un-self-aware rulers of North Korea. The joke might be appreciated by Tristram Hunt – its intellectual-in-chief and shadow education secretary whose nonsense policies imply a far healthier sense of humour than that of the Bootle Labour Party. By the way, his full name is Tristram Julian William Hunt and he’s the son of a life peer. Upon meeting him, one is never quite sure whether to shake his hand or bow.

Labour’s embrace of the hereditary principle matches its philosophical drift. The Blairites never really liked Wilson's old Labour Party (all that nasty warm beer and pipe smoke) and tried their best to turn the movement in to a Democratic Party modelled on Bill Clinton’s. So the Blairs, the Kinnocks and the Straws are really mirror images of the Kennedys and the Clintons – nice, smart rich people who think power is theirs by divine right. They'll continue to get what they want until the voters finally tire of the same old names running everything. And that moment could be just around the corner.

Until then, aristocratic privilege will continue to dominate the Left. They treat constituencies like public school places, you know. Little Euan's name was probably put down for Bootle at birth…

Max nothing wrong with that item above unless you are in denial.

By all means you believe the right wing press and osbournes hangers on.

It looks 100% accurate to me.

eh? i don't follow you gf.


Are you saying young Euan isn't running for a seat in the 2015 election?


Are you saying the labour party isn't becoming a family run affair?


Sounds more like Dallas, full of Nu Lab grandees kids and to hell with the working man....lookit the names...Prescott, Straw, Kinnock, Blair...they're making the tories look respectable.

Strange the Guardian doesent have anything to say.