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.

even the guardian's headline doesn't have anything polite to say about labour's performance either

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hay's makes a strange promoter of democracy, for he doesn't like MEPs but presumably likes the concept of an elected parliament, and doesn't like trial by jury, though that is one of the cornerstones of a democracy

No they wouldnt.

Camoron looks like a Fat Budgie.

Anyway the Times knows Tories have taken a battering.

Take a look at the seats Tories have lost, now take a look how many UKIP have gained, notice how close the 2 figures are.

little wonder Tory Back benches want a deal with UKIP........but it wont happen.

Labours fault is over estimating how well they would do. Thing is tho like myself a lot of labour voters this time went and voted tacticaly and voted UKIP in both elections yesterday.

Theyl go back to labour at the GE.

You could say the same about the tory malcontents gf.

I like juries, but would want 'expert juries' made up of people who understand evidence. I would prefer that MEPs were not elected. I would prefer that each party get the same proportion of representatives as their share of MPs and be appointed by their parties. Electing MEPs seems pointless. Who knows their local MEP - almost no one.

The Conservatives have done very well so far. Even Labour say they need 400 to 500 extra council seats. Michael Foot got 1,000 gain in council seats and then had the biggest defeat for Labour ever. Miliband is becoming as unpopular as Foot and Kinnock.

Ukip 'earthquake' rocks Labour and Tories in Elections 2014

Nigel Farage’s party has taken dozens of council seats from the Tories and Labour, dominating the south and making serious inroads in Labour’s northern heartlands



By Peter Dominiczak, Assistant Political Editor

9:45AM BST 23 May 2014



Ukip’s “political earthquake” has rocked the Conservatives and Labour, with Nigel Farage’s party taking dozens of seats from Britain’s main parties.


Mr Farage’s party has taken dozens of council seats from the Tories and Labour, dominating the south and making serious inroads in Labour’s northern heartlands.




With over a third of councils having declared, Ukip had gained nearly a hundred seats - already exceeding expectations of around 80 wins.


By 6am on Friday, with 100 of the 172 councils up for election in England and northern Ireland still to declare, the Tories had lost 93 seats, Labour gained 74, the Lib Dems lost 72, Ukip gained 84, the Greens gained one and other parties were up seven.



More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/local-elections/10851024/Ukip-earthquake-rocks-Labour-and-Tories-in-Elections-2014.html

OK Max(forget Hays clap trap from right wing press) lets say we have a theoretical neutral position here and no knowledge of whats gone on before politicaly before these elections.

So a chap say from Canada just a average Joe and you give him a sheet of paper with the results on so far......what does he do and see!!!!!

Straight away he would say "well this UKIP party have gained a vast amount of seats and i notice this Conservative party have lost more or less the same the UKIP party have gained. Its obvious people have gone from one to the other.

I also notice this Labour party have made some gains and the Lib/Dems have done nothing.

I think this Conservative party will have to do a bit of thinking on how they are going to regain their seats back.".....................ENDS

Finito thats the facts rather than what is percieved to be the facts as we have been doctrined with by the newspapers and the partys themselves.

http://news.sky.com/story/1267308/symbolic-failure-spells-gloom-for-ed-miliband

Symbolic Failure Spells Gloom For Ed Miliband

The failure to take Walsall from a Tory-Lib Dem coalition is among results showing Labour short of where it needs to be next year.

Winning Walsall would have been symbolic.

Labour candidates winning enough seats to dislodge a Tory-Lib Dem coalition. A Labour majority on a local level, replicating what Ed Miliband is desperate to achieve next May.

"We're hopeful," said one source yesterday afternoon.

That hope began to visibly fade on the faces of the party faithful as the results started to ring in through the night.

Not only did Labour fail to secure the three seats it needed (winning two), it arguably fell short because UKIP gained three seats.

Call Me Dave is in big trouble gf.

No one believes his "cast iron promises" anymore.

Just a protest vote.

Rubbish post hays watch SKY news and it predicts a labour government based on the results so far and a outright majority when all london counts have been done.

You take too much notice of biased right wing tosh newspapers.

Big Big trouble Max. The Tory press are trying to deflect from it to labour.

So you see what I mean from my neutral annology above.

Conservatives have a year to win and Miliband has a year to do even worse.

The conservatives don't have a year, they need to ditch Cameroon now before it's too late....he cant win, you must know that.

Ahhhhhhhhh but your forgeting a interest rate rise(maybe two) and Inflation rising and wages not catching up. Think of those poor devils 2million with mortgages they cant afford.

bad logic sticky as you singularly naively assume that a ukip gains are solely at the expense of the tories when this is patently rubbish

also, apart from a few diehards like you :-) , why would anyone revert to labour from ukip, when the main plank for ukip is "get out of europe; no further discussion", whereas labour don't even want to renegotiate anything, let alone give the country a chance to vote on the issue?

Britain seeks to change land access rules to speed up shale drive

LONDON, May 23 (Reuters) - Britain is seeking to change the rules regarding land access to make it easier and quicker for shale oil and gas companies to drill underground deposits, as the government steps up efforts to exploit the country's shale resources. The government on Friday also published a report which suggested as much as 4.4 billion barrels of shale oil could lie beneath the Southern England countryside, adding to last year's estimates that there were enormous shale gas deposits in northern England. Shale oil and gas could help alleviate Britain's growing dependency on energy imports but the method used to extract the resources from rocks - fracking - has prompted environmental protests amid fears it could cause earthquakes and contaminate drinking water. The government said it was launching a consultation to simplify the existing procedures for companies who want to drill underground.

LONDON/AMSTERDAM, May 23 (Reuters) - Britain's Eurosceptic UK Independence Party made strong gains but their Dutch counterparts stumbled as more countries voted on Friday in European Parliament elections expected to produce a widespread anti-EU protest vote on a very low turnout. Nigel Farage's UKIP, which wants to pull Britain out of the European Union and severely restrict immigration, grabbed seats from both the governing Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party in local elections held at the same time as the EU vote on Thursday, partial results showed. If those scores are confirmed or amplified in the European ballot, from which results will only be released late on Sunday, it could increase pressure on Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, a year before a general election, to take a harder line on reducing the EU's powers. "Looking at the average vote shares across the country, and without wishing to count any chickens before they're hatched, it looks pretty good," an ebullient Farage said as evidence of his anti-establishment party's surge trickled in. By contrast, far right Dutch populist Geert Wilders, whose anti-EU, anti-Islam Freedom Party had been forecast to top the poll in the Netherlands, was beaten into fourth place by pro-European parties in a surprise reverse, according to exit polls. His PVV was projected to get just 12.2 percent, behind the centrist Democrats 66, the centre-right Christian Democrats and Prime Minister Mark Rutte's right-wing liberals. Wilders blamed the disappointing score on a low turnout of around 35 percent, saying that "by staying home (voters) showed their loathing for and disinterest in the European Union. The Netherlands has not become more pro-European." Voters in Ireland and the Czech Republic began casting their ballots on Friday but most of the EU's 28 nations hold the election on Sunday. Some 388 million Europeans are eligible to vote for 751 members of the parliament, which is an equal co-legislator with member governments on most EU laws.

By contrast, far right Dutch populist Geert Wilders, whose anti-EU, anti-Islam Freedom Party had been forecast to top the poll in the Netherlands, was beaten into fourth place by pro-European parties in a surprise reverse, according to exit polls


phew and thank goodness! ..... clearly the dutch perceived the hidden danger and voted accordingly, even if the turnout was low (35%)

Cynic well your wrong because I watched it life most of the night and UKIP gains by and large were Tory losses.

Ok they have taken a few off labour but by no way on the scale as tory to UKIP.