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.

sticky - you, hays and fred can believe what you like and then gibber on interminably between yourselves .... for myself, i'm happy that the report i posted from BBC is fair and accurate even if it does not coincide with what you would like

Its a load of bunkum that report cyners.

Fact.....Tories lost over 175 seats and lost 11 councils.

Fact..... Labour gained 280 seats and gained 6 councils

Fact......UKIP nabbed most of the Tory dont knows.

Fact.......Labour are just 4 seats short for an overal GE majority.

Now if thats a positive for the Conservative Party .....well im a Dutch Man.

whatever you say, and as i said before, you believe what you like .... for myself, i thought the BBC report both balanced and fair .... by and large, (all) other professional and knowledgeable commentators (which you most certainly are not) conclude the same as BBC

Cyners READ THE FACTS (above) NOT THE SPIN.

Back to the drawing-board (again?) for Universal Credit



It is a testament to the ineptitude of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain ‘Sunken’ Smith that his flagship scheme has been sent back to square one – listed as “reset” by the government organisation responsible for grading its progress.

Mr… Smith (otherwise known as RTU or Returned To Unit, in tribute to a lifetime of failure) is determined that Universal Credit – which rolls all the major benefits into a single payment which the government can manipulate to make life extremely uncomfortable for claimants – will be his legacy; the achievement that marks him out for posterity.

Well, it will certainly remind us all of the man’s nature. Universal Credit has been beset with one false start after another and remains capable of handling only the simplest of tasks while promising miracles – and when it fails to deliver, its faults are explained away with implausible excuses.

The latest is that the Major Projects Authority (MPA) assessed the project last September and its judgement is out-of-date because there has been progress in implementing the scheme through pilot projects in Job Centres.

That seems about as plausible as RTU’s claim that the scheme has not written OFF £140 million of taxpayers’ money; instead the cash has been written down (meaning, it seems, that the value of the investment has been downgraded in the same way your computer is worth less now than the amount you paid for it – “the amortisation of cost over a period of time”). That’s not an acceptable answer as the money has still been spent.

Alternatively, you may wish to consider cabinet colleague Francis Maude’s claim that UC implementation has been “pretty lamentable”. The Secretary-in-a-State said this was a reference to a time before he made emergency changes to the project; changes that he did not mention to anybody – even the Commons Work and Pensions select committee, when it was investigating the project, maintaining that all was well.

In fact, this latest excuse is also among the oldest in Mr… Smith’s arsenal; it was used last year in response to the rating UC had received at the time.

The MPA rates major schemes according to a ‘traffic light’ system – green, amber or red. Universal Credit was previously marked as amber/red, meaning it was in danger of failure.

The organisation’s new report, released yesterday (Friday), possibly in an attempt to bury bad news, states: “This time last year, we rated 31 projects red or amber/red. Of these 31 projects, more than half did better this year and only one has got worse.”

You won’t get any prizes for guessing which one!

The bad news is that, despite everything, Universal Credit remains an ongoing project and will therefore continue to haemorrhage taxpayers’ pounds – that’s your hard-earned shekels – by the million.

The good news is that we can look forward to more media humiliation for Smith himself.

The man has caused more misery than anybody since Margaret Thatcher; it is right that he should face a little suffering of his own.

Well that would be a first for a long time - "the BBC report both balanced and fair"!:-)

Indeed, the facts again.......

electionista @electionista ·
UK - BBC projected national vote share based on local election results:

LAB 31%
CON 29%
UKIP 17%
LDEM 13%

That's marginal for just one UKIP MP. Not good as they got 23% last time in council elections, which was last year! Who would have thought that UKIP would be doing worse?

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

The long awaited Lord Ashcroft Marginal Poll is just out and gives a MASSIVE boost to labour. See it below, read and weep HAYS.

Saturday, 24 May 2014
LORD ASHCROFT MARGINAL POLLS
This is from Lord Ashcroft site http://lordashcroftpolls.com/

By Lord Ashcroft

In the last few weeks I have polled more than 26,000 voters in 26 constituencies that will be among the most closely contested between the Conservatives and Labour at the next general election.

Across the battleground I found a 6.5% swing from the Conservatives to Labour – enough to topple 83 Tory MPs and give Ed Miliband a comfortable majority. But this is a snapshot, not a prediction. The research also found that most voters in these seats are optimistic about the economy, and only three in ten would rather see Mr Miliband as Prime Minister than David Cameron. As I have found in the Ashcroft National Poll, half of voters say they may change their mind before the election – and there is still a year to go.

The full results are below.

Con-Lab Battleground - Results summary
Con-Lab battleground - full data tables

Amber Valley
Broxtowe
Cardiff North
Hendon
Great Yarmouth
Lancaster & Fleetwood
Morecambe & Lunesdale
North Warwickshire
Sherwood
Stockton South
Thanet South
Thurrock
Waveney
Wolverhampton South West
Bolton West
Birmingham Edgbaston
Derby North
Dudley North
Halifax
Hampstead & Kilburn
Great Grimsby
Morley & Outwood
Southampton Itchen
Telford
Walsall North
Wirral South

Must be difficult for Lord Ashcroft to publish these figures.

Bet hes been biting his tounge.

Full marks though to a man who goes againt the PRESENT Tory grain of being a cheat and lieing all the time ie, IDS and Camoron himself.

Well done Lord Ashcroft. An old fashioned Tory a tory who if thier was more of them I would consider rejoining the party. Im sure others would aswel.

It pays to be honest.

Not Spin like the Tory press but FACTS.

Why would Ed feel good about Thurrock?

UKIP took 5 extra seats there.

2 from old Lab

3 from nu Tory


https://www.thurrock.gov.uk/vote2014

This should have been one of the best weeks of Ed Miliband’s career. In fact, it has been by far the worst. Disaster followed disaster.

Having made the ‘cost of living crisis’ the centrepiece of his local and Euro election campaign, the hapless Miliband suggested that his family’s weekly shop cost around £70 or £80 — a figure most commentators agreed was a woeful underestimate, suggesting that he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

Then the man who lives in a London house worth £2.5 million announced rather coyly that he is only ‘relatively comfortably off’.

Elsewhere, he floundered in a cringe-making radio interview in Swindon, unable either to remember the name of the borough’s Labour leader, or identify that the Tories ran the council.

Worst of all were those pictures of him clumsily scoffing a bacon-and-ketchup sandwich in a desperate attempt to look like a man of the people. Those images, above all, will remain in the public’s minds.

To cap it all, yesterday — a day when he might have expected to be celebrating victory in the local elections and telling his troops to ‘prepare for Government’ — Mr Miliband found that Labour had turned in a shockingly poor performance.

It's grim oop north...


http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/local-elections-major-political-earthquake-not-many-dead/

he he ho ho ha ha

Hays I suspect when Ed sees that poll from lord Ashcroft it is one of his best weeks ever. .................................. and thats when conditions favour the tories , just think when the economy turns down those 83 seats tory to labour could easily double.

*Max I reckon you should be focusing in on the Tory press and asking why they have chosen to give UKIP about only 20% of the headlines and space they deserve in thier newspapers, instead they have chosen to try and bury the Excelent news and deflect from Tory woes to labours solid showing.

The spin is deafening, they are overlooking facts and are running scared of labour trying to discredit Milliband instead of asking why Camoron has performed so poorly a real disaster election for the tories

Lets face it he couldnt produce an overal majority against the weakest priminister this country as ever had(Brown)so what chance now with Nigel stealing his followers.

It was written on Camorons face yesterday afternoon when he did that outside interview for SKY, his face all screwed up he was fuming, livid, agressive. He knew UKIP had truely given him a good kicking.

UKIP wont take Rotherham in the GE, as per my post yesterday it was a special one off protest vote.

LOL
Just one special protest vote that saw UKIP take 45% of the vote in a Labour stronghold. Of 21 seats being voted on, UKIP took 10.
What would be the protest be about? Labour are not even in government. Silly gf.

Hays fool. It was a protest over Asian men grooming white girls. They picked on the labour council for that. Its a one off, I have relations and freinds in Rotherham.

I suggest you look up the facts before embarassing yourself in the future.

That's not a protest.

Ohhhhhh shut up, they more you post the more you look a fool .

Just remember you have taken one hell of a kicking this afternoon and from the boot of one of your own .........LORD ASHCROFT.

The locals, when interviewed gave other reasons. A Yorkshire businessman bankrolled a huge poster campaign in the area. They are planning to do even more at the GE.