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.

good to see two asian immigrants win the prestigious national spelling competition in usa

Jean-Claude Juncker is not guaranteed to get the job. He is a committed federalist and there are quite a few other EU leaders who don't want him.

UKIP/CON coalition


And now for the bad news Tony Blair 'Seeks New Role' To Re-Engage In British Political Debate And Join The Fight Against Euroscepticism

This is worth a few minutes of your time to watch.

The time is 2005 and the scene is the European Parliament. It's 'Anti-Europe' Nigel Farage versus 'Pro-Europe' Tony Blair. Farage speaks first and then Blair gives him a good blasting:

do we want tony blair anywhere near uk front-line politics again?

i don't care from what party he emanated, but he showed himself to be a complete and accomplished liar and slimeball when pm, and has done nothing but stuff his bank accounts under the pretence of acting for charity and the like ever since

Tony Blair is a working class hero.

i can see you blushing from here :-)

Well said cynic , i have nothing to add , actually i could add about 10 000 more words as to why he was a slimeball but couldn't be bothered to waste my fingertips ...

Not to mention his wife's charity work ?

Although the "Big Bang" eased stock market transactions

I think it did a lot more then that

Manuel,

I thought Blair had a similar indoctrination as the rest of the tory elite.

Cameron could be old school friends of yours.

=======

They are a variety if JAs and when young far better.

Mind an old fart like yourself in with early dementia set in you probably would not notice the difference.

A supporter of Ukip ? in Newark – where MEP Roger Helmer is standing in next week’s crucial by-election, despite a very prominent row over homophobia – has claimed that same-sex marriage is “appalling” and will lead to people “marrying pigs”.

Huff post / AOL
Are so anti UKIP that they have to find just one surporter of UKIP out of all the many thousand's and make an whole page artical out of it .

Our voting system is flawed, but politicians don’t seem to care

In the push for ever wider 'engagement’ with the electorate, integrity is being lost




Many polling stations in Tower Hamlets tried to encourage people to vote the 'right' way Photo: Reuters


Charles Moore
By Charles Moore

8:50PM BST 30 May 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/local-elections/10865271/Our-voting-system-is-flawed-but-politicians-dont-seem-to-care.html



When we voted for the European elections in our village last week, both my wife and I forgot our polling cards. We were not asked to produce them or any other means of identification. No tellers sat outside the polling station. It felt nice that the democratic process could be so relaxed.


It was not like that for the voters of Tower Hamlets in London. Outside many polling stations, it seems – and in some cases, inside them – large numbers of supporters of the Tower Hamlets First party and its mayoral candidate, Lutfur Rahman, gathered to encourage people to vote the “right” way. Such gatherings are against electoral law, and protests were duly made, but although the police were present, they did nothing. Mr Rahman was elected mayor and, after four and a half days of chaotic counting, the council results were finally settled. Tower Hamlets First increased their representation to 18 councillors (only one woman, all Muslim). According to the local Labour MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, the authorities responsible – Tower Hamlets Council and the Electoral Commission – “don’t seem to be able to deliver a clean election”.


Tower Hamlets has been a problem for many years, but its controversies are not unique. There have been cases of electoral malpractice in Birmingham, Bradford, Slough, Woking, Peterborough. There are also serious problems, particularly in big cities, with the Electoral Register. If you compare the register with the contemporary census, you will find a difference of millions – millions who are at different addresses from those registered, and millions more who are not on the electoral register at all – much higher numbers than in the past.


Richard Mawrey QC is a judge and an Election Commissioner. He is consistently scathing about how badly our voting arrangements work. In his judgment on Woking in 2012 (where a Liberal Democrat called Mohammed Bashir was convicted of corrupt practices, including registering “ghost” voters), the judge praised the returning officer as being “an honest man called on to operate a dishonest system”. In the Slough case, he said that “to ignore the problem that [fraud] is widespread, particularly in local elections, is a policy even an ostrich would despise”. His main point is that our newish law permitting postal voting on demand is “wide open to fraud”.


There are two reasons for this – forgery and coercion. The first has now been mitigated by insisting on postal voters giving a signature and a date of birth (in Tower Hamlets this time, no fewer than 10 per cent of the postal votes returned were rejected because of discrepancies in this area). The second flourishes, particularly in minority ethnic communities, where leaders can exploit clan or family ties to “harvest” votes from their juniors and from women.



Our modern democratic system dates from 1872 when the secret ballot was introduced. The modern system of unrestricted postal voting almost reverses that great step forward. After the 1872 Act, voting became a private act, performed in public. Today, in postal voting, it is all too often a public act, though performed in private. There is no protection of its secrecy and therefore nothing to stop its manipulation. Another big problem is “personation” – voting at the polling station as someone else. It is actually illegal to ask a voter to produce proof of identity at the poll, so personation is well-nigh undetectable.

You would have thought politicians would be worried. They are rightly alarmed by public disillusionment with politics. If the nuts and bolts of democracy shake loose, that disillusionment will be complete. Yet the parties seem to be facing the other way. All of them voted for the extension of postal voting. They seem obsessed with the question of “engagement” – getting more people to take part. They neglect the integrity of the process itself.

Graham Allen MP, the chairman of the relevant parliamentary select committee, recently wrote a protest to Mr Mawrey for giving his opinion on the poor state of affairs. Mr Allen accused him of “political assertion without evidence” and referred his case to the Chairman of the Judges’ Council.


The Electoral Commission is the body supposed to ensure that all is well with British voting. But if you look at its remit and pronouncements, you will see that it focuses more on engagement than on making votes trustworthy. In a speech in March, its chairman, Jenny Watson, seemed preoccupied with the need to “modernise”. “As a society, we are at risk,” she said clumsily, “of how we ask people to engage with our electoral system… becoming increasingly disconnected from how they interact with both each other and with other institutions, from their banking arrangements to their weekly shop.” The system needed to be “more reflective of the wider society”. She said how nice it would be if people could register to vote on the actual day of the election. She played down issues of fraud. She praised the work of pressure groups, such as Operation Black Vote (OBV), which try to get new voters. She did not praise anyone who checks that registered voters are true ones.

Miss Watson is right that we expect things to be quicker nowadays, but if you think about it, modern society actually makes far more demands for proof of identity than in the past. Try getting on an internal flight, or buying a drink if you are young, or hiring a car, to see what I mean. Some of this is irksome, but the essential point is that the transaction matters, and so it should be accurate and legal. Jenny Watson mentioned banking. Would it be good if you could walk in, or write off, to demand a bank account and get one without proving who you were? No, but you can get the vote that way.

The board of the Electoral Commission is stuffed with the usual public-sector princes and princesses who rule modern life. Miss Watson herself is a director of Wrap (Waste and Resources Action Programme), and was the last Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission and campaign director for Charter88.


I looked up Operation Black Vote on its website, which it subtitles “The Home of Black Politics”. (Imagine what Jenny Watson would say if there were a website called “The Home of White Politics”.) Its lead “News” item praises Lutfur Rahman for his “unprecedented victory” in Tower Hamlets “despite every dirty trick in the book used against him”.

I notice OBV was established by “black volunteers” at Charter88 in the year Miss Watson joined the organisation. Obviously she cannot control what OBV says today, but this impermeable circle of politically correct, self-reinforcing organisations undermines one’s confidence. Is there any issue involving ethnic minorities in which the wider needs of the democratic process and administrative rigour will get a hearing? Does our entire voting system have to be laid open to abuse for fear of causing offence to a few?

When I was a boy in the Sixties, my father was a Liberal candidate in Northern Ireland. The division of the tribes there made the voting process deeply corrupt, even including voting in the name of the dead. I remember one man telling my father that he had voted 90 times for the Unionists at the previous election and would be happy to do the same for him on this occasion. (Sadly, he refused.)

Nowadays, to guard against this dark past, Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom which has strict electoral laws carefully invigilated. The rest of the country has allowed its most basic public service to decay. An electoral system without clean voting quickly becomes like a hospital with MRSA.

If you like tennis, there is on ITV 4, Murray at the French open at 5 all in the fifth set!

Did he lose????????. If yes he should never have got rid of that ex coach.

It became too dark. They halted at 7 all until tomorrow.

Excuse me, are we talking about the guy in football terms as saying ANYONE BUT ENGLAND! He's a Scot for fuck sake! British till September I await with bated breath :O)

I certainly don't want England to win the World Cup even though I am English. The English are good losers but terrible winners. We still say endlessly that 1966 was our finest hour and there have been hundreds of replays of the final. If we won again it would be terrible. We would have breast beating for years. When the next WC came round again there would be endless speculation about whether there would be a chance of winning for a third time. Far better to lose gracefully early on and then enjoy watching the competition and the better teams.

Update - Labour lead at 3
by YouGov in Politics
Sun June 1, 2014 6 a.m. BST

Latest YouGov / Sunday Times results 30th May - Con 33%, Lab 36%, LD 7%, UKIP 15%

It is interesting that there are news items are saying that UKIP will keep their rise in popularity in the GE but polls are still showing the same percentage for the GE.

This is all pointing to the EU election being a temporary thing and due to the low turnout distorting the figures with the pro UKIP voters being more determined to vote. In fact the ones who voted for UKIP in the EU elections may be the sum total of all UKIP voters that there are including the temporary protest voters. If that is the case, then the poll above giving UKIP 15% is probably right and they will come nowhere in the GE.