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.

Spot on Stan. An industry expert on late night news gave that explanation.

Although I agree with Hilary (for once and who raised this point first yesterday) what on earth are they doing flying in air space where 2 planes have been brought down very recently.

TANKER for you.................

https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment/overview

Dont go down the pub getting pissed with it. Its for your gas fire.

looking a bit rough here, black clouds and thundering.

Going to rain anytime now.

Absolutely G/F.. that reminds me I must get that roof repaired.

LOL Stan, just wait till it rains cats and dogs.

Class War 2014: The Rich Kids of Snapchat
Posted on July 19, 2014 by David Hencke



If ever David Cameron’s claim that we are all in it together needed to be proved false, look at a site on Facebook called the Rich Kids of Snapchat.

Set up by a 17 year old British public schoolboy and liked by 244,000 people this site celebrates the life style of the super rich public schoolboys – the new generation expecting to run Britain in a decade or so.

Far from having any concern for the rest of us, this ” fun ” site worships money, fast cars, Gucci, luxury yachts and private jets,champagne and has an unhealthy interest in guns.

It is virtually the calling card of the new ” Bullingdon Club ” and the kids know they are the new ” boss class ” – the future generation of Tory Cabinet ministers, entrepreneurs and flashy businessmen and bankers. And some will have the vote in next year’s election,

Among the fun pictures are kids using £50 notes as toilet paper, £20 notes for tablecloths, handling guns to protect their estates from the ” peasants”, and commuting from home to public school by private helicopters or showing they have a £10m private bank account at Coutts.

Not surprisingly this has produced a reaction across the net with people calling for the site to be taken down, and a spate of hostile comments – sometimes producing ripostes like warning people to shut up as they will be their boss in future life.

More seriously as the Inforrm blog reveals these antics have posed problems for the more mature seriously rich parents who wish to hide their opulent life styles from the rest of us and pretend “we are all in it together”.

As the Inforrm blog says : ” The consequences could be very serious for those wealthy teens, and their families, where potentially inflammatory images appear which include identifying information such as faces, car registrations and locations.

One 19 year old, who frequently posted about his lavish lifestyle and who was featured on Tumblr site “Rich Kids on Instagram”, has already run into trouble, having had several luxury cars from his father’s rental business subsequently set alight by vandals, causing over £500,000 worth of damage to his father’s business.

Another featured ‘rich kid’ was Alexa Dell, daughter of Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell, who posted an image of her brother tucking into a feast onboard a private jet, bound for Fiji. She also used her Twitter account to regularly post details of her location, complete with GPS location tagging- somewhat undermining the annual US$2.7 million her father reportedly spends on family security. Upon discovering this, Alexa’s account was removed and her image has been taken down.”

The blog rightly points out that in an era of unemployment and poverty where ceo’s have made people redundant this can be inflammatory.

It rightly adds:” a teen bragging about the lavish lifestyle of his or her CEO parent who has recently made redundancies or been the recipient of a sizeable bonus can easily catch the eye of a journalist on the hunt for a story – as can any images posted by a naive child who has a parent in the public eye. “

But to me the whole site seems symptomatic of a yawning divide opening up in the UK and the last thing I would want to see is it taken down. Such antics provide the perfect foil to attack the wealthy Lynton Crosby and the image he wants the Tories to present to the electorate of the ruling class in the next election. Spoilt brats revealing themselves for what they really are!

Meanwhile in true entrepreneurial fashion the site is up for sale by its 17 year old owner. He has been offered $150,000 by an American but might let it go for a mere $40,000 to a Brit with spare cash from his pocket money.

Usual rubbish.

As fine a bunch of shits as ever graced a page..

Haze,

I think the image shows rather unusual rubbish.

---------

GF.

I think that image could be used by labour on a placard with such quotes as:

1) Vote tory and be ruled by us for another 5years.
2) Vote tory and we will be responsible for ruining Britain for another 5years
3) Vote tory this is where the cabinet all the Old Etonians go for a holiday.
4) Vote tory and be as stupid as us.

ETC. Ect.

Bloody hell Fred your an hard task master. Ohhhh I get yeah re- rubbish.

Yep Hays type of people. Mind the lad has been honest about the photo whats he say....

Usual rubbish.

At least the lads being honest about the Eton Boys.

First time Ive ever seen him give way on his tory boys, you never know itl be peeing it down next....

8-)

How did you do that?

:-)

Only Mahmood Bina knows!

Quite amusing!

.

Fred Im God......Hilary knows. he he.

Lass was right though yesterday, re- flight paths. Full marks u were right. Well done.

Hays.................. will be copying my code.

I saw Miliband today saying there will be no return to tax and spend. That it was not possible just to spend mony. That is one of the funniest speeches I have seen in a long time. Maybe he would be better doing stand up.

Fishfinger,

If you were god, you'd have left no evidence of your work, and you'd have also cleaned the page of its 200+ W3C validation errors.

But, I can understand why you'd want my babies... Just paste up your address and I'll drop them off sometime tomorrow.

Oh, nearly neglected to say, I'm sure that Hays doesn't need to copy your code. He could've probably written that himself, upside down, hanging over the banister.

Ukip’s popularity is no surprise given the main parties’ neglect of voters

Nigel Farage has toured the country speaking to real people while the established parties offer only stage-managed events



Matthew Goodwin


theguardian.com, Saturday 19 July 2014 11.30 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/19/ukip-popularity-main-parties-neglect-voters-nigel-farage



Nigel Farage (centre) celebrates with newly elected Ukip councillors in Basildon, Essex in May 2014. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters


How do you campaign against a party like Ukip? This is the question occupying Labour and Conservative strategists as they prepare for the 2015 general election. One place they could start is by recognising the scale of political inequality in modern Britain and that a large number of voters feel utterly disconnected from our political process.

The depressing scale of political inequality was brilliantly captured by the Electoral Reform Society, which looked at how our main parties spent money at the last general election. It found huge geographical differences. If you lived in the most valuable seat in the country (Luton South) it is good news; £130,000 was ploughed into contacting voters, including almost £3,000 on public meetings. This meant a vote was effectively worth £3. But if you lived in the least valuable seat – the ultra-safe Labour seat of Bootle – it is a different picture; barely £5,000 was spent, no money was devoted to public meetings and a vote is worth less than 20p. This is not exactly what John Stuart Mill had in mind when he talked of an equal democracy representing every citizen in a proportionate manner.

It’s not the fault of the parties (although their failure to offer serious alternatives to first-past-the-post speaks volumes). It is the fault of the system, which only prospered when Labour and the Conservatives could attract more than 80% of the vote and there was no appetite for challengers. But that era is gone. In other systems, parties have incentives to engage with more voters. But in Britain – where only one in three of us live in a marginal seat – such incentives do not exist. Instead, we are left with a democracy where parties spent 162% more money in the 50 most competitive seats than in the 50 least competitive. Chances are, you are one of the 20 million who live in a safe seat and so won’t be hearing much from our parties next year.

Is it any wonder that voters are turning to parties like Ukip? When some voters are valued 22 times more than others simply based on where they live, you have space for populists. This political inequality validates their claim that politicians “are not listening”. It is why last month Ukip announced that it wants to rebuild trust in politics and give voters a greater say through Swiss-style referendums. It is also why Nigel Farage ordered his activists at the last elections to hold as many public meetings as possible. Perhaps he had read the research; in almost one in three seats at the last election, almost no money was spent by the main parties on public meetings. My own calculations suggest the picture is bleaker; in more than half of all seats not even £100 was spent on public meetings.

As our grassroots democracy has hollowed, Farage has toured the country, speaking to voters and (as he told me) “hanging around for a couple of hours afterwards to hear whatever was on their minds”. Compare this with the stage-managed events of our main parties – a few workers huddled in a factory, glazed expressions, listening to an overly wonkish policy announcement.

The main parties often ridicule Ukip for not having a voter identification system that can match their short-term electoral professionalism. But they miss the point; over the long haul, the strength of populist parties flows from their repudiation of these bland techniques. You will not resolve voters’ grievances by treating them like a focus group.

The implications of all this are reflected in other evidence. I’ve looked at the 20 seats that saw the lowest amount of spending. They include places such as Ashton-under-Lyne, Doncaster Central, Halton, Knowsley, North Tyneside, Rotherham and Sheffield, where parties spent a paltry 34p per vote. Fast forward to the European parliament elections this year. In all these places Ukip finished second, with at least 20% of the vote. Bottom of the list was Bootle, where Ukip averaged 28% – just six points behind Labour.

Labour and Tory strategists will respond with something like: “Yes, but Ukip will not win parliamentary seats.” This is what is wrong with our representative democracy – it ignores a groundswell of public discontent with how the system is working. Elections are supposed to offer us all an equal chance to join a national conversation about our society and how it can be improved. But our system is encouraging the main parties to ignore a large swathe of voters and is chipping away at our basic right to participate meaningfully in politics, thus creating fertile soil for populists.




Read the comments:

Hilary,

Just paste up your address and I'll drop them off sometime tomorrow.



What are you promising to drop for GF?

Does your mother know?

A senior pro-Russian rebel commander in eastern Ukraine has suggested that many of the victims of the MH17 plane crash may have died days before the plane took off.

Igor Girkin said, on the pro-rebel website Russkaya Vesna, that he was told by people at the crash site that a "significant number" of the bodies were not fresh.