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.

Yep its not very good is it especialy when these thugs could be attacking the streets of Germany, France , spain and Italy in a few years time even earlier.

As Ive said Im all for British air strikes, these people are far worse than Bin ladens lot.

You would at least expect some EEC initiative on food aid, but I havent seen any, or if thier is it must be very small.

and now a chuckler for you .....


TO WHOM DOES THE LAND OF ISRAEL BELONG??

An Israeli sense of humour at United Nations set the record straight.
An ingenious example of speech and politics occurred recently in the
United Nations Assembly and made the world community smile.

A representative from Israel began:
'Before beginning my talk I want to tell you something about Moses.
When he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought,
"What a good opportunity to have a bath
Moses removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the water.
When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished.
A Palestinian had stolen them!

The Palestinian representative at the UN jumped up and furiously shouted,
"What are you talking about?……. The Palestinians weren't there then."
The Israeli representative smiled and said:
"And now that we have made that clear, I will begin my speech

Right OK better not laugh or Il get picked up on it by someone.

Pandora's box




Domestic abuse offence could cover emotional as well as physical harm

Government launches consultation on strengthening law by explicitly stating that domestic abuse covers coercive behaviour



Haroon Siddique


theguardian.com, Wednesday 20 August 2014 09.52 BST



A new criminal offence of domestic abuse could be introduced to include emotional and psychological harm inflicted by a partner within a relationship.

The government launched a consultation on Wednesday to look at strengthening the law by explicitly stating that domestic abuse covers coercive and controlling behaviour as well as physical harm.

The move comes after the way that police respond to domestic abuse in England and Wales was condemned as "alarming and unacceptable" in a report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) in March.

The consultation document says that police fail to see abuse, particularly in its nonviolent form, as a serious crime, adding: "Creating a specific offence of domestic abuse may send a clear, consistent message to frontline agencies that nonviolent control in an intimate relationship is criminal.

"Explicitly capturing this in legislation may also help victims identify the behaviour they are suffering as wrong and encourage them to report it, and cause perpetrators to rethink their controlling behaviour."

The latest statistics reported in the Crime Survey for England and Wales suggest that 30% of women and 16% of men will experience domestic abuse during their lifetime.



More: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/20/new-domestic-violence-offence-consultation

"I was in full control until I hit the fence," he said.

"Not so," said the magistrates. "We find you guilty of dangerous driving and you will return to the court for sentencing next week."

The bike rider had a camera on his helmet and loaded the film of the incident onto the Internet.

I'm on the side of the magistrates. What do you think? Here's the news article and a video of the film from the rider's camera:

More HERE

I think he meant to say, "I was in full control until I wasn't."

Re the talk of the MPC raising interest rates anytime soon, they haven't exited QE yet.

They're in uncharted territory here, but conventional economic wisdom says they need to exit QE before raising rates. And a QE exit will take a bit of time to flush through the system, so....

..so we are stuck with low rates for some time yet?

Hmmm? Obviously.

No were saying the BoE com are divided on wether rates should go up or not.

The timing will obviously be sorted out by the 9 members, but if house prices carry on rising it will be sooner rather than later, Carney is frightened to death of a bubble burst for obvious reasons.

house prices have risen year/year for ages, with just the occasional blip
thus, it's not the rise itself, but the rate thereof and whether or not it is considered to be getting our of hand
there are of course other ways of limiting house price rises than via interest rates

House prices are not included within the CPI basket. Property rental costs are included, as are furniture costs, and household insurance costs, etc, but house price inflation in itself does not dictate in any way, shape or form what the MPC do about raising or lowering rates. The MPC's mandate from the Chancellor requires them to use only CPI which, by its very nature, will always serve to make the economy look better than it might actually be through a effect called Pollyanna Creep. Basically, when a particular item starts to become expensive, fewer people buy it, so its weighting within the CPI basket is reduced which has the effect of keeping CPI at a favourable level.

MPC is not exactly divided over interest rates. Just 2 out of 9 wanted a rate rise. It may have something to do with their politics. The key point is that the 2 are external members as are 2 others. The majority of 5 are BoE employees and will probably toe the line of no rise.

The other interesting point is that the 2 who wanted the rise gave reasons that were marginally true at the time and now are not true. That means that a new vote may be 9-0 for no rate rise next time.

A commentary on the Camerons' holiday snap

As the Prime Minister and his wife's annual summer holiday photograph is released, why this is the worst one yet

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11046361/A-commentary-on-the-Camerons-holiday-snap.html



comment section disabled....I wonder why?

Alice Audley works on the Features desk at the Daily Telegraph

Wonder what she looks like on holiday ? sounds like she spends it criticising other holiday makers

Q. Wonder what she looks like on holiday ?

A. http://aliceaudley.com/about/

I see a gang of lowlife scumbag Romanian cash machine robbers have been sentenced to a few months in prison. Does anyone know if they will be deported when they get out or , due to the goodness of EUROPE we'll have to provide them with free B&b for the next umpteen years.

Yep this Tory government are useless.

They should get rid of the front bench and put Bill Cash, John Redwood etc etc in place.

Would easily win the GE then, now not a chance in hell.

Update - Labour lead at 4
by YouGov in Politics
Thu August 21, 2014 6 a.m. BST

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 20th August - Con 34%, Lab 38%, LD 9%, UKIP 11%

The great jobs deception

It is sad that many people are likely to see this month’s headline increase in employment and take it as a sign that the British economy really is on the mend, as the Coalition keeps claiming.
Silly, silly people.

Exactly one week ago, the Department for Work and Pensions announced “the steepest annual fall in unemployment in a quarter of a century“, adding that “unemployment fell by 437,000 over the past year – and 132,000 in only the past three months – which is the biggest annual fall in 25 years”.

This blog has already pointed out that it is possible to account for all of the drop in unemployment over the last three months as being due to sanctions placed on jobseekers by the Department for Work and Pensions. The figure is meaningless.

The DWP also stated that the number of people in work was continuing to rise, “with 820,000 more people in a job compared with 12 months ago”. This masks an inconvenient truth that ministers would rather you didn’t know – about self-employment.

Self-employment, the government would have you believe, is one of the great success stories of the Coalition. More people are self-employed now than at any point over the past 40 years - with the total number of people in self-employment rising by 408,000 in the last year, to 4.59 million according to the Office for National Statistics.

The ONS also tells us that the rise in total employment since 2008 is mostly among the self-employed, which may – on the face of it – seem good.

Here’s the hammer-blow: Average income from self-employment has fallen by 22 per cent since 2008-9.

Self-employed people are a lot worse-off than they used to be.

It seems Flip Chart Fairy Tales was absolutely right to say fewer people were leaving self-employment (the ONS confirms this), and we may conclude that FCFT is right in its belief that this is because people have not been able to reach their target in terms of pensions (the number of over-65s who are self-employed has more than doubled in the past five years to reach nearly 500,000), or there is no employed work available for people of their expertise or experience.

These are people who are seeing their business shrink but have nowhere else to go. For them, there has been no economic upturn at all.

Figures also show an increase in the number of self-employed tax credit claimants. This is because claiming self-employment and taking tax credits is easier than signing on the dole and living in fear of being sanctioned.

More people are in work – those figures aren’t wrong, but the reasons behind them are not what the government would have you believe.

Self-employed people are remaining in business, despite dwindling returns, because they simply cannot afford to stop.

Those who are claiming tax credits are not contributing to the economy – quite the opposite, in fact.

So the latest employment figures are nothing to shout about and the government is deceiving you in doing so.

A better indicator of our economic well-being would be to measure the number of people who contributed to the Treasury by paying income tax.

The government does not provide that figure.

Quelle surprise.

20/8/2014

When the economy is recovering from a recession low incomes are very helpful. It is to be expected and welcomed.