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.

DB4,

You may be correct about SNP gaining Scottish seats from Labour and possibly Lib Dems.

But you have to consider where the electees will cast their votes and what affiliations they are likely to make.

My guess is in a coalition government in general it would be with Labour or Lib Dems.

Could be wrong.
=====

Manuel,

Once again, I think you are again guilty of projection of your own traits on another person.

A feature of many old reactionaries.

In general, I feel no obligations to point out the fallibilities of others, but I am prepared to make exceptions in the cases such as yours and Haze.

Also, I enjoy making observations and waiting for them to be disproved. Politics interests me, the dishonesty of politicians even more.

Homelessness hits five-year high – Shelter 4/10/2014

The number of people made homeless because they were evicted by their private landlord has more than doubled in the last five years, new government figures show, according to Shelter.

In the past twelve months, 13,990 households were accepted as homeless by their council after their landlord ended their private rented tenancy, compared with 5,650 five years ago. Private rental evictions became the number one cause of homelessness for the first time in early 2012, and now represent nearly a third (30 per cent) of all homelessness cases in England.

More than nine million people now privately rent their homes in England, and almost one in three renting households are families. Shelter is warning that the situation is likely to get worse as a combination of sky-high rents, unstable short-term tenancies and a wave of welfare changes are leaving thousands of families struggling to find anywhere they can afford to live.

The government’s figures also reveal that the number of homeless families in temporary accommodation rose to 44,510 – the highest it has been for five years.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: “Behind every one of these shocking statistics stands a person or a family who’s gone through the tragedy of losing their home. And what’s more worrying is that we know these figures are only the tip of the iceberg.

“The failure of successive governments to build enough affordable homes has left us with a housing market that’s totally out of control. As a result more and more families are finding themselves living in unstable rented homes, unable to put down roots and facing a monthly battle with sky-high housing costs.

“We speak to families every day who are struggling to cope with the cost of housing, often forced to cut back on essentials or even skip meals just to keep a roof over their children’s heads.

“With so many of us already on a financial knife-edge, all it takes is one thing like a sudden rent rise to tip a family into a spiral that ends in homelessness.

“Politicians have to give back hope to all those crying out for a stable home, by building the genuinely affordable homes that we desperately need.”

Wait – there’s more (according to Shelter’s blog).

While the overall number of households accepted as homeless has slightly dropped again this quarter, the number in B&B has increased to an 11 year high.

And the number of households placed in temporary accommodation in another council area is at the highest level since records began in 1998. And a quarter of temporary accommodation is now out of area.

What Shelter won’t tell you is that this is the intended result of government policies designed to turf people the Conservatives (and, one imagines, the Liberal Democrats) deem undesirable out of areas they consider to be desirable and force them to find somewhere else to live – if they can.

The Bedroom Tax, the Benefit Cap, low wages, high private rents and house prices all contribute to this, and are either Tory policies or phenomena the Tories and their friends have allowed to go unchecked.

Tories don’t care if these people end up starving on the street, as long as they can make a fat wad of cash out of the space they leave behind.

Theirs right and wrong, Ive reported the post below to MONEY AM MANAGEMENT....

Chris Carson - 05 Oct 2014 17:22 - 3903 of 3904

Fuck off PURPLE or whoever your calling yourself this week!!! Go and pick on some other disabled posters, your good at that. Your Credibility is well donald!! deal with it.

The crescendo of support is sadly lacking PURPLE, you have been found out, deal with it.

Fred, I agree with quite a lot of your comments, but I cannot understand when you obviously feel so strongly about politics that you don't vote. Why?

DB4,

I see the problems with my own conclusions.

I also have a sneaking liking for:

"Yours is to reason why, but not to do or die!"

I have difficulty with beliefs! Which are often momentary.

-----

That it why I enjoy middle games more than endgames!

8-)

Purple you back in the classroom, Sir, Sir hand up. Yorkshire WIMP!

We are seeing the start of Labour's slide into the bottomless pit from where there is no return.

stop talking the same sort of rubbish as do fred and sticky!

Yes Hays yes.

Two polls in the Sunday papers. The weekly YouGov/Sunday Times poll has topline figures of CON 36%, LAB 34%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 13%. That means both the YouGov polls since Cameron’s conference speech have shown a small Tory lead, though it’s worth noting that that the Populus poll on Friday did not show any movement to the Conservatives so the trend is not all one way. The more important caveat is that the polls were taken in the context of very good publicity for the Conservatives from their conference – we don’t know if it will last once the agenda moves on to, say, the expected UKIP by-election win on Thursday.

Of course. You have to be optimistic. If Cameron manages to exclude Scottish MPs from voting on English affairs, it won't even matter if Labour win from time to time at a GE. Even a Labour budget would get voted down. England would become ungovernable by Labour. If we get a Conservative government this time, it will put through the constituency boundary changes that it wanted to this time, but the Libs reneged because they didn't get their Lords reform. The changes will result in quite a few lost Labour seats and a couple of Tory and Lib seats.

Victim

VICTIM - 02 Oct 2014 10:29 - 46655 of 46859

If the Cons get in again Fred, will you be happy . It just seems that if they don't you will have lots of time on your hands.

========

Apologies. missed the post.

8-)

Absence may make the heart grow fonder!

also,

"The devil finds work for idle hands."


So watch out!

====

Truth is the Labour party has such a hammering in the media, they need a little help and giving it, appeals to me!


Especially, when it irritates Manuel!

your very silly rantings don't irritate me at all except insofar as they take up so much space

Who is purple?

No sooner have the jocks said no, up pops another wee beastie...




Sturgeon: Devo max will bring independence closer




Sunday 5 October 2014



Scottish independence is a matter of "when, not if" - particularly if unionist parties deliver on their vow of substantial new powers for Holyrood, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said.




Devolution of the financial, economic and welfare powers implicit in unionist pledges of "home rule" will render future "scaremongering" over Scotland's capacity for self-government "risible", according to Ms Sturgeon, who is almost certain to be Scotland's next first minister.


But she recognised that Westminster faces a difficult task in delivering powers which it claimed "would cause the sky to fall in" before the referendum.

Ms Sturgeon will today face calls to rule out a rapid second referendum by Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael, who has already warned nationalists against arguing for "independence by the back door" in the forthcoming Smith Commission negotiations on more powers.

Writing in left-wing periodical Scottish Left Review, Ms Sturgeon said: "There is no going back - and much as they might have wanted to, Whitehall politicians and mandarins cannot put us back in a devolved box.

"The word 'devolution' is no longer adequate, for that describes a process of handing down carefully circumscribed powers from on high to a relatively passive people.

"Scotland is now more politically engaged and assertive than at any stage of the democratic era."



More: http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/scottish-politics/sturgeon-extra-powers-promised-by-unionist-parties-will-bring-independenc.1412505388

Perhaps gf would like to answer that question MaxK, but I doubt it. (Post 46863)

Sturgeon could be an absolute nightmare for the Labour party in Scotland. Salmond will seem like a pussycat in comparison.

Did Salmond confuse Cameron by purring?

Perhaps Fred, but Sturgeon has serious claws!

PETER HITCHENS: The Dave diet: hair gel, snake oil and terminological inexactitudes

By Peter Hitchens

Published: 00:49, 5 October 2014


'Snake-oil and hair gel': The Prime Minister wore a Help For Heroes wristband during his conference speech in Birmingham on Wednesday, despite needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2780929/PETER-HITCHENS-The-Dave-diet-hair-gel-snake-oil-terminological-inexactitudes.html



How odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.

Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.

Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.

One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?

It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.

The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.

Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.

You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.


There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.

What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.

I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.

But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve.

His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.

I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.