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.

Still I wouldn't rule out UKIP, I know plenty of people here on the south coast that WILL vote for them..

Haze.

You are back in Noddy Land again.

At the rate tory party members are defecting there won't be a party to vote for.

I don't think such a rump should be even allowed party political broadcasts at the time of the next election, especially as Cameron seems to much of a coward to debate policies with Farage.

After the next G/E, what will remain of the tory party other than a rabble, seen by many to be led by a cowardly liar, who its members were unable to rid themselves of.

The lack of courage shown by the poser Cameron will be played on by Farage right up to the next election.

=====================

Caswell, may be a "good" constituency MP, but he only comes into "contact" with minority of the his electorate and possibly by the time of the next election the rest will have forgotten who he is!

SHORTIE STOP ARGUING..........LOL.

Yep the Tories ......and labour dismiss UKIP at there peril.

BIG BIG point you make their Fred. Tory defections.

i don't agree with your summation of the result in m'chester
however, i would accept that by-elections often give totally skewed results that are not borne out in a general election
and i'll preempt hays by saying that clacton is a completely different kettle of fish

Sorry GF lol.... But in my defence there has only been 1 person I've ever argued with on this site... I took yours and everyone elses advise by the way and squelched the idiot..

I think you are all missing the big picture here!!

And here it is!!

JR clearly is alive and getting into British politics!!

LOL good on you Shortie. (probably follow me now LOL)

Go on whats the big picture then?.

Who ever gets in nothing will really change... Conservative / Labour / Lim-Dems, same shit just packaged in a different colour...

What MONSTER RAVING LOONEY PARTY????????

Lord Sutch

I always remember a female newscaster interviewing him just before a result was due, she said to him "what place do women have in your partys future" his reply "they can always come back to my place dear" .......LOL

On a key note, how many times have you ever listened to the news and heard that due to an EU resolution or law something couldn't be done... The deporting of Abu Qatada and EU human rights legislation... Health & Safety legislation... the list goes on and on.... What's the real cost of being in the EU??

Cameron said we'd have a referendum on Europe if the Conservatives win a majority, a majority isn't very likely now so neither is the referendum... Yet he still insists on pretending he's open to a democratic vote on Europe when in reality the vote will never happen..!

He is hanging on to his own skin!

His place in history is noted!

I like the way Cameron, Osborne and Clegg claim to have created jobs, fabricating the facts when reclassification of people who work in further education etc. have simply been reclassified from public sector workers to private sector workers..

There are plenty of examples like this, they all feed the myth that the government has a handle on the economy.... LIE!!

Well said Shortie you should post here more often, Fred and I could do with a man like you.

It also helps you get rid of stress this thread until Manuel turns up ....he he

A very good thread for the trader who needs to blow off steam and reinvigorate ones self.

Nigel Farage gambled, and Nigel Farage won. On the day of his speech to Ukip conference I explained how the leader of the People’ Revolution had rolled the dice by pledging to park his tanks on Labour’s lawn in Heywood and Middleton. “9 October was supposed to be Ukip’s purple letter day,” I wrote. “the moment they secured their first elected MP. Now a win in Clacton will not be enough. They have to run Labour close in Heywood as well, or else run the risk of undermining their own conference narrative”.

They didn’t run Ed Miliband close. They ran Ed Miliband over.

Yes, the turnout was a pitiful 36 per cent. A lot of Ukip’s tanks broke down before they made it as far as Labour’s northern heartland. But those that did get that far ran amok. Labour had been expecting to win the seat by 15-20 points. They clung on by just 2.

Clacton will get all the headlines this morning. Rightly, because Ukip now has its first elected member of parliament. Or, if we’re being accurate, its first appropriated member of parliament.

“Happy birthday!”, Nigel Farage cheekily said to David Cameron via Sky News. It was not a happy birthday. It was a terrible result for the Tories, right at the bottom end of their expectations.

But it was an even worse result for Labour. In fact, it was a catastrophe.

The Tories knew Clacton was coming. They had priced defeat in. No one on Labour’s side saw Heywood coming. There had been whispers circulating Labour conference that the party had a problem in the seat. But over the past fortnight the whispers had ceased. Opinion polls gave Labour a 20-point lead. Even in the minutes after the polls closed Labour officials were confidently briefing that victory would be theirs by a comfortable margin. In the end they came within a whisker of losing.
This morning both the main parties believe they are staring down the barrels of Nigel Farage’s tanks. They are both wrong, but there’s no point arguing the point now. Common sense is no match for the narrative of a people’s revolution.



But only one party is in a position to do anything about it. Cameron can shift his party to the Right to meet the Ukip threat. If he shifts too far it will be electorally disastrous. But he can reach out incrementally to disaffected Ukip supporters in a range of areas – immigration, welfare, English votes, Europe, law and order, etc, and still go with the political grain of his party.

Miliband can’t. Last night wasn’t the moment he nearly lost a parliamentary seat. It was the moment he lost his entire electoral strategy.

He has built his hopes of victory around taking the 29 per cent of people who voted Labour in 2010, and bolting on an additional 6 per cent of disaffected Lib Dem voters. The 35 per cent strategy.

That strategy is dead. His 35 per cent coalition is fracturing (or is at least perceived to be fracturing). And there is nothing – literally nothing – he can do about it.

To beat back Farage he needs to move Right on all those issues I listed above. But he can’t. Because if he turns right on immigration or welfare or law and order, the Left of his party will turn on him and the Lib Dem refugees will abandon him.

This morning every Left-of-centre commentator and blog will be shrieking about how Heywood demonstrates the extent to which Labour is losing touch with its working-class base. And they will be correct. But what have those commentators and blogs spent the past week doing? Demanding Miliband defends the Human Rights Act. Insisting he rejects Tory welfare cuts. Telling him to attack the Tories for prioritising tax cuts ahead of increased public sector spending.

Labour has spent the past four years convincing itself it could win from the Left. And as a result it has no defence against an assault from the Right.

Miliband is in serious, serious trouble this morning. Heywood was supposed to act as a firebreak to a disastrous fortnight for Labour’s leader. Instead he finds himself encircled by flames.

His personal authority collapsed with his disastrous conference speech. His policy offer was shredded by Cameron’s own audacious conference address. And his electoral strategy has just been shredded by Farage.

Yesterday, even before the polls had closed in Heywood, a story appeared that underlined the extent to which Miliband’s position as leader of his party is slowly but surely becoming untenable. A briefing had been given to the New Statesman in which Miliband had let it be known he was seeking to cut tuition fees from £9,000 to £6,000. But, according to the magazine’s political editor George Eaton, he had been prevented from doing so by senior members of his shadow cabinet.

I phoned a member of the shadow cabinet to ask what they thought of the fact Miliband and his team were now briefing against them. "So that's what Ed and his people are up to?” they responded, “Fine. Bring it on".

Last night Nigel Farage also challenged Ed Miliband to “bring it on”. But he can’t.

Dan Hodges
Daily Telegraph

Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation

sticky - into every life a little rain (and pain) must fall :-)