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.

The English Question should be simple to fix

Labour’s opposition to fair treatment for England is risking Britain’s integrity - Gordon Brown, its former leader, has missed the point





By Telegraph View

6:20AM BST 15 Oct 2014



Sometimes, Parliament rises to the occasion – and it did so yesterday with an all-day debate on the constitution, in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum.


It was apparent that the passions inflamed by the two-year campaign had not subsided in some quarters. Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, fulminated like an Old Testament prophet against what he perceived as Conservative perfidy. He considered David Cameron’s decision to raise the English Question in the aftermath of the referendum to have been partisan and dangerous, railing against any suggestion that there should be English votes for English laws and calling it a recipe for constitutional crisis. It would, said Mr Brown, create two classes of MP, be unbalanced because of the disproportionate size of England, and hasten the break-up of the Union that its proponents claim they want to preserve.


Not for the first time, Mr Brown missed the point. The devolutionary settlement of 1998 left an injustice at the heart of our democratic system that the last government did nothing to address. It created not so much two classes of MP as, in the words of Sir George Young, the former Commons leader, two classes of voter, with those in England possessing less leverage over events in the UK than their Scottish counterparts.


If Mr Brown had a point, it was in warning of the consequences of devolving full income tax powers to Scotland – a proposal put forward by a Conservative committee chaired by Lord Strathclyde, which went further than anything suggested by Labour. This is an important argument that will need to be resolved by the all-party committee established to consider the way forward. But that would require a full contribution from Labour, one it appears reluctant to make. Its leaders complain they are being bounced into something politically advantageous to the Tories, and want to refer the whole issue to a constitutional convention after the 2015 general election. In other words, they want to kick this matter yet again into the long grass.


More:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11162204/The-English-Question-should-be-simple-to-fix.html

another 6 months or more of current uk interest rates, or have you forgotten already?

Cynic, the average Joe always seems to have enough money to spend on booze! An article in the Telegraph this morning details what a strain this is putting on the NHS.

DB4,

Are you TT?

No Fred, I'm a wine drinker - in moderation!

As a reminder of this governments supervised recovery

That reminds me , got to recover that deck chair for next summer

PMQs was interesting, if only to see that Milibland is still WEAK.

Aha! It's lunchtime.

Time for a break. Time for some Mozart......

Inflation falling plus unemployment falling plus reduced tax receipts should have the Treasuries alarm bells ringing. AND RINGING LOUDLY.

Especially with all that debt they are ringing up.

Glad Im out of this market, made a mistake this morning buying AHT but who cares with all these falls. Soon back out for a small loss.

Some of the so called experts on advfn have had me in tears of laughter for the past month.

How can they get it so wrong.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Must be sat on some massive loses.

DB4,

What is you wine bill at the end of the month.

Compare it to the average Joe like me!

My kinda girl Exec...

GF, I'm loving these markets, been long, short, long again, big bets, small bets... I love a storm, its raining money for me...

No good for the short term stock player though, ok for intraday trading done a bit on EZJ today. Nicely up and down.

Suppose I could do some shorting but to be honest cant be assed and you get others who are long wound up.

Nice to have rest really in fact longest rest Ive had in years.

Good for us spread betters, I love a short market as you well know... Bounce tomorrow maybe if 6240ish doesn't hold I think..

I'm debating a long play in gold also

POLL: Lord Freud has apologised – should he keep his job? 15/10/2014

Lord Freud has apologised for suggesting that disabled people were not ‘worth’ the minimum wage.

According to The Spectator, he has said:

“I would like to offer a full and unreserved apology. I was foolish to accept the premise of the question. To be clear, all disabled people should be paid at least the minimum wage, without exception, and I accept that it is offensive to suggest anything else.

“I care passionately about disabled people. I am proud to have played a full part in a government that is fully committed to helping disabled people overcome the many barriers they face in finding employment. That is why through Universal Credit – which I referred to in my response – we have increased overall spending on disabled households by £250m, offered the most generous work allowance ever, and increased the disability addition to £360 per month.

“I am profoundly sorry for any offence I have caused to any disabled people.”

Those of you who are disabled will no doubt be extremely interested – if not entertained – by the second paragraph of the above, in which Lord Freud fantasizes about his role in the Conservative-led Coalition’s policies of impoverishing them and forcing them towards death in the gutter or suicide before they get that far.

It is easy to see how ‘Lord Fraud’ got his nickname.

GF.

Can you ask Haze whether Lord Freud is one of the senior tories he is pally with?

I was thinking birds of a feather!