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.

A fantastic flow chart here from twitter.

Farage accused Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, of acting as the head of a “banana republic” after he said that pressure was placed on Grigule to stand down if she wanted to lead a parliamentary delegation to Kazakhstan.

The Ukip leader said: “It is clear that the European parliament does not follow its long-term practice of sharing delegation and chairmanship positions in a fair manner according to the D’Hondt system [of selection]. If we are correct in our understanding about the events, President Schulz would be more suited to being the president of a parliament in a banana republic. It would seem he has exceeded his role that should apply to a neutral chairman or president of a parliament. I believe this is an example of political bias on an extraordinary scale.”

http://order-order.com/2014/10/16/charity-condemning-freud-packed-with-labour-supporters/

Guido has found more from Mencap on whether or not some disabled people should be exempt from the minimum wage. Here they are in February 2000 once again backing the very idea Lord Freud has got in so much trouble over:

“The minimum wage has helped many people with learning disabilities. But people who have severe learning disabilities are also employed, even though they may have a productivity rate of 30% of the average. An employer may say that they will pay someone £15 a week for doing 15 hours work – and generally everyone is happy with this. The person with learning disabilities isn’t excluded from a working environment, and gets to go on works dos and generally join in with the team. And it’s good for the rest of the team too. Unfortunately, if employers have to pay the minimum wage, they may have to let these valuable members of their staff go.”

Under Labour, Mencap used to support the proposal. Yesterday Mencap described it as “disgusting”. A cynic might say their condemnation of Lord Freud was political…

And what about Scope, another disability charity? They were consulted on the 2003 Labour government document backing a policy more draconian that what Freud proposed. Yesterday they said Freud’s comments were “unacceptable”. Surely a reaction completely unrelated to their patron being Cherie Blair, their trustees including former Labour adviser Agnes Fletcher and Brent Labour member Jacqui Penalver, and their Director of External Affairs Mark Atkinson being a former Labour candidate. Not like a charity to be overtly partisan…

Year 2000 to 2003,!!!!!! old historical rubbish.

One as to take this incident with Fraud and place it alongside present government attitudes/policy to the disabled and Welfare.

The present DWP is rotten from top to bottom and the charities know that.

Fraud cannot be seperated as a one off incident.

By the way Labour have more secret tapes of Fraud and what he as been saying.

PMQs next week should be a humdinger.

And tonight's curry will be a ring stinger, no doubt.

:o)

Dont eat curry just mustard hilary.

Snouts In The Trough: Legal Loan Shark Firm Cosies Up To Iain Duncan Smith At Tory Dinner
Posted on October 13, 2014 by johnny void

A company which harasses people in their homes to take out small loans with huge interest rates enjoyed a slap up meal with Iain Duncan Smith at the Tory Party’s Winter fundraising dinner.

The Bureax of Investigative Journalism revealed over the weekend that three executives of a doorstep lenders CLC Finance shared a table with the Secretary of State at the glitzy event where attendees were reported to have a combined wealth of £22 billion. According to the website, they enjoyed a ‘wide-ranging discussion’with IDS on matters including Universal Credit. Perhaps they discussed the propsed five week waiting period for the new benefit or the current benefit sanctioning regime which is forcing hundreds of thousands of people into debt and destitution.

CLC Finance are the kind of bastards who persuade you to take out a hundred quid loan and then want a hundred and fifty back from you over the next five months. Their vile business model is based on the real poverty trap – the stark fact that if you are hungry, or your kid needs shoes, then you will be forced to make short term decisions that have negative consequences in the future. This doesn’t just lead to poor people staying poor, it makes people in poverty poorer.

There has been no better friend to loan sharks, whether legal or otherwise, than Iain Duncan Smith. One of his most vindictive welfare reforms was scrapping Crisis Loans, small advance payments which were repayable out of benefits and barely cost the tax payer a penny. What they meant was that if someone’s oven broke down, they were a vicitm of crime, or faced a similar emergency, then they would not be dependent on scum like Wonga or CLC Finance.

The DWP’s first move was to divert the funding for Crisis Loans to Local Authorities and tell them they could do as they please with it. Many set up foodstamp style voucher schemes, whilst some abandoned their poorest residents completely and simply sat on most of the money. Then, at the beginning of this year and around the time of the Tory Fundraising Dinner, the Government announced they would be ending even this scant funding. This decision prompted many councils to say they would no longer provide any emergency help at all.

A Judicial Review brought by Child Poverty Action Group has prompted the DWP to ‘rethink’ this decision, pending a recently launched pulic consultation. Of course the real consultations take place around expensive dining tables where private sector poverty pimps cosy up to ministers and discuss ways to make themselves richer at the expense of the rest of us.

Nasty gf, very nasty.

Would you expect different from IDS?

Is it a case of birds of feather flock together with a nest in No 10!

Lord Freud, the minister for welfare reform, has conceded that he was “foolish” to suggest that some disabled people might not be entitled to the minimum wage. This was a crass comment by any standards, and he was right to offer a sincere apology. He may yet have to resign.


Still, the way his remark was used by the Labour Party is revealing. Lord Freud was speaking two weeks ago at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. The discussion concerned ways of helping disabled people back into work, not how to punish them financially. Lord Freud was responding to a question about whether pay top-ups were the answer. As he said, perhaps he should have rejected the premise of the question; but such fringe meetings are supposed to involve a free and frank exchange of views.


Labour must have had the transcript of this meeting for some time – yet chose to wait until midday yesterday to disclose it. If it was so revealing of the Government’s callousness, why was it not brought to the public’s attention sooner?


The reason, of course, was to draw attention away from two other matters. One was the publication of the latest employment figures, showing near-record levels of people in work and the largest ever annual fall in unemployment – down 538,000 in the last 12 months, which is itself partly due to the welfare reforms engineered by Lord Freud. The second was the mounting criticism of Ed Miliband’s leadership.


Such tactics won’t wash. The central political question to be considered over the next few months is not what Lord Freud said at a conference fringe meeting, but whether Mr Miliband is suitable to be prime minister. No amount of diversionary spin is going to stop it being asked over and over again.

The Telegraph

Are you as certain as the Telegraph?

-----------

It seems to some, that Cameron is preparing another lie over negotiations with the EU.

He conned the Scots, or he thinks he has and now trying to do the same to the more gullible voters at Rochester.

He certainly has brass, but looks cheaper by the day!

========

Haze,

Are you another bird of the same feather?

DB4,

Why have the tory tricksters and PR teams been so active to-day on Fraud's case.

More trembling in central office.

Send for the haze he will be able to tell them what to say!

Of course he is Fred.

And secondly doodlebug was the first to say Fraud should resign.

Here we are........

doodlebug4 - 15 Oct 2014 20:08 - 47722 of 47848

Fred, for once I agree with you! Of course Lord Freud should be sacked immediately, his comments were utterly appalling. Putting aside party politics , if Cameron doesn't sack him within the next 24 hours then he is an idiot...........ends

But this time he hides behind a Telegraph article undated and without the articles author.

The Cameroon thing about €urope is just tory central office trying to stop the haemorrhage of votes to ukip.

He's still trying to blow smoke up your ass along the lines that he can actually change anything....he cant!

No Cameron did not fool the Scots one iota, they will get everything they have asked for. What he did was a masterstroke, the destruction of the Labour Party in Scotland. Gordon Brown was the fall guy who fell into it. His defence of the Union was epic, if only he had shown the same as leader of the Labour Party. Still to use Fred's favourite word MIND, he is bound to make a fortune on the after dinner speech circuit made famous by his former leader BLAIR. Labour are history in Scotland! EVERY CLOUD !!!!

Oct 16, 2014 22:46 By Torcuil Crichton
THE Lib-Dem MP insists the pro-Union parties will honour their vow to the people of Scotland and will deliver on their promises within the agreed timetable.

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Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael tells MPs new powers are on way to Scotland
SCOTTISH secretary Alistair Carmichael today insisted that more powers are on the way to Holyrood.

He told MPs the vow made by the pro-Union parties to deliver more devolution for Scotland was already being acted on.

Carmichael said: “The vow, the timetable are designed to strengthen Scotland in a secure United Kingdom.

“That is what people voted for and that is what they will get – more powers in a Scottish parliament within a modern UK delivered to the timetable agreed.”

During a heated Commons debate on devolution, the fourth in four days, Carmicheal called on the SNP to act in “good faith” in the cross-party Smith Commission on devolution.

SNP MP Pete Wishart raised the point that up to 70 Conservative MPs have signed a parliamentary motion calling for a review of the Barnett funding formula.

Under the formula, Scotland gets more public spending per person than England because of the higher cost of delivering services in remote rural communities.

“Barnett is safe because it is in the vow,” said Carmichael, responding to Wishart.

And he rounded on claims by the SNP and some Yes supporters that Westminster is trying to backtrack on the vow, which was published on the front page of the Daily Record .

Carmichael said of Wishart: “He seeks time and time again to suggest that somehow the vow made by the party leaders was not made in good faith.

“He seeks at every turn to undermine public confidence in the vow.

Gordon Brown warns the Commons against the Tojan Horse of English votes for English MPsGordon Brown warns the Commons against the Tojan Horse of English votes for English MPs
“If he wishes not to accept the verdict of the people of Scotland that is fine, but if he and his party are to take part in the Smith Commission in good faith he should accept that all of us are taking part in good faith.”

In the half hour debate, Gordon Brown said David Cameron’s demand to limit the votes of Scottish MPs in Westminster is a Tory “Trojan horse” that would actually deliver independence.

The former Prime Minister said demands for English votes for English laws should not hold back more powers for Holyrood

The Kirkcaldy MP yesterday presented a petition signed by 120,000 Scots, including Record readers , demanding the terms of the vow be met without conditions.

The petition, organised online by the campaign group 38 Degrees, urges Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg: “Please stick to those promises on the timetable you agreed. Scotland won’t accept less.”

Brown told MPs: “The people who signed it – Yes and No voters alike – are determined the vow made by all the three main party leaders on Tuesday, September 16, before the referendum is kept.”

Brown wants to spike Cameron’s English votes plan which would see 100 per cent of income tax devolved to Scotland and Scots MPs excluded from setting English financial issues in Westminster. Brown said that Cameron’s idea to limit the votes of Scottish MPs was “a constitutional crisis in the making”.

He told MPs: “This proposal to devolve 100 per cent of income tax and then exclude Scottish MPs from voting on income tax at Westminster is anti-Scottish but it is also anti-British

“By abandoning income tax as a shared tax, it threatens to end the pooling and sharing of risks and resources that underpins the unity of the UK.”

Brown told MPs there were 16 areas of agreement as the Smith Commission on devolution met for the first time. But there are still considerable differences on the level of taxes to be devolved.

Brown said 100 per cent devolution of income tax, as the Tories suggest, should be rejected.

Nice one Gordon, nice one son, nice one Gordon, let's have another one! Labour are finished in Scotland. Every Cloud! :0)

Lord Freud was talking to someone with a disabled relative on one way the government could help by topping up a lower wage so they could find work more easily, he was only trying to help. The reaction to his comment was unfair and way over the top.