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.

By Michael Deacon, Parliamentary Sketchwriter
4:31PM GMT 29 Oct 2014
At Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron and Ed Miliband blame each other over immigration, while Harriet Harman tries to shame Mr Cameron with a feminist T-shirt

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband and David Cameron hotly debated immigration. Since polling suggests the subject is a vote-loser for both of them, it was a bit like watching two men wrestling each other at the top of a cliff, before rolling angrily over the edge to their simultaneous doom.

It turned out that Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband agreed on only one thing about immigration: namely, that the other should apologise for it.

“He might want to apologise for the mess that Labour left!” shouted Mr Cameron.

“There’s only one person who should be apologising on immigration, and that’s him!” shouted Mr Miliband.

“I ask him again, get up and apologise for your record!” shouted Mr Cameron.

“Why doesn’t he just admit it, on immigration he has failed!” shouted Mr Miliband.

“What have we heard today? Not a single word of apology!” shouted Mr Cameron.

Well, at least he got that right.

Mr Miliband reminded MPs that, before the last election, Mr Cameron had promised to bring net migration down to “tens of thousands”. Net migration today, the Labour leader pointed out, stands at 243,000. I don’t know whether Mr Cameron considered shouting, “But that is tens of thousands! Twenty-four tens of thousands!” If he did, he thought better of it.

As well as accusing the Government of incompetence, Mr Miliband accused it of callousness, for deciding that it would not support search-and-rescue operations to save refugees in the Mediterranean. In other words, the Government is going to let migrants drown. Rumour has it that if the policy proves a success, the Home Office plans to roll it out across the country, with a special ducking stool installed in every town.

Most weeks, Mr Cameron can rely on his MPs to back up his replies to Mr Miliband with triumphant jeers. This time, though, the majority sat quiet, looking uneasy. Immigration is becoming a difficult subject for Tory MPs: on the one hand, they want to talk about it, but on the other, they fear the argument is already lost to Ukip, at least as far as most voters are concerned, and so on the whole it might be wiser to avoid the subject altogether. Unfortunately, that’s difficult too.

I doubt many Labour MPs drew much encouragement from these posturingly cross exchanges either. If there was a winner at all, it was a man who wasn’t there: one Nigel Farage.

The other talking point was Harriet Harman’s outfit. On Monday, the fashion magazine Elle complained that the Prime Minister had refused to be pictured wearing a T-shirt with a feminist slogan. So naturally Ms Harman wore that very T-shirt to PMQs, while peering at Mr Cameron haughtily. The slogan read: “This is What a Feminist Looks Like.”

I wonder if it’s occurred to some enterprising person to market a T-shirt with the slogan “This is What Someone Morally Superior to You Looks Like”. I suspect it would do very well.

The Telegraph

Nigel Farage has already won his fight with Labour and Conservatives

A crescendo of shrill proclamations rises in Westminster as David Cameron and Ed Miliband race to be more Ukip than Ukip


John Crace


The Guardian, Wednesday 29 October 2014 18.10 GMT



A demonstrator pulls the strings of a David Cameron puppet in Birmingham, 29 September 2014. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images


The Ukip Santa has come two months early. A couple of weeks ago Nigel Farage got his first member of parliament: at prime minister’s questions he appeared to have 650. Well, 649 to be accurate. Douglas Carswell was nowhere to be seen; he must have been off at his shrink to find out how he had suddenly become the most moderate voice in the Commons.

There’s only one thing on the mind of both parties at the moment: next year’s general election. And the race is on to see who can become more Ukip than Ukip. Who do we hate? Immigrants. When do we hate them? Now.

It is normally at least 15 minutes into PMQs before David Cameron’s voice becomes shrill and tetchy, but on Wednesday he was shrieking from the off. Perhaps he had just had a bad morning; perhaps he had choked at the sight of Harriet “No publicity stunts” Harman sitting directly opposite him wearing a “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt. To be fair to the prime minister, he wouldn’t be the only one to wonder how soon it will be before the deputy leader of the opposition transmogrifies into Grayson Perry. Or perhaps he had just decided that hysteria was the only reasonable way to deal with immigrants.



more: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/29/cameron-miliband-race-ukip-immigration

A FORMER Labour MEP has warned that shadow international development minister Jim Murphy would ‘help to break up the Union’ if elected leader of the Scottish Labour Party.


Hugh Kerr, who spent more than three decades as an activist, councillor and MEP in Scotland and England writes in today’s Scotsman that he feels ‘some sympathy for the pain that socialists who remain in the Labour Party in Scotland must feel’.

Mr Kerr fell out with the New Labour government shortly after the general election in May 1997, accusing the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, of ‘Stalinist tendencies’ for planning to abolish euro-constituencies and for introducing a party list regional system for future European elections.

He was expelled from the Labour Party in the late 1998 for his opposition to Mr Blair.

• Keep up to date with all aspects of Scottish life with The Scotsman iPhone app, completely free to download and use

In his letter, Mr Kerr claims that Labour ‘signed its own death warrant’ when it decided to campaign with the Conservatives and oppose independence.

The former MEP adds: “If Labour had campaigned for independence, we would have won the vote and Labour could have won the next Scottish Parliament election.

“The only person who might stand a chance of pulling Labour together and putting up a fight would be Gordon Brown, but the ‘great clunking fist’ sees himself as a colossus on the world stage and is very unlikely to stand, not least because he isn’t certain he would win.

“So that leaves Jim Murphy as the likely winner of the leadership election but the certain loser of the general election in Scotland next year and of the Scottish Parliament in 2016.”

Mr Kerr continues by saying that Mr Murphy ‘may help in the historic task of gaining independence for Scotland.’

He adds: “A Murphy leadership will ensure at least 20 MPs for the SNP next May and I can’t see anyone taking Ed Miliband seriously as an alternative prime minister.

“So five more years of a Tory government sustained by a rump of Liberals and a sack of Ukip MPs, a vote to leave the EU in 2017 and lots more cuts will convince the Scottish people that independence is the only answer.”

Mr Kerr added that he believed Mr Murphy ‘would help break up the Union’ if elected.

Mr Kerr served as Tommy Sheridan’s spin doctor in the early 2000s, stood as an SSP candidate in May 2003, and again in June 2004 for the European Parliamentary Elections.

He joined the SNP in November 2011.

• Read the letter in full here>>>

Nigel Farage has already won his fight with Labour and Conservatives

That doesn't say much for his followers. or what he and followers represent!

Goebbels are you still breathing?

What are you talking about Fred?

Can you expand and clarify?

Fred, two sentences will do in reply- we don't need a couple of A4 pages!

Either or it will be codswallop.

I have a feeling you wouldn't understand either.

Examine the history and economics of the 20s and 30s, what Hitler built his "power" on and relate it to the present political period.

Could be wrong, but doubt that there is no similarity!

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/5798/full

Labour has Lost Me

MAUREEN LIPMAN

For the first time in five decades, I shall not be voting Labour. I have always been a socialist and I believe in the principles of socialism. I have stood on the hustings beside Neil Kinnock and canvassed for my Aunt Rita in her constituency in Hull. I was, somewhat blurrily, a Blair luvvie and I used my dislike of Mrs Thatcher to fuel some deadly impersonations of her. My late husband, Jack Rosenthal, canvassed for Sydney Silverman in the 1945 General Election. "In them days," said the father in his seminal television play Bar Mitzvah Boy, "they handed you your Labour Party membership just after your circumcision. They gave with one hand and took away with the other.''

I still believe that, until the Iraq debacle, Tony Blair did great work to restore the party's fortunes. I still thumb through Tony Benn's diaries with a fond smile and I am Alan Johnson's number one fan as a politician, a writer and a humane human being. I have all the time in the world for Margaret Beckett and still admire Frank Field. I rather liked David Miliband and have a sneaking suspicion he may return strengthened by his time out in the real world. But this lot? The Chuka Harman Burnham Hunt Balls brigade? I can't, in all seriousness, go into a booth and put my mark on any one of them.

Ed Miliband's leadership coup was as biblical as anything in the book of Genesis, although the unions probably had less sway in those days. He comes from a family of secular Jews but his need for union approval is much greater than his need for Jewish support. We make up less than one per cent of the population, so why should he care if we vote for him or not? At a recent gathering he asked me if I was a practising Jew. I told him I was constantly practising and seldom achieving, but I did my best. "Do you do Shabbat dinners?" he asked. "Yes, when I can," I told him. "Would you like to come?" He expressed enthusiasm to learn more about his religion of his birth. We parted with a promise to ring each other's people. Two days later he was all over the papers, knocking back a bacon sandwich.

Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a secular Jew chomping on a thinly sliced, pan-fried pig rump — my late husband, before we were married, had been known to queue up for such a thing from the catering van on an early morning film shoot. That was fine with me. His choice. I just couldn't kiss him. Wouldn't or couldn't or both. Fair choice, I thought: treif or wife?

There is a story about a rabbi who longed to try a pig's head — just couldn't get the thought out of his own head. One day he had cause to travel many miles away and he decided to sneak under nightfall into a small, out of the way restaurant, famous for its pig's heads. The head was delivered steaming to his table, replete with an apple in its mouth. As the rabbi was about to take a large bite out of the pig, the doors opened and in walked one of his congregation. He turned to the incomer and yelled: "Can you believe this farshtinkener place? You ask for an apple and this is how they serve it!"

"More than 10,000 asylum-seekers 'left in limbo' ".....
epic nuts ....
and I always thought Poland(I mean my %!?!....) is a field of typical systemic poo poo...
well, poo poo here too...

48769 - yes indeed; one of a number remarkable and remarkably brave people who saved jews during the war

that said, there is no real parallel between that and the flood of economic refugees who want to enter uk by any means .... whether or not uk really is the land of gold and super-soft benefits is neither here nor there; that is what is perceived
i also fail to understood why the french do not send these people back whence they came; patently they do not want them in france any more than we do in uk

yes cynic , back to yesterday pm question time ,our can the public vote for any of those two parties con or lab they are a joke school children shouting at each other
but no answers and policy to stop the rot .
the uk voters have had enough of services been destroyed .

action is needed now if we can not say who can come to the uk then we do not need a vote just pull the uk out now .
if UKIP SAY A VOTE FOR THEM AND THEY GET ELECTED WE WILL NOT NEED A FURTHER VOTE WE WILL LEAVE THE EU IN 12 MONTHS AND PAY NO MORE CASH TO THECORRUPT EU

AND IF THE VOTERS ARE TOLD THAT UKIP WILL BEELECTED THAT IS FOR SURE A CERT

whatever you say, or whatever it is you are trying to say!
in 6/7 months time the ballot box will have spoken and we'll just have to get on with whatever that has dished us up with

just for you cynic the uk public will vote to leave the stinking rotten eu
and ukip are the only party that will give the voters the choice

I wouldn't be too sure about that Tanker.


But for sure, ukip are going to cause a lot of squeaky bum problems for sitting mp's in former so called "safe seats"


When a party can cause such large swings in the voting pattern, no one is safe.

it must be a great comfort to be so sure in such weighty matters

i wonder how deflated he'll be (if) when his red-hot favourite falls at at the first?
perhaps he's a manic depressive, in which case, he'll no doubt have the medication to deal with the inevitable mood swings this sort of failure will bring about

The emotional part of immigration is these foreign buggers are coming to this country to steal our goodies and food, and some big boys and girls don't like sharing.

The real problem is that the immigrants usually are not attempting to swamp another's country but fleeing from the problems in their own "countries" and until those problems are addressed then the "floods" will continue.

Addressing the problems by building bigger and bigger walls down stream has only a temporary effect.

Storming into the EU or elsewhere telling them what they should do to "save" the Uk will have benefit. It needs a fully organised response by UN ad EU rather than small individual countries demanding their supposed "rights", especially some of the complainant have plunder and are attempting to plunder those countries.

cynic . nothing that happens will affect me loads of cash good pensions and getting near to the grave . I just feel sorry for the young who have not brought on the problems they are going to have . innocent of the crime of destroying what their grand fathers fought for all going down the pan by crooks running the country from all the 3 main parties they have all just looked after them selves and put two fingers up to the public and the public are now waking from the nightmare

fred your post . if the brits had ran away and not fought to save their country they would be no were to run the scum should stay at home and fight to get it better not
go begging to other countries who fight . they are just cowards and scum