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.

What a nice man!



Looks like he gave her 2p

Photo op gone wrong!

Does he look shifty or what?

Chris if your wife's problem is her knee joints perhaps due to the wear on the cartilage try Liquid form of Glucosamine, Chondroitin and MSM. Holland and Barratt sell it and it's a reasonable price, I appreciate it may not suit everyone but my wife used to suffer with her knee joints and has taken this for years and has no pain whatsoever. She did try to go without it on a couple of occasions for a 3 or 4 week period but the pain returned. It will take about 3 weeks or so to get working, so if your wife does decide to try it, persevere. Good luck
2517

Haze,

I think you would probably be taking money out of the cup.

Max, I can visualise you acting as his bodyguard.

Roll on the G/e.


It will interesting to see how low both of you can stoop.

NOW GET BACK TO ROMANIA

Thanks George, she's been there done that and got the T-shirt, sadly didn't work for her. Cheers for the thought though much appreciated.

Funny how he can't even bring himself to look at her. He looks more concerned to make sure he is being photographed.

Talk about shifty

Cynic,

Here is a challenge for you.

If you haven't listen to tonight'd Any Questions/

It was (for me) one of the most interesting program for quiet a while.

The two ladies Ratna Lachman, Allison Pearson, were extremely well spoken, thoughtful and their contributions challenging, although from slightly differerent stances.

David Blunkett seems to have matured better than expected. a bit like old port.

The other is panel member Nadhim Zahawi MP, was I think out of touch and should return to his heated stable.


Max, give it a miss, you are unlikely to understand the arguments.

I must admit Fred, I do struggle with your brand of logic.


But keep it coming, you never know.

Ukip extends lead over Tories in Rochester, new poll finds

A new poll finds that Nigel Farage's party has a 15-point lead over the Conservatives ahead of the Rochester by-election on November 20





By Steven Swinford, Senior Political Correspondent

6:30PM GMT 31 Oct 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage/11202499/Ukip-has-extended-its-lead-over-the-Tories-in-Rochester-new-poll-finds.html


Ukip has extended its lead over the Conservatives in Rochester ahead of a critical by-election, a new poll has found.


The Survation/ Unite poll found that Ukip has increased its lead by eight points to 48 per cent while the Conservatives hold just 33 per cent of the vote.


Conservative backbenchers are increasingly pessimistic of retaining the seat after Mark Reckless, the former Tory MP, triggered the by-election by defecting to Ukip.


Nigel Farage's party will gain its second MP if Mr Reckless wins the seat after Douglas Carswell won in Clacton.


UKIP Leader Nigel Farage MEP said: "This poll is further evidence that the voters of Rochester and Strood simply do not buy David Cameron's lines, nor trust his record on their most immediate concerns: local health, immigration, and job creation.


"While the Conservative Party were spending the first part of the by-election campaign on a PR-exercise for their candidate, and spending most of their election allowances on the derisory 'primary' – UKIP's candidate and our activists were out meeting voters, discussing their priorities, and proving that only we can bring about the change that Rochester, and indeed Britain, needs.

"I'd hate to be David Cameron this Halloween: there'll be no treats, and his tricks aren't working".

fred - AQ must assuredly have been past my bedtime though when i do listen to it, it's on my way back from golf on a sunday .... generally speaking, it is a very good programme

Conservative backbenchers are increasingly pessimistic
the tories have never had a hope in hell of retaining this seat ..... my fine hat will most certainly not need to be eaten!

Feel sorry for Richard Branson and the space project and the families of the Pilots....highly risky business going into space.....this will delay the first commercial flight by several years I reckon....

The Cons dine out on the above and are still plundering the country under the philosophy of austerity for all, other than for themselves.

By Ben Riley-Smith, Political Correspondent
12:01AM GMT 31 Oct 2014
Money invested by the UK Government abroad found to be actively encouraging corrupt practices by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact

British taxpayers' money is funding corruption in foreign countries, an official investigation has found for the first time.

Money invested by the UK Government abroad was found to be actively encouraging corrupt practices by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact.

One development project in Nepal encouraged people to forge documents to gain grants while police stations in Nigeria linked to British aid were increasingly demanding bribes, the report discovered.

The damning findings will fuel criticism from Conservative MPs of David Cameron's decision to commit 0.7 per cent of the UK's gross national income to foreign aid spending – more than £12 billion pounds a year.

It is understood to be the first time an independent body has found evidence that the Department for International Development (Dfid) may have broken its "do no harm" policy – a central pledge in the Government's aid programme.

Dfid's anti-corruption effort was given an amber-red rating, meaning it is classed as performing relatively poorly and significant improvements must be made, and warned political sensitivities were constraining the department's willingness to directly tackle the problem.

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One Nepalese local development project was encouraging citizens to "to pay bribes to government officials or to forge documentation in order to receive funding" for projects, the report found.

A group of Nigerian police stations linked to British aid were found to be "as bad as – if not worse than – other police stations" and citizens perceived requests for bribes were increasing.

A DfiD source refuted criticisms of the Nepalese project, saying the department did not directly fund the body in question and added it had a positive impact on the community. The source made similar points about the police stations in Nigeria.

"We witnessed negative impacts of programming, where government systems that lead the poor to have to pay bribes and become the victims of corruption were perpetuated and not tackled by programmes," the report found.

"Did and other donors knew – or should have known, given the media coverage – of these negative consequences for the poor."

Graham Ward, ICAI chief commissioner, said: "We saw very little evidence that the work DfId is doing to combat corruption is successfully addressing the impact of corruption as experienced by the poor.

"Indeed, there is little indication that DfId has sought to address the forms of corruption that most directly affect the poor: so called 'petty' corruption. This is a gap in DfId's programming that needs to be filled."

DfId spokeswoman said: "ICAI's report rightly highlights some of DfId's work which reflects our zero tolerance approach to fraud and corruption. We have anti-corruption and counter fraud plans for each country that we give bilateral aid to.

"While these plans are tailored to the individual needs of each country, they are based on a common principle that tackles the root causes of corruption by building strong institutions and requiring good governance.

Figures earlier this year disclosed that Britain hiked its aid spending by more than any other country in Europe last year.

Foreign aid soared by 28 per cent last year, meaning the UK hit its target of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on overseas development.

It left Britain with the second most generous aid budget in the world, outstripped only by the United States.

The report followed claims from campaigners that the British Government had given more than £1billion in aid to Ethiopia while its security forces tortured, killed and raped.

Thousands of brutal abuses against citizens suspected of political opposition were revealed in documents by Amnesty International, according to the Daily Mail.

The human rights group warned that citizens have faced torture and unlawful state killings in a nation-wide crackdown by authorities.

The Telegraph

Haze

Was the government, led by Cameron and Home Office Secretary Theresa May, trying to hide something away, or suppress anything before the Minister 2015 General Election.

The government seems to have to be urged to get an inquiry into historical child sex abuse moving quickly after Fiona Woolf stood down as its chairwoman.
As you will well remember another establishment figure Baroness Butler-Sloss was pressurised into stepping down.

It strikes me, at the very least , further incompetence and ineptitude by the cabinet clique.,

I just wonder what the messages are from party central office.

Personally, I think the message from the country is for the government to stand down.

Here's one for you to avoid Fred!




Labour's PCC Victory In the Rape-Gang Regions of the North Is Proof that Turkeys Do Vote for Christmas





by James Delingpole

1 Nov 2014, 2:01 AM PDT

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/11/01/Labour-s-PCC-victory-in-the-rape-gang-regions-of-the-North-is-proof-that-turkeys-do-vote-for-Christmas



A few weeks ago I spent most of an afternoon glued to my computer screen watching Keith Vaz MP leading the Home Affairs Select Committee investigation into the Rotherham child-rape-gang scandal.

I had only meant to watch for a few minutes but I just couldn't pull myself away. Nor could my wife, who peeked over my shoulder and found herself inexorably sucked in too, a bit like on that Radiohead Just video where everybody is compelled to do very weird things against their better judgement because of something they have just heard a strange man say.

Why were we so transfixed? Imagine for a moment watching a court case in which the defendants were: Freddy Krueger; the radioactive maggots from Doctor Who and The Green Death; and Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well that was how it felt watching some of the council workers and senior policemen being grilled over Rotherham. They were so devoid of integrity, honesty or even basic humanity, so devious, so slippery and mendacious that you couldn't help watching if only to marvel that the human species is actually capable of plumbing such lows of puke-inducing rankness.

It was hard to decide which of the characters was the most noisome, but among those that particularly caught my eye were:

Joyce Thacker, the former £130,000 per year head of Rotherham Children's Services (who has since, very grudgingly, resigned with a £40,000 pay off - plus, of course, her full lavish pension rights)

Shaun Wright, another former head of Rotherham Children's Services who also recently resigned from his new sinecure as South Yorkshire's Police and Crime Commissioner.

Mereddyd Hughes, head of South Yorkshire Police between 2004 and 2011.

It wasn't what these people had done that was the problem. It was what they had so signally failed to do: their ruddy jobs.

Did I mention that the wretched Thacker woman was on £130,000 a year? I did but I'll mention it again. Joyce "Rosa Klebb's less charming elder sister" Thacker was paid £130,000 a year, out of the public purse, to do a job whose requirements presumably included making sure children in the Rotherham area didn't get plied with alcohol, drugged with heroin, and serially raped and sex trafficked on an epic scale by organised gangs of predominantly Muslim older men.

Not letting children get gang-raped would also, I imagine, have been part of Shaun Wright's remit when he was the Rotherham councillor in charge of Children's Services.

And not letting children get gang-raped would, I'm educatedly guessing, also have been among Meredydd Hughes's responsibilities as head of South Yorkshire Police. (Yes. We know from your track record, Meredydd that you placed a much higher priority on nicking speeding motorists. But child rape is a crime too, you know. Indeed, some of us would consider it almost worse than speeding).

But those 1400 children - and that's just the conservative estimate; and in one small town - were raped all the same. And the question I asked myself when the scandal was exposed by the Jay inquiry - and the question that certainly hasn't been answered by any of the investigations since, especially not by the recent semi-whitewash report by Labour MP Ann Coffey, is how come the various authorities which should have stopped it happening instead turned a blind eye to it for well over a decade?

We're not talking about the odd rotten apple here. We're talking about an entrenched system of what you might call "institutional child rape apologism" or even "institutional child rape endorsement," extending all the way from the so-called "Muslim community" through to the local councils, the childcare charities such as Barnardos and even the police. This was one of the things that made that Keith Vaz hearing so compelling: first the bravura stonewalling from the guilty parties ("I cannot recollect" was the phrase you kept hearing); second the evident lack of guilt; third, the almost indignant reluctance to admit that they'd done anything wrong. I wonder if this was how it felt during the Nuremberg trials: watching people who inhabit an entirely different moral universe.

Well in the weeks since I've been reflecting on this strange phenomenon and I've come up with various theories as to how such things can have come to pass in a modern, civilised society which prides itself on the attention and effort it devotes to the protection of children.

One of these theories can be summed up in a word: Labour.

I'm not suggesting that these crimes couldn't have occurred in a Lib-Dem governed district. Or even, just possibly, in a Conservative controlled one - though that does strike me as a lot less likely.

But it's notable in the case of Rotherham that all the players I mentioned above are Labour people through and through - Thacker, obviously, on a Labour dominated council; Wright, who successfully stood as the Labour candidate for the PCC; Hughes who announced his intention to stand as the Labour candidate for the PCC but was beaten to the nomination by Wright.

Why do I think the rape-gang problem is an especially Labour phenomenon? Not because I think the party is swarming with paedophiles (that's more of a Lib Dem thing) but rather because of its political and moral priorities. As I told Chuka Umunna at the dinner before Any Questions the other week, "the reason I loathe your party is not because you're a bunch of lefties: I actually quite like and respect, honest old school lefties. No, I hate you because you're not the party of ordinary working people any more. You're the party of quangocrats and welfare scroungers and bloated public sector workers with ring-fenced pensions and anyone you can persuade belongs to an oppressed minority"

And I think this very much applies in northern Labour strongholds like Rotherham where brand loyalty is so purblind and instinctive that even were they to exhume Jimmy Savile and stick a red rosette on him he'd win any given election by a mile. By ten miles, probably, once you'd taken into account the postal vote.

Though I'm not a Labour man, it gives me no pleasure saying this. There was a time, I'm sure, when Labour really did do its job by its natural constituency, making sure they were cared for from cradle to grave, improving their rights in the workplace, creating the kind of communities where people looked out for one another and where their kids weren't routinely raped by gangs, that kind of thing.

But those days are long over and a new hierarchy of New Labour values has been established: one in which, for example, it is far preferable to allow hundreds of white children to be sexually abused by gangs of Kashmiri-Pakistani origin than to risk being considered in any way racist or Islamophobic or culturally judgemental; one in which maintaining high public sector staffing levels is an end so noble that any amount of lying, covering up, bullying, data-destroying, smearing, buck-passing, and money-wasting is forgiveable, nay desirable, if it means getting one over on all those hateful Tory types who believe that jobs should only exist if they're useful and productive.

Sadly, Labour is still managing to parlay its past reputation into present votes. Look at what happened at the elections to replace the disgraced South Yorkshire PCC man Shaun Wright. The voters of South Yorkshire pondered the issue for all of a fraction of a second and placed their cross where they always have done: in the box next to the Labour man.

Yes, UKIP increased their vote-share dramatically. Yes, there may well be something in their complaint that 80 per cent of the votes were postal votes, which are particularly vulnerable to manipulation. But the fact remains that not even UKIP's gloriously unsubtle poster on the lines of "Vote Labour, get more rape gangs" was enough to dissuade the people of the north from voting yet again for the party whose ideology, corruption, incompetence, identity-politicking and cynical opportunism are the main reason their kids can't walk the streets safely at night and the main reason their towns are now divided by ghettos and no-go zones.

You might argue it's no more than they deserve for being such numbskulls. But I wouldn't. No one deserves what these once-proud white working class communities are experiencing under the squalid maladministration of those Labour apparatchiks whom they naively persist in imagining represent their best interests.

Are the cons trying to cover up the Thatcher years and later periods?

There is was a stench around Rotherham and it was exposed.

There were "corrupt" and "abusive" practices throughout the UK which have been covered up. I would be interested in a exposure of some of the London streets.

But what some are seeing is a ongoing cover up by an inept government to prevent necessary exposure.

Of course UKIP will jump on it. If this is urge on examination good, if it is out political grandstanding for the furtherment of Farage and cronies then I don't show your obvious delight.