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 feast was Saturnalia based on the Roman god Saturn's. The 25 Dec is the winter solstice in the Julian calendar. It was a time of gift giving. The Christians set their own feast days to coincide with the Roman ones to suppress them. There is no real association with any religious event in history such as the birth of JC.

even the mail is saying the immigration report is a load of bollocks .
have they found the millions of illegals the man who did the report read about the stupid prat

Re: The Luxembourg VAT scam.

For a change, I have to say how good it is to read something like this concerning the EU and its law changing.......

LUXEMBOURG will be the big loser – to the tune of between €600m to €1.1billion – when new EU VAT rules on digital services sales come into effect in 2015.

Luxembourg VAT revenue
The 2014 budget for Luxembourg was a tough one as the country comes to grips with losing between €600m and €1.1billion in VAT revenues due to the new EU rules.

The winners and losers of the VAT reform note that Luxembourg’s competitive advantage will be swept away by the new rules.

The new rules are enshrined in the 2015 VAT Directive which dictates that VAT collection on digital services (e.g. software, music and image downloading as well as ebooks) will be based on where the end consumer is located. The existing rules use the location of the supplier as the basis for applying VAT.

This is the reason that companies such as Apple, Amazon and Microsoft located their European HQs in Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s VAT rate is very low, its standard rate is 15% but it offered a super reduced rate of just 3% on ebooks, as well as the country’s hotel and catering industries. However, as of from January 1, 2015, that competitive advantage will be erased with the introduction of the new EU VAT rules.

Necessary steps by Luxembourg
Luxembourg has already taken the necessary steps to address their €545m budget deficit by increasing its key VAT rates by two percent, their standard rate from 2015 onwards will be 17%. However, the government of the Grand Duchy has not raised their super reduced rate of 3% stating that it wants to protect jobs in its hotel and catering industries.

Luxembourg has estimated that it will lose 70 percent of its VAT revenue from the rule changes, ranging between €660m and €1.1billion.

However, Luxembourg officials believe the country will remain attractive as an EU HQ for global companies.

“Companies like Amazon are based in Luxembourg because we are business friendly and we offer them a great gateway into the [EU] and excellent talent . . . the VAT tax regime on ebooks is not going to be a game-changer,” said one official.
On the flip side of the rule change is the benefit that countries with a large digital services consumer base will receive. The UK Chancellor for the Exchequer George Osborne outlined in his 2014 Budget speech that the UK can expect to receive £1.2billion in extra VAT receipts between 2015 and 2018, that’s £300m per year.

The rules – according to the European Commission – are a levelling of the playing field when it comes to EU VAT. Luxembourg’s competitive advantage will be wiped out and the larger EU economies will receive the VAT revenue created by their own consumers. For example, the UK will receive the VAT collected from UK sales on e-books; Germany will receive the VAT collected from music downloads in Germany, and so on. A fairer taxation system and one that returns VAT to being a consumption tax.

Run for the hills.. the europeans are coming -):

One of the problems with Luxembourg's vat rules is that companies based there such as Amazon won't give you a vat receipt. That means that businesses that use Amazon cannot claim back the vat.

panic stations.....



Balls denies claims Labour split over Miliband's leadership: Politics Live blog



http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2014/nov/06/nick-clegg-hosts-his-call-clegg-phone-in-politics-live-blog

GF,

One of the questions I would like to ask is, "how much profits are made by the companies which are outsource to by the NHS?".

What are their overall profits which are paid for by the TAX PAYER, (you know that high earning rich Working Class like Cameron and crew) for those services and cost of management and %profit?

Just a thought, especially as if the con party were to get into power again there will be further cut backs and outsourcing as efficiency measures so we can pay our way.

Sorry pay their way!

To me it seems that the Gay Rights lobby are changing from being the persecuted to the persecutors.

Strange world!

Max.

Neither Balls. nor Miliband are mad.

At the closeness of the next General Election they will sink or swim together.

Even, if the had differences of opinion on some policies, I doubt they are great and certainly I think and hope that they and the shadow cabinet would be continually reconsidering policies and giving each other and their party room for discussion.

The economic situation is a hell of a long way from being stable and it is that which really counts when you are drawing up future policies. (or should be.) The rest all though being played up in the media are side issues.

This is another media attempt to see splits where they are not or conjure them up.

I always thought, "at least for last 60 years, when I first started reading it" that it had a liberal bias and leaning, and a little surprised how much they have lent towards labour over the last 10 years.

------

Wait for the last 2-3 months of the run up to the election.

Ed's personal standing is partially due to media and tory party smearing.

He has a thick skin and think and hope he will ride his horse more carefully than Kinnock did.

But wait for the wrath when Cameron loses Rochester and the G.E.

======

What I am waiting for, is when Cameron goes to Europe they start laughing at him
openly!

Labour will get there 35% for sure Fred after ROCHESTER.

Debatable wether Camoron will be leading the tories into the GE especialy with more defections.

Is that defections or infections?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11212964/Ed-Miliband-is-abandoned-left-to-face-his-destiny-alone.html

Ed Miliband is abandoned, left to face his destiny alone

Even the New Statesman is calling time on the Ed Miliband era. Labour and the Left are turning on their leader

And then there were none. This morning Jason Cowley – editor of the house journal of the progressive Left, the New Statesman – has effectively called time on Ed Miliband’s leadership. Miliband is “trapped”, he writes. “His MPs sense it and the polls reflect it. Ukip is attracting support in the party’s old working-class northern English heartlands and winning converts in key Home Counties swing seats that Labour would once have hoped to win. In Scotland the SNP has become the natural party of government.”

According to Cowley, “Labour wins well when its leader seems most in tune with the times and can speak for and to the people about who they are and what they want to be in the near future: Attlee in 1945, Wilson in 1966, Blair in 1997.” By contrast, Miliband “does not have a compelling personal story to tell the electorate”. He “doesn’t really understand the lower middle class or material aspiration. He doesn’t understand Essex Man or Woman”. Instead, Labour is currently lead by “an old-style Hampstead socialist”, with “a deterministic, quasi-Marxist analysis of our present ills”, who has created “a gulf between the radicalism of his rhetoric and the low-toned incrementalism of his policies”.

This is not the Daily Mail we’re talking about, but the New Statesman. On the front cover is an artist’s impression of Miliband wearing a fez. Six months from the election, the Left is now openly mocking its own leader.

Yesterday evening, as the embargoed copies of Cowley’s article began to circulate, it was announced that Miliband had conducted a mini-reshuffle. Shadow transport secretary Mary Creagh had replaced Jim Murphy at DfID, and had in return been replaced by Michael Dugher, who had previously held the post of shadow minister for kicking lumps out of the Coalition.

But there were two other significant appointments. Lucy Powell, Ed Miliband’s former chief of staff, has been formally brought into the shadow cabinet, as has key Miliband supporter and union go-between Jon Trickett. Powell is a rising star, Trickett an old Westminster greybeard. Yet both were already fully paid-up members of the Miliband inner circle. And their elevation represents a final, symbolic circling of the wagons.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/ed-miliband-s-problem-not-policy-tone-and-increasingly-he-seems-trapped

..................In a recent interview, Alex Salmond was scathing about Miliband, describing him as “more unelectable” than Michael Foot. He had none of “Foot’s wonderful qualities or intelligence. He’s more unelectable than Neil Kinnock was; and Kinnock had considerable powers of oratory, and didn’t lack political courage.” One would expect Salmond to be dismissive of a Labour leader but it is worrying for the party that even allies now speak similarly of him and his failings..............

Hazyone,

Your dreams and hopes are more confuse than you are!

I do hope you are betting on Cameron.

He reminds me of my bottom draw winners!

Haystack,

Once the Currant Bun nail their colours to the mast, and tell all of the thick northerners to vote Conservative throughout the course of w/c Monday 4th May, that'll be game over.

Except Liverpool hils, they wouldn't wipe their arxe on it. Not to put to fine a point on it :0)

I wouldn't expect anything else from the Mickey Mousers, Chris.

he he we shall see even the poisonous dwarf Ester is facing a humiliating defeat. And protests outside her house before the GE.

By Steven Swinford, Senior Political Correspondent
2:48PM GMT 06 Nov 2014
Labour MPs say Ed Miliband is costing them votes and must stand down while Gordon Brown's former spin doctor says 'mood is pretty black'

Ed Miliband is facing open calls from his own MPs to stand down amid growing concerns that he will cost his party the General Election.

Two MPs are understood to have told David Watts, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, that they believe it is time for Mr Miliband to go.

One MP said: "We are down to 29 per cent in the polls and that could go down further. He is less popular than Nick Clegg and he will cost us votes at the General Election.

"We are hearing it on the doorstep. People are saying 'you are doing an alright job but we don't like your leader'. He is costing me votes."

Mr Watts has reportedly told the MPs that they are not the first to raise concerns about Mr Miliband's leadership with him, but said that there is no alternative candidate for the leadership. Mr Watts declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph.

It came as Damian McBride, Gordon Brown's former spin doctor, said that Labour is "whistling in the wind" if it thinks that it can win round voters to "the real Ed".

He told BBC One's Daily Politics: "He can't do much about the fact he comes from Hampstead but he can do something about the fact that he's constantly acting as though life revolves around what goes on in Hampstead and that there's no sense of getting out there and understanding what ordinary people are feeling, including about himself, and trying to address that personal problem he's got."


In an attempt to bolster his position Ed Miliband has appointed Lucy Powell as the vice-chariman of the general election campaign. She previously ran his successful leadership campaign.

She suggested that Mr Miliband would play a more prominent role on the doorstep. She said: "I'm going to unblock the system to make sure that our operation is serving all of those fantastic candidates and our fantastic front bench and Ed as our leader.

"We always need to review these things and make sure that they are working at their very best and I'm absolutely sure that, with some new energy and vigour into the system, we can make sure that all of our candidates, our front bench, our shadow cabinet, are getting the best service that they want."

However Mr McBride said: "They have almost got no choice because they have either got to say he's not going to work and his ratings are going to stay where they are or they have got to say if more people got to know the real Ed, then somehow we'd all be turned around. But I think they may be whistling in the wind."

Asked if he gave credence to claims about a letter being circulated among backbenchers, he replied: "I don't know and it's difficult to know because the paranoia that comes out of the Miliband camp is so rank that they will invent plots even when there are none.

"But I think the mood is pretty black in Labour, and certainly since the conference. Since party conference the mood has got blacker and these are wild times."

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, said: "All I know is that everybody in the Labour Party, from Ed Miliband down, is focused on tackling the cost-of-living crisis, building an economy which works for working people, reforming Europe but not walking away, having tough and fair controls on immigration, saving our National Health Service - that's what Labour's for.

"It's the Conservative Party which are riven and divided and defecting left, right and centre. We will focus on Tory division, Labour will stay united."

The Telegraph

''Labour will stay united." do they mean Unite.
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