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.

GF,

Post 50134

Cameron and Osborne have been in "power" for four and half years.

They have been aware of the problems in the financial services, banking and FOREX since 2008.

They have done nothing or next to nothing to address the problems.

From the outside it would seem that this government is hand in hand with the perpetrators of the "crimes" which appear committed.

Cameron and Osborne have been exposed for what they are and trying to lie their ways out of self their own inappropriate economic and political planning when it can be seen they have failed.

I am waiting to see if the records have gone missing again and the next inquiry they have to be stuffed with their mates, with a hope that "no conclusions" can be drawn and the problem kicked into the long grass once again.

Under which government was and attempt to cover up at Hillsborough, probable cover up of paedophile ring, attempted cover up of Blunt and cohorts.

Of course the elitist government of those who think they have a right to govern.

Similar to the present bunch of incompetents.

FRED wait till you see my next post, youl enjoy it.

The UK’s EU surcharge (another blow for Osborne) – Second Reading 13/11/2014

At first glance, this article from the House of Commons Library blog didn’t look as though it was going to contribute anything new.

We know why the UK had to pay a surcharge to the EU based on its economy performance from 2002 until 2013 (according to this article; 2009 according to some others). We know that it relates to the EU budget because member states pay a proportion of their gross national income into the EU’s coffers in return for membership. We know that the revision goes back to 2002 because the EU disagreed with the way some member states had worked out their figures. We know that the question of whether the rebate would always apply to this payment is hotly debated.

But then the article states:

“Concessions have been reached on the timing and staging of payments. Member States will be able to pay in stages with payment completed by 1 September 2015. The original amending budget required a single payment to be made by 1 December 2014.

“Member States paying later will not incur interest charges for doing so. Regulations would have allowed for interest payments of 2 percentage points above the base rate, increasing by a 0.25 percentage point for each month of delay.” [Boldings mine.]

Didn’t Osborne come back from Europe saying he had negotiated concessions for the UK? What’s all this “member states” business?

For example, on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday (November 9), he said: “This is a real win for British taxpayers… It’s another sign this government can get a good deal for Britain in Europe.” [Bolding, again, mine.]

There’s no mention of the other member states in his renegotiation story at all! Osborne makes it look as though he negotiated a deal for the UK that the other states agreed…

… In fact, it seems all member states agreed on a deal that would affect all member states.

For all we know, Osborne could have sat at the back of the room and twiddled his thumbs. The more we learn about this deal, the less significant his role seems to be.

bbc last year over 4 million people got food poisoning from take aways or eating in restaurants . over 4 million

Thirteen arrested over Greater Manchester trafficking ring BBC news. Shocking statistics.

Watching Miliband's terrible comeback speech. He is talking to Labour faithful. It is the usual platitudes and the activists are lapping it up. He is still a dead duck of course.

i am greatly amused by indie's headline today ..... "miliband blames 'vested interests' in media as labour trails tories in polls"

i have no idea how large this lead is said to be, and it's about as relevant as all the other polls we have been seeing on this thread ..... however, it certainly says an awful lot about EM and his (and his party's) voter appeal when he has to start crying for mummy when his bunch can't even knock the cream-puff tories for six, and indeed is close to being bowled between his legs

Haze,

At least he has a party faithful.

The Cons are only faithful to putting a knife in the back of one another.

ROCHESTER and the Grinders will be out!

The vested interest in the media comment is one of Miliband's more imbicilic ones. He seems to have missed the adverse comments in the left wing Guardian. Even worse there was the terrible bashing he got from the The New Statesman which is almost the Labour party house magazine. He must think the public are completely stupid. Don't forget the 'unfit to be Prime Minister' comments from his own MPs. He is a buffoon of the first order and that will become clearer as we approach the GE.

Haystack your infatuation with the boy Milliband must be causing your family some concern.

Stan,

The Con Artists are sh.. scared of Miliband exposing Cameron and Osborne for the grubby little stunted adolescents they and some of their camp followers are!

Every snide remark of Haze and likes, are gradually being recognise by the voters and improves Miliband chances.

Diversion from Rochester failure and the results of the bursting of Cameron's balloon by Farage and exposure of Cameron and Osborne's deceit.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9368672/its-not-just-ed-miliband-labours-on-the-wrong-side-of-history/

Ed Miliband is the least of Labour’s problems. Its troubles go far deeper than any individual. They are structural and, potentially, fatal. It is certainly easier for Labour MPs, and ultimately more comforting, to concentrate on Miliband’s deficiencies as a leader than the existential crisis facing the left. But until somebody comes up with an answer to the question of what the party is for — in an era of austerity and globalisation — it will be stuck in a death spiral.

The Labour party has always believed in spending money for the common good. Public spending was the glue that held together the traditional Labour coalition and the New Labour one. Tony Blair increased public spending from 41 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 44 per cent in 2007 — the second largest rise in the developed world in this period. By the time Labour lost power, 53 per cent of GDP was being spent by the state.

Miliband is far more left-wing than Blair, but he can’t promise increases anything like that. As he meant to say, but infamously forgot to, in his conference speech this autumn, ‘There won’t be money to spend after the next election.’

An absence of public money makes it that much harder to promise people that if they vote Labour, their lives will improve. Miliband is having to try to keep the party’s electoral coalition together without the key binding ingredient. This opens up space on Labour’s left, which the SNP and the Greens are busily trying to occupy.

These difficulties are compounded by globalisation, which severely restricts governments’ freedom of action. If governments try to raise taxes too much, businesses and people simply move elsewhere. Socialism in one country isn’t an option any more.

When François Hollande came to power in France, Miliband hailed the new president as someone who understood ‘that something can be done’. Two-and-a-half years on, unemployment in France is up to 10.5 per cent, only 12 per cent of voters approve of what Hollande is doing and the economy is flatlining. Most damningly of all for Miliband, Hollande has had to abandon socialism and appoint a reformist prime minister, Manuel Valls, who is overseeing €40 billion of tax cuts for business, paid for by €50 billion of cuts in public spending. So much for Miliband’s claim that Hollande would prove that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’.

Hollande’s difficulties can be traced back to his commitment to introduce a top tax rate of 75 per cent. In this era, when people are more mobile than ever and governments rely on a decreasing number of income taxpayers for a larger and larger share of their revenues, national leaders can’t afford to have dramatically higher tax rates than other countries. If you try to squeeze the rich now, they leave long before you can hear the pips squeak.

Politicians can’t be heroes any more. Instead, they have to operate within the tightly drawn tramlines of the global economy. This is true for those on the left and the right, but the pressure that this places on countries to adopt a low-tax, light-regulation regime is something with which the right is far more comfortable.

Labour’s electoral position is under threat from parties that reject the economic constraints of globalisation. The Greens, according to the latest ICM/Guardian poll, now command 6 per cent support — a sixfold increase on what they polled at the last election and, to put it in perspective, twice what Ukip scored then. Even more alarming for Labour is what is happening in Scotland, one of the party’s traditional strongholds. Polls suggest that Labour’s number of Scottish seats could fall from 40 to ten, or even as few as four, next May, with the SNP garnering more than 40 per cent support. Labour’s position is probably not as dire as that, but its iron grip on Scotland appears to have been broken.

Scotland is a demonstration of what can happen when a nationalist party moves to the left. The worry for Labour is that Ukip could be undergoing the same transformation. Ukip has, since its foundation, been far more of a problem for the Tories than Labour: it was a libertarian, Euro-sceptic splinter from the Tory party, after all. Its one MP used to be a Tory, it draws more votes from the Tories than any other party and it is almost certain to win a second seat from them in the Rochester by-election next week.

But Ukip is changing rapidly. It is no longer a libertarian party. Instead, it now opposes efficiency savings in the National Health Service, the US-EU free trade deal and the so-called bedroom tax. These positions are combined with the most popular policy on voters’ biggest concern, immigration. If Ukip continues on this journey, it will become a serious threat to Labour in its heartlands in the urban north. Indeed, in the recent Heywood and Middleton by-election, Ukip cut Labour’s majority from almost 6,000 to a mere 617.

Then there is Russell Brand. It might seem absurd for an article on politics to discuss a priapic comedian best known for making an obscene crank call to an elderly actor. But Brand is fast becoming one of the most popular street captains of the left-wing mob. When he recently urged his followers to sign a petition calling for a parliamentary discussion of drugs, one of his specialist subjects, it sailed through the 100,000 barrier needed to secure a Commons debate. But what should most alarm the parliamentary left about Brand’s emergence as a political figure is that he believes people should not vote: a self-defeating electoral strategy if ever there was one.

Miliband’s aim when he became Labour leader was simple. He believed that by uniting the left as the right split between the Tories and Ukip, he could win power and overturn the Thatcher-Blair consensus.

As the most left-wing Labour leader since Neil Kinnock, and the greenest, he seemed well placed to bring the left together. He was comfortable honouring its tribal traditions in a way that his recent predecessors have not been. Unlike John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he attended the Durham Miners’ Gala. He also made a point of going on a trade union anti-austerity march, comparing it to the civil rights protests that Martin Luther King led in the United States in the 1960s. But despite this no-enemies-to-the-left approach, he is still faced with a fracturing of his support.

As if these problems were not enough, Labour finds itself trying to straddle the growing divide between London and the rest of the country. Half the Labour membership lives in the capital and the importance of this has been radically increased by Miliband moving the party to a one member, one vote franchise for leadership elections. But London MPs only make up 17 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party. This wouldn’t be a problem if London and the rest of the country thought alike. But on immigration the capital takes a radically different view to the rest of the country. Polling by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory in 2011 showed that less than half of Londoners — 46 per cent — favour reducing immigration, while the figure is 70 per cent in the north and 75 per cent in the Midlands and Wales. It is hard to see how Labour can please both its London members and its voters elsewhere in the country on this crucial issue.

Normally, a party in Labour’s situation would look around the world for inspiration, for a model to copy. This is what Labour did in the 1990s. The Clinton Democrats inspired their presentation (New Democrats/New Labour), their campaign techniques (the war room), and their policies (tax credits). But the centre-left is in disarray across the industrialised world: there is no model to copy. Indeed, in Greece and Spain parties of the radical left have usurped the role of the traditional centre-left parties and now lead in the polls.

To be sure, the Tories are not short of problems either. The fracturing of politics has hit their support, too; it is impossible to see how they can hit 40 per cent with Ukip polling so high. They have not won a majority for 22 years and, even against Miliband and Labour with all their problems, are highly unlikely to do so next May. But austerity and globalisation do not pose existential questions for the centre-right. Rather, austerity presents them with an opportunity to shrink the size of the state. Also, the pressure to keep corporate and top income tax rates down strengthens the right’s hand — offering a justification for positions that are bound to be unpopular in the current populist political climate.

Labour could still eke out a win next year. A combination of the rise of Ukip, the decline of the Liberal Democrats and favourable constituency boundaries could see them stagger back into office. But this would be a self-defeating victory. A Labour government making massive cuts to public spending would simply speed the rise of the Greens, the SNP and Ukip, and Labour’s decline. In 2020, Labour could find itself being supplanted in Scotland by the SNP and its hold on the urban north significantly weakened by Ukip.

Ed Miliband may not be a natural leader. But those who think that getting rid of him would solve Labour’s problems are deluding themselves about the disaster that the left faces.

Spot on Fred, but I'm getting worried about him as I'm sure the rest of us are -):

The one that needs to be worried about is Ed Miliband. Hopefully the press have Ed Balls in their sights as well.

poll trend
though the MORI poll might be described as a rogue, as does indeed happen from time to time, there is no escaping the fact that whereas for many months labour was showing a 6 point lead - even that wasn't anything to boast about - that lead is now consistently at only 1-2 points and drifting

Oh don't you start.. now get back to your work please -):

thankfully i was out all yesterday - golf with client + bank manager :-) - but my post above is no more than a fair obervation

I have listen to Miliband's speech and thought it good.

The things which stands out is that he thoughtful, analytic and has honesty and integrity which is certainly not apparent in the overgrown etonian twins.

Also, I "believe" the majority of the UK are politically moderate and what he has said and will say appeals to them, although they may like Ed to have a little more charisma.

Crosby's smutty effect on the media and camp followers like Haze, Cynic will obviously concentrate on the messenger, but the labour party and voters will hopefully concentrate on the message as well as the messenger.

I know who I would trust.

Especially as more and more unfolds for this Gove rment and it u-bends more and more!

Stan,

Manuel, doesn't have any more dishes to wash and all the customers have fled without paying the bills.

He is hoping for a loan from his bank manager.

Times are hard on the Embankment.

The public know that Miliband won't be PM. The newspapers, the TV commentators and even the Labour party know. It is only Miliband that is in denial. It will be amusing to watch and see at what point it dawns on him.