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.

Hazel Blear backs Ed Miliband’s decision to sack Emily Thornberry

Is that the Hazel Blears who flipped her houses

I thought her name was spelt Blair ?

Scotland, Scotland Scotland!!!!!

who says £7.9m?
for example, in the current climate, houses on the wentworth estate regularly fail to get near the value attributed ..... mind you £7.9m won't get near the price asked for many of those tasteless monstrosities

Join the twitterstorm #CameronMustGo


https://twitter.com/hashtag/CameronMustGO?src=hash

Anyone watching 'It Was Alright In The 1970's" on Channel 4, absolutely brilliant. How did we get away with it? Black and White Minstrel Show etc. Different world :0)

That comment applies the Labour front bench as well, apart from many on the back benches.

Agreed Haystack, all flavours are at it!

Gordon Brown is standing down, just announced. He is probably getting on the same gravy train as Blair.

Has Fred died? Awfully quiet :0)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2845737/The-Thornberry-Set-million-pound-homes-Ed-s-elite-live-cheek-jowl-leafy-north-London.html

The Thornberry Set and their million pound homes... how Ed's elite live cheek by jowl in leafy north London

Emily Thornberry lives in £3million Islington home with Oxbridge educated lawyer husband Sir Christopher Nugee
Neighbours include Labour grandees Tony and Cherie Blair, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, and Lard Falconer
Both Miliband brothers live nearby, along with Tessa Jowell and Margret Hodge - frontrunners for London Mayor

Emily Thornberry’s Islington home is at the heart of the liberal elite’s dinner party circuit. Directly next door is Margaret Hodge, who is expected to seek Labour’s nomination to be the next London Mayor.

Ms Thornberry's home is a vast, four-storey Victorian townhouse in an area beloved of lawyers and bankers, where a similar property changed hands earlier this year for £2.9 million - £900,000 above the threshold for Labour’s planned ‘soak-the-rich’ mansion tax.

Hodge’s likely rival, Tessa Jowell, lives a couple of miles north. If Ms Thornberry ever needs to consult Tom Baldwin, one of Ed Miliband’s key advisers, he is only a short stroll away.

Mr Miliband can be found two miles away, not far from Neil Kinnock, Alastair Campbell and Miliband’s adviser Stewart Wood. Others nearby include Ed’s brother David, Lord Falconer, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls.

Ms Thornberry shares her home with Oxbridge educated lawyer husband Sir Christopher, a barrister at Wilberforce Chambers whose specialities included the lucrative field of off-shore trusts (which, among other things, help rich people avoid taxes).

The pair bought the property in 1993, two years after they married, and moved in during the same week as another great Islingtonian power couple, Tony and Cherie Blair.

Ms Thornberry, a close Ed Miliband ally and one of the first to back him as leader in his battle against brother David, stepped down from her post as Shadow Attorney General two days ago.

The resignation came after she was confronted by a 'furious' Ed following her tweet of a house in Rochester flying three England flags from the upstairs windows, with a white van parked in the driveway.

Gordon Brown to STEP DOWN as MP at next General Election after 32 years in the Commons:

Former Prime Minister to announce plans 'within days', sources say

Gordon Brown will formally announce plans to stand down 'within days'

Sources say he wants to bow out on a high after showing in referendum

Former Prime Minister has been an MP in the Commons for 32 years

Comes in the wake of Alistair Darling also announcing plans to step down

By Thomas Burrows for MailOnline

Published: 22:26, 22 November 2014 | Updated: 00:04, 23 November 2014


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2845713/Gordon-Brown-STEP-MP-Former-Prime-Minister-step-days-32-years-Commons-sources-claim.html

did no labour MP's claim big expenses too?
none of the shadow cabinet???

Course they do, they are all at it!

it was a rhetorical question :-)

it's just that it would be nice to have some balance on this thread occasionally from the non-rabid section of this board

Boris bridge news....




The Thames garden bridge is nothing but a wasteful blight

The cost of Joanna Lumley’s idea has risen to £175m so far and the impact on the surrounding area will be horrendous



Rowan Moore


The Observer, Saturday 22 November 2014 17.45 GMT




How the garden bridge will look, according to its backers. Photograph: Arup/Heatherwick Studios



You get a cold call from someone charming and plausible, who tells you about something wonderful – solar panels, let’s say, or a conservatory – that will transform your house, give a faint glow of green virtue and which due to some miraculous financing arrangement will cost you nothing. Feeling weak, you say yes, and end up with a leaking roof, unmet promises and large bills. Something like this is happening to the public with the garden bridge proposed for the Thames.

Lord Davies, chairman of the Garden Bridge Trust, says that “support for the bridge has been overwhelming”. You would expect this: who could not want the free gift of a poetic-vision-cum-infrastructural-facility? Except that such public consultation as has happened is rendered worthless by the fact that it was vague or silent on a number of significant details, which might well have led to different responses. The small print for the Amazing Garden Bridge Offer is itself fantastical.

Presented last year as a £60m project entirely funded by the private sector, it is now has a budget of £175m and requires £60m of public funding, money that could otherwise be spent on much needed crossings of less privileged parts of the Thames. Described by its inventor, Joanna Lumley, as “a chance to walk through woodlands”, it actually has 2,500 square metres of vegetation, which is less than half a football pitch, and is reached by hefty stairs and ramps. In the space of three months, its estimated annual running costs have gone from £2.5m to £3m to £3.5m.

It is called a place to “linger and enjoy the river and all of its attributes in a peaceful and tranquil environment”, but Transport for London has estimated that the football match-size crowds around its landing point will sometimes have a “pedestrian comfort level” of D – this is the second worst of five categories and means “very uncomfortable”. The project will create potentially dangerous crowd pressures on nearby parts of the southern Thames embankments that haven’t been studied. On the bridge itself, numbers will be controlled by security, with resulting queues to get on. This is hardly a ramble of Wordsworthian bliss.




More good news here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/22/thames-garden-bridge-huge-expensive-folly

.