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.

Peter Smith ‏@Redpeter99 11h hours ago

When nobody was watching Ed claimed £7K a year in expenses and Cameron claimed £135K. Yet another reason why #CameronMustGo

Conservatives well on course to win GE. Cameron still doing an excellent job.

Good gear eh Haystack?


Let me know your dealer.

Big black man on London Bridge.

Conservatives and Labour tied and heading for hung parliament, but Labour should lose most of their seats in Scotland. This would easily make Conservatives the biggest party.

No wrong the polls take into account people living in scotland.

And when the defections start.....well.

If Tories have to rely on a coalition with UKIP............ohhh dear.

Sutton@NFFC ‏@mac123_m 1 hour ago

#CameronMustGo He has resided over disparity between the rich & poor. Wonder where the money goes? Have a look.

The National: New paper will support independent Scotland







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A new pro-independence daily newspaper is expected to launch in Scotland on Monday in response to the burgeoning support for the SNP following the independence campaign.

Called The National, the tabloid will be produced by the stable that publishes Glasgow’s Herald. Priced 50p, it will have a banner reading: “The newspaper that supports an independent Scotland”, and a print run of about 50,000.

The paper has not yet received full funding from the newspaper group Newsquest. Instead it will have a “pilot” launch under the editorship of Richard Walker, who became editor of the Sunday Herald in 2003 and turned it into Scotland’s only overtly SNP-supporting title. During the run-in to September’s referendum the Herald registered a substantial hike in circulation.

Pro-independence The National newspaper details revealed


Details have been released of a pilot which could lead to a new daily, pro-independence newspaper for Scotland.

Sunday Herald editor Richard Walker told a 12,000 crowd of SNP supporters at Glasgow's Hydro that The National would be published from Monday.

However, Mr Walker said publishers Newsquest had only committed to running the newspaper for five days.

Mr Walker, who will edit the paper, said independence supporters needed to convince them there was a market.

The Sunday Herald was the only Scottish newspaper to actively support independence during the referendum.

The new newspaper, which will cost 50p, will be available in newsagents and in an electronic version via online subscription.



Richard Walker will be the editor of The National
The editor told the crowd at the Hydro that people had suggested the paper should cost 45p, to match the percentage of people who voted Yes in the referendum.

But he added: "We are no longer the 45. We are the 50-plus and we will become the 60 and the 70."

He urged independence supporters to ensure that the newspaper became a permanent feature in the Scottish media landscape.

Herald & Times Group managing director Tim Blott said: "It is the first time in many years that a new daily newspaper has been launched in Scotland. The National is an exciting opportunity to meet the needs of a very politically-engaged section of the Scottish population.

"We recognise that launching a newspaper in 2014 is to some extent counter-intuitive but we consistently argue for the power of great journalism and informed opinion.

"We will trial the new title in its proposed format for a week and if, as anticipated, it takes off, then it will become a new and dynamic fixture in Scottish publishing."

By Boris Johnson
6:10AM GMT 24 Nov 2014
The Labour leader’s overreaction to the flag tweet has revealed an uncomfortable truth.

You know what I mean by the Darwin Awards, those satirical celebrations of the people who manage each year to die in the most idiotic possible way – so boosting the quality of the human gene pool. We are talking about the vandals who manage to urinate on power lines; the metal thieves who brilliantly attempt to steal live copper cables. I think it is time we had some political Darwin Awards, to mark our appreciation of the greatest self‑immolators of our time.

This year’s winner would surely be Ed Miliband. He approached the humdrum matter of a tweet by Emily Thornberry in rather the same flamboyant style as the chap in America who won the 2012 Darwin Award.

This intrepid fellow defeated his many rivals by his remarkable handling of an otherwise average suburban barbecue in North Carolina. Noticing a bottle of salsa sauce that contained a yellowish fluid, he guessed it must be alcohol. He took a long and refreshing draught. It was petrol. He spat it out all over his clothes, and then – relieved at his narrow squeak – he decided to relax. He lit a cigarette. I am afraid to say the poor fellow died the following day, in the burns unit of the local hospital.

It was exactly this flair for catastrophe that Miliband has brought to the Thornberry business. He took an everyday occurrence and turned it into something absolutely spectacular. One of his closest Labour friends had been out campaigning in Rochester, and she took a photo on her mobile of a house. The house had some England flags on it, and a white Ford Transit van parked in front of it. She then “tweeted” this photo, and captioned it, “Image of Rochester”. So far, so dull, eh?

It was an entirely run-of-the-mill English townscape, with some straightforward words to go with it. There was no obvious insult, no abuse, no overt sneering. She might have got away with it entirely, had some alert blogger not spotted it. He instantly detected the coded message that Emily Thornberry was sending to all her right-on, bien-pensant, Labour-luvvie friends in Islington, or wherever else it is that they follow her on Twitter.

A furious twitstorm blew up, as it does so often these days – like some summer squall in the Mediterranean: quick to rise, quick to die. Some people denounced her, some defended her. And yet still Emily might have survived; she might today be luxuriating in her position as shadow attorney general; she might never have been chased down her street by photographers; the name Emily Thornberry would still be relatively unknown, and not – as it is today - on the lips of every newspaper columnist, every broadcaster and everyone in the entire country who drives a white van or flies the England flag.

But then Ed Miliband stepped in. He ingeniously doused himself with petrol; he lit the match – and ka-boom: there he is, with staring panda eyes and frazzled hair, and the entire Labour Party looking on in amazement at the destruction. He fired Emily; indeed he is said to have lost his cool altogether and actually shouted at the woman.

This tells us several important things about his leadership, and about the Labour Party under Miliband. The first is that he is prone to panic under pressure – and that is in itself a reason why he should not be prime minister. The second is that he clearly can’t think straight. By sacking Emily Thornberry so violently, he has emphatically and publicly endorsed the real meaning of her tweet.

Rachel Reeves and other ministers have been lining up to support this interpretation – that Thornberry was being snooty about that home in Rochester, and of course they are right. She was indeed being snobbish and condescending. She was showing her Twitter followers that house in order to belittle it and make fun of it.

When Emily Thornberry looks at a white van, she ought to see the people who make this economy go, the grafters and the entrepreneurs who comprise a huge proportion of the GDP of the South East. These are the people any government should want to help and support – by cutting their taxes, for instance, or helping them with a diesel scrappage scheme so that they can buy less polluting vehicles.


If you own a white van, you have worked to buy a vital asset; you are more likely to be helping others into employment; and yet Thornberry looks at a white van and sees only an enemy – a cultural enemy.

She doesn’t care much about small businesses and their problems, and in her experience too many white van men have unacceptably Right-wing views. And what does she see in those England flags? She should see an innocent symbol of patriotism, and love of our country – its language and history and institutions, its Royal family and its countryside, pubs, Shakespeare, football, fish and chips, you name it.

But that is not what Emily sees. She sees the dreaded flag of pot-belled, immigrant-bashing lager louts. She sees the kind of flag that Labour councils have tried in the past to ban from public buildings; she sees a symbol of deplorable nationalism and jingo.

As for the house itself – what does Emily see? She should see a tribute to the efforts of the homeowner, someone who has worked not just to own the place but also to ensure that its architectural features somehow reflect his or her personality. Of course she sees no such thing – only a reminder of the achievement of her bête noire, Mrs Thatcher, who mobilised people to buy their own home.

Mrs Thornberry’s tweet was superbly eloquent of everything that is wrong with the modern Labour Party – a party that is all too obviously full of middle-class lawyers like her, who secretly disdain hard‑working, George Cross-waving white van men. But she might have got away with it; she might have been able to fudge it and keep her head down until the twitstorm passed, and then claim that it had all been grievously misunderstood.

Well done Ed, for so brutally confirming the truth about what Labour really thinks. Give that man a Darwin Award.

The Telegraph

Ukip is now MORE POPULAR than Labour: Nigel Farage gets polls boost as Ukip surges ahead

NIGEL Farage won a fresh boost today when an opinion poll pronounced his party the second most popular after the Conservatives, pushing Labour into third place.



By: Alison Little, Deputy Political Editor
Published: Mon, November 24, 2014



http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/539175/Boost-Farage-Ukip-second-Tories