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.

Cynic just go on holiday then and when you return complain like mad, you'd be amazed at the compensations that get paid out! Most ABTA bonded tour-operators just don't have the capacity to fully deal with complaints plus the cost of tribunal puts them off defending themselves anyway..

When i grows up to I, you can have a holiday.

But if it wasn't so serious the political scene would be funny.

With the clowns at the centre of government, and a clown like Farage looking in from the outside!




I used to like clowns!

Sang at party Central Office:

Isn't it rich, isn't it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
And where are the clowns? Quick send in the clowns
Don't bother they're here

New crackdown on welfare to lift the economy by £7bn

A CRACKDOWN on welfare handouts is to be massively expanded next year, Iain Duncan Smith will announce today.



By: Macer Hall
Published: Tue, November 25, 2014







The Tory Work and Pensions Secretary is to promise that his universal credit benefit system will be delivered by a third of job centres by next spring.

And he insisted the new payment, which replaces six other benefits for jobseekers, will boost the economy by about £7billion a year by encouraging welfare claimants back into work.

Mr Duncan Smith last night launched a blistering attack on Labour for leaving millions of claimants addicted to handouts.



Labour left us with a welfare state that simply wasn’t fit for purpose

Iain Duncan Smith


He said: “Labour left us with a welfare state that simply wasn’t fit for purpose, spending billions of taxpayers’ money on a system that frequently trapped the very people it was supposed to help in cycles of worklessness and welfare dependency.

“It was so complicated you needed a maths degree to see if it was worth taking a job.



more: http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/539628/Iain-Duncan-Smith-Expands-Welfare-Crackdown

Haze and Manuel,

Are the Confidence Trickster's party trying to lose the next election?

Perhaps, if so, the wisest thing they are doing in the last 5 years!

Look forward to the crackdown.

There's been alot of talk about supermarkets being the culprit for small farmers going bust recently, but another culprit thats not been discussed is the EU Common Agricultural Policy.

The idea that the CAP protects small farmers and the rural way of life is a myth. Eighty percent of CAP aid goes to just 25 percent of farms. The biggest slice of the subsidy pie is handed to the landed gentry, environment- destroying mega-farm and vast agro-industrial conglomerates. Figures from the UK show Queen Elizabeth II gets around half-a-million euro a year. Food industry giants like Campina or Nestle have been handed hundreds of millions. Small-scale European farmers get little and poor farmers in developing nations are shut out of European markets.

Just another reason why we should say good bye to Euro and a policy designed to keep the rich, rich...

i'ld bet the biggest slice of any EU farm subsidy goes to the inefficient french farmers and other big slabs to the likes of italy who have told mega porkies about what has been planted (olive trees), dug up (old vines) or just left to lie fallow

Of course Cynic, potentially anyone with land can benefit from CAP its so open to abuse and miss-managent. CAP is a double whammy for your wallet. Taxpayers fork out billions in subsidies then pay again when CAP artificially inflates food prices. CAP supporters say this is a price to pay for food security – that’s nonsense. With free trade we could import bountiful cheap food from the United States, Canada, China and elsewhere in the globalized world. Food security just isn’t a problem. CAP artificially shields farmers from healthy competition hindering the evolution of more modern, more efficient agriculture. Personally I think there is too much food regulation, what's wrong with a wonkey carrot, why is so much un-uniform food put to waste when food banks could readily be stocked..! Just where is the sense in all this, there is none, except for if you own a large estate and can claim EU farming subsidies for it...

Now lets think about it, you own a large estate, the government tax you for owning it on one hand, pays the EU CAP on the other and you simply claim the money plus a bit more back, erm TAX Free... sounds like a nice loop hole doesn't it... Unfortunately you only produced wonkey carrots on your land that year that were not uniform enough to enter into the EU's food chain and thus had to be disposed of, meaning you also now have a claim for compensation... Its better than benefit fraud this one!!

The wonky carrot business is not the EU. It is the supermarket's choice to do with appearance. My local greengrocer sells wonky carrots.

Those 60 wet wipes , it was for 60 boxes

Haystack, have a look at the below.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/knobbly-fruit-and-veg-back-on-menu-as-eu-plans-to-scrap-uniformity-laws-847911.html

So if your producing for say Tesco that only accept class 1 carrots and unfortunately your harvest falls short and you are unable to sell to Tesco then you could scrap the harvest or try and sell elsewhere at a lower price. Either way, compensation for the harvest would be sought.

Hays Hays Hays Hays..............Mili getting into bed with Nigel.

Guido Fawkes ‏@GuidoFawkes 7m minutes ago
Secret UKIP Labour Meeting This Lunchtime

Mili getting into bed with Nigel.

Only after the GE , and what would UKIP want from Labour in a coalition ? A referendum on the EU. Can't see the Unions and the rank & file letting UKIP put a foot inside the Labour party

From Ukip to the SNP, Britain's anti-Westminster movement is not about class
When London feels like another world, it's easy to hate the establishment – regardless of your background

By Allan Massie3:20PM GMT 25 Nov 2014CommentsComment
An article in The Times says that Ukip is cashing in on our obsession with class. It was sparked off by a poll which suggests that more people (27 per cent) think Ukip in touch with the white working-class than Labour (only 21 per cent). This is evidence of the progress Ukip claims to have been making in what have long been rock-solid Labour seats in the North of England.
It’s on the face of it a strange development. Only 12 months ago your typical Ukip recruit was usually seen as a disaffected Tory which is why Labour was complacent about the progress Ukip was making. It would cost the Tories votes and seats, and deliver the coming election to Labour on its 35 per cent core vote. Now there is panic in Labour ranks – even though its poll rating still hovers around the 32-35 per cent mark.
The present Labour panic is been occasioned by the fallout from Emily Thornberry’s already notorious white van/ St George’s Cross photograph and tweet.
The fact that Ms Thornberry, though a lawyer, comes from a working-class background herself, only makes the whole thing more absurd. The truth is of course that Ukip’s rise has precious little to do with class. If it did, if Ukip really represented a working-class revulsion from Labour, one might expect it to be doing considerably better in the polls than it is. One might even expect the level of support for the two parties to be reversed, as natural Tories deserted Ukip in alarm and returned to their Conservative home.
To understand what‘s happening it’s instructive to look at where Labour really seems to be in deep trouble, for the time being anyway. This is in Scotland, not the north of England. Since the referendum when the Labour Party campaigned for the Union in alliance with the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, it has apparently been bleeding to death. Startling opinion polls threaten it with the loss of all but a handful of its 40 Scottish seats. If they are to be believed, voters are fleeing Labour in flocks, especially in working-class constituencies in Glasgow and Lanarkshire. But these defectors are not rushing to join Nigel Farage‘s merry band; they have no interest in Ukip. On the contrary they are turning to the SNP, a middle-class party now led by a generation of Glasgow University graduates. The SNP’s new leadership is composed of the sort of people who helped keep Scottish Labour on the rails while the Labour Party lost its nerve and cohesion in England during the Thatcher years: middle-class, middle of the road, sensible pragmatists like John Smith, Donald Dewar and George Robertson.


Nevertheless the SNP and Ukip, though in most respects very different (partly because the SNP has now experience of the responsibility of government) have one thing in common: both are anti-Westminster parties, both are tapping in to a mood of disaffection with the British political establishment, with the Conservatives and Labour alike, with the BBC and the City of London, with the banks and the CBI. The Liberal Democrats used to benefit from their distance from power, but by – patriotically, I would say – agreeing to form a Coalition with the Tories, they became part of the political establishment and have suffered accordingly.
The anti-Westminster, anti-establishment mood has nothing, or nothing much, to do with class, because it is shared by people of all classes. It has far more to do with the distance from London.
The SNP and Ukip have something else in common. Nigel Farage often says “I want my country back”, and his supporters echo his words and cheer him loudly. The SNP doesn’t need to put it quite like that, because they already form the (devolved) Government of Scotland, but they say they want their country out – out of the UK – and this comes to much the same thing.
Neither the Conservatives nor Labour have any idea of how to address the problem of the anti-establishment surge. Both have experienced a sharp decline in membership. Once healthy constituency associations are now hollow shells. By playing the metropolitan game and choosing candidates whose whole career has been in politics, they have divorced themselves from the country, and have relied on long-standing habits of voting to win elections.
Their only comfort is that enough people in England aren’t ready to break these habits – not yet anyway. So between them the two big parties will probably still secure some 70 per cent of the vote in May, and one of them will somehow be able to form some sort of government. But their position is fragile. The bonds are fraying, and, unless they can repair their relationship with the country beyond London and the Home Counties, their decline will continue. What we are seeing is a revolt of the Country against the Court, and it’s got very little to do with class.

because the supermarkets decided wonky carrots were not readily saleable just as eu decided that old varieties of apples could not be sold/grown commercially ..... similarly i have no idea what the alleged logic behind that was, any more than the current crap being touted about marigolds and over gloves

Supermarkets give wonky vegetables to food banks. Trussel Trust.

Its amazing the crap that out of the EU followed by a directive of some sort later to be followed by a fine because someone didn't obey the directive.... Red tape and bureaucracy....

The below is a good read on the EU.....

http://www.betteroffout.net/the-case/10-eu-myths-about-withdrawl/