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.

Conservatives and Labour tied

Latest YouGov / Sunday Times results 5th December -

Con 32%, Lab 32%, LD 6%, UKIP 17%;

Times to come under tory misrule!

And that they are brass necked liars.

By Christopher Booker
10:00PM GMT 06 Dec 2014
It was on July 14 1998 that Gordon Brown announced that he planned to double public spending in 10 years, writes Christopher Booker.

Strangely missing from all of last week’s talk about the “government deficit” and Gordon Brown stepping down as an MP was any reference to the origins of what future generations will look back on as arguably the most catastrophic political blunder in our history.

The reason why Mr Brown for two years enjoyed a reputation as a “prudent” Chancellor was that he had been committed by his predecessor, Kenneth Clarke, to keep public spending under tight control under the “Maastricht criteria”. (It was not widely noted that Britain was bound by the Maastricht Treaty to comply with stages one and two of Economic and Monetary Union – it was only from stage three, the euro, that we had an opt-out.)

This had cut public spending to a mere 36 per cent of GDP, its lowest point for four decades. But on July 14 1998, carried away by the success of the economy he inherited from the Tories, Brown announced, with the aid of his economic adviser, Ed Balls, that he now planned to double public spending in 10 years. As the Economist memorably observed, he had “morphed from Scrooge into Father Christmas”.

The consequences of Brown’s hubris, as we now see, are that public spending has soared from £322 billion a year to £732 billion, still remorselessly rising every year. Despite the talk of “cuts” so beloved of the BBC, under this Government alone the national debt has more than doubled, having recently topped a mind-boggling £1.5 trillion.

George Osborne may talk airily of spending £2 billion on roads here, another £2 billion on flood defences there. But each of these sums represents only what he has this year had to borrow each week to plug the ever-widening hole in our finances. So dire is our plight that the £60 billion a year we now pay just in interest on our borrowings has risen to become the fifth-largest item in public spending, exceeded only by the ever-rising bills for welfare, education and the NHS.

Mr Osborne may now talk even more recklessly of how he hopes to cut the deficit to zero within five years. But so long as hundreds of council officials and NHS managers continue to pay themselves more than the £142,000 a year earned by the Prime Minister – let alone that £50 billion earmarked for HS2 – we know nothing is seriously being done to rein in a public-spending spree that continues to spray out our cash uncontrollably in all directions.

We can scarcely expect to be told about this by the BBC, when 91 of its executives have also arranged to pay themselves more than Mr Cameron every year. We live in a country where too many people in the public sector have totally lost contact with reality.

But the start of it was that day back in 1998 when Messrs Brown and Balls unleashed a monster that now threatens to swallow us all.

If Maggie hadn't squandered the profits from North Sea and selling the national silver and spent the proceeds on the infrastructure, NHS and Schools etc. there would have been no reasons for repairing the roofs and holes in the walls, by the labour governments. At least we had a decent improving health service etc. before the present incompetent corrupt party of Cons started to destroy it.

It's a sad day, lads...

Katie Price reduces breasts by FIVE cup sizes because she wants to be taken "more seriously".

:-(

total rubbish fred and you know it ..... as usual, you choose to bend the facts to suit your rather silly and obvious agenda

Manuel..

I suggest you change your specs.

Even Macmillan condemned the tories for what the were doing.

Go back and examine the period.

it's purely the way you choose to interpret to suit your very predictable agenda
you really are very dull at (most) times which is why you (and a few others) are rarely worth reading

Strange how some cannot face realities which are painful to them.

A of state denial!

it worries me not how you choose to interpret history to suit yourself .... if you wish to believe your own drivel, then carry on doing so, for the world or even very very few in this country will pay the slightest attention to your perpetual rantings .... nor for that matter to hays or similar diehards of any hue

for myself, i'll just carry on with life and adapt to whatever garbage or roses happen to be thrown at me

Manuel.

I think the May election may show you that you are mistaken.

But a man of such refined tastes as yours, is unlikely to know the difference between garbage and roses.

how the election pans out has no bearing at all on your interpretation of history, any more than it did when labour got kicked out previously or the conservatives 12 years or whenever before that nor when labour was kicked out 13 years prior to that .... it's just a regular cycle with each bunch bringing with it some good things and usually a bunch of bad too

nor does it matter whether or not i can recognise the difference between garbage and roses, so long as i can adapt to whatever it happens to be

I thought you might chuck yourself in the bin.

Mind planting you may be a better idea.

The current rhetoric from Labour is potentially very confusing for the man on the Clapham omnibus. Their message is ill defined and has the appearance treacle. They are opposed to cuts. Well that is what we thought. It turns out that they are opposed to cuts that are not theirs.

Recently they have been saying, reluctantly, that serious cuts in the next parliament will be needed. They don't specify what the cuts will be or even in what areas. Bearing in mind that we have had serious cuts in all the obvious areas, it is difficult to see where they can make substantial cuts that will be very different to the Coalition's cuts. You might like to add to that, the fact that Labour say they will reverse some current cuts, which will only increase the amount of cuts to be done to balance the books.

and i'm afraid the conservatives also lack any credibility though i will readily grant that a poisoned chalice was inherited when they came to power

with the economy in dire straits, i remain convinced that harsh medicine was indeed the the right course of action, socially painful as that most assuredly has been in particular for the the lower income brackets, with considerable hardship coming its wake

could/should swathes of money been borrowed - no other way - to finance major infrastructure programmes? ...... in the light that this money has now been miraculously "found", i suspect that with hindsight some part should have been implemented

however, i really don't even pretend to know if that would have have undermined the "harsh medicine" required .... my gut feeling is that a prudent programme would have done no harm, though of course that is with hindsight

certainly history has shown that borrowing and borrowing and borrowing to "buy" the country out of recession and similar always ends in tears

=========

NHS and schools and similar
throwing barrowloads of money at these institutions is really no answer at all to the problems that both very clearly have

the NHS in particular looks to be a complete augean stable, and i greatly doubt that can ever be brought back to a semblance of the help-all-for-free service that was originally envisaged ..... in fact, it worked for several decades, but as the population increased, augmented by an ever growing aged and non-contributing sector, so the pressures both financially and for staffing have become too great

===========

immigration
a disaster area brought about by earlier gov'ts and the nettle never grasped by the incumbents
assuredly it would have been difficult to implement a meaningful procedure, probably along the lines of the oz system, but ducking the issue and the confrontation required with the eu megalithic structure, has merely made matters worse

Has everyone put up their Xmas trees? We did ours today after much untangling of lights and replacing bulbs. Everywhere we went there were people carrying trees or loading them into cars.

A good programme at 5pm today on BBC1 Supermarket secrets, well worth a watch.
On next week as well. A portion of the programme was on the wine industry and how Tesco knows what to order in the run up to Christmas. A lot of wine is drunk in the run up to the big day and then the emphasis switches to champagne on the big day and for the new year, as well as wine. A huge vessel came in the docks from Australia carrying 40ft standard containers. I thought they would be packed with boxes of wine but there was not one glass bottle on the ship, with millions of ltrs on board. The 40ft containers had a huge plastic liner that was filled with wine, all air tight.Only one liner per container. They were than emptied into vats and all the bottling was done here. The wine industry has moved on. :-))

Bulbs - your living in the past. :-))