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.

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. :-))

Dreamcatcher, thank goodness I never drink Aussie wines! Rocket fuel!

Dennis Skinner (aka The Beast of Bolsover) is always good entertainment. It would be a shame if he wasn't around, no matter how barmy he is.

lol. doodlebug4.

the problem with this one imo, is that the NuLab toffs stood by and let it happen/covered up when in power...so it's a bit rich to be pointing the bone at this stage.

What a pathetic excuse for a no show.

http://news.sky.com/story/1387592/farage-blames-immigration-for-ukip-event-no-show

Nigel Farage has blamed immigration for failing to turn up at a UKIP event in Wales at which 100 people had paid £25 each to meet him.

The UKIP leader said that population growth had resulted in a snarled-up M4 motorway that made the journey take far longer than expected.

He has been accused of a lack of professionalism after failing to attend the "Meet Nigel Farage" evening in Port Talbot.

"It took me six hours and 15 minutes to get here – it should have taken three-and-a-half to four," he told BBC's Sunday Politics Wales.

"That has nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a country in which the population is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be."

You bin on the M25 lately Haystack?

Come on Carl.

Foggy for me to win it, too. :-)