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.

Hilary, sounds like you just summed up Bob Geldofs finances in one hit there..

Fishfinger,

Thanks for asking, but I'll be here till April.

The snow's not really arrived yet - it's still a bit thin, although there's been a dusting overnight, and there's a big dump forecast for Saturday. Unfortunately, we have logs to get inside and icicles to break in the meantime.

Bit like being Im a Celebrity in the Jungle then Hils, other extreme though.

Get plenty of hot wine down you.

This is more like it

Conservatives lead at 1

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 8th December -

Con 34%, Lab 33%, LD 6%, UKIP 15%;

"Get plenty of hot wine down you.", Yeah... all down it's front I expect -):

Ed Insists on Privacy for Pre-Xmas Turkey Eating Rehearsal

Strange that the actual visitors to food banks are often the fattest

You been in the queue again then H/S?

Liberal Democrats facing even bigger wipeout than expected

Junior coalition partners could have fewer than 20 MPs after 2015 general election – compared with the 57 elected in 2010



Rowena Mason, political correspondent


The Guardian, Tuesday 9 December 2014






The Liberal Democrats may be facing a greater wipeout than previously predicted, leaving them with fewer than 20 MPs after the next election, research based on the British Election Study has suggested.

A conference in London on Tuesday will feature an analysis from Dr Steve Fisher of Oxford University, which concludes that Nick Clegg’s party appears to be losing votes more heavily in seats it currently holds than it is nationally.

The study casts doubt on the party’s argument that its incumbent MPs will buck the national trend because of local popularity. The data suggests its parliamentary representation could more than halve from the 57 MPs who won seats at the last election.

The performance of the Lib Dems is crucial to the outcome of the next election because the party has so many marginal seats that could fall to either Labour or the Conservatives, potentially making the difference between which is the largest party or has a majority.

“The result is very strong, so if the pattern in the British Election Survey were replicated at the election then it would not be a surprise if the Liberal Democrats were below 20 seats after the election,” Fisher said.

In a blog, Fisher wrote: “If they are indeed losing most heavily in the seats they are defending, they are set to lose several more seats than national polls with uniform swing would predict … for many Liberal Democrat MPs to hold on to their seats they will need to become even more personally popular than they were in 2010: a tough task under the circumstances.”

The academic said Labour were the clear beneficiaries of this pattern of decline in support for the Lib Dems. However, he said, this particular constituency pattern was not hugely advantageous for Ed Miliband’s party because “most Liberal Democrat seats have the Conservatives in second place and it will be tough for Labour to come from third to win”.

Separate research from Prof Geoff Evans and Jon Mellon of Oxford University suggests Ukip will pose twice as much of a threat to the Conservatives as it will to Labour in terms of the number of seats potentially lost.




More + graphics here:http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/09/liberal-democrats-face-bigger-wipeout-than-expected

mansion tax
there's always loopholes - and arrow-slits :-)


off-shore bank accounts
from experience, i can tell you BVI is almost impossible and though Bahrain used to be easy, it most assuredly no longer is
they also tend to be quite expensive to maintain and use

Germany has announced that they will take 30,000 asylum seekers from Syria. They take more refugees and asylum seekers than any of the other EU countries. In fact they take 40% of all asylumn seekers in Europe.

Cyners,

Don't know if you misread my earlier post, but I'm not sure why you'd ever want to set up an offshore bank account in the BVI - that's the place for domiciling the IBC. Your offshore bank accounts would be somewhere respectable like HK.

it was merely because my (now late) partner and i decided it was a nicer place to visit than the bahamas

A food bank in stockport as been prosecuted for feeding grossly obese people , it was also reported that the local council had employed workers to winded the front door two months ago, as the food bank had to close because a 22 stone women had got stuck and the fire brigade had to be called out.

Osborne’s biggest lie: ‘Conservatives are competent’ 9/12/2014


As history will remember him: George Osborne will be remembered, but not for his calamitous career as Chancellor. His name will forever be linked to cocaine and (let’s call them) ‘ladies of the night’.

Georgie Orgy, nose puddings and lies
Starved the poor – some of them died.
When the voters have their say
George Osborne will run away.

It would be impossible to take George Osborne seriously, if not for the fact that his plans threaten the livelihood, health, and indeed the lives – not only of British citizens, but of the nation itself.

His words yesterday (Monday), during the row with the Liberal Democrats over economic policy, certainly do not deserve any respect after the absolute nonsense he spouted to Parliament last week, masquerading as the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Autumn Statement.

According to the BBC, he said spending cuts to reduce the deficit are a “price that works for our country”. Why?

“We are going to have to make savings.” Why? “We are going to have to cut certain welfare bills like benefits that go to working-age people.” Why?

“But the prize is economic stability, growth, jobs in the future, brighter future, I think that’s a price that works for our country.” Why?

Notice that he did not give any reasons for his statements. He presented them as though they were incontestable facts. They’re not.

Look at, for example, his claim that working-age benefits must be cut. Is he proposing cuts to benefits taken by working people because their employers are too miserly to pay them a living wage? Does he have a plan to help those people make ends meet, then? This writer hasn’t seen it!

That’s unless it’s the hoary old “Ask your boss for a raise.” Clearly, privileged George never had to try that.

You can be sure he won’t be requiring companies to pay a living wage to make up for the shortfall of in-work benefits that he is planning. The result is as inevitable as night following day: Working people will be unable to support themselves. If they pay housing costs but don’t buy food, they’ll become sick and will lose their jobs; if they buy food but neglect the rent/mortgage, they’ll be evicted and will lose their jobs due to homelessness.

The huge cumulative drop in the amount of cash being circulated through the economy implies a consequent effect on businesses; with fewer ordinary working people able to buy their goods, firms will go out of business. Super-rich twits like Osborne will be insulated from the effects for a while but the recession he is determined to cause will eventually overtake even his family wallpaper business. What will he do then?

The last four and a half years have shown that cutting public spending will not reduce the deficit. As many people have pointed out, it is madness to repeat the process and expect a different result. Looking at the BBC quotation, it seems Osborne is caught in a lie. His spending cuts aren’t about reducing the deficit at all; they’re about reducing the state – as bloggers like Alex Little, Martin Odoni, Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, kittysjones, and blogs like Flip Chart Fairy Tales, Skwawkbox, and even Vox Political have made clear.

We don’t have to make savings – we should be concentrating on increasing productivity and profit instead. That will get the deficit down much more quickly than whittling away the apparatus of the state until the damage is irreparable.

We don’t have to cut benefits to working-age people – we should be ensuring that nobody with a job needs to claim benefits; that they are paid enough to support themselves and their families.

We should also be providing the highest-quality education to youngsters and training to jobseekers young and old, in order to ensure that they can get a job without spending useless months parked in a benefit system that is more about hiding the unemployed in sanction hell than about providing any actual help.

Osborne’s way offers no stability, no growth, no jobs, and you’d better believe he offers no future.

Chequebook euthanasia – who’s the biggest threat to other people?8/12/2014


Here comes the reaper: Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Believe it or not, the author of these blog articles doesn’t spend all his time at Vox Towers churning them out.

That’s why, earlier today (Monday), it was possible to gauge the veracity of this blog’s ‘chequebook euthanasia’ story by asking acquaintances at a local hotel for their opinion.

After hearing the circumstances of the case from beginning to end, one friend (who is today Christened, thanks to bar staff at the same hotel, ‘The Guinness Guy’) responded: “That’s bulls**t.”

Further questioning revealed that he’s not a fan of Russia Today; when he learned I’d been interviewed by that channel, he lost interest.

Then there’s the response on Beastrabban\’s Weblog. The Beast wrote: “Mike, in his article discussing Messers Appleby’s and Warner’s findings, suggests that the question [“Why haven’t you committed suicide?”] may even be a subtle strategy by the Tories and their corporate enablers to nudge the vulnerable into [doing so]. Their deaths by their own hands would allow the Tories to make savings on the welfare budget, while allowing them to deny any actual responsibility for their deaths.

“Mike may have a point here. I’ve a friend who used to be a psychiatric nurse. He told me that the law has been changed governing admissions to mental hospitals. It used to be the case that someone could be sectioned if they were a danger to themselves and others. Now, under Dave Cameron, it’s been altered. The law no longer requires that they be admitted if they are a danger to themselves, only if they are a threat to other people. Clearly, Cameron’s government have no interest in preventing people from taking their own life. And this question put to depressives of why they haven’t, suggests that they are in fact hoping that some may even do so.”

Of course, this blog places more credence with the Beast’s response. Not only does he provide evidence (albeit third-hand) but he also happens to be Yr Obdt Srvt’s big brother.

The change in the law is definitely worth researching. After all, if the law requires people to be sectioned if they are a danger to other people, isn’t it time David Cameron, George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith and their entire ruthless cadre of bandits were locked up once and for all?

George Osborne helps Racial ethnic minority working girl to get treatment for her drug habit.

stop the drivelling sticky and tell us (me!) that you have managed to sidestep the carnage of the last couple of days
i had a much bigger dow short running than i now have, but balls shrivelled at the size of the growing loss so cut 60% of it around 17850 - never mind

Carnage, got to be joking Ive been raking it in for the past 3 weeks just ask Casey Carson.

May have just got lucky but I have now open at 14 long positions the most I have had in the last 5 years.

I feel extremely bullish and this fall today probably with wed and thursday is a man made engineered drop in order to open the market for the XMAS bounce.

I knew it was coming.

The last 2 years have been identical.

Ive got a copy of Robbie Burns diary/almanac, last week was spot on a muted week and this week mon to thursday down days and miserable followed by on Friday a bounce back and then a bounce right through to first week in Jan a step back for a week and then full throttle to beg of March.