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.

Happy crimbo DC.

Happy crimbo to everyone.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03gm0ym

This is how to save time in the NHS , no need for a mid wife shortage.

ps Merry Christmas to all [ did i say all ] , never mind ITS CHRISTMAS and good will to all men/others

I just spoke to a courier from Yodel, who was making deliveries on Xmas day. I went out for a walk and found Starbucks open plus a few mini supermarkets. All were doing brisk business.

Yes and?... You may have a day off H/S as it's Christmas Day today (and yes we know that you are not into all that like a lot of us) but never the less...

I love Xmas. I just don't subscribe to an artificially created religious festival that was invented to suppress a pagan Roman festival that was even more fun.

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn, held on the 17th of December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to the 23rd of December. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves. The poet Catullus called it "the best of days."

Back to normal!

Tony Benn, a KGB spy? No, he was far too dangerous for us
Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB's top spy in London, reveals he feared Tony Benn's rise to prominence could destabilise Cold War Britain


By Matthew Holehouse, Political Correspondent7:30AM GMT 26 Dec 2014
To his followers, he was a political giant who kept the red flag flying to the end.
To his detractors, he was the most dangerous man in parliament, who sought to turn Britain into an outpost of the Eastern Bloc and in the process almost destroyed the Labour Party.
And to the KGB, he was major threat to the stability of Cold War Europe and too “stupid” to be recruited as an agent.
For Tony Benn, the former Cabinet minister and Labour radical who died in March this year, was too left wing for the Soviet Union, the KGB’s top agent in London has revealed.
Oleg Gordievsky, who led Soviet intelligence operations in Britain in the 1980s before dramatically defecting to the West, said he was filled with horror at the "catastrophic" prospect of Tony Benn taking the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, fearing it would alter the delicate balance of power in Europe.



It is an admission that will surprise many of his opponents.
Benn’s demand for the nationalisation of industry, trade union power, unilateral disarmament and the abolition of the monarchy turned the 1981 contest against Denis Healey into a bitter and destructive battle for Labour’s soul.
While he was a critic of the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and human rights abuses, Benn visited Moscow several times as a minister, hailing the “professionalism” of the regime after dining at the Kremlin and the “brilliance” of the space programme.
In 1967, after hosting Premier Kosygin in London, he was granted a rare invitation to attend the May Day Parade in Moscow’s Red Square – a move blocked by diplomats on the grounds it could cause “great political embarrassment”. He was also frequent guest at the Soviet Embassy in London, attending a drinks party there on the night George Blake, the Communist mole in MI6, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs.
Yet, in an interview with The Telegraph, Gordievsky reveals for the first time how Benn was quietly shunned by diplomats as a potential source and his views expunged from spies’ briefings to Moscow after they concluded his observations were nothing more than “left-wing fairytales”.
Gordievsky was a colonel in the KGB and resident-designate in London from 1982 to 1985, in charge of intelligence gathering and espionage against Margaret Thatcher’s government as the Cold War reached its dangerous endgame. Since 1974 he had been working for MI6.
He has always maintained that the late Michael Foot, the Labour leader at the time and Benn’s friend and colleague, had previously worked for the Russians as an “agent of influence”, codenamed Boot. Foot always denied the claim, and successfully sued the Sunday Times for libel.
Benn, by contrast, was regarded after little use, according to Gordievsky, now 76 and living in England. In 2007, he was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) by the Queen for "services to the security of the United Kingdom''.
A two-and-a-half hour lunch in late 1983 at the Soviet embassy with Benn led Viktor Popov, the ambassador, to declare him unreliable.
At a meeting that December, Popov ordered agents from the KGB, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the military intelligence directorate to remove any information gleaned from Benn from dispatches to Moscow.
“He was not intelligence material,” Gordievsky said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
“Popov said, when going through your reports about meetings with different politicians to be sent to Moscow, be careful. Some of them are not truthful. I said, who are you talking about? He said Tony Benn.”
“He was an unnecessary simpleton, who told left-wing fairytales and falsified stories,” Gordievsky concluded.
The view on the Left that he was an intellectual titan was not shared by the Russians, he added.
“He was absolutely unsuitable for political life, and I don’t know why the ambassador invited him to lunch; perhaps because he had the authority of being a major left-wing figure.”
Benn’s diaries confirm he did indeed lunch with Ambassador Popov and Michael Meacher, the Labour left-winger, at the Soviet Embassy in London in October 1983.
They discussed Michael Foot’s correspondence with Andropov, the Soviet leader, asking for his views on Britain abandoning all nuclear weapons ahead of that year’s General Election.
At the meeting Popov told Benn that Soviet intelligence had forewarning of the recent US invasion of Grenada, and they discussed proposals to cut the USSR’s missile stocks.
Two years earlier, Gordievsky claims he over-ruled hardline intelligence officers who wanted to support Benn in the 1981 deputy leadership contest.
By this late era, he emphasises, the KGB no interest in sparking a socialist revolution in Britain, and was focussed preserving the balance of power between the east and west. That meant doing nothing to destabilise either political party.
“The staff of the station, brought up with a very conservative, left-wing position, said gosh, we are going to have a wonderful new deputy head of the Labour Party,” said Gordievsky.
“And I was the only one who said, are you ok in the head? If he is, he will destroy the Labour Party. He will destroy the left-wing in Britain. And some intelligence officers listening to this said, ‘Yes, Oleg, you must be right. It was an excessive expression of our admiration’."
“I sent analysis to Moscow, saying the intention of some Labour supporters to elect Tony Benn would be catastrophic, and very, very dangerous. I was very much caring for the normal political balance of the country."

Former KGB colonel says he paid late union leader Jack Jones £200 for information
Jack Jones was in the pay of the KGB when he was Britain's most powerful union leader, according to a former spy chief.



By Martin Beckford 10:00PM BST 22 Apr 2009
The former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, who died aged 96 this week, is said to have been paid £200 for collaborating with the Soviet secret service during the Cold War.
Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who also worked as a double agent for MI5 before becoming the highest-ranking defector to the West, claims he personally gave Jones the money for useful information.
He claims that in 1982 he was posted to London as the Soviet Union's espionage chief in Britain and met Jones – supposedly given the codename Dream – at his flat in south London. By that time he had retired but was still close to key figures in Labour and the trades union movement.
The 70-year-old Russian, who lives in Surrey, says he asked Jones to tell him the names of other left-wingers who would make good recruits for the Soviets.
"For that I paid him £200," Mr Gordievsky told The Daily Telegraph.
He also claimed Jones also passed on intelligence about the leadership of the Labour Party.
Jones was one of Britain's most prominent left-wing figures, having fought in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades before becoming head of the TGWU and a confidant of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, the Labour prime ministers.
But he always denied that he helped the Soviets or even met Mr Gordievsky, describing the suggestions as a "slur and an outrage".
"I met Soviet officials at embassies and on visits to Russia on behalf of my members,'' he said when the allegations first surfaced in 1995. "They might have been KGB. I did not realise I was a target. If I had known I was a target for the KGB, or the CIA, I would have had nothing to do with them. I cannot recall any direct approach from the KGB.''
It was later claimed that he had in fact been working for British intelligence, informing of MI5 when Russians approached him.
Mr Gordievsky was in 2007 appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) by the Queen for "services to the security of the United Kingdom''.
A year ago he claimed he had been poisoned by a Russian assassin in a case that echoed the murder of his friend Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian spy.

Is Ed Miliband really Labour's worst ever leader?


Labour's leadership crisis has been a long time coming. Since taking the top job in his party, Ed Miliband has had trouble convincing anyone to take him seriously. As his poll lead and personal approval ratings leave Ed facing the prospect of throwing away an election that was his for the taking we ask if the Labour Party is looking at its worst leader of all time.
Here are Ed's contenders:



Jim Callaghan
"Sunny Jim" became leader of the Labour Party, and prime minister, after Harold Wilson's surprise resignation in 1976. He became the first person to have held all four great offices of state – foreign secretary, home secretary, chancellor and PM.
But after four unremarkable years, he was brought down by his conflict with the unions: the strikes over pay during the Winter of Discontent crippled his government's popularity, and his response to an interviewer's question about the "mounting chaos" in the country ("I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos") led to the Sun's famous headline: "Crisis? What crisis?" Callaghan never recovered, later admitting that he had "let the country down", and was ousted by Margaret Thatcher's Tories in 1979.



Michael Foot
Given how he is remembered, it's surprising to think that Michael Foot was elected as Labour leader, after Callaghan stood down in 1980, as a compromise candidate between the Bennite Left of the party and the Right, represented mainly by Denis Healey. But as soon as he was elected, four senior Right-wing party members – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers – left t form the Social Democratic Party, pushing the party to the Left.
Despite leading the polls early in his leadership, by the time the general election came around, Foot – who had been mocked for wearing a "donkey jacket" to the Remembrance Sunday wreath-laying ceremony – lost in a landslide, their vote split with the SDP. The Labour manifesto, which advocated higher taxes, nuclear disarmament, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the nationalising of the banks, was described by the Right-wing Labour MP Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history".


Neil Kinnock
Kinnock remains the longest-serving leader of the opposition in British history, having led the Labour Party in the wilderness from 1983 to 1992. The first years of his leadership were spent in a bitter fight with the party's Left, particularly the "Militant Tendency", the Trotskyist movement within the party. He was also highly critical of Arthur Scargill and the tactics used in the miners' strike.
Despite leading the polls ahead of the 1992 election, Kinnock and his party suffered a shock defeat (leading the Sun to declare it was "the Sun wot won it", after a sustained campaign against him), and was replaced as leader by John Smith.



Gordon Brown
After Labour, under Tony Blair, won election in a landslide in 1997, Gordon Brown became chancellor of the exchequer, where he remained for almost 10 years. But it was claimed that before the election, in a restaurant in Islington, the pair had agreed that Blair would stand aside to allow Brown to become leader. A decade later, this happened – but only after the two men's relationship had become unworkable, with widespread rumours that Brown was actively sabotaging Blair from within the Treasury.
Once in power, Brown looked set for an easy victory over a demoralised Tory party – and he came close to calling an election in the first months of his premiership, while he was riding high in the polls. But he backed away from it, and shortly after the global economy collapsed; then, a series of leadership challenges and defeats in by-elections and local and European elections left him weaker and weaker. In the run-up to the 2010 general election he was caught on microphone calling Gillian Duffy, a Labour voter he had talked to, "a bigoted woman". Labour slumped to defeat in the election and the only saving grace was that despite the party's unpopularity the Tories were unable to achieve a majority


Ed Miliband
One of Brown's key aides, Miliband, together with his brother David and his close colleague from the Treasury days Ed Balls, was expected to take a key role as the party came to terms with the end of New Labour and a return to opposition. But David was expected to be the next Labour leader. In the post-election leadership contest, though, Miliband stood – unexpectedly – and, with the support of the Left of the party and the trade unions, beat his brother, in what commentators described as "fratricide" and "stabbing his brother in the back".
His awkward personal style, though, has never been popular with the electorate – he has consistently trailed both his party and his opposite number, David Cameron, in terms of popularity, even while Labour has remained ahead in the polls. And various PR gaffes and terrible photo opportunities, including his failure to eat a bacon sandwich and a tweet which described the late Bob Holness as the host of "Blackbusters", have dogged his leadership, as his poll lead against the Tories has gently ebbed. In recent days he has suffered another blow, as rumours of a leadership challenge have swirled around him, although he has denied a plot against him and insisted he will lead the party to the election.

Why does the Labour party continue to elect such dismal leaders? They are all unsuitable to run the country. They are chosen by the influence of the unions. It also seems that the Labour party is very good at recruiting incompetents in general.

Haze,

Because the prefer a reasonably honest group of individuals who have aspire to a social responsibility rather than the elected a corrupt bunch of self serving elitist who tend to dependent on inherited advantages and intent on preserving their personal advantages.

Hopefully, and probably the UK electorate will hold similar views.


-=-=-=-==

Max,

If you haven’t already viewed http://www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/professor-vernon-bogdanor-fba-cbe
Have a look.

http://www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/professor-vernon-bogdanor-fba-cbe

It was part of my period of growing up and was an interesting reflection of the 45-51 political period and effects on UK politics.

Also, one may see similarities to the present political period.

==========


I wish he had included a critique of the successes and failures of the actual period of government.

Ed is the biggest gaffe of all of them. David Milliband would have been our next PM without doubt imo.

TV was blinkin awful I thought .....don't watch much anyway but what do you get ? Eastenders, Emmerdale, Coronation Street and some panel shows.......is that the best they can serve now ? if the younger generation could go back to the seventies and see the fantastic shows throughout the Christmas/New Year where you were really spoilt for choice....would never have believed then how poor it is today...thank god for dvds...anyway..having a quiet Christmas/New Year.....

And what the hell is a ...Crimbo ?......does that come from latin ?...

RF

Didn't you watch " On The Buses " , just as funny as it was in the 70's

Don't you have Free view ? there are loads of old shows to watch.

Anyway...stuffing myself with leg of lamb follow-up....chateau plonko....followed by deserto muller corner out of date cherry.....

Yes Allders....I do....had a look on channel 24...nothing....15...can't remember...6....Bond seen too many times....will have a look tonight....I do have some Steptoe dvds to watch.....

Didn't you see that "On the Buses " was on yesterday and all the Carry on films

Didn't you see that "On the Buses " was on yesterday and all the Carry on films