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.

Yes Max, there's a very nice looking :-)) housewife that delivers for next and the likes in her 'y' reg ford car. I suppose they get to know the routes/ address locations to make things quicker. Also noticed a lot more signed for deliveries are being hidden somewhere ie over the back gate, to save a double visit if the person is out.

The country is short of drivers especially hgv drivers,. so all is not lost. Mind you, they will have to take a test.

Low wage rip off Britain set up by the "Con" Party Government of the 80's maintained by Tory Blair and now pushing earnings further down and hours up with this mob.

You lot make me laugh, If you Right Wingers don't like it...then stop persistently voting for it.

stan - how do you arbitrarily raise wage levels particularly for those at the lower end of the qualification scale without additional productivity and/or a smaller workforce if you are to remain competitive?

Yes, but we have to get away from the "in work" benefits lark.

Companies need to pay a realistic wage, it's no good having record employment if it's actually costing the taxpayer money.

NHS

There are no shortage of Filipino fully trained Nurses and other medical staff who want to work in the NHS who speak english, but the new immigration and red tape to get a visa is stopping or delaying them working here, also coming from a country with a lot of poverty the cost to get the document's to come here are very high.

i am reliably informed that the best nurses are no longer uk-trained, so it is certainly no surprise that most now come from overseas
that they may well cost less is also no disadvantage in one way, especially where NHS and its trusts are already strapped for cash

doctors present a completely different set of conundra, one of which being, that for better or for worse, hours are restricted ..... this has a variety of benefits, but also brings a goodly number of problems in its wake

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2888820/Labour-poll-crisis-Miliband-clashes-Election-chief-Insults-fly-Ed-labelled-indecisive-Douglas-Alexander-accused-sulking.html

Labour poll 'crisis' as Miliband clashes with his own Election chief: Insults fly with Ed labelled 'indecisive' and Douglas Alexander accused of 'sulking'

Insiders say Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander are barely speaking
Shadow Cabinet Ministers fear fallout could rob them of victory in Election
Mr Miliband's allies accuse Mr Alexander of 'sulking' since Lucy Powell was put in charge of day-to-day campaigning in the General Election
Mr Alexander's friends say he is frustrated by Mr Miliband's indecisiveness

A growing rift between Ed Miliband and his Election chief has sparked new fears that the Labour campaign is in crisis.

Labour insiders say relations between Mr Miliband and chief strategist Douglas Alexander are so bad, they are barely on speaking terms.

Miliband's allies have accused Mr Alexander of 'sulking' after Miliband put Lucy Powell in charge of day-to-day campaigning in the Election. Alexander's friends have hit back, claiming he is 'frustrated' by Miliband's 'inability to act decisively'.

max - you're not entirely wrong, but if the company has to pay more at the base, then that increases their overheads as well as all the other bits like extra employers' NIC and holiday pay etc

what then should be done to ensure that that company can stay in business at all?

Sell it back to "Royal Mail" and raise charges or subsidise.

They are going to be bailed out by the public purse in unemployment "benefits" anyway.

Again..."You lot make me laugh, If you Right Wingers don't like it...then stop persistently voting for it."

Referendum would turn UK’s presidency of EU into a ‘farce’
MPs and Foreign Office officials alarmed over possible clash of in/out vote with Britain’s turn to lead member states

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/dec/27/referendum-uk-presidency-eu-vote



Haze and Manuel's icon leading them into the wilderness.

Perhaps, where they belong.


Senior MPs and Foreign Office officials have raised concerns about the UK’s ability to conduct its next six-month presidency of the EU – scheduled for the second half of 2017 – because it is likely to coincide with an in/out referendum if the Tories win the next general election.

The UK is next due to take the chair of EU meetings and business from 1 July 2017 until the end of that year, with UK ministers chairing meetings and taking responsibility for forging agreements among the 28 member nations, as well as setting a British agenda during its period at the helm.

But MPs and senior mandarins believe it could prove unworkable, and that the UK might well have to apply to have the presidency shelved, because David Cameron has promised to hold an in/out referendum by the end of 2017. EU member states take turns to hold the presidency. The last time the UK held the reins was in the second half of 2005.

The Observer has learned that the issue is already causing headaches within the Foreign Office, which is in the initial stages of planning the next UK term as president, amid growing uncertainty about whether the country will even be in the EU after 2017.

A senior Foreign Office source said that, if Cameron were still prime minister and called a 2017 referendum, the ability of UK ministers to serve as neutral chairpersons of EU meetings would be in serious question. “It will be very difficult, and if the prime minister finds himself recommending a British exit it will be unworkable,” said the source.

Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader and a member of the foreign affairs select committee, said that, if the Tories were still in power and had called a referendum, a British presidency would be chaotic. “It would not be so much a paradox as a parody, with Tory ministers in charge of the EU while trying to leave it,” he said.

Cameron has made clear in recent months that, if he cannot renegotiate the UK’s membership, including changes to the EU’s founding principle of “freedom of movement”, then he may be prepared to recommend an exit in a referendum. In the event that the Tories win the next election, a so-called “Brexit” has become more likely, after the German and French set their faces against fundamental changes to the EU treaties, including freedom of movement.

Conservative Eurosceptic Sir Bill Cash, chairman of the Commons European scrutiny committee, who wants the referendum brought forward to 2016, said: “It would be chaos. You could have some ministers in charge of EU meetings who were known to be in favour of the UK leaving and some who were in favour of staying in.”

Max,

Haze and Manuel don't have the attention span to read this article, but gives a fair assessment of the UK and consequence of right winged ideology,

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/28/rightwing-ideology-lost-britiain-war-afghanistan-and-is-destroying-state-and-country


Will Hutton

Right-of-centre ideology has lost us the war in Afghanistan and much more besides
The ignominious retreat from Afghanistan is emblematic of a wider malaise that is afflicting Britain today

----

short excerpt

"In some respects, as James Meek writes in the current London Review of Books, the whole enterprise is worse than a defeat. To be defeated, he writes, “the army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it”. David Cameron’s assertion at the end of 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission “was accomplished” completed the political and military’s establishment’s catalogue of wholesale mis-statements, dishonesty, betrayal and refusal to acknowledge reality that characterised the whole affair. It matches the then defence secretary John Reid in 2006 declaring that the Helmand mission could be achieved without a bullet being fired. It is left to a war poet such as James Milton, who speaks to us as eloquently as the war poets of the First World War, or other ex-soldiers and ex-diplomats in their books and essays to expose the waste, delusions, third-rate thinking and grand failure of military and geopolitical strategy that led to the whole disaster.

The Ministry of Defence and the military establishment are revealed as over-optimistic boneheads. Everything militated against success. The amount of money that was squandered beggars belief. The initial assessment – asking 1,200 brave paratroopers to pacify a province that later required 30,000 Nato soldiers – was a monumental miscalculation by any standards. Too much of what was planned was driven not by military need or political calculation – but by trying to impress the US.

But the US, although much more effective than the patronising British, was, at a meta strategic level, wrong. The war against terrorism, developed by George W Bush in the hours after 9/11 with little consultation with his own military or cabinet, let alone his allies, is one of the great failures of the rightwing mind. The reflex reaction to an act of mass terror was not to outsmart, out-think and marginalise the new enemy – it was to get even by being even more violent, lawless and vicious, leading Nato into the Afghan quagmire, and the coalition in Iraq. Two trillion dollars later and hundreds of thousand dead and displaced, the world is predictably much less safe for the west than it was – and jihadism is much more entrenched."

===========-
If UK is kicked out of the EU, then USA will deal with EU direct and the UK will be the flotsam and jetsam left on the beach.

You forget Fred, it was that raving lefty loon Bomber Blair who led the charge into Afghanland and G'Daffyland.

And it took a lot of conservative rebels to defeat Cameroon's idea of a wizard wheeze caper in Syria.


As for the UK getting kicked out of the €U? Why should we be worried about that? The whole thing is going to collapse anyway.

Some reading for you Fred:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-231214.html

i assume a reasonable assumption that our resident red-bannerist won't like your stuff Max :-)

Max,

Follow Napoleon's banner and see where it gets you!

Read a balanced paper and not ones fit only for bad fish and chips.

If you read the article you may have a more informed opinion of thoughts about the Iraq affair and "success".

Napoleon's mind freezers over, if it the contents of an article are more than a sentence and are only half read when not in accord with his ill thought out position, or the latest Con party mantra.

Unfortunately, his brain, or the little he may have originally had, is now addled and reading time span and his concentration, from what he repeats is writes seems locked in his own meanderings.

He repeatedly states that those other than himself are stupid, or similar, but open appears to have the intelligence of a gnat and unable to concentrate for long enough to read any article to the end, which contradicts his indoctrinated previous views..

Mind some lucky "block" idiots last longer than one would expect!

I can see why his wife no longer wishes to entertain at home.



========

When are the Tory boys going to realise that the normal labour supporter doesnt mind who wins the election as long as its labour and another and perhaphs another.

WE JUST DONT WANT THE RICH BOYS IN POWER AGAIN.

GF.

Correct.

I think the majority of the UK want to see the back of this present elite cabal and hope for a more socially responsible government in its place.

By SCOTT MACNAB
Labour leader Ed Miliband has been branded an electoral 
“liability” after reports emerged that he was blocked from speaking in an eve-of-referendum rally earlier this year.


Pro-union chiefs in the Better Together Campaign in Scotland feared Mr Miliband’s presence could be detrimental to their campaign, it was claimed.

Labour last night insisted Mr Miliband played a “vital role” in the referendum campaign and was in Scotland more than any other Westminster leader.

But the reports placed fresh questions over the role Mr Miliband will play in the coming UK election campaign north of the Border, with Labour haemorrhaging support to the SNP.

It was also claimed Tories Philip Hammond and Iain Duncan Smith were banned from campaigning by members of their own campaign.

Nationalists last night seized on the reports, which also claimed Mr Miliband had a “hugely negative impact” on the campaign. SNP Glasgow Cathcart MSP James Dornan said: “These revelations prove that Ed Miliband was seen by his party as a liability during the referendum campaign – a Labour leader seen as so out of touch that he joined senior Tories Philip Hammond and Iain Duncan Smith in not being permitted to even speak to voters in Scotland.”

It was claimed that Mr 
Miliband was asked by then Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont “Why are you here? You are not winning any votes.”

Ms Lamont subsequently quit as Scottish leader after the referendum victory, accusing Mr Miliband of treating Scotland like a “branch office.” Another Labour source described Mr Miliband as a “total liability” who had a “hugely negative” impact on the referendum campaign and “didn’t win us one vote”.

But a Scottish Labour spokesman last night played down the reports. “The referendum was a decision taken in Scotland by people who live and work here,” he said. “Ed Miliband played a vital role in the campaign to keep the UK together and campaigned in Scotland more than any other UK party leader.”

A weekend poll forecast that Labour is facing heavy losses at the general election in May to the SNP, which is expected to take 45 of Scotland’s 59 seats. The collapse of Labour in Scotland would offset any gains the party makes in England and Wales and could put Downing Street beyond Mr Miliband’s reach.

Labour has slumped to 26 per cent in Westminster voting intentions, while the SNP is on track for 43 per cent, an ICM poll of 1,004 Scottish adults states. Labour’s previous hold on 41 seats could slip down to 10, while the SNP is set to increase from six seats to 45 of Scotland’s total 59 places in the Commons.

Spot on Fred.

Been up at my local Con Club quite a bit these hols had to get away from her indoors, driving me mad.

No kidding Camoron and Osbourne are detested now.

The older Tory voter now turning against them.

Say they are all going to UKIP mind, so TANKERS theory might have something to it.