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.

By Bruno Waterfield, Brussels, and agencies
6:25PM GMT 15 Jan 2015
Three people killed in anti-terror raid in Verviers, Belgian federal prosecutor says, after local residents report hearing gunfire and explosions

Three people have been killed during a terrorism-related police operation against suspected jihadists in Belgium, a federal prosecutor said.

Local residents in Verviers, in the east of the country, heard a fusillade of machine gun shots and explosions.

Reports indicate that the gunfight followed a foiled jihadist attack on a local police station.

“A second Paris has been avoided,” a ministry of justice source told Nieuwsblad newspaper.

A local resident said: "I heard two explosions and saw two young men run away. They were between 25 and 30 years of Arab origin."

Another local resident told RTBF television: "I heard a sort of explosion, followed by several gunshots. For the moment, I cannot tell you any more because I don't dare go out to see what is happening."

A third resident said "machineguns were firing for about 10 minutes."

A number of people have been arrested. The operation is now believed to be over.

What as Fester McVey staged a coup and kicked fat Dave out.

When is the CHICKEN coming home?


Nigel wants to tar and feather him!

Fears of a 'disenfranchised generation' after almost a million people disappear from electoral roll




Crackdown on voter fraud could cause a massive reduction in turnout



Andrew Grice Author Biography , Hannah Fearn

Thursday 15 January 2015



Hundreds of thousands of young people could miss the chance to vote in May’s general election following a change in the way people register, prompting fears of a “disenfranchised generation”.



New figures reveal that almost one million people have gone missing from the electoral roll in the past year. Today Ed Miliband will describe it as a “scandal” and accuse the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats of denying young people a voice.

To combat fraud, the Government is switching from household registration to a system where people can no longer register others in their household and must add themselves individually to the roll.

This means that universities and colleges no longer register students living in halls of residence. Statistics compiled by Labour show a big fall in registered voters in university towns and cities including Cardiff, Liverpool, Newcastle, Southampton, Leicester, Nottingham, Brighton, Durham and Hull. In London, the drop is almost 100,000.



More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/fears-of-a-disenfranchised-generation-after-almost-a-million-people-disappear-from-electoral-roll-9981453.html

What do you expect from this bunch of NASTY party creepers.

The French used to have a show called :"the bebete show",,,,,all the main characters/politicians were muppets of a sort so you had Kermitterand and Scooter Chirac and Barsy......a scream at times....

They are only doing what the previous lot did.

In any case, Nick don't care cos they wont vote for him this time around.

Conservatives and Labour tied

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 15th January -

Con 32%, Lab 32%, LD 6%, UKIP 16%, GRN 8%

Voters prefer spending on services to cutting borrowing15/01/2015

British people tend to say the next government should spend more on public services – even if it has to borrow more or tax more

We now have a clear definition of the ballot-box question – the choice the voters feel they are making when their little pencil hovers over the paper: do we want deeper cuts to reduce the deficit, or do we prefer to spend more on public services? In YouGov polling for the Times Red Box, we put it to the voters: "If you had to choose, which of the following directions would you like the next government to take Britain in?" and we gave them three choices.

24% opted for "doing more to reduce the amount the government borrows and the debt it builds up, even if it means public services do less or have to do things with less money"
32% preferred "Giving public services more money and more investment to try and improve services, even if it means the government has to borrow more and builds up more debt"
29% want to leave borrowing and spending as now



With another sample, the question substituted lower taxes for reducing the deficit. This actually increased the preference for more spending, with only 14% going for "trying to keep down or reduce the amount of tax that people pay, even if it means public services do less or have to do things with less money", while 42% preferred "giving public services more money and more investment to try and improve services, even if it means many people have to pay more in tax" (and 32% who wanted things to stay as now).

If Labour can persuade people that they will protect public services from the deepest cuts while still showing a modicum of concern about debt, they are in with a strong fighting chance of edging the Tories.

I see membership of the Green Party has exceeded that of both UKIP and Lib Dems.
2517

Id say the above gives Labour a clear advantage over the Tories. Lets just hope they take note.

It is about time that voter registration was tidied up. Previously, a member of the household would list people allowed to vote. There were large numbers of false registrations, notably in Tower Hamlets and the Midlands. In some cases there were 100 people registered to vote at one address. Now you need proper ID such as passport details or National Insurance number. The fall in voter registrations is almost exclusively in Labour seats therefore a good thing!

“We will ensure that young people do not lose their voice,” Ed Miliband will tell his audience at Sheffield Hallam university at noon, as he tries to convince traditionally left-leaning under-35s to register to vote. Perhaps not the best choice of venue given the Labour Students branch at the very same university was abolished just six months ago, because they didn’t have enough members to fill their committee positions.

Surprise surprise


People want more spending, ...as long as it's someone elses money.

no mention of paying more tax to fund the extra spending in the questionaire i take it :-)

How do you spend £3.7 billion in just eight weeks? In a Government supposedly wracked by austerity, this was the unusual problem faced by officials at the Department for International Development (Dfid) in 2013.

All around, their Whitehall colleagues were finding ways of imposing cuts, but in Dfid’s imposing new headquarters off Trafalgar Square, the big worry was how to shovel money out of the door.

This is the central message of the latest report on Dfid from the National Audit Office. The most powerful objection to the Government’s promise to devote 0.7 per cent of national income to overseas aid was that spending money would then become an end in itself.

The rational way to run anything – whether a Whitehall department or a fish and chip shop – is to decide what you want to achieve and then spend as little as you can get away with. Once you subordinate everything to hitting a spending target, you turn the rules of rational management on their head.

Back in 2013, Britain became the first G7 country to hit the 0.7 per cent target by the simple device of giving Dfid the biggest percentage increase in its budget ever enjoyed by any Whitehall department in peacetime history. Overnight, Dfid’s allocation jumped by 33 per cent to £10.4 billion – and spending this money became the ministry's central goal.

Officials had to cope with another unusual problem. At the end of every calendar year, the rich countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report their aid spending and their progress towards meeting the 0.7 per cent target.

Like the rest of Whitehall, however, Dfid works according to the financial year, running from April to April. And the Government had promised to hit the 0.7 per cent target in 2013. So there were no prizes for spending money in January or February 2014: this would not count towards keeping the pledge for 2013.

So Dfid found itself on a spending splurge in November and December 2013. At first, its officials thought they would have to shovel £2.7 billion out of the door in those two months. But the figures went awry and it turned out they would somehow have to spend £3.7 billion.

How to solve the problem? Well, overseas development assistance falls into two categories: bilateral aid, which Britain gives directly to poor countries, and multilateral aid, which goes to organisations like the World Bank or the United Nations.

The advantage of the latter category is that various arms of the UN are always asking for money. If you have a few billion pounds going spare, you can always write a cheque to the UN. And that is essentially what Dfid did. In November and December 2013, it suddenly gave £1.7 billion to multilateral organisations. In particular, Britain gave £415 million to the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and malaria.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. In the end, the cash wasn’t wasted. But it’s never a good idea to make spending money a target in itself. And if Dfid’s role is increasingly going to be writing cheques for international organisations, then does it really need a staff of 2,700?

Telegraph

Well sorry lads but YOUGOV is the TORIES MOUTHPIECE.

Not labours.