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.

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.

a good reason to trust none of the polls then wouldn't you think?
ashcroft's may be the exception, insofar as and polls are worth a cracker, and i recollect even he reckons labour are struggling

No the experts are saying it was a one off flunked ashcroft poll this last monday (as was the one that showed a labour lead of 5%) and Ashcroft as pointed out Labour are in front in the marginals but the Tories have closed the gap, not significantly though.

Here.........

I’m in meetings and out and about tomorrow, so I’m doing week two’s round up tonight. The second week of 2015 and the long campaign we saw the first two phone polls of the year – Ipsos MORI’s monthly political monitor and the first weekly Ashcroft poll of the year.

YouGov/S Times (9/1/15) – CON 32%, LAB 32%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 18%, GRN 6%
Ashcroft (11/1/15) – CON 34%, LAB 28%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 16%, GRN 8%
Populus (11/1/15) – CON 32%, LAB 37%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 13%, GRN 4%
YouGov/Sun (12/1/15) – CON 32%, LAB 33%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 17%, GRN 6%
Ipsos MORI (13/1/15) – CON 33%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 11%, GRN 8%
YouGov/Sun (13/1/15) – CON 32%, LAB 33%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 7%
YouGov/Sun (14/1/15) – CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 15%, GRN 7%
YouGov/Sun (15/1/15) – CON 32%, LAB 32%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 16%, GRN 8%

Ashcroft’s poll looks like an obvious outlier with a six point Conservative lead, most polls however clustered around a wafer thin Labour lead. The UKPR average of the latest polls now has figures of CON 33%(nc), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 7%(-1), UKIP 15%(+1), GRN 7%(+1). Lord Ashcroft also started the year with a change to his methods, like YouGov moving to include UKIP in the main voting intention prompt.

you lost the bet on interest rates big time, so reckon the same for a labour majority :-)
indeed, it's far from clear if labour will even hold the largest number of seats
fave must be a weakly led weak gov't whoever happens to get his arse into #10

all in all, i think we're in for a dreadful time in 2015

Draghi can still turn the markets around next week. But it as been a very long bull run.

Im getting set up in gold and silver and hoping for a bull market in this area for the next couple of years.

Holding FRES. ACA, and HOC. Could be very risky but for once using stops but not too tight.

Still chance for a rate increase but Very unlikely.

YOU WILL get a groveling apology.

i don't want one, even from you :-)

dow is ridiculous today, and it's even been easy to sit on my hands for once, for it's totally impossible to work out where it will go even within say a 10 minute time span ..... it's movement spread has often been 60/70 points even within that short span

The snooker is crap too.