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.

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.

Yep was reading a report on a Yank site about extreme volatility.

Nope youl get a groveler from me. I stick to my word.

Probably just spent his weekly benefit cheque in the local pub:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11350409/Drunk-man-tries-to-have-sex-with-postbox.html

GF,

Manuel never makes a mistake and is unlikely to apologise.

His opinions are incontrovertible.

8-)

i'll settle for a pint of mild and bitter and a decent slab of home-made raised pie with piccalilli :-)

Give him a bitter pint.

Hemlock.

well done fred ..... an apology from you too please, as it's sticky who will owe me one

Non, je ne regrette rien!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU

plus que ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

Cut off date is a week before the GE.

does your local still mild?
i don't come across it often and indeed, can't quite place where i last saw it

on the other hand - and more for Balerboy than you - there is an extraordinary little pub called Tucker's Grave at Faulkland (Soms) that is well worth a visit
apart from the beer, they also serve REAL Thatcher's cider that comes from just down the road

Thatcher's cider - you are having a laugh, the left wing rabble wouldn't go anywhere near that out of principle.