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.

Should be put in prison for 2 years.

Bloody election, they will be knocking on doors before long pestering people... As per previous years I always tell whoever knocks they have my vote and refuse to put one of there posters up in my window. I may just stick this up instead!!

electric gates work too :-)

By Laura Donnelly, Ben Riley-Smith and Steven Swinford

10:00PM GMT 27 Jan 2015

Ed Miliband’s attempts to make the NHS his key election weapon have descended into chaos after he was accused of running a “comfort zone campaign” and refused to endorse the shadow health secretary.


As both parties stepped up their election campaigns, the Labour leader’s efforts to put the NHS at the heart of his party’s strategy appeared to backfire.


At a speech in Manchester on Tuesday, he set out a 10-year plan for the health service. But within hours, he came under attack from party heavyweights, with the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn accusing him of running a “pale imitation” of Neil Kinnock’s doomed electoral operation in 1992.


The leading Blairite said that Mr Miliband was sticking too closely to Labour’s “comfort zone” in its campaign, and was at risk of making “a fatal mistake” in its approach to the NHS, by failing to promise real reform.


The attack came as Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, made a speech in London setting out the detail of Labour’s NHS plans. But he was left pleading for a place in a future cabinet, after Mr Miliband pointedly refused to say whether Mr Burnham would become health secretary in the event of a Labour victory.

In a further embarrassing slip, Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, was revealed to have been discussing the depths of the party’s dark mood.

“Some of our colleagues think optimism is an eye disease,” Mr Johnson was recorded as saying at a fundraising event last week.

With the NHS set to take centre stage in the battleground between the major parties, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, has offered a pay rise to more than a million workers, resulting in the suspension of major strikes across the health service which were due to start tomorrow.

The offer means that NHS staff earning up to £56,000 will receive a one per cent pay rise in 2015-16, with an increase of more than five per cent for the lowest paid. Officials said the costs would be paid by freezing incremental pay rises – a controversial system that gives staff automatic increases linked to time served – for those earning more than £40,000 during the year.

In addition, reforms will be made to NHS redundancy rules for the highest paid, capping payouts at £160,000 rather than the current £500,000.

The proposals agreed will now go to union members for consultation. They will affect more than 1.1 million nurses, midwives, ambulance workers, administrators, porters and cleaners.

The suspension of planned strikes, which could have badly disrupted NHS services at a time when they are under unprecedented pressure, is likely to insulate the Conservatives from attacks over their handling of the NHS.

The plans detailed by Labour promise 10,000 more nurses, partly funded by a mansion tax on homes worth more than £2 million, and a system combining health and social care, to keep more older people out of hospital.

Mr Miliband said the election campaign was “a fight for the future of the NHS” and suggested that a Conservative victory could leave the NHS “sunk by a toxic mix of cuts, crisis and privatisation”.

But the Tories questioned Mr Miliband’s sums, accusing him of promising the same money twice, having said in Tuesday's speech that the mansion tax would be used to cut the deficit.

Mr Miliband also said that he “honestly can’t remember” using the word “weaponise” to describe his party’s strategy of fighting on the issue of the NHS in the run-up to the general election.

The Prime Minister has said the use of the term was “disgusting” and accused him of treating the NHS like a “political football”.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the influential magazine Health Service Journal, Mr Miliband refused to promise Mr Burnham the post of health secretary if Labour were to win the election.

Mr Burnham has been in the shadow post since 2010, but has repeatedly come under fire for his handling of the NHS when he was health secretary before that – most notably for refusing a public inquiry into the Mid Staffs hospital trust scandal.

While praising Mr Burnham’s current work, Mr Miliband told the journal that his policy was “never to nominate anybody for government” because it suggests he is presuming victory or “measuring the curtains”.

The shadow health secretary was left making a desperate plea for the post, saying he hoped his “passion” for his policies and the 10 to 15 years he had spent working on them would give him the chance to deliver his plan. He told a press conference: “Of course I want to see these plans through – I’ve put a lot of my thinking and myself into them, it’s been a long process.” But he conceded that the decision would be made by Mr Miliband.

At the same time, speaking on BBC Radio Four’s World at One, Mr Milburn – who is credited with being a reforming health secretary during his tenure from 1999 to 2003 – raised fears that Labour was set to repeat the 1992 defeat, when a victory was widely expected. “I think the biggest risk for Labour on health, and indeed more generally, is that we could look like we’re sticking to our comfort zone but aren’t prepared to strike out into territory that in the end the public know any party of government will have to strike out into – which is to make some difficult changes and difficult choices,” he said.

They're all third rate turds...bobbing around in the toilet of Westminster, waiting to be flushed.

Looks more like the retreat from Moscow!

Greek government halts privatisation plans – business live


http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/jan/28/greek-government-privatisation-programme-alexis-tsiptas-live

Looks good to me!

But you would prefer this!

Even better!

Conservatives lead at 1

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 27th January -

Con 34%, Lab 33%, LD 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 7%;

Someone has messed up the font size on this thread recently!

Yep Hays but did you see the SKY poll last night an ongoing poll. Had labour as the biggest party not an overall majority but with the SNP as coalition a 20 seat majority.

I said it would happen.

Get ready for your mansion tax bill..............................smirk.

David Cameron churns out another Benefit Cap lie 27/01/2015



Cameron’s heart really isn’t in this election campaign, is it?

Today he’s been rehashing an old lie about the Coalition’s Benefit Cap – that it encourages people into work.

The Cap – for those who have been out of the country or incapacitated in some way since 2012 – limits benefits to £26,000 per family. When it was first put in place, the Tories claimed that this was equal to the average income of British families, and people on benefits should not earn more.

That might seem fair – but the average income of British families – taking everything into account, rather than just wages as the Tories did – is in fact around £31,000. And that was just the first lie!

It wasn’t long before Work and Pensions ghoul Iain Duncan Smith was implicated in another untruth, when he claimed that the mere mention of the Cap sent around 8,000 benefit claimants scurrying into employment. It was another lie; he was reprimanded by Andrew Dilnot of the UK Statistics Authority for that one!

Now Cameron has repeated his assertion that the Tories will reduce the capped figure to £23,000 if elected into office in May – because £26,000 clearly isn’t humiliating enough for unemployed familes and he wants to make them suffer (his words may have varied from this).

According to the BBC, “He said he was responding to public concerns the cap, which sets a maximum limit for state support for individual households, was set at too low a level.” Too low – so he wants to make it lower? The man is demented.

He also rejected calls for Child Benefit to be exempted from the Cap – showing his true colours on the matter of child poverty. Cameron is all for increasing it!

Cameron claimed on Radio 4’s Today programme that the Cap was having the desired effect and that about 40 per cent of households which were no longer subject to the cap had found work. Tory figures are notoriously untrustworthy, though.

Also, when he says a policy is having “the desired effect”, what effect is that, exactly?

“The evidence is that the cap set at £26,000 has worked. Many thousands of households that were subject to that cap have gone out and found work.

“It shows that many who have been subject to the cap have been more successful in finding work than those who have not.”

Does it really? If so many people have found work, then perhaps Mr Cameron can explain why Income Tax receipts have fallen under his leadership?

Nasty Lying sleazy Tories.

Andy Burnham’s car crash with Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark

A very tetchy Shadow Health Secretary began the interview by admitting “there is a role for the private sector”, then piled into the Tories for putting “all services” at the hands of the market. As Kirsty politely pointed out, only 6% of NHS services have been outsourced to the private sector, and the vast majority of that was done by Burnham’s Labour government:



When Wark asked for “a straight answer” on how much Labour would allow to be outsourced – “a number, a number please” – Burnham refused, saying: “I’m not going to put a number on it” and that responsibility for this was at local level. The Tory outsourcing so aggressively decried by Burnham is just 1.5% more than he implemented, and he won’t even commit to reducing it. 

Perhaps Burnham’s bad mood was something to do with this morning’s front pages, which report Labour figures have responded to his big speech yesterday by laying into the party’s NHS strategy.

As Miliband centres Labour’s election campaign on the NHS, public satisfaction is at an all time high…

instead of concentrating on all your usual claptrap and nonsense - also applies to fred and haze and even stan on occasion - perhaps you should be more concerned with the effects of having a badly hung parliament, with the two major parties led by complete numpties and with neither party even having good lieutenants and ncos behind them

somewhere into the mix, you can then throw snp who will have a good slab of seats, but probably not quite enough to be kingmakers, and discuss how you want to treat with them and their readable agenda

I am expecting either a Conservative majority or a Con/Lib coalition. So it will be more of the same or some strong government. I agree with you that SNP won't do as well as is being predicted. To do that they would have to overturn 25,000 majorities in some cases. Every recent election has shown that the polls underestimate the Conservative vote.