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.

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.

The words Claptrap and Alf in the same sentence...say no more.

fine stan, but how about addressing the issues i raised ...... if you are betting that labour will have an outright majority, then say so

In short the Conservative mandate for the GE..

shortie - and that for labour is what? .... i assume none of the other parties warrant any mention at all

If you are talking about removing freedoms then look at the Blair government. By the way none of the details below involved repealing any anti union laws brought in by Thatcher.

The Blair years: new law passed every three hours
Last updated at 08:12 04 June 2007


In his ten years as Prime Minister, Tony Blair has introduced a new law every three-and-a- quarter hours, new research reveals.

Since 1997, an average of 2,685 laws have been passed every year - a 22 per cent rise on the previous decade.

They have covered subjects ranging from the importing of bed linen to the evaluation of statistics on labour costs.

The figure does not include European Union laws which also affect Britain - last year, 2,100 of those were passed, bringing the total to 4,785 or 13 every day, according to legal publishers Sweet & Maxwell.

Of the laws, 98 per cent were brought in by statutory instruments, rather than Acts of Parliament. The procedure allows less time for debate by MPs than the tabling of a Bill.

The statutes themselves have become longer, with five Acts passed last year taking more than 100 pages to explain, three of them more than 200, another above 300, another above 500 and one more than 700 pages long.

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Oliver Heald said: "Tony Blair and Gordon Brown think the answer to everything is to make a new law.

"But, after creating thousands of new laws, violent crime has doubled."

A spokesman for the Bar Council, which represents barristers in England and Wales, said: "Politicians often equate legislation with action.

Oh the other parties are just as hideous, I just like taking the piss out of Cameron the most. He has to be the most uninspiring, waffle talking, back tracking, lying prime minister that this country has ever had. I thought Blair topped it but Cameron wins the prize in my book... I wouldn't trust the man with a mop and bucket!

The Conservative philosophy is to increase freedom and reduce the nanny state that is so prevalent under Labour.

fred before the alt"" bit in the code for that picture of Farage can you insert

width="200" height="150"

please???

I love this one!! So true..

Could you ever trust him again!?!