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.

Interesting to see as UKIP modify and moderate their "mantras" they polling rates are beginning to soften.

I'll tell you what!

As we walk the dog in the local park, the standard of girls' legs is going up in leaps and bounds!

If I see some absolutely fantastic legs in front of me, well, it's mostly a case of 'Thank you Eastern Europe!'

Anyone concur?

I'd be careful in this environment ExecLine.

russian gas
no one here seems to have noticed that putin is threatening to cut off gas supplies to ukraine and others in a very few days time

Frackin' 'ell! He's not, is he?

so it was implied on the wireless earlier - ie ukraine's pre-paid gas is due to expire in a few days time

That's the funny thing about people, they like to get paid.

Exec,

What sort of dog are you looking at?

-----0-00-

Manuel,

Perhaps, the sanctions can include non-payment of bills.

Take a break? More like give us a break... Danny Alexander pins his election chances on toe-curling garish pamphlet including his own recipe for 'sausage and butternut squash stew'

Garish campaign pamphlet produced by Treasury minister appears to be based on Take a Break magazine

Talk of the Glens contains no fewer than 17 photos of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury – including one as a child

'Danny's sausage and butternut squash stew' which includes 'roughly diced' squash but 'finely chopped' onion

He is pictured posing with Quentin Willson and a bottle of Dalwhinnie whisky is offered as a crossword prize

By Alan Roden For The Scottish Daily Mail

Published: 11:58, 26 February 2015 | Updated: 14:10, 26 February 2015







Like all good lifestyle mags, it features family recipes, a crossword and minor celebrities. But 'Talk of the Glens' is a magazine with a difference – it is actually a political campaign leaflet for one of Britain's most high-profile MPs.

Apparently modelled on 'Take a Break', the garish pamphlet is Danny Alexander's secret weapon as he bids to see off a major election challenge from the SNP in his Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey seat.

It contains no fewer than 17 photos of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury – including one of him as a young child and several digitally manipulated images of Mr Alexander from the internet.

With the catchline 'true life stories from the Highlands', the magazine includes a recipe for 'Danny's sausage and butternut squash stew' – which includes 'roughly diced' squash but 'finely chopped' onion - and a crossword that offers the prize of a bottle of Dalwhinnie single malt whisky.


the whole thing is here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2970162/Take-break-like-break-Danny-Alexander-pins-election-chances-toe-curling-garish-pamphlet-including-recipe-sausage-butternut-squash-stew.html

Max will you stop posting DimLib nonsense I though you were a Kipper, also I was just on my way to the Ukraine but just caught Alf's warning... close thing eh? -):

Manuels, how many boats and canoes can you rent to the Ukraine, Germans to ship gas from USA, Canada, Argentina, and Mexico.

Is it feasible to replace "necessary" gas supply?

===

Mind you, the 75 Instructors and specialists Dodgy Dave has sent to the Ukraine should frighten the life out of Putin and quieten him down.

i don't know fred
i confess i don't even know if there are pipelines running from europe (as opposed to russia) into ukraine

for sure there are LNG tankers that hold "lots!!", but how many could be mobilised at short order and whether or not that would even give a short term solution, i really don't know

simplest, and what i suspect will happen, is that eu will throw several $bn to ukraine so they can top up their gas meter for another few months

Dead right Fred and as one of DD's trusty 75 I've pulled out on account that they can't keep the heating on now... so there.

Manuel,

I have 3 things in the back of my mind and can't tie them up.

1) back in the period of the Yugoslav civil war, one of the whispers was that there was an oil pipe line being built through Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia and into "Western Europe" from Romania and its middle east suppliers.

There were innuendos that this was one reason Nato got involved. I thought it baloney at the time.

2) another feint memory is that the USA (Japan) were building some colossal gas tankers a few years back.

3) that some gas refinery plants were being built at sea for cleaning up the gas, directly freezing it and shipping from berths at sea in "refrigerated" tankers.

What volumes I do not know.

I thought it may having being done in anticipation of Putin and ME.

1) don't know

2) yes, they exist but there's still only so much that can be carried

3) LNG is carried in refrigerated form - ie chilled so cold it turns to liquid as it takes up much less room of course
i have certainly heard of floating storage tanks (ships) which are used as intermediaries between incoming vessels and distribution on shore, but not the other way round

Ed Miliband told his energy price freeze could make the lights go out
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is confronted over his energy price freeze by a small-business owner who warns that 'massive investment' is needed in Britain's energy infrastructure


By Steven Swinford, Deputy Political Editor1:23PM GMT 26 Feb 2015
Ed Miliband has been warned during a keynote address to business leaders that his energy price freeze could lead to the lights going out.
The Labour leader was confronted during an address manufacturers and engineering companies about his plans to reduce the profit margins of energy companies.
One director at a small business warned that "new power investment" is "desperately needed" and said that the energy companies will need to make "massive investments".
Mark Carleton, services director at Mestec, a company which measures factory performance, said: "Power generation capacity margins are at historic lows. Investment in new power generation is desperately needed. The Labour party's apparent position is that energy company's profit margins of between 3.5 and 4.5 per cent are excessive.
"What level of profits would you regard as acceptable, and do you believe that profit margins of below the current levels are going to be sufficient to incentivise energy companies to make the massive investments that are required to keep our lights on? Or do you believe that the funding to build new generation facilities is going to come from elsewhere."


Mr Miliband has said that one of his first acts in office would be to pass emergency legislation forbidding energy firms from increasing domestic prices for almost two years.
Speaking at the EEF conference in London, he said: "Let me just be straight with you. When it comes to the way that our energy market works, I don't think it's working well. All of the evidence on margins made on each customer, what happens to wholesale retail prices, all of the evidence suggests I am right on this.
"We need energy companies to invest in the future. But the judgment I took, and I think it was the right judgment 18 months ago, was that we needed to reset the market. That's the point of the price freeze. We have also set out a very detailed set of proposals for how the energy market should work in the future.
"You can only carry public consent on this if you have a regulatory system that works and people have faith in."
During his speech Mr Miliband said he would be a "champion" for engineering and manufacturing if he becomes Prime Minister.
He admitted that "if I am Prime Minister we won't always agree", but added that businesses will "always have a voice, we will always listen".
The Labour leader said: "If I am Prime Minister after May 7, I will champion your cause ...
"I believe manufacturing and engineering are the wave of the future. Not simply the pride of our past.
"I dare say if I am Prime Minister we won't always agree. But you will always have a voice. We will always listen.
"We will always engage in dialogue. And we will always strive to work together. Our future depends on it."
Mr Miliband said he wanted to give businesses more control over funding, as well as asking companies who win government contracts and those recruiting from outside the EU to take on apprentices.
"Our 10 year aim, our shared mission as a country, must be to ensure that as many young people leaving school at 18 go on to an apprenticeship as go into higher education," he added.
Mr Miliband also stressed his desire to stay in the EU – in contrast to the Tories' commitment to an in-out referendum.
"There is no greater threat to the long-term stability and prosperity of Britain and British business than leaving the European Union," he said. "That is why it is so wrong to play fast and loose with our membership of the European Union."

Bill Jamieson: The predictable economic recovery
WORLD of punditry must own up to getting it wrong about the remarkable resilience of the business cycle, writes Bill Jamieson

Record numbers in work, inflation at a new low, business start-ups booming, the stock market at a new high: first one milestone, then another.

Welcome to the recovery – yes, the Recovery that Should Never Have Been.

Let’s take a trip down Memory Lane, to 2009. The global banking crisis had struck. The economy was spinning into deep recession. Financial markets were gripped with fear. Shares were plunging. On newsstands and on television, then on bookshelves and social media, the harbingers of doom closed in.

Earnest commentators warned of apocalypse. House prices would dive, millions of homes would be engulfed in negative equity. Capitalism as we knew it was in its deepest crisis. Across America and Europe thousands of businesses would be closed and millions thrown out of work. On BBC Newsnight the studio back wall projected terrifying graphs of plunging markets. And in bookshops and book festivals the gloomiest tomes poured forth. Talk of recovery was dismissed as facile: we had not grasped the full magnitude of the crisis. Mass unemployment would be with us for years as governments rammed through dreadful austerity programmes.

For the doom-mongers it was boom-time. Hours of analysis were given to them on TV and their books – the more grisly and apocalyptic the title the better – flew off the shelves.

Now it’s certainly true that we suffered a sharp and painful recession. Recovery took its time. On net trade – our balance of payments – the figures are still dire. There’s a long way to go yet before we can pronounce a full recovery.

But look, too, at what actually happened. The business cycle did something totally predictable. It turned. Here’s a tip: that’s what cycles do. The economy, both in Scotland and across the UK, has now been in recovery for three years. Last year output passed its pre-recession peak. In the year to the third quarter of 2014 – the latest for which official figures are available – the economy in Scotland grew by 3 per cent. Hands up those who forecast this? No hands.


For many it is the labour market that provides the best indicator of our economic health. What happened here? Far from mass unemployment, many companies hoarded labour during the downturn. Business recovered, there was a deluge of business start-ups, firms started recruiting, unemployment fell and numbers in work climbed steadily. Since 2010 three private sector jobs have been created for every one public sector job lost.

Don’t say Scotland missed out on this. Figures last week showed unemployment in Scotland fell by 15,000 in the three months to December and is now down to 5.4 per cent – lower than the UK average (5.7 per cent). And numbers in work rose to a record high of 2,625,000 over the same period.

Are these recovery milestones soon to be wiped out as we falter and slump backwards? It never does to believe in a linear path of upturn any more than a linear descent into a Great Depression.

But the stock market isn’t too gloomy about prospects. This week the FTSE 100 index of leading shares passed a new milestone. It hit an all-time high, beating the previous record set 15 years ago.
Investors took heart from the OECD’s latest survey of the UK economy noting its 2.6 per cent growth last year was the highest in the G7. And it expects the same this year.

Yet over the past five years leading forecasters such as the Fraser of Allander Institute consistently under-estimated the strength of recovery. It was not alone in this. But its analysis constantly argued that the recovery needed higher government spending and warned that “austerity” cutbacks would hold back our performance.

Yet despite five years of spending constraint, economic growth in Scotland and across the UK has defied these gloomy predictions. Of particular note has been the surge in new business start-ups – the number in Scotland has risen by almost 50 per cent since the end of the recession, taking us to the highest level in the series back in 2004.

Across the UK a record number of new businesses were started last year – more than 580,000. But all this should not have happened.

What of that house price collapse? Scotland’s mainstream market was indeed hit by economic worries, poor sentiment and lending constraints. But according to upmarket estate agency Savills this week, it is likely to show a strong performance over the course of 2015, with the highest rate of growth across all UK regions. “There continues to be”, it says, “strong market activity in Scotland’s traditional prime market hotspots like Edinburgh, Aberdeen and the West End of Glasgow.”


Consumer confidence has recovered too. A study by Lloyds Bank finds that household confidence in spending has risen to its highest point in four years.

Finally, what of spend on infrastructure projects, a particular concern of the Keynesian School? Yes, many projects were cancelled or deferred. But today we are standing on the threshold of a regeneration of our infrastructure across the UK running into hundreds of billions of pounds and the biggest upgrade to our power, roads and railways since the Victorian era.

Add up all the scattered, disjointed bits of news about road projects, rail upgrades, nuclear plant refurbishment, flood mitigation and plans to transform transport connectivity and it comes to a massive sum.

Nor is Scotland missing out here, either. All told, Scotland’s five largest transport projects will total more than £7.5 billion over the next three decades.

The Scottish Government is never slow to bleat about grinding Westminster austerity. But this week infrastructure secretary Keith Brown forgot to put on the ragged trouser outfit and the threadbare jacket. He spoke of schools, colleges, hospitals, transport and other public infrastructure projects worth around £1.5bn set to be completed this year.

Well said, Mr Brown.

But this, too, fits with a story nobody foretold. It may be a classic case of economists being right in theory – but wrong in practice. Never mind. Let’s raise a glass – to the recovery that we were kept being told would never happen.



VOTE LABOUR AND THROW IT ALL AWAY! LOL!!!

Ed Balls to reject SNP’s £180bn spending demand

DAVID MADDOX
00:00Thursday 26 February 2015
92
HAVE YOUR SAY
ED BALLS will come to Scotland today to ­reject Nicola Sturgeon’s demands that the next government spends an extra £180 billion in the next five years.

In a tough message Labour’s shadow chancellor – on a visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow – will warn that a Labour government will have to “balance the books”.

Earlier this month the First Minister visited London to state the price of the SNP propping up a Labour government would be an increase in spending of 0.5 per cent, a total of £180 billion, and dropping plans to balance the books by 2020.

Speaking at University College London, she said: “Labour is far too slavishly attached to the Westminster fixation on deficit reduction in isolation.”

However, despite insisting Labour will end the deficit by 2020, Mr Balls will challenge SNP claims his party will repeat Tory austerity policies.

Mr Balls will highlight Labour’s planned mansion tax on homes worth £2 million or more, ending zero hours contracts, raising the minimum wage to £8 an hour and restoring the 50p tax rate for those earning £150,000 or more. He will say: “This is the change Scotland needs but only ­Labour or the Tories can form the next government and every vote for the SNP is another vote which will make it more likely the ­Tories will form the next ­government.”

His speech comes as Scottish Labour launches its first election broadcast under Jim Murphy’s leadership, repeating the message of “balancing the books” in a “fair way”.

Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran also pressed home the message yesterday during Scottish questions in the Commons where she revealed Commons’ library figures showed 82 per cent of the 27,000 new jobs north of the Border since 2010 were low paid while 28 per cent were zero hours contracts.
She said: “This government stands up for the wrong people: they help out their friends who have been avoiding their taxes, yet they do not help those who work hard and play by the rules, but do not even get a decent wage in return.”

However, Tory Scotland ­Office minister David Mundell hit back: “You [Labour] could start by endorsing [Scottish Tory leader] Ruth Davidson’s proposal to incentivise the paying of the minimum wage, and that is actually a fact, not rhetoric.”

Just in case some of the Conners Party missed it or are in denial about the dear leader.

Immigration to Britain rises in pre-election blow to Cameron
BY KYLIE MACLELLAN
LONDON Thu Feb 26, 2015 2:27pm GMT

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Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron fields questions after delivering a speech on education at a Conservative Party event in a school in Enfield, north London, February 2, 2015. REUTERS/Andrew Winning
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron fields questions after delivering a speech on education at a Conservative Party event in a school in Enfield, north London, February 2, 2015.
CREDIT: REUTERS/ANDREW WINNING
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(Reuters) - The number of people moving to Britain surged last year, an embarrassment for Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservatives had pledged to cut net annual migration to the tens of thousands, close to a national election.

Official data published on Thursday showed a net 298,000 people moved to Britain in the year to September 2014, a 40 percent rise from the previous 12 months and more than when the Conservative-led coalition government took power in 2010.

With polls showing the Conservatives neck-and-neck with the opposition Labour party ahead of the May 7 vote and immigration one of voters' top concerns, the rise is awkward for Cameron. His party is also under pressure from the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which favours strong curbs on immigration.

Both Labour and UKIP said Cameron's immigration pledge was now "in tatters."

"This government's policy is fatally holed beneath the water line and is sinking fast," said UKIP migration spokesman Steven Woolfe, describing the numbers as "absolutely staggering."

A ComRes poll for ITV on Thursday showed UKIP was by far the most trusted party to control immigration, and 40 percent of Britons said immigration had a negative impact on the economy.

A spokeswoman for Cameron said the figures were "disappointing" but that the government had taken several steps to tackle the levels of migration and the prime minister did not regret making the promise.

"He thinks it is in the interests of our country, that we will have a better, stronger country if we had lower net migration," she said.

Cameron, who has pledged to re-negotiate Britain's ties with the EU ahead of a 2017 membership referendum if re-elected, has set out plans to restrict EU migrants' access to welfare benefit payments in a bid to make it less attractive to come to Britain.

Releasing its final migration data before the election, Britain's Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the number of EU citizens coming to Britain increased by 43,000 to 251,000 during the period.

The number of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, whose restrictions on working in Britain were removed on Jan. 1 last year, was 37,000, up from 24,000 over the same period in 2013.

With British economic growth outpacing most of the EU it has become an increasingly appealing destination for those seeking work. The ONS said that between October and December 2014 employment of EU nationals in Britain was 269,000 higher than a year earlier.

-=-=-=-=-=-=

Pledges have a different meaning for Dodgy Dave before and after the deal!

strewth!
so much verbiage today; i can see why i'm not bothering much