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.

Another Burnley boy in the news:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/32257895

The most terrifying thing about Nicola Sturgeon is that she may be - sort of - right

Opportunity is faltering in this country, and the Conservatives must find a better answer than the 'progressives' now circling around Ed Miliband




From left, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband shakes hands with Plaid Cymru Party leader Leanne Wood, Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett, as UKIP leader Nigel Farage stands at his lectern after a British election debate broadcast on television at Central Hall Westminster, London, Thursday, April 16, 2015 Photo: Stefan Rousseau/Pool





Charles Moore
By Charles Moore

7:10PM BST 17 Apr 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11546046/The-most-terrifying-thing-about-Nicola-Sturgeon-is-that-she-may-be-sort-of-right.html



A reverse takeover (RTO) is when a smaller company takes over a bigger one. It is defined as “a type of merger used by private companies to become publicly traded without resorting to an initial public offering (IPO)”. This is what the SNP is trying to do to the Labour Party.


On Thursday night’s television debate, Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, made this clear. Under her RTO, the bigger company will be taken over immediately after the general election. Then – without an IPO, i.e. the opportunity for non-Scottish voters to have a say – she will have the whip-hand in the Government not just of Scotland, but of the whole of the United Kingdom.


One must gasp with admiration at the way she does it. To pursue the business analogy, she makes Ed Miliband look like the complacent chief executive who won’t quite tackle the competition (by agreeing to “lock David Cameron out of government”) and hasn’t got the vision to revive the brand.


Ms Sturgeon’s brand is “progressive change”, which is a 21st-century way of saying “socialism”. Even before the merger is effected, it is selling well. In the TV debate, the Greens and the Welsh Nationalists were with her on this. Mr Miliband tried to be too, at least as much as is consistent with wearing a dark suit and trying to look like a statesman. So is progressive Nick Clegg, who didn’t show up. If you asked the also-absent Mr Cameron, I expect he would tell you how much he likes progressive change too.


Which leaves only Nigel Farage pointing out rather crossly that all this progress is not so marvellous if taxpayers – already burdened with debt – have to pay out yet more, if business is squeezed and scorned, and if foreigners have an automatic right to the benefits.

Mr Farage was right to complain that the live audience in Methodist Central Hall was a BBC self-parody of Left-wing bias, as was the panel. But what struck me about the debate was not how unlike the ones which include the Tories and the Liberals it was, but how similar.

The mood of all these meetings is that “austerity” is bad, that there is a prevailing unfairness holding the people back which the conventional party leaders won’t address. So when Ms Sturgeon calls for boldness, her words find an echo not just in Glasgow, but from Land’s End to John O’Groats. She has become a major player in the nation she wishes to break asunder. If she pulls off her RTO, I recommend she chuck in all this stuff about Scottish independence, get a Westminster seat, and become Progressive Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She is not weighed down by that New Labour/Old Labour burden, all that Milibaggage.

If, like me, you dislike the word “progressive” and don’t believe in ever-higher taxes, you may not be enjoying the campaign very much. If you do not understand why the manifesto of the Conservative Party should boast, Soviet-style, “We have a plan for every stage of your life”, you may wonder if there is anyone left who believes in a free society. If you are dismayed by the lack of attention in this campaign to how prosperity is created, you may feel cut out of the national conversation.

But one must calm down and consider soberly a horrifying possibility – that Nicola Sturgeon may be, sort of, right.


There is something dreadfully inadequate about “austerity” (although if people think they have experienced the real thing here, they should go and live in Greece or Spain). There is something awry with a society in which wages are only now rising in real terms after seven years of stagnation. There is something rotten about the chief executive of a high street bank (HSBC) being a “non-dom” in the country where he was born and in which he works. And who could blame young people, unable to get their feet on the housing ladder, if they grabbed any actual ladders lying to hand, climbed into all those empty London properties owned by absentee Russians, and squatted there?

None of the ruling parties in the age of the credit crunch has answered the problems the crisis created. Labour, which presided over the bust and had the most collusive relationship with big banks of any government in our history, bears the heaviest blame. But the Conservatives endorsed the spending policies of the Gordon Brown era and so addressed the crisis too late. The voters sensed this and, for that reason, neither party could win the last election.

In 2015, the voters sense a similar thing, with the difference that Nick Clegg no longer seems like anybody’s answer. Neither Tories nor Labour can quite say why they want to be in charge. The Conservative-led Coalition has made strong progress recently, shown again in yesterday’s job totals, but probably too late. A similar air emanates from all three main parties – one of evasion, embarrassment, even fear.

Therefore the marginal entrants attract the attention. Even if the SNP wins every single seat in Scotland on May 7, the party will still have only a fifth of the votes of Labour or Tory, nationwide. But it will have authority, and the big boys won’t.

So Ms Sturgeon is right that the economic system is not still working properly and the political system likewise. Where are she and all the other lovers of “progressive change” wrong?


Obviously they are wrong to ignore or despise markets, business and how money makes the world go round. But one should not frame this argument in the usual cliché that socialists have heart and capitalists have head. Their key, mistaken, almost unchallenged assumption is that the problem of nowadays is inequality.

Once you make economic inequality the chief measure of social ill, you always end up with socialism as your remedy. You think each economic difference is automatically wrong, so the easy remedy is to take from the better-off. This is an incentive to make people poorer because, so long as they are all poor, you feel you have achieved something. Making people poor is one of the few things that governments are really good at. Such equality is a social evil.

Surely the key wrong of the credit crunch era is not inequality, but the lack of opportunity. It does not harm the young person earning £25,000 a year if someone else earns £500,000. Indeed, if we all got £25,000, he would have fewer life-chances and much less to motivate him. But if there is a special caste of people who earn £500,000 from which he is forever excluded, then he has no chance.

Opportunity is not growing in modern Britain. It costs about three times more to buy your first house, in real terms, than it did 30 years ago, and it takes longer to find one. It is harder to get well-educated if your parents cannot afford to pay for it (though Michael Gove improved this situation before being punished for his courage and moved on). My generation was the first of which a sizeable percentage owned shares. Now we look as if we shall be the last. We had serious incentives to save, and our personal pensions were the envy of continental Europe. For the young and middle-aged today, saving makes no sense and the private pension has become like a tree from which successive chancellors have stripped almost all the fruit.

The Tories are talking, rightly, of security. But security is earned by opportunity taken, and opportunity is stuttering. If they do not win this election, it will be because, no longer knowing what they believe, they are tongue-tied when confronted by the language of “progressive change”.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-32352674

Ed Milliband turned up and look what happened to him , the green oz women was all pie in the sky policy's, SNP wants to form a Labour/SNP government but at the same time wants to leave the UK, go and don't stick your nose into the English Parliament. They all turned on UKIP over Farage saying there should be a end to free NHS treatment for people who turn up from all over the World, and we often hear of foreigners having treatment over here and going home without paying

we often hear of foreigners having treatment over here and going home without paying

i have no idea of the quantum of this problem, but per earlier posts on this subject, except in the case of genuine "acute emergency", i fail to see why payment cannot be enforced at the door
this is standard procedure for any private clinic, whether for blood tests or surgical procedure
certainly, collecting after the event quickly becomes very time-consuming and thus expensive as any credit controller will tell you

cyners - 18 Apr 2015 10:30 - 58779 of 58779
"we often hear of foreigners having treatment over here and going home without paying" in the Daily Mail.

"i have no idea of the quantum of this problem"

It's a major problem to Daily Mail readers and bigoted UKIP voters. But, to normal, sane-minded folks, the numbers involved are negligible.

do you know the amount of money involved, or are you just speculating?

linked to that, do you have any objection to the concept that immigrants should need to have contributed to the system or to have lived and worked here for a certain amount of time before they qualify for welfare benefits?

Post 58780

Allah will be pleased. I am worried that I agree with Hil.
=-=-=-===-=

Max,

I would think the posters were probably put up by members of the lunatic fringe of UKIP!

My son did tell me the amount involved, Cyners - I can't recall how much it was because life's too short to worry about trivia like that, but it's not a great deal in the grand scheme of things.

In answer to your second question, it's not something I'm bothered about. But it does depend upon whether you're talking about EU or non-EU immigrants. If you wanted to limit or deny EU immigrants from receiving benefits or healthcare, you'd require a law change to make the same rules apply to UK nationals too.

"not a great deal in the grand scheme of things" can be an awfully large amount :-)

Pop over to la belle france hilly, trot down to the benefits office...see how far you get.

That also goes for healthcare of the non emergency kind.

I do pop over to la belle France regularly as it happens, Max, on account of how we own a few properties (mostly converted town houses, and some viagers) in Herault and Gard, and I spend my summers there. So yeah, I do know exactly how the French healthcare system works, and that's what you have insurance for.

But what has that got to do with anything that the UK does exactly?

i should imagine, along the lines that uk's magnanimity and generosity to eu and non-eu immigrants alike is unnecessary and unsupportable
btw, i don't think a change in law would be required, but solely to internal regulation and application

I thought it was Fred who was posting , not Hilary.

It's a major problem to Daily Mail readers and bigoted UKIP voters
Here we go again, talk about foreigners abusing the NHS , and the problems of mass uncontrolled immigration you are called a bigoted UKIP voter


on account of how we own a few properties (mostly converted town houses, and some viagers)

You want to get back and live like the normal working class have to live in overcrowded innner city's

What will he do for a vote?


He is a ??????

Classic :-)


hilary - 18 Apr 2015 14:24 - 58787 of 58790


I do know exactly how the French healthcare system works, and that's what you have insurance for.

perhaps the box should be showing a picture of Sturgeon, for EM would assuredly have his strings operated by her