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.

If Ed Miliband's in the driving seat, Nicola Sturgeon will be steering him to the Left
A Labour-SNP coalition would be a recipe for chaos that could lead to the break-up of the UK

By Boris Johnson
10:01PM BST 19 Apr 2015

You wouldn’t get Herod to run a baby farm, would you? It would not normally occur to you to interview a convicted jewel thief for the post of custodian of the Tower of London.
You would not dream of asking a fox to look after the henhouse or a temperance campaigner to run a brewery or Attila the Hun to work as a doorkeeper for the Roman senate – and no one in their right mind would enter into a contract with a bunch of voracious weevils to protect the lovely old timbers in the tower of the local church. Would they?
Any such course of action would be totally nuts. So can someone tell me why in the name of all that is holy there are some apparently rational people who are even contemplating the elevation of the Scottish Nationalist Party to a position of effective dominance in the government of the United Kingdom – an entity that they are sworn to destroy?

That is their charter, their aim, their ambition, their mission statement: to overturn last year’s referendum, and to break us up. They want to end Britain, to decapitate Britannia, to cause a constitutional upheaval that would gravely weaken this country, a rupture that has provoked horror in Britain’s friends around the world – and a silent chuckle among those who do not wish us quite so well.

And yet it is now clear that it is only with the help of the SNP – a party that is literally anti-British – that Ed Miliband can have any hope of governing this country. The Labour implosion in Scotland means that his chances of forming a majority government are now put at less than 1 per cent.

If Miliband is to occupy Downing Street, he will have to do it either by means of a formal coalition with Salmond/Sturgeon, or with an arrangement called confidence and supply, by which the Scots Nats agree to help knock his legislation through the Commons.

It is therefore obvious to every serious political analyst that he would be in many ways the plaything of the SNP. Unless he has the support of that 40-plus bloc of Scottish secessionists, he will be stymied. If Miliband somehow manages to form a minority government, he will be peeping from Alec Salmond’s sporran like a baffled baby kangaroo. He would be the vacillating Macbeth, pushed hither and yon by Lady Macbeth, in the form of Nicola Sturgeon.

Did you see her the other night, telling him to man up, to screw his courage to the sticking place – to do what she told him to do because “you are not strong enough on your own”? The awful truth is that she is right. Without her help and her say-so, and without the support of Salmond and his troops in the Commons, there is not a single bill that Labour could get through. It is a recipe for chaos; and worse than chaos – because the SNP has changed over the years.

The reason they have lampreyed the life out of Labour in Scotland is that they have become ever more Left wing. Miliband is already the most Left-wing Labour leader since Michael Foot, promoting an agenda that seems to be avowedly hostile to wealth creation and “predatory” capitalism. The SNP are Lefties on steroids. They want to abandon any attempt to get the deficit under control, and indeed the Treasury has calculated that they would borrow another £148 billion.

They think taxes are far too low in Britain, and would seek new “progressive” taxes on top of what Labour is already proposing. They would scrap Trident, denuding Britain of its nuclear deterrent and sending future prime ministers naked into the conference chamber. The SNP would junk all attempts to reform the welfare system – even though they have the support of most voters in this country, and indeed most Labour voters.

They seem to dislike anything to do with America or free trade, and so would ditch the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, even though the deal would be good for the UK economy. On many of these issues they would of course be opposed, initially, by many Labour MPs. But what could they do? Unless Miliband plays ball, he will be powerless to legislate. He would lose the confidence of parliament, and he would be chucked out.

Yes, he will be sitting in the driving seat, pretending to be steering the car – but all the time he will have clever Nicola next to him, whispering in his ear, and perpetually yanking the steering wheel to the Left. Eventually there will be another terrible crash, just as there was in 2008/9.

But why should the SNP care a hoot about that? There is a grim sense in which the worst outcome for the UK is also – for a party that wants to break up the UK – the best.

Miliband’s proposed deal with the Scots Nats is like the fable of the frog that agrees to carry the scorpion across the river. In the end he will get stung – because that is the nature of the beast.

The risk is that by the end of this calamitous partnership there will be so many people in England who are cheesed off by the SNP’s behaviour that they will be only too happy to bid Scotland goodbye; and anybody thinking of voting Ukip should realise that by putting in a Labour/SNP alliance they are going to turn the UK into the Former UK, and their party will have to be called FUKIP.

Keep the Tories and you keep the Beefeaters guarding the Tower; you let farmers protect their chickens with their own shotguns; you keep out Attila and other roaming Eastern European criminals with tougher immigration controls; you keep Britain’s booming breweries and distilleries exporting overseas with ever-greater confidence; you repair the church tower with the VAT refund introduced by George Osborne – and as for the crèche that was in danger of being run by Herod, you fund ever better child care with the 30-hour free care announced in the manifesto.

Vote Tory to stop a Labour/SNP coalition from wrecking the country – a choice, as I may have mentioned before, between competence and chaos.

The mere thought of Fifi and Wallace and Grommett running the country reckon it's odds on a Conservative majority :0)

Northerners and Scots are the same.

Whatever turns you on.

I would think Cameron is leading the tory on a death march to oblivion.

He won't be able to buy himself out of trouble this time!

Perhaps, he can do it to Chopin's Funeral March!

.

No Fred, your getting confused Labour are being given the last rites in Scotland by Fifi and Wee Eck! LOL!

An American friend came to visit me in London last week, and after a few days he suddenly announced:

‘Your election is completely insane!’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3047165/PIERS-MORGAN-Meet-dangerous-wee-woman-world-ve-never-heard-of.html#ixzz3XrlmY5G7



Coincidentally, I too have reached the exact same conclusion after spending a few weeks back in my home country and witnessing at first hand the political carnage erupting as Britain prepares for its first General Election in five years on May 7th.

But I was curious as to why he had.

‘I always assumed that you basically have a 2-party system like ours,’ he replied. ‘We have Republican versus Democrat, you have Conservative versus Labour. Yes, you have a few other smaller parties, but they never have any real power.’

‘Well, that’s basically still true,’ I replied.

‘No it’s not!’ he roared. ‘There’s some tiny red-headed lady from Scotland who’s chewing them all up and makes William Wallace look shy! She’s fantastic!’

It was my turn to laugh. More from nervous discomfort than amusement.
For the truth is that Nicola Sturgeon, firebrand leader of the Scottish National Party, is indeed chewing them all up.

This diminutive but sharp-witted woman has rampaged through the UK election campaign like a mini-Godzilla, breathing fire and brimstone in such a passionate manner that even Wallace himself – a Scottish warrior hero immortalized by Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, who died trying (and failing..) to wrestle independence from the English in the late 13th Century - might have struggled to emulate it.

Today, Sturgeon unveiled the SNP’s manifesto with a speech of such dynamism that even many English voters were left drooling with admiration.

She’s made every other party leader look tame and lame by contrast and shaken the foundations of the UK’s political machinery to the very core.
But in the process, she is emerging as the world’s most dangerous woman that few outside Britain have ever heard of.

Let me explain.

The pathetic reality of British politics right now is that neither of the two main parties has a hope in hell of winning an overall majority at the general election.

So they will have to take a begging bowl to one of the smaller parties to do a deal that allows them to form a ‘coalition’ government. The biggest ‘smaller’ party will almost certainly be the SNP, who should end up with 40-50 seats in Parliament, having pretty much wiped out the socialist Labour party in that country, which used to be considered its heartland.

And Sturgeon has already made it crystal clear she would rather be mortally impaled on a rusty set of bagpipes than do a deal with current Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party.

So the smart money is now beginning to drift towards a coalition government between Labour and the SNP.

This would instantly propel Nicola Sturgeon into the real corridors of power, as a major player - and who knows what merry hell she may wreak once there?
So no, ‘fantastic’ isn’t quite the way I’d describe Ms Sturgeon.

Try ‘terrifying’.

I don’t use that phrase lightly, nor is my concern based on any kind of misogynist view of female politicians.

Margaret Thatcher was the first person I ever voted for, at the 1983 election a few weeks after I turned 18 – the legal voting age in the UK.

In many ways, Sturgeon reminds me of Thatcher.

She’s a tough, uncompromising woman with a fierce, combative intelligence – she’s a lawyer – and an ever fiercer ambition.

She also shares Thatcher’s withering disdain for the myriad less able men who dare to cross her political patch.

But that’s pretty much where the comparisons end.

Politically, they are about as closely aligned as Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

Thatcher was a tremendously patriotic advocate of both the United Kingdom and Great Britain.

(Note: they are not, as many Americans believe, the same thing. The UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain comprises only England, Scotland and Wales. Southern Ireland is an independent Republic and part of neither.)

Sturgeon wants Scottish independence, thereby breaking up the UK after more than 300 years.

The SNP narrowly failed to achieve this in a referendum a few months ago, but their hunger to try again remains just as ravenous and if anything their support has increased since then, especially since Scots know they can safely vote for the nationalists in a UK general election without Britain immediately ceasing to exist.

And the rest of us can’t rely on our Queen to have her hanged, drawn and quartered to stop this mission in its tracks, in the way her predecessor King Edward 1 eventually dealt with Mr Wallace.

But why does this matter to anyone outside of poor old Britain?

Well, an independent Scotland, by common rational consent, would be an economic and military disaster for the rest of the UK and, by default, its allies - notably America.

Scottish armed forces have played a consistently key role in the UK’s military actions. Without their guaranteed involvement, Britain’s capacity and effectiveness would be severely diminished which is bad news for an America which knows that, even if their actual numbers are relatively small, having British forces on the ground in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is very valuable politically.

But that’s not even the biggest threat Ms Sturgeon poses to national and international security.

She’s also made it very clear that she would not renew the UK’s “Trident” nuclear subamarine programme if it was her decision.

And she may make kicking it out of its Scottish naval base a deal-breaker for her support.

The $150 billion cost for the American nuke built-system is ‘unjustified’, she insists.

Instead, she would rely on conventional weaponry.

This is where she moves from ‘Scottish agent provocateur’ to ‘Most Dangerous Woman in Britain’ territory.

For the UK to remove its nuclear deterrent at such a dangerously unstable global time is, as my serving British Army officer brother put it, ‘utter madness.’

The world has never needed stable nuclear powers more than today, as terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda seek to join despotic regimes like North Korea in acquiring them, and old enemies like Russia grow ever-more aggressive,
Yet if Sturgeon had her way, America would lose its most reliable nuclear ally at a stroke.

Britain would not only be defenceless to a nuclear attack from this kind of enemy.

If our army, air-force and navy are broken up it would also inevitably weaken NATO.

And England on its own would very possiblylose Britain’s full-time seat on the United Nations Security Council which again, is a key vote the US can almost always rely upon.

America politicians must be freaking out at the prospect of such an alarming shift in the UK’s military spending, thinking and influence.
No wonder President Obama made an 11th hour plea to Scots to stay united when the referendum took place.

We now face the prospect of having our Government being dictated to by a woman who wants to smash up the UK, abandon the nuclear deterrent and defiantly cry ‘No chance, laddie’ next time the White House asks for our help.

Like I said, terrifying.

I still have a letter from Maggie Thatcher adorning my London office, congratulating me on winning a nuclear debate at my high school.
I argued passionately then about the insanity of disarming ourselves at a time of considerable global tension.

The situation is now undeniably even more unstable and worrying.

So the SNP’s surging power couldn’t come at a worse time.

Before the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, William Wallace declared: ‘We come here with no peaceful intent, but ready for battle, determined to avenge our wrongs and set our country free. Let your masters come and attack us; we are ready to meet them beard to beard.’

The only difference between Nicola Sturgeon and William Wallace is she doesn’t have a beard.

Piers Morgan

What's the latest polls........

Populus have voting intentions of CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 15%, GRN 4%.

ICM have topline figures of CON 34%, LAB 32%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 11%, GRN 5%

In other words, nobody knows whats going to happen.

Piers Morgan that dreadful thing I despise him . a truly awful individual.

whatever the various opinions expessed here, the odds must surely favour a coalition of labour and snp + perhaps a few of the also-rans
this scarcely fills one with confidence , but then nor do the tories

one way or another, the current bunch of political leaders and their henchmen make the much scorned WW1 generals look like a collection of super-heroes

let's at least hope for another GE within just a few months ...... a bit like chucking in one's hand at scrabble and hoping for a better selection of letters next time around

The cut back Kippers at it again:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32390436

Just a bunch of ex "Con" artist voters in the main.

Sir John Major: A Labour and SNP deal will cause 'mayhem'




By Peter Dominiczak, Political Editor

10:30PM BST 20 Apr 2015

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An Ed Miliband government propped up by the SNP will lead to “mayhem” as Labour faces a “daily dose of political blackmail” that will lead to higher taxes and job losses, Sir John Major is to warn.


Making his first intervention of the general election campaign, the former Conservative prime minister will use a speech to warn that all voters in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will "all pay the price" if there is a deal between Mr Miliband and Miss Sturgeon.


The SNP will be in a position to "bring down the government at any time" if its demands for increased spending in Scotland are not met, Sir John will say.


It came as two of Labour’s most senior figures on Monday opened the doors to talks with the SNP in the event of another hung Parliament.




Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, and Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, both suggested that Mr Miliband could look to do a deal with Miss Sturgeon after the May 7 vote.

It represents a significant shift in Labour’s rhetoric over a deal with the SNP. Mr Balls last week said that any deal with the Scottish nationalists would be a “betrayal” of English voters.

Mr Miliband has repeatedly refused to rule out a deal with the SNP after the election, despite insisting that he would never form a coalition with Miss Sturgeon.




In a sign of the growing confusion in the Labour Party over Scotland, Mr Miliband on Monday repeatedly said “that ain’t gonna happen” when asked if the SNP would be “calling the shots” after the election, but again did not conclusively rule out a deal.

Miss Sturgeon on Monday unveiled her election manifesto and pledged to force a UK government into £140billion of extra spending.

Her plans would mean around £5,200 more borrowing per household in the UK, raising the prospect of significant tax hikes worth thousands for families across the country.

Laying the groundwork for a post-election deal with Mr Miliband, the SNP prospectus also supported a series of flagship Labour pledges including the reintroduction of the 50p top rate of tax, reversing the NHS reforms as well as a cut in tuition fees to £6,000.




On the prospect of a Labour government requiring SNP support, Sir John will say: “This is a recipe for mayhem. At the very moment our country needs a strong and stable government, we risk a weak and unstable one - pushed to the Left by its allies, and open to a daily dose of political blackmail.

"In 16 days' time, the people of the United Kingdom will elect our next Government. There is a simple choice to make: do you vote for the Party that presided over economic chaos: or the Party that has led us out of it?"

While Cameron and Farage alienate 5.3 million Scots.

No wonder the Scots wish to leave the UK!


Well done!

Rubbish, you can't blame the Cons for Labour's demise in Scotland. Not called canny for nowt, branch office ring any bells?

I hear when Sturgeon wins the election she is going to transfer the Clyde Side Trident bases to the Thames embankment, suggesting as London is the heart of the nation it should be better protected!

It could be the next London tourist attraction with Boris as the tourist guide!

Only sensible...What a good idea.