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.

Still laughing at the above pictures......(:)).....

Politics will get knocked off the headlines for a bit as a result of the new Royal baby girl.

She went in at around 6am or so and the baby was born at 8:34 am. So easy peasy.

Sounds like she was actually in advanced conservative, sorry, labour, when she went in.

8lbs 3ozs

It sounds like she will most probably be going home today too.

Exec,


Hope you have them same luck when you deliver.

it is indeed a very witty and funny cartoon, unlike those from the socialist worker or from wherever free culls his, which rarely have any humour attaching

===========

you don't really think the consultants would allow their WHOLE w/e to be wrecked do you?

Who TF is Alice?

Duke of Edinburgh's mother, Princess Alice died 1969

Max,

I think would prefer to cuddle up with Nicola for the weekend rather than your page 3 pin up:



or Haze's mother!



=-===-=

Guess which one reminds me of Ken Dodd?

The first slapper is standing in Shrewsbury and was the one who was useless on QT weeks ago... she's going to get a right kicking.

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/05/02/leader-most-seats-has-biggest-mandate/

Voters: leader from party with most seats has bigger mandate

Voters tend to believe the leader of the largest party has the better claim to be Prime Minister, not the leader of whichever group of parties can command a majority

The public may be headed for disappointment if the leader of the largest party on May 8th fails to form a government – they think that leader has the better claim to become PM.

I wonder if one day that, you'll say that, you care
If you say you love me madly, I'll gladly, be there
Like a puppet on a string

Love is just like a merry-go-round
With all the fun of a fair
One day I'm feeling down on the ground
Then I'm up in the air
Are you leading me on?
Tomorrow will you be gone?

I wonder if one day that, you'll say that, you care
If you say you love me madly, I'll gladly, be there
Like a puppet on a string

I may win on the roundabout
Then I'll lose on the swings
In or out, there is never a doubt
Just who's pulling the strings
I'm all tied up in you
But where's it leading me to?

I wonder if one day that, you'll say that, you care
If you say you love me madly, I'll gladly, be there
Like a puppet on a string

I wonder if one day that, you'll say that, you care
If you say you love me madly, I'll gladly, be there
Like a puppet on a string

Like a puppet on a..... String


LOL!!!!!

you show your age very badly

cyners - Does this look like the face of concern :0) :0) I don't think so.

Are you still supporting goldfinger, mike740 or whoever he is calling himself in the last half hour, week month whatever? Considering you spend the majority of your time arguing against him on his thread across the road, why bother?

So an individual who is the leader of a party, which has less support than the majority of MPs and voters should be PM.

Cameron doesn't even hold the respect of his own party, nor the majority of MPs, nor the voters.

He has as much chance as a wax cat in hell!

Nicola Sturgeon slams Labour “No” to SNP deal


16:20Saturday 02 May 2015
172
HAVE YOUR SAY
PEOPLE across Scotland, including Labour voters, have been “appalled” at Ed Miliband’s refusal to work with the SNP to keep out a Conservative government, according to Nicola Sturgeon.

The SNP leader said any opportunity to “get the Tories out” should be seized, as she hit out at the Labour leader for saying he would not consider a post-election deal with her party if the General Election results in a hung parliament.

If you really want progressive politics and social justice, surely we’ve got to take any opportunity to get the Tories out
Nicola Sturgeon
Mr Miliband declared earlier this week: “If the price of a Labour government is a coalition or a deal with the SNP, it is not going to happen.”


DON'T WORRY NICOLA ED WAS DOING WHAT THE LABOUR PARTY DO BEST, LYING!!!!

Jack McConnell: Anti-Tory alliance will not work



14:53Saturday 02 May 2015
37
HAVE YOUR SAY
THE SNP and Labour would not be able to “gang up” against David Cameron and form an anti-Tory government if the Conservatives win most seats in next week’s election, a former Labour first minister has warned.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has offered to make Labour’s Ed Miliband prime minister if there is an “anti-Tory majority” in the House of Commons and block the Conservatives from a second term in government.

SNP argument that everybody else could gang up on him will not work
Lord McConnell
But Lord McConnell said, even if Mr Cameron fails to win an overall majority, the “public perception will be that he has won” if he emerges from the May 7 election with the largest number of MPs.

The former Scottish first minister refused to try to form an administration in Edinburgh after the 2007 Holyrood elections, as the SNP won one more seat that Labour.

Lord McConnell told BBC Newsnight he had been “under massive pressure” to work with the Lib Dems and Conservatives to “try to put together an anti-SNP coalition”.

But he added: “My view was, even people who hadn’t voted for the SNP felt they had won. If we had tried to do anything that went against the grain we would have been in massive trouble.”

The Labour politician said that meant “even if Cameron was to lose a few seats, if he still has a few seats more than Labour then public perception will be that he has won”.

In those circumstances he said the “SNP argument that everybody else could gang up on him will not work”.


He said: “If we get to Friday morning and the sitting Prime Minister who is in Number 10 has won more seats than anyone else he will automatically get the first go and the public will expect him to do that.”

However he said: “If Cameron loses, even by only one or two seats, then all the momentum and pressure shifts to Ed Miliband to try and form a government - and so will public opinion.”

Sturgeon and Cameron all a Twitter over Royal Baby


19:26Saturday 02 May 2015
5
HAVE YOUR SAY
WITHIN minutes of the announcement that the Duchess of Cambridge had gone into labour, excitement broke out on social media as the world prepared to welcome the fourth in line to the throne.

Despite the early hour the topic began trending almost immediately on Twitter, with #RoyalBaby and Kate Middleton the top two worldwide.





While many fans gathered at the Lindo Wing others followed and reacted to the news online.

In the last week of the election campaign the party leaders were quick to break away from campaigning by sending their best to the royal couple.

Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: “Many congratulations to Prince William, Catherine and George on the birth of their baby girl. Lovely news.”

While David Cameron wrote: “My best wishes to the Duchess of Cambridge, who is having her second child today. The whole country will wish her well.”


Nick Clegg shared the Prime Minister’s sentiments, saying: “Best of luck to the Duchess of Cambridge today, as she gives birth to her second child. The thoughts of the whole country will be with her.”

Labour leader Ed Miliband said: “I want to pass on my best wishes to the Duchess of Cambridge. My thoughts are with her and the Duke of Cambridge today. I wish them well.”


Author JK Rowling had speculated on Friday that the birth may take place yesterday. She said: “I wonder what odds we’d get on the royal baby being born tomorrow and called Victoria?”

The Lego group took the opportunity to create a new Lego Royal Family, complete the baby princess in a pram, tweeting: “It’s a girl! Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.”But Twitter user Liz Webb said she was keeping her fingers crossed. “Come on #RoyalBaby. Please be born today and be a princess called Elizabeth.”

Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their baby girl. I’m absolutely delighted for them.
David Cameron


I'm sure all the republican Nats on here, will share in Nicola Sturgeons congratulations to the Royal couple.

https://twitter.com/jimmyscotloyal/status/594477552720343040

Oh and a comment from a Nationalist too!

-:)


Nice tweet from the First Minister. Now she can get back to work, damaging Scotland and the United Kingdom.

chris - i note your incursions on that thread .... in fact i rather enjoy chatting with sticky (mike), despite his somewhat strange political stance

Interview: Jim Murphy laments Labour complacency


PETER ROSS
00:00Saturday 02 May 2015
85
HAVE YOUR SAY
IN the latest of our series of encounters in the run-up to the general election, Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy talks popularity, polls and why he keeps on smiling.

There are many emotions one might experience on encountering the leader of the Scottish Labour Party. Anger is popular at the moment, at least among those who shout abuse at him in the street. Curiousity is more appropriate for a journalist. But the trouble is that when I do meet Jim Murphy – in a cafe in his East Renfrewshire constituency – a sense of pity keeps breaking through.


He wouldn’t welcome it. Murphy seems a proud man, a man’s man, not the sort to feel sorry for himself, or to be comfortable at the thought of others feeling so. But, God, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes (size 13) or, more to the point, inside his head right now. Labour are facing a wipe-out, or close enough, in Scotland, on his watch. “He will be feeling crushed,” a party colleague who knows him well told me. “But he will not show it.”

That last point, at least, is true. Focus group comments, published this week, saw Murphy described as a “merchant of doom” and “a bag of nerves”. Yet the man I meet could not appear more serene. Sustained by tea and an empire biscuit, he speaks quietly and calmly, and makes small jokes whenever possible. He remains unbruised by the campaign, he insists, holding out his arms for inspection.

“Is this the hardest thing I’ve ever done?” he says. “Of course not. Growing up in a housing scheme a couple of miles from here was harder than this. Living in a caravan with my mum and dad, that’s harder. Moving to South Africa during apartheid and trying to dodge [national service in] the South African army, and living in a house full of ANC supporters, that’s harder. Moving back home by myself and being out of work, and knocking on people’s doors, and asking for permission to wash people’s cars for 50 pence a time – all of that is harder. This isn’t even in my top ten.”

Our interview had been rescheduled repeatedly, and every day a new poll showed Labour losing further seats until, eventually, just before we met, Ipsos-Mori predicted the SNP winning every Scottish constituency. A yellow map. Forget “Labour Isn’t Working”, here was the new Scottish reality: Labour isn’t existing. That same day, a caller rang up a Radio Scotland phone-in to ask Murphy: “Do you think you’ll be remembered as the man who killed Labour in ­Scotland?”

The Labour Party got over the finishing line in the referendum and thought, ‘Right, we’re going to have a rest now.’



The question is premature. We do not yet have a body, and Murphy is determined that there won’t be one. “We’re behind in the polls but I’m not going to change my approach. I’m going to keep campaigning with a smile on my face.”

When he says things like this, it’s tempting to believe that he is masochistic, or delusional, or both. On the other hand, what would be the point of public despair? After all, one could argue that none of this is strictly his fault. The SNP surge feels like Blair’s 1997 landslide – a cultural and historic force against which any opposing strategy is useless.




Murphy benefited from that landslide, becoming an MP at the age of 29 in 1997, much to his and everyone else’s surprise. The young man who shouldn’t win, won. Now, with poetic symmetry, the middle-aged man faces the possibility of defeat in his own constituency by an inexperienced SNP candidate who, on paper, should not be able to overcome his huge majority.

In fact, Murphy says he is confident of holding East Renfrewshire, and shrugs off the idea that it might be embarrassing to rely on tactical voting by Conservative supporters who want to stop the SNP from taking the seat. A vote is a vote, even if the voter holds their nose while casting it.

One thing I find interesting, I tell Murphy, is how much some people hate him. I don’t think there’s been a politician since Margaret Thatcher who has inspired such loathing amongst certain people…

“You’re being melodramatic,” he interrupts. “You’re genuinely being melodramatic.”


No. Clearly the dislike isn’t as widespread as with Thatcher, but among a certain section of the public, there is an intense loathing that I haven’t seen directed towards any other politician.

“Every Labour politician gets that at the moment. Gordon Brown gets it. Alistair Darling gets it. I get it. Douglas Alexander gets it.”

Not in the same way as Murphy gets it. The thrown eggs. The shouting and swearing during stump speeches. The poison online. I tell him about a woman I met, recently, in Barrhead, part of his constituency. I had approached her, randomly, on the main street. She was 39, a former Labour member who is planning to vote SNP because she feels that party are now the true socialists. Par for the course for this election, but at the mention of Murphy’s name, a darkness came into her voice. “I pass him every day,” she said. “I park my car outside his house. He’s always so cheerful, saying, ‘Hello,’ and I just want to kick him in the kneecaps.”

Murphy, hearing this story, doesn’t miss a beat. “So, I should wear shinguards. Is that what you’re saying?”

No. But what is it like to be hated like that?


“Keep smiling…”

MURPHY is extremely disciplined, with a surfeit of energy. The evening before our morning meeting, he had been interviewed on Scotland Tonight. Afterwards, he had gone out for a run, as he does most nights, completing a 16 kilometre circuit of Glasgow’s south side and returning home at 2am. He used to listen to Johnny Cash while he ran, but now he prefers silence. “It’s a good way of clearing your head.”

This tirelessness seems an important part of his character. It’s apparent in his analysis of where Labour has gone wrong of late. “I think the biggest mistake we made was going to sleep. The Labour Party got over the finishing line in the referendum and thought, ‘Right, we’re going to have a rest now.’ Whereas the SNP and the Tories saw it as the start of something, Labour behaved as if it was the end. That was the mistake. I take my share of the blame. That isn’t a kick at any individual. We all thought, ‘Job done’. The people of Scotland wanted an answer, and the Labour Party wasn’t offering one.”

As a result, he says, “At the most passionate and febrile moment in Scottish politics, the Labour Party left politics to a wounded but confident Scottish Nationalism and the beginning of David Cameron’s assertive English nationalism. We should have been there, trying to bring the country together.”

Can he bring it together in future? Murphy is 47 and has been Scottish Labour leader for just five months. He has worked hard, thought hard, and fought hard to take back the left wing from the SNP. None of it has worked, and already there are Scottish Labour politicians calling openly, if anonymously, for his resignation in the aftermath of this election. The Glasgow South West Labour MP Ian Davidson, meanwhile, has suggested that the party should “be playing down Jim because he is not a particularly stimulating leadership figure”.

MURPHY also has a perception problem when it comes to sincerity. He has a strong personal story to tell about himself – growing up poor in Glasgow, sleeping in a drawer as a baby, and all of that – but there are many who simply sneer at this as Monty Python mawkishness. Nicola Sturgeon’s “working class girl made good” narrative plays well with the public, but Murphy’s, for whatever reason, seems to inspire cynicism.

Whether he has plans to step down following the election, or whether, indeed, he will be forced to do so, is not something Murphy would ever admit at this stage. But given that he seems almost pathologically incapable of admitting vulnerability or defeat, it would be surprising if his thoughts were not already racing ahead to ­Holyrood 2016.

“I know it’s tough times at the minute…” he says, “but it’s a really important time to be leading the party I love.”

comments
Here is the school that Dim Murphy went to.

https://www.google.co.za/search?q=Milnerton+High+Model+C+school&rlz=1C1CAFB_enZA611ZA614&es_sm=93&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=pDZFVbSYE4eM7Ab5n4HoCQ&ved=0CDYQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=667

In South African terms, It was a model "C" school which meant that although it was a Government school it still charged fees which were just high enough to keep out the less affluent black families from sending their kids ensuring that the majority were white kids.


An interesting part of the article reads:-

"Moving to South Africa during apartheid and trying to dodge [national service in] the South African army, and living in a house full of ANC supporters, that's harder."

Dim Murphy went to school in the affluent area of Milnerton and went to Milnerton High.

Have a look at Milnerton High:-

http://www.milnertonhigh.co.za/
______________________________________________________________________________

Have look at the accommodation for holidaymakers in Milnerton.

http://www.tripadvisor.co.za/SmartDeals-g312665-Milnerton_Western_Cape-Hotel-Deals.html
______________________________________________________________________________

Doesn't look like the kind of place that would harbour ANC supporters.

In fact it isn't the kind of place that would harbour ANC supporters.
______________________________________________________________________________

If Murphy's family left South Africa because of anti apartheid sentiments, why did his brother stay here.

I had a beer with him in Milnerton only last year.


More fantasy stuff Jim Murphy. The hard life in the wealthiest part of Cape Town getting the best education at the best Schools then running away like a coward when payback time came then making up stories of how he stayed in South Africa during Apartheid but decided to leave when it was being dismantled (end of the good times) in the Tri Cameral Parliament with the first stages of Mandela's release. Then he comes to Scotland not having paid a cent into the system and spends 9 years at Stathclyde University without passing a single exam. He then support tuition fees of 9000 a year for Students implying his own stay would have meant his leaving an equivalent debt of 150 000 in grants and fees (no charge) without a qualification at the end. A lazy useless bag of sh#t. Then he imposes the same fees and no grant support on people who do the work and get their degrees yet are left with 50 000 + in loans which many will be burdened with fro the rest of there life because of this million p0und a year expenses claimant shyster.
Smell the coffee Jim, you're a two faced self serving lying bag of sh#t just like the rest of your party and that's why you're on the way out.. and not before time too.


Well I've just read your masterpiece Murph.
Complacency is not unique to the Scottish electorate, the problem has been decades of complacency of the Labour Party, who took the Scottish vote for granted.
Don't look to blame the Scots....look to your self first!!!!!!
The New Labour strategy....the Scottish Blame Game ....." We never did anything.....how could you do this to us "


She wants to kick him in the kneecaps and Jim Doom's answer is to wear shin pads ... no wonder they are laughed at.