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.

Andrew Wilson: Westminster must talk to SNP MPs

ANDREW WILSON
21:46Saturday 02 May 2015
8
HAVE YOUR SAY
WHATEVER the democratic choices made at the ballot box, most reasonable people want politicians to work tog­ether constructively for the public good.

They’d also rather like their democratic choices to be respected and legitimised, rather than ignored or lampooned. On the whole, in mature democracies, this is what tends to happen. When it doesn’t, pressure mounts on the constitutional framework itself.

‘The conduct of politicians must improve in the aftermath of the election’
The near-hysteria about the SNP should, we hope, subside once the die is cast on Thursday. Whatever the shape of Parliament, all politicians must work to represent all of the electorate and to engage in a mature and adult way to ensure the business of government can be done. As it happens, I doubt that the number of SNP MPs will be as good as the polls currently suggest, for two main reasons. First, incumbency means some long-serving MPs will be hard to unseat in a tight battle, whatever their party. Second, it is clear that a co-ordinated tactical voting eff­ort conjoining the Better Together team of Labour and the Tories with the Liberals is well underway. It seems likely that Labour’s Scottish leader, Jim Murphy, may be returned on the back of Tory voters, having lost much of his own support to the SNP. We’ll see where that takes us.

What is undoubtedly true is that there are likely to be considerably more SNP MPs than the six they got last time. There is even the chance they could become the third party and overtake the Liberal Democrats UK-wide. This makes the current positioning of the big parties deeply curious and illogical to me. They all say that the SNP can have no place in making Parliament and the government work because they believe in independence.

The SNP lost the referendum and another one is neither likely nor in the interests of independence supporters anytime in the foreseeable fut­ure. That is unless Britain votes to leave Europe and Scotland doesn’t, in which case some of my most aggressively unionist friends will swap sides in a heartbeat.

All three London parties were also prepared to liaise with SNP business managers to organise debates, votes and parliamentary business on a weekly basis throughout the entirety of the last Parliament, when a referendum was actually in the offing.

Ed Miliband even requested a number of meetings with his SNP opposite number and co-ordinated extremely closely over a co-sponsored motion on the crisis in Syria that changed UK government policy fundamentally. In Scotland, Labour and the SNP are in coalition in three local authorities. What just doesn’t make any sense to me, though, is the core argument from all three London parties that they can’t work with the SNP because of its constitutional goal. Surely if the SNP were even an implicit part of the decisions taken at Westminster it would make their wrongly alleged desire to wedge the country apart on issues far more difficult if not impossible.

The greatest risk to the unity of the British system will come from a message from the London parties that the votes of a large chunk of Scottish voters are somehow illegitimate or unworthy of influence. It suggests a two-tier system that would do more to damage the coherence of the UK than anything any SNP politician could ever say. In my humble estimation they just haven’t thought it through. Either that or their desperation is so great they will do anything – at all – to win ugly in the narrowest of battles for a tiny proportion of swing votes.


The 2015 general election will surely be seen as one of the most tawdry and divisive campaigns in memory and what an irony that it is the SNP that has positioned itself as the one party wanting to behave and co-operate constructively.

What is becoming very clear is that as the rest of the UK gets to know Nicola Sturgeon better they increasingly like what they see. None of the three establishment parties are carrying anything like the trust rating she enjoys.

They traduce her party for the narrowest of short-term reasons and in doing so diminish themselves far more than her and the very union they purport to hold sacrosanct. It is just not good enough.

What is always true is that the conduct of politicians, and leaders in particular, must dramatically improve in the aftermath of the election.


The country may not give any party a majority, so it will be incumbent on all minorities to find the best way to unify as many people as possible beh­ind the course we must all take next.

Most of us have grown tired of the invented outrage, lazy tribalism and the politics of division.

Good people can disagree on the party they support and the final destination they desire for their country. Come Friday it is time for bridges to replace trenches, in all directions.


comments
Andrew. I note your concern for the situation "that would do more to damage the coherence of the UK than anything any SNP politician could ever say". I'm not convinced about your sincerity, though. You are still a member of the SNP aren't you?

Andrew, it would be great if everything settled down a bit after the GE, but with the Tories howling at the moon, just because they have to share the chamber with a bloc of SNP who actually might have a say, I'm not expecting the breakout of peace and reasonableness anytime soon - despite Nicolas best efforts.
I do believe those thinkers South of the border are waking up to the reality of the SNP gaining more from the UK tax payer. If I was living in Wales or NI I would be very upset about Scotland getting more than other regions. If the SNP get their way and eventually get a Yes vote then just watch the UK shipbuilding jobs associated with the Royal Navy go back to Belfast, Appledore, Barrow and Portsmouth. Turkeys shouldn't vote for Christmas.

What a stupidly naive article. makes out like the SNP are just like any other party, soon the whole of the UK will come to love Nicola like the Scots do, SNP just want to take part. No, they want to take it apart, if they have to wait for another referendum no matter, they'll try to chip away and cause havoc in the meantime. The biggest problem is that they want to push Miliband left and seek another £148billion of borrowing. All on the back of 40% of 9% of electorate. As Judd would say in Poldark, tint right, tint fit, tint proper. After the election the political establishment needs to get its head around constitutional change, so far England's been given no choice and as someone said today, for the English this isn't a union, it's a sentence.

from today's guardian ......

Ed Miliband: Conservatives have secret plan to reorganise NHS after election ....... The report is understood to focus not on controversial issues, such as the contracting out of health services, but on the excessively complex NHS bureaucracy, some of which may have been worsened by changes introduced by the previous health secretary, Andrew Lansley.

=======

and a damn good job too, so why labour should want to brand it as something reprehensible, i really do not know
and do i care that lansley is a tory, and he didn't get it right?
not at all

Vote Nu Labour, the party of equality



https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%23EverydaySexualSegregation&src=hash

Ed Miliband’s plan to erect an 8ft stone monument to Labour’s manifesto in the Downing Street garden is unlikely to get planning permission, Westminster’s planning chief has indicated.

Conservative councillors, who outnumber Labour councillors on the relevant planning committee by three to one, will have the final say as to whether Labour's political gesture can go ahead.

Robert Davis, the Conservative councillor who chairs the planning committee and its cabinet member for the built environment told the Independent Mr Miliband’s plan would face a number of obstacles.

“The fact is the committee who would make the decision comprises of three Conservatives and one Labour member so you could probably guess without me having to tell you the likely way the decision would go,” he said.

Moses Miliband lays down the law

Boris writing in the paper today

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11580804/Dont-let-Ed-Miliband-sink-this-country-with-his-commie-slab-of-rock.html

Don’t let Ed Miliband sink this country with his commie slab of rock

Electing Labour would undo the success of the past five years and send us back to the Seventie

It’s the smugness that gets me. It’s the brass-necked complacency. As a piece of premature chicken-counting combined with insolent disrespect to the will of the electorate, this Labour stunt is frankly unbeatable.

Never mind measuring the curtains for Downing Street, Ed Miliband is so confident of victory this Thursday that he has already commissioned a vast monument to himself. He has caused a stonemason to engrave an 8ft 6in slab of limestone with a series of fine-sounding but essentially vacuous slogans, as if this were East Germany circa 1973, and he has promised – nay, sworn – that on the very first day of his regime the work will be religiously installed in the garden of the prime minister’s offices.

In true totalitarian fashion, he has signed it himself, and appended the red-rose Socialist logo of the Labour Party.

When someone showed me a pic of Ed in front of this absurdity, I thought it was a joke, some photoshopped wheeze.

It is no joke, my friends. This thing exists, and Ed fully intends that this tasteless, verbless, truthless stele should loom over No 10 like some kitsch version of the laws of Hammurabi, or some new Decalogue – except that he couldn’t think of 10 things to say.

What was he drinking? What was he smoking? What was he on when he came up with this one? Keep taking the tablets, Ed – don’t erect them in government offices. There are all sorts of people who are capable of putting a stop to this vandalism. If (heaven forfend) Ed Miliband were indeed to find himself in Downing Street this week, then the head of the Civil Service would quietly tell him not to be such a confounded idiot. No 10 is a department of state; you can’t use it for party-political propaganda. Imagine the hoo-ha if I had festooned City Hall with the Conservative logo, after we kicked out the Labour administration in 2008.

Then there is Westminster Council, for whose punctilious planning department I have deep respect. No 10 is a Grade I-listed building. Would they allow it to be desecrated with some weird commie slab? No way.

But there is another far more important person who can kibosh the whole thing – and that, of course, is you: you, the dear, the gentle, the reader who has already put up with so much election coverage and who is now about to take centre stage.

You can stop Ed and his monument; you can stop him stone dead. After all the yarping and the carping from the media and the politicos, it is time for you to have your say; and on Thursday you have a decision-making tool more powerful than 100 TV studios or a million barrels of newspaper ink. You have the stubby pencil and the bit of paper, and you hold the destiny of the country in your hands.

It will take only 23 more seats to give the Conservatives the stability of an absolute majority – something that is now completely beyond the reach of the Labour Party. So wherever you are voting, I hope you will consider why Ed Miliband reached for this preposterous gimmick. Why carve slogans in stone? Why pretend that there is something imperishable about his words? Why go to these lengths to tell us there is something fixed and rocklike about his agenda? Why? Because he knows – and he knows that we know – that the opposite is the case.

If this country were to make the tragic mistake of electing Ed Miliband and the Labour Party, we would usher in perhaps the most intrinsically weak government of modern times. Far from being graven in stone, his words would not be worth the paper they were written on. Miliband knows that his intentions would count for nothing – that he could not get a single bill through the Commons – without the approval of the Scottish Nationalists. He wouldn’t be Moses or Hammurabi; he would be rapidly transformed into the obsequious butler of Downing Street, constantly tending to the demands of fiery Aunt Nicola, always making sure that Alec Salmond was topped up with pink champagne – and at the expense of the English taxpayer.

Britain’s political stability would be seriously weakened. The two parties plainly despise each other, and already fight like ferrets in a sack. The economy would be weakened, as Labour and SNP competed to impose a series of smash-and-grab policies that would simply discourage enterprise and drive away investment. British public services would be weakened by the consequent fall in economic confidence and tax revenues. Britain’s defences would be weakened, as the Scots Nats campaigned for nuclear disarmament; and Britain’s standing abroad would be weakened by Miliband’s refusal to take on the British responsibility – to lead reform in Europe, and then put those reforms to the British people in a referendum.

With the eurozone still in turmoil, with a revanchist Putin, with the American economy wobbling again, there is only one way to give this country the strong leadership it needs – and that is to give David Cameron and the Conservatives five more years. We have come back from a terrible recession – exacerbated by Miliband and Ed Balls – to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the West, with dizzying growth in employment and new businesses. This country has amazing potential standing at the crossroads of the global economy: the commercial, cultural, creative, tech, medical and university capital of Europe if not the world – and still a huge manufacturing power.

Our mission now must be to ensure that more people share in that success across the country, to raise productivity, and to harness a more dynamic market economy to help pay for the poor, the needy, and better and better public services. I cannot believe that people will want to put that at risk, and to return to the Seventies nostrums of Labour. The Tories need another five years to embed and extend the considerable achievements of this coalition.

Let us therefore consign Milibandias and his tombstone to the bafflement of future archaeologists. Let it go down as the last act of a desperate candidate, and the heaviest suicide note in history.

Paul O'Grady says he'll leave Britain for Venice if Tories win the election

That's a bonus!

The Times

Don’t sneak into No 10, Labour MPs warn Miliband

Sam Coates and Laura Pitel

Last updated at 12:05AM, May 4 2015

Ed Miliband will not have the right to govern if he wins 15 fewer seats than the Conservatives in Thursday’s election, senior Labour party figures have warned. In a series of interviews with The Times yesterday, parliamentary candidates rejected claims by allies of Mr Miliband that he could become prime minister even if Labour was not the largest party in the Commons. One frontbencher suggested that Mr Miliband should resign if he finished as few as 12 seats behind David Cameron. Others fear that Labour’s future in key battlegrounds in England would be compromised if he scraped a parliamentary majority only with the help of Scottish Nationalists.

UKIP, BNP and the Party of Confidence Tricksters are getting more and more desperate.

=-=-=-=-=
Haze,

Is it true the blue rinsed and tory party grandees have bought grinders and are sharpening the knives for Dodgy Dave and Osborne?

Georgie boy, IDS and Theresa are very quiet?

Are they weaving and diving, or are they reading books written by Boris on playing the clown?





--------

Vote UKIP or Tory, it doesn't matter, they both belong to the same clubs.

How many so called safe "Con" Party lying toerags will lose their seats on Thursday?

I know at least one that has a very good chance, and one that I have a direct interest in...we shall see.

Nothing compared to the hoards of Labour MPs to be out of work in Scotland. Plus plenty down south. Miliband looking less and less likely to be leader in a week or so.

Irrelevant, the Tories are going to get kicked out... and not before time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/poll-tracker

If you look at the polls individually you will see that only 2 out of 8 polls make Labour in the lead.

Yet again, thats irrelevant.

Cameron won't budge from number 10. He will run a minority government. Whatever the result, Miliband will not be PM.

How many more times H/S...Stop dreaming your "Con" artistes have got zero chance of winning the election.

Two socialist countries in trouble!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11581349/Warning-lights-flash-over-Greece-and-France-as-manufacturing-stumbles.html

'Warning lights' flash over Greece and France as manufacturing stumbles

France and Greece remain the eurozone's laggards, with the former "locked in reverse gear" as manufacturing remains mired in contraction in April

Warning lights are flashing over the Greek and French economies, analysts said on Monday, after a closely-watched manufacturing survey showed both nations remained "mired in contraction" in April.

Turmoil in Greece, and concerns that the country could default on its debt and be forced out of the eurozone pushed Greek activity to a 22-month low, according to Markit's latest manufacturing barometer.

The figures also suggested that the European Central Bank's €1.1 trillion bond-buying programme, which has helped to weaken the euro, has so far failed to lift France out of its chronic malaise.

French manufacturing activity contracted for the 11th consecutive month in April, with the rate of decline the fastest so far this year. Markit also said employment levels fell for a thirteenth successive month in April.

“The French manufacturing sector remains locked in reverse gear," said Jack Kennedy, senior economist at Markit. "Production levels were cut at an accelerated rate amid a steeper decline in new orders. This was despite a further fall in prices charged and the recent weakening of the euro, underlining the competitive challenge facing firms.”

Markit's French manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI) fell to 48 in April, from 48.8 in March. This was lower than a flash estimate of 48.4 and well below the 50 level that divides growth from contraction. Greece's PMI contracted to 46.5, from a previous reading of 48.

Could this be a sighting of Miliband's desperately needed flying pig?

SNP candidate asks Tory voters to help beat Labour


DAVID MADDOX
12:34Monday 04 May 2015
4
HAVE YOUR SAY
THE SNP have been accused of “rank hypocrisy” after it emerged that the party’s East Renfrewshire candidate has written directly to Tory voters asking for their help in keeping Labour out.

The letter entitled “lend me your vote” was sent to Tory voters by SNP candidate Kirsten Oswald who hopes to unseat Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy.

It comes despite First Minister Nicola Sturgeon claiming that she wants an “anti-Tory alliance” and to put Ed Miliband into Downing Street and “lock the Tories out”.

But in her letter Ms Oswald said she “respects the values” of the Tories and pointed out that independent polls showed that the SNP is “the party with the best chance of beating Labour”.

She went on that if the Tories lent her their votes then then they would have an MP “who understands your values, your concerns and your priorities.”

Labour have argued that Ms Sturgeon and the SNP have been encouraging people across the UK to vote “anything but Labour” including the Greens in England and Plaid Cymru in Wales.

And with Mr Miliband saying he would not form a Labour government if it depends on SNP votes, the party has claimed that the SNP’s secret agenda is to have a Tory government in Westminster so they can force a second referendum.

Scottish Deputy leader Kezia Dugdale said that the letter confirmed the “hypocrisy” of the SNP.


She said: “That an SNP candidate should be begging Tory voters to help unseat a Labour MP shows the depths of their desperation.

“After weeks of telling Scots that they’ll do everything to keep the Tories out of power, they’ll tell Tory voters that they now ‘respect their beliefs’ when it helps them try to seat Jim Murphy.

“This is rank hypocrisy from the SNP, whose empty rhetoric on standing up to the Tories is now plain for all to see; they’ll say whatever they need to get a second referendum.

With senior Labour figures already claiming they need to save some of their 41 seats in Scotland for the party to be the biggest in Westminster and able to form a minority government, Ms Dugdale said that if the SNP manage to to win 50 or more seats, as suggested in the polls, it will help David Cameron get back in Downing Street.


She said: “The irony is that David Cameron is rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of Scotland sending more Nationalists to Westminster, because every SNP MP makes it more likely he’ll sneak into Downing St by the back door.

“In just five days time the people of Scotland face a choice, the road to a fairer economy with Scottish Labour or the road to a Tory government and a second referendum with the SNP.”

However, Ms Oswald insisted she was trying to contrast voter values with the current negative Tory tactics focusing on the SNP holding the balance of power.

She said: “The point being made is the contrast between what were shared values across the political spectrum and the appalling Tory Party campaign which Gordon Brown has described as ‘anti-Scottish’. That is what the Tory Party has become.”


Dear [Conservative voter],

When we spoke to you sometime ago you told us that the Conservatives are the party you most identify with.

I respect that. I respect the values of hard work, responsibility and public service which the Conservative party has traditionally stood for.

In our constituency, independent polls show that the party with the best chance of beating Labour is the SNP.

A vote for me is a vote for a committed local candidate who understands your values, your concerns and your priorities.

People who live in our local area deserve to be confident that their MP will stand up for them, and be available and accessible to local people.

If I am elected, I will be a full time local MP, with the interests of East Renfrewshire and all our communities at heart. I will commit to serve the full term of parliament.

On the 7th May, I’m asking for your vote, for everyone in East Renfrewshire, and for a stronger Scotland.

Warm regards,

Kirsten Oswald SNP

comments

Apparently many Lib Dem voters in Inverness are voting tactically with the SNP to kick the Tory Danny Alexander out.

The hypocrisy isn't in asking for voters to vote tactically, it is who is asking whom to vote for them. Sturgeon and the SNP have demonised the tories and are threatening to use their voting block to deny Cameron No 10 even if his party gets the most votes. Do you get it now?


Where's the problem ?
Kezia shouldn't be throwing stones - Labour activists in Perthshire have been campaigning FOR the Tories ! ! ! Kirsten Oswald doesn't pretend to be campaigning for anything other than her own party - honesty in politics - a foreign concept to many of the desperadoes !

Anyway, I think that the Conservatives in East Renfrewshire should vote conservative - all of this 'tactical voting' guff, is just that . . . Guff !


Is this not what they are all up to?

All UK political parties, including the regionals, are venal wastes of space.

I am still unable to vote in my constituency due to lack of respect for any of the balloons on the ballot paper.