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.

.. And your answers are H/S

The really funny part of the Independent article is that Corbyn is even more unpopular with the public than Osborne.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-under-mounting-pressure-as-unison-leader-urges-labour-to-get-its-act-together-a6743506.html

Jeremy Corbyn under mounting pressure as Unison leader urges Labour to 'get its act together'

Dave Prentis's blunt words come as poll reveals six out of 10 voters believe Mr Corbyn would not keep them safe

eremy Corbyn’s leadership has been plunged deeper into crisis after a key union leader broke ranks to criticise him. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis, who backed Mr Corbyn for the leadership, said it could not “get any worse” for the party and warned it was time it “got its act together” before it lost any chance of returning to power in 2020.

His blunt words came as a damaging poll revealed six out of 10 voters now believe Mr Corbyn would not keep them safe. A poll for The Independent on Sunday shows Mr Corbyn’s support plummeted in the wake of his response to last week’s Paris terror attacks.

Overall, voters are now more than twice as likely to say they are unfavourable towards Mr Corbyn, after an 8 per cent increase since September in people who see him negatively.

t follows Mr Corbyn’s decision to criticise publicly David Cameron’s order for security services to “shoot to kill” armed terrorists attacking civilians in the UK.

Mr Prentis, the first union leader to attack the Labour leader openly, said the party under Mr Corbyn did not appear to understand people’s concerns – including “their need to feel safe and secure”. “Divisive rows over Trident or shoot to kill are distractions no one needs,” he said.

“It’s got to stop. If it doesn’t, Labour stands little chance of winning back the millions who deserted the party in May.”

Mr Prentis, who represents more than 1.3 million workers, said the Labour leader needed to turn things around quickly.

He said: “To many voters, Labour no longer seems to understand the issues that matter to ordinary people. Their money worries, their need to feel safe and secure. So Labour must stop with the verbal fisticuffs, and get back to showing ordinary people that the party is on their side.”

According to today’s ComRes poll, members of the public are now twice as likely to say they trust Mr Cameron to keep them and their family safe as Mr Corbyn – with 39 per cent backing the PM compared with 17 per cent for the Labour leader. Three in five people canvassed – 58 per cent – say they don’t trust Mr Corbyn to keep them safe.

Earlier last week, the former Labour frontbencher Chuka Umunna said this perception was a “disqualification from office”.

But Mr Corbyn has demanded more loyalty from Labour MPs and insisted he had a mandate from party members.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34891928

Osborne paying for another war?

Rule Brittania!
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article1636215.ece

Perhaps the hazy one doesn't read this either,

What a party.

Mind could be seen as bumping up the economy!

Or is it just a period of austerity for some.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/Politics/article1636210.ece

Minister put sex tryst club on expenses

ROBERT HALFON, the minister at the centre of an alleged blackmail plot over his affair with a young activist, has charged taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds for stays at the private members’ club where he would meet up with his mistress.

Halfon, the 46-year-old minister without portfolio, who attends cabinet, admitted last week that he had cheated on his long-term partner with Alexandra Paterson.

The Tories were plunged into turmoil as his confession sparked sleazy claims about young activists being “pimped” out to MPs, along with allegations of bullying, sexual harassment and drug-taking in the party’s youth wing.

Two young activists have attempted to take their own lives since the suicide of a third, Elliott Johnson, first lifted the lid on the scandal, insiders claimed this weekend.

Cant get at the whole article


But.....A thirty year old "young activist"?


Shurely shome mistake?

I think MAM should ban Fred for being a boring old fart, and bring Goldfinger back, i think that would be a good exchange

You think?.. Well there's a thing.

Even goldfinger has turned against Corbyn. He posted an attack against him on the other side. That was a surprise.

Even Unison has been moaning about Corbyn.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-under-mounting-pressure-as-unison-leader-urges-labour-to-get-its-act-together-a6743506.html

Mark,

Ask Hays.

He is probably down and Tory Central Office getting the spin he is supposed to be shovelling out!

Ed Miliband breaks his silence over Jeremy Corbyn, telling MPs: 'I bet you didn't think things would actually get worse'

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband has broken his silence over his successor Jeremy Corbyn – and suggested he was turning out to be an even bigger flop than he was.

Mr Miliband had stayed tight-lipped about Mr Corbyn’s disastrous performance, but last week, he astonished a group of Labour MPs by telling them: ‘I bet you didn’t think things would actually get worse.’

Jeremy Corbyn faces U-turn on Syria vote?

The shadow chancellor has suggested that the party is now open to the possibility of giving MPs the right to vote with their conscience on the issue

Cheating accusations mar Zimbabwe's 'Mister Ugly' contest

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Pageant judges have crowned a new winner of Zimbabwe's 4th annual "Mister Ugly" contest, upsetting supporters of the crowd favorite and prompting rioting at the event.

Corbyn could change his name to Cameron!


Could be said he is doing a Cameron!

While dossing on the streets of London could be called doing and Osborne.



=-=-=-=

I personally think that all votes in Parliament and House of lords should be based on conscience and not political, or personal advantages.

Perhaps, to many want a peerage or a backhanders. Good business sense for some!

Better business sense to get paid by Lobyist's to vote.

Biggest Conservative lead while in govt since Jan 1991. Worst Labour % in opposition since Sep 1983.

How many seats did the tories win in 1997 and how many seats did they lose?

Worth reading.

Everything we hold dear is being cut to the bone. Weep for our country

Will Hutton


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/22/tories-autumn-statement-george-osborne

Last Thursday, my wife was readmitted to hospital nearly two years after her first admission for treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She is very ill, but the nursing, always humane and in sufficient numbers two years ago, is reduced to a heroic but hard-pressed minimum. She has been left untended for hours at a stretch, reduced to tearful desperation at her neglect. The NHS, allegedly a “protected” public service, is beginning to show the signs of five years of real spending cumulatively not matching the growth of health need. Between 2010 and 2015, health spending grew at the slowest (0.7% a year) over a five-year period since the NHS’s foundation. As the Health Foundation observed last week, continuation of these trends is impossible: health spending must rise, funded if necessary by raising the standard rate of income tax.

There will be tens of thousands of patients suffering in the same way this weekend. Yet my protest on their behalf is purposeless. It will cut no ice with either the chancellor or his vicar on earth, Nick Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury. Their twin drive to reduce public spending to just over 36% of GDP in the last year of this parliament is because, as Macpherson declares more fervently than any Tory politician, the budget must be in surplus and raising tax rates is impossible.

Necessarily there will be collateral damage. It is obviously regrettable that there are too few nurses on a ward, too few police, too few teachers and too little of every public service. but this is necessary to serve the greater cause of debt reduction.

To reduce the stock of the public debt to below 80% of GDP and not pay a penny more in income or property tax, let alone higher taxes on pollution, sugar, petrol or alcohol, is now our collective national purpose. Everything – from the courts to local authority swimming pools – is subordinate to that aim.

Not every judgment George Osborne makes is wrong. He is right to advocate the northern powerhouse, to spend on infrastructure, to stay in the EU, radically to devolve control of public spending to city regions in return for the creation of coherent city governance and to sustain spending on aid and development. It is hard to fault raising the minimum wage or to try to spare science spending from the worst of the cuts.

But the big call he is making is entirely misconceived. There is no economic or social argument to justify these arbitrary targets for spending and debt, especially when the cost of debt service, given low interest rates and the average 14-year term of our government debt, has rarely been lower over the past 300 years.

This is not to contest the need to balance current public spending and current revenues over the economic cycle. As I wrote in my first book, The Revolution That

Never Was, completed 30 years ago this month, Keynes was no deficit denier. But governments have choices about how they arrive at this outcome.

The cuts in welfare will hit the well-being of millions, including their children

The Conservatives’ choice is driven by a refusal to see any merit in public activity: in their worldview, the point of life and the purpose of civilisation is to celebrate and protect the private individual, the private firm and private property. The state should be as small as possible. It has no role, say, in owning Channel 4 to secure public service broadcasting; it will be privatised with scant care about its ultimate owner. Equally, there was no point in holding the 40% stake in Eurostar, forecast to generate more than £700m in dividends over the next decade and a good payback for £3bn of public investment. Thus it was sold for £757m in March, the government concerned to get the sale through before the general election. You could only proclaim a £2.25bn loss on the public balance sheet and the surrender of £700m of dividends as a “fantastic deal for UK taxpayers”, as Osborne did, if you see zero value in public activity.

It is this philosophy that will drive the choices to be laid out on Wednesday. The spending of the so-called protected departments – the £189bn spent this year on the NHS, schools for five- to 16-year-olds, aid and defence – will rise in cash terms in line with inflation, but only to buy the same in 2019-20 as it does today, an unprecedented decade-long freeze in real terms. The block grants to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be hit slightly harder, protected only in cash terms, implying, after adjusting for inflation, a small real fall. The axe therefore has to fall on what is left – £77bn of spending by 15 departments along with non-school spending.

So if we take the summer budget and Office of Budget Responsibility economic forecasts as the baseline (both may change) – and there are no new tax increases – to meet his target, the chancellor has to find £22bn of cuts from this £77bn, crucial areas of our national life that have already cumulatively been cut by 30% since 2010.

As the Resolution Trust points out, seven of the smaller departments have settled for 21% cuts, which leaves the big five – Business, Communities and Local Government, Justice, the Home Office and non-schools education – to bear the brunt. This can only mean the de facto wind-up of the Department for Business as a pro-active department, further shrinkage of the criminal justice system (mitigated by prison sell-offs), local government reduced to a husk and the knell of further education.

Meanwhile, the cuts in welfare will hit the wellbeing of millions, including their children. Expect on top a firesale of government assets – from housing associations to Channel 4.

Is this wanted, necessary or appropriate for these profoundly troubled times? I think it’s a first-order category error and that in 2015 the need – whether protection from terrorism or the promotion of innovation and investment – is for complex collaborative action between a properly resourced, agile public sector and a private sector in desperate need of remoralising and repurposing. There is no magic in a 36% state. But as Osborne knows, he is politically free to do what he wants. The leadership of the Labour party offers no substantive intellectual or political opposition, nor represents a potential governing coalition, nor, wedded to a bankrupt simplistic top-down statism, understands the complexities of these new times. Rarely has the principal opposition party been so irrelevant at a time of national need. All that is left is noises off – the odd newspaper editorial or column and civil society and business beginning to stir as they experience the impact. Weep for our country.