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.

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.

Max,

You can read at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/nov/22/robert-halfon-expensed-members-club-room-where-he-met-mistress

But haze tells us he has better contacts.


A Conservative cabinet minister has charged taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds to stay at a private members’ club where he would meet up with his mistress.

Robert Halfon, a minister without portfolio who attends cabinet, last week admitted to cheating on his partner after it emerged he was warned that a Tory aide was trying to blackmail him.

Halfon confessed to the affair following reports that a Tory election aide, Mark Clarke, had planned to film him leaving the East India Club in central London with the woman concerned, a Tory activist. Clarke denies the blackmail claim.

It emerged on Sunday that Halfon claimed more than £30,000 in expenses to stay at the East India Club in the four years after he was elected in 2010, receipts posted on his website show.

Another interesting article.

(At least for me!)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/08/george-osborne-u-turn-tax-credits

George Osborne’s dilemma: he daren’t U-turn but can’t afford not to
Andrew Rawnsley
Andrew Rawnsley
The chancellor built his reputation on being politically smart. Tax credits will put that to the ultimate test
George Osborne faces the biggest test of his chancellorship.
George Osborne faces the biggest test of his chancellorship. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Sunday 8 November 2015 05.00 GMT Last modified on Sunday 8 November 2015 09.24 GMT
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Before the election, George Osborne flirted with the idea of moving to the Foreign Office, a change of job that David Cameron would have granted to his friend had he insisted upon it. He ultimately concluded that staying put in the counting house better served his ambitions. The calculation was that his desire to be the next tenant of Number 10 was more likely to be advanced by maintaining his grip on the mighty tentacles of the Treasury rather than being the person put on the plane when the prime minister can’t be bothered.

I wonder if he now has the occasional twinge of regret that he didn’t take the chance to make his escape. In just over a fortnight, he delivers his winter financial statement, a budget in all but name. This is a big moment. I’m not sure everyone has yet grasped just how big. The chancellor must not only release himself from the perilous snare he is in over tax credits; he will also be unveiling a spending squeeze of extraordinarily severe proportions. And he must somehow do both in a way that doesn’t so alarm or anger the voters that his backbenchers revolt and his reputation is shredded.

Contemplating this challenge, one senior Tory goes so far as to predict: “If he doesn’t get it right, he’s dead.” It is fair to say that the author of that prediction is not one of Mr Osborne’s greatest fans. The chancellor will shrug off forecasts that this could be terminal for his ambitions. Previous rumours of his demise, notably after his 2012 omnishambles budget, proved to be exaggerated.

The rollercoaster ride of this chancellor’s reputation tells us a lot about the fickleness of political fashion. Just a few months ago, when he unveiled his July budget to roars of delight from Tory MPs and a stunned silence from the Labour benches, he was being lauded by colleagues and much of the media as the master of the universe. What a clever fellow was George. He had dished Labour by raising the minimum wage and re-badging it as a living wage. He had shafted Boris, too. He was waxing so large that even the prime minister was in his shadow. Never had he looked more powerful. Nor more popular with this party. In Conservative Home’s regular poll of Tory activists that asks them to rate their leading politicians, he toppled Boris from the top slot.

Since then, everyone has woken up to what the cuts to tax credits will do to the incomes of more than 3 million poorer workers and the chancellor’s claim to be the champion of the strivers. In the latest Conservative Home poll, he has taken a tumble. You may be amused to learn that this was brought to my attention by one of his cabinet colleagues. “George has fallen to eighth,” he remarked with ill-disguised relish.

For the obverse of Osborne the Octopus’s great power is the commensurate resentment that it breeds in others. He has built a formidable network across government by promoting his favourites to influential positions and created a considerable powerbase. But it also means that he is not much liked by those who feel excluded from the magic circle. One minister who has enjoyed a rapid ascent under his patronage remarked to me recently: “There are many of my intake still sitting on the backbenches and they blame George for it.”

His real problem with tax credits is that the chancellor has lost his majority in the Commons
So there’s the personal bound up with the political in his dilemma over tax credits. It was the defiant vote in the Lords that compelled him to have a rethink, but the leaping lords are not the real source of his troubles. Since the 1909-10 clash over the People’s Budget between David Lloyd George and the then entirely hereditary peers, a determined government has always ultimately prevailed over the unelected chamber.

That is why all the blustering about a constitutional crisis was so much hot air. His real problem with tax credits is not that the Tories lack a majority in the Lords; his real problem is that the chancellor has lost his majority in the Commons. Ten days ago, Frank Field, the Labour chairman of the work and pensions select committee, tabled a motion demanding a pause to the “terrifying” cuts. That attracted the support of 20 Conservative MPs in the voting lobby. Not a single Tory backbencher who spoke in the preceding debate gave unqualified support to the chancellor. The size of the Tory mutiny would have been much larger had Mr Osborne not been very busy trying to buy off rebellious-minded Tory backbenchers with promises to favour their constituencies – do you need a bridge or a bypass? – and issuing general reassurances that he would fix the tax credit problem.

Yet the more his options are examined, the trickier it looks. When I asked a person close to events what he thought Mr Osborne would do, he replied: “I literally don’t know. I don’t think he knows either.” One idea much discussed within the Treasury, and hinted at in the chancellor’s statements since his reversal in the Lords, is “transitional protection”: stretching out the implementation of the cuts to soften their immediate impact. But some members of the cabinet don’t like the sound of that. They fear that shifting the pain to later into the parliament would be no fix at all. “That could be worse,” says one minister. All sorts of other schemes for easing the blow to poorer workers are being floated, from imposing the cuts only on new claimants to making adjustments to tax bands to give additional compensation to the losers. But all these tweaks and fudges suffer the same handicap. They would still leave substantial numbers of people worse off.

The chancellor’s calculations are further complicated because they have become entangled with the parallel battle he is fighting with cabinet colleagues over their departmental budgets. The primary purpose of the winter statement is supposed to be his announcement of where he will be squeezing public spending in the years up to 2020. The run-up to the event is being accompanied by a loud drum roll of protest from those who will face the brunt of the cuts. Chief constables are waving furious truncheons. The care sector is warning that further cuts to local government budgets, combined with the costs of implementing the living wage, will be a catastrophe for the elderly. Junior doctors are heading towards strike action and school budgets are feeling the pinch, an illustration of the mounting financial pressure even in areas such as the NHS that have some protection from the squeeze.

On the non-protected departments, these cuts are going to be of a severity that is not yet fully appreciated either by the public or MPs. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons that areas such as transport and policing are looking at overall cuts to their day-to-day spending of more than 25% by the end of this parliament, bringing the total cuts since 2010 to more than 50%. Cuts of that magnitude are without precedent.

When I asked one member of the cabinet about the state of her negotiations with the Treasury, she gave me the sort of horrified grimace that you would have seen on the face of someone who witnessed the handiwork of Jack the Ripper. I asked another member of the cabinet whether the spending ministers were screaming blue murder. He laughed: “They are screaming every colour of murder.” Friends of Iain Duncan Smith, a veteran of many previous cage fights with the chancellor, are putting it about that he will resign if the budget for universal credit is raided.

These battles with the spending ministers are a large part of the explanation for why the chancellor has been so stubborn about tax credits. He did not want colleagues to think he could be pushed into retreat because that would encourage the cabinet to resist him.

It is this that prevents him from embracing the cleanest way out of his tax credit trouble. That would be to forget about trying to tweak this or fudge that. The simplest fire escape would be to abandon the cuts to tax credits altogether. That is the course being urged on him by thinktanks such as the Resolution Foundation and influential voices like that of Frank Field. The MP for Birkenhead is not only regarded as a great sage on these issues, he is also the Labour parliamentarian most widely admired and respected by Tories. It would be sensible of the chancellor to open a channel of communication with Mr Field. I would not be entirely surprised to find that he has done so already.

I’ve written previously that a chancellor can always find some money when he is in a real jam. This chancellor has U-turned before. And plenty of people have come forward with suggestions about where he could find savings to fund a retreat on tax credits. So why not? Because abandoning the cut altogether would be the mother of all U-turns. He will fear that it would involve such a colossal loss of face that his authority would be irretrievably corroded.

The foundation of George Osborne’s reputation with his party is the belief that he is politically smart. He’s going to have to be very clever indeed to find his way out of this one.

Let's give Freddy Boy a trip down memory lane! :0)

Top 10 most shocking Labour party scandals
By Harry Cockburn


Cash for access, MPs’ expenses, egg pelting and more…

In Britain, we love a political scandal. Sleaze, corruption and hypocrisy maintain public interest in the political sphere in a way that debate over policies will never quite match.

It might be argued that revelations of politicians’ acts of moral turpitude are essential - a yardstick by which we can measure ourselves and our political system, and a reminder to those with power that they are not above scrutiny.




No large political party has managed to avoid having to deal with uncomfortable issues at one time or another, and the Labour party is no exception. Indeed, Labour can rival major contenders such as UKIP and the Tories when it comes to scandalous behaviour.

We take a filthy trawl through some of the party’s most compromising moments:

1. Formula 1 and cigarettes, 1997
In the year Tony Blair steered his party to a landslide electoral victory, Labour soon managed to become ensnarled in a scandal involving a £1m donation from Formula 1 Boss Bernie Ecclestone. The large sum of money began to raise eyebrows when the incoming government changed its policy to allow Formula 1 to continue being sponsored by tobacco manufacturers. When the scandal came to light, the party reversed its policy and returned the donation.

2. Mandelson’s loan, 1998
Peter Mandelson had barely been a member of Blair’s cabinet before he was forced to resign. Mandelson kicked up a storm after it emerged that he’d taken an interest-free personal loan of £373,000 from fellow Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson to help buy a house in Notting Hill in 1996. This wasn’t a problem in itself; however, Robinson was the subject of an inquiry into his business dealings by Mandelson’s department. Mandelson later said that he’d not taken part in any decisions directly relating to Robinson, and he had also failed to register the loan with the Register of Members’ Interests. After coming under pressure from Blair, Mandelson resigned his position on 23rd December 1998. Robinson was also forced to resign. Not such a Merry Christmas after all.

3. Ron Davis’s mad moment, 1998
Meanwhile, Welsh Labour MP Ron Davies was busy making life difficult for himself, and stood down from his position as Secretary of State for Wales after a “moment of madness”, during which he was mugged at knifepoint when he picked up a man on Clapham Common and took him for a meal.

4. Prescott I, 2001
During the 2001 election campaign, John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister and a former amateur boxer, delivered a deft punch to the face of farmer Craig Evans who had thrown an egg at him.

5. Burying bad news, 2001
Later that year, and on the same day as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, Labour spin doctor Jo Moore made a catastrophic error of judgement and wrote an email to a press officer suggesting it was a good day to bury bad news. “It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury,” she wrote. “Councillors’ expenses?” A story about councillors’ expenses subsequently appeared. When the email emerged publicly a month later, Moore made a public apology for the insensitivity. But the following year, another email appeared suggesting Moore had tried a similarly crass tactic again, a mistake for which she was force to resign.



2003 was the year of “Jowellgate”, named after the financial brouhaha that engulfed Tessa Jowell, Labour’s secretary of state for culture, media and sport. The scandal arose when her husband David Mills, a lawyer, was alleged to have corruptly received £340,000 from the bunga-bunga loving Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Mills was subsequently investigated in Italy for money laundering and alleged tax fraud. Jowell was investigated over the allegations against her husband due to a potential clash between her personal life and ministerial duties. Tony Blair, a political ally of Berlusconi, eventually cleared her of any wrongdoing.

In 2006 it emerged that Prescott had been having an affair with his diary secretary Tracy Temple between 2002 and 2004. The affair, and Prescott’s entertainment of Temple at Dorneywood, his official residency, raised questions about use of public finances.

8. Cash for influence scandal I, 2009
Four Labour party life peers with names not dissimilar to Harry Potter villains were the subject of a scandal that saw them become the first peers in 367 years to be suspended from the house. Lord Snape, Lord Moonie, Lord Taylor of Blackburn and Lord Truscott were exposed by Sunday Times journalists to be offering to help make amendments to legislation in return for up to £120,000.

The House of Lords privileges committee found that Lords Moonie, Truscott and Blackburn had all breached the House’s code of conduct, but that Lord Snape had not.

9. MPs expenses scandal, 2009
From 8th May 2009, the Daily Telegraph began publishing daily instalments of leaked documents providing the shocking details of MPs expenses claims. Labour MPs were well represented in the naughty list. Indeed, of the six MPs that were eventually convicted for false accounting and other expenses abuse, all were from the Labour party.

Some of the Labour Party’s members’ most ridiculous claims at the tax-payers’ expense include:

Prescott III: John Prescott’s £312 claim for fitting mock Tudor beams to his constituency home, and for two new toilet seats in as many years, according to the Telegraph.

David Miliband allegedly claimed for gardening expenses and nearly £30,000 in repairs, decorations, and furnishings his family home in South Shields.

Margaret Moran claimed £22,500 for treating dry rot at her third home in Southampton, and later argued that MPs need a London home, a constituency home and a third home for family life. She later agreed to repay the sum, saying she understood her constituents’ anger.

Quentin Davis, who defected to the Labour party when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, claimed £10,000 for window repairs at his second home, an 18th century mansion.

Three former Labour cabinet members managed to get themselves into hot water after they were secretly filmed by Channel 4’s Dispatches journalists admitting to using their positions to influence government policy in return for cash. Geoff Hoon, Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt were all interviewed along with other MPs. Some of the most memorable recorded comments include Byers describing himself as “a cab for hire” and Hoon saying he wanted to make “some real money”. Hoon was banned from Parliament for five years and Byers for two years.



Beyond 2010 – The Miliband years

Not so much a political scandal as a fraternal one, Ed Miliband became a late runner in the Labour leadership race, challenging his brother David to lead the opposition government. The plucky upstart garnered the support of influential unions and sealed his victory. Relations between them are reportedly very frosty.

Since then, Miliband has steered clear of major controversy, but did make people groan with despair when, during a 2011 public sector strike over cuts, Miliband repeated himself like a crazy robot to ITV’s Damon Green who was interviewing him for television.



The biggest New Labour scandal was the illegal invasion of Iraq based on the lies told by Blair and Campbell.


I seem to recall that after the Labour party lost the general election Gordon Brown still signed a treaty with the EU before David Cameron could confirm the take over by the conservative/lib dem coalition committing

going back a page or two ....

apart from prurient interest, what does it matter in the slightest if a minister has been shagging his mistress in a member's club or even a hotel room? .... they're both much the same thing

that he was claiming the room on expenses (it was cheap by london prices) is also a total irrelevance, for it seems he was fully entitled to do so, and that he took his mistress there, is again, totally irrlevant

Who woke you up Bamber?

just back from golf and a very good lunch :-)