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.

JRM is indeed a great caricature figure, but for all that, he is a very intelligent and witty guy and is not afraid to say would he truly thinks

Jacob is a decent man. As you say, intelligent, principled and lucid. Too good a man to be party leader.

cnbc /eu news today .
merkel tells trump that they must not stop free world trade deals .
it would be bad news for all .
yet the eu wants to have trade tariffs with the uk

is she a nutter , or am I missing something .
she calls for all the g20 to have free trade agreements , is the uk not a g20 country

Particularly bad news for a major exporter such as Germany. Doubt if many of the other 27 share her views. Most are on the bones of their asses or receiving subsidies to keep them sweet.

I like the lucid, clear, common- sense approach which Jacob Rees-Mogg always shows when he speaks. Indeed, I am a very big fan of his.

Last night, he told us, that in his opinion, it is common sense to raid the both the Foreign Aid and HS2 projects to fund more important things. However, he did seem to dismiss spending the money on pay rises for state workers and thought that housing was a much more important thing to spend money on.

Funnily enough, just about all the audience thought we should keep on with Foreign Aid and helping the underpriviledged throughout the world and they minimised the poor spending of money and the effect of any associated levels of corruption.

No one passed any comments about scrapping HS2 though. IMHO, I thought that was a bit weird.

I wonder if JRM would make a good PM? I think the people could grow to like him very much. He is also quite interesting to listen to.

JRM says we are either in the EU or we are not.

Others liken being in the EU to being pregnant. You either are or you are not. There isn't really any inbetween.

italy pensioners to have pay cuts Italy bankrupt debt out of control

they need 140b to stay afloat

Just have to wait for the Italian Gov/banks to implement the Bail-In

stan /fred very happy today their left wing scum friends now setting fire to cars buildings

has fred says along with stan if you lose at the election do not except the decisions
riot , their left wing scum friends are now doing what they stand for

the german gov should tell the police shoot them

corbyn encouraging the young to fight by any means to make their lives richer
if that means rioting then you have my blessing , corbyn inciting riots at the music festival with drunk and drugged youths , he may has well of given them guns

stan /fred will not post on the scum setting fire to cars and buildings in Germany

Notice Trump doing a two-handed shake to Putin's one-hander.

Meanwhile, Putin is obviously dead jealous of Trump's hair - or maybe just smiling politely at it.

Theresa asks him once again, "Is it actually real?"

"Do the lights go out first before the show starts?"

merkel states again we want to keep free trade,
but uk will have to pay ,
the woman is a nutter

how can the eu call for free world trade among the g20 and then want the uk to pay for free trade ,
the eu is corrupt and rotten ,

merkel on paris climate agreement ,only Germany are allowed to break that agreement that is why we are going to build more coal fired stations we are above the laws

This was posted up across the road by Gain, no attrib, sorry. Good read tho.



the consequences of Brown/Blair spending spree


One of the worst features of minority governments is that they’re inescapably extravagant. Parliamentary votes become pricey, pork-barrelling affairs. Every pay-out invites a dozen fresh demands. “If you can afford HS2, you can afford a billion pounds for Ulster!” “If you can afford a billion pounds for Ulster, you can afford the winter fuel allowance!” “If you can afford the winter fuel allowance, you can afford a proper public-sector pay rise!” And so on.

With each new concession, the notion of sound finances is weakened, and voters become habituated to the idea that there is a pot of gold somewhere. It’s not anyone’s fault, in particular; it’s just what happens when there is no overall majority.

Now for something that shouldn’t really need saying but that, in the present climate, plainly does. There is no pot of gold. We are getting deeper into debt at the rate of £46 billion a year. That hard, clunking fact should be at the centre of our political debate; but, at some point in the past year, politicians more or less stopped talking about it.

Not talking about it didn’t make it go away, of course. As Ayn Rand once said, we can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality. We may have removed the deficit from our political debate, but we have not removed it from our budget.

I don’t particularly enjoy having to point this out. The people who want to spend more money are, for the most part, decent and well-intentioned citizens. They are looking at their particular cause rather than at the overall picture. In their own terms, they often have a perfectly good argument. Everyone – certainly every politician – will have some worthy projects to fund. Home Secretaries, by and large, want the police to be paid more, Defence Secretaries want the same for soldiers, Health Secretaries for nurses, Education Secretaries for teachers. But – to repeat – we are still borrowing more than we raise to the tune of nearly a billion pounds a week.

Our whole vocabulary is wrong. Austerity, in its non-political definition, is a trait, not a condition. An austere person is frugal, Spartan. Whether you find these characteristics admirable will depend on your point of view, but they are precisely that – characteristics. They are not a response to external circumstances.

By talking of “austerity” rather than of “living within our means”, we suggest that the restraint of public spending is essentially a choice. Hence the jejune slogan that Leftists have taken up the world over, namely: “Growth not austerity”. Seriously, comrades, if it were that easy, don’t you think someone would have done it by now?

Do coppers and soldiers and teachers deserve a pay rise? Most of them do, yes. If we happened to have £9.2 billion lying around, they’d have as strong claim to it as anyone. Indeed, I’d like, in a perfect world, to see wages rise for everyone. As Tim Worstall has pointed out, private sector pay has lagged behind that of state employees: Gordon Brown’s profligacy punished almost all of us. But, for the last time, we don’t have the dosh. We have run up more debt in the past decade than in the previous 30 decades put together.

I’m sorry to bang on about it, but the implication in much of the media coverage is that politicians who oppose these pay rises are stingy, as though it were their own money they were refusing to hand over. It isn’t: it’s money they’d be taking from what our national poet calls “your children yet unborn and unbegot”.

Who is being unselfish here? The claimant who insists that the rest of us get further into debt so as to give him more – or the MP who is prepared to withstand protests and criticism in order to stand up for the rights of people who will never thank him?

Not that there are many such MPs at present. Arguing for more spending is always tempting and, since the election, there has been precious little discipline – fiscal, political or personal. Every measure that might have constrained expenditure was dropped from the Queen’s Speech; every measure that will indebt us further, from retaining the pensions triple lock to increasing defence spending, was retained.

Eventually, though, accounts have to be settled; debts have to be paid. Imagine that you have been lending me a thousand pounds a week for several years, and that I have been using it to fund a lavish lifestyle. If you stop lending me the cash – I say nothing of repaying it, simply no longer getting as much of it – my lifestyle is bound to change. I can go on as many anti-cuts marches as I like; I can write articles demanding “Growth not austerity!”; I can call you a heartless, sociopathic Tory bastard. But, in the end, I will have to fit my spending to my income. That isn’t austerity; it’s reality.

Excellent read. It's about time MP's of all parties got real.

Another action to incense the ordinary folk, especially those unable to insure their properties against flooding.

TM sanctioned £30m to Africa to enable them to obtain insurance against flooding. This is what's totally wrong with this country's politicians, they have this urge to be seen as good guys around the world at the expense of the taxpayer who is paying for the politicians vanity project whilst being unable to obtain the same for themselves. Bl---y stinks.