Thought I'd start a new thread as this is going to be a major talking point this year...have not made up my mind yet...(unlike bucksfizz)....but thinking of voting for an exit as Europe is not doing Britain any good at all it seems....

I think I felt that!

Dil,

If you hurry you can get a season ticket on this bus!

Labour do a fine job of fecking the NHS up in Wales already Fred.

Perhaps, it is due to the material they have to work with.

Reality strikes home!

hilary,

7856

..

He may be a lawyer, but he's certainly no Harvey Specter!

Reminds me of Helter Skelter - The Beatles

Cheers,
KidA

Reminds me of that film , the one where they had a marathon dance session which i think was won by the last pair standing , " They shoot horses don't they . " i won't say who should be shot .

They shoot horses don' they - was a hit for the group America in the 70's over here.

No that was " A Horse with no name " . they were a Welsh band who sang they shoot horses don't they .

Nop it was America, I have their LP.

" Racing Cars " was the Welsh group that sang it .

Got a couple of Racing Car LPs as well, will check when I get home.

I stand corrected It was Racing Cars on the Downtown Tonight album 1976.

I was thinking of Tin man by America.

Ed: Gareth Mortimer (guitarist / lead vocalist) – aka Morty died 2015 from cancer.

He had a very distinct voice that you couldn't miss, very sad that he's gone and not to be heard of live again.

The long read

PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain



Oxford University graduates in philosophy, politics and economics make up an astonishing proportion of Britain’s elite. But has it produced an out-of-touch ruling class?



by Andy Beckett

Thursday 23 February 2017 06.00 GMT



Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.

Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.


On the BBC Radio 4 website, the Financial Times statistics expert and Oxford PPE graduate Tim Harford presented his first election podcast. On BBC1, Oxford PPE graduate and Newsnight presenter Evan Davies conducted the first of a series of interviews with party leaders. In the print media, there was an election special in the Economist magazine, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Zanny Minton-Beddoes; a clutch of election articles in the political magazine Prospect, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Bronwen Maddox; an election column in the Guardian by Oxford PPE graduate Simon Jenkins; and more election coverage in the Times and the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, studied PPE at Oxford.

More than any other course at any other university, more than any revered or resented private school, and in a manner probably unmatched in any other democracy, Oxford PPE pervades British political life. From the right to the left, from the centre ground to the fringes, from analysts to protagonists, consensus-seekers to revolutionary activists, environmentalists to ultra-capitalists, statists to libertarians, elitists to populists, bureaucrats to spin doctors, bullies to charmers, successive networks of PPEists have been at work at all levels of British politics – sometimes prominently, sometimes more quietly – since the degree was established 97 years ago.

“It is overwhelmingly from Oxford that the governing elite has reproduced itself, generation after generation,” writes the pre-eminent British political biographer, John Campbell, in his 2014 study of the postwar Labour reformer and SDP co‑founder Roy Jenkins, who studied PPE at the university in the 1930s. The three-year undergraduate course was then less than two decades old, but it was “already the course of choice for aspiring politicians”: the future Labour leaders Michael Foot and Hugh Gaitskell, the future prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson.



Oxford University graduates in philosophy, politics and economics make up an astonishing proportion of Britain’s elite. But has it produced an out-of-touch ruling class?


But Oxford PPE is more than a factory for politicians and the people who judge them for a living. It also gives many of these public figures a shared outlook: confident, internationalist, intellectually flexible, and above all sure that small groups of supposedly well-educated, rational people, such as themselves, can and should improve Britain and the wider world. The course has also been taken by many foreign leaders-in-the-making, among them Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. An Oxford PPE degree has become a global status symbol of academic achievement and worldly potential.

The Labour peer and thinker Maurice Glasman, who studied modern history at Cambridge, says: “PPE combines the status of an elite university degree – PPE is the ultimate form of being good at school – with the stamp of a vocational course. It is perfect training for cabinet membership, and it gives you a view of life. It is a very profound cultural form.”



Full article here, and well worth a read imo.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

Max,

Now what's a died in the wood Right Wing pusher like you doing reading the Guardian then?

I had the single They Shoot Horses Don't They , definitely Racing Cars.

...and in the meantime let's have the remoaners anthem.

Noel bless him

Stan

I read them all, and even the Graun comes with a good one now and again.

btw, did you agree with what was written?

Max,

I thought you were still reading your first Beano!

Vote Tory.