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.

like it or not, the world was a safer place until it started copulating with monkeys!

Back to the conspiracy theories again.

cynic

That hasn't been proven yet

.

Rooney

In an embarrassing revelation for Nigel Farage, a letter has emerged in which the Ukip leader is described as a "bully" and a "fascist" by teachers at his South London school, forcing the party boss to defend himself against the accusations.

Revealed by Channel 4 News, the letter was written in June 1981 by Chloe Deakin, an English teacher at the prestigious Dulwich College where Farage was a pupil.

In the missive, sent to the school’s headmaster David Emms, Deakin implores her boss to reconsider appointing the future Ukip leader a prefect, citing a recent staff meeting in which Farage was described as a "fascist", adding that there was "considerable reaction" from Deakin’s colleagues to the appointment.

The letter adds: "Another colleague, who teaches the boy, described his publicly professed racist and neo-fascist views; and he cited a particular incident in which Farage was so offensive to a boy in his set, that he had to be removed from the lesson. This master stated his view that this behaviour was precisely why the boy should not be made a prefect.

"Yet another colleague described how, at a Combined Cadet Force (CCF) camp organised by the college, Farage and others had marched through a quiet Sussex village very late at night shouting Hitler-youth songs."

On Thursday Farage said the notion of him singing Hitler Youth songs was "baloney" while rejecting allegations that he made racist remarks. When confronted by Channel 4 News, the Ukip leader admitted he'd done "some ridiculous things," adding: "Not necessarily racist things. It depends how you define it.”

He added: "You've got to remember that ever since 1968 up until the last couple of years, we've not been able in this country, intelligently to discuss immigration, to discuss integration, it's all been a buried subject and that's happened through academia, it's happened through politics and the media."

Farage was told that fellow pupils remember him making racist comments, to which he replied: "Oh well I might have wound some of them up too. All through the 1970s and 80s I would counter any received wisdom on any subject quite deliberately - I wasn't alone in doing that. It was a very political school. We had people who were members of very left-wing organisations, we also had boys at school who were members of hard-right organisations."

Bob Jope, a former English teacher who taught Farage, alleged staff made accusations that Farage voiced views that were not simply right-wing but "quite clearly racist".

Jope told Channel 4: "To some extent, you might say the accusation from some staff was that Nigel had voiced views that were not simply right wing, as nobody's going to object to a place on the spectrum, but views that were quite clearly racist, and those racist views were considered again by the staff who had heard them - some at first hand, some had heard about them - were considered to be not the views that a school should tolerate."

Farage will speak in London tomorrow at Ukip's conference. Addressing criticism for failing to deal strongly enough with party candidates found to have posted extremist views online, he will concede that being "the most independent-minded body of men and women" ever seen in British politics "presents occasional difficulties".

Farage will say: "We have some people with overactive Facebook accounts. And we have some who make public pronouncements that I would not always choose myself."

He appeared to include among them both senior MEP Godfrey Bloom and party treasurer Stuart Wheeler, who have courted controversy over public remarks. Bloom was criticised for an attack on Britain sending aid to "Bongo Bongo Land" and been forced to deny claims no "self-respecting businessman" would hire a woman of child-bearing age were sexist.

Ex-Tory donor Wheeler also denied being sexist after arguing that women are not as good as men at bridge, poker and chess in an argument against quotas for female board members.

Farage will say: "I had the most blistering row with Godfrey Bloom in a Strasbourg restaurant the other day. He wants to fight for his beliefs and I was saying that we need to stick to the big messages. I don't always agree on policy with Stuart Wheeler either.

"If the choice is between our being browbeaten through political correctness to stay within the current received wisdoms or to be a party of free debate then be in no doubt we must be the party of radical alternatives and free speech. There is however one important qualification. We oppose racism. We oppose extremism. We oppose sectarianism of the left or right."

September 19, 2013 · 7:54 pm

Why bureaucrats are the ultimate survivors

http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/


Today’s news that NHS “managers”are seeing their levels of pay rise at three times those of nurses is yet another quiver to the Slog’s eternal bow: that until we get health provision away from Government and out of greedy private hands, it will remain a problem for taxpayers and patients alike. Mutualisation is the obvious (and only) solution that will solve the problems of doctors, nurses, patients and the clueless political spectrum at Westminster, but still it continues to be a bunion on the eternally dragged feet of the United Kingdom.

The reason - that is to say, the main reason – is bureaucrats. Left and Right may meddle and push through expensive systemic change, but at the pulling of stumps the bureaucrats will still be there. They will collaborate in every reorganisation (however ideologically muddled or administratively daft) , and ensure that all their suggestions complicate just enough to require…..yes, more bureaucrats. Privatising a railway network? Have one company for the rails and one for the coaches. Modernising the NHS? Create an internal market. Scaling down the armed forces? Add more MoD drones in order to carry it out.

I’ve posted ad nauseam on the subject of just how much these folks cost us in pension liabilities, but the bottom line is that the Civil Service remains by far the least accountable soci0-economic group in Britain. If a political policy fails, no Whitehall heads roll. And if a Ministry closes, every Whitehall plonker is found a job. When they retire (on index-linked pensions at 52) there are further stipends as non-exec this and advisory that. No functionary is ever found guilty: the bureaucratic equivalent of the death penalty is an admonishment.

When employed in the advertising business, I worked on and off for Government clients via the Central Office of Information (COI) over three decades. The COI contained, almost without exception, lightweight dictators with a penchant for fine wine and an unparalleled agility when it came to dodging any and every flying turd. One would plough through a dozen turgid meetings, at which point the Minister of State made a brief but disastrous appearance, grasping every irrelevant factor with clinical precision, and exiting in short order. The bureaucrats would then panic, make the agency work weekends and nights to do the politician’s bidding, and – somehow – a campaign would appear. On the whole, it was in the wrong medium, carried an impenetrable message, and went miles over the heads of its target audience.

When the first Thatcherites got into office, the COI was ignored in favour of the Minister’s political strategist, and a communications ‘guru’ he had personally hired to work in his department – usually some bow-tied soak with a long track-record of agency underachievement behind him. By the early 1990s, the meetings with government clients had doubled in size, and the main game in town was spotting who had the power to say ‘yes’ as opposed to ‘no’.

The pool of sludge from which such unproductive Grand National fences are fashioned is shallow and murky, but basically the three chief criteria are (i) very high IQ (ii) difficulty with shoelaces and (iii) incorrigible idleness. Any and all commercial experience is frowned upon, and treated as circumstantial evidence of lowbrow thinking. Inability to do the Times crossword in under 40 minutes will mark any recruit down for the Slow Lane. The British civil servant is the last and most pointless example of the Great British Amateur.

The reason why there is no cross-Party consensus on the need to fire one bureaucrat in two remains as simple as ever. In the Tory Party, every Minister quickly realises that (often through mates in the security services) the Sir Humphrey with whom they’ve been blessed knows the location of every incriminating negative, and the nature of every peccadillo, related to that Minister of the Crown. When it comes to the Labour Party, Sir Humphrey’s underlings are all members of a trade union affiliated to the TUC. And in both Parties, senior civil servants know the Whips well enough to be able to gather further dirt on the Minister with whom they’ve been landed.

As it is, some observers now take a degree of solace in the fact that austerity Britain has (at long last) started to reduce the numbers of Whitehall and local government fat cats. But there isn’t a lot of real cutting at the top: some 43000 jobs have gone, contributing to government savings of £5bn in the 12 months of fiscal 2011-12. That works out at around £120K a head – which, believe it or not, is very much the middle ranks. That represents a cut in headcount of 8% – but in salary costs, considerable less: 3-4% at most. How nice it would be if the UK unemployment level was only 4%.

In any event, the question is as much one of quality as quantity. The French civil service is better paid than ours, but then it does have an enviable record of taking smart decisions and making good calls….as opposed to the catalogue of complicated incompetence that marks out our bureaucrats as something extra-special. It is quite possible to build a case against the FCO, for example, based on the conclusion that it hasn’t backed the right horse since 1909. The MoD has managed to fire half the squaddies in the army, but not one of its own ranks; it regularly supplies the wrong goods at the wrong time to every one of our defenders on land, at sea and in the air. The DoH has failed spectacularly for 60 years to use its muscle in order to negotiate lower drug prices, and on every occasion where the private sector has provided services to it, this outstandingly hopeless Ministry has been run round in circles at our expense.

As currently structured, our administrative class has a vested interest in making things expensive via a bottomless pit of taxpayers’ money. This site has always believed that mutualisation of civil service functions would save the citizens of Britain a fortune in taxes, and remove the power that these nincompoops have in our constitutional processes. Were it not for the blackmailing ability they have, such things would’ve happened decades ago. But as it is, the same situation pertains everywhere from Washington to Athens. The People can starve, the country be invaded and the Rule of Law suspended, but the bureacrats will still be there.

Interesting read..............................


David Cameron’s Conservatives are running scared of UKIP
SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 9:10 AM
Author:

John Spellar

UKIP will spend their Conference this weekend trying to pose as a mainstream political party with mass appeal. As well as hearing from Nigel Farage, their leader, there’ll no doubt be an appearance from Godfrey Bloom, their resident cartoon sexist. It’s unlikely that there will be appearances for their two former MEPs who have been jailed for fraud. And they probably won’t showcase the various councillors and candidates who have been exposed in the press as having far-right views.

If you listen to their leader, UKIP are a party of straight talkers with credible, mainstream policies which, when delivered with a dash of bluff honesty, are the key to a plan to target ordinary working people. But the reality is quite different. The truth is that UKIP don’t want to communicate the truth about their policies. They don’t share your values – in reality they’re even more right-wing than the Tories. At the last election they ran on a platform of cutting public services even deeper and faster than the Tories, on cutting taxes for the wealthiest and on taking billions out of the NHS, subsidising the better off to go private. They want to abolish your right to parental leave and maternity pay. Bizarrely, their manifesto included a policy of paying the same level of benefits to absolutely everyone – even people who refuse to look for a job.

Far from being the breath of fresh air driven by idealistic beliefs that they’d like us to think, UKIP are no strangers to cynical policy u-turns, constantly chopping and changing for narrow political advantage. For instance, at the last election they backed high speed rail but now, aware of some Tories’ discomfort about the route, they have flip-flopped to explicit opposition to the scheme.

Despite their policies, though, UKIP are having an influence – on the Conservatives. If you don’t believe me, listen to David Cameron. In 2006, as a fresh-faced young leader, he described UKIP as “a bunch of, well, fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, basically”. This year, though, he changed his tune. After UKIP gained 139 seats, mostly from the Conservatives, in this year’s council elections Cameron was invited to repeat the insult. He refused, saying “it is no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for”.

It’s one more piece of evidence that David Cameron’s Conservatives are running scared of UKIP. In the early stages of his leadership of the Conservatives, David Cameron tried to demonstrate that he and his party had changed. He hugged huskies, hugged hoodies, asked people to “Vote blue, go green” and criticised his party for “banging on about Europe”.

But he failed to take his party with him. Between 2005 and 2010 the Conservatives lost 75,000 members, and the decline has continued in Government – figures revealed by the party this week showed that membership has almost halved since David Cameron became leader. As the Conservative Party’s membership has declined, UKIP’s has risen – and UKIP’s appeal to former Tory voters threatens Conservative prospects at the next election.

David Cameron has started responding to the UKIP threat, changing his language and his policies and moving to the right. Not only on Europe, where pressure from UKIP and his own backbenchers has forced him to make concessions, but on policy after policy David Cameron has moved the Conservatives onto UKIP’s ground. Sometimes – as on the notorious “Go home or face arrest” anti-immigrant van – even Nigel Farage has attacked them as “nasty”.

With Conservative backbenchers demanding that Cameron go even further, with an electoral pact or even a coalition with UKIP, it’s clear that many Conservatives’ sympathies lie with Nigel Farage’s party. As the Conservative Party drifts to the right, David Cameron weakly tags along in its wake.

can't be bothered to read through all today's verbiage, but i really dislike all the periodic political smear, this time aimed at farage ..... that's not cricket!

Barclays Bank computer theft: Eight held over £1.3m haul

Eight men have been arrested in connection with a £1.3m theft by gang who took control of a Barclays Bank computer.

The money was transferred from the branch in Swiss Cottage in north London in April, a Met Police spokesman said.

Searches are being carried out at addresses across London where property including cash, jewellery, drugs and credit cards have been seized.

The men, aged between 24 and 47, were arrested on Thursday and Friday.

Following the report of the theft, police found a "keyboard video mouse" (KVM) switch attached to one of the branch's computers.

It had had been placed there by a man purporting to be an IT engineer the day before the theft on 5 April

Update: Labour lead at 1
by YouGov in Politics
Fri September 20, 6 a.m. BST

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 19th September - Con 34%, Lab 35%, LD 11%, UKIP 11%;

I think garbage should be superimposed over the cabbage and applied to the next tory conference.

Garbage in and Garbage out will be the appropriate banner for the next tory conference with the theme song "we will all sink together", which, of course, will be arranged by head "office" and sang rousingly a under Dave's baton.

I do hope somebody asks Cameron about his "successful" mismanagement of the "Syria vote" and his ability to plan an invasion of another country, when he is too incompetent to manage his "owned" party.




Strikes me Nigel coming up on the back of UKIP is winning up the straight against a weakened Dave, who appears to be without Rebecca's pony, which was trained by the Murdoch stables.



Will the Stalker Borisconi be there?

Boris will be there...after the election, no fool him.

Not a fool, but what is he?

a very clever barrister by training if i recollect correctly

Not a barrister. He was a journalist and then an MP. He read classics at Oxford.

Is that the new way of describing him?

I hear Dave and George (the heir apparent) define him slightly differently.

i gave you the sensible answer :-)

as an mp, i'ld assuredly vote for boris, but i really don't see him as a party leader let alone pm
much as i and many others enjoy boris's public persona, i think he would have a spot of bother being taken uber-seriously by other foreign leaders ...... do you think (for example) that the swedes, germans and dutch would even start to understand his humour, let alone the russkies and chinese

He could be the Prime Minister without being an MP. It is not a legal requirement. There have been PMs who were in the House of Lords. He wouldn't be able to do PM's questions.

Well Cameron has set a precedent by not answering questions at PMQs time.

Seems common practice.