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.

I said that cyners!!!!!!!!!!

This article is about dave and ma merkel, complete with the junker.

However, there is a contribution from a poster who suggests a deal has already been done. If this is the case, and the conditions altered to stop benefit tourism etc, I can see dave being able to fight and win an election on the back of it.


http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/eu-exclusive-juncker-doctrine-spells-out-why-uk-cannot-change-the-essentials/



3] Merkel has given UK Government a get out if they choose to use it. The free movement is for people to seek work, not benefit tourism. Suggest the UK follows the Main EU countries, pay Tax credits, unemployment benefits etc, by a] ring fencing them from general taxation b] let the employers pick up the tab with increased Nat Ins contributions, c] these benefits only paid after 2-3 years of paid employment in the UK.

Number Of Low-Paid Workers Hits Record High Of Over Five Million 6/11/2014

The proportion of employees in low-paid work across Britain increased from 21 to 22 per cent last year – to just over five million people – a Resolution Foundation report revealed this week.

Resolution Foundation’s report, Low Pay Britain 2014, found that the number of people earning less than two-thirds of median hourly pay – equivalent to £7.69 an hour – rose to 5.2 million, an increase of 250,000 on the previous year.

The increase in low pay partly reflects the rapid growth in the jobs market, say Resolution Foundation, with the number of employees rising by around 340,000 between April 2012 and April 2013. But the research also shows that the proportion of employees earning less than £7.69 an hour rose slightly, reversing a small improvement in the previous year.

Resolution Foundation says ‘the report send a challenge to employers, government and all political parties to prevent people getting stuck in low pay and help them to move out of in-work poverty’.

The report also highlights that:

The ‘stickiness’ of low paid work is a serious problem. Almost one in four minimum wage employees who have been in work over the last five years have been stuck on the minimum rate for the entire time.
Women are still far more likely to be low-paid than men. More than one-in-four (27 per cent) female employees earned less than £7.69 an hour last year, compared with 17 per cent of men. This gap has slowly but steadily narrowed over the last three decades. Back in 1983, one-in-three (33 per cent) women were low paid, compared with 8 per cent of men. However, the steady decline in the proportion of women in low paid work halted last year (rising by one percentage point).
The UK has among the highest proportion of full-time low-paid workers across the OECD. Although the proportion remains higher in the US, employees in Britain are likelier to be low paid than those in other broadly comparable economies like Germany or Australia; twice as likely to be low-paid as workers in Switzerland; and four times as likely as those in Belgium.
Matthew Whittaker, Chief Economist at the Resolution Foundation, said:

“While recent months have brought much welcome news on the number of people moving into employment, the squeeze on real earnings continues. While low pay is likely to be better than no pay at all, it’s troubling that the number of low-paid workers across Britain reached a record high last year.

“Being low paid – and getting stuck there for years on end – creates not only immediate financial pressures, but can permanently affect people’s career prospects. A growing rump of low-paid jobs also presents a financial headache for the government because it fails to boost the tax take and raises the benefits bill for working people.

“All political parties have expressed an ambition to tackle low pay. Yet the proportion of low-paid workers has barely moved in the last 20 years. A focus on raising the minimum wage can certainly help the very lowest paid workers in Britain, but we need a broader low pay strategy in order to lift larger numbers out of working poverty.

“Economic growth alone won’t solve our low pay problem. We need to look more closely at the kind of jobs being created, the industries that are growing and the ability of people to move from one job or sector to the other, if we’re really going to get to grips with low pay in Britain today.”

Responding to the report, Labour’s Shadow Treasury Minister Catherine McKinnell MP said:

“These figures show that too many people are in low-paid jobs under this Government. Working people are over £1600 a year worse off since the last election which is why most people are still not feeling the recovery.

“Labour’s economic plan will create more good jobs and make work pay. We will raise the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020 and give businesses tax incentives to pay the living wage. We will also boost vocational education and apprenticeships, expand free childcare for working parents and introduce a lower 10p starting rate of tax.

“In contrast, the Tories only stand up for a privileged few. They want to cut tax credits again for millions of working families while keeping a £3 billion a year tax cut for the top one per cent.”

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady added:

“Last weekend 90,000 joined our march to call for a pay rise for workers across Britain and this report shows why.

“Many of the jobs created since the crash are very much of the low-paid, casual and zero hours variety. This risks many people and their families simply being left behind, unable to share in any benefit from the economic recovery – while those at the top take an increasing share of the nation’s wealth.

“What’s more, once in a low-paid job, it can be hard, if not nigh on impossible to get higher paid work. Without a new approach it’s quite likely that the overwhelming majority of the five million workers currently in low-paid work will still be stuck there a decade from now.”

Cynic.

Well you could at least get your post accurate.

If you haven't read the 4th Protocol by Frederick Forsyth try it.

Based on cold war and you may see from the "Philby" letters where your paranoia of communism may have originated from.

Fascinating period and the book is well written although sometimes I felt I needed a note book to list the characters.

It is a longish novel, but you should be able to get to the end of the book it you start now!

Ps, never thought much of Freddy before I read this one,

Who is Nigel Farage's new Polish mate? 6/11/2014



We all had a good laugh when it was reported that UKIP's so-called European Freedom and Direct Democracy group had collapsed after the withdrawal of the Latvian MEP Iveta Grigule, who quit the group within six months of joining it, meaning that they had representation from fewer than the seven EU nations necessary to form an official group and claim £millions in subsidies from the EU.

I'm pretty sure anyone but the most hardcore of UKIP tribalists must have thought "good job too ... what on earth is an anti-EU party doing gobbling up subsidies from the organisation they supposedly oppose anyway?"

Unfortunately Farage was quick to find a makeweight MEP from elsewhere to fill out his group again in order to requalify them to continue riding the EU funding gravy train. The MEP he found was The Polish MEP Robert Iwaszkiewicz, who comes from a political party so fanatically right-wing that even the French Front National wanted absolutely nothing to do with them!

In this article I'm going to take a closer look at the ragtag bunches of parties that Nigel Farage builds around UKIP in order to gobble up EU subsidies, and then go on to look at UKIP's new Polish friend and the party that he represents.

The European Freedom and Democracy group (2009-2014)

If you know anything much at all about European politics, it is blindingly obvious that EFDD (and the predecessor group EFD) are just haphazard groups of parties, with virtually nothing in common apart from the fact that without being part of such groups, UKIP would be short of the multinational alliance necessary in order to claim £millions in party subsidies from the EU.

The fact that UKIP's 2009-2014 group was pretty much a random jumble of parties can be seen by looking at the schitzophrenic voting record of the EFD group. One vote that is of particular interest to me is the May 2013 vote on whether the EU should proceed with negotiating the TTIP Corporate Power Grab, which is a proposed "trade deal" designed to completely over-write the democratic and judicial systems of signature states with pro-corporate legiaslation.

Given their habit of harping on endlessly about British sovereignty, one would have expected UKIP and their EFD group to vote against TTIP, however a look at the voting record reveals that only one UKIP MEP even bothered to vote, and he voted in favour of it, along with the majority of the EFD group. In fact the ex-Tory Roger Helmer joined 17 other EFD MEPs in voting in favour of TTIP, whilst only two MEPs in the whole group rebelled and voted against it.

It's quite extraordinary that UKIP are now pretending to be opposed to TTIP, even though Roger Helmer, and the majority of their political group voted in favour of it last time it came before the European Parliament, and their economics spokesperson William "Dartmouth" Legge continues speaking out in favour of it.The European Freedom and Direct Democracy group (2014-)

The composition of UKIP's group has changed dramatically since the 2014 European Elections. Out went the Italian neo-fascists Legia Nord and in came Beppe Grillo's populist Five Star Movement protest party in their place. The neo-fascist True Finns party also departed, as did the Calvinist Dutch political party SGP and the radical right-wing Greek Popular Orthodox Rally. In fact the only survivors other than UKIP from the previous incarnation are the two MEPs from the Lithuanian Order and Justice party. To reflect this change the group name was altered to include the word "Direct".

Within UKIP's reconstituted European gang, only one other party provides more than two MEPs, and that is Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement (MS5) which provides 17, to UKIP's 24, the other five contribute only seven MEPs between them.

The Five Star Movement and UKIP make extremely odd bedfellows. The only similarities seem to be that they are both Eurosceptic parties, and that they both have a charismatic populist as their leaders.

There are large policy differences between the two parties, not least the MS5 support for gay marriage and gay equality, their commitment to digital democracy and their environmentalist policy platform. A bunch of gay equality enthusiasts and environmentalists look like extremely odd bedfellows to a party riddled with climate change deniers and gay equality opposers.

Perhaps the strongest indicator that MS5 are extremely odd companions for UKIP is that they initially tried to join the left-wing (and strongly anti-TTIP) Green - European Freedom Alliance containing the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the SNP, but they were rejected.

After being rejected by the Greens MS5 tried to join the ALDE group which contains the one remaining Lib-Dem MEP, but they were rejected by them too.

Only after being rejected by the long-established Green and Liberal Democrat parliamentary groups did MS5 settle for joining Nigel Farage's ragtag bunch.

Another really confusing aspect to MS5's participation in UKIP's EFDD group is their commitment to preventing politics from becoming a way to make money and a career choice, which manifests through their rejection of publicly allocated funds to their party. What a party with such a commitment to not scamming expenses and making a career out of politics is doing propping up a European group which pretty much only exists to ensure that UKIP receive £millions in subsidies from the EU is anybodies guess.

Who is Nigel Farage's new Polish mate?

The new addition to UKIP's disparate bunch of Euro oddballs is the Polish MEP Robert Iwaszkiewicz who has been given special dispensation from his KNP party to join the UKIP group.
KNP is an extreme-right group led by Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who is one of the most "outspoken" MEPs in Europe, who has a habit of doing things like denying the holocaust, saying that women shouldn't be allowed to vote and referring to black Americans as "niggers".

Here are some quotes from the leader of the Polish party that has saved UKIP's lucrative European subsidies by lending them one of his MEPs.
"Women are dumber than men and should not be allowed to vote"
"Evolution has ensured that women are not too intelligent"
"The general public should not see the disabled on television" (an objection to the 2012 Summer Paralympics)
"Democracy is the stupidest form of government ever conceived"
"Gays are a gang of louts imported from abroad"
"We must destroy the minimum wage and we must destroy the power of trade unions" (from this speech in which he refered to black Americans as "niggers")
As for the man himself, UKIP's new ally Robert Iwaszkiewicz has praised Adolf Hitler for his tax policies and defended domestic violence. Here are a couple of quotes:
"If taxes were lower in Hitler's time, and now they're higher, what's wrong with wanting to say so?"
"[wife beating can] help bring many wives back down to earth"

It's absolutely clear that UKIP is now reliant upon a man from a very distasteful extreme-right bunch of Holocaust deniers in order to keep their taxpayer funded subsidies rolling in.

Ukipper reactions

It's no surprise at all that the overwhelming reaction of Ukippers to all of this has been to jump straight into self-pitying conspiracy theory mode, because that was precisely the mentality of their leader Nigel Farage when the Latvian MEP Iveta Grigule left the EFDD group.

Instead of contemplating the idea that she might have left because EFDD is an incoherent group made up of totalitarians, libertarians, anti-gay, pro-gay, environmentalists, climate change deniers, extreme right-wingers and wannabe-greens, to Farage and his followers it was clearly the result of some grand conspiracy orchestrated by Martin Schultz and a cabal of evil Euro-federalists.

The Ukipper reaction to the revelation that their new Polish friend comes from a disgusting and misogynistic extreme-right party is similar. You only have to read any article exposing KNP for what they are, to see a bunch of Ukippers complaining that the quotes have been "taken out of context"; that they were "only jokes"; that they were "deliberately mistranslated"; and that it's all some big conspiracy against the brave UKIP freedom fighters.

This tendency to jump straight into conspiracy theory mode derives from the tribalist hero narratives of the UKIP campaign. It's impossible for the tribalist Ukipper to see that UKIP has ever done anything wrong, because they are by definition the heroes of the story, meaning the narrative would be rendered incoherent if the problems they encounter are of their own making, rather than the result of the meddling of some arch-villain (in this case Martin Schultz, but in other cases the Lib-Lab-Cons, the media, the gays, the environmentalists, the PC brigade ...).

Conclusion

It's absolutely no surprise to anyone who follows European politics that Nigel Farage has once again hopped into bed with terrible nutters from the extreme-right fringe in order to keep UKIP's ticket to ride the EU gravy train of party funding. In the last European Parliament he cavorted with Italian neo-fascists who openly declared that the mass murderer Anders Brevik had "excellent ideas" that were "in defence of Western civilisation", and already in the new parliament he's been forced to defend the outrageous history of his Swedish Democrat allies, which grew out of the Nordic Nazi Party.

The fact that UKIP are up to their old tricks of hanging about with the dregs of the extreme-right fringe in order to secure more taxpayer funding for their party is not at all surprising. What is much more interesting is the fact that the Italian progressives MS5 continue to prop this group up. What on earth are a bunch of pro-equality, environmentalist, digital democracy enthusiast, wannabe Greens doing propping up this increasingly vile extreme-right coalition?

Perhaps someone who speaks Italian could ask the leader of MS5 Beppe Grillo what he thinks he is achieving by associating himself and his party with right-wing opportunists like Nigel Farage, and extreme-right fanatics like Robert Iwaszkiewicz and the Sweden Democrats?

If Janusz Korwin-Mikke is rejected by UKIP he should apply for British Nationality and stand for leadership of the right wing of the tory looney right after the General Election.


He sounds like he is made for them!

Load of old rubbish re cycled again. Farage has said over and over again the money UKP get's from the EU is to fund his get out of the EU campaign.

hi fred - can't remember if i've read "4th protocol" or not, though quite possibly ..... for a nice jewish boy i have wide catholic taste in reading as well as food and wine, so having just finished pg wodehouse "golf anthology", i'm wading through "lancaster and york" by alison weir ..... i confess i don't even try to keep track of the various medieval family interconnections but it makes good and interesting reading nevertheless

I use to try to read French books and some of them had the characters in listed in order of appearance.

The same would be more useful to me now.

With the devious mind you have it may trigger old memories.
=========

Names have always been a problem for me, and I am told I called my father mummy. (Not true. But I did call him a few other things.)

PS.

Have a bacon sandwich for breakfast.

You deserve some reward!

Sounds like you have retired from business cynic , were do you find the time from ?

most certainly haven't retired, but nearly all our biz is overseas so on a different time zone
i can easily walk to the office and the local food shops are all quite close to hand - butcher/fishmonger about 2 miles away .... thus no great problem to buy pretty much on a daily basis and to cook 4/5/6 times a week
i always read for a bit before i go to sleep

easy-peasy :-)

I am sick of this government’s gob-smacking meanness
Non-scroungers are funding the DWP to the tune of £10bn in unclaimed benefits – but woe betide those who try to claim benefits when they need to


Michele Hanson
The Guardian, 5/11/2014



Here are some people I bet you haven’t heard much about – the benefit NON-scroungers. Those millions of people who don’t claim the money to which they are entitled. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) owes them around £10bn in unclaimed benefits. Yes, 10 billion pounds. It dwarfs benefit fraud, which was around £2bn in 2011-12. DWP are the real cheats. They’re winning hands down. And no wonder.

Have you tried to claim any benefits lately? My friend X has. He’s had bladder cancer, and now has no bladder. That’s not much fun: painful, uncomfortable, humiliating, debilitating, and with leaks, floods and expensive large nappies. He is on a state pension and antidepressants. Then he managed to get attendance allowance. A triumph. But not for long. DWP didn’t want to make his life too much of a breeze: they took away his pension credit.

So Mr X and I went along to the local council office, where some very kind, sympathetic women are trying to sort out his mountain of gobbledygook and contradictory DWP documents, the mad maze of what he is and isn’t supposed to claim for, the difficult mess his life has become, and whether they can get him a grant for a new mattress and tumble dryer, which he badly needs but can’t afford.

God forbid that the poor and sick should have the tiniest smidgen of comfort or pleasure. And to make damn sure they don’t, I hear that our government may have secret plans to cut ESA (employment and support allowance/sickness benefit) by around £30, so that it’s about level with jobseeker’s allowance (JSA), to make sure no one is tempted to malinger in luxury on ESA, when they could be better starving and struggling on JSA.

Just a measly £30. That’s a mediocre bottle of wine for our leaders. Or a lifeline for someone like Mr X. I am so sick of this government’s gob-smacking meanness. Surely that’s not what we want this country to be like? Heartless, unfair, cruel and full of greed and misery, smoke and mirrors. Our government may fancy that, but we don’t. Do we?

@michelerhanson

I hear that Cameron is sweating in Helsinki.

He needs the press to divert attention from his failures.

Check the responses to his hand shakes.

Some even wipe their hands afterwards.

Mind Haze and DB4 will say he is playing a blinder.

I think he needs a guide dog.

=====

Somebody has just told me they have seen a draft copy of a letter asking Cameron to stand down before Xmas.

Mentions of Haque to postpone his retirement from politics.

Interesting!

By Steven Swinford, James Kirkup and Matthew Holehouse
The Telegraph

10:24PM GMT 06 Nov 2014

Ed Miliband has made a public call for Labour MPs to back him, adding fuel to the crisis surrounding his leadership.


At least four backbenchers have called on Mr Miliband to step down amid growing fears that he is leading his party to a general election defeat.


The Labour leader used an unplanned television interview to try to dismiss talk of a plot against him.


It is understood that Mr Miliband decided to confront the leadership issue publicly because he feared allies of Gordon Brown were organising a concerted attempt to remove him. But the high-risk strategy appeared to backfire as MPs said Mr Miliband had only deepened the sense of crisis around his leadership.


“Going on television to talk about it was mad. It makes it look even worse than it is,” one frontbencher said. “I started off thinking this was the usual grumbling, but now it looks more serious than that.”

Another MP said the impromptu interview on BBC News was a sign of a “bunker mentality” among Mr Miliband’s team. “He thinks we’re all out to get him.”

One party official said Mr Miliband was starting to show signs of personal strain over his party’s poor poll ratings. “He’s been lashing out, blaming people, which is out of character.”

Mr Miliband made his address after at least four backbenchers called for his resignation.

Two of the MPs who want Mr Miliband to stand down were named in Westminster as Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, and Ian Austin, the Labour MP for Dudley South. Both were unavailable for comment.

Several MPs have directly approached David Watts, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), to say that they believe it is time for Mr Miliband to go.

They could now be joined by more than a dozen other MPs with slim majorities who fear that Mr Miliband’s leadership could cost them their seats in May.

The MPs are furious at their leader’s “lacklustre” performance at the party’s conference and a poll at the weekend that suggested he is now less popular than Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader.

One of the MPs told The Telegraph: “The mood in the party is black. We are down to 29 per cent in the polls and that could go down further.

“He is less popular than Nick Clegg and he will cost us votes at the general election.

“We are hearing it on the doorstep. People are saying, 'You are doing an all-right job but we don’t like your leader’.”

In his address, Mr Miliband chose to tackle the rumours head on. He said: “This is nonsense, I don’t accept that this matter arises. I believe that what the party wants to focus on is the country. There are huge issues that our country faces. We are determined to be a one-term opposition.”

A YouGov poll for LBC radio last night found that nearly half of voters believe the Labour Party would be more likely to win the general election without Mr Miliband as leader.

Lord Soley, a former chairman of the PLP, admitted that Mr Miliband’s predicament was “serious”.

He said: “It would be silly to say that every Labour MP is relaxed about the present situation.

“You know that that’s not true and it’s no good me saying they are relaxed.

“And at the moment they’re just in their constituencies fighting in their constituencies and I think that’s what they need to do.

“But I do think at centre we can do it differently… It’s not rocket science, actually.

“It’s been done before and we can do it again.”

One member of the shadow cabinet said: “We’re in a bizarre, possibly unique, situation. The PLP have now lost confidence in the Labour Party leader. But they feel there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Amid increasing tensions within the party, Mr Watts denied that he had been involved in an argument with Mr Miliband about the challenges to his leadership.

Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former spin doctor, said that Labour was “whistling in the wind” if it thinks that it can win round voters to “the real Ed”.

He told Daily Politics on BBC One “They have almost got no choice because they have either got to say, 'He’s not going to work and his ratings are going to stay where they are’, or they have got to say, 'If more people got to know the real Ed, then somehow we’d all be turned around’. But I think they may be whistling in the wind.”

The growing leadership challenge facing Mr Miliband came after he was forced to overhaul his election team just six months before the general election. He turned to Lucy Powell, his former chief of staff, to take charge of the campaign operation. However, the appointment was criticised by Labour MPs, who said she had little experience of campaigning, having only been elected at a by-election in 2012. Mrs Powell failed in her previous attempt to get elected in 2010 despite challenging a Liberal Democrat in a marginal seat.

Andrew Harrup, the general secretary of the Fabian Society think tank which is affiliated with Labour, said he believed that Mr Miliband was a “hindrance” to the party’s success.

Meanwhile, as Mr Miliband faced a political crisis, his brother, David, whom he narrowly beat to become Labour leader, was rubbing shoulders with celebrities including Sting, at a charitable event. The older Miliband brother, the International Rescue Committee president, was hosting the Annual Freedom Award Benefit Event.

The older Miliband brother, the International Rescue Committee president, was hosting the Annual Freedom Award Benefit Event.



perhaps we are not missing anything after all.....

From the peoples daily...

Yes all over Twitter Fred..........

Somebody has just told me they have seen a draft copy of a letter asking Cameron to stand down before Xmas.

Mentions of Haque to postpone his retirement from politics.

Interesting!

QT was a non event this evening with very little sensible said

You mean the Tory was a non entity, who the heck is he anyway?????????????????????