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.

Conservatives lead at 1

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 17th November -

Con 33%, Lab 32%, LD 7%, UKIP 15%;

The polls have been up and down almost every day. The figures are all within the normal margins of error for polls. That shows the parties are pretty much even at the moment.

H/S now watching Milliband at every opportunity he can, ITV morning TV now.. see his 50512 for confirmation.

Miliband is always worth watching. Every time, it is like a new episode of Mr Bean.

Populus poll has topline figures of CON 35%, LAB 36%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 11%, GRN 5%. This is the lowest that any poll has shown UKIP for a while,

Last night on ITV

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2838759/Just-couldn-t-worse-Ed-takes-TV-battering-Myleene-Labour-leader-humiliated-taken-task-singer-proposed-mansion-tax.html

Well you wanted a Klass war, Ed! As if things weren't bad enough, now the beleaguered Labour leader is humiliated on TV by former pop star Myleene as she takes him to task over the mansion tax

Ed Miliband quizzed by Myleene Klass over Labour’s mansion tax plan
Party leader looked lost and bewildered as the singer tore strips off him
Labour wants to impose a levy on homes worth more than £2million
But Klass told him: 'You may as well just tax me on this glass of water'
Viewers said she was ‘doing a Paxman’ and ‘wiping the floor’ with Miliband
Labour leader turns to Kim Kardashian to improve his image in photos

After some of the worst weeks of his leadership, he may have hoped that taking on a former pop singer in a TV debate would provide a welcome boost.

But Ed Miliband was left humiliated last night after he was unceremoniously taken to task by Myleene Klass over Labour’s proposed mansion tax.

The party leader looked lost and bewildered as the singer tore strips out of his pledge to impose a tax on homes worth more than £2million.

‘When you do look at the people who will be suffering this tax, it’s true a lot of them are grannies who have had these houses in their families for a long, long time.

'The people who are the super-super rich buying their houses for £140million, this is not necessarily going to affect them because they’ve got their tax rebates and amazing accountants. It’s going to be the little grannies who have lived in those houses for years and years.’

Mr Miliband responded: ‘I totally understand that people don’t like paying more in tax. The values of my government are going to be different to the values of this government.’

you don't have to if you don't record until prosecution is agreed by CPS

Cameron is alway worth watching . Every time, it is like watching a scene from Walter Mitty.

Im reliably informed his EC chums (not) have a new nickname for him Deceptive Dave.

H/S Have you thought of starting a EMS club up yet?

G/F, DD I like it -):

Klass was just a big mouth screaming all the time, she ruined the show actualy.

Milliband looked embarrassed for her.

It was obvious to a blind man she is one of them going to be effected by the mansion tax as were the other panelists on the show.

Yep Deceptive Dave, its spreading here like Bird flu aswel.

This is a good fan site.

http://awkwardedmilibandmoments.tumblr.com/

didn't watch, but if MK's comment is as shown above, then of course she's absolutely right

my parents (both now dead as it happens), bought their house with 2 acres of land just after the war for £7.000 ...... purely by happenstance and location, it was of course worth a massive amount more when my mother (last survivor) died about 3 years ago, not least because the extra land (a large orchard) now had outline planning for 4 houses

by all means charge extra stamp duty on purchase - it's already been applied, although in a most unfair manner - but to charge super-tax purely because "the market says" a certain property is worth this arbitary £2m cannot be just, the more so if it isn't a staggered tax

=========

i wouldn 't be surprised if similar also applies in Aberdeen where housing is apparently staggeringly expensive

It was nice to see Miliband making a fool of himself again last night. Every panel member attacked him last night. The audience joined in as well. He is a walking car crash. When the public were asked to choose actors who should play politicians the other day, the was Rowan Atkinson. Cameron got Hugh Grant, Clegg got Colin Firth.

Alf, The word we use is "Fair" in this country, you should know that by now.. so just pay up or right.

Deceptive Dave makes a fool of himself everytime he speaks. He lies so much he forgets what he as lied about and is always getting letters from the parliamentry watchdog who look over conduct of the house of commons MPs.

People have lost count now how many times hes now had to apologise.

I don't buy this "poor old granny" stuff.

If you are sitting on an asset worth £2mill+, you are not a poor old granny at all, in fact you are very rich, top % of the population.

Why shouldn't they pay more?

palestian scum killing people well they pray about ways up the palestians as scum wipe them from the good earth wipe them out .

hays you non posting of these act says you are lost for words of the scum

Cameron’s global crash warning: He’ll do nothing about it 18/11/2014


“Our long-term economic plan is working!” says Cameron – and the debt keeps rising.

It’s more accurate to say he’ll do nothing right.

David Cameron is warning that another global financial crash is on the way. It’s an accurate warning – others have been forecasting it for a while but, seeing him saying it, didn’t you ask yourself who he’ll be blaming this time?

It can’t be Labour’s fault – Labour has been out of office for a few years and besides, Labour policies were sorting out the fallout left by the last right-wing-precipitated global financial catastrophe until the Tories lied their way into office and then twiddled their thumbs for four long years.

He reckons emerging markets that sustained the recovery (what recovery?) are slowing down but the British economy is growing and needs to be insulated from any crash. He says employment is up massively and new businesses are proliferating – but if you scratch the surface of that claim you’ll see that the number of hours worked is no higher than in 2010 and new businesses are being ‘run’ by people who are claiming tax credits as self-employed because then they won’t be hassled by the DWP while claiming JSA. There are new businesses, of course, but not nearly as many as Cameron wants you to believe.

Cameron’s article in The Guardian, if read properly, is comedy. It certainly isn’t to be taken seriously.

“When we faced similar problems in recent years, too many politicians offered easy answers, thinking we could spend, borrow and tax our way to prosperity,” he writes. Which politicians? Gordon Brown is the only Chancellor in recent history to manage a surplus, rather than a deficit; his policies brought the UK unexpected prosperity (which, unfortunately, led to the EU surcharge that has so badly embarrassed George Osborne); and his successor Alistair Darling introduced policies that knocked £38 billion off the deficit created by the right-wing bankers’ gambling binge.

Cameron must be referring to Conservative politicians in his own government.

es, look, here’s a bit where he writes: “It is more important than ever that we send a clear message to the world that Britain is not going to waver on dealing with its debts.” He could have cut that sentence down to read: “Britain is not dealing with its debts.” The national debt has more than doubled since the Conservatives started running the economy – from around £800 billion to £1.8 trillion by 2015, meaning George Osborne’s pitiful attempts to tackle the national deficit by cutting public services and selling off the country’s assets have achieved less than nothing.

“This stability is vital in attracting the business and international investment that delivers growth and jobs, and which keeps long-term interest rates low.” You couldn’t make this up. Interest rates are low because lenders know the UK has its own sovereign currency and will always be able to pay its debts, one way or another, even if it means printing more money (quantitative easing, anyone?) – remember when the UK’s triple-A credit rating went downriver despite all Osborne’s efforts to keep it? He claimed this meant the cost of borrowing would leap, but the effect has gone unnoticed.

There’s a lot more waffle and you can read it on The Guardian‘s site. It’s amazing a paper of its standing bothered to publish it.

For a more informed opinion, let’s go to Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, pausing for a moment to wish him well in his recovery from recent surgery.

“His focus is instead on highlighting problems in Europe and on signing TTIP – the trade treaty that will require the privatisation of the NHS whatever he says now,” writes Mr Murphy – possibly from the recovery ward.

“This is a man who can see a crisis coming and who must know that his austerity programme can only make it worse (anyone but a fool can see taking money out of a failing economy, as he plans to do, is bound to make it worse) but who is resolutely refusing to recognise the issues that will cause this next wave of economic collapse.

“The wrong people have the money… The people who spend least of their incomes have had the biggest pay rises and are the only ones to enjoy effective tax decreases over the last few years. These people are the highest income earners in the UK.

“At the same time, cutting benefits for the poorest and increasing VAT (which together with deliberately enforced wage cuts have reduced the net disposable income of most people) and cutting taxes for the wealthiest, this has been the inevitable outcome. And we know this outcome has not happened by chance: this is deliberate.

“When there’s a shortage of spending in the economy to let the wealthiest get wealthier, [it] simply means that the imbalances within it get worse. And it’s imbalances that cause crises.

“Corporation tax cuts and reforms to our corporation tax system that means that multinational corporations based in the UK can, since 2010, find it much easier to make effective use of tax havens to cut their UK tax bills have also made the problem worse. I reckon these cuts are costing at least £10 billion a year. What these cuts do is transfer money that would have belonged to the state to companies in the hope that they will be encouraged to invest it as a result. But they aren’t doing any such thing.

“Companies are taking the tax cuts and banking them. They aren’t even giving them back to their owners. They’re just hoarding it. Like the wealthy (perhaps, unsurprisingly) large companies are simply sitting on their cash.

“The tax gap is another indication of this. What really belongs to the government is in the hands of crooks and cheats, with massive economic consequences.

“What can be done? I’ve always pointed out that there are only four drivers of the economy: consumer spending, investment, net foreign flows and government spending.

“Investment is not happening; business will not do it: that’s why they havecash.
“Net foreign flows are broadly neutral: the trade deficit is dire but hot money still comes to the UK, although we cannot rely on that.
“Consumer spending is poor and may get worse: most people do not have the money.
“And that leaves the government to put matters right. It has to generate new economic activity.”
Mr Murphy proposes more quantitative easing – printing money and then investing it in a new, sustainable infrastructive (not the kind that Cameron is pushing); rebalancing tax by increasing taxes for those who can pay; and closing the tax gap.

You won’t see any of those under a Conservative government!

Get ready to batten down the hatches for another round of financial catastrophe, and this time, be prepared to put the blame where it really belongs – on Conservative politicians whose supposed reputation for financial competence is a myth and who should never have been allowed near the national economy.

And remember where the blame lies when you vote next May.