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.

TIM,

Well done.

The true spirit of a little englander.

Mind the Cayman Islands are full of British tax dodgers.

Perhaps, you could move there.

Beckham shows us all just how easy it is......

as i recall it was said that King Canute was in the wrong place at the wrong time. can this be correct? is it a double negative?
i'm looking for a March low on a few of my holdings.
regards
jkd

PS. In the penultimate section, Hosni Mubarak, has just had a suspected heart attack.

Could it be that he requires re-sectioning?

Nice summary of Sir Alex Ferguson's current position with leading team Manchester United this season in today's Sun:

Fergie ready for his finest hour

STEVEN HOWARD - Chief sports writer
Published: Today

ALEX FERGUSON is approaching the climax of what could well be his greatest season at Old Trafford.

Victory over Manchester City at Wembley tomorrow and another Double looks on the cards.

And a record-breaking 19th Manchester United title to finally overhaul Liverpool.

Should he then guide United past Schalke and into the Champions League Final few will argue that this season's achievements have been his finest in all his 25 years at Old Trafford.

Yes, surpassing even the Treble of 1999. Even if United fail to beat Barcelona or Real Madrid.

Of course, he has been aided and abetted by the failure of his rivals. And yet for Ferguson to have taken this current United team to the fringe of such success is a triumph in itself. For he has done it despite everything.

Despite the club selling Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez.

Despite United being hamstrung by massive debts.

Despite Rio Ferdinand missing so many games.

Despite Wayne Rooney's transfer request destabilising the club in the middle of a run that saw the out-of-form England striker score just five goals in 17 league games.

Despite United's poor away form.

Despite Antonio Valencia missing five months of the season.

Despite the millions spent by the noisy neighbours.

And despite his continued run-ins with the FA.

The most outstanding aspect to his managerial ability is the way he keeps rejuvenating the club.

Nothing stagnates (unlike Chelsea). It's always being freshened up.

Take Javier Hernandez.

Eyebrows were raised - nowhere more than in Mexico - when United paid 6million for him. Just 22, he was almost as unheard-of as his club Chivas, who sounded more like a brand of whisky.

He has already scored 18 goals, more than the combined total of City's Mario Balotelli and Edin Dzeko, who cost 51m between them. Hernandez has even relegated Dimitar Berbatov to the bench.

Yet even here Ferguson has worked some sort of magic, with Berbatov still scoring the goals that makes him United's leading scorer and playing the sort of pivotal role that saw him come on and change the game as United trailed West Ham 2-0.

Similarly, Ferguson has not only retained but continues to get the best out of veterans Edwin van der Sar, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes.

Even more miraculous, he has maintained faith in Michael Carrick who, while United fans had all but given up on him, had his best game for several seasons in the Champions League quarter-final first leg at Stamford Bridge.

On paper, this United team should stand no comparison with Ferguson's previous sides.

Certainly not the Treble-winners who had Keane, Scholes and Giggs in their prime, Beckham, Schmeichel, Yorke, Cole, the Nevilles, Irwin and Stam.

And the glorious attacking ensemble of Cantona, Hughes, Kanchelskis and a young Giggs in the mid-90s.

Ferguson has wrung every last drop out of the present crop. And, like all the other teams, they are coming to the boil at just the right time.

And still he builds for the future.

With Gary Neville retired and Giggs and Scholes heading over the horizon, in have come Hernandez, Valencia, Fabio and Rafael da Silva and Chris Smalling.

While Nani is still only 24.

There is much talk again of how long Ferguson will remain at the helm with his 70th birthday due on the last day of the year.

How it might be best to get out at the top (again).

But something tells me he will continue to press on.

If Ferguson can get so much out of a squad that played so indifferently for so long this season, he will surely want to be around when they finally start playing!

Taken from http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/football/3528101/Fergie-set-for-his-finest-hour.html

Exec - Indeed, the finest manager in the Premier League without question. Just hope he buggers off at the end of the season and gives the rest of us a chance :O) Be a few referees will be hoping he retires as well no doubt!

And surely Arsene Wenger gets the prize for competence, honesty and calm.

Not to mention the special Specsavers award for never having seen anything controversial that went in his favour.

And lets not forget "fergie time" - where the game will continue until united score :-)

This is me,

Bird table post. Absolutely so spot on its scary.

Reported today that 25% of all new births in the UK are to foreign born mothers, and that the percentage of immigrants has doubled in less than 20 years, (Well done the Blair and Brown double act).

A Muslim Cleric was quoted as saying that, 'We don't need violence to take over the none Muslim world, we will achieve this in less than 50 years by population numbers'.

How frighteningly true.

Greek seems easily frightened.

When did his ancestors get to England?

Labour Party documents were revealed a year or so ago that showed Labour wanted to increase immigration to acheive social engineering and thus increase their share of the vote.

Did you get that from the Beano, or the Dandy?

Mind the tory party proving black is equivalent to white.


Say it now and change it later and we are listening while we do it.

Hays, have a good weekend.

Did you get that from the Beano, or the Dandy?

Mind the tory party proving black is equivalent to white.


Say it now and change it later and we are listening while we do it.

Hays, have a good weekend.

,

A former government adviser said Labour had allowed huge increases in immigration over the past decade to socially engineer a more multicultural Britain.

Andrew Neather, a speechwriter who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration".

Ministers hoped to radically change the country and by doing so "rub the Right's nose in diversity".

But Mr Neather said senior Labour figures were reluctant to discuss the policy, fearing it would alienate its "core working-class vote".

OR

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Politics/Ex-Government-Adviser-Andrew-Neather-Says-Mass-Immigration-To-UK-Was-Deliberate/Article/200910415414170">http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Politics/Ex-Government-Adviser-Andrew-Neather-Says-Mass-Immigration-To-UK-Was-Deliberate/Article/200910415414170

Labour ministers deliberately encouraged mass immigration to diversify Britain over the past decade, a former Downing Street adviser has claimed.

Andrew Neather said the mass influx of migrant workers seen in recent years was not the result of a mistake or miscalculation but rather a policy the party preferred not to reveal to its core voters.

He said the strategy was intended to fill gaps in the labour market and make the UK more multicultural, at the same time as scoring political points against the Opposition.

Mr Neather worked as a speechwriter for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
"Mass migration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural," he wrote in in the London Evening Standard.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if it wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

On the BBC's Question Time programme, Jack Straw faced questions about whether the policy has played a part in the rise in popularity of the BNP.

OR

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article6898174.ece

Labours secret scheme to build multicultural Britain

Can the recent success of the British National party be explained by the misguided immigration policy of the government? That was the killer question from the floor during the notorious episode of Question Time 10 days ago. Four times it was put to Jack Straw, the justice secretary, and four times he avoided answering it. Until that evening I had thought Straw was a fairly decent sort of bloke, for a politician. No longer. In a man so central to the new Labour project, who has served in cabinet under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who has been home secretary and foreign secretary, evasion on such an important subject is shocking.

In his first evasion Straw waffled about Enoch Powells recruitment of immigrants to work for the National Health Service. But that was more than 40 years ago and, as David Dimbleby pointed out, Labour has been in power for the past 12 years and Straw should answer the question. Again he waffled irrelevantly, this time about identity.

Dimbleby challenged him for a third time: Are you saying there is no worry about the scale of immigration in this country? Is that the point youre making? I cant get out what youre saying. Straw responded by saying that new figures show a reduction in the rate of increase in migration and added something about the new points system, all of which was offensively irrelevant.

So, for a fourth time, Dimbleby pressed him to answer the question. Again Straw failed to do so, but concluded by saying: I dont believe it is.

An answer emerged the next day in a London evening newspaper. I then learnt that giving Straw the benefit of this doubt had been naive: the explanation is much more sinister. In an astonishingly insouciant article Andrew Neather a former adviser to Straw, Blair and David Blunkett revealed that Labour ministers had a hidden agenda in allowing immigrants to flood into the country.

According to Neather, who was present at secret meetings during the summer of 2000, the government had a driving political purpose which was: mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

Whats more, Neather said he came away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended even if this wasnt its main purpose to rub the rights nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.

Ministers longed for an immigration boom but wouldnt talk about it, he wrote. They probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasnt necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working mens clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.

The revelations get worse. There was a reluctance ... in government, he wrote, to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labours core white working-class vote. The social outcomes that ministers cared about were those affecting the immigrants. This, Neather explains, shone out in a report published in 2001 after these confidential deliberations.