Awol

Also agree with kidlewis that people who don't even turn up at the polling station have no right to whinge about politics. IMO.

by whinge presumably you mean discuss? :winkold:

I personally would turn up, my vote would be spoiled as follows ..

None of the above X

Fair play and without wishing to sound like everyones grandad, too many people have fought and died for our right to express a choice and if that is to spoil your ballot then as far as I'm concerned you have participated. We get precious little chance to influence the way we are governed as it is and should use it at every opportunity, particularly people who are clearly intelligent and switched on to the world around them. Doing nothing is little better than being another clueless and reality TV hypnotised mong imo, though I stress that is not aimed at anyone posting on this thread.

As it stands I'd vote Tory, then bitch about them for the next four years :-) I do think Cameron is a bit of a removed word but at least his lot would be competent. If Nick Clegg got hit by a bus and Huhne or Cable took over I'd think about voting Lib Dem.

Also agree with kidlewis that people who don't even turn up at the polling station have no right to whinge about politics. IMO.

Now the Scotland Office Minister David Cairns has jacked it in citing Gordon's 'leadership'.

Oh dear, if he wasn't such a c unit I could almost pity the bloke.

It's like watching the suicide squad in the Life of Bryan. Is there nothing the party members themselves can do if the PLP are set to self destruct mode?

Although I'd very much like to see them out of government at the moment I strongly agree that the reduction of the Labour Party on the scale being touted by some commentators would be a very bad thing for the country in the longer term.

It is of course in the hands of Labour MP's and more specifically those ministers with the influence to give Gordon the push required. I hope one of them mans up and does the dead before any such action becomes a moot point.

.... is putting the boot into the slack jawed idiot now

good to see Jon showing the caring face of Conservatism trying to make fun from a guys physical characteristics

Oh the fun that right wing bring and their caring attitudes

Call a spade a spade Ian and he is a slack jawed idiot. Good to see one his own - now former - party whips calling for a leadership election too, bet you're looking forward to the party conference!

Even Polly Toynbee is putting the boot into the slack jawed idiot now

Unseating Gordon Brown may be Labour's last chance

Getting rid of the prime minister is a very high risk strategy, but a dying party should be ready to take dangerous medicine.

The smell of death around this government is so overpowering it seems to have anaesthetised them all. One bungle follows another and yet those about to die sit silently by. So is that it - the great September relaunch, the great economic recovery plan?

The problem is not lack of substance but absurdly grandiose expectations, raised mostly by briefings from No10 suggesting that there were magic answers. The ineptitude of Brown's Downing Street worsens by the week. The shrinking band of those he trusts are now his old rottweilers, who shred what's left of their leader's reputation. This week when they mauled Alistair Darling for telling an obvious truth (his actual words much exaggerated in the reporting), they attacked one of Brown's few truly loyal friends and a decent man. This is the sign of an inner cabal out of control. Brown apparently denies he orders these attacks on others, but fails to sack those who carry them out.

The latest disaster is Downing Street's mishandling of a windfall tax on energy companies. The idea was allowed to run until the last moment, suggesting £1bn of unearned profits might be taken to ease the pain of the poorest. Downing Street started the talk of issuing energy vouchers to the needy, and only days ago denied the idea was dead. When Compass, the left-of-centre pressure group, gathered a great popular petition in support of it, endorsed by 122 MPs, several parliamentary private secretaries and, privately, many ministers, it looked like pushing at an open door. After all, Brown himself was the architect of that £5bn windfall on the utilities.

So it was a needless shock when the prime minister told the Scottish CBI that windfalls were "short-term gimmicks and giveaways". Instead, the energy companies will next week spend a lot less than that £1bn on lagging lofts and insulating windows. Of course energy saving is essential - but it will get few of the vulnerable through this winter. As talks continue, the government now negotiates like a highwayman without a gun. What's to negotiate?

It was not the left, but the Conservative-run Local Government Association that exposed the big six energy companies for giving shareholders a 20% dividend increase. Now there will be a stormy Labour conference as Compass and the unions prepare an emergency motion. The winter death figures will be watched by Brown's enemies: fairly or not, any extra old-and-cold deaths will be laid at his door.

All this was so avoidable. In both the housing and fuel plans, no clear principle was spelled out. Brown should have said the government will not, and cannot, stop house prices falling. The stamp duty holiday is a bad mistake - all too characteristic of the prime minister. It's an expensive way to entice first-time buyers into negative equity, as all predictions are of steeper falls in house price. That money - maybe £600m - would be much better spent letting councils buy homes to keep a roof over the heads of families whose own homes have been repossessed - and buying cheap properties for social housing.

But again, Brown yearns for that "tax cut" headline. Again he cuts a good tax on property as he did in income tax, while letting unfair purchase taxes hit the poorest hardest. A windfall tax was a chance not only to relieve the hard-pressed, but to signal some recompense for a decade of wealth trickling upwards.

Charles Clarke's call for Brown's head was met by resounding silence this week, making it look less a clarion call than a lonely trumpeting of the Last Post. But it may come to be seen as the opening assassination salvo. The danger is it will be a painfully slow-motion stabbing, too late to make much difference.

A cabinet of minnows and spineless backbenchers include many - perhaps most - who want Brown gone, but lack the nerve to act. They wait for someone else, for Brown to walk away or for a proverbial bus to save them from the task. First they put it off in July: wait until after the summer, many said. Now it's wait until the party conference - as if that "speech of a lifetime" could make a scrap of difference at this stage. Then it will be "Don't rock the boat before the Glenrothes byelection". Will that deliver the electric shock to end the inertia that neither Crewe nor Glasgow East could? Or will they put it off until after Christmas, or catastrophic May elections? Some say a recession is no time for internal wrangling; but the longer they leave it, the longer the leadership question hangs over them. It will not go away.

Soon Cameron's lead will be gold-plated, his succession virtually inevitable. Another year effectively unchallenged by Labour, his contradictions and vacuities unridiculed and unexposed, will gift him an almost unopposed victory. Already at conferences the lobby groups and voluntary organisations hang on every word of shadow ministers, yawning through mere ministers on their way out. Already power, money, glamour, foreign interest and attention flock to Cameron in a political tide whose undertow knocks Labour off its feet with every wave.

Stoking up fear of some fictitious Blairite coup is the Brown camp's trump card. They spook the unions with warnings that privatisers, tax-cutters and wealth-worshippers will take over if Brown is unseated. Personal rivalries - as between David Miliband and Ed Balls - are falsely dressed up as second-generation Brown/Blair battles. But this is all costume drama, wearing the political clothes of yesterday. The imaginary Blair/Brown ideological distinction has now been exposed as the sham it always was. Brown used to let it be known he opposed university fees, war, ID cards, Trident, foundation hospitals and a host of other things he now supports. The 10p tax band abolition to bribe the better off was a wickedness entirely of his own devising. Letting rip the disastrous house price boom was him, as was letting top earnings soar unchecked while reckless banks had "light-touch regulation" and public sector workers were pinned to below-inflation pay. The sad truth is that he opposed Blair, not Blair policies.

So why would unions save his skin now? As the TUC gathers this weekend, they should consider that whoever was to stand as leader, they could win an election in the Labour party only with a radical new agenda. Unseating a prime minister is very high risk - but a dying party should be ready to take dangerous medicine if that's the last chance left.

So long, fair well...

I suspect the only relaunch Labour MP's would like to see Gordon make is into space..

Property market to remain stagnant until 2010

The credit crunch could last another 18 months, with the property market to remain stagnant until 2010, a leading British mortgage provider warned today.

Andy Hornby, chief executive of HBOS, said house prices were not likely to rise again until 2010 while lenders waited "to give the confidence back into the system for banks to start lending again".

Hornby - whose bank owns the Halifax and Bank of Scotland - said British banks would continue to suffer major problems in offering loans until they could once again raise significant sums on wholesale financial markets.

The HBOS chief said that US money-market investors would not resume channelling of money to UK banks for mortgage-lending until US house prices started to recover — a process he said was set to last well into 2010.

Related Links

Voters are dissatisfied, admits Harman

Power is lost. Can Labour find its self-respect?

Harman struggles to shine positive light

"My personal view, for what it's worth, is that it will take 18 months to play through the system," Hornby said.

"It's going to take 18 months before US house prices have started to rise again - which is what's required for banks to have the confidence to start lending again. It will take a long time to play out."

Hornby said the UK economy would continue to see a considerable slowdown in GDP and a continuance in house price deflation, which is stronger than the early 1990s.

"To balance that.., I don't believe unemployment levels are going to get as high as they peaked in the early 1990s. That's going to be the very important underpin in terms of people being able to keep paying mortgages.

However, Hornby said he was confident that the market would recover in the longer term once US house prices started rising again, though he made clear he did not expect growth to return to the high rates seen in recent years.

"I believe it will be growing again, if you are talking about a three to five-year period," he said.

"I do believe markets correct over time and I believe asset-backed securities will have come back into some kind of normal trading environment and therefore wholesale markets will have unblocked.

"However, I don't think the growth in credit will be as strong as we saw in the previous cycle. I think banks' models will be altered for the long term."

Asked if the package of measures unveiled last week by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to assist those affected by the difficulties in the property market would have an impact, Hornby said: "These small initiatives will help the market, but there is no magic bullet.

"Nothing is going to change the core correction mechanisms that always happen in markets as supply and demand balance over time. I don't think individuals' behaviour is going to be massively affected."

Hornby's comments come in the same week that London’s index of leading blue-chip shares, the FTSE 100, suffered a 7% fall in value, its largest since July 2002.

The pound sterling dropped to a two-year low against the dollar, after the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast that the UK economy would fall into recession this year.

Chancellor Alistair Darling had earlier said that Britain and the world were facing economic times that “were arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years”.

Money has been paid back?

Only a small amount and part of that has been lent back.

Didn't they effectively right off the first 3 billion a few weeks ago as non-recoverable? Expect there will be plenty more too but the public purse should just keep shelling out according to Ian - unless of course you are, for example, a young couple who felt they had to get onto the ladder 18 months ago and are now facing real trouble. Let's face it they're just mugs, not like those clever men in suits.

no AWOL take your blinkers off ...

the fact of the thatcher swindle changed the countries psyche

it encouraged home ownership (intially on the cheap and I have say corrupt) for all when for some it was never the answer, this led to all the decent stock being took off the council's books and my Mrs's confirms now how hard it is for anyone to get an hone.

Gradually this led to more demand for priavte rented which led to buy to let and deprived even more people of the chance of an home who cpould afford it

prices went up - Demand > Supply

a far greater amount of council housing available would have decreased the demand and kept prices under check

but the ones who pushed the sell off ocf course never had to worry about finding a cheap affordable house did they ?

Thanks for not answering my point at all. You back the banks ( NR) but think individual borrowers should be punished for being stupid. How very socialist of you Ian.

I agreed with you that Thatcher started the problem but then said Labour have only deepened the problem which you ignore - blinkers eh?

They've had ten years and three election victories to do something about it but they haven't, in fact the situation is worse now than in 97. Stop trying to pass the buck and realise that 10 years in government equals responsibility for the state of things today.

and snowy you have not answered the point about why we shoudl help to fund those who should never have got mortgages tin the first place, it is only delaying what wpould happen

but I am against any support of those in trouble, I knwo it sounds harsh but sometimes the lessons as you said need to be learnt

Aren't you making the same argument that you specifically opposed in relation to Northern Wreck, that is to say why should the public have to bail out irresponsible lenders who got themselves into trouble?

It's surprising that you back the banks but not the man in the street.

Be honest the only thing underpinning [extreme irony mode]Gordon's economic miracle [/off] was a massive debt bubble that they positively encouraged. Trying to blame Thatcher for this governments feck ups is fairly weak mate tbh, yes she started the rot but what have Labour done to address it? Nothing.

Cleese. A comedy genius.

8-10 is the perfect size for me, I think girls skinner than this are less attractive than girls that are above it (but not too far above it!)

Yep, agree with that entirely. 8-10 usually means nice bum and legs which I'd take over 12-14 with big funbags everytime.

Tin hats on - 1984 or brave new world?

....

I believe some police forces have already trialled some smaller drones, but this scale gives a little more scope to the data capture. Now we see the usefulness of the afghan / iraq conflicts - the govt can test out their new toys before deploying them in the UK.

The rumour - and it's in the public domain - is that they are already flying over Birmingham and trying to intercept voice print matches for Talibrum fighters recorded by the Nimrods in Afghan who have since come 'home'. Also doing the same thing 'oop North in the Leeds/Bradford area.

I'd be surprised if the intention was to eventually use them as a replacement for plod on the street (purely because of the cost element of buying, operating and maintaining huge numbers of UAV's) but I guess you'd be silly to rule anything out these days.

Don't worry folks, Gordo is going to give us a stamp duty holiday to kick start the housing market. How? He's going to borrow even more money!!

Something about being another day older and deeper in debt... Useless fecking tool of a man.

Snowy

Dare I mention *cringes* pop idol politics?!!

Tune in next week for the Westminster edition of It's a Knock Out when David Miliband will attempt to drown the PM in his own drool.

C units, the lot of 'em.

I'm actually very excited to see who the replacement for Barry could be. With the goals scored last season I'm not really worried about our attacking options even sans the model pro. We've added a bloody great keeper and as long as we have a good back four by 1st of September - which I'm sure we will - I'll remain confident that we can knock f*** out of all comers bar Manure.

I wouldn't have said that two years ago even with 10 pints of ale in me.

General,

I think you all still have the full support and confidence of the vast majority of Villa fans, who I believe share my embarassment and bewilderment at the comments of a lunatic fringe.

Many thanks and keep up the great work.

I voted yes for a few simple reasons.

1) As a team we are streets ahead of where we were when MON and Randy took over.

2) We have UEFA Cup football again and have achieved Europe two years into a five year plan which I reckon is ahead of schedule.

3) That five year plan was intended to build a team around the talent of Barry and his actions this summer have, I think, de-railed the carefully laid plans of MON. That is why this window looks a bit bonkers at the moment but ALL of the statements coming from the club recognise the same facts that we do - we need numbers and quality in serveral positions and are doing our best to get them, while also possibly adjusting some targets to cope with the loss of GB. Fine, it makes sense and I'm happy to accept that and let them get on with it.

4) Yes it would be nice to have everything done and dusted by now - and four players in is not a bad start - but I recognise the market doesn't operate to benefit AVFC and things will happen when they happen. Neither you, I or anyone else bleating about it wont make any difference so why become semi hysterical? ( that is not directed at any individual just an observation of some peoples apparent thought processes.)

In short a little more composure and objectivity would go a long way to cheering up those who are currently upset, which I'm not, at all.

Brown is just too spineless to sack him

Sorry Jon but why should he sack him? and Spineless - sorry that does not make any sense

Hi Ian. By spineless I mean weak, indecisive, a ditherer if you will. All the evidence of his Premiership to date indicate those character traits (election that was abandoned, 10p tax cave in, referendum etc etc etc).

Miliband has been positioning himself for a leadership challenge, what otherwise was that article he wrote in the Guardian about if not his vision for Labour? if Brown really was a leader he'd stamp his authority on the situation and sack or demote him.

My opinion is that he is too weak to act decisively and will put decisions (and reality) on the back burner in the hope of limping to the party conference in September. If he makes it through August I can see him going for a strategy of appeasement and promoting Miliband in the reshuffle.

It is looking bad for them though Ian, even Harriet Harperson has had to deny she's plotting, as has Jack Straw. No smoke without fire? The ship is sinking and the rats know it, so the real question is whether any of them have the courage to save their party from electoral oblivion.

The obsession with Tories for sacking people is amazing - would explain the jobless figures under them I suppose :-)

Not sure what your point is unless it was a little dig at me? In fun, obviously :winkold:

IF (and it's a big if) things haven't kicked off before the reshuffle comes around I can see Miliband becoming Chancellor. Brown is just too spineless to sack him so the only other alternative is promotion because he has to be seen to shake up the status quo.

FWIW I expect a challenge to be under way before September anyway.

^ Am I glad the bird nagged me into going fixed rate on duel fuel till Dec 09 with BG - yesterday!

Talk about a close one.

Jackie Ashley, writing in the Grauniad, seems to be pretty sure that Labour needs a new leader:

The whole national press is saturated with stories of coup plots etc. much of it from people who are very pro-Labour but not blind. Prescott and a few others are in denial but the dribbling incompetent is truely screwed and if Labour don't have the balls to act soon they'll be gone for three/four terms again.

I'll confess, I only voted for Jacqui Smith as she's a Villan

You're right Trekka and not just in the way you mean. She's an evil behatch imo.

I voted Johnson because the government are going to have some big problems with the unions soon because they know Brown is weak and are likely to push for a hard left agenda in return for their millions. With the state of Labour's finances at the moment plus a serious electability problem, they may just delude themselves that this would be a good idea and revert to type. As a union man himself Johnson may be the best placed potential candidate to limit the fallout of any industrial action.

They could go for Harriet Harman as Deputy but I reckon she'd be as bad or worse.

For me their best option is to call a GE ASAP allowing Miliband to take over what remains of the PLP and have a good re-think of what they are about. They will only get more unpopular as time goes on so it'd be in Labour's interest to save what they can now.

I'd be interested to hear the Ian's thoughts on this; do you guys think Brown should carry on to the election or does this convince you he will never be elected to the role of PM?