chrisp65

it is tricky extracting a liberal slant from just about any policy. I was going to try and get clever and mention things like the early 80's attitude toward the re patriation of Diego Garcia and attitudes towards homosexuality etc., but it all comes back to 'liberal'.

yeah, point 'e' was really offering up alternatives to your point on only having the BNP as somewhere non-Labout to go, points 'f' and 'g' I kinda lost concentration due to an earlier incident with a bottle of Morgan's Spiced Rum.

all good stuff though

I'm on a works laptop right now so I have to resist logging any time on BNP or SWP style websites to dig a bit deeper on this. They don't mind a little bit of lovely ladies thread coming up in the history, but no heavy politics.

.......

I'd hazard a bet that if you took basically any Old Labour (and probably quite a few Tory, especially pre-Thatcher) manifesto, stripped out the stuff that there was agreement with the Liberals on, and you'd be left with something rather similar to a BNP manifesto. If you were an Old Labour voter who didn't like the movement towards liberalism (in form of argument if not actual action... though the same charge can just as easily be levelled at the Thatcher-and-after Tories**) by New Labour, the BNP (or complete withdrawal from the electoral system) is basically the only way to go.

You would lose that bet. It's quite a strain to look for any policies that cannot be judged against Liberalism, but here goes:

a) the BNP would be pro nuclear, Labour were traditionally anti

the BNP would be broadly pro 'our boys' in their attitude towards the military, Labour in the 60's to 80's wasn't

c) BNP is anti left wing unions, Labour never used to be

d) old Labour would've told the Queen to stick her cucumber sandwiches

e) Parties such as Respect, Green, SWP etc offer plenty of alternatives without voting racist grunting mouth breather

f) old labour never denied the holocaust

g) to the best of my knowledge the founders of the old Labour party were never convicted of organising neo nazi activity

But that ideal of looking after anyone is one that is left leaning.

The Coinservatives, to be blunt and basic (and in some way wrong but lets run with it), tell you to help yourself. The BNP, and Labour (traditionally), say we'll help you. Thats something a traditional Conservative would not, and it's a fundamental aspect of why the BNP is closer to Labour's heartland than the Conservatives.

If you can't accept that... you're just wrong.

I can accept they use mechanisms of the Left, but once they start discriminating they are not socialists. Socialism is about unity not segregation.

they are extremists. Whichever direction you set out in as an extremist, you just end up around the back with the nutters from the other side.

I can't really get offended by the guy leaving.

I'm a Villa fan, I'd pay to play for Villa.

But as a Villa fan, if I was playing well for Fulham and getting a million and Everton offered me two million I'd be looking to move. It's not that he's not loyal. It's just a job for him. We will not be looking to replace him with Ian Taylor and as such we will most likely be replacing him with another player that will see us as the club between his last one and next one.

The Beach Boys - Feel Flows

oh that coupled with a Small Faces pick is immense

Primal Scream's 'Higher Than The Sun, dub remix'

Sounds great, shocked to see 1991 written on it though!

I recently asked my mate's little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up... She said she wanted to be Prime Minister some day. Both of her parents, Lib Dems, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do? 'She replied, 'as nobody will ever vote for the Quisling liberal elite again after their complicity in closing down UK plc that is a purely academic construct and as I'm only 5 I'm not able to answer it in a cohesive and thought through manner. Luckily, being old money middle class types my parents will insulate me from their devastation. Have you seen my picture of a house. I'm going to give it to a tramp.'.

apologies, I did have a much longer retort that calculated a need to clear up 9,985.75 gardens to get on the housing ladder, but even I was bored when I read it back.

and see the way Coves dealt with Balls on news night ..another potential labour leader that has just harmed his cause

No I didn't see it to be honest but please don't try and talk up the performance of Goves after the week he has just had, he made a total arse of himself with the errors in that list.

I would imagine he is in for some very uncomfortable visits to some schools next week.

I did see the Goves / Balls newsnight spat. By my recollection Goves half heartedly retracted what he accused balls of and changed his accusation from a list of specifics (which the civil servants corrected Goves on in writing) to a stumbling accusation of broad waffly intent.

The dying days of Labour were very poor, with Balls being as poor as any of the others. Faced with this open goal Goves has **** up in the clamour to cut. He'd do well to just lie low for a good while.

NOT falling out of love.

The game has always had big rich clubs that dominate and can flash the cash to ultimately influence league position. Not a definitive example, just one I’m familiar with off the top of my head. 1953 Barry Town were doing ok, lower league, but pushing on. They had a teenager called Derek Tapscott. Tappy came to the attention of Arsenal who made an offer. The offer of £4000 in 1953 was far more than the Barry team could possibly resist. For Tappy it was a choice of playing for free and earning a crust working in a butchers, or playing for Arsenal, being taught a trade, having a subsidised house and being paid a guaranteed retainer during the closed season.

Small teams couldn’t possibly compete with that kind of muscle, and so the big teams guaranteed their position by soaking up the best talent. Not quite seeing what has changed.

World Cup? Quite good so far. The Dutch and the Germans are still in it and could meet each other in the final, that’d be worth watching. For the eleventh consecutive WC England failed to beat any ‘major’ team in order to progress. So did the team underperform or were expectations out of kilter with reality?

Am I more or less likely than 20 years ago to get hit by a coin whilst watching footy? Less likely. Am I more or less likely to be stopped on the motorway en route and photographed by the police for displaying football colours on a match day? Less likely. Am I legally obliged to buy a £45 nylon top advertising a casino? No. Do I have to pay who knows what for biased Sky coverage? No.

All in all I think people worry too much about football. If the whole football monster collapsed tomorrow someone nearby would get hold of a ball and four jumpers and start it up again. If I was good enough I’d play in my local team (they’d have to be pretty bad), if I wasn’t good enough I’d go and watch them to meet up with mates and shout at strangers.

rhys vs gatorra

Reminds me of

genius find, that's about to hit another site where I will claim to have found it myself !

I've got tickets for the gatorra gig, slightly over priced at £12 a pop but should be a giggle

It's not incredibly original any more, it's true, the format is pretty predictable, but it's still one of the best shows on British TV, simply because it isn't clearings in the woods dancing, or clearings in the woods singing, or clearings in the woods buying a house, or selling a house, or doing up a house to sell it for more than they bought it for, or clearings in the woods cooking a meal for people in their newly bought house.

By simply not being aimed at women, it's good for a few million viewers.

Bang!

so true - it's just a brainless harmless bit of entertainment not aimed at the same old antiques / houses / food format

it ain't great, it's formulaic, but it is a little bit of fun

not sure if this is one for bollitics or just general chat, but here goes:

woke up on Thursday with a touch of the old red eye, still had it yesterday. Woke up this morning and it's still there and I've got blurry vision. Popped into Spec Savers in town about 10:30 this morning. They instantly took it more seriously than I had, gave me a quick examination and phoned the hospital to say I was on my way in! Pooping myself to listen to that conversation without a decent explanation to me first. Anyway, duty optho type person says get straight in. I get there at about 12 noon (its a 14 mile drive through mid saturday shopping traffic). I was booked in, seen within 20 minutes, in and out for various tests. I'm now home, can't see bugger all through the one eye, and I've been booked back in for Monday on instruction that if this gets worse phone the hospital direct and go straight there. Not completely obvious what is wrong, I'm clearly confusing them as apparently the scarring means I should be in serious pain but I'm not.

Anyway, the big waffly point I'd like to make is that I'm not currently feeling the money poured into the nhs was quite as wasteful as others may think. I'm lucky enough for my last few experiences of the nhs to have been a good few years ago and that was a whole load of shocking third world experience I don't want repeated.

The only way to judge this and put any political slant on it I suppose would be to do the same eye trick again in 5 years time and see what happens.

Off for a little lay down in a dark room.

cheers guys, birthday soon, if the cash roles in I'll report back!

ok a camera question from a novice (well not complete novice but ex OM10 user and digital moron).

I've currently got a couple of Canon Ixus digitals of varying vintage. Easy to use, pocket sized etc., but really annoying that they are both slow to grab focus and take a shot. Trying, for instance to persuade them to take a picture of the kids on a leisure park ride is almost impossible. The thinking time means you miss the shot. I've fancied a new digital Olympus Pen for no real reason than it looked and felt like my old OM 10. I've read some reviews and apparently it's also 'slow' on action or low light shots.

So, my question: on a budget from 0 to £300 what digi / digi slr camera can I get that takes a good happy amateur photo and is capable of photgraphing a moving thing without taking 90 minutes to run through face recognition software or some such. But is also capable of 'photography' above and beyong happy snapping when I happen to find a stunning piece of architecture that needs capturing.

I'm not simply too lazy to google, I'd just prefer recommendation from this thread to pages of What camera stats.

cheers

The new govt has decided to cut 11% of costs at Companies House in Cardiff. Essentially the 'costs' of Companies House are its staff. So I'd guess in round numbers that's a decree from Central Offfice that CH has to shed about 120 jobs. Doubtless those 120 will be told in a few months time they are making the unemployment figures look bad and they should stop being feckless spongers and get a bike.

It would be nice to see the staff there told they can choose to all take a pay cut to secure everyone's jobs, albeit on lower pay. It would actually be clever tactics from the govt to offer that option, the staff might even reject the offer absolving the govt of the accusation of tory kneejerk sackings. We shall see.

.......And proof of the dumbing down of the entire country is here, students are threatening to go on strike, that is dumb. Back in the day, students would have had a march in London, the odd sit in to raise awareness (or kill the vice chancellor in my case, good job we brought the coffin along - :oops: most unfortunate) and gone along to the bar and had a few shandies and considered the job done, going on strike would have been obviously laughable

...ah the London March. That gave me a lovely flashback. All on the bus, drinking before we've left town, hammered and tired when we arrived in London. Subverting the protest chant so we had a call and response of 'what do we want?' answered with 'beaujolais nouveau please'. Then off down Carnaby Street to spend my insufficient grant on vinyl.

And so it begins...

Students are 'burden on the taxpayer' says David Willetts

I know the new NUS president and I can tell you now that he will lead a national strike if this goes ahead!

HOLY POOP!

Newsnight telling me last night that we're close to peak oil was bad enough, but this! This could have serious consequences some of you may not have stopped to consider.......

.......can't think of any admittedly. Possibly a few less bags of washing back to mum's the country over if the students stay in their jams all day?

we can reduce the number of MP’s

Wasn't that in the Tory Manifesto ?

of course whether the Tory manifesto becomes like the Liebour one and is just a tree that died in vain , remains to be seen

dash it all, I wish I'd voted for them now!

not really, they're cnuts

With the government looking for cost saving ideas from the public, I think I’ve got half an idea to get the ball rolling. It’s not a massive sum of money, but every little helps.

We currently have 650 MP’s with constituencies that vary between 50,000 voters and 80,000 voters. With a little planning the number of voters could be smoothed out, currently some constituencies are 50% larger than others so surely either their MP’s can’t cope or the one’s with lower numbers are under employed.

With less constituencies we can reduce the number of MP’s. Not some great revolutionary cull, just a shaving to make a saving. Not even 10%, just a 7.5% reduction. 50 MP’s in round numbers taking us from 650 to a nice round figure of 600. I’m quietly confident my quality of life wouldn’t noticeably deteriorate due to the Commons dropping from 650 to 600 MP’s.

The result? Well a bog basic MP earns £65,738 with staff allowances (up to £103,800), admin expenses (up to £23,000), communication expenses (up to £10,400) plus a whole raft of other expenses a cannon fodder back bencher can easily cost us £200,000 a year without having to flip, dip or take the piss in any way. 50 MP’s at £200k each is £10,000,000 a year. Over a single parliament that’s a saving of 40 or 50 million quid.

More than the relatively modest saving of tens of millions, it would show that the MP’s are sharing our pain.

Max Hastings, Piers Morgan, John Redwood and Alastair Campbell all in the same room and not a suicide bomber, wonky drone, friendly fire missile, or pretend SWP student with eggs for miles around.

Classic missed opportunity there.

Oh dear lord she's a headcase.

In 1996 Abbott was accused of racism when she suggested that "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" in her local hospital in West London were unsuitable as nurses because they "may never have met a black person before".

From wiki.

Voting record (from PublicWhip)

How Diane Abbott voted on key issues since 2001:

Voted moderately for equal gay rights.

Voted very strongly against the Iraq war.

Voted a mixture of for and against introducing ID cards.

Voted moderately for removing hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Voted very strongly for a wholly elected House of Lords.

Voted moderately for the hunting ban.

Voted a mixture of for and against laws to stop climate change.

Voted strongly against introducing foundation hospitals.

Voted moderately against Labour's anti-terrorism laws.

Voted very strongly against replacing Trident.

Voted moderately against introducing student top-up fees.

yeah, absolute headcase

(ironical)

not my cup of tea, bit of a media darling

I've just drawn Brasil in the office sweep.

The money is as good as mine.

I believe the definition of left and right and hard left etc is skewed by where we are today. We currently have a system where there are three parties all offering different flavours of essentially the same thing. You might want your icecream with sprinkles or prefer it with strawberry sauce or like a flake up your 99. But it's all icecream and somehow we've all happily gone along with it and happily call each other names over our stance on sprinkles.

Back in the mid 70's Harold Wilson (not considered at all extreme at the time) had a plan to kerb house price rises and mortgage rate hikes by nationalising all land. All land taken out of private lease from the Queen and into State control, for the people. **** your sprinkles, who wants a mug of tea?

If you want 'land is power give the land to the people' these days where can you go? Not even the SWP. They are more interested in selling you a solid silver clenched left fist pendant on their website merchandising page.

So for me PR or AV is just another way of gently herding sufficient sheep into the unspectacular middle ground. Except of course, being afraid to protect jobs because it might upset billionaire money traders isn't actually the middle. Allowing 100,000 local government or nhs staff (that may well be the bread winners in their families) to be laid off so the rest of us don't have to pay an extra penny income tax (and thus take longer to acquire that flat screen tv) is not the middle ground.

I'm off for a lie down.

very happy with that, and with tickets for the second T20 against Pakistan already in the bag looking forward to a good summer of cricket

Has Kemp got a decent chance if he puts his hat in? Could he be rushed into parliament?

to be honest there are so many skeletons in that particular family cupboard I think the press would have a field day, more shagging and knocking off of each others relatives and spouses than an Austrian house party