peterms

Whooosh...

I may be wrong but I think there was a touch of sarcasm in the initial post !! I assumed not, as that would make the original comment nonsensical and just plain wrong, factually, as was pointed out. Maybe I'm just too trusting and naive.

No. No, really, don't do that. Especially if you've invited people round.

Over the last couple of days, I've heard a lot of things on the radio from people expressing forceful opinions based on assumptions which actually aren't based in fact. It's amazing how simple repetition of stuff becomes so quickly taken as fact. Well done for acknowledging that your information was flawed. Most people just sail on regardless.

Well, you only need two cars because you've chosen to live out of town in a cheaper place to live, rather than live close to your work. Now if you had chosen to live in a more central place, so you could walk to work, you wouldn't need two cars. Of course your housing costs would be higher, but that's ok if you can afford them and don't lose your job, at which point you will be told that you should have been living in a lower cost area because the state can't be expected to pick up the bill for your lavish lifestyle, collecting money each month and passing it on to the mortgage company or landlord. Oh...hang on...

Oh dear. I wonder whether any of these chappies have ever tried to do anything like this in any remotely comparable context? If they had, then perhaps things like this wouldn't come as such a great surprise to them. Could it be that they're learning on the job as they go along, at our expense? Surely not. They are men of experience, who understand business and the big wide world. Aren't they? From here.

Well, taste is personal, and that style isn't my taste. More to the point, the awkward lever and handle looks like it's not going to deal with a lot of use. It looks decorative rather than functional. I agree with Rob's comment about electric grinders. Our coffee grinder that we used for spices died a few months ago, and we spent ages looking for a replacement. We eventually got this, against my better judgement, as I had looked at it in the shop and moved on, only to find that she had gone to the same shop at another time and bought it. It's pig ugly, but lives in a cupboard. It does the job. Only problem is that if you hear it straining, it means there's something like a cinnamon stick caught under the blade, and you need to unplug and free it manually or else you will burn out the motor. Not a common occurrence, just one to be aware of.

To be fair, it's just a more emphatic way of saying what several commentators have been saying, that the speech was vacuous, disjointed, and generally not too good. Haven't heard it myself. And Ian, it's "populace", for **** sake. Populous is the adjective.

Save, yes, save enough, no. The cost of being old, and being cared for while old, is getting mad. Pushing £1,000 a week, for some people, for example. Little chance of saving that much, if you might need 20 years support. Hence my previous points about the ageing population. Is it better for the economy that people save their income against a rainy day, or spend it on generating economic activity? Both are necessary, in fact. Is that a comment on the partial coverage of the US system, or what? Can you link to data for those odd figures? I should think that common sense, comparing old age before pensions with old age after, would rebut your claim. Have you read Mayhew, on the pathetic and impoverished lives and deaths of poor people before the welfare state? Though I suppose since the US is recreating this anew each year, perhaps you get to view it first hand, not read about London a century and a half ago.

It would be helpful to see how many, and in what circumstances. It would also be helpful to know in respect of what they were getting this funding, and who was the actual beneficiary. My guess is that we are talking about a tiny number of large households in Inner London who are homeless, who the local authority can't find housing for because of government policy preventing them building housing, and so the council have had to enter into a private sector leasing arrangement. This means that a private landlord can let a large property to the council at a massive rent, because they really have no choice. (Well, until they repeal the homelessness legislation, which I had thought was legislation the Libs supported, or so David Steel may have thought). The recipient of the money is the landlord, who may be an individual, a company, an offshore trust, or whatever. But it's the family who lives there that is assumed, falsely, to be getting the benefit of the money, when in fact they just pass it to the landlord. This kind of case is meat and drink to the tories because it fuels the ignorant prejudice that there's a load of people out there, mainly immigrants/asylum seekers, living a life of luxury at our expense. The point of the story, of course, is that it gives some ideological cover, however thin and poorly researched, to the coming cuts in benefits to protect bankers' bonuses.

Compulsory private health care in Holland, no NHS here. Apart from that....spot on :? As I said, I don't have enough money for kids so I put some away for a rainy day or when i get old. What's wrong with that, I don't want to get stuff for free when I could work hard and earn it. The logical solution is to get the state out of funding care for the elderly. Indeed. Send for the beadle to give the blighters a sound thrashing before escorting them to the workhouse. Like in the good old days, before all this state funded socialistic nonsense reared its head.

If we have fewer children, we will have quite an unbalanced population. The change in demographics caused by the ageing population is significant, and if the balance shifts even further through discouraging, or not encouraging having children, we will see some problems down the line. Already Japan is developing robots to deliver personal care to all those old people, because they are running short of humans to do it. Here, the discussion has been more about the problem of a shrinking tax base supporting a massive increase in pension costs and healthcare, driven by those demographic changes.

There is some Tory unease emerging among conference-goers about the child benefit cuts, according to journos on the spot. No doubt the faithful will be elated about the benefit cap, and the prospect of driving unemployed vagrants from the parish: It will be like a larger-scale, legal form of Shirley Porter's gerrymandering. Or a less in-your-face version of pass laws or the Israeli wall. We're all in this together.

Is that Les Dawson behind him? I'm not sure, but at least two of them could pass for corpses, which may account for the bloke who's holding his nose.

I was interested in this picture from the conference. Mr Cameron seems to be listening to Mr Osborne's speech with rapt attention, but other delegates seem less enthralled.

On the immediate issue about gainers and losers from these changes, this is interesting:

It's a certainty that the cuts will hit the poor harder, and the tactic is to take away one of the less defensible middle-class benefits for tactical reasons, making the case that "everyone has suffered", while leaving bankers, Murdoch etc alone. But that's only the tactical point. There's a wider strategy at play here, which is about undermining the credibility of the welfare state in order to make it easier to dismantle it. Not the whole welfare state, though, just aspects of it. So pensions will be protected, while poor people living in expensive areas will be told to move to Wigan or somewhere cheap. Before embarking on an assault on parts of the welfare state, it's necessary to create a mindset that such a move is necessary and justified. So we are hearing all the stuff about "the size of the deficit we inherited means there is no alternative" (translated, the bankers screwed up, and we would like you to pay for their incompetence rather than them). And we are hearing horror stories about some family who are paying their landlord silly amounts of rent, covered by HB. Both of these are part of the softening up process which precedes what is meant to be the rolling back of the state which Thatcher crowed about but actually achieved the reverse. It's a radical, ambitious, and deeply scary project. The stuff about quangoes is a minor theme in this drama. First outsource some government functions to a specially created board with very narrowly defined powers and remit, then mock it in the tabloids for being the "Potato Inspection Committee" or some such, then abolish it. Result - one more governmental function done away with. Spend billions on consultants but do away with things like the Darwin Advisory Committee, which since no-one's ever heard of it, must be a waste of space, right? The bigger picture is about redistribution of wealth and power away from the poorer towards the richer, and if chopping a bit of child benefit helps to create a bit of a smokescreen at the expense of a bit of angst among the core vote, well that's a price worth paying. The whole thing depends on the tactics not being transparent, the Libs staying on board, and the support of the core vote holding firm at key moments. The prize is redefining the role of the state and the power relationships in the country, in the interests of the already wealthy and powerful. In the end, that's what the Tory party is for.

Yes there are. We all know it's where this was set.

The less we choose to spend on train safety, the more we will need to spend on nurses, perhaps?

So, a fire-sale of state assets to private corporations in order to pay for the losses incurred by, er, private corporations? And cut the standard of living of the poorest to avoid any inconvenience for the bankers? The role of the state to squeeze the poor to protect the rich? Sounds like a scenario from one of the less competent and more corrupt third world countries.

There is no detail yet. It will emerge over the autumn, partly on 20 October but no doubt with more detail to follow after that. What we have so far is more a statement of general direction, and some kites being flown about removing universal benefits from the middle classes. These have been trailed. Together with the proposed increase in student fees, with students leaving university with debts of £80k, it will be interesting to see how the core Tory vote responds, when they see the impact on them personally of bailing out the bankers.

I thought he gave a perfectly reasonable answer to a typically daft meeja question. "Do you support the Palestinian right to return?" "Well, it depends what borders we're talking about. I support a two-state solution." It's not a question which admits of a yes/no answer, especially without clarifying return to what exactly. A general area of the country? The exact land borders and houses which their parents were driven from? What? Pointing this out doesn't qualify as ducking the question. It's ludicrous to try to reduce such things to a yes/no in the first place. Well, Ed, we've got thirty seconds on an issue which has occupied half the western world for the last half century. What's your position? Come on, Ed, I must press you.

Sounds inventive, and interesting.

May be hard to appreciate the flavour if you do that, and also a very good chance of cooking it to mush. Try it as a salad - blanch in boiling water for a couple of minutes then refresh in cold water, drain, then dress with olive oil, lemon juice, capers, and finely chopped chili and olives, salt and pepper. Or as a sauce with pasta - soften onions and garlic and chili gently in olive oil, add some chopped anchovies and stir until they melt, boil the cauliflower until tender (couple of minutes), refresh in cold water and drain, add to the onions etc, add cream and grated Parmesan, season, and mix with the pasta which has been cooking in the few minutes it takes to do this. Video demo of a variation on this here. I prefer chubby pasta like rigatoni or conchiglie with this - spaghetti and chunky veg just doesn't look right together. Better still, use half it for each recipe. Though if you leave it for more than a couple of days the tips will start going brown, so don't hang about. You could blanch it all now and use it in a day or two.

Interesting that the Indie gives him credit for finally confronting the child abuse issue. In fact, his handling of it has been a history of complicity, concealment, evasion, and silence. Only now that some sort of action is inescapable is he making a few anodyne remarks. There's a much better leader column here.