Mr. Eagles, perhaps it's as well I'm not off to the Ilkley meeting. One shudders to think what sentence a man would get for thrashing someone to death with a large haddock.
It ought to be, Mr. N, but I suppose some thick idiot will kick up a fuss at some stage. I once got into dreadful trouble at a meeting (in the public sector) for using the expression "the bitter end" - they said it was an expression used in slavery and therefore to utter it showed I was a racist - God's honest truth.
LOL! That is brilliant!
Are you sure it wasn't a spoof - a competition to see who could invent the most ludicrously absurd example of PC nonsense and be taken seriously?
My father was once taken to task for saying "I call a spade a spade" back in the 80's
My dad being as he is refused to apologise and it all fizzled out.
It is political dirty tricks to portray the crazies in any party as representative of that entire party, and it is indeed overtly negative, but it is at least taking things actual people have said or written, whereas the Labour PEB which drew such derision was just a rather pathetic skit portraying make believe statements as fact.
Neither is positive, which is unfortunate, but in terms of standard political dealing one was a little more over the line than the other in terms of presenting a very partisan view as 'fact', hence the Labour one drawing mroe criticism than a standard negative ad I suspect. If they'd spliced in actual footage of some Tory cllr saying something offensive or stupid, it would still have been condemned by Tories, but it would have been par for the course.
Indeed. It would be unfair, for example, to portray Mike Hancock or Chris Huhne as representative of all Lib Dems.
Or Cyril Smith, or Jeremy Thorpe, or Charles Kennedy...
If only Charles Kennedy WAS reflective of all Lib Dems. Sadly the Party has been taken over by unscrupulous careerists like Clegg and Laws. I wonder whether there is a strong enough base to the party that has the will to move on from this rather grubby period in their history.
That grubby period? You mean that period for the first time in nearly a century the Liberals and their successor parties were part of a peacetime government?
The Liberals were part of the National government in the early '30s, so more like eighty years.
While having made some mistakes (all parties do, and particularly ones that have been out of government a long time) generally I am happy with the LD ministers and their role in government. Cable has been a waste of space, but the remainder have performed well.
In the short term I expect the party to suffer, but in the longer term this will be recognised as a very competent government. The prospect of either Labour or Tory majority government red in tooth and claw is not a pleasant prospect.
Indeed. It would be unfair, for example, to portray Mike Hancock or Chris Huhne as representative of all Lib Dems.
Or Cyril Smith, or Jeremy Thorpe, or Charles Kennedy...
The number of voters willing to give the LDs credit for being reasonably competent during a difficult governmental period is, I suspect, far less than those who would have preferred there to be no government at all which had the Tories in it.
I think the hysterical negativity surrounding the LDs and their virtual wipeouts from certain regions is out of proportion to the level of their supposed political crimes and duplicities, which is normally just the same thing all parties do, just in opposition to what those who hate them wanted, but I really don't see how even in the long term they will benefit.
In the long term, this may come to be seen as a competent government (time will tell I guess, though at the least it's somehow less dysfunctional than the previous Lab majority government), but in the long term there would not appear to be a space for a middle ground centrist party of the scale the LDs once achieved and want to remain as.
There's nothing wrong with having a smaller, niche focus as a political party, and they might achieve a more modest goal, but they still have pretensions to the numbers they achieved in recent times, and in the long term becoming the junior party to Labour that so many apparently thought they were voting for, seems the likeliest way to achieve that. More than expecting people to go 'Those LDs proved pretty ok in government, we should give them credit for partnering with the hated Tories'. The hatred is too irrational in its passion to be overcome without a change in course I think.
It is political dirty tricks to portray the crazies in any party as representative of that entire party, and it is indeed overtly negative, but it is at least taking things actual people have said or written, whereas the Labour PEB which drew such derision was just a rather pathetic skit portraying make believe statements as fact.
Neither is positive, which is unfortunate, but in terms of standard political dealing one was a little more over the line than the other in terms of presenting a very partisan view as 'fact', hence the Labour one drawing mroe criticism than a standard negative ad I suspect. If they'd spliced in actual footage of some Tory cllr saying something offensive or stupid, it would still have been condemned by Tories, but it would have been par for the course.
Indeed. It would be unfair, for example, to portray Mike Hancock or Chris Huhne as representative of all Lib Dems.
Or Cyril Smith, or Jeremy Thorpe, or Charles Kennedy...
If only Charles Kennedy WAS reflective of all Lib Dems. Sadly the Party has been taken over by unscrupulous careerists like Clegg and Laws. I wonder whether there is a strong enough base to the party that has the will to move on from this rather grubby period in their history.
That grubby period? You mean that period for the first time in nearly a century the Liberals and their successor parties were part of a peacetime government?
The Liberals were part of the National government in the early '30s, so more like eighty years.
They were also part of Churchill's wartime coalition.
Predictably John Swinney has popped up to pretend that he really means "yes". Clearly when Scotland votes no they're going to pretend that the citizens really mean yes.
The version in the FT is better
Scottish banks would be stopped from printing sterling banknotes and Scots would need to hold on to pound currency that crossed the border if the country continued to use sterling after declaring independence, George Osborne has said.
The chancellor told the cross-party Scottish affairs committee on Wednesday that if Scots wanted to continue using the pound, they would do so without the authority of the Bank of England. Mr Osborne said this would mean Scotland could no longer mint its own distinctive pound banknotes. as it does today, Scots would also have to hold enough currency to run their economy.
‘Ed Miliband has had four years and hasn’t managed to shift his personal ratings and public perception of him one iota. His numbers are catastrophic – worse than IDS [Iain Duncan Smith] or Gordon Brown. No-one has ever gone on to win an election with ratings as bad as this.’
Comments
@ 3:11pm
I think you should read the Dodge biography of Hannibal again.
My dad being as he is refused to apologise and it all fizzled out.
I think the hysterical negativity surrounding the LDs and their virtual wipeouts from certain regions is out of proportion to the level of their supposed political crimes and duplicities, which is normally just the same thing all parties do, just in opposition to what those who hate them wanted, but I really don't see how even in the long term they will benefit.
In the long term, this may come to be seen as a competent government (time will tell I guess, though at the least it's somehow less dysfunctional than the previous Lab majority government), but in the long term there would not appear to be a space for a middle ground centrist party of the scale the LDs once achieved and want to remain as.
There's nothing wrong with having a smaller, niche focus as a political party, and they might achieve a more modest goal, but they still have pretensions to the numbers they achieved in recent times, and in the long term becoming the junior party to Labour that so many apparently thought they were voting for, seems the likeliest way to achieve that. More than expecting people to go 'Those LDs proved pretty ok in government, we should give them credit for partnering with the hated Tories'. The hatred is too irrational in its passion to be overcome without a change in course I think.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21145103
he is too thick to realise that
Well in the end I think we all know what kind...
‘Ed Miliband has had four years and hasn’t managed to shift his personal ratings and public perception of him one iota. His numbers are catastrophic – worse than IDS [Iain Duncan Smith] or Gordon Brown. No-one has ever gone on to win an election with ratings as bad as this.’
Is this true?