Only because Osborne's attempt to tax them more were beaten back
What was the actual policy that led to the pasty tax attacks anyway? I cannot recall. Something to do with taxing stuff that is heated up?
Restaurants and cafes have to charge VAT on food sales, but supermarkets do not. Osborne wanted to charge "hot" takeaway food VAT, now I don't remember exactly what the anomaly is, whether a Chinese takeaway has to charge VAT or not, but the budget attempted to draw a distinction between food that was at the "ambient" temperature - such as a sandwich, say - and food that was "hotter", such as a pasty (or sausage roll, pizza slice, toasted sandwich...). Hence, "pasty tax".
Miss Cyclefree, precisely. We would have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than a few thousand, and it's hard to imagine we'd have fewer refugees with whom to deal.
If the Tories somehow claw their way back in to power (probs in Coalition with the LDs) it will be because of this toxic Miliband=Sturgeon meme.
It's powerful.
Finally something we agree on when you are not viciously slagging off lefties. Labour need to have a convincing narrative here to counter, but I don't actually think they can find one.
Something tells me that the SNP's hubris is deliberately engineered to keep the Tories in power.
If the Tories somehow claw their way back in to power (probs in Coalition with the LDs) it will be because of this toxic Miliband=Sturgeon meme.
It's powerful.
It would be most entertaining if the SNP wiped out SLAB and the Tories got a majority elsewhere and formed the next government. (No idea if this could happen on the figures.)
What then would be in the Tories' long-term interests? To give the SNP what they want? Ignore them and drive Scottish voters back to SLAB?
Thank you. To me - but I am in London - they sound a touch hubristic. I wonder, therefore, whether the SLAB wipeout will be as bad as forecast. If a party were so obviously behaving as if they were guaranteed my vote I'd be tempted to give them a bloody nose.
Purely anecdotal but I was talking to a family member who lives in another marginal London constituency and he commented - and he is pretty small "c" conservative and old-fashioned (in the best sense) - that EdM was growing on him (as a person) and he thought the Tory campaign was dire. He's going to some hustings in the constituency later this week.
The media reportage of the SNP in London in particular is not necessarily going to give the actual nuances, to put it mildly. Quite a bit of what I read [edit: up here, in contrast] is actually cautious and wary about what might still go wrong. It's more 'we might actually do this' rather than 'we will'.
But that brings me to the other factor beside what Mr kle4 mentions, which is that the SNP MUST be seen to be winning to be worth voting for - and conversely that the portrayal of Labour as increasingly a wasted vote is important. This is the first time in living memory that a SNP vote in a UKGE wasn't likely to be a wasted vote (think voting LD in many southern seats) so the more people realise this the better.
A lot of people in Scotland used to vote tactically against the Tories - or at least that was an important consideration: the NOTA vote benefited SLAB hugely because thy were often the more credible opposition. Now?
Yet a vote for the SNP WILL be a wasted vote if the threat of Sturgeon (see the poll below) frightens enough English people into voting Tory.
You Scotch guys may not get the nuances of English politics up there in Caledonia.
Down here the Sturgeon-Miliband-pocket stuff is working. The SNP sound arrogant and meddlesome, and Labour look rattled on the issue.
I'm not so sure its working further north. Many people up here in the Labour heartlands would probably like Labour to return to their left wing roots.
Mind you they equally would like their local Labour councils not to be totally crap. But this time around they've been convinced that its the Conservative local authority budget cuts that are the root cause of their crapness not the councillors themselves...
If Labour get in and don't increase Local authority grants I think there will be hell to pay...
If the Tories somehow claw their way back in to power (probs in Coalition with the LDs) it will be because of this toxic Miliband=Sturgeon meme.
It's powerful.
Indeed. The Tories and the SNP are working well together as two jaws of a vice with Labour stuck in the middle. Both prosper if the other does well, whilst paying lip service to insults.
Not quite sure what Labour can do about it. They're too defensive in my book right now, with the agenda being set elsewhere. It has not been closed down.
Maybe Ed should say "I would work with the SNP if that is what the people decide, but only if they renounced another referendum. Country comes above party." Sturgeon then has to at least put up or shut up.
Miss Cyclefree, precisely. We would have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than a few thousand, and it's hard to imagine we'd have fewer refugees with whom to deal.
Shouldn't other countries - the US, for instance - get involved? We cannot dump desperate people back in countries where they are likely to be killed. So maybe on a world basis we need to do what the world so conspicuously failed to do in the 1930's and share the burden of providing a safe haven for refugees.
Ultimately, the world - the civilized bit of it anyway - is going to have to excise the cancer that is IS and Islamic extremism.
Only because Osborne's attempt to tax them more were beaten back
What was the actual policy that led to the pasty tax attacks anyway? I cannot recall. Something to do with taxing stuff that is heated up?
Restaurants and cafes have to charge VAT on food sales, but supermarkets do not. Osborne wanted to charge "hot" takeaway food VAT, now I don't remember exactly what the anomaly is, whether a Chinese takeaway has to charge VAT or not, but the budget attempted to draw a distinction between food that was at the "ambient" temperature - such as a sandwich, say - and food that was "hotter", such as a pasty (or sausage roll, pizza slice, toasted sandwich...). Hence, "pasty tax".
Hot food takeaways have had to charge VAT for years. Every chippie in the land has had to do so for decades. The whole pasty tax debacle was one company which had been under attack by HMRC for years who took exception to a change in the wording designed to close a loophole they had been using.
Your fish and chips - and your hot pasty from almost any other outlet bar the one involved - and basically any other hot takeaway food are still charged at standard VAT rate.
Most northern working class Labour supporters want left wing economics and conservative social policy. This is another vice Labour are trapped in: torn between appeasing their London-dominated member base, which tends to be the more hardline multiculturalists, and their voting base in the provinces. Labour are in danger of a three-way destruction: the Conservatives in the non-London south, UKIP in northern England and south Wales, and nationalists in north Wales and Scotland.
How we deal with those fleeing all these catastrophes is hard to say. Leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean is, quite apart from any moral considerations, unlikely to succeed. If the choice is between living with IS or possible drowning there's no decision to take. Send them somewhere else? Maybe - but where? Why would Tunisia or Morocco want to have these people? Letting them into Europe? We can't take everyone who wants to leave the Middle East or Africa.
The only way that works, I think is to scoop them out of the water and dump them back on th beach in Libya.
We can't take moral responsibility for everyone who sets sail across the Med.
Most northern working class Labour supporters want left wing economics and conservative social policy. This is another vice Labour are trapped in: torn between appeasing their London-dominated member base, which tends to be the more hardline multiculturalists, and their voting base in the provinces. Labour are in danger of a three-way destruction: the Conservatives in the non-London south, UKIP in northern England and south Wales, and nationalists in north Wales and Scotland.
Both major parties are coalitions that are always changing. Believe it or not there are still Europhile Tories.
Miss Cyclefree, precisely. We would have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than a few thousand, and it's hard to imagine we'd have fewer refugees with whom to deal.
Shouldn't other countries - the US, for instance - get involved? We cannot dump desperate people back in countries where they are likely to be killed. So maybe on a world basis we need to do what the world so conspicuously failed to do in the 1930's and share the burden of providing a safe haven for refugees.
Ultimately, the world - the civilized bit of it anyway - is going to have to excise the cancer that is IS and Islamic extremism.
Most refugees are to be found in adjacent countries. Lebanon is overflowing with Syrians, Kenya with Somalis, South Africa with Zimbabweans etc etc.
But at what point does a refugee become an economic migrant?
The media reportage of the SNP in London in particular is not necessarily going to give the actual nuances, to put it mildly. Quite a bit of what I read [edit: up here, in contrast] is actually cautious and wary about what might still go wrong. It's more 'we might actually do this' rather than 'we will'.
But that brings me to the other factor beside what Mr kle4 mentions, which is that the SNP MUST be seen to be winning to be worth voting for - and conversely that the portrayal of Labour as increasingly a wasted vote is important. This is the first time in living memory that a SNP vote in a UKGE wasn't likely to be a wasted vote (think voting LD in many southern seats) so the more people realise this the better.
A lot of people in Scotland used to vote tactically against the Tories - or at least that was an important consideration: the NOTA vote benefited SLAB hugely because thy were often the more credible opposition. Now?
Yet a vote for the SNP WILL be a wasted vote if the threat of Sturgeon (see the poll below) frightens enough English people into voting Tory.
You Scotch guys may not get the nuances of English politics up there in Caledonia.
Down here the Sturgeon-Miliband-pocket stuff is working. The SNP sound arrogant and meddlesome, and Labour look rattled on the issue.
Afternoon!
You mean, if the *portrayed threat* ... but yes, of course I see that argument (though half the time we're told that is exactly what the SNP want). Though it will be interesting to see how well that works in the long run. It's not even as if the SNP have won (likely as it seems).
I sometimes wonder if people realise how the media in London is so very different at times from the same media in Scotland (hard as it is to believe with the DT). There's a very nice example conveniently to hand here. As usual with Wings, he insists on giving the primary sources, so those of us with a sensitive disposition don't need to read the comments:
Quite telling, really, on the state of the union that the same newspaper has to change its message for what is purportedly the same election to the same parliament with mostly the same parties. And that a serious political commentator has to specify which edition it is - rUK or Scotland ...
Only because Osborne's attempt to tax them more were beaten back
What was the actual policy that led to the pasty tax attacks anyway? I cannot recall. Something to do with taxing stuff that is heated up?
Restaurants and cafes have to charge VAT on food sales, but supermarkets do not. Osborne wanted to charge "hot" takeaway food VAT, now I don't remember exactly what the anomaly is, whether a Chinese takeaway has to charge VAT or not, but the budget attempted to draw a distinction between food that was at the "ambient" temperature - such as a sandwich, say - and food that was "hotter", such as a pasty (or sausage roll, pizza slice, toasted sandwich...). Hence, "pasty tax".
It's to do with whether it is cooked on the premise (like a restaurant or takeaway) which attracts VAT or whether, as Greggs argued, it should be treated like food (zero rated) as it was merely kept warm but not cooked...
Essentially Greggs whipped up a very successful campaign to lock in a competitive advantage for themselves. No one benefited except the owners of Greggs, who - thanks to Labour - now pay less tax than the Tories wanted them to.
Hi Bob. I now live in a safe Labour constituency, so perhaps by optimism for the Conservatives is a natural barrier against this situation! But in all seriousness I tend to shape my predictions based on gut and data; that is why I would be awful at political betting! My view is that the country are, excluding Scotland, a bit 'meh' about the whole General Election.
They don't mind Cameron, think the government has done alright, can see signs of progress but not sufficiently startling progress on a day-to-day level to really make them enthusiastic about the government. Coupled with the traditional lack of love for the Conservatives; our support tends to be more on respect/trust than this; I sense that in England/Wales there is general contentment amongst voters, but not elation at their circumstances.
For Labour voters think they are a decent enough bunch but don't trust them on the economy. Miliband is not a vote winner, but neither, as they have seen him more, does he completely scare them. But not scaring them doesn't make them want him to be PM. For the Lib Dems, they are simply fighting against the red liberals departing.
As such, once we acknowledge that Scotland is clearly going to be different (SNP gains, but not as many as the polls suggest), but recognise the macro picture in England and Wales is of nothing much changing I think despite talk of the breakdown of a two party system, flux and change, we will not see that much fundamental change; part of this due to FPTP.
Labour will be hit in Scotland, gain some from the Lib Dems but under shoot their targets against the Conservatives. The Conservatives will take hits from Labour and perhaps UKIP around the margins but gain from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems will be hit hard, but not face wipe out. As such I went with a mid to mid-high percentage prediction for the Cons and 300+ seats.
Back to Lancashire I also think, based on gut that the Conservatives will hold Pendle too; something Lord Ashcroft has picked up.
Finally, football. I am not one for hyperbole with football, but Saturday is without doubt an exception. I think it is a must-win match. Beat Leicester and we will survive, draw and we hobble on, lose and then we are in the last chance saloon with the beer running low! I predicted we would need 35 points and would finish 16th; blind optimism again!? But Dyche's positive attitude has genuinely transformed us as a club.
If the Tories somehow claw their way back in to power (probs in Coalition with the LDs) it will be because of this toxic Miliband=Sturgeon meme.
It's powerful.
Indeed. The Tories and the SNP are working well together as two jaws of a vice with Labour stuck in the middle. Both prosper if the other does well, whilst paying lip service to insults.
Not quite sure what Labour can do about it. They're too defensive in my book right now, with the agenda being set elsewhere. It has not been closed down.
Maybe Ed should say "I would work with the SNP if that is what the people decide, but only if they renounced another referendum. Country comes above party." Sturgeon then has to at least put up or shut up.
That still doesn't shut it down- in fact it fires it up. Labour's in a pickle on this one- they have to struggle on saying that they are going to govern by themselves and will not cowtow to the SNP or anyone else, but it doesn't wash.
How we deal with those fleeing all these catastrophes is hard to say. Leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean is, quite apart from any moral considerations, unlikely to succeed. If the choice is between living with IS or possible drowning there's no decision to take. Send them somewhere else? Maybe - but where? Why would Tunisia or Morocco want to have these people? Letting them into Europe? We can't take everyone who wants to leave the Middle East or Africa.
The only way that works, I think is to scoop them out of the water and dump them back on th beach in Libya.
We can't take moral responsibility for everyone who sets sail across the Med.
That seems like the right strategy to me. Have a processing centre in Tunisia or somewhere else in North Africa. We set a cap for the EU to take the top 10,000 (or whatever the number is) most desperate cases each year, and ship anyone else back to the beaches. We can't take everyone fleeing a warzone, and it is perverse to only take the ones that dare and succeed the dangerous crossing - almost encouraging a perilous risk of human life.
I think the problem is that judges throw cases out if they believe the defendent is mentally incapable of organising their own defence or testifying.
If he were charged, the first thing the defence would do is argue that he is not fit to plead. The judge would then hear evidence of his medical condition. If he agreed that Lord Janner was not fit to plead and conduct his defence the case would not proceed. If depends on how advanced and bad the dementia is. People can have dementia for years before they completely lose their ability to know what is going on.
If the judge were to throw the case out there would, no doubt, be people arguing that this was another establishment stitch-up.
I'm curious as to why nothing more has come out about who was in charge in the CPS in Leicestershire when the case was not, according to Ken McDonald, referred to London and whether the rules/internal processes were quite as clear as was being made out at the weekend. McDonald was clearly pointing the finger at local prosecutors in order to divert blame away from the London hierarchy. There could be quite a lot more finger-pointing going on. One would have thought that a local prosecutor might well want to refer upward on a CYA basis, if nothing else. But who knows.
Ernest Walter Saunders ... was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but released after 10 months as he was believed to be suffering from Alzheimer's disease, which is incurable. He subsequently made a full recovery.
Mr. 1000, yes, but that's the mistake Machiavelli warns of in The Prince. To correct a flaw, people often jump so far in the other direction they simply replace too much with not enough, or vice versa.
@James and @Sykes Prince Charles is a Claret, and isn't OGH? I know these things because my friend is so obsessed with them that even I have taken to following them as my second team. Go Clarets on Saturday.
How we deal with those fleeing all these catastrophes is hard to say. Leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean is, quite apart from any moral considerations, unlikely to succeed. If the choice is between living with IS or possible drowning there's no decision to take. Send them somewhere else? Maybe - but where? Why would Tunisia or Morocco want to have these people? Letting them into Europe? We can't take everyone who wants to leave the Middle East or Africa.
The only way that works, I think is to scoop them out of the water and dump them back on th beach in Libya.
We can't take moral responsibility for everyone who sets sail across the Med.
That seems like the right strategy to me. Have a processing centre in Tunisia or somewhere else in North Africa. We set a cap for the EU to take the top 10,000 (or whatever the number is) most desperate cases each year, and ship anyone else back to the beaches. We can't take everyone fleeing a warzone, and it is perverse to only take the ones that dare and succeed the dangerous crossing - almost encouraging a perilous risk of human life.
It's also important to remember that most of the people are *not* Libyans. I think the latest bunch were from Somalia and Eritrea. Saying we will take them because there is a war in Libya makes no sense.
Thank you. To me - but I am in London - they sound a touch hubristic. I wonder, therefore, whether the SLAB wipeout will be as bad as forecast. If a party were so obviously behaving as if they were guaranteed my vote I'd be tempted to give them a bloody nose.
Purely anecdotal but I was talking to a family member who lives in another marginal London constituency and he commented - and he is pretty small "c" conservative and old-fashioned (in the best sense) - that EdM was growing on him (as a person) and he thought the Tory campaign was dire. He's going to some hustings in the constituency later this week.
The media reportage of the SNP in London in particular is not necessarily going to give the actual nuances, to put it mildly. Quite a bit of what I read [edit: up here, in contrast] is actually cautious and wary about what might still go wrong. It's more 'we might actually do this' rather than 'we will'.
But that brings me to the other factor beside what Mr kle4 mentions, which is that the SNP MUST be seen to be winning to be worth voting for - and conversely that the portrayal of Labour as increasingly a wasted vote is important. This is the first time in living memory that a SNP vote in a UKGE wasn't likely to be a wasted vote (think voting LD in many southern seats) so the more people realise this the better.
A lot of people in Scotland used to vote tactically against the Tories - or at least that was an important consideration: the NOTA vote benefited SLAB hugely because thy were often the more credible opposition. Now?
Yet a vote for the SNP WILL be a wasted vote if the threat of Sturgeon (see the poll below) frightens enough English people into voting Tory.
You Scotch guys may not get the nuances of English politics up there in Caledonia.
Down here the Sturgeon-Miliband-pocket stuff is working. The SNP sound arrogant and meddlesome, and Labour look rattled on the issue.
I'm not so sure its working further north. Many people up here in the Labour heartlands would probably like Labour to return to their left wing roots.
Yup. A lot of people in the North of England dislike the South more than they dislike Scotland. And the polls show there's a not insubstantial number of people in England (mostly from Labour) who say they'd quite like to vote SNP themselves if they had the chance.
The meme might work in terms of bringing Kippers back to the Tories, but I don't think it's going to cause Labour themselves to lose many votes.
No one benefited except the owners of Greggs, who - thanks to Labour - now pay less tax than the Tories wanted them to.
It was Osborne who changed the rules back, not Labour. Credit where credit is due.
But it was Labour who played along with Gregg's for political advantage.
If they had seen this for what it was - a minor, sensible, rational tweaking of the rules which had been on HMRC's wishlist for years [McBride referenced that in his book] - then the change would have gone through.
ICM breakdown by constituency type is interesting. Small sample size on the crossbreaks, and I haven't got the 2010 results to hand, but it looks decent for Con - particularly the high Lab vote in safe Con seats.
I think the problem is that judges throw cases out if they believe the defendent is mentally incapable of organising their own defence or testifying.
If he were charged, the first thing the defence would do is argue that he is not fit to plead. The judge would then hear evidence of his medical condition. If he agreed that Lord Janner was not fit to plead and conduct his defence the case would not proceed. If depends on how advanced and bad the dementia is. People can have dementia for years before they completely lose their ability to know what is going on.
If the judge were to throw the case out there would, no doubt, be people arguing that this was another establishment stitch-up.
I'm curious as to why nothing more has come out about who was in charge in the CPS in Leicestershire when the case was not, according to Ken McDonald, referred to London and whether the rules/internal processes were quite as clear as was being made out at the weekend. McDonald was clearly pointing the finger at local prosecutors in order to divert blame away from the London hierarchy. There could be quite a lot more finger-pointing going on. One would have thought that a local prosecutor might well want to refer upward on a CYA basis, if nothing else. But who knows.
Read about the Frank Beck court case in 1994, Paul Winston (one of the victims) named Janner in court. Nothing happened. Frank Beck claimed (rather implausibly) that he was framed by people in power because he knew too much.
There is far more evidence here than has come to light about the supposed Parliamentary Paedophilia ring. We in Leicester are outside the M25 so not of interest to the media most of the time.
Most northern working class Labour supporters want left wing economics and conservative social policy. This is another vice Labour are trapped in: torn between appeasing their London-dominated member base, which tends to be the more hardline multiculturalists, and their voting base in the provinces. Labour are in danger of a three-way destruction: the Conservatives in the non-London south, UKIP in northern England and south Wales, and nationalists in north Wales and Scotland.
Both major parties are coalitions that are always changing. Believe it or not there are still Europhile Tories.
That all depends on how you define "Europhile". The party is fairly split between those who wish to leave and those who wish to want to give one last shot at reform. But in terms of those who actively support ever closer union, it must be less than 10% of the party.
As for intraparty coalitions, they are always changing. But if you want to change in a positive way you need to more than make-up for the people you're losing. If Labour lose the white working class in Scotland, Wales and the North, it's not entirely clear what groups can make up for that.
Miss Cyclefree, precisely. We would have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than a few thousand, and it's hard to imagine we'd have fewer refugees with whom to deal.
Shouldn't other countries - the US, for instance - get involved? We cannot dump desperate people back in countries where they are likely to be killed. So maybe on a world basis we need to do what the world so conspicuously failed to do in the 1930's and share the burden of providing a safe haven for refugees.
Ultimately, the world - the civilized bit of it anyway - is going to have to excise the cancer that is IS and Islamic extremism.
Most refugees are to be found in adjacent countries. Lebanon is overflowing with Syrians, Kenya with Somalis, South Africa with Zimbabweans etc etc.
But at what point does a refugee become an economic migrant?
The refugee convention gives pretty clear language as to the distinction - something to do with fear of persecution, rather than some generalized public danger. Persecution can be either individual (e.g. a political dissident) or group-related (e.g. pogroms against the Yazidi), but must be targeted to a belief or ethnicity, not a general danger to which all are exposed.
No one benefited except the owners of Greggs, who - thanks to Labour - now pay less tax than the Tories wanted them to.
It was Osborne who changed the rules back, not Labour. Credit where credit is due.
But it was Labour who played along with Gregg's for political advantage.
If they had seen this for what it was - a minor, sensible, rational tweaking of the rules which had been on HMRC's wishlist for years [McBride referenced that in his book] - then the change would have gone through.
And if Osborne had a backbone...
Oppositions oppose, it's what they do. Governments should govern.
Mr. 565, most of us hate neither southern England nor Scotland.
"Hate" is probably too strong a word, but I do genuinely think if you asked northerners whether they feared the South having too much influence on politics or Scotland, more would answer the South.
The media reportage of the SNP in London in particular is not necessarily going to give the to put it mildly. Quite a bit of what I read [edit: up here, in contrast] is actually cautious and wary about what might still go wrong. It's more 'we might actually do this' rather than 'we will'.
But that brings me to the other factor beside what Mr kle4 mentions, which is that the SNP MUST be seen to be winning to be worth voting for - and conversely that the portrayal of Labour as increasingly a wasted vote is important. This is the first time in living memory that a SNP vote in a UKGE wasn't likely to be a wasted vote (think voting LD in many southern seats) so the more people realise this the better.
A lot of people in Scotland used to vote tactically against the Tories - or at least that was an important consideration: the NOTA vote benefited SLAB hugely because thy were often the more credible opposition. Now?
Yet a vote for the SNP WILL be a wasted vote if the threat of Sturgeon (see the poll below) frightens enough English people into voting Tory.
You Scotch guys may not get the nuances of English politics up there in Caledonia.
Down here the Sturgeon-Miliband-pocket stuff is working. The SNP sound arrogant and meddlesome, and Labour look rattled on the issue.
Afternoon!
You mean, if the *portrayed threat* ... but yes, of course I see that argument (though half the time we're told that is exactly what the SNP want). Though it will be interesting to see how well that works in the long run. It's not even as if the SNP have won (likely as it seems).
I sometimes wonder if people realise how the media in London is so very different at times from the same media in Scotland (hard as it is to believe with the DT). There's a very nice example conveniently to hand here. As usual with Wings, he insists on giving the primary sources, so those of us with a sensitive disposition don't need to read the comments:
Quite telling, really, on the state of the union that the same newspaper has to change its message for what is purportedly the same election to the same parliament with mostly the same parties. And that a serious political commentator has to specify which edition it is - rUK or Scotland ...
It's done for the same reason organisations like British Gas and the RSPB have rebranded (God forbid any Scottish donor should have to help an English bird) - nationalist feeling bordering on boorishness. In England such sensitivities would be condemned. In Scotland they have been nurtured.
@James and @Sykes Prince Charles is a Claret, and isn't OGH? I know these things because my friend is so obsessed with them that even I have taken to following them as my second team. Go Clarets on Saturday.
It will be a big game for Leicester 3 points and we are pretty safe, but a draw would probably do for us, Burney need a win. Leicester are in form at the right time. We won 2 nil last time we went to Turf Moor a year ago in the Championship.
I think the problem is that judges throw cases out if they believe the defendent is mentally incapable of organising their own defence or testifying.
Not according to the other examples in that article.
It does rather depend on whether in those other cases they were fit to plead and give instructions as to their defence. Having dementia does not, per se, prevent that. So without knowing the medical evidence in each case we can't really say.
We cannot dump desperate people back in countries where they are likely to be killed.
How much are you prepared to pay to make this happen? How many North African refugees are you prepared to have living next door to you?
Or is someone else picking up the tab for your ostentatious morality?
I wasn't trying to be ostentatiously moral. I was musing as to what we can do given that we cannot take everyone fleeing. But if we do dump them back on Libyan beaches then we should not be surprised to see IS murderers kill them, as we've already seen.
There are no good choices here. Either we ignore and live with the fact that people will die / be killed in possibly horrendous ways. Or we take some - and how do we make that choice? And justify to people here who don't want more immigrants of any type? We certainly cannot take all. But at the moment we're just taking those who manage to make it across, even if they are not the types we want and may have amongs them those who threaten us
Mr. 565, most of us hate neither southern England nor Scotland.
"Hate" is probably too strong a word, but I do genuinely think if you asked northerners whether they feared the South having too much influence on politics or Scotland, more would answer the South.
The anti SNP feeling is present in Leics, but probably more effective as a GOTV message for soft Tories and wavering kippers than a way to win over the reds. Not that it matters much as I think the 7 Leics seats are safe, Labour seem to have given up in Loughborough and that is the only one that is winnable for them.
I think the problem is that judges throw cases out if they believe the defendent is mentally incapable of organising their own defence or testifying.
Not according to the other examples in that article.
It does rather depend on whether in those other cases they were fit to plead and give instructions as to their defence. Having dementia does not, per se, prevent that. So without knowing the medical evidence in each case we can't really say.
Article: "Lord Janner is said to have written to Lords clerks earlier this month to tell them he did not want to step down as a serving peer."
... but cannot plead in his defence?
Not gonna convince most regular people in the country with that one.
Mr. 1000, yes, but that's the mistake Machiavelli warns of in The Prince. To correct a flaw, people often jump so far in the other direction they simply replace too much with not enough, or vice versa.
David Coburn MEP @DavidCoburnUKip 6m6 minutes ago Nick Clegg admits on BBC - Coalition are responsible for Med refugee crisis due to their intervention in Libya
What happened to France and the USA? I suppose there would have been no refugee crisis if they had done nothing, I mean the population in Bengazi would have been massacred and in no condition to be refugees. Clegg shows what an idiot he is by suggesting the do nothing option would not have created refugees
Just did an analysis comparing the main parties performance on social media. Looks like the Conservative spend on their Facebook campaign is working to get them likes but it is not feeding through to success in the polls. Check it out. http://go.import.io/socialmediaukelection
from BBC: SNP will represent UK interests, leader Nicola Sturgeon says
Nicola Sturgeon seems to have become increasingly arrogant about her parties ability to dictate to rUK after the GE. Surely this will be a major turn off for English DK voters and will sure up the Tory vote south of the border. That a Scottish Party could hold England to ransom is an anathema to English voters
She, the SNP, has no right to consider at all those English only issues which are devolved to Scotland. What right has Sturgeon to vote on the English NHS?
The same right as English MP's currently decide the Scottish NHS budget.
No one benefited except the owners of Greggs, who - thanks to Labour - now pay less tax than the Tories wanted them to.
It was Osborne who changed the rules back, not Labour. Credit where credit is due.
But it was Labour who played along with Gregg's for political advantage.
If they had seen this for what it was - a minor, sensible, rational tweaking of the rules which had been on HMRC's wishlist for years [McBride referenced that in his book] - then the change would have gone through.
And if Osborne had a backbone...
Oppositions oppose, it's what they do. Governments should govern.
I always take great delight in asking for my £3 subway to be toasted, thus meaning I am getting it for £2.50. (plus vat) Does anyone else engage in reverse tax avoidance?
Comments
If 33% actually WANT the SNP then that's pretty remarkable.
Eck 11%
SNP 19%
Nicola 22%
Clegg 31%
Would NOT like
Eck 65%
SNP 59%
Nicola 54%
Clegg 44%
ComRes.
https://twitter.com/JimForScotland/status/590129068789473280?t=1&cn=cmVjb3NfbmV0d29ya19kaWdlc3RfdHJpZ2dlcmVk&sig=9b1249544d2f940139395e62103a95ba54e089fd&al=1&refsrc=email&iid=6278c394838644c3a73fd4fc869b5d61&autoactions=1429545916&uid=386518376&nid=244+133
Labour's campaign has nothing to do with Scotland. That was lost after the referendum.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/20/tories-still-ahead-labour-latest-guardian-icm-poll
Note 95% certainty to vote from SNP supporters. There is nothing Labour can do in this campaign to stem the tide.
Miss Cyclefree, precisely. We would have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths rather than a few thousand, and it's hard to imagine we'd have fewer refugees with whom to deal.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3046992/Why-Labour-Peer-Lord-Janner-not-prosecuted-dementia-19-defendants-suffering-disease-convicted-sex-crimes-TEN-past-year.html#comments
Labour need to have a convincing narrative here to counter, but I don't actually think they can find one.
Something tells me that the SNP's hubris is deliberately engineered to keep the Tories in power.
What then would be in the Tories' long-term interests? To give the SNP what they want? Ignore them and drive Scottish voters back to SLAB?
Mind you they equally would like their local Labour councils not to be totally crap. But this time around they've been convinced that its the Conservative local authority budget cuts that are the root cause of their crapness not the councillors themselves...
If Labour get in and don't increase Local authority grants I think there will be hell to pay...
That doesn't help me
Sunday Times had details of a Lords document he had signed very recently.
Not quite sure what Labour can do about it. They're too defensive in my book right now, with the agenda being set elsewhere. It has not been closed down.
Maybe Ed should say "I would work with the SNP if that is what the people decide, but only if they renounced another referendum. Country comes above party." Sturgeon then has to at least put up or shut up.
Ultimately, the world - the civilized bit of it anyway - is going to have to excise the cancer that is IS and Islamic extremism.
Not according to the other examples in that article.
No down sides or costs associated with mass immigration then?
All we need to do is keep importing more people and the futures bright eh?
70 million no prob, 80 million great!, 100 million - we will all be millionaires by this time next year!
I find Lib Dem bar charts more believable.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-notice-7091-catering-and-take-away-food/vat-notice-7091-catering-and-take-away-food
Your fish and chips - and your hot pasty from almost any other outlet bar the one involved - and basically any other hot takeaway food are still charged at standard VAT rate.
Most northern working class Labour supporters want left wing economics and conservative social policy. This is another vice Labour are trapped in: torn between appeasing their London-dominated member base, which tends to be the more hardline multiculturalists, and their voting base in the provinces. Labour are in danger of a three-way destruction: the Conservatives in the non-London south, UKIP in northern England and south Wales, and nationalists in north Wales and Scotland.
We can't take moral responsibility for everyone who sets sail across the Med.
Obama's foreign policy seems to be to do nothing unless he has to.
But at what point does a refugee become an economic migrant?
You mean, if the *portrayed threat* ... but yes, of course I see that argument (though half the time we're told that is exactly what the SNP want). Though it will be interesting to see how well that works in the long run. It's not even as if the SNP have won (likely as it seems).
I sometimes wonder if people realise how the media in London is so very different at times from the same media in Scotland (hard as it is to believe with the DT). There's a very nice example conveniently to hand here. As usual with Wings, he insists on giving the primary sources, so those of us with a sensitive disposition don't need to read the comments:
http://wingsoverscotland.com/the-vortex-of-the-sun/
Though as the Rev. also points out, they don't always shy from giving us the same version on both sides of the border
http://wingsoverscotland.com/the-angry-cheerleaders/#more-69829
Quite telling, really, on the state of the union that the same newspaper has to change its message for what is purportedly the same election to the same parliament with mostly the same parties. And that a serious political commentator has to specify which edition it is - rUK or Scotland ...
Essentially Greggs whipped up a very successful campaign to lock in a competitive advantage for themselves. No one benefited except the owners of Greggs, who - thanks to Labour - now pay less tax than the Tories wanted them to.
Hi Bob. I now live in a safe Labour constituency, so perhaps by optimism for the Conservatives is a natural barrier against this situation! But in all seriousness I tend to shape my predictions based on gut and data; that is why I would be awful at political betting! My view is that the country are, excluding Scotland, a bit 'meh' about the whole General Election.
They don't mind Cameron, think the government has done alright, can see signs of progress but not sufficiently startling progress on a day-to-day level to really make them enthusiastic about the government. Coupled with the traditional lack of love for the Conservatives; our support tends to be more on respect/trust than this; I sense that in England/Wales there is general contentment amongst voters, but not elation at their circumstances.
For Labour voters think they are a decent enough bunch but don't trust them on the economy. Miliband is not a vote winner, but neither, as they have seen him more, does he completely scare them. But not scaring them doesn't make them want him to be PM. For the Lib Dems, they are simply fighting against the red liberals departing.
As such, once we acknowledge that Scotland is clearly going to be different (SNP gains, but not as many as the polls suggest), but recognise the macro picture in England and Wales is of nothing much changing I think despite talk of the breakdown of a two party system, flux and change, we will not see that much fundamental change; part of this due to FPTP.
Labour will be hit in Scotland, gain some from the Lib Dems but under shoot their targets against the Conservatives. The Conservatives will take hits from Labour and perhaps UKIP around the margins but gain from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems will be hit hard, but not face wipe out. As such I went with a mid to mid-high percentage prediction for the Cons and 300+ seats.
Back to Lancashire I also think, based on gut that the Conservatives will hold Pendle too; something Lord Ashcroft has picked up.
Finally, football. I am not one for hyperbole with football, but Saturday is without doubt an exception. I think it is a must-win match. Beat Leicester and we will survive, draw and we hobble on, lose and then we are in the last chance saloon with the beer running low! I predicted we would need 35 points and would finish 16th; blind optimism again!? But Dyche's positive attitude has genuinely transformed us as a club.
If the judge were to throw the case out there would, no doubt, be people arguing that this was another establishment stitch-up.
I'm curious as to why nothing more has come out about who was in charge in the CPS in Leicestershire when the case was not, according to Ken McDonald, referred to London and whether the rules/internal processes were quite as clear as was being made out at the weekend. McDonald was clearly pointing the finger at local prosecutors in order to divert blame away from the London hierarchy. There could be quite a lot more finger-pointing going on. One would have thought that a local prosecutor might well want to refer upward on a CYA basis, if nothing else. But who knows.
For working class people, mass immigration is a proven wage depressant... but who cares? If they complain, call them racist from afar
How much are you prepared to pay to make this happen? How many North African refugees are you prepared to have living next door to you?
Or is someone else picking up the tab for your ostentatious morality?
I thought Edinburgh North and Leith would be closer than that but the Unionist vote is just too fragmented there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Saunders
Ernest Walter Saunders ... was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but released after 10 months as he was believed to be suffering from Alzheimer's disease, which is incurable. He subsequently made a full recovery.
The dangers of solar panels...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-32382795
Prince Charles is a Claret, and isn't OGH? I know these things because my friend is so obsessed with them that even I have taken to following them as my second team.
Go Clarets on Saturday.
The meme might work in terms of bringing Kippers back to the Tories, but I don't think it's going to cause Labour themselves to lose many votes.
If they had seen this for what it was - a minor, sensible, rational tweaking of the rules which had been on HMRC's wishlist for years [McBride referenced that in his book] - then the change would have gone through.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDCvOU7W4AEPnku.png
There is far more evidence here than has come to light about the supposed Parliamentary Paedophilia ring. We in Leicester are outside the M25 so not of interest to the media most of the time.
As for intraparty coalitions, they are always changing. But if you want to change in a positive way you need to more than make-up for the people you're losing. If Labour lose the white working class in Scotland, Wales and the North, it's not entirely clear what groups can make up for that.
Oppositions oppose, it's what they do. Governments should govern.
I wasn't trying to be ostentatiously moral. I was musing as to what we can do given that we cannot take everyone fleeing. But if we do dump them back on Libyan beaches then we should not be surprised to see IS murderers kill them, as we've already seen.
There are no good choices here. Either we ignore and live with the fact that people will die / be killed in possibly horrendous ways. Or we take some - and how do we make that choice? And justify to people here who don't want more immigrants of any type? We certainly cannot take all. But at the moment we're just taking those who manage to make it across, even if they are not the types we want and may have amongs them those who threaten us
Whichever way you look at it, it's a mess.
Article: "Lord Janner is said to have written to Lords clerks earlier this month to tell them he did not want to step down as a serving peer."
... but cannot plead in his defence?
Not gonna convince most regular people in the country with that one.
I suppose there would have been no refugee crisis if they had done nothing, I mean the population in Bengazi would have been massacred and in no condition to be refugees.
Clegg shows what an idiot he is by suggesting the do nothing option would not have created refugees