evil woman

Yes I can see how starting my post to the link "Stephen Bush over at the New Statesman has written an interesting article"... might cause confusion to the terminally thick .

That is hilarious. I'm just trying to imagine why any other party except Labour might want another election. SNP have all bar 3 seats in Scotland. Why would they risk that position to allow their chief opponents to regain ground? The parties in Ireland are pretty well set and can't afford another campaign. Neither can the Libdems who lost most of the party funds on lost deposits Do you think Labour might lend them the odd million? ---------- Post added 14-05-2015 at 23:51 ---------- Keep telling yourself that if it stops you taking an overdose.

And 8 DUP just to take 8 off the opposition and add 8 to the majority. Then there are 4 Sinn Fien who don't even attend Westminster. I'm thinking the majority is good enough to get any policy through. I think the way the cards are getting restacked they might be OK for 5 years after that as well... Labour handed victory to Cameron by 5 years trying to undermine the Libdems. It handed a large number of seats to the Tories. After the boundary changes it might be a generation before Labour are in a position to challenge for power. It was a master stroke nominating Ed Miliband as Labour leader. Thank you. Thank you... http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/ Stephen Bush over at the New Statesman has written an interesting article about the mountain that faces Labour at the next election. I’ve now had chance to sit down and play with the election results and the picture is as bleak for Labour as Stephen paints – for various reasons, the electoral system has now tilted against Labour in the same way it was tilted against the Conservatives at the last few elections. Looking at how the vote was distributed at the general election the Conservatives should, on a uniform swing, be able to secure a majority on a lead of about 6%. Labour would need a lead of almost thirteen points. On an equal amount of votes – 34.5% a piece – the Conservatives would have almost fifty seats more than Labour, Labour would need to have a lead of about four points over the Conservatives just to get the most seats in a hung Parliament. The way the cards have fallen, the system is now even more skewed against Labour than it was against the Conservatives. How did this happen? It’s probably a mixture of three factors. One is the decline of the Liberal Democrats and tactical voting – one of the reasons the electoral system had worked against the Tories in recent decades was that Labour and Lib Dem voters had been prepared to vote tactically against the Tories, and the Lib Dems have held lots of seats in areas that would otherwise be Tory. Those factors have vanished. At the same time the new dominance of the SNP in an area that was a Labour heartland has tilted the system against Labour. Labour had a lead over the Conservatives of 9% in Scotland, but Labour and Conservative got the same number of Scottish seats because the SNP took them all. Finally there is how the swing was distributed at this election. Overall there was virtually no swing at all between Labour and Conservative across Great Britain, but underneath this there were variances. In the Conservative held target seats that Labour needed to gain there was a swing towards the Conservatives (presumably because most of these seats were being contested by first time Conservative incumbents). In the seats that Labour already held there was a swing towards Labour – in short, Labour won votes in places where they were of no use to them, piling up useless votes in seats they already held.

I do wonder if they actually rehearse in order to make the Freudian slips.

Oh this did make me smile.. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/labours-path-back-power-tougher-you-think

Because you don't seem to realise that to build a motorway or railway from one side of the Pennines to the other you don't need to go across the top of them.

I see the Greek economy returned to recession today. There but for the grace of....... http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-falls-back-into-recession-1431519144

So you've never heard of the Mont Blanc Tunnel?

Thatcher got 3 bites of the cherry because the electorate prefered her to the alternative. Her policies were more popular than Labour's alternative. Cameron will very likely get the option of a third bite because his policies are more popular with the voters than Labour's alternative. Indeed the only time in the last 4 decades when voters sided with Labour was when Blair made a credible alternative to Tory policy by adopting most of it. I have to laugh about the Clegg issue round here. You guys spent 5 years slagging off a minor party and in the end handed most of their seats to the Tories. :hihi: The poll here is an interesting one. The alternatives are not realistic. The options should be RIGHT or DOWN. That's really a dilema for you isn't it? You can appoint a leader who represents your views and lose, or appoint one who doesn't and actually have a prospect of winning. The trouble is Blair now earns about £10 million a year. Even if you could afford to bring him back, he probably votes Conservative anyhow.

You do post a load of tripe mecky. FROM YESTERDAY http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32720772 Bank of England says UK economy to grow by 2.5% in 2015 You probably missed that the economy of France has barely emerged from recession and has been struggling along at 0.3% annual groth for the last 3 years whilst the UK has been the strong evconomy of Europe. http://country.eiu.com/france Unlike most of the euro zone, there is no sign yet of a turnaround in the French economy; we expect real GDP growth of just 0.9% in 2015, rising to 1.2% next year.

I think I would rather safety inspections be carried out by people who are competant and trained to deal with such matters, not a young girl who has flown out to do 6 weeks summer work in the university holidays. A tour operator has a duty of care to ensure that a hotel or resort to which they send customers complies with all relevant safety requirement. That should require nothing more than checking that the hotel has all the corret and up to date certificates in place. A hotel that is used by 500 tour operators from around the world could not function, if in adition to the local authorities, every single one of those companies sent in a team of electricians, gas inspectors, structural engineers, pool inspectors, water quality inspectors etc etc. That requirement is down to the hotel and it is up to them to show certificates of compliance to show the above is in order. Regarding the inquest. Thomas Cook is under no obligation to give evidence at an inquest. I am pretty sure that their legal representitives as well as their insurers have insisted that they don't.

It is rather like a car MOT. A safety inspection is only good on the day of an inspection. A holiday rep cannot be expected to go to every hotel and check every appliance in that hotel every day. Hotels are, or should, be inspected by the local authorities to ensure complicity with safety requirement. A tour operator should be responsible for ensuring the relevant inspections have been carried out and the certificates are in place. I have no idea if the hotel complied with the law in those respects. If it did then it is difficult to see a case against Thomas Cook. If it didn't then there is. If the hotel didn't comply with relevant requirements the local authority should be sticking the owners in prison.

And the court of law in Greece said Thomas Cook had no case to answer and as Thomas Cook is one of the more reputable companies I'll probably book through them again..

And as the Tories got 20% more votes than Labour where does that leave them? Ain't life a bitch when your party has just lost 2 elections in a row and is hell bent on losing the next one too?

They built her a special toilet at Sheffield Town Hall for the Maundy visit last month. I'm not sure whether she did use it, but I know of one person who did..

Would that tax dodger status apply to Lewis Hamilton or his Mercedes team mate Nico Rosberg, or both?

I'm pretty sure the deputy PM was a Sheffield MP for the last 5 years. Folks like you kept bad mouthing him, so I suspect you are crying crocodile tears about a lack of local chaps in the cabinet now. ---------- Post added 13-05-2015 at 16:54 ---------- There was a plan to build a motorway between Manchester and Sheffield. They even got round to building it from both ends. Sadly for Sheffield Harold Wilson's government pulled the plug on that one so there is a short stretch of motorway from Manchester to nowhere and the M62 across to Bradford Leeds and Hull.

Just a couple of points here. Nissan and Toyota make around 1 million cars a year in the UK. Airbags tend to be a bought in item. There was a time in the USA where Ford discovered a major safety issue on one of its cars. They carried on regardless as the compensation to those killed was less than the cost of putting the faults right.

I'm sure it has, particularly with folk who work in the private sector and who do not benefit from index linked final salary pensions and retirement at 55. I'm pretty sure many of them have little sympathy with folks who do but still expect the rest of us to dig deeper so that they can have a little more. Bring on the driverless trains.

Or more likely an art gallery or a museum . But heaven forbid the rabid dogs whose party just lost the election couldn't find something else to moan about.

It wasn't the insincere word the think tank had given them that month.

I think they might settle for a Hokey Cokey.:hihi:

I think it is because the electorate got fed up with militant unions decades ago and a strike a month ago would have handed another million votes to Cameron. Then of course the RMT fields 50 or so candidates in the council elections. I'm not sure that commuters stranded on a railway platform are more likely to vote for them.

Oh dear Mecky. You seem to have missed the Tories won the election by popular demand. We didn't want Miliband as Prime Minister. You have 5 years before Labour lose another election and ditch another no hope leader. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32719779 Unemployment has continued to fall and the number of people in work has continued to rise, according to the latest official figures. The number of people out of work in the January to March period fell to 1.83 million, down 35,000 from the previous quarter. The total number in work rose to 31.1 million. The number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance fell by 12,600 in April to 764,000.

That's correct. We voted in droves not to have a Labour government, and thank god we aren't getting one.