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What sort of deal do you think the Tories will offer the broker??? They won't, they'll be in no position to dictate terms because Ukip simply isn't going to keep a Tory government in power unconditionally like the Lib Dems have. There may be a "supply and confidence" deal providing we get a referendum on the EU straight away, and not after Cameron has had time to stack the deck. Getting this country back on its feet implies giving the requisite two years notice to the EU, and the sooner that happens the better. Once our notice is in then whoever is tasked with negotiating will have a much stronger hand - it's quite likely we'll be offered associate membership on very favourable terms. All the trade, without any of the political crap. Where do you think the money has come from for this turnaround in the countries fortunes. Not everything is about handouts or robbing Peter to pay Paul. In fact we are much deeper in debt that when Brown left office. What the politicos are talking about is the rate at which the debt is increasing. They are not very keen to explain this though, so they refer to the rate of increase as the deficit, not the actual debt itself. Yes, none of us could get that past our bank manager for one second, but (with very few exceptions) all governments are heavily borrowed - mainly because they can, and because it's a very easy way to buy votes. There is no additional money, just a bit more confidence in the minds of those we borrow from that somehow we'll be able to repay when the crunch comes. That increase in confidence means we are borrowing at record low rates, and far less than most other countries. Not having to pay so much interest means we can service the debt and less taxpayers money needs to be channelled in that direction. Overseas investors are happier to hold pounds and not swap them for something more risky, so the value of Sterling goes up. The way to blow the whole thing, and to go back into crisis, is to start spending like there is no tomorrow once again. Balls knows all this and with typical duplicity is telling the markets that he's going to be very responsible, and in fact might have to cut back spending more than the Tories. But, he's trying to give the opposite impression to the electorate. If you analyse his LPC speech he's actually proposing bigger NHS cuts than the Tories, but the idiots at conference (those who weren't actually asleep) were applauding this. If you doubt this I can point you at an apolitical analysis of his proposals. Mostly from the welfare cuts & I don't mean the dole,it's come from the selling of our assets this time the royal Mail cutting back on the national health,education the list goes on if they get in next time God knows what will happen more zero hour contracts it could get even worse..everybody tries to blame the last government but it was a worldwide meltdown. Hmm.. as I said there is no new money. Remember that it was Labour who introduced the private sector into the NHS. In principal some of it made sense, but they completely botched PFI and landed the NHS with huge debts that it now has to pay out of current income - money that should have been available for treating patients. Once again I can go into detail if you doubt this. Woah, we are back to Gordo's "it's a global problem"! That's far too simplistic. Yes, there was a global turn-down (there's an argument that it started right here with the stupidity at Northern Rock). But, Gordo brainwashed himself into the idea that the good times were bad times, and that everything would come right in the end. Economists were telling him for years that he'd misread the economic cycle, and that he shouldn't be spending on the assumption that revenues would increase to cover it. We'd settled into a fairly regular 11 year economic cycle, but Gordo kept repeatedly adding a year to the official forecasts. He simply wouldn't accept that he'd completely misread the charts. He lectured in economics at a crappy polytechnic, and arrogantly thought that he knew better than hundreds of top-flight economists who constantly analysed all the figures on banks of computers. It was the classic Nick Leeson story: a guy who'd made the wrong call, and, rather than come clean at an early stage to limit the damage, sailed on with the hope that it would all come right on the next move - and so completely bust the bank! In part he caused that global problem! A decent chancellor should have been comparing notes with others, and counselling caution, not junketing around the world boasting that he'd "ended boom and bust"! An easyway to stop people from the rest of Europe coming here is to make the minimum wage the same in all eu countries,that would stop loads thinking of coming here..some countries pay £2.50 ph we pay £6.55ph but both of these amounts are s***...If we come out of the Eu what sort of prouduct can England of the rest of the world & who could we trade with....Malcolm didn't get that kettle & pot thing.. You going to nip over to Romania or Greece or... and tell the PM that they should hike their minimum wage three or four times Tony? They'll say that's brilliant, please leave your cheque for a squillion of your Breetish pounds on the table as you leave to pay for this. The Euro's too dodgy as we are figuring out how best to hit the Germans in the pocket when we abandon it one Friday night after foreign bankers have left for their luxury villas. No one told us that the Germans would be running our country and telling us what to do, and - as our parents told us - you magnificent Breetish don't do that! Ah, the our economy depends on the EU argument! No it bloomin' doesn't! Our little island didn't get to be the most successful trading nation on the planet by shelling out a significant proportion of our GDP to Europe. The EU accounts for an ever-decreasing portion of our exports, and we buy significantly more from them than they buy from us. Did you notice an increase in trade or in jobs when we joined? But, here's the really interesting bit that LibLabCon won't tell you (or they will once the British people have presented them with a firm Brexit instruction): the EU treaties require the EU to negotiate trade agreements on favourable terms with any member who gives the requisite to years notice of leaving. As they have more to lose from a lousy deal than we have, it's near certain that trade-wise things will continue pretty much as they did before. But, we will be freed from the crippling and continuing demands for more money to prop up the failing EU, and we will be free to negotiate trade agreements outside the EU on any terms that suit us. Economists who have looked at this dispassionately and worst-case (certainly not the EU funded LSE!) calculate that we will take a small hit in the first year; so small that it likely will go unnoticed. But, from the second year onward we'll be boosting our trade worldwide as we get our act together. From then on the sky's the limit for an independent UK, and your union buddies can start demanding more money!

Do you want to be in'it? If so PLEASE explain exactly why? People voted to put Ukip in Brussels to send a message to LibLabCon that they don't trust them, and they don't trust the failing EU either. When the elites (who you tug your forelock to) conspire not to give our people a choice they send a party to Brussels to tell them all to go hang! Here's us doing it:- It's really very simple, your union needs to tell puppet leader Miliband to stop ducking the issue and give the public a referendum on whether they want to be in a European superstate or not. Labour started as a democratic party with magnificent intentions, but has now completely lost touch with its democratic roots. It is now about power for power's sake, and keeping the gravy train rolling. Labour no longer has any relevance to anyone in this town or anything in it. This was thoroughly proven in the last round of LibLabCon musical chairs. Lavery is a shill for the ruling elites - whether he realises this or not - you decide. He's an elitist joke, just like Dennis Skinner has become; Skinner's heckling has now been institutionalised, like other "discordant" events in the distant past - that's how you nullify them. Electing Lavery disenfranchises everyone in this town - we all become that joke!. LibLabCon is all about manipulating things to keep the Westminster elite in power. A political game to keep people who don't really believe in democracy in cushy jobs, and provide a retirement path for them into copious non-jobs in Brussels. Labour and Tory have already packed the House of Lords past overflow with "jobs" for life - eighty quid every morning just for signing in, then slope off to find something which pays better before lunch at the club. Us mugs struggling to pay our mortgages, or even put food on the table, pay for all the junketing and non-jobs! Old Labour wanted to abolish the House of Lords; New Labour has packed it out with cronies no company will give a directorship to because they couldn't run a proverbial in a brewery; and that's before I get on to the Commons, Quangos, Parliamentary Committees, Public Trusts, etc. and the above all the EU..! Mini revolution coming Tony, just like at the start of the last century. The more people discover about how things really work the sooner this will happen. You are either with the good guys or with the bad guys.

So.. on your reckoning Labour will be nominally in charge but the Scot Nats will be in the driving seat and bleeding the rest of the UK even more than they are now. Oil revenues have more than halved since Salmond was salivating over spending all of them whilst having the UK stand as guarantor for his debt, so any nationalist with an ounce of sense will be thanking their lucky stars that they lost their referendum. Now best strategy is to let the rest of the UK take the revenue hit whilst holding a hand out for more more more! Miliband and Balls will be in no position to refuse; so what a miserable prospect for the whole country. A re-run of the Gordo saga: hold on to power whatever burden you inflict on the nation. Having bankrupt our children and children's children by running up future liabilities, M&B will proceed to bankrupt the present generation by trashing the current account too! Tony, name me one Labour government in history that hasn't ended in total economic mess, and left the country economically far worse off than when it took power? Blair got away with this by pretending that Labour had turned a new leaf - New Labour; "things can only get better". This time there's not even that pretence; it's pretty tired old Labour, with absolutely nothing new to say. Same old state socialism (with a nod to Thatcherism and the market), same old economic mess. In less than a year this will be apparent to even the most tribal Labour voter, and we'll all have to suffer a full four further years of muddle, lost opportunity, and being bled dry by both the EU and Scotland! "a few seats" eh? The party that was being mocked for having no MPs now represents this country in Brussels, and has won half of the recent parliamentary elections. In the other half it ran both Tory and Labour so close that they are still in shock! In Labour's seat it was Tory voters who kept them in power! Carry on with your sloped playing field; carry on with the out of date boundaries; carry on with the postal vote fraud; carry on with lowering the voting age to hook in kids you can easily fool; leave the flood gates open to always grateful first-generation immigrants - none of this gerrymandering alters the fact that your elites are drinking in the last chance saloon. Ukip won't form a government this time around, but the sights are firmly set on 2020 when popular democracy will be restored to this country after two generations absence! If your LibLabCon elitists want to believe that Ukip is another SDP then they're welcome to yet another of those illusions. The bright thing to do is to join the people's party and help mould policy.

If they didn't do due diligence on the footfall before they took over then they are an even more crap outfit than the media is painting them. My bet is that they did their sums, and even if things are flagging now it can be readily turned around. Though, we'd be naive to expect any payback to the community in future.

This would surely be the case if populations were anywhere near where they are today, but the fact is that historically the UK was very sparsely populated and heavily forested. For every one thousand people in the UK today estimates put the 5,000BC population at only a single person (around 60 thousand in total). Even around 0BC the UK population was only about 1.5M. It's also a fair conclusion that the South of England would have been more heavily populated than the North. Ancients would have clustered a lot more tightly than we do today; not to do so would have invited extinction. There was no means of wreaking any sort of a living from the most of the landmass, so successful tribes would have cherry-picked the best locations and stuck with them over long periods. They would have had next to no awareness of where most coal and iron deposits were, and only stumbled on them by accidents of nature.

It's not very often that the logic of both Miliband and Clegg is compelling, but when it matches your own thoughts then eggs is surely eggs. I'm talking about cast-iron-promise Dave's refusal to take part in public debate because the Greens aren't included (yet, this time he is being forced to face Ukip's questions). "Cut the green crap" Dave! No one believes for an instant that you rate communism with plants as a serious proposition in any seat which doesn't suffer from a vast oversupply of latter-day hippies. This is an excuse as overwhelmingly lame as Labour's we can't discuss the EU because we need to focus on the economy (our tiny minds can only ever consider one thing at a time, and we can't see any possible connection). Secretly both Miliband and Clegg are delighted they can shift the blame onto frit Dave - neither wants to face the compelling proposition of running our country for the benefit of all the people in it - but that's politics folks! Tories and ex-Tories, who have a better measure of Dave than most, have already told us that this is exactly the kind of pathetic excuse Dave will surely use to wriggle out of his promise of allowing the British people to freely decide on their future - wriggle-out for the third time! Those people's concerns about Cameron are genuine, and you'd be a fool to believe a word he says.

Someone who isn't a masculinist perhaps? Actually, I meant to say feminazi, but the buzzword escaped me in the now fashionable rush to judgement. I suspect that if you ask 20 "feminists" you'll likely get 21 quite different definitions. I will accept the very sensible Germaine Greer's definition (though she's too old for me ) - but, as I'm not allowed a link here... I think that she's rather p'd off by language revisionism too. Come to think of it I don't have any problem with purple and yellow hair.

Yup, another cultural marxist witch hunt. Someone needs to say shut up and at least wait for the appeal to be heard, as apparently the judiciary have now bought into the whole positive discrimination thing too! White + male + heterosexual - well... why even bother with a trial? Send him to the guillotine and be done with it! Of course maximum redress will only be had if the audience is restricted to baying feminists with brightly coloured hair (Blue seems to be in vogue).

It's going on forty years since I learned about Ebac, and then drove down to darkest Co. Durham to buy one of their "building driers" to solve a humidity problem in a small Bedlington industrial project. In fact a short while before, and on a phone call through then yellow pages, we'd hired one of their dehumidifiers . Dressed in local blue finnegans hammerite paint it wasn't terribly efficient, but it proved we had a problem and that we needed one permanently. When we got to Newton Aycliffe we were shown into a vast new industrial unit with little in it, but there was a short row of brand new two-tone beige driers that had just been produced. They were more angular, more "modern", and there was obviously a process of continuous improvement going on. Out came the cheque book and the machine we returned with to Bedlington ran completely unmaintained for decades in various roles. Over the years It must have pulled enough water out of the air to fill a large swimming pool! That's pretty much all I knew about Ebac - they were North East; they were progressive; they produced good gear, they were approachable, and they supplied local builders - until.. I turned the TV on last year. Lo and behold there was ex-CBI supremo Digby Jones called in to put Ebac back on the straight and narrow! It seems the founder had died and left the whole show to the key workers as a worker's cooperative. Wow, this was suddenly interesting stuff! It got even more interesting when it became clear that they'd bought a bust Scottish freezer manufacturer from a liquidator on the telephone for a megasum, and had never actually eye-balled what they'd contracted to pay for! Their intention was to move the production facilities to the North East and resume freezer production. Where they intended to do this looked remarkably like the empty factory floor I'd visited nigh on forty years before - except, the roof now leaked badly, evidenced by large pools of water! As you might imagine Digby Jones shook his head and grumbled at the lack of "due diligence", overconfidence, and dearth of business nouce. Despite a return months later the program ended inconclusively. Ever-mounting problems meant Ebac still hadn't produced a single freezer, and the original business plan had become a joke! One thing I did pick up from the program was that they'd already moved mass market - into domestic dehumidifiers - and were producing a pretty advanced one in a moulded housing. In the last couple of weeks we've just bought one of the same, but I can't rate it just yet as it hasn't arrived at the final destination. But... the real purpose of this post is to highlight the hot news that this Wednesday Ebac produced the very first washing machine on their production line. The ambitious plan is to take 10% of the UK washing machine market, and add another 150 North East jobs in the process. I believe they will do just that! Keep it up Ebac, you are a shining example of what home grown North East enterprise can achieve when it sheds the crippling state-dependency mindset!

It would be interesting if someone could separate the fact from the folklore here and explain the exact connection. Tony says "he believed in rubbish" which is not entirely true. What made those broadcasts so dangerous, and why most people listened, was that in amongst the propaganda were hard facts our own government was hiding. It took quite a while before the government worked out that coming clean was the best policy, and that the British people could take the truth. Pity it took a foreign dictator to force it out of them! Some lessons there for the current lot I think, and I'm not just talking about the Beeb!

Here's your link Tony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw William Joyce spoke for the Third Reich - UKIP speaks against the Fourth Reich (the one Miliband and Balls and Cameron and Clegg would rather not mention). Get the subtle difference? Politics aside the Bothal-HawHaw connection is quite interesting. I've heard this local tale before, but AFAIR no one has ever expanded on the details. There were a number of people dubbed Lord Haw Haw, or variants, so we are not necessarily talking about Joyce here. One thing which amused me when little was that there was a popular local conception of Hitler as a "house" painter, which extended to cartoons of him painting a swastika on our market cross. He was of course an artist, and by all accounts a lousy one! I concluded that quite a lot of local folklore probably resulted from mishearings and misconceptions. Apologies if I've posted this before, but as you raise the Nazis you might like to discover where they all went:

Keep saying it and in a Cultural Marxist world it will become true! Fact - in the North of England UKIP support is mostly ex-Labour. If you doubt this look at the Heywood and Middleton result. Five things went Labour's way and kept them in one of their "safest" seats by a whisker: 1) Lib Dems switching to Labour. 2) The usual organised postal vote fraud that Labour pulls (Ukip won on the clean on-the-table ballot). 3) Immigrants expressing their gratitude to the party of uncontrolled mass immigration. 4) Wet behind the ears youngsters who've no real world experience of Labour duplicity and lies. But mainly it was... 5) ...those right wing Tories that you so despise. If just 600 or so had really been the interchangeable Ukip supporters you claim Labour would have lost one of its safest seats! Next time Heywood will succumb to popular democracy and there will be no going back despite those establishment-wedded Tory voters! Labour knows their days are numbered as ever-increasing numbers of working class people wise up to its duplicity. Labour strategy to offset this is to keep the floodgates open to immigrants (whilst pretending it intends to do the opposite, and duplicitously "admitting" to major mistakes), and also lower the voting age to try to con more impressionable youngsters. Won't work! Labour is an early 20th century party (just like the Tories), and it's days are strictly numbered. The real problem is the damage it will do whilst in its death throes. Out of the ashes might emerge a democratic party that once again makes some sense to ordinary people; so, it's in every one's interest that it be despatched as quickly and cleanly as possible.

So... Labour campaign organiser Rob Sherrington publicly calls the queen a Nazi and tells her to f'off! http://order-order.com/2015/01/05/paid-labour-staff-members-online-queen-is-nazi-rant/ Total silence from the cultural marxist journos at the Beeb! Just imagine how the Beeb would have treated this if it could have been pinned on anyone who was remotely associated with Ukip - even in a private conversation? Much of the time the distortion is not what the Beeb reports, it's what they censor! They've just got around to slanted reporting of the anti-islamisation rallies in Germany that other news organisations have been freely reporting on for some time. Curious though that BBC is broadcasting an attendance at the Dresden rally of 10,000, whilst the internet (including the BBC's own website!) is reporting it at 18,000. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-06/anti-immigration-rally-draws-18000-to-protest-in-germany/6001852 For a detailed study of how the BBC slants the news in favour of the political establishment see: http://biasedbbc.org/ Recently public comment on the grossly over-moderated bbc website has been taking a direction that overwhelmingly doesn't follow the party line. So, in true Cultural Marxist fashion, the Orwellian Beeb have now shut virtually all public input down! Time to scrap the licence fee I think. I'd be happy to see a rump of public service radio broadcasting continue on a vastly reduced public spend, and organised around the World Service and Radio 4. But in my book the BBC, as it's organised today, is surely an outdated relic of 20th century paternalism.

So, yet another tweak that tribal Labour voters failed to notice, and which the London-centric liberal elites who control the party would rather leave highly ambiguous? Our Mr Lavery has started to notice though. Sooner or later he's going to work out that he's in the wrong party. The question is will he have the guts to do anything about it, or will he learn to keep his mouth shut, and so keep his seat on the political gravy train?

Would love to see it Tony! What would making "the right decision" look like?

Well.. the new Microsoft doesn't seem that different from the old Microsoft. A few times during 2014 I'd been tempted to buy a Windows Phone 8 device at an aggressive promotional price, but stalled and ultimately went for something else. What made me hesitate was generally the fact that the device was blighted with only 512MB of RAM or (and it's mostly the or) the long history of Microsoft prematurely abandoning its many failed platforms. Yeah, I've still got a fair number of manufacturer-abandoned MS NBT devices in boxes somewhere, but happily was able to completely dodge Windows RT. That's not an easy dodge for someone who has always been into extreme portability, and a sucker for any new gismo. All I see now is moans from people who gave MS another chance on the strength of the (now abandoned too) Nokia name. Great hardware is useless if it's welded to dead end software. So, I really don't care how good that 40 megapixel camera on the Lumia 1020 is, and how intuitive the operating system, it's surely going the way of just about every other offering from a company that - at core - can't properly relate to its customers. One that struggled to do so in far less competitive days. Can a leading software corporation that always had problems innovating fast enough (and simply relied on total market dominance) ever hope to rescue a hardware one that went down because it was similarly blighted? My advice: WP8 - avoid at any price! In a year or so (when you've forgotten this post even existed) you'll be congratulating yourself that you were so percipient. Think I'm wrong here?

Thank you everybody (including Brian) for those kind words! I can handle the beast - in fact I somehow manage to handle several of them every day - but I don't know about Alison.

No lost postings I'm aware of, but moderators may know more. The camera can only handle a tiny few simultaneous connections at the moment. It was done that way for expediency, and in the knowledge that only accredited members could access it. But, the hardware and software is already there for "broadcast" when we get some time. Our major objective in early '15 is to get a major new release of the site software deployed. It's a complete rewrite and I think members will like it.

Think I'm beginning to suffer the same symptoms as Symptoms! Good thing you never had a job as a headline writer Malc: it would have been the shortest job ever, when the local rag hit the streets with NEWS! heading the front page! I've edited the thread title - a bit!

http://www.bedlington.co.uk/community/gallery/image/1698-me-mam-advertising/ Only difficult if you don't glance at the piccies at the top of the current board index page! Tony's mum was called Sylvia, and - if my infant memory isn't addled - was a quite stunning red-head, and quite a personality in the town! I suspect she may feature in other group pictures that have been posted. If I'm wrong here then someone will surely prove this right in the course of time. Anyway, Tony's family, in common with other's in Bedlington, knew more about making bicycles than just about anywhere else in the UK. Making real things featured heavily in the town's economy before WWII, and for a bit over a decade after. During the war they supplied the forces who sent Bedlington bikes all over the World. They still turn up in barns and foreign fields. Interestingly, they also produced the components for those sectional Bailey Bridges you see in the war films. I think Billy Scott - Scotts Engineering Works - up the bank behind the former Elliott's Garage - also contributed here, and there was a good deal of mutual exchange of engineering services.

Thank you for the clarification Nigel; I can enjoy my Christmas meal now! Our doctrine-bound simple minded lefties don't seem to be able to get their heads around the fact that it's the intent - and not the precise form of words - that's that's all important. Sadly, we meekly permit them to redefine our language to suit their prejudices!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04vs348 So, has the UK arm of the Apple Marketing Corporation finally turned? Probably not, but some kudos for at least telling part of the truth about the Apple façade. Of course other companies are at least partly guilty of similar practices, but for the most part workers and suppliers have a choice as they're far from monopolistic. There are many great products out there that are functionally better than Apple - all are far better value, and don't fuel an near-evil US monopoly. This is particularly true of the UK, where Apple are quite frankly taking the proverbial out of their blinkered faithful. So, don't be a dumb fashionista: take the advice of your nearest techie before parting with your hard-earned UK£. In the fashion biz it's very easy to become "uncool" in no time at all!

I may well know the answer, but it wouldn't be fair to say, right away. Here's a secondary question that's a lot more difficult: What's the connection?

Downloaded and not downloaded, at the same instant. Actually the Jim Al-Kahlili series is well worth a watch - unlike the whining, fawning, cr*p from the Schroedinger's Cat that is Brian Cox - he's a pretty sharp presenter. Hurry, hurry, last chance on #1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b04v5vjz

Not quite. In the case of the left discussing right it's you're totally evil. Other way around it's simply please try to use your intelligence, and get your head out of the clouds! I notice Len McCluskey is doing a rethink. Maybe it came to him when he fell asleep during Miliband's speech at the LPC? Seems he's given up on his own man already. Yet more evidence that the current LibLabCon stitch-up is well past it's sell by date I'd say. It doesn't even do anything for the people who pull the strings (with the notable exception of the EU overlords, who have them all in their pocket). Re "No clear cut answers": Putting the EU under the required two year's notice that we want what we were originally sold - a pan European Free Trade Area - is pretty clear cut. There's also quite a few other bloomin' obvious things we can do right away to get out of the present decline. However none of them accord with the self-interest of establishment politicos.