Monday 25th April 2016

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 3:21 pm

George Osborne family revolt grows: now his aunt backs Brexit
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics ... 32916.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I'm saying nothing.

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 3:23 pm

norman smith ‏@BBCNormanS 9m9 minutes ago
From where I'm sitting. ..Nicky Morgan has a way to go before she wins her MPs round to forced Academies policy

Isabel Hardman ‏@IsabelHardman 10m10 minutes ago
Fair to say this has been a pretty hostile education questions for Nicky Morgan

AnatolyKasparov · Post by **AnatolyKasparov** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 3:26 pm

yahyah wrote:Just completed my correct postal vote forms, three of them.

On one of them for the Welsh Assembly- under UKIP, appears the name Mostyn Neil Hamilton !
Bet he never used Mostyn when he stood in Tatton for the Tories. Plain old Neil was probably good enough then.

Actually, I'm pretty sure he did - if only because I distinctly recall that being read out at election night 1997.

Of fond memory, especially in this case

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 3:32 pm

Kevin Maguire ‏@Kevin_Maguire 2m2 minutes ago
Kevin Maguire Retweeted LBC
Cameron will have to condemn himself and Zac Goldsmith at this week's #pmqs

LBCVerified account
‏@LBC
LBC can reveal the Imam branded an Isis supporter by PM last week was invited to a Conservative Party meeting

yahyah · Post by **yahyah** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 3:36 pm

rebeccariots2 wrote:
Kevin Maguire ‏@Kevin_Maguire 2m2 minutes ago
Kevin Maguire Retweeted LBC
Cameron will have to condemn himself and Zac Goldsmith at this week's #pmqs

LBCVerified account
‏@LBC
LBC can reveal the Imam branded an Isis supporter by PM last week was invited to a Conservative Party meeting

John Humphries seemed woefully ill informed about issues surrounding Goldsmith's smears when he interviewed Khan on Saturday.

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 3:44 pm

Sian Griffiths ‏@SianGriffiths6 2h2 hours ago
86% council run schools now rated “good”/“outstanding” @ofsted, compared to 82% academies and 79 % free schools says @LGANews @LGAcomms

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:03 pm

Torcuil Crichton Retweeted
Kevin Schofield ‏@PolhomeEditor 5m5 minutes ago
SNP MP Iain Blackford shouts "Tory poodle" at @JWoodcockMP after he says the Nats' "obsession" with Indy would cost thousands of jobs.

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:15 pm

Plaid Cymru candidate Arfon Jones defends 'bomb' tweet
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2016-wales-36132140" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Carl Sargeant ‏@carlsargeant1 17m17 minutes ago
Wow! @ElisThomasD was right to back @david_taylor http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2016-wales-36132140" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; … What are you doing with this #Leanne

Albert Owen MP ‏@AlbertOwenMP 14m14 minutes ago
BBC News - Plaid Cymru candidate Arfon Jones defends 'bomb' tweet http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2016-wales-36132140" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; … A disgrace Daffydd El was right vote Labour May 5

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:17 pm

Mirror Politics ‏@MirrorPolitics 1m1 minute ago
Jeremy Hunt 'chauffered 50 yards to avoid Downing Street junior doctors protest'
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/je ... ds-7831322" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; …

No handy trees to hide behind then.

AnatolyKasparov · Post by **AnatolyKasparov** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:19 pm

yahyah wrote: John Humphries seemed woefully ill informed

You could have left it at that really

yahyah · Post by **yahyah** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:24 pm

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/polit ... e-11237413" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

latest Welsh polling.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:34 pm

A short, informative video number crunching the BHS closure.

http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/local- ... ng-8341477" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Scroll down to 2nd video.

PorFavor · Post by **PorFavor** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:48 pm

So, why is it so important that this particular manifesto pledge (7-day NHS) be stuck to?

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:56 pm

Andy Cowper ‏@HPIAndyCowper 17m17 minutes ago

That is comfortably @heidi_mp's most effective performance as shadow health

seeingclearly · Post by **seeingclearly** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 4:57 pm

So they can get the docs on the same kind of contracts everyone else is on, lower the unit costs etc.

frightful_oik · Post by **frightful_oik** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:04 pm

ohsocynical wrote:Andy Cowper ‏@HPIAndyCowper 17m17 minutes ago

That is comfortably @heidi_mp's most effective performance as shadow health

5Live played all of Hunt's speech and then cut away so the presenter could repeat what Hunt said while HA was speaking.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:05 pm

Patrick Stewart sketch: what has the ECHR ever done for us?

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ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:06 pm

seeingclearly wrote:So they can get the docs on the same kind of contracts everyone else is on, lower the unit costs etc.

How are you? No snow today

yahyah · Post by **yahyah** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:18 pm

Yes, hope you are on the mend SeeingClearly.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:20 pm

I know I'm a financial illiterate, but how can an employer be allowed to help themselves to a pension fund? Isn't that theft?

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:21 pm

yahyah wrote:Yes, hope you are on the mend SeeingClearly.

Have you heard from your doctor yet YahYah?

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:22 pm

I've PMd CJA
She isn't logged in today. Hope everything is okay with her.

ephemerid · Post by **ephemerid** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:24 pm

Government defeated again in the Lords on the Housing Bill.

253 to 205 - homes must be built to carbon compliance standards.

Good.

It's all falling apart.

Doublegood.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:27 pm

Some idiot on Twitter blaming Corbyn for the strike.

I told him he'd got it ass backwards, strikes are a protest against government policy.

yahyah · Post by **yahyah** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:31 pm

ohsocynical wrote:
yahyah wrote:Yes, hope you are on the mend SeeingClearly.
Have you heard from your doctor yet YahYah?

Yes, thanks for asking.

She thinks the Dumbo-esque swelling is a side effect to one of the meds I've been on for six weeks or so.
She was surprised to hear that it extended up past my knees too, that's what worried me plus it was very uncomfortable.
Am to change to a new drug tomorrow, but it means another blood test in two weeks and regularly after as it is one that has implications for the kidneys.

Am sitting with my feet up on a stool to help reduce swelling, most frustrating as I want to be doing things.
Rest is no fun when it is enforced rest.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:32 pm

Morgan’s academisation plan is going around the S-bend, not a U-turn

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/04/2 ... -a-u-turn/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:34 pm

Sorry, but I can't get past the fact Morgan always looks gormless.

yahyah · Post by **yahyah** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:35 pm

Remember Ed M's call for responsible capitalism, and how he got derided for daring to talk about it ?
BHS shows he was right to do so.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:38 pm

yahyah wrote:
ohsocynical wrote:
yahyah wrote:Yes, hope you are on the mend SeeingClearly.
Have you heard from your doctor yet YahYah?
Yes, thanks for asking.

She thinks the Dumbo-esque swelling is a side effect to one of the meds I've been on for six weeks or so.
She was surprised to hear that it extended up past my knees too, that's what worried me plus it was very uncomfortable.
Am to change to a new drug tomorrow, but it means another blood test in two weeks and regularly after as it is one that has implications for the kidneys.

Am sitting with my feet up on a stool to help reduce swelling, most frustrating as I want to be doing things.
Rest is no fun when it is enforced rest.

I sympathise, but you need to keep those feet up. Stock yourself up with books and your computer and chill.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:39 pm

PS. Putting your feet up on the couch is more comfortable than a stool...

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 5:45 pm

Dennis Skinner Tells Jeremy Hunt To ‘Wipe That Smirk Off Your Face’ Over Junior Doctors Strike

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/d ... f671e838c2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 6:08 pm

More than £25m was paid from BHS to its owner, Retail Acquisitions, in the 13 months between the department store’s sale and it collapsing into administration, the Guardian understands.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... btn_fb#_=_" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 6:24 pm

Friday 21 October 2005

Philip Green pays himself record £1.2bn.

The retail entrepreneur Philip Green has banked £1.2bn after awarding himself the biggest pay cheque in British corporate history. The huge dividend has come from the Arcadia fashion business, which has 2,000 outlets and spans high street names including Top Shop, Wallis and Burton. It is more than four times the group's pre-tax profits of £253m.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/200 ... are_btn_tw

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 6:30 pm

Poor BHS. Nothing more than a cash cow.

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 6:38 pm

Paul Waugh ‏@paulwaugh 16m16 minutes ago
Tory MP Richard Fuller tells Commons Sir Phillip Green handling of BHS pensions is "the unacceptable face of capitalism". #heathrowlandremix

TR'sGhost · Post by **TR'sGhost** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 6:40 pm

ohsocynical wrote:I know I'm a financial illiterate, but how can an employer be allowed to help themselves to a pension fund? Isn't that theft?

It depends on who, legally speaking, the owner of the fund is. If it's an independent trust or similar, then it doesn't belong to the company and isn't part of the company assets. Otherwise...

Buying up a company to get your hands on the accumulated pension fund is a long-standing issue. Between 1950 and 1968 my late father worked for a company that had a vey good pension scheme. In 1968 that company was bought up by a US-based multi-national. They offered my father a job, which he took, and to be honest he later did far better than he ever could have with his original employer.

The sting came at retirement because the 18 years he'd been paying into that first pension scheme were worth nothing. They didn't count for his second employer's scheme, and the multi-national had simply absorbed his first pension scheme's capital into their profits for 1968. Doing this being a major reason why they bought up companies, many of which weren't even operating in the same markets as the multi-national which they just asset-stripped and closed.

Post by **refitman** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 7:06 pm

ohsocynical wrote:Patrick Stewart sketch: what has the ECHR ever done for us?

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[youtube]ptfmAY6M6aA[/youtube]
A lot of commenters on the Graun not getting it.

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 7:17 pm

Emily Ashton ‏@elashton 15m15 minutes ago
James Brokenshire setting out why government opposes Labour move to accept 3,000 lone child refugees from Europe

Emily Ashton ‏@elashton 8m8 minutes ago
Tim Farron and Yvette Cooper furious at govt’s refusal to help thousands of stranded children who "need help now"

More of that compassionate Conservatism on show.

rebeccariots2 · Post by **rebeccariots2** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 7:43 pm

Tamara Cohen ‏@tamcohen 45m45 minutes ago
Those backing Lord Dubs amendment to let in 3,000 refugee children in Europe say they think the government will win tonight's vote

Disgusting.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 8:00 pm

Robert Peston

In March 2015, I gave a lecture in honour of my dad, the annual Peston Lecture at Queen Mary College - where he founded the economics department 50 years ago. It felt a bit odd to do so, but I am pleased that I did.
I tried in the lecture to capture the spirit of his commitment to social justice. I hope you will forgive me publishing it here. Sorry it is so long. The world has obviously changed since I wrote it well over a year ago. But I think the fundamental argument remains relevant.

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ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 8:33 pm

Extract from Peston's speech. [Link posted above]

I just had to post it in case any of you didn't have time to go through the whole thing.

Which brings me to my favourite argument for narrowing the gap between the plutocracy and the rest, which is it turns out we would be doing the super-wealthy a huge favour – in a moral sense – by levelling them, by cutting them down to size. There is now a large body of social psychological research that we become worse people when we become – for these purposes – too rich. As it happens, this is no revelation for me. One of the things that always struck me from decades as a professional luncher and diner was that the very wealthiest, notably the billionaires, never carry cash and never offer to pay. Now I recently met a social psychologist based at Berkeley in California, Dacher Keltner, who devotes his life to assessing how individual prosperity affects our behaviour. And he claims to be able to prove that we should pity rather than resent the super-wealthy, because they are less human than most in important ways. For example Keltner organised a bunch of students to monitor cars going through a pedestrian zone where the cars were supposed to slow down. There was an unambiguous correlation between the price of the vehicle and a refusal to slow down. Those driving Porsches and BMWs did not apparently believe the rules applied to them. Which again was not a surprise to me. Because years of observation of the very rich has shown me that they are frequently characterised both by extreme impatience and the notion that mores and laws are for others.
But perhaps my favourite of Keltner’s experiments concerned a bowl of sweeties in the reception of his lab, where he had gathered together a bunch of people from different social backgrounds, some well off, some impecunious. As the subjects were leaving the lab, they passed by a big bowl of sweets, on which was very clearly written ‘For the children of the Institute of Human Development’. And what Keltner found was that the wealthy participants were much more likely to take candy from children.
Keltner believes he has proved that those with less money empathise more with people who are in trouble. Here perhaps is his most dramatic finding. When most people see an image of a starving skeletal child in a famine, there is an automatic activation of the Vagus nerve, part of the wiring that connects brain with vital organs, and which slows the heart and facilitates a sense of connection with any terrible image. It turns out that poorer people have a strong Vagus nerve reaction to people suffering, whereas wealthier people in the lab absolutely had no reaction. In Keltner’s words, there was a massive compassion deficit in the more well heeled.

Not that we didn't already know it.

ohsocynical · Post by **ohsocynical** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 8:59 pm

The media is ignoring the fact that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour is pulling ahead in the polls

http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-media ... lls-2016-4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

RogerOThornhill · Post by **RogerOThornhill** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 10:07 pm

Evening all. Successful day in the library today...

Compare these two:

In November, Munira Mirza, London’s deputy mayor for education, questioned the boundaries that put the neighbouring London boroughs of Islington and Hackney in separate regions.

“One of the expectations of the current system was that the London school system, which is very high-performing, would share its expertise outside London. That hasn’t really transpired,” she told the MPs.

Sources involved in planning for the commissioners, first developed under Michael Gove, the former education secretary, say the government was concerned that a London commissioner would fall under the jurisdiction of London’s mayor rather than the DfE.

http://schoolsweek.co.uk/government-rej ... ner-reform

And then Nick Gibb in the HoC.

Mr Gibb

I read the hon. Gentleman’s recent letter to the Ofsted lead for the north-west, Chris Russell, and I share his ambition to improve standards of education in Greater Manchester, but it is not a top-down reform; it is devolution in its purest form that gives control of schools to the professionals on the frontline. That is what this is about. He should be supporting the measures because they will raise academic standards right across our schools system.

He is a halfwit who is making this up as he goes along. There's no strategy or plan behind this - utterly chaotic.

RogerOThornhill · Post by **RogerOThornhill** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 10:10 pm

Others noticed this too...

Laura McInerney ‏@miss_mcinerney 7h7 hours ago
Nick Gibb says that the academies policy is "devolution in its purest form". I just... I mean... #facepalm #eduqs

HindleA · Post by **HindleA** » Mon 25 Apr, 2016 10:48 pm

http://hillsborough.liverpoolecho.co.uk/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
96 Candles Burn Bright

JFT 96 YNWA.

HindleA · Post by **HindleA** » Tue 26 Apr, 2016 1:54 am

Hunt writes a second letter to Mr.Porter.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... ark-porter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

HindleA · Post by **HindleA** » Tue 26 Apr, 2016 1:55 am

Jeremy Hunt,aged 4 and a half.