Blah Blah

Yes I agree Burbage, nothing of any real content there, just the same empty promises since she became PM on helping the many while doing absolutely nothing to do so. Having said that, there have been some indications that they are getting the message that austerity has gone too far and that they are losing the young over issues like housing. The relaxing of some pay caps. The announcment that UC claimants will be able to get advance payments immidiately after being deaf to the issues since it was introduced. I suspect they realised that without that concession (essentially the reintroduction of the crisis loans they abolished) that roll out of UC would have sent food bank use through the roof (beyond the ability of exisiting food banks to cope). And they have also announced that those with lifelong disabilities and conditions that won't improve will no longer have to go through Work Capability Assessments. There are expected to be moves to let councils build homes again (in some rationed form) - something the Tories have bitterly opposed for three decades. And they have found another ?10bn for help to buy from that magic money tree. All of this is too little too late. The people hit hardest by Tory policies are not going to forget what things like Welfare reform have put them through. May's problem is that she is at the mercy some not very nice right wing Tory troublemakers, and those trouble makers will destroy the Tory Party - not least because they refuse to change with public mood.

Ha ha Alan. Love it. I think you are right Red devil. The return of Aaron Banks signals the unhappiness at negotiations from Farage and the first steps towards doing something about it. I really do think this whole brexit think is going to end up in some kind of political civil war, within the two main parties as much as between all parties. And it will go on for a decade at least. I do not understand the hard brexiteers. They seem intent in causing as much chaos as possible, in the short term at least. Fears of 70's style socialism are the least of the country's worries right now.

She should grow a spine and fire him. She is doomed anyway, she may as well go down fighting for it.

Oh dear uncle.....could you be any more of a Tory apologist if you tried? May lost the majority for two reasons. A manifesto that attacked the Tory core vote (the so called dementia tax) and a reliance on brexit as an issue over the economy (the usual stomping ground of the Tories over Labour). Whether you like it or not, two thirds of under 35's support Corbyn and see Labour as the party that speaks for them. The tories only have themselves to blame for this. They are an aging party that witihn 20 years will have lost their core vote unless they change direction and start looking at policy that offers affordable aspiration to the young. At the core of this (and it is the same for the Blairites of Labour) is the end of the neo classical capitalist era. It has run its course just like the post war era before it. Why else do you think we are seeing the re-emergence of populism and extremes?

You could be right about stooges although I have no idea how those audiences are picked. Henry Bolton is picking the wrong fight if he has chosen to start with the LGBT community. I give him 6 months.

Nigello Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Sleep is a good illness preventer (to an extent, > of course - I am not saying "kip cures all > ailments"). Longer and darker nights make it > easier! I am not convinced by the use of vitamins > and zinc etc, though. Supplements are harder for the body to digest than from more natural sources like food, sunlight etc etc and research has mixed views on their effectiveness. Some supplements, like fish oil, have better results than others, like iron, which seems to be very difficult to absorb from supplements. As always, a varied diet of non processed foods is the best route to good health. And getting the right amount of sleep (it varies for individuals but 7 hours is the standard need)is also a good route not just to good health but also good mental well being. Cities are always the bedrock of infectious illness, for obvious reasons. Vitamin C is one of the known vitamins to speed recovery from colds, combined with ginger. Garlic on a regular basis is a great boost to the immune system. But on a cellular level, the nature of a virus is that it has to infiltrate the body before the immune system kicks in to fight it. All that diet does is to ensure that the immune system is as strong as it can be and is ready for the fight. Eating and sleeping well won't stop anyone getting ill, but it will determine how quickly and well someone recovers. And that in turn slows the rate at which other people get infected. It's worth remembering that whilst we vaccinate against influenza for very good reasons, a good number of elderly people every year go on do develop fatal pnuemonia from common colds and chest infections they caught from interaction with other people. That cold that you shake off after a few days, can be lethal to an elderly person. We all have a responsibility in that sense to make sure we do what we can to minimise the spread of even a common cold.

LOL Seabag :D

rendelharris Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- Count > your blessings, you had to pay a vast proportion > of your income in mortgage payments, to buy your > house now someone on an averageish income would > need about three times their income every month to > afford it The latest data now shows that average house prices are EIGHT times the average salary. Back in the early 80's, mortgages were I think restricted to 2.5 times salary. DF has nothing whatsoever to complain about.

I agree with Seabag. Someone sitting in a home they bought decades ago is not in a poor position. And you should also consider yourself lucky to have savings too DF. Todays young people can neither save nor buy because of the cost of rents and then starting cost of property. We bought our home in 2001 and consider ourselves lucky, but as someone says above, we needed two salaries to do it. We have two children and have no idea how they are ever going to buy a home, and fully expect we will have to use our savings to help them. They again will be of the lucky few. The downturn in prices is the first in a very long time and is being attributed to a lack of overseas investors. Maybe that is one good impact from the Brexit vote. The housing market in London has been artificially inflated for decades and can't go on like that.

I had no idea wood burners were so popular and have learned something there. I wonder as well how far advanced filter technology is, or could be, to deal with the problem. Filters on cars don't work very effectively, do I don't know.

UKIP is now surely finished? Once they no longer have those MEPs they will have no legitimate claim to media attention either. Hopefully they will fade into obscurity. Even Farage thinks the party has served its purpose. I found Question Time painful. The rent a mob audience seems to be a typical part of the show now. Is it just me or do the brexit voters on there always seem to be aggressive towards and intolerant of any kind of debate? I noted the young guy who couldn't understand why we can't just leave. Does he read nothing, watch nothing, listen to nothing, understand nothing? And then the other guy who wouldn't let Ayesha Harazika answer, and had to be put in his place when she called him a bully. Peter Hitchens is a curious one, because he seems to be far more reasonable these days and talks a lot of sense. Basically he is speaking for the middle ground, which neither the Tories nor Labour are representing right now. What interested me though is how he seems more angry at the Tory party for their failings.

It is important to understand that a bad cold or chest infection, is not the flu and a flu jab won't prevent catching those. Influenza is a different kind of virus and anyone who is at risk should have the vaccine. It is the progression to pnuemonia that makes it fatal in some people, hence why anyone over 65 and those with respiratory conditions are offered the vaccine. We've not seen a global pandemic for a long time, and vaccinations are part of preventing that too. There are a lot of things we can do though to make sure our immune systems are as strong as they can be as well. Diet is very important - don't allow yourself to get run down and where possible, avoid people who already have colds. The reason why these viruses are more prolific in winter is because they live longer in cold temperatures. A flu virus remains infectious for around one week at human body temperature, but can last for thirty day at zero degrees, and longer at lower temperatures than that. Most disinfectants will kill viruses on hard surfaces.

I think the issue with gentrification is not so much the ebb, flow and evolution of an area, but the speed with which the change is happening at the moment. I was trying to think of when there was last anything on this scale of change. The mass building programmes of the late 60's early 70's perhaps?

New vehicles automatically cut out the engine when stationary and restart it when the brake comes off. In the future, all vehicles will do this. The law does not seem to be clear from Edhistory's post but it is always a good idea to count to ten when frustrated, and then be calm when asking for something. It tends to bring the helpful side out of a person more often than not. At least we are no longer burning coal fires and having to battle with smog every other day. The technology to get rid of vehicle pollution is already there. It will just take time for it to work through new vehicle sales.

This highlights perfectly the complexity of global trade. It only takes one element of the chain to be adversely affected and the whole thing falls. The single market, for all the faults of the EU, is the only large market in the world which offers seemless free trade between a sizeable group of nations. We pay around ?12bn a year to be part of it. If our exporters had to pay WTO tariffs on the things they export to the EU, it would add around ?40bn a year to their costs. And yes, as a body, the EU has clout because of the size of the market it protects. The UK on its own is a tiny market. There is no way we can expect to get favourable deals with markets much bigger than our own. 37% of our exports to the EU are in cars, pharmaceuticals, raw materials and nuclear parts - all things that the US produces themselves. There is no way that the US is going to open themselves up to imports of things that compete directly wwith their home grown businesses doing the same thing.

It is not against EU rules to nationalise anything (another myth spread the left this time). The issue is one of monopolies and competition. So under EU rules, you can nationalise a railway, as long as there is competition. That might be tricky with a railway (assuming you want to nationalise every line) but with other things like an energy company for example, you could have a state owned provider competing alongside other providers. The consumer then has the choice. For me, putting all that trade at risk for the folly of nationalising a railway is wreckless. And listening to the speeches yesterday, it is becoming very clear that a Corbyn and McDonnell government will either have to borrow heavily to deliver all of these promises, or not deliver them at all.

Black cabs have always complained about competition of any kind. They don't like Addison Lee either. But they are just too expensive for a lot of people, up to three times the cost of the average mini cab fare.

But the EU federal thing is a red herring anyway. If nothing else, Maastricht showed that the UK have always had a position from which to negotiate exemptions. And TTIP was brought down by public lobbying so that just enough of the 27 member states said no. Indeed the UK and Cameron had to agree to exempt the NHS from any TTIP deal (due to public concern) something it was perfectly possible to do. This is another huge area of lack of knowledge about EU processes for legislation. Even on immigration, we have always had the power to deport any EU national who has not found a job after three months (other EU countries do it). This idea that free movement means anyone can come and we have no way of sending them away is just not correct.

Yes, Sturgeon might be the voice of reason in that coalition. But the price might be another referendum on independence for Scotland, although I don't think there is appetite for that in Scotland. Some think that part of the swing away from the SNP has been because of the obsession with independence. I also think the Tories and esp the brexiteers, are terrified of a Labour SNP coalition, and also now see that as a real posibility. The two year transition deal is designed to make sure that the Tories, if parliament goes the full term, will have had complete control of Brexit and made sure we are fully out just by election time, without the impacts of a cliff having hit yet, to affect their electoral chances. It's a plan based purely on political expediency, not what is best for the country. Lots can go very wrong in the meantime and force an early election of course.

I don't diagree with you there Loz, but I also think that we are in for a run of hung and coalition government, before the centre ground splits away and forms a new party. A Labour SNP coalition is less likely to remove us from the SM and CU than a Tory/ DUP one. But you are right in that Corbyn's eurosceptic position is a minority one amongst labour MPs. And I don't expect that to change as the hard left has had very little success in changing the shape of local constituency parties.

I think it is reality check time for leavers. Most people who voted leave have no understanding of how business, trade and exports work, none whatsoever. The politicians driving the leave campaign deliberately didn't educate them on any of that (and nor did the remain side either to be fair). Experts tried to warn about all of this but people with simplistic world views don't ever listen to experts. There was a flurry of leave voters who claimed they had done their research, but then couldn't hold an informed conversation about any of it. In a nutshell, they voted leave for reasons around immigration and who makes the rules, over the really important issue of economics and trade. Even if we decided to not leave the EU, the damage is now done. Business is relocating (as we were warmed it would), skilled people are leaving the country, as we were warned they would, prices and inflation are up, the pound is down and the economy is slowing to a rate taking us closer to recession, just as it was warned it would. Slowly we are going to conceed to every EU demand in order to get a deal. I would still put money on us ending up staying in the SM and CU. The Tory Party will rip itself apart in the process.

I see the Black Cab complaints as those of luddites. The technology is there, it is already being used and the caariage office refuses to modernise with it. There is only ever one outcome to business models that don;t move with the times. As someone has pointed out, the carriage office wants a monopoly only to keep prices as high as possible. Even before Uber, black cabs complained about private mini cab companies. The Last time I took a Black Cab (years ago) it was at night from Lewisham Stn (off the last train) to Nunhead, and it cost ?17 - completely ridiculous. They charge for time and distance, and no of people, and pieces of luggage and there is a standing charge before the cab even moves anywhere too. All ways of racking up the fare. A mini cab would have cost ?6. That is why there is so little sympathy for the carriage office.

Thank you Jerry for clarifying this. So Meadow Property should have applied for a TEN and didn't. We can absolve DHFC from any blame here. They have the correct licence in place for the events they run at the club, and yes there have been problems in the past, but things seem to have sorted themselves out. We should continue to support both the football club and the volunteers that have kept the club going through bad times and good. So can James Barber look into this? Why did Meadow Property not apply for a TEN and what can Southwark licensing do to admonish this behaviour so this does not happen in future.