Blah Blah

We got back from an Easter break to have completely missed the storm but our back garden looks like the gnomes all had a rave before collapsing in drunken heaps. No trees down though thankfully.

There is a school that still teaches side saddle for 'ladies'. I grew up with horses but I can't recall ever seeing anyone compete riding so. As a mount it's as steady as riding cross saddle but I can't see it being more comfortable. A rider needs to be able rise and I would imagine side saddle being much harder work, especially at a trot. My wife beats me every time being a nordic giant Loz. She was born wearing skis I think and gets right down into a fetal position when hurtling down the piste. As for me, my 6 ft plus doesn't do crounching and wind resistance alone keeps me in my place. I'm not a great skier - a bit of a scaredy cat really :D

Female downhill skiers tend to be very tall though. I don't know the physics of it all but all things being equal there has to be more to it, otherwise every skier would achieve the same speed. Om half pipe etc, I wonder if it's just a case of less girls snowboarding. How many girls skateboard for example?

The block and tackle takes all the strain in sailing and modern racing yachts use winches and rachetts because sails have to be trimmed quickly. And women and men compete against each other in many sailing events. Equestrian is another one. Women don't seem to have any less of a problem sending a horse over huge fences than men do they.

I think Labours problems with the left are a certain type of misguided activist who still dreams of a truly socialist revolution that is never going to happen. And those people would rather see Labour lose elections than seek to truly represent everyone. To be honest, the Tories are now so far to the right in economic thinking that Labour don't need to leave the centre ground on the economy anyway.

So what about sports like curling? Or skiing? Or figure skating? Or sailing? There are plenty of sports that have no discernable difference between men and women. And actually, very few sporting events are televised anyway, even at the top level. Most sport needs massive sponsorship to even exist.

We made some Mary Berry hot cross buns with the kids last weekend and the ingredients were very cheap, so it's hard to see why ?1.50 a bun would be justified, even with the recent rent hikes on retail space in ED.

Sometimes though, the unelectable leaders are needed to get a party to the leader who is electable. It's almost a necessry form of metamorphosis after a long time in power. The Tories went through the same merry-go-round after the demise of Thatcher.

If the Tories ditch Osborne, they may find a replacement that actually knows what they are doing.

Not sure I agree with that. Men setting rules that exclude women from a whole range of activities is as clear as it gets. History is full of examples.

Is Angela Eagle leadership material? http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/angela-eagles-powerful-speech-mauling-7609958

You assume that all sports were originally played by men before women. There is no evidence of that. I would assume that in their earliest forms, most sports were played by kids of both genders playing together, and the same may have been true for adults as well. It is only patriarchy that has developed this false history of sport being for men first.

I'm with Otta. But what I would say is that Corbyn has upped his game of recent at the dispatch box. Maybe he's finally realised that 'a new kind of politics' doesn't work. But I still don't think he will be able to covert enough swing votes to win a GE without a major shift in those 100 or so Tory marginals, many of them rural. Come election time, his stances on defence etc will be ripped into by the Tories and every effort will be made to scare the public. John McDOnnell however has impressed me. He has to cut through the Tory myth that Labour single handedly ruined the UKs economy and he is starting to do that. Given the shambles after the budget that is becomming increasingly easy to do, and Osborne I think is one of the worst chacellors in living memory. He's completely lacking in any ideas or seemingly any understanding of the differences between national economics and household. I haven't heard anything from McDonnell on that level that doesn't make sense yet. I've met the guy a couple of times at Trade Union and Labour events and he's extremely smart. I would prefer him as leader, but still think a fresh face would be more impactful. I'd quite like to see a woman in the role - someone that can deal with Niccola Sturgeon and because Cameron doesn't like debating with women. I thought Emily Thornberry was impressive on Question Time last week. McDOnnell is doing fine as shadow chancellor. BUT a lot is going to happen over the summer, the outcomes of which we don't yet know. Will a poor show by Labour at local elcetions force a leadership challenge before conference enables the NEC to change the rules on challenges in the autumn? Will Cameron and Osborne still be at the head of the Tory party, or will Boris be holding the crown following an out vote on the EU? 2020 seems an age away.

Found this info on premiership clubs. Pretty much all of them have huge debts, barely make annual profits, yet continue to pay huge salaries. Now that's bonkers. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/29/premier-league-finances-club-by-club

But the problem with all these arguments is that women are constantly being compared to men. Perhaps if we stopped doing that, we might see the merit of the sports they play. I'm pretty sure broadcast companies pay huge megabucks for the rights to televise the womens tennis slam tornaments just as they do the mens, and prizemoney is just a drop in the ocean to the revenues generated by that. And I think that's the point with all sport. If the money coming in can afford X or Y prizemoney, then that's all there is to it. There are plenty of sports that have no huge financial draw for male participants too. That's why we have things like the Olympics. For those few sports people that do make the top, the real money is in the endorsements and sponsorship anyway. Having said all that, I have no interest in sport anyway!

What was being proposed in 1959 isn't really relevant to what Thatcher's government brought in. The key figure in it all though was Conservative councillor Horace Cutler, who started selling council homes to tenants once he became leader of the GLC in 1977, and it was he that purusuaded Thatcher's government to adopt it as policy, through Hesaltine, who had to work to pursuade an initially resistant Thatcher round to the idea.

That's not quite true Uncleglen. People have always been able to apply to buy a council home but the council were under no obligation to sell. RTB not only took away the councils right to refuse it also forced them to sell at a discount and under Thatcher they weren't allowed to use the money from the sale to build or buy new homes. So let's not go down the path of trying to pin the loss of 2 million plus council homes on Labour shall we? I think it's both Otta. But we now have a government totally opposed to council homes, who also thinks social rents are subsidised when they are not, and that private market rent is where rent should be. They bang on about low inflation but housing inflation is never included in the figures. If it were it would be off the scale. They also fail to understand that it is in the interests of property developers to keep supply low, which is one reason why the private market can not be left to fix the supply problem and is also the reason why the government is going to give billions to private companies to build starter homes (so they don't lose out on market profits). Our taxes would be better spent building homes for social rent. At least the equity and rental income from those sees a return to the taxpayer. Giving a subsidy to private developers so that a few people can get a home for 20% below market rate does not.

It's precisely because of the challenge he wants to make that he has backed Brexit. The consensus seems to be the that the result won't matter because at least 100 Tory MPs look set to vote for Brexit and Boris would have their support. If Osborne and Teresa May run too, and split votes with Cameron, then Boris would definitely go through to the second round. The question is whether Osborne and May would jump into a leadership challenge rather than waiting for Cameron to step down first imo.

I think that's spot on ????. Osborne is finished and Boris will absolutely be challenging for the leadership in the summer I think.

Iain Duncan Smith has resigned. The fallout begins.

The issue here is that the money doesn't provide what the homeless need, which is affordable and secure accomodation. There are 75,000 families for example, currently in expensive temporary B&B accomodation because local authorities have nowhere to house them. New Labour pretty much eradicated this, but now we are back to where we were 30 years ago, but in higher numbers. The continued sell off of social housing, the continued stranglehold on not allowing councils to replace those homes, and welfare caps making much of the private rented sector unaccessible to those people are all factors. Rough sleepers are often those with other problems, with alcohol, drugs or mental health and they need specialist support along with sheltered accomodation at a time when all of those services have been cut back because of the 40% cut in central funding to LAs. The bottom line is this. We have a government that doesn't really believe in a welfare state. It thinks charities should increasingly play that role - which takes us back to Victorian thinking on these things. It doesn't see anything wrong with millions of people needing food parcels for that very reason, and doesn't think it really needs to care about the poor because the poor don't traditionally vote Conservative. Nothing makes my blood boil more than hearing some MP who was born into privilege going on about personal responsibility. They just don't understand the poor, or poverty or really how much is against those born into it. BUT, most voters are not affected by most of these things and too many have been conditioned to think the poor only have themselves to blame. The media has a lot to answer for as well.

I don't disagree with any of that DaveR, but often these things are the result of things going wrong in other parts of the economy. And anything that stays a certain way for any period of time becomes entrenched. The only real answer would be enough jobs for all (and ones that pay enough to live on), but we are as far away from that as we've ever been. On acadmeies, I'm a bit on the fence. What matters to me is outcomes. I do wish though that the great experiment with children's state run education would stop. You are never going to match the oucomes of private educaton while you continue to have a shortage of teachers and huge class sizes in the state sector.

I think that's the difficulty with the debate. Many genuine claimants feel tarred with a brush because of the efforts that other claimants don't make. But claimants can't get away with doing nothing anymore. And I would still like to think that most people given the choice between working and claiming would choose work. We know there are at least a million people in full time working making that choice, because we top up their wages. And that's before even getting to the tax credits figures. What hasn't changed though is the ratio of available jobs to those chasing them. Even in London, you will have 100s of people going after a basic job. How does any employer sort through that?

To answer your question LondonM, probably not as many as some areas would like to make us think. JSA claimants ARE required to demonstrate they are looking for work. Those on disability benefits ARE put through the governments work capability assessment, and many genuinely ill people fail to get through it. We could look at the level of sanctions as an indicator, but 63% of those sanctioned are on ESA are in the WRAG - so have some kind of health problem. When people are ill, they can't function on the same level from day to day. I think the issue is that under New Labour, people became parked for years on different types of benefits with no review - which isn't a good thing, but now we have a system that has flipped to the other extreme. The long term unemployed often have specific reasons for being so, like age, or living in areas of high unemployment. So assuming that unemployment is soley the fault of the unemployed themselves is wrong in many cases. Unemployment figures also are not ever a true reflection and there's a lot of temporarily unemployed within those figures. If we look instead at the number of people who are economically inactive, that figure hasn't gone down (it's currently around 30% of age 16-64 adults). Of those people, how many are dependent on the state for financial help? I'd have to look for some reliable figures on that, but I think the real problem remains the level of wages compared to the cost of living (and housing) in general and then in turn, the number of people in work compared to those their taxes need to support (which includes the under 16s and over 65s of course). Entertaining any idea that any percentage of claimants abusing the system counters that is nonsense. And to add, benefit fraud is thought to be just 0.7% of all claims.

There is pelnty of evidence that genuinely disabled people are being unfairly hit hard - 80 suicides, thousands dying from underlying conditions within six weeks of being found fit for work by Atos and Maximus for example. So the system to sort out genuine claimants from those who are able, is flawed and deeply so. That's before we even get into the debates on the realistic chances of the disabled being able to find work. Employers prejudice against several groups of people based on everything from age to disability. Nothing is being done by government to address that. The message is clear. If you are disabled or over 50 or Long Term Unemployed, you are damned on every level. Just on mental health conditions DaveR, it can take years for someone to recover from a breakdown, and they will need specific ongoing support to get well. This is perhaps the most misunderstood area of disibility by both the public and government alike and there is nothing like the funding needed in place to deal with this. Their continued attacks on the disabled are beyond any measure of reason if ever they were. We can afford to give tax breaks to the top 10% but we can't afford to make sure half a million disabled people have enough to live on. Completely spot on Jah Lush regarding tax credits and that's why he was so happy to u-turn. At the time it was pointed out that Universal Credit was going to wipe out the tax credits anyway. Now compare this to the ESA cut where the government is defying the Lords - because there is no alternate way to cut them without people noticing. Osborne has created a hole for himself for sure. The really cynical part is the offset of some tax collectons for two years (allowing them to be paid in arrears) therefore creating a windfall tax in 2019 to try and con us all into thinking he's suddenly come good on his target to reduce the deficit or even send it into surplus. It will be a total con based on a year of creative accounting that won't be repeated in the following year. Deliberately deceptive is an understatement for Osborne. The real pointer is the increasing fall in investment rates. NOTHING Osborne has ever done has sent that in the right direction. He just doesn't understand that excessive cutting strangles capital investment. He's relying completely on the free market to stimulate the economy and it's not working and hasn't worked for the last 6 years! How long does it have to go on before he wakes up? Does anyone really believe anything he says anymore on fiscal targets? He's missed every target he has set, and now just looks like some kind of fantasist. Public borrowing is up. Investment down. Exports down. Productivity down. And everything continuously being downgraded. Yet he and Cameron insist they are doing the best job with the economy, not just within the country, but in the whole G7!!!!! Complete fantasy.