vinceayre

As long as Milliband and Balls are at the top of the Labour tree the Conservatives are fine and dandy.

vicki08 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ive adopted and i did not find the process that > bad and we are over 40 and the boys we adopted > were 3-4years at the time of adoption Well done you. *sticks hero of the children badge on her*

So child poverty is set to start rising again, and yet we still spend billions on world aid and weapons. I guess your trite messages about the problem gave Ladymuck the push to leave the forum. Maybe you could ask yourselves how many of you have actually done something positive about poverty and inequality in Britain or is it all just hot air and "reasoned debate"

Pellmel, Well done to you. It takes courage to bring up such a personal and private loss as you have done. To lose someone, be it your unborn child or your 90 year old granny is a loss either way and the pain is still as real. Grieving is a precess and whether it takes a month a year or a decade it is your personal process. To speak openly and simply as you have on such a loss is not only going to help you but i can assure it will help many others as well.

As a Tory, albeit one who voted for Labour twice when you had a Tory bloke in charge, I think Labour is not only broken but totally irrelevant for todays society in this country. The section of society they used to represent is no longer there, anyone who votes for them simply on principal is voting in the full knowledge that there will not be enough "principled" votes to get them elected. The Labour party was born from the death of the Liberals, I think we are seeing the reversing of that process. Also Milliband, Balls and Cooper are so unelectable it is verging on comic, I have never seen such a group of politicians with such a lack of charisma attain such high office, apart from Foot perhaps, he was even worse and looked what happened there.

An article in the Daily Mail(apologies for reading such a middle class rag, I shall go and buy two Guardians to repent) that only 70 babies were adopted last year. I find this number totally unbelievable, please someone tell me its wrong. How many children were adopted last year, anyone know?

Hal Best answer you have ever given!!

If the government stopped paying for IVF the adoption rate would increase massively. I had friends who adopted a few years ago and they said the process was so horrendous it nearly broke their marriage up as they were treated like child molesters from word go. it took them two years to adopt, it is verging on a crime for white middle class couples who are over 30 to want to adopt a child in some inner London boroughs. The Social Workers would rather the child stay in care than make a decision that may prove not to be a perfect fit. When I was first adopted it wasn't a right fit so I went back to the orphanage but then my "parents" came along and chose me and I had what can only be described as a wonderful and loving childhood. They would be too old to adopt under todays regime, I would probably not have been taken as i was getting on a bit and of course all couples would like a baby which is understandable. There are tens of thousands of young children in care just wanting to love someone and call them their own, I find it heartbreaking.

There is no age limit on leaving your child at home alone. If though your child comes to harm you will be prosecuted for neglect and SS may take the child from you if you are deemed to pose a risk of neglect in the future. Both my kids are left on their own at times and i feel it benefits them, we started by just 10 minutes and then slowly moved it up from there. With my daughter she was about 11years and my son was 10.

Fuschia, I had asthma as a child and still do to a very minor extent. Once I left home it virtually disappeared and this was due to two reasons. We had a cat (fluffy!!) i loved her but she without doubt caused me to have asthma far worse than i should have. I bought a flat when i left home to find under the dirty carpets it had wood flooring, it made a huge difference to me and even now 24 years later I still have no carpets or pets with fur or feathers and im fine. How do i know this because my mother still has cats and whenever i visit i leave with eyes streaming and throat itching. People will tell you otherwise regards the pet but you do really need to get rid of it to give your child a chance at not having asthma all the through her child hood. If you can do wood floors you will find that it makes a massive difference to the house dust mites as they love carpets. I used to spend the summers in Spain as a child and had zero asthma there, my parents said it was the "sea air" but it was in fact no fluffy and no carpets. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Huguenot, The value of unrealised losses/debt held by the banks, insurance company's and government in credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations is mind numbingly huge,think tens of trillions. These debts have been subsidised by government hand outs to the tune of about a trillion dollars so far otherwise known as debt swap/QE, the banks held the stinky assets and now the central banks hold them, it may work but if it doesn't we will get the recession we deserved a la 1929. With the massive bankruptcy in the financial sector that started in 2007 and escalated in 2008 culminating in Lehman bankruptcy, with Bear Stearns gone, RBS bankrupt, Morgan Stanley bankrupt, Merrill Lynch bankrupt and the bigee AIG bankrupt and a whole host of other banks world wide gone we should have had a depression on the scale of 1930s, we didn't and all of the banks are now making billions in profit (and not paying tax on that, one of the biggest banks in London now is BoA who are chaneling all of their profits through Merrill's London base and wont pay tax on them for about 10 years) trading the QE cash they were given free of charge. Nothing has changed in reality, the rich are still getting richer. Its about a phoney as it gets! JohnL Labour wining the next election is virtually impossible now ED is in charge, what exactly am i boasting and bragging about and just so you know i voted Labour twice until the idiot scot was put in charge. How do you define rich by the way as a relative term or an exact term and if exact at what point are you no longer poor? The only way Yvette Cooper gets in is if ED says he no longer thinks Tony Blair was an idiot and war monger and decides he no longer wants the wife and baby positing the thought that rent boys and hookers by the hour are a better bet.

The next election was decided when the unions put in their puppet, its the election after that which will now be decided by a few events yet to happen. They are: The cuts and any further tax raises will be have to be seen to be equitable, as the child benefit cut has been, after all who cares about a few well off people loosing state handouts, not as many it turns out as the media would have us believe. How much and how severe the industrial action becomes, the laws to come will require a majority of the union to vote for a strike not just a minority of voting members as is the case now. If these laws happen the union power will diminish which will give Labour a better chance. Once the labour party has ditched ED after the next election defeat and the Tories have ditched the Liberals who will wonder off into obscurity again, if Labour manage to pick a middle of the road leader they may have a chance in 2020. If not Dave will get 15 straight years in power. If the actual recession comes that we should have had and not the phoney recession we are in the Tories will lose power before 2020 and it will be a LibLab coalition that is formed "in the national interest" again.

Huguenot The point with particles being created and destroyed simultaneously out of nothing is the same point Schr?dinger made regarding his cat, was the act of observation creating the event or would it have happened anyway? Under quantum physics law the answer is yes to both meaning the same event has two different out comes simultaneously. Hawking's will be regarded with the same regard as the likes of Niels Bohr and Max Planck in the future, as to some one out thinking him now, i don't think so.

English took over as the de facto world language about 300 years ago , catch up!

not drilling until you are sure is a method of avoiding You cant ever be sure that's my point. It's not a binary world Decisions are binary, its either a yes or a no. At some point someone has to make a call. If we try to mitigate the risk away we will never move forward.

Sean your naivety of the real world is shown with your comment on not drilling because we don't understand all the risks.

* hides under the table in case his Tory neighbours see him posting on the EDF*

There are no methods for avoiding what happened to the oil well as it would seem BP has tapped one of the biggest wells yet, the pressure that is coming out off that pipe should have eased by now which is why they were surprised when the top-fill didn't work. The pressure was simply too much for any fail safe. From what I have heard the oil industry is pretty much in awe of what BP are doing at the moment. Not only are they drilling a mile below sea level they are then two more miles into bedrock. They are drilling at a pace unheard of with a pipe about 3" in diameter which is going to meet up with another pipe three miles down. That is some skill! Obama is just playing the classic schoolboy trick of "its not me Miss I didn't do it, it was him" Sadly though their CEO is a PR disaster waiting to happen.

Hello my name is vinceayre and I am a Tory. But in my defence I did vote for Labour twice, and I have worked in Nunhead since the mid seventies and have seen first hand what poverty does to people, so I am all for any party that tries to relieve the burden of poverty. This country is so rich yet there are so many very poor people in it, its just wrong. The Labour party betrayed the poor people of this country and they are actually finished as a force for social reform and care. I hope they elect the person they most deserve.

Please please please let it be Diane Abbott.

I will grant you that the NHS is far better now to the extent I cancelled our private medical cover years ago. As for helping the poor they have failed miserably. The rich have got significantly richer under Labour but the poorest in society have simply got poorer. Under the Tories that is sort of expected to an extent but under Labour its shameful. If Labour don't represent the working class and the poor people in our society who does? They seem to forget that they came about by pushing aside the Liberals, maybe now the tide is turning.

What a load of bollox, the labour party has had thirteen years to reduce child poverty and economic inequality in the country and it has totally failed to do both. Give the new people a chance at least before they are ousted. They really cat f*ck it up much more than labour has.

Stop paying her and she will stop being sick, check your contract all you have to pay is SSP.

Do you pay her when she is off?

And now Obama is comparing it to 9/11 what a moron.