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david_carnell

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Everything posted by david_carnell

  1. MamoraMan - because i seperate executive, legislature and party. The party is a much broader church. Essentially I find myself increasingly unhappy with quite a lot of the actions taken by this govt. and have come close to handing in my membership on a few occasions. What keeps me a member is the grass roots membership. I think it's too easy to say it's one and the same. Look at the variation just on the labour benches in the commons. Are you suggesting Dennis Skinner and Diane Abbott have the same views as the cabinet? Neither do I for the most part but without coming across all Maoist, chnage has to come from within. And currently I still hope to be a part of that. That's why I say I am a member of the Labour Party and not the government.
  2. ???? Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > And she's the Home Secretary! Are you sure you'll > be canvassing for them next Juneish DC? Mmm, honestly, I'm not sure. Maybe. There has to be something to get me passionate again and at the moment it's fire fighting rather than policy making so I'm feeling pretty disillusioned. Coupled with the crap I had to listen to during the London elections and I'm less than keen. But I might change my mind. I support the party, not the government.
  3. Oh, I see, sorry - I thought you meant the porn thing made her a hypocrite. Theft is perhaps a tad harsh - duplicitous, corrupt, sneaky - I'll take any three from the top. But you're not wrong.
  4. Well, seeing as it was her husband (or possibly even son) who was looking at it then I fail to see the connection between her own moral fortitude and this incident - are we to be judged on the behaviour of our spouses/partners/children? And she didn't thieve anything - it has cost the taxpayer nothing. It was leaked from the expenses office that she asked whether she could claim it and was told "No". I really don't see the problem.
  5. Anelka? He played for Arsenal, 'Pool and Man City right? And I think he's won both of those medals.
  6. I've explained in full elsewhere SteveT, why I think MPs and Ministers especially should be paid more but in brief: ?I think the current salaries are low in comparison to the responsibility - especially if you compare it the private sector - and especially for Secretaries of State and Ministers ?To attract the most promising candidates into politics (i.e. not the power-hungry crazy ones) you should be prepared to pay top ???. ?With a higher basic salary MPs could afford two homes without having all this expenses shenanigans. Like I said, the porn thing is a non-issue so I'm not going to talk about it further. Achievements for individual MPs are very hard to measure; and doubly so if you happen not to agree with the measures they enact. I'm not sure what your alternative would be, SteveT? @PeckhamRose - thank you. And, tbh, I don't really like Jacqui, Harriet, Hazel and many other male and female members of this government. There are one or two bright lights though.
  7. Touch?. I think I had that one coming.
  8. Oh, god, and I was eyeing up a cricket jumper the other day...what am I turning into?! http://incentive.elle.mindroute.com/file/bfoxbridge.jpg *hangs head in shame* *then realises that plovers eggs and champagne await and buggers off*
  9. PGC - are you inviting me to Lords or giving fashion tips? I don't have my eggs & bacon tie though - will a panama see me entry to the members enclosure regardless? You're lucky I didn't enquire after Moos's cat!
  10. Wee Quinnie - did you just compare me, as Moos suggests, to Sebastian Flyte? *faints* Will you marry me? Yeah, Old Town is quite cool in an odd way, but their menswear is MUCH better than the womens'. Moos - is your teddy as pretty as Aloysius? If not, I'm not interested. I am the ultimate aesthete!
  11. Moos Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Soz. > > I think it would be less 'our man in Havana' and > more Hannibal Lecter. I'm holidaying in Florence so that's rather apt. BBW - How did you know I was teaming it with cream trousers and jacket?! Are you the shop assistant who laughed at me last week?
  12. Ahhh... the French method. A bit de trop I think for this situation.
  13. Wee Qunnie, answers are as follows: Yes. See here: Grenson - Kent *swoon* Cathy K? Tres naff mon amie. Nearly as naff, in fact, as littering postings with random French words. Your silver shoes? Now, not knowing what you look like this is tricky. But they look like dancing shoes to me, so a black, pleated skirt that twirls whilst you dance would be the ticket. I'll leave your top half alone, I'm not Gok and I don't like the word "bangers". Now, I'd like the favour returned... can a man under 60 (well 30 actually) get away with a panama hat? On holiday and at home!
  14. Ladies. If you are looking for the high-waisted trouser, these are rather fetching....(and the model too!) http://www.old-town.co.uk/product_photos/highrise8.jpg ...to the extent I am ordering the men's version: http://www.old-town.co.uk/product_photos/highrise5.jpg
  15. Ok. There are two (possibly three) seemingly different arguments going on at once here. The first is over porn-gate. This is a load of hot air. The most laughable aspect is that it never cost the taxpayer anything. She submitted the expenses form to the relevant parliamentary office and it was rejected. But someone leaked it. And if it was an ordinary film the Mail/Express et al would never have got their pants in a twist over it. It's a non-story and from now on should be treated as such. The second issue is expenses (and most particularly second-home expenses) for MPs in general. In theory it seems an eminently sensible idea. Many MPs constituencies are far from London and when they stay in London for House of Commons business from Monday-Thursday there should be accommodation. Now, I think it churlish to expect MPs to live in some sort of student-like halls of residence and therefore they should be free to pick where to live. I also don't think it unreasonable that the tax payer should furnish these homes to a decent standard. I don't want my law-makers sleeping on floors or eating only from tins. Finally we reach this particular nubbin - (T)Jacqui's behaviour. Whilst she has not broken any specific parliamentary codes of conduct, her behaviour is morally dubious. Whilst I normally find David Cameron nauseous, he said this weekend that politicians should stop and think more often as whether their actions appear appropriate to the man-in-the-street rather than whether they follow guidelines. This seems common sense. A stricter, more transparent expenses system coupled with a higher parliamentary wage should eliminate the problem rather easily. I do, however, think some sense of perspective should be retained. These are reasonably small amounts of money. Whilst this does not lessen the moral ambiguity of MPs actions it should be remembered that national corporations regularly avoid billions of pounds of tax through complex grey areas of tax evasion and avoidance. The Guardian recently ran a series of articles highlighting the, frankly, loathsome practises used by some highly recognisable FTSE100 companies and yet it receives very little coverage in society in general. Yet the sums of money being wasted are 100s of times more.
  16. Roberto Duran?
  17. Fisichella? He's been around donkey's years. Or Picquet Snr? Or Jean Alessi?
  18. Without wishing to sound preachy or snobbish please can I counsel people against buying supermarket bread (especially non-organic). It is created using the Chorley-Wood Bread Process (CBP) of which I cannot speak ill too strongly. Essentially, to create cheap, easy-rise bread whilst using nutritionally worthless, over-processed grain, the bread is mixed with a high proportion of vegetable fats. This gives supermarket bread its overly-elastic properties that are unmissable in supermarket bread. But this comes at a cost to your health and your palette. CBP produced bread contains much higher quantities of salt (due to the lack of flavour in the bleached wheat used) and higher quantities of yeast (to guarantee fully risen bread every-time) which has been attributed as a factor in the growth of bread/wheat/yeast-intolerances. And then there are the hidden vegetable fats. Stealth fat is a growing problem - these are the fats that we don?t know are there. We expect there to be fat in a chocolate bar. But we don?t expect 3 slices of some breads to have as much fat as that chocolate bar. It does. The only reason it is there is to help make bread quicker to make and make it last longer on the shelf thus creating larger profits for the supermarkets. This bread is inferior in flavour and all-round quality to the breads that small, independent bakers are producing all over SE London are producing fresh, every day. See here and here for example. These people are trying to provide you with a high-quality, high-nutrition product. It's expensive. Good flour, highly trained staff (not some Sainsbos student who can open and close a pre-set oven door) and high street rents. It all costs. A lot. But please, I urge you, seek them out, try their produce and talk to them about their passion for bread. Sourdoughs, rye-breads, Pain-de-Campagne - stuff you'd never see inside a supermarket - these things are fabulous examples of a craftsman at work. And you can tell when you eat it. Bread should cost more than we pay in supermarkets. In fact it does. Supermarkets will sell it as a loss-leader and then shaft you on other products you don't know the cost of. These bakers are not trying to fleece you - they are trying to feed you a healthy foodstuff and make a small profit to make a living. If they could sell it cheaper, they would. So please, support them, buy from them and eat their bread. It'll make you feel better.
  19. MamoraMan - I think comparing the danger of climate change including the over-heating of the earth rendering vast swathes uninhabitable, to the production of excess horse-dung in Victorian London a little disingenuous? The trouble with many of the so-called new technologies (although many of them haven't advanced much since the 1980s) is that they remain a distant pipe dream. Take hydrogen fuel cells for example. In theory an excellent alternative to the petrol driven engines of the present. The Bush administration invested billions in it (to the detriment of the electric car btw) but a workable hydrogen car/motorbike/engine remains elusive due to five major, and so far, insurmountable problems (this is care of Joseph Romm, author of The Hype About Hydrogen): 1. Current fuel cell cars cost an average of $1,000,000. This cost has to drop. 2. Current materials cannot store enough hydrogen in a reasonable space to provide the range customers demand. 3. Hydrogen fuel is wildly expensive. Even hydrogen from dirty fossil fuels is two or three times more expensive than gasoline and hydrogen from clean electrolysis even more so. 4. The need for an entire new fuelling infrastructure. Someone is going have to build at least ten or twenty thousand hydrogen fuelling stations, before anybody is going to be interested. 5. Competing technologies will improve over time as well. You have to hope and pray that the competitors in the marketplace don't get any better. Because right now the best car in the marketplace just got a lot better - the hybrid vehicle. Now, this is just one technology that is seen as a future saviour, has billions spent on it and yet still isn't a realistic alternative to fossil fuels. Surely what we should be doing in the meantime is making the most efficient use of those fuels and ensuring we burn them in the cleanest way possible. So to argue, which I think you are MM, that we can sit back, relax, and wait for technology to save us seems ostrich-like behaviour.
  20. Heh - very good Ted. MikeP, sir, please can I ditch the toga for a monster suit?
  21. Thanks PGC. Does knowing you're bonkers make more or less dangerous to the general public?
  22. I am now officially a child again for 2 hours so I can go and see this when it comes out: Where The Wild Things Are And I now also want to go to a fancy-dress party in that boys monster outfit! Does that make me very strange, or just a bit strange?
  23. Each pose costs six oboloi. That's a pint in today's money.
  24. What the devil is all this about whispering in peoples ears?! Speak up man. Caught some shrapnel in '54 - no eardrum, see. Anyway I'll be there. Might be bringing some old uni chums too who are in the big smoke for the weekend.
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