diable rouge

I think most sensible people realised that there would have to be some payback for the lockdowns etc, so it's more a case of how. Surprised the Gov in its current plight missed the open goal of a windfall tax on the energy companies, who are making huuuuuge profits on the back of energy price rises. Seems Sunak didn't want to 'put off investors'. Profits before people, I wonder how that will go down in the Red Wall...

''Of course they do but can you imagine the title if I included everyone e.g It's going to be tough on families, single people, pensioners, war heroes, non binary people and the general unwashed?'' I thought you had it there for a moment. How about It's going to be tough on...*cue drum roll*...everyone

1. Not a fan of combis in houses/multiple bathrooms so will leave that to others. 2. Biggest problem will be the 4'' waste pipe if you're having a loo, if so, might be easier to go straight down to the ground floor and run it under the floor void to the nearest drain. If you've got a solid ground floor then requires digging a trench etc, messy. The other option is to try to run a waste pipe within the depth of the upper floor (depends on direction of joists and depth of fall required to get to a vertical stack), or run it below the ceiling and box it out (can look ugly). You might be able to use a macerator and have a smaller bore waste pipe, again not a fan as they can be noisy and prone to blockages. 3. You shouldn't need planning if no material change to elevations e.g. modifications to a window, but you will need Building Control to sign-off the new works.

Thanks Meds, I'm in...

''His comments about Starmer were unsavoury, but not sure it's a lie to point out that he was DPP when the CPS failed to prosecute Saville.'' He didn't point that out, he stated that Starmer failed to prosecute Saville. That's simply not true and as Seph stated above, it's nothing more than a far-right smear that Johnson parroted. Johnson going full-Trump yet again and we all know how well that turned out. Here's a Reuters fact-check article rebutting the smear...https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-britain-savile-idUSL1N2RP200

From Jessica Elgot... Hoyle gives a light touch rebuke to Johnson on his Savile comments."Procedurally, nothing disorderly occurred. But such allegations should not be made lightly "I am far from satisfied that the comments in question were appropriate on this occasion... I want a nicer Parliament." Therein lies the problem, he can't even insist that Johnson withdraws the smear...

Best if you go and lie down in a darkened room...it will pass.

''There?s a clip of Johnson I saw yesterday, from a little while back.'' Rory Stewart Tweeted about it recently, here's a link...https://twitter.com/RoryStewartUK/status/1487342161616150531?cxt=HHwWhoC9qZr0jKQpAAAA

''Just back from a gathering of local like-minded folk...hope the fireworks didn't disturb your dog...'' Let's put this one down to intoxication...

Yesterday showed how inadequate Parliamentary procedure is when someone knowingly lies and/or makes false claims/smears. Blackford is asked to leave the chamber because he called Johnson a liar (something which is patently true both inside and outside of Parliament) based on nothing more than an archaic principle that 'Honourary Members' cannot be called a liar in the chamber as it's considered 'unparliamentary language'. You then have Johnson making a false claim/smear that Starmer when head of the DPP failed to prosecute Saville, which is untrue. This is what Tory MP Julian Smith Tweeted about it... ''The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Saville yesterday is wrong & cannot be defended. It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can't just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate.'' So here we have a system that allows an MP to tell a lie and/or make false claims/allegations yet not be held accountable if untrue. Parliamentary Privilege also prevents Starmer from making a claim of slander in an outside court. This is why Raab on the radio this morning referred to what Johnson said but wouldn't say whether the claim was true or not, because he wasn't covered by PP. So when a proven liar is called out for his lies in Parliament, they are protected by the system. This PM and the Gov know this and are deliberately abusing it...

It's the new Guy Fawkes Night, every year there'll be a 'bonfire of EU red tape' while ignoring Brexit has created a internal border of red tape of it's own making...

He likes hiding in cold places...

According to the report's Terms of Reference it was never going to be blockbuster stuff, but it was more critical than I expected e.g. ''the failure of leadership''. Don't forget, it was also heavily redacted, this is just an ''update''. Starmer hasn't been the greatest LOTO, but his speech in the Commons was very good, and that will strike more of a chord with the public and the sacrifices we made. Lordy knows what Johnson was thinking of when he brought up Saville. This is not going to go away and no amount of running-off to the Ukraine or hiding in fridges is going to detract from that, especially as we now know there definitely was a party in the No. 10 flat, which the Met are investigating. Oh, and the small matter of 300+ photos in their files...

''But weren?t we told we could do that not by raising taxes but by leaving eu?'' We were also told there would be 'levelling-up', yet increases in NI hit the lower paid harder...

That only addresses the stupidity of the protagonists, to change most pro-Brexit voters minds about Brexit they need to feel the economic effects of Brexit personally...

Frosty has become Gaslighter-in-Chief, while simultaneously being held up as some sort of Brexit intellectual by Leavers. Well, quite. Guess who's going to have to pick up the tab for the incompetence. From a cityam* report earlier in the week... The political choice of Brexit has cost UK businesses as much as the unforeseeable Covid pandemic. British companies have lost over ?250bn to Covid and an equal amount to Brexit by the end of 2021, but the Brexit tally is now rising faster, The Centre for Economics and Business Research found that Covid-19 lockdowns had cost UK businesses ?251bn by March of last year. It revealed the value of the goods and services produced by the economy was more than ?250bn lower than it would otherwise have been. It calculated the Gross value added (GVA), which measures the value of the goods and services produced by the economy, minus the costs of inputs and raw materials needed to deliver them. Covid-19 cost small businesses alone an estimated ?126.6bn, according to the business insurer Simply Business, while a November 2021 Government report revealed the UK lost almost ?365 billion in GDP from Covid overall. Commenting on the figures, David Jinks, who is head of consumer research at delivery firm ParcelHero, said: ?British businesses have had a torrid few years.? ?Brexit or Covid, which has been the heavier burden for them to bear? The shocking answer is that the entirely avoidable Brexit crisis has had as much of an impact on UK businesses as the unforeseeable Covid-19 tragedy, and its costs are still rising,? he added. ?No one could have foreseen the arrival of the pandemic and there was little that could have been done to shield UK businesses in advance. However, this is certainly not the case for the impact of Brexit on UK businesses,? Jinks said. The confrontational handling of trade negotiations with the European Union made ?a bad situation worse,? he stated. Before Brexit had even happened, a 2020 report by Bloomberg Economics revealed that, by the end of that year, the economic cost of Brexit already exceeded ?200bn in lost revenues to UK companies. It calculated the British economy was 3 per cent smaller than it otherwise would have been. Since Brexit actually happened, on 1 January, 2021, the UK Trade Policy Observatory reveals that the reduction in trade has lost UK businesses a further ?44bn. ?That breaks down to ?32.5bn lost in potential imports to the UK and ?11bn in exports to the EU,? Jinks pointed out. The UK Government splashed a further ?8.1bn on preparing for Brexit and the end of the transition period, according to the Institute for Government. ?In our view, that was money that should have been spent on promoting UK trade across the EU and beyond, not battening down the hatches,? noted Jinks. The figures mean that the combined costs of Brexit and of the pandemic both equal around ?250bn. However, in the long term, Brexit could end up costing even more than Covid-19. Thomas Sampson, Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, said: ?When measured in terms of their impact on the present value of UK GDP, the Brexit shock is forecast to be two to three times greater than the impact of Covid-19. Moreover, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) told the BBC last October that leaving the EU would ?reduce our long run GDP by around 4 per cent.? It is believed the effect of the pandemic will reduce GDP output by only a further 2 per cent. With the end of lockdown and travel restrictions, the impact of Covid measures is now receding but the Brexit bill continues to mount. The most recent Government Business Insights report has revealed that, last month, 66 per cent of UK businesses experienced challenges with exporting and 79 per cent with importing. ?This has had a knock-on effect on transport and logistics companies. A staggering 36.7 per cent of transport and logistics companies either closed, paused trading entirely or continued trading only partially in December,? Jinks shared. This is only how much the loss of physical goods sales has cost. The Institute for Fiscal Studies say exports of professional services to the EU slumped from 44 per cent of the UK?s entire international services trade in 2016, before Brexit negotiations got underway, to just 30 per cent in 2021. It forecast a net drop in overall UK services exports. *The cityam editor is (was?) pro-Brexit

It's here folks!...

If SG's report can be published while the Met is carrying out a similar investigation, then that just confirms that the report was only ever going to be very lightweight in substance and carry little sway with regards to passing judgement on Partygate as a whole and/or any individual's behaviour. I would've thought though that No 10 will still fight hard against its publication, because ''waiting for the Met investigation'' buys them more time for the dust to settle. Having said that, as a former No.10 pollster (James Johnson) says, most people have already made their mind up about Johnson's behaviour... The big winner from today is, once again, Keir Starmer. Unless MPs seek a resolution, he will face Boris? Tories in May: racked by constant division, investigated by the police, with a leader who the public now despise and have already decided broke the rules. Every % of Tory recovery in the polls will be jumped on as proof of people ?moving on?. But the damage to how voters view Boris - on trust, competence, delivery - is done. Mention him in focus groups now and it prompts anger but also laughter and derision. The latter will stay. Many point to the high % of Tory-Don?t Knows in the polls as a sign the PM can bounce back. But one reading of those Don?t Knows, borne out by the focus groups, is that many of them are only keeping their line open to the Party because they expect it to act. Yes, today?s twist will be welcomed by No10. But, as the saga drags on, it is the worst outcome for the Conservative Party?s long-term electability. The state of public opinion is clear - and with it, the PM?s interests and the Party?s interests no longer align. It's the ''electability'' that will be the eventual undoing of Johnson...

Can't wait for the season finale!...:)

A couple of snippets from law and policy commentator David Allen Green... ''The way this government is collapsing over Covid regulations chaos should have been how this government should have collapsed because of Brexit chaos Only the hyper-partisanship of the Brexit issue saved it The shambles is not new - only that it cannot be hidden behind Brexit'' This is so true, but it actually all started with the Owen Patterson scandal, similar to Partygate in that it couldn't be 'protected' by Brexit. This Gov and PM have done far worse things under Brexit than anything Partygate has thrown up, but they were conveniently ignored or clapped and cheered through by Brexiters. It will be interesting to see whether Johnson's reputation getting trashed even further over Partygate, will also eventually rub-off onto Brexit itself. Johnson was very much the face and lies of Brexit. ''The irony of the cakeist Prime Minister being brought down by a cake. He wanted to impose the rules on the rest of us but not on himself.'' Irony indeed, after all it was Johnson who said during Brexit negotiations ''We can have our cake and eat it too'', obviously a mantra his privileged life has allowed him to follow. Until now...

''Events dear boy, events'' Suspect like the original Brexit thread, this thread will morph into other threads depending on what happens next. Plus you have the Ukraine situation which might throw up other issues with whoever the PM and governing party are...

malumbu Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- In one respect it is a shame that Partygate has distracted us from other failings on the PM, not sure how much Dom is orchestrating this, and if so why the drip drip feed. Suspect the drip feed is all about controlling the narrative, or more to the point, preventing Johnson and No 10 from controlling it and putting another spin on it. Cummings said he has deliberately given written evidence to Sue Gray for this very reason. Lots of chatter that the big juicy leak will come out after the Sue Gray report is released, but that will probably be on hold now that the Met are officially investigating it...

malumbu Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- I worked in an office for many years. Each birthday was different, some would bring in cake and leave it in the tea point (no office party), some would go down the pub (in the old days lunch time, later years after work), some wouldn't tell a soul, some would take the day off. Very very rarely any sort of gathering in the office, maybe a big birthday. In one office I once worked in (a period building like No. 10 but on a much smaller scale), whoever had a birthday had to buy cakes for the rest of the staff, and mid-afternoon we would all troop off to the office meeting room with mugs of tea in hand and have a good scoff and natter. Similarly if someone was leaving, although they didn't have to buy their own leaving presents!... :)

''I think TheCat needs to come clean on exactly where he/she does work.'' Well, he doesn't work at No 10 because he paints a picture of a typical open-plan office, which it isn't. This 'celebratory gathering' (I don't think it was a party in the true sense of the word, but newspapers will always use a far more punchier term for their headlines) happened in the Cabinet Room, which if you want to relate to a typical office would be something like a director's meeting room, where all the big heads meet. Journalists who've been inside it say that it would be impossible to socially distance circa 30 people in such a room which is dominated by a large conference table. So it wasn't a case of employees sat at their open-plan desks and stopping work for a bit, they all must have trooped-in from wherever they were working (Downing Street is a large warren-like series of rooms, something like circa 100 in total, so one would expect [hope!] that those who needed to work in No 10 and weren't WFH, were easily able to work and maintain social distance guidelines and certainly weren't working ''next to each other''). Then there was the singing, something that was strictly prohibited even in much more open and cavernous spaces such as as churches, because this was one of the ways the virus could be passed on even if maintaining social distancing. Although this episode can be seen to be less of a breach than the full-on parties in the garden and basement of No 10, nevertheless it was another major infringement of the the rules/guidelines the Gov and PM had been telling the country to adhere to, and those who didn't and were reported to the police, were fined. It's further evidence that they were telling the country to do one thing while completely ignoring their own rules/guidelines. You also have to remember that Johnson stood up in Parliament and feigned 'dismay' and any knowledge of parties/gatherings in No 10 when the Allegra Stratton video emerged back in December, which we now know to be untrue as he was in direct attendance in this latest revelation and the larger garden party. So in the context of that alone, this story is anything but frivolous. I see while writing this, the Met are now going to officially investigate the whole 'partygate' thing, although it didn't say why. Perhaps it was this story that finally broke the dam whereby they couldn't ignore the whole saga anymore, or maybe Sue Gray has found something else that she was duty bound to report to the Met, leaving them no option but to open an investigation. Whatever, I think we can all agree that Johnson is in an even worse position than he was last week...