Pistolpete2

You notice the word HALF!

chris955

Yes, its a well known saying.

SultanOfSwing

The glass is merely twice as large as it needs to be.

chris955

One half at a time

Yorkieabroad

42 seconds....

http://video.search.yahoo.com/video/...=p&age=0&&tt=b

Bud the Wiser

I wonder what will happen when quantitative easing ends.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance...he-uk-economy/

Pistolpete2

I thought the Bank people had agreed to stop Quantitative Easing as it is no longer needed. However, they have to now unwind their asset holdings in some fashion. It's the same issue right now in the US where they are worried that it will cause interest rate rises as they try to get out of what they bought.

JW is talking of what he perceives as being the damage already done to savers.

Bud the Wiser

You're correct, I should have said the aftermath of the effects of quantitative easing.

Bud the Wiser

Posted this in Chris955's less serious thread about the UK, when really it deserves a higher profile.


Pistolpete replied to the post with..........

When you have senior politicians admitting they've got a policy as important as immigration wrong, albeit several years later, then you know that their are some serious issues to overcome. It doesn't take much to spark civil unrest, you only have to look back at the recent UK riots to understand this.

Pistolpete2

On this immigration thing, it seems that the UK Government failed to recognise that if France and Germany closed their doors to Eastern Europeans for a time, then they would look for access where the shrinking opportunity then presented itself and muggins UK was the main opportunity.

More and more YES MINISTER! looks uncannily like reality TV these days when, at the very least, it comes to not spotting the moving goalposts and generally poor or lacking advice. In this case they were supposedly warned of the German/French ramifications but ignored them, so MISTAKE is probably an under-statement.

bigglesworth

Not sure about the Yes Minister aspect.

It has been pretty plain for some time that the admission of a million odd East Europeans was a deliberate piece of gerrymandering by the Labour Party as the overwhelming -over two thirds -majority of new immigrants vote for them.

This was alluded to by an ex civil servant called Neather some years ago.

The minutes of the meeting in which it was openly discussed in the Home Office (attended by Tony Blair and David Blunkett) were originally released ten years ago, but with bits missing. The full version came out a year or so ago under the Freedom of Information Act.

Pistolpete2

Indeed, poking around, I see the Daily Mail came out with a rehash of the overall approx three million immigrants who entered the UK from all corners of the planet, under the New Labour 'conspiracy', after Jack Straw opened his mouth regarding the MISTAKE last week, but there is no mention of it being corroborated by the FOI Act, which would have been nice what with it being the DM, and Labour still deny the conspiracy element, so it seems, in spite of the 'fly on the wall' Andrew Neather.

I think the conspiracy - calling a spade a spade - kicked off well before the Eastern Europeans became part of the EU enlargement and therefore entitled to enter the UK in due course anyway, so they were accident rather than really design.

This from the 'fly':

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-...s-6786170.html

OK, so he's writing for a London audience but the favourables seem to apply far more to London than anywhere else because the rest simply don't - as he says - have the ability to absorb their own into a workforce let alone an influx of outsiders so could not really be part of the 'conversation'.

It all seems so incredibly cavalier to thumb your noses at your then own core voters simply because you fear you will soon, I guess, be found out to be spinning charlatons. Now, of course, both main parties have to dance to the middle classes as core.

bigglesworth

Pete, I am operating from memory here, but I think Andrew Neather was mentioned quite a bit earlier than that. The 2009 stuff was after an FOI request from Migrationwatch. There was something in most of the broadsheets and The Economist.

I am not sure any of them pay attention to their core voters. If the electorate actually examined what the outcomes of a particular government were, they might be surprised.
Income inequality for example, ALWAYS widens under a Labour Government and narrows under Conservative. Reason being, Labour KNOW ordinary workers will broadly vote Labour anyway, and focus vote winning policies on middle income earners.
Conservatives assume middle income will very broadly vote for them, so try to attract lower income votes.
But maybe I am just a bit cynical about the whole rigmarole.
None of them really pay any regard to the rich - except insofar as they want their money- as there are so few of them. But they try very hard not to frighten them away. The top one percent of earners pay 30 percent of all income tax.

BRADLEY1973

I think that if you look at the UK economic situation then South Africa is probably a better bet. Given the UK pension crisis and the fact that the UK are currently closing loop holes in their financial system to stop the out flow of capital alot of Brits are finding that the future may not be so rosy both interms of future prospects but also when they get to retirement and have to pay a lot of tax on their income or risk losing 55% of their pension to HMRC when they pass on.

TheCreature

2012 figures. Murder's UK 722. Murder's South Africa 15,940.

Actually making it to a pensionable age in SA seems to be a major issue.