Keith Sansum1
- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
not correct but ok
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
Courtesy Independent................
Tory Eurosceptics on edge as David Cameron plans EU opt-ins
Prime minister set to sign up to measures opposed by right as decision follows warning of threat to UK's security
Tory Eurosceptics are headed for another clash with Cameron over the EU. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
David Cameron is to risk a fresh row with Tory Eurosceptics by signing up to nearly a third of a series of European
policing and criminal justice measures that have been heavily criticised by backbenchers campaigning to curb the EU.
The prime minister, who said earlier this week that membership of the EU gives the UK a seat at the world's
"top table", is expected to opt in to 30-40 of the measures following warnings of a threat to security if Britain
fails to sign up.
The decision by the Cameron, which has still to be finalised in negotiations between Danny Alexander and
Oliver Letwin, will disappoint Eurosceptics who had hoped Britain would stand apart from most of the 130 measures.
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
What a can of worms..............
Courtesy Independent...................
How the fruits of financier's high-cost loans found their way into Tory coffers
Conservative party grandee controls firm which charges interest at 75 per cent APR
A top Conservative Party funder is revealed today as the man behind one of Britain's biggest high-cost lenders.
Financier Henry Angest - a friend of the Camerons and a former Tory Treasurer - gave the Conservatives
a £5m overdraft facility shortly before the last General Election at an attractive interest rate of just 3.5 per cent.
The high-cost credit company Mr Angest controls, Everyday Loans, charges members of the public interest
at an average 74.8 per cent APR.
The news - uncovered following analysis of accounts by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism -
will prove awkward for the Conservatives, as Mr Angest becomes the second high-profile Tory donor
profiting from the growing high-cost credit industry.
The Conservative donor and government adviser Adrian Beecroft has a major stake in Wonga,
Britain's best-known payday lender, which charges borrowers more than 4,000 per cent APR.
Mr Beecroft has given almost £800,000 to the Tories in the last seven years, contributing more
than £100,000 last December.
Last October, Jonathan Luff, a senior adviser to David Cameron, quit Downing Street to become
a lobbyist for Wonga.
The Government claimed earlier this year to be cracking down on high-interest lenders.
Guest 745- Registered: 27 Mar 2012
- Posts: 3,370
Remember this reg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_Honours
Time for change the old parties are just to tainted by greed and corruption
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
Courtesy Independent............
Hardline Tory Eurosceptics could set the party on a route to 'political suicide,' claims Lord Patten
The former European Commissioner says displays of disunity could sink Conservative chances at the
next election
Hardline Tory Eurosceptics determined to get Britain out of the European Union could set the party
on a route to "political suicide", the former Conservative chairman warned today.
Lord Patten, now the BBC's chairman, also urged fractious MPs to rally behind David Cameron,
telling them: "Parties that don't look united don't win elections."
He said it would be "perfectly possible" for Mr Cameron to renegotiate the terms of Britain's membership
of the EU that should be acceptable to the country.
But he added: "If your response to that is that nothing would be acceptable, then I think that would be
bad news for the Conservative Party.
"If nothing is acceptable, I recall Winston Churchill's very wise observation that the problem with
political suicide is that you live to regret it."
Guest 745- Registered: 27 Mar 2012
- Posts: 3,370
Complete lack of democracy,
the Politicians just don't respect the voters demands for a referendum on this festering undemocratic EU money pit .
Guest 725- Registered: 7 Oct 2011
- Posts: 1,418
Who cares what Patten says after all it's not like He's a Conservative. He's so far to the left of the party He makes Owen Jones seem grown up.
After the latest scandal at the BBC why bother copy and pasting the nonsense he spouts.
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
patten on the left lol whatever next
hes a hard line tory
the message behind this is that the tories are tearing themselves apart over the EU
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Brian Dixon
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
does that mean that the uk is festering to kiethb.
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
Festering is one way of putting it
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
chris patten is very much on the dave wing of the party.
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
Of course he is howard
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
Just a thought...........
Courtesy Will Hutton.........
If only Britain had joined the euro If Gordon Brown had chosen to join the single currency 10 years ago,
both the European Union and Britain would be stronger now
Elliott set out the establishment consensus in a classic piece this month on his alternative history of what would have happened had Britain joined. Essentially, he says, there would have been a bigger boom in the runup to 2007 and a more disastrous bust. Britain would now be struggling to maintain its membership as anti-EU sentiment mushroomed, prompting its eventual exit, dramatising the inherent unsoundness of yoking disparate economies into one inflexible currency.
But there is a more optimistic, alternative history. The first obvious point is that Britain could have joined the euro only if a referendum had been won. A victory would have depended on it being an obvious good deal, with the pound entering at a competitive rate and the euro's structure, rules and governance reformed to accommodate British concerns and interests. The European Central Bank would have needed to look more like the US Federal Reserve, with more scope for fiscal and monetary activism. The Germans would doubtless have insisted, in return, that the EU banking system be more conservatively managed.
The last decade would have been very different. What none of the mockers of the euro ever acknowledge is the economic doomsday machine that Brown created through not joining. By not locking in a competitive pound, Britain suffered a decade of chronic sterling overvaluation, made more acute by the City of London sucking in capital from abroad to finance the extraordinary credit and property boom of those years.
Imports surged and exports sagged; the economy outside banking, which made goods and services to be sold abroad, either stagnated or shrank. Much of the best of UK manufacturing was auctioned off to foreigners. Today we find that, despite a huge currency devaluation, there are just not enough companies to take advantage of it: too much of the rest of British capacity, thanks to foreign takeover, has become a part of global supply chains that are indifferent to exchange-rate variation. Our export response has been feeble; evidence of the economic orthodoxy's inability to devise policies and structures that favour production.
Inside the euro, at a highly competitive exchange rate, Britain's exports would instead have soared, and its traded goods sector would have expanded, not shrunk. Regional cities would have boomed around sustainable activity rather than property and credit. The euro's rules would have meant a less reckless fiscal policy, and banks would have been more constrained in lending for property. They would have had to lend proportionately more to fast-growing real enterprise, reinforced because the new rules would have required them to lend in a more balanced way.
Britain would have entered the 2008 crisis with a far less unbalanced economy, a stronger banking system and international accounts, and a government deficit much less acute. And the reformed eurozone could have responded much more flexibly and cleverly than it did.
In any case, both Britain and Europe are now wrestling with depressed economic activity caused by overstretched bank and company balance sheets - and the exchange-rate regime is hardly the cause of this distress. Germany and the stronger EU countries are plainly wrong in their overemphasis on austerity as a solution, but surely right to argue that the only long-term solution is for the whole of Europe to move to their productivist, stakeholder capitalism.
British mainstream commentators see the obvious fissure between the stronger European north and the weaker south as proof positive that the euro is fatally flawed. But suppose countries like Greece or Ireland rise to the German challenge? Already there are encouraging auguries in both. If so, notwithstanding excessive austerity, they could weather the crisis, and become stronger.
There is plainly a chance one or more countries could leave, but there is a greater chance the system in some form will hold - it is in too many countries' interests to avoid failure. Then expect a pan-European recovery to begin in the second half of the decade that will gather strength in the 2020s.
Inside the euro for the last decade, the economic and political debate would have necessarily moved on. Having won a historic referendum decisively affirming Britain's future in Europe, the Blair government would have had to think in European terms about how to produce, invest, innovate and export. Sure, there would have been problems. But Britain outside the euro in 2013, with endless spending cuts, thebiggest fall in real wages for a century, 500,000 people relying on food banks, and a weak unbalanced economy, is hardly a land of milk and honey.
Emboldened by his referendum victory, Blair could have sacked Brown before the disastrous second phase of his chancellorship and lacklustre prime ministership. Blairism would have morphed into a new form of European social democracy, fashioning British-style stakeholder capitalism. UK politics would not have moved so decisively to the right, with conservatives preaching free-market Thatcherism while the left clings to a bastard Keynesianism - united only in their belief, against all the evidence including Britain's export performance, that floating exchange rates are a universal panacea.
A single currency demands disciplines and painful trade-offs: but floating exchange rates after a financial crisis are a transmission mechanism for bank-runs and beggar-my-neighbour devaluations. Magic bullets do not exist. Had Britain joined, both we and Europe would have been better placed, and Larry Elliott would now be writing about how better to get Britain to innovate and invest under a fourth-term Labour government. A better world all round.
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
barry must be busy, nearly an hour since reg posted the above.
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
Surely the debate on the In/Out is to go on,
The mouse cant make his mind up as to whether to please some of his party
or stay as he is now and stay in the EU in the hope of reform
even though isolating yourself
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 725- Registered: 7 Oct 2011
- Posts: 1,418
Will Hutton eh? A walking oxymoron being a socialist economist. How on Earth is that possible? A socialist economist proved wrong and wrong time and time again.
Come on at least choose an economist with some credentials.
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
gorden brown and gidion spring to mind.
Guest 698- Registered: 28 May 2010
- Posts: 8,664
everyone is entitled to their view
thats what makes the forum such a great place
each to his own
I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat - Harold Wilson
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
TO TRUE peter
maybe other friends of yours should observe your view
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Guest 698- Registered: 28 May 2010
- Posts: 8,664
I'm not responsible for my friends, Keith, neither are you.
I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat - Harold Wilson
