Mao Cap

That's what I saw at first when I read that post. Proper ROFL moment!

Yep, did one to Poitiers when I was 15. If everything works out it can be a brilliant experience for your kid, but there are a huge number of potential pitfalls involved - your child could simply not get on with their exchange partner or their family, or they could not get on with you when they come over here, or there could be problems with what they eat (like my family, all voracious meat-eaters, who got stuck with the ONLY vegetarian in France), or the school (the English or the French one, shamefully much more likely to be ours) might treat them as a temporary inconvenience to be ignored as much as possible. Tons of things like that. But the main factor is your daughter - if she's quite a confident, outgoing sort of person then she'll most likely have a good time and find it very useful. At 15 I was a very shy introverted Morrissey type - still generally had a good time, but could have made a great deal more of it if I had gone out of my way to be friendly, try and speak French to people even if they had good English, etc.

I suspect there's quite a lot of people like myself who find that restricting themselves to three posts a day is not a problem or even desirable, as opposed to some THIS IS A DISGRACE IM NOT PAYING TO USE THE INTERNETZ RAWR thing. I still like coming on here, but shortly before the £5 user fee was introduced I'd resolved to spend less time arsing around on this and other internet forums anyway. So not paying the fiver is quite a good way to discipline myself so I can just post a bit on the most interesting threads and then bugger off until the next day instead of wading through the stuff I find less interesting for the sake of it.

I get the odd episode now, but it's improved a lot in the past couple of years. Benadryl always worked well for me, or failing that Clarityn.

(Not The) Kevin Moore was a good poster, as was Guantanamera Saint.

Sorry, should have said "Like Cameron's ever seen a game that wasn't through the glass of a Villa Park corporate box" Come on, someone equates my fine club with a Tory Prime Minister and I'm supposed to let that sh*t slide? I wouldn't equate someone on my side with Saints, FFS.

Like Cameron's ever watched a game of football in his life.

Well, yeah. That's what it was supposed to be.

Sorry for delay, used up my three posts. The European elections got a turnout of about 40%, i.e. the already ideologically committed. No denying that the number of people who have strong feelings against the EU does indeed dwarf the number strongly in favour of more integration - that's because it's a much bigger deal on the right than on the left, you don't get your casual Labour voter in Leeds or wherever going "MUST RALLY BEHIND OUR MIGHTY EURO OVERLORDS11!1" because although they don't mind the EU, they ultimately doesn't really give a sh*t and so don't turn up. On the other hand a Tory in Redhill, filled with nationalistic rage from a thirty-year diet of Mail editorials about baby-eating immigrant paedos being allowed to bring the price of your house down under the dastardly Human Rights Act, will actually bother to vote. However, you and Wes seem to be missing my point, which is that taking an aggressive stance towards the EU would have little positive effect on the Conservative share of the vote. The issue is, rightly or wrongly, a sideshow to people outside the Tory hardcore.

You knows it man Well they did when the Conservative Party were banging that drum to little response throughout their shift to the right in the early 2000s, and there is little reason why that should change now. Whatever statistics get pulled out of the air about what a utopian world we'd live in if we weren't in the EU (probably from Policy Exchange or Taxpayers' Alliance or one of them, and therefore so skewed as to be completely meaningless - wouldn't treat studies from think-thanks with an obvious agenda saying how great the EU was with any more respect, mind) most people go for weeks at a time without the EU ever crossing their mind. I know I do, anyway. Housing, schools, care for the elderly, yep. Lisbon Treaty, meh. People can be riled up for a second by stories about straight bananas and heroic grocers refusing to measure stuff in grams and kilograms and all that piddling Little Englander type of sh*te, but five seconds later they'll put down their Mail and forget all about it. Not saying the Tory party couldn't bring in a few UKIP voters in from the cold with some more radical anti-Europe rhetoric and manoeuvres (those were presumably the people they were going for by joining in with all those nutty far-right parties in the European Parliament) but for every one of them they'd lose as much or more Ken Clarke-type people on the left of the party without making much of a difference to floating voters. Not worth doing if they want to appeal to a wider section of the electorate.

The issues around treaties and sovereignty and all that crap have little visible effect on peoples' lives and are only a matter of interest to hardcore Tory and UKIP types, whose votes those parties can rely upon anyway. To your average floating voter (i.e. vaguely anti-EU but not really too bothered, Europe seems to consistently come last in most lists of voters' concerns) the only thing that might bother them would be an actual move towards joining the euro, as a big and visible step that would have a substantial effect on the lives of everyone. And as joining the euro didn't and wasn't going to happen under Labour, anti-Europe talk will be met with indifference (and is of course always a dodgy thing to discuss in the Tory party anyway). What I mean is, they're stuck preaching to the converted and there doesn't seem to be many issues around which they can capitalise on and attract new Tories.

A pretty slick and well-run campaign. Huge advertising revenue paid for by mates in the City. Six of the nine national newspapers performing fellatio on DC and pausing only ot spit what was in their mouths at Brown/Clegg for four whole weeks (with the others pretty lukewarm either way except the Mirror). A deeply unpopular PM who got himself into a PR disaster a few days before the election. A knackered government who most people (including many on the left) would do nearly anything to kick out. The Lib Dems doing slightly better as a proportion of the vote, but most people who said they would vote for them actually bottling it at the last minute. Failing to get a majority and receiving only 38% (I think?) of the vote is a pretty poor payoff with all the above factors on your side. Hard to see what the Tories can do to win any more people over. They could do the immigrant-hating, gay-bashing, prison-building, Mail/Express, frothing at the mouth type stuff, but that certainly didn't get them anywhere in 2001 or 2005. Some proper monetarist 80s sh*t? - cutting services (the amount you can save from "reducing waste" is actually f*ck-all in macroeconomic terms) trying to break public sector unions etc. would be greeted ecstatically by the right of the party and the Tory heartlands, but only significantly higher taxes can really make a difference to the deficit over the next few years. Impose them, and the City and wealthy start to get fractious and give it their usual horsesh*t about moving to Dubai and so on. Don't impose them, and the opposition parties can point out the skyrocketing inequality and that the cuts aren't even achieving what they're supposed to. Some euro-bashing might be useful with what's going on at the moment, but then you'd have to acknowledge Gordon Brown's role in keeping Britain out of the single currency. The straight bananas, "paedo immigrants given £1m under Human Rights Act" is just more populist preaching to the converted. This has turned out incredibly long, but yeah - poor level of support considering the most favourable circumstances for 13 years (longer than that, if anything).

The Alliance Party was pretty good news as well. A liberal, non-sectarian party in control of East Belfast - who could have imagined that even five years ago? Of course, a lot of it was Robinson's dodgy dealings and his wife ****ging that 16 year old and whatnot, but still, it's good to see.

Good luck FF.

British workers had "never had it so good" in the early 60s due to the post-1945 Keynesian consensus which the Tories had to abide by if they wanted to be electable, despite their natural instincts. Same way the Labour Party has had to mainly stick to the post-1979 Thatcherite consensus, despite their natural instincts And as for council houses, they had to exist for people to buy them, and they existed because of the, err, Labour Party. Town and Country Planning Act, late 40s I think. But even if I took your point those two are still pretty pitiful contributions to the lot of ordinary folk compared to the introduction of old age pensions, the NHS, the minimum wage, etc. etc.

F*ck researching the 80s, research the last century and see how every last measure improving the lives of ordinary people has came from the Liberal and Labour parties, opposed every step of the way by the Tories. The faces may change, but their foul blakc soul remains the same. Lower than vermin... Off to vote now, brb.

Two fine publications which knock hell out of any of our dailies, including the better ones (that is, the Indy and to a lesser extent the Times or Grauniad).

True story, was at a Ginnum v Saints League Cup game some years ago (must have been about 14) and got some grief from three scumbag Medway youths walking through one of them. Kind of nervy because there's no coppers around and you end up getting lost. Stick to the main roads, they stink and all but that's just Medway for you

Would mean f*ck-all even without the thing in Rochdale.

Arg, the bloody fool. He actually is the proverbial bloke who fell in a barrel of tits and came up sucking his thumb. James Purnell and the others who tried to oust him a while back knew their stuff, I suppose.

HOT TIP - For a sneak preview of Dune's new opinions next week, read whatever those loathsome slugs McKinstry or Flynn are saying in the Express.

You need to put on a wig and get yourself on Mumsnet, Stanley - that's apparently where the election will be won or lost

Was surprised to get an NF leaflet through the door this morning, knew they were still around but had no idea they fought any elections (let alone in Maidstone which is hardly a hub of racial tension). Claimed that all three parties were in a sinister plot to turn Britain into a communist state, and as evidence provided the statement "look how many ministers are of Eastern European (i.e. MARXIST!!!) extraction!". Umm, quite. Stanley/Dune, you know what this is about? I was completely anywhere of any subversive Russians, Poles, Lithuanians in the Cabinet.

Johnny, as Clegg now appears to be the big rival you'll need to come up with a rhyming nickname for him, something of the calibre of "Fraudon Clown". Any ideas? I'd suggest "Pick Smegg" myself