ecuk268

I thought the ruling party in the French Assembly was the UMP - a centre-right party, although I believe the the Senate is a coalition. True, the french unions are strong but maybe that's why they have 1st class health and education.

Here's one for Dune to put on his shopping list. http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/bnp-launches-aryan-spread-201004232668/

Quite. Most historians think that he was Roman and was born in Palestine where his father was stationed in the Roman Army. Other countries that mark St Georges Day include Russia, Portugal and Egypt.

I think that the authorities need to come down hard on these people. There's far too much fence shaking going on these days. It would never have happened when I was a boy. Next thing you know, they'll be knocking on peoples doors and running away.

Reminds me of a remark from a Glasgow Police Chief many years ago. When asked to explain the high numbers of murders in Glasgow he said "Yes, we do have a lot of murders, but they're not too serious. Most of them are just husbands killing their wives".

I remember when the PR men tried to give Maggie Thatcher a sense of humour. She paraphrased the Monty Python "dead parrot" phrases but obviously had no idea about why it was funny.

If you really want a reason to vote Tory (or not) have a look at our local councillors. The Tories have run Southampton for the past few years. The first thing that they did was to cut the pay of care workers. Then they closed 2 old people’s homes, closed Millbrook Library, proposed to replace qualified librarians with volunteers and now want to scrap residential wardens from old peoples sheltered accommodation. Strangely enough, the Chairman of the Finance Committee (who is the Tory candidate for Southampton Test) was on the radio saying that he was against this despite leading the committee that proposed it. Meanwhile, in Hampshire CC, the unions agreed to have their mileage rate cut from 53 to 40p. However Councillors were given the choice of claiming the higher or lower rates. A Tory from Fareham said that he’d carry on claiming the higher rate because he couldn’t afford to run his Jag otherwise.

In Germany, coalition is the norm. They don't seem to have done too bad. Italy, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Austria, Norway and Sweden often have coalitions. It seems to work for them. All it needs is the politicians to genuinely to put the interests of the country first rather then those of the unions or Lord Ashcroft.

Ah, Stephen Milligan - died in rather bizarre circumstances.

Despite my left-leaning inclination, I got 55% for both Labour and the Tories which probably highlights the lack of a real difference between them. What surprised me was 54% for UKIP who I think are a bunch of xenophobes and 52% for the BNP and I'd never vote for those racist Nazis.

I remember standing on the Milton terraces on a sunny afternoon in 1984 watching Steve and Danny Wallace both get hat-tricks as we thumped Coventry 8-2. Not often a team has 2 players scoring hat-tricks. Left-back for Coventry was a young Stuart Pearce.

Markus didn't get to be a multi-millionaire by throwing his money around. I think he'd need to be confident that we could stay in the Premiership before investing in new infrastructure. Bearing in mind the problems in finding a site and then the battles with the nimbys for planning permission, maybe an extension to St Marys would be the better option. So, hopefully the Premiership in 5 years, but increased capacity could take a bit longer.

Appears to be part of a whole re-vamping of the Academy setup. The hostel in Hill Lane is being sold and the lads will be placed with families in the city. It's meant to get them to do more for themselves rather than being looked after by the hostel staff.

I liked Danny. Remember his reaction to his goal at Palace just before we went down. It obviously meant a lot to him. Frannie Benali said that after the 2003 Final, Danny offered him his medal because "You've been here since you were a school kid, you deserve it more than me".

Saw the UKIP deputy leader on the telly saying that 72% of UK legislation came from the EU. The R4 programme "More or Less" which looks at the statistics behind sensationalist claims decided to analyse this. What actually happened was that the EU president made a speech where he said that 72% of EU legislation came from the European Parliament (and was therefore voted on by elected members). The other 28% came from the Council of Ministers. Another interesting fact that UKIP decline to mention is that even if we withdrew from the EU, we would still need EU legislation if we wished to continue trading with them. Even China has EU legislation on their statute books regarding quality of goods, safety standards etc.

Try this one: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/

http://www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/cream/pages/CDP/CDP_18_09.pdf The above is a study of immigration conducted in 2009 by University College, London. It concludes that EU immigrants made a "substantial net contribution to the UK fiscal system", paying 37 per cent more in taxes than they received in welfare payments. Researchers found that, on average, migrants were younger and better educated than the native population, as well as being 60 per cent less likely to claim benefits and 58 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Bet the Daily Mail didn't report it.

I keep getting election junk from Sandra Gidley and Caroline Nokes (Romsey). They don't seem to realise that I'm not in their constituency. I'm in Southampton Test. Doesn't say much for their organisation if they don't know their constituency boundaries. I pointed it out to a Lib-Dem worker but she insisted that I was wrong.

Newcomers group together to begin with - look at the UK "ghettos" in France and Spain as the UK ex-pats tend to live in the same areas. But. over time, they disperse. Southampton is a good example. In my bit of Upper Shirley we have Asians, Afro-Caribbeans, and families from France, Italy and Greece. My son was at school with all of them plus a lad from Chile, and his best mate had an Italian dad and a French mum. Haven't noticed any race riots in our road recently - people get on fine together.

So, you'd recommend an increased minimum wage and strong unions to protect the workers rights????

Some of you may know Sunnyfields farm near Totton. They run a successful organic farm shop and grow their own crops locally. I was out there a while ago and asked them why they employed so many Polish workers. The answer was - they turn up on time every day, they work hard and they never go off "sick". They've tried the local Job Centres but the locals seem afraid of hard work. The same was shown in a recent TV programme where they were interviewing people coming out of a Job Centre and asking them if they'd like a job on the local farms. Many of them were not interested - "hard work" was a common reason.

Aren't the masons the right-wing equivalent of the unions but more secretive?

My wife is a teacher and has fairly central political views. Some of her colleagues are true-blue Tories. She's a strong supporter of state education which is not surprising as that's her employer. She's not in a union, but many of her colleagues are. You seem to connect all unions with left-wing politics. What about all those commie farmers in the NFU or the top civil servants in the First Division Association or the Association of Chief Police Officers or the Police Federation - are they all raving lefties?

He's a pinball wizard, there has to be a twist A pinball wizard, got such a supple wrist

A word of caution. It refers to foreign born, not immigrants. So if you were born in Spain when your mum was on holiday, you would be included. The other missing data is when did these people arrive in the UK. Some of them could have been here for 40 years. There is no split between EU and non-EU so how many are EU citizens making use of the freedom to work in any EU country (as do thousands of UK citizens)? Also, increased immigration creates jobs as more people create demand for goods and services and therefore people have to be employed to provide them.