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Goes without saying but, IMHO, Prescott was guilty of hypocrisy of the worst kind.

Prescott was the worst kind of Labour politician. One that starts of as an ordinary working class lad but who becomes so enthralled by the trappings of wealth and power that he uses his roots to maintain his status despite being so far removed from them he's lost sight of the need for truth.

Thank you. Hugs and kisses. VFTT.

I think you're being too kind to him TBF.

Like Alan Johnson you mean?

You have to remember that there is a large swathe of voters who will vote for the person and not the policies. My wife was saying that at work the majority of the women were now going to vote Liberal because of Clegg. It's these floating voters that will decide the outcome. The two remaining debates are really going to heap the pressure on Cameron to turn this around and I always thought him the most media savvy of them all, a triumph of style over substance and now I'm not so sure.

And there were very many, myself included, who just accepted the fact and sucked it up because, believe it or not, we deserved it. It's your ongoing cheating that really ****es us off.

I can neither confirm nor deny that statement.

No complaints here.

One is an ordinary chap.

I remember the cook from river cottage cooking one for some toffs. He kept it in fresh running water for a few weeks to flush it out but it still tasted of grass.

Didn't realise they were crossing en masse in their own craft.

You dismiss it as you are myopic to alternative strategies or to even use them as a jumping off point to a wider, cross party debate on a key issue. The bit I've highlighted, I think you'll find, is accepted by all the mainstream parties and is the same policy as operated by Canada, Oz and NZ amongst others.

The whole point of the type of immigration control that they are on about is that it's skilled, not the non-skilled dross we've been straddled with so your farm worker analogy doesn't fit. The ins and outs I don't know or pretend to know nor do I necessarily agree with it but I'm not blinkered enough to dismiss it out of hand.

The BNP, whilst odious, have a political mandate. The NF do not and Dune/Stanley freely admits to attending BNP rallies. How many non-racists do you know that go out of their way to attend NF rallies?

Yeah right, none of us have advocated direct military intervention. None of us have said that what has happened to the white farmers was/is as bad as anything that happened in SA.

Dune/Stanley freely admits to being a racist and attending NF rallies. He quite likes to get onto social Darwinism. It has nothing to do with having a stance on immigration (which most of us do have) more to do with him being a bigoted racist.

In some regions, apart from the institutional work shy lazy bast*rds, unemployment is very negligable and skilled workers are needed. The logic being is that once they are settled and working they wouldn't then want to move to the cities. It's based on a model already in play which appears to work in Oz. Remember though, that we are talking targeted (non EU) immigration and not the disastrous open door policy that has been used.

It's a fair point. Official crime figures are down but the popoulations fear of crime is up. I would hazard a guess that 24hr news and the interweb has had an impact on that. I feel neither more safe or more vunerable than I did under Blair or the tories.

Mackerel is yummy (not the one that posts on here as that would be just wrong).

As I understood it it was about incentivising (non EU) immigrants to settle in areas that they wouldn't normally consider but where the need for people is evident. Most end up in the cities where a community, same as theirs at "home", is already established. I believe it's roughly modelled on the Oz approach.

Exactly. I did the French vineyards as a 17yo. The influx in my local area are all young and all go "home". Many are students and there has never been any real mither.

TBH, this issue, along with care for the elderly and electorial reform, which are huge and generational, may well need a cross party collective approach to solve, otherwise we have expensive chop and change at each change of political hue.

We have a large influx on Eastern Europeans about now and they'll stay, working in poly tunnels on the farms, until around September(ish) when they all go again. This sort of temporary and transient workforce is here to stay, especially as businesses love it because they don't have to pay NI as they are employing them for less than 6 months.