Torres

https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2?ec=0.0&soc=-5.64

The rest of the 95% hardcore who unfortunately can't make ****pit park on a Saturday are the bestest in the business at booing the players off the pitch sat in front of their radios though.

Buy him and put him to use as a toilet cleaner

Lezzing it up with Susan Kalman. Get THAT image out of your head.

I despair.

There's plenty on the pompey takeover thread. "Ed meets rallyboy" - I'd watch that.

I would hope that people from across the political spectrum would be able to agree that Brand is a plum of the highest order.

Yes, that's a Pompey fan wishing that they could sign a couple of players no longer wanted by Chesterfield

So, the general consensus seems to be that the Conservatives have run a pretty ineffective campaign, but that judgement has been made at a national level. Does anyone here live in a marginal constituency that might be considered a "target" seat for any of the major parties? If so, how have the campaigns been at a local level? FWIW, my standing MP is (was) Conservative, with a majority of about 7,000, and is odds-on to retain the seat. I've not had sight nor sound of any candidate or any campaigners, and I've had just one leaflet in my post box from UKIP which went straight into the recycling bin before even getting through my door.

Which is fine, but it doesn't justify using the fact that your opponent was privately educated as stick with which to beat them, especially if you were privately educated yourself.

In the London Review of Books University of Cambridge lecturer David Runciman said that the book fudged the issue of its subtitle thesis of its UK first edition, and asked whether it is that “in more equal societies almost everyone does better, or is it simply that everyone does better on average?" In the European Sociological Review, sociologist John Goldthorpe argued that the book relied too heavily on income inequality over other forms of inequality (including broader economic inequality), and demonstrated a one-dimensional understanding of social stratification, with social class being in effect treated as merely a marker for income. He concluded that much more research was needed to support either the Wilkinson and Pickett "account of the psychosocial generation of the contextual effects of inequality on health or the rival neo-materialist account". Richard Reeves in The Guardian called the book "a thorough-going attempt to demonstrate scientifically the benefits of a smaller gap between rich and poor", but said there were problems with the book's approach. "Drawing a line through a series of data points signals nothing concrete about statistical significance [...] since they do not provide any statistical analyses, this can't be verified." John Kay in The Financial Times said that "the evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams, with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests" In 2010, Tino Sanandaji and others wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they said, "when we attempted to duplicate their findings with data from the U.N. and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we found no such correlation" Peter Robert Saunders, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Sussex University, published a report for the think tank Policy Exchange questioning the statistics in The Spirit Level. He claimed that only one of the correlations in the book—that between infant mortality and income inequality—stood up to scrutiny, and that the rest were either false or ambiguous. Christopher Snowdon, an independent researcher and adjunct scholar at the Democracy Institute, published a book largely devoted to a critique of The Spirit Level, entitled, The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything. One of its central claims is that Wilkinson excludes certain countries from his data without justification, such as South Korea and the Czech Republic. It also argues that Wilkinson and Pickett falsely claim the existence of a scientific consensus when much of the literature disagrees with their findings.

To be fair, that's unarguably true.

Sorry, dim. Yeah, sorry, I totally misread what you wrote.

And yet you're suggesting that a government encourage this in future by stepping in and forcing lenders to write it off.

We'll just tell the lenders (presumably including mutual societies and the like?) to write off a load of their debt and give homeowners a break. That'll solve the problem! After all, money isn't real so we can ignore it when it suits. Mental.

Do you have insider knowledge of an announcement by Milliband tomorrow that he's going to abolish capitalism? [emoji38]

It started with his solution to a likely problem arising from rent controls, which he's now spun off into some debate in capitalism itself because he knows he was talking arse. I lol'd.

Laughable. You're barking (up the wrong tree).

Jesus. You've not though that through at all, have you? So homeowners find themselves out of pocket, so what shall we do? Oooh, yeah, let's introduce more legislation that forces lenders to write off some of those loans! What do you think the banking reaction to that would be? Sit by and do nothing and see their bottom lines take a hit, or insure themselves from further government raids by hiking up mortgage lending rates? Now what happens pap, now that mortgage lending rates have jumped to an unaffordable 10%+? Who pays the heaviest price now?

Define "good reason".

Nothing to stop tenants asking for contracts longer than 12 months, and nothing to stop landlords agreeing to it. In my experience it's quite rare for tenants to want to commit to anything more than 12 months.

No idea shurlock - the only reason you're allowed to be worried about the SNP is that you've fallen for right-wing propaganda. [emoji106]

Well well, another victim of the Tory propaganda machine: Gordon Brown warns over 'chaos and constitutional crisis' of voting SNP http://gu.com/p/47p56

What a tit.

This again betrays your lack of understanding of where the SNP support comes from. It's not "normal" voter support that we experience this side of the border. Yes, a lot of the SNP support comes from left-leaning "working class" Scots who feel that the centrist Labour party run by "the champagne socialist North London elite" no longer represent them, but also from huge number of Scots for whom independence is the number one issue and to whom the SNP are the only major party in Scotland who are committed to it. The SNP not voting with Ed's Labour government and leading to a vote of no confidence in that government is not going to have any major consequence in the eyes of that SNP support. The threat from the SNP to Labour is real - and that's all that counts when it comes to any confidence and supply negotiations. You can bet your bottom that the SNP won't be trying to look after the people of Hampshire.