Torres

Maybe this will help you sleep at night then. From today's Guardian:

Nothing wrong with giving people in council houses that chance to buy their own homes, assuming you believe that homeownership is a good thing. It only falls down if you don't build new social housing to replace that sold off.

Cue employers making sure that none of their employees on zero hour contracts get "regular hours for more than 12 weeks", thus making things worse, not better.

Wat r these commets mean lol Then you stop the abuse, you don't gum up the labour market by outlawing zero hour contracts entirely. Some unscrupulous employers will use anything they can to exploit their workers and have done since the beginning of time - if they're not doing it by sharp practices in relation to zero hour contracts, they'll do it in another way....

Yeah, pesky jobs.

Nice to see that Factless Allen was on the ball and breaking this news today. Neil, you have one job.....

Not if, when. Seriously, what? If you know you're not going to make the play-offs, why wait? And, from the comments section on the story: Oh, and:

Playing at left back?

Don't forget the 10 point end of season bonus they get for being the bestest.

Yes, it counts. It might not change the result, but it counts. The idea that one individual's vote should always change a result is an absurdity. Pretty sure that a middle-aged woman needing to see a cancer specialist on the NHS is quite serious. No, his point was that we shouldn't make decisions based on the majority wish, because then the minority lose out. As I said, that's absurd. You can LOL all you like, but if the estimated 1million young people who are not even registered to vote got off their arses and actually did vote, the mainstream politicians who are apparently failing them so would certainly sit up and take notice. Perhaps then we'd see more policies that appealed to the under-25s rather than so many which appear to appeal to the over 65s. If even a quarter of the 39% of eligible adults who didn't vote in the last GE did this time around, there'd be a reaction. I'll make it clear that I have no numbers to back this one up, but I've a pretty strong hunch that if you surveyed a decent selection of people who smashed stuff to up "because they didn't have a voice" you'd find that a very unhealthy percentage of them didn't vote in 2010.

Oh, so the minority should hold sway?

All you have to do to get yourself a voice is register to vote and then use it.

Wah wah wah, the process is broken, let's smash other people's stuff up. Pathetic.

Yes, that one.

Re-engage with the democratic process. It's really not difficult.

Which was an even more retarded policy, effectively allowing the energy companies to raise their prices to at or just below the cap, justify their prices with the line "we're not breaching the cap" and killing the limited competition there is in the market. It beggars belief

Can't wait to see the Labour campaign pick this one up and run with it pap, as I'm sure they will. Vote Tory, Get Riots I can see the billboards now

No, the story is about utterly failing to properly fix the public finances when it should have been done.

Yes pap, definitely directly attributable to the last government. In little over a year they'd turned the police into a trigger happy bunch of racists and stoked tensions so high that rioting was inevitable. We can all be sure this certainly wouldn't have happened if Brown had won in 2010, and that poor Croydon furniture store wouldn't have suffered a scratch. Oh yes. Give us strength or spare us this tosh.

Except that the Labour government made absolutely no provision for the drop in taxation revenue that any basic understanding of the economic cycle will tell you is inevitable, because the all-seeing Chancellor had decreed that the era of boom and bust was over. Indeed, he'd committed the country to lengthy and hugely expensive PFI contracts and turned country into a public spending junkie seemingly believing that the money would always be there to spend because the era of boom and bust was over. The government convinced households and encouraged them that they really should be taking advantage of all the cheap credit available because perpetual growth really was possible and that the era of boom and bust was over. I don't blame the last government for causing the crisis, but it's sure as hell their fault that it was as painful as it was for both the man on the street's wallet and the public purse. Prudent, my arse. The man was a disaster.

That may well depend on who any coalition partners are and who they would rather work with as Conservative leader. Substitute names and parties where appropriate and marked with * but Cameron wouldn't get kicked out in favour of May* if Clegg* refused to work with anyone but Cameron or Osborne*. Would those backbench malcontents back Boris* over Cameron if they felt that Cameron kept Farage* in check better than Boris* would? Any succession plots and races would be incredibly complex.

If he can build a workable coalition, yes. Otherwise, not a hope.

They haven't, because people just don't believe Ed or believe in Ed. His caricature of a nice but slightly pathetic chap will hurt him here. Given the growing perception of Sturgeon (on both sides of the border) as a strong-willed and highly capable politician there is a sense that a) should they need to, Labour will form some sort of coalition with the SNP, because Ed is Ed, and b) that Sturgeon will be too powerful for Ed, because Ed is Ed, and get far more from the bargain than she's really entitled to. Sturgeon says that no Trident in Scotland is a definite, but anyone who followed the independence campaign will know that in reality the SNP would back down if they could extract the right concessions - concessions which would be hugely costly to Westminster and the English. That's what this is really about. Vote Labour, get anti-English SNP nutters. I imagine the Tories are working on a snappier slogan.

As I said, Trident isn't the real issue, the electorate on the whole don't care about Trident, but it's been weaponised (hoho) to get at the real point of SNP influence over Milliband.