Wes Tender

Were your ears burning?

Yes, Opal trail very nice. We had three days on the Pas De Calais in November and liked it a lot. The coast south of Le Touquet is lovely, with miles of sandy beaches. Le Touquet itself is very ritzy. There is a succession of beach resorts all the way down to the the Somme estuary. We stayed one night at Berck Plage and another at St Omer. That itself is a lovely old medieval town just half an hour from Calais. A cheap holiday can be had by taking the car across from Calais for about £80/£100 and then staying in 2* hotels like the budget version of Ibis, which are clean and modern, if a little basic. On the plus side, some lovely scenery and beaches, plenty to do in the resorts and inland, duty frees and top up in the hypermarkets on booze and local produce.

I'll assume that as you're a teacher, the inability to spell "shiny" correctly must have been a typo. HTH

What is pathetic is your two word dismissive response to somebody else's opinion. I understand that you're a teacher/lecturer and it might be that as a result you have some over-inflated opinion of what a clever person you are, but responding to others' opinions in this manner hardly demonstrates much intellectual capacity. How about you trying to respond to the points OldNick made and the questions he asked? Then, even if other posters disagreed with your views as you do with OldNick's at least they would have some degree of respect for you.

So Sturgeon refusing to form an alliance with Milliband and vice versa doesn't mean that there will have to be any horse trading between the two parties if they allied themselves together in order the keep out the Conservatives? That's just naive to think that. Sturgeon having labelled Milliband's Labour as Labour Lite indicates that if they are to support them, it will be on the basis that the SNP (and indeed Plaid Cymru and maybe the Greens if they get any seats), will put pressure on them to be more dogmatic in pursuit of more left-wing policies. If Labour did not have their support on some issues, then it would be possible that they would be outvoted where the Conservatives might be supported by the other parties. But then again, the other interesting scenario will be whether the SNP vote with Labour on solely English matters, raising anger at the West Lothian question. But then they would probably want that, as the growing English nationalism that would result would help them in their aims of an independent Scotland.

Why is being a so-called blue nose a bit dodgy on a football forum? I'd like to hear your reasoning. And you shouldn't refer back in history to the roots of the Conservative & Unionist Party in order to draw any conclusions as to how you perceive them now. CB Fry has castigated me severely for daring to reflect on what Labour was like 30/40 years ago, so you had better watch out for his scolding, fair and even-handed as he always is. And excuse me for not understanding how the nasty right is any worse than the nasty left, especially the squeeze them until the pips squeak brigade.

aintforever: You're going to exclude yourself from that, naturally.

I didn't realise that there were stipulations as to who could comment on this part of the forum and which party they should support.

Cameron makes these accusations about Balls-up in his constituency seat. Apparently Balls-up only has a majority of 1100, so definitely one to target.

And the counter-argument is that despite the revenue that the exchequer gets from taxation on cigarettes, there are costs borne by the NHS in treating smoking-related diseases and lost productivity in the work-place caused by smoking. So although at the time of this article, smoking cost the NHS less than the amount that taxation on smoking generated, taking other factors into account makes the situation much more difficult to judge. I also suspect that numbers of smokers has declined since that article, as many have subsequently switched to E-fags. https://fullfact.org/factchecks/does_smoking_cost_as_much_as_it_makes_for_the_treasury-29288

People seem to have forgotten that before food banks, there were soup kitchens.

The power that our governments have to affect anything is over-estimated? By you, maybe. By increasing taxation to a level where it is deemed to be excessive for businesses or individuals so that they either find it attractive to try and avoid paying it, or relocate elsewhere in the World doesn't seem a minor result of government policies to me.

When Labour was in power, increased poverty levels were all down to the nasty banks and the global recession. Now that the Tories/Lib Dems are in power, everything is their fault. Also, as a ruse to emphasise the problem, Pap shows a map swathed in green to show that most of the country is starving, instead of one that would more reasonably show dots in the places where there are food banks.

Firstly I challenge the assertion that an alliance of Labour, the SNP, Lib Dems and Greens could be called balanced, especially in the case of the SNP, whose aim is to break up the UK. Secondly, I also challenge your assertion that the last coalition government did not have the support of the people. As the two parties gained the majority of votes, that is patently nonsense.

I haven't been educated on this thread regarding the RTB scheme, as I had enough of a grounding in it to begin with and have found out nothing particularly new, least of all that the scheme was open to some degree of abuse. Pretty well every scheme involving incentives, benefits and reductions is going to be open to abuse. But despite your research into the abuse, you have been unable to put any sort of percentage figure on it at all. I applaud the consistency of your debating style where you claim some degree of expertise and then when somebody calls you on it, you deride the intelligence of your questioners and throw a few insults in their direction. Andrew Neil would have a field day with you, claiming that you had some factual evidence gained through research and then being unable to quantify it.

Pardon me, but it was you who claimed that you had done the research, whereas I was merely making assumptions that the percentage of properties bought by unscrupulous landlords deliberately targeting RTB owners was probably small compared to the other normal reasons why those properties were then resold and how landlords came to own 30% of former council properties. What is a sh*te debating tactic is claiming that you have done the research and then back-tracking when quizzed on it. As you say though, it is scandalous that Westminster Council allowed people on Housing Benefits to purchase their properties without making sufficient enquiries as to how they came upon the money to buy them. Apparently they claimed it was from an overseas gift which was difficult to check, but then it should have been stipulated that if the property was to be sold three years later, all of the discount should have been repaid. It is claimed now that any requests to buy from occupants on Housing Benefits will be rigorously checked, but the horse has already bolted on many of those properties.

. So having done the research, you'll be able to point me in the direction of a link to the site that can provide the figures to show how many of these properties are owned by private landlords who have aggresively targeted new owners of former council properties and what percentage of them have come into the hands of landlords because of the reasons I outlined, i.e. sales because of movement of employment, upscaling property, going into care or death, etc. Having seen your response to Torres, I see that you don't know A cursory search revealed a much more alarming situation in my opinion, whereby an individual would rent a property and then sub-let it on, converting lounges and dining rooms into extra bedrooms so that he made a substantial profit beyond the original rent paid. I would have thought that this would have been disallowed by the original rental agreement, but nevertheless it seems to be something quite widespread.

Of course I suspected that you would not have turfed your mother out on the street, and you show your caring side by indicating that she could continue to live in her former residence and that in true Thatcher style, you would then hand it down to your children and wealth would thus cascade down through the generations, your children having a good start to their adult lives with a foot on the housing ladder. Albeit that the likelihood would be that when you pop your clogs, your estate comprising this property and your own home would together probably attract Inheritance Tax. But going back to that last line of yours, now we have established that it only applies to unscrupulous landlords who will hoover up these properties on the cheap to then impose hefty rents on their tenants, let's look a bit more closely at it. I'm presuming that unless they are less caring than you, that they are not buying these properties off their relatives and then turfing them out. That being the case, they are finding tenants of Council/Housing Association properties and pursuading them to either allow that unscrupulous person to buy the property on their behalf with an agreement that it will be transferred into their name after three years, (unlikely) or else the tenant would have bought it themselves and then been pursuaded to sell it to this individual at a profit. Either way, the question is begged where will that tenant then live? They could buy another property with the proceeds, but as they had bought their own property on the cheap, they are unlikely to get anything comparable at the same price. Then having lived at that property for some years in order to be able to buy it, they would also have to face moving elsewhere. If renting, then their rent would likely be considerably higher than they were paying previously, and probably even more than their mortgage to buy would have been. In short, it doesn't stack up. I suspect that in the one third of cases where these former Council properties have ended up in the hands of private landlords, the majority have been because the owners have sold them for no more sinister reason than that they have moved elsewhere, moved up the property ladder, or died/gone into a nursing home, etc. At that point, these landlords might purchase those properties, not many at all via the route that you have outlined.

His example has been proven to be nonsense and he's wriggling and having to resort to name-calling in a vain effort to try and justify his position.

There you are, as obtuse and obfusticating as usual in order to avoid answering the question. Have a look at the last line you wrote. Now please do answer my question regarding what would become of your mother under the scenario whereby you followed the hypothetical course that you have outlined above and rented out or sold her property. Unless you're going to answer the question of what would become of her under that scenario, then that last line is totally superfluous to your argument. So it appears that it is you who is telling porkies.

I said that if you went through with your plan to buy your mother's house, wait three years, then transfer the deeds into your name, sell the property and trouser the profit, that it would raise the question as to where your mother would then live. Unless you can present me with a third solution, it seems plain that she would either have to find some other accomodation, or to live with you or another family member. If she went to live elsewhere, she would be paying rent, wouldn't she? So instead of huffing and puffing, do let us know what your solution to your mother's accomodation would be, and really what the point was in you raising this ruse of buying her Council property. Because as it stands, it is complete and utter nonsense.

But you used your mother as an example, a component of your argument and your response shows that you got ratty as a result, mush.

So the scenario that you painted about buying your mother's council house and selling it at a profit was just so much guff. You could do it but wouldn't. But we have to be concerned about all the other people who would be unfeeling enough to do that, people who don't care for their parents, is that it? And you feel entitled to be miffed at this angle of attack, but perfectly fine about levelling something similar against Batman's family. Hypocrite.

I'm surprised that nobody has picked up on what Pap would do with his own mother when he had given the money to her to buy her property and then taken over the deeds after three years. He insinuates that he could then sell the property and trouser the profit gained by the discounted purchase price, so either she's out on the street, or living with Pap.

That isn't difficult.