General Election 2019 - AND IT’S LIVE!

[Baxter Parp]

SNP have been at the helm, controlling the Council for 12 years, since before the tram contract was awarded. But the mess was absolutely nowt to do with them. Aye, okay then. A big boy did it and ran away. Big, bad Labour/Lib Dem. 
Now, much as it gratifies me to be educating you and, much as you benefit from that education Parps, this is all a bit parochial and it's boring the tits off everybody else. So just suck it up and let's say no more on the matter.
Have a nice day.

Are you mental? How can 12 councillors control a 58 seat council? The SNP have never had a majority in Edinburgh. f**k this, you're going on ignore, dimwit.

[Pet Jeden]

7 minutes ago, Baxter Parp said:

2 hours ago, Pet Jeden said:

SNP have been at the helm, controlling the Council for 12 years, since before the tram contract was awarded. But the mess was absolutely nowt to do with them. Aye, okay then. A big boy did it and ran away. Big, bad Labour/Lib Dem. 
Now, much as it gratifies me to be educating you and, much as you benefit from that education Parps, this is all a bit parochial and it's boring the tits off everybody else. So just suck it up and let's say no more on the matter.
Have a nice day.

Are you mental? How can 12 councillors control a 58 seat council? The SNP have never had a majority in Edinburgh. f**k this, you're going on ignore, dimwit.

Sigh.

Same way 45 SNP MPs in a coalition with Labour intend to control a 650 seat parliament. Now, stop embarrassing yourself. Last word.

[tirso]

11 minutes ago, Pet Jeden said:

Sigh.

Same way 45 SNP MPs in a coalition with Labour intend to control a 650 seat parliament. Now, stop embarrassing yourself. Last word.

even if that is true, your description of "at the helm" is a bit misleading surely.  a lot more too it than that when you factor in the parliament context.

that said i think political parties are not great at local level.

  

[Kyle]

20 minutes ago, Pet Jeden said:

Sigh.

Same way 45 SNP MPs in a coalition with Labour intend to control a 650 seat parliament. Now, stop embarrassing yourself. Last word.

The people that say that are clearly wrong, as are those who say a party with 12 out of 58 seats in a council are 'at the helm'.

 

[Ross.]

Recent polls giving me the fear but I am hoping that the huge number of recently registered voters will help swing it in unexpected ways. A Labour/SNP coalition would be delightful, albeit very unlikely.

[John Lambies Doos]

Pat Jeden having a mare on this thread

[jamamafegan]

Pat Jeden having a mare

FTFY

[Bonksy+HisChristianParade]

Anyone got access to this article? Behind a paywall and am I f**k giving the Telegraph any money.

Likely to provide more evidence that Boris is ideologically opposed to the NHS and is a snivelling lying c**t.

[NotThePars]

Recent polls giving me the fear but I am hoping that the huge number of recently registered voters will help swing it in unexpected ways. A Labour/SNP coalition would be delightful, albeit very unlikely.

Bizarrely, despite my hangover, I’m full of optimism about the election. Looking forward to normal service resuming in a few hours.

[Londonwell]

1 minute ago, NotThePars said:

 

Bizarrely, despite my hangover, I’m full of optimism about the election. Looking forward to normal service resuming in a few hours.

 

You’re still drunk.

[Ross.]

1 minute ago, NotThePars said:

Bizarrely, despite my hangover, I’m full of optimism about the election. Looking forward to normal service resuming in a few hours.

I should probably drink more. That will solve my problem.

[welshbairn]

11 minutes ago, Bonksy+HisChristianParade said:

Anyone got access to this article? Behind a paywall and am I f**k giving the Telegraph any money.

Likely to provide more evidence that Boris is ideologically opposed to the NHS and is a snivelling lying c**t.

Not that revealing I'm afraid.

Quote

I snap, crackle and pop at this view of the NHS
BORIS JOHNSON

A general sign for an Accident and Emergency department at a National Health Service (NHS) hospital
The people who are paying more in their taxes for this universal service, are the people who find that their operations are cancelled at the last minute.
It is a feature of my psychology (and perhaps yours, too) that I never really lose my rag in political arguments, except when confronted by unreasonableness on the part of those I know and love. At which point I blow a gasket. So it fell that the other day I was sitting at some dinner party next to the wife of an old friend, and she started in on the classic posh-liberal routine, about why only the Labour Party can really be trusted with the NHS. "What you Tories don't understand," she said, as I glowered at my plate, "is the role the health service plays in bringing us all TOGETHER.

"It unites the NATION. I was sitting in a ward the other day, after having some operation done, and thinking how MAAHVELLOUS it was to be among all these people, from all walks of life, and all races, and I realised we were all in a sense equal. I mean, I don't think I ever feel so close to the rest of society as I do in a hospital." Really? I said. Not even on the beach?

"Not the kind of beaches I go to," she tinkled; and on she went, explaining how maahvellous it was that the duke and dustman were treated alike in our glorious New Jerusalem, watching the same TV, eating the same spotted dick, attended by the same starch-bosomed nurses. It was a wonderful system, she said, and to prove her point she revealed her own recent miracle experience.

She had been sitting at another dinner party, she said, and there had been this brilliant consultant dermatologist there. She told him of her affliction. Though physically charming in every respect, she disclosed that she was troubled by a Rice Krispie on her back. The dermatologist could not have been more attentive. "Don't you worry," he told her, and to cut a long story short this noble physician somehow wangled matters so that she was able to go and see him the following morning. She had barely arrived in his consulting rooms when he whipped out his scalpel, and the Rice Krispie was gone before you could say snap, crackle and pop. "I mean," said my friend triumphantly, "wasn't that just fantastic? And it was all free! That's what you Tories don't understand about the NHS. That's why people in this country love it as it is." And at this point - even-tempered chap though I like to think I am - I started to grit my teeth and breathe a little stertorously.

Every week, like all MPs, I get miserable and dejected letters from patients, and the relatives of patients, who have suffered in the system my friend extolled. It is a fact that there are still 980,600 people still on NHS waiting lists, and some delays are actually going up. In 1998, 28 per cent of patients had to wait longer than four weeks to begin radical radiotherapy. By 2002, that proportion had increased to 81 per cent. If we had the kind of success in treating cancer that they have in other European countries, it is estimated that we would save 25,000 lives per year; and so on and so on. And yet this is the system, designed in 1948, which my well-meaning friend believes is unimprovable.

Consider again her own experience, and its fundamentally soviet corruption. Here she is, a member of the middle-class nomenklatura, the kind of person who might well find herself sitting next to a top dermatologist at a dinner party. Of course she is able, by her charm, to persuade him to juggle his appointments book for her; and, of course, all-powerful fellow that he is, the excellent consultant is happy to oblige. The Rice Krispie is removed; she leaves hospital feeling uniformly flawless, and somehow deluding herself that this service is universal, when in reality her experience has been wholly exceptional.

There are hundreds of thousands of people waiting for life-saving operations, who are never going to meet their consultant radiologists or cardiologists at dinner parties, and who have no choice but to take whatever the NHS provides, whenever it gets round to providing it. These are the people who are paying more and more in their taxes for this "unimprovable" universal service, and who find that their operations are cancelled at the last minute, because the surgeon is too busy; and all the while the affluent liberal middle classes use their clout and their contacts to get the best from the system, and then feel all gooey and warm inside because they have participated in the socialising marvel of free healthcare.

My friend may think her experience marvellous, but I think it outrageous, and for what it is worth it is also unjust, surely, that the taxpayer is coughing up for Rice Krispie removal, the kind of cosmetic operation that in France or Germany would almost certainly be covered by insurance. What my friend fails to understand is that she has a choice in healthcare, where millions have none; and what the Tories want to do is extend that choice. Instead of treating patients like serfs and dolts, why not give them the same prerogatives, the same influence, as my friend who goes to dinner parties?

Why not let people choose when and where they will be seen, rather than being mucked around by the bureaucrats? I liked it yesterday in the Commons when Blair and Howard laid into each other about health; or at least I liked it in the sense that Howard is absolutely right to be angry. Labour believe they have a monopoly on virtue and on caring and that they somehow have an ideological freehold upon the NHS. On the contrary: they are so deeply wedded to their union-based model that there is no realistic hope of reform under this government. Many Labour MPs already feel spiritually in opposition, sundered from the leadership by the Iraq war. It is getting on for time they were put out of their misery, and put into formal opposition as well.

 

[Bonksy+HisChristianParade]

1 minute ago, welshbairn said:

Not that revealing I'm afraid.

 

Yeah slightly misrepresented in that tweet. 

[Pet Jeden]

1 hour ago, tirso said:

even if that is true, your description of "at the helm" is a bit misleading surely.  a lot more too it than that when you factor in the parliament context.

that said i think political parties are not great at local level.

  

Not a bit of it. Incontrovertible proof...

[beefybake]

1 hour ago, Ross. said:

Recent polls giving me the fear but I am hoping that the huge number of recently registered voters will help swing it in unexpected ways. A Labour/SNP coalition would be delightful, albeit very unlikely.

At a guess, I'd say the vast majority of those new voters have not been accessed by the pollsters.

[Big Fifer]

Rumours now swirling that the Tories have offered Boris for an interview on Marr on Sunday instead of with Neil. 

[Mark Connolly]

2 minutes ago, Big Fifer said:

Rumours now swirling that the Tories have offered Boris for an interview on Marr on Sunday instead of with Neil. 

They should agree, then have Neil attack Marr backstage with a chair and head out himself.

[Stellaboz]

Any Tories on here like to try and shape this into a positive? The fact that your fabulous leader is shiting it?

[Sir Tarmo Kink]

Any Tories on here like to try and shape this into a positive? The fact that your fabulous leader is shiting it?

He’s busy delivering the vote of the public

[George Parr]

Just now, Stellaboz said:

Any Tories on here like to try and shape this into a positive? The fact that your fabulous leader is shiting it?

The positive for the Tories is that the public are far more likely to recall Corbyn getting his arse handed to him than the fact Al Johnson shat it.