Is Lidl's cake cheaper because they use carrots from Bulgaria which are sprayed with pesticide then harvested by illegal immigrant workers from Uzbekistan for 2p per day? The cakes then mass-produced in a dark corner of Romania in atrocious conditions, vacuum packed and then trucked across the whole of Europe to land on Lidl's shelves? Every step of the production process involving exploitation of some poor beings? I'm not saying Sainsbury's is any more ethically produced, just pointing out there is a thought process behind buying food (or at least there should be) which covers more than just the price.
The reason I made my post was because the outer packaging looked remarkably similiar. Also the internal pakaging was the exact same so I suspect the very similiar tasting cakes were sourced from the same supplier!! Don't know what Bulgaria, Romania and Uzbekistan have to do with a saving provided by a German company of £0.80 on the 'basic' price; ho hum!
Apologies Kenny, not picking specifically on your example. We need to be much more aware as consumers, not just looking at the price. This includes everything from milk, eggs, tomatoes, lettuce, bread through to jeans, sports goods and electronic equipment- everything we buy has the potential to be thr product of exploited labour and we as consumers need to do more to discern between quality products and crap. Otherwise we will all die of BSE (or some other such man-induced pestilence).
You want some cheap cake Ron? Go marks and spencers an hour before closing, pot luck what you get but sold for pennies at the? Days end -you may have the blue rinse squad as rivals though!
Actually, the schools and hospitals were built with £220bn of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) borrowing, the current value of which is around £300bn. I am sure your children and grandchildren will thank Gordon Brown for making sure that they pay for their education and their health care. In the best tradition of Labour economics, their government even managed to negotiate the worst possible terms with a handful of big private sector interests who worked in forty years of maintenance contracts at generous terms – taxpayers’ money direct to shareholders’ pockets. Well done Prudent Brown.
We will get none of the above. The only three games in town are Labour minority, Tory minority and Tory majority. The LibDems are going to be too small to make a majority coalition with either of the big two and they will not enter an alliance with anybody that is dealing with UKIP or the SNP. I think 4 is definitely impossible and 3 extremely improbable as the polling suggests UKIP will only get one or two seats. As Labour and the Liberal Democrats are both pro-Europe with virtually no conditions, they are the place to put your cross in the box if you want more of the failing socialist super state. All the extra doctors and nurses that everyone is promising will be coming from Spain and Portugal, so they need to keep them sweet at least. If you are a low wage, low skill worker, the EU is a disaster for you as uncontrolled immigration guarantees your circumstances will never improve.
I didn't think a Government could be formed with a minority. So someone will need to form a coalition or we just keep having re-elections until one party has a majority. How does that work? Will people just be given the choice of the 2 parties with the largest number of seats?
It's all pretty simple, just read the link. http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen...h-less-than-a-week-to-go-till-polling-da.html
****ing hell Cyc. So what's the answer? That sounds like Cameron could resign and leave Labour and SNP to form a Governmemt Should have read this before suggesting my banker bet. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen
On a less serious point did anyone see the photos of Eddie Izzard campaigning with labour in Glasgow today? I am sure I was not alone in thinking he looked a lot more fetching than Nicola Salmond.
According to Labour’s Luciana Berger on Daily Politics, the Tories are going to privatise the NHS. Andrew Neil pointed out that before the 1992 election Labour’s Robin Cook said that John Major was going to privatise the NHS. Now which party was in power when around four per cent of the NHS work was tendered to the private sector? Five years later it is about six per cent after the Coalition. Since they are all promising billions in extra spending on the NHS that they are going to achieve through closing tax avoidance loopholes, private health will be the only way to go because no government of any party has successfully done anything about tax avoidance in my lifetime. During this election campaign, the best comedy programme on television has been Daily Politics: Candidates of all parties not answering the questions and making crackpot allegations about opponents. You could not write this stuff... Miliband has his pledges chiselled in stone but nobody said whether he collected them from Nicola Sturgeon. So toxic is Miliband to the Labour brand that their next Election Broadcast is fronted by Steve Coogan. What a laugh!
There have been some appalling decisions made throughout the Labour party in the last few years but the guy who put his hand up at the union meeting and said ' how about we support his brother Ed instead' has a lot to answer for. The biggest obstacle to anyone trying to rationalise voting Labour is that the role of PM demands leadership, yet when you look at Ed Milliband there are zero qualities associated with leadership. He is intelligent and would make a decent cabinet minister but he is not a leader. This has not just appeared however it's clear upon first hearing him speak and watching him interact and the Union big wigs who secured his selection against the majority of other votes must accept responsibility. The Tories are there for the taking and yet are unlikely to get taken because Labour fired a blank instead of a bullet.
I had heard that there were scuffles in Glasgow at the Labour rally. I wonder if Eddie said something too risqué? Once the SNP are running Glasgow, there will only be two groups of people with jobs: Job Centre staff and the guy who has to take the traffic cone off Wellington’s head every morning. That is progressive politics for you...
I know it says that I am an Economist somewhere around here but I am not really. It does occur to me that whilst a few folks here will know how to work out their bets, they might not have a clue about some of the terms being bandied about by the various liars looking for election; so here goes: Budget Deficit (aka Public Sector Net Borrowing, PSNB) This is the amount of money that the government has to borrow annually to make up the shortfall between what they want to spend and the amount of money that comes in from tax receipts and sales of assets. In 2012/13 this was £115bn, which was 7.4 per cent of GDP. Primary Budget Balance This is the Budget Deficit plus the money spent on interest repayments on existing Debt. Currently interest repayments represent the fourth largest annual outlay after social security, health and education. Primary Budget Deficit This is the level of the Deficit but not including money spent on interest repayments. Structural Deficit This is the level of the Deficit when the economy is at full employment. Trade Deficit This is when the value of Imports exceeds the value of Exports. National Debt (aka Public Sector Debt) This is the accumulated amount of money that the government owes over a period of years. This money is owed to Private Sector, Overseas and Banking owners of UK gilts (bonds sold to raise money). In December 2014, this was £1,483.3bn, which was 80.9 per cent of GDP. Currently a quarter of the UK National Debt is owned by the Bank Of England thanks to Quantitative Easing. It is argued that the National Debt should include those debts such as pension contributions and Private Finance Initiative spending that are off balance sheet but still have to be paid. Total UK Debt This is the National Debt plus Private Debt, which is Household Debt, Business Sector Debt and Financial Sector Debt. This stands at over 500 per cent of GDP. Percentage of GDP This is the preferred way of measuring Debt or Deficit because this is relative, irrespective of the value of the currency or the size of the numbers. If the total real Debt increases but GDP increases at a faster rate then the ratio falls. After World War II, the UK National Debt was over 200% of GDP. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, there were very high tax rates generating extra tax revenues. The post War invention of the NHS and Welfare State plus European rebuilding led to domestic economic growth (triggering rises in incomes) and full employment (indeed immigration in the 1950s and 1960s to fill a labour/skill shortage). In the 1970s economic growth slowed as the ‘golden period’ of economic expansion ran out of steam and there was industrial strife. Now as global growth slows, especially in what we have called the emerging economies, prospects for further reliance on high taxes from high employment to reduce the National Debt do not look promising.
A history lesson will follow, Ron. The first two Labour governments were minorities where Ramsay MacDonald was backed by Liberal votes on an ad hoc basis (no coalition). Surely you remember the 1977 “Lib-Lab Pact” when James Callaghan had lost his majority because of a bye-election defeat and had to rely on David Steel’s Liberals to avoid a vote of no confidence? After that fell apart, Labour survived as a minority until 1979.
I don't remember what happened last week QM . I did see something to that effect in the article Cyc linked to but I didn't take it in. So what do you think is the most likely outcome?
