I think that Wallace has played an absolute blinder and gone from a chinless wonder to someone that might win the next election…

Well played.

While the Hate Mail is making a good case for press regulation.

Not sure I like press regulation – perhaps it could apply only to the Mail. And the Express.

Blimey, actually agree with glupton here. Humanised him a lot.

It’s all good fun isn’t it. Haven’t smiled as much at something on the radio in ages as Alistair Campbell talking about Dacre yesterday. I want it to go on and on, but sadly I think it will have burned out by Monday.

They really are a bunch of **** at the Mail aren’t they? Sadly, while I think Miliband has played a blinder, I’m not sure it will make him any more palatable to people who decide how they’re going to vote based on what people look and sound like.

doesnt look like the mail will back down

they are a huge organisation, biggest news website in the world, massively popular newspaper

the twitterati may hate the daily fail but plenty of oldies still love them and their divisive right wing politics have plenty of very wealthy backers

kimbers – Member
doesnt look like the mail will back down

they are a huge organisation, biggest “news” website in the world, massively popular newspaper

FTFY

@kimber how do you define news website ? I find it hard to imagine that there’s not something in the US or China bigger ?

Funny how the Mail’s anti labour story has backfired. There’s another Parliamentary vote on press regulation soon, hopefully it goes through.

An eye opener for me was (according to Campbell)the £14 million pension pot that Dacre has apparently accrued.100 times higher than the average public sector pension pot and 200 times more than the average private sector pot.Good to see tax relief funded by us all goes to those who really need it.Makes the Mail’s rabid criticism of public sector pensions somewhat hypocritical.

,An eye opener for me was (according to Campbell)the £14 million pension pot that Dacre has apparently accrued.100 times higher than the average public sector pension pot and 200 times more than the average private sector pot.Good to see tax relief funded by us all goes to those who really need it.Makes the Mail’s rabid criticism of public sector pensions somewhat hypocritical.

And if Mr G brown Esq hadn’t been allowed free reign as chancellor Mr Dacre’s pension pot would have been limited to £125k

The Daily Wail, openly racist so you don’t have to be.

Nobby you forgot slyly anti-semitic too

Well played.

Well played in the short term but I’m not so sure long term.

The Mail won’t forget this …… he has humiliated them by highlighting just how nasty, dishonest, and vindictive, they really are. And to add to their humiliation senior Tory politicians have stepped forward to defend the honour of his deceased Marxist father.

This is far from over…..there is over 18 months until the next general election and precisely because the Mail is nasty, dishonest, and vindictive, Miliband can expect them to seek their revenge with an endless stream of character assassinating front page lies. He won’t be able to stop them.

Now that wouldn’t matter that much if had the stomach for a tooth and nail fight, but he hasn’t imo. Yes he was prepared to make a principle stand against their lies which claimed that his father hated Britain, but I doubt that he has the confidence to go much further than that.

Last month’s Labour Party Conference showed just how far Miliband was prepared to go. For example, the privatisation of Britain’s utilities has not been a success. The claim made pre-privatisation that privatisation would drive down prices for consumers has been exposed as a lie. Profits that once went to the Treasury, and helped reduce taxation, now go to companies some of which ironically are partly owned by French, German, and Chinese, state owned companies, none are British state owned companies.

Recognising that a principled stand needs to made against never-ending energy price increases which result from the false and artificial market of monopolies, with all its consequences for consumers, Miliband does just that and makes one. Unfortunately lacking the confidence to make the correct principled stand, because of the inevitable political furore it will cause, he makes the wrong one and announces a 20 month energy price freeze.

The obvious response to the failure of privatision is to bring the energy companies back into public ownership, British public ownership. The greedy profit-hungry energy companies even went so far as to strengthen the case for nationalisation by using bully-boy tactics and publicly threatening to hold the country to ransom with blackouts, if they couldn’t maintain their hugely generous level of profits during these austere times.

But Miliband showed conclusively that he’s no “Red Ed” preferring a limp slap rather than the knockout blow that a real Red Ed would have delivered.

So yes Miliband gave the Daily Mail a slap this week, but don’t expect a lot more, and expect the Daily Mail to maul him revengefully in the coming months.

On the plus side it’s almost certainly more than his brother would have done.

IMHO

On the other hand… How influential is the Mail, really? Obviously it’s hugely influential with enthusiastic Mail readers, but you’d think that’s a demographic more or less lost to Milliband anyway. It’s like worrying about how well you’re reviewing in Total **** Weekly.

On the other hand, the Mail by exposing themselves so openly as lowlifes are probably diminishing that influence- I can’t see them winning any new readers from it because the sort of person that it plays well with probably already reads it. But they’re certainly putting some people off.

(incidentally the title of Total **** Weekly is really misleading, it’s disappointingly hard to fap to)

On the other hand… How influential is the Mail, really? Obviously it’s hugely influential with enthusiastic Mail readers, but you’d think that’s a demographic more or less lost to Milliband anyway.

You’d think. But. Although it has an overtly Tory editorial only half of the dm’s readership vote conservative. The rest are lib and lab voters. 7 out 10 of the major papers have a right wing editorial which means a lot of people who vote to the left also read to the right.

(incidentally the title of Total **** Weekly is really misleading, it’s disappointingly hard to fap to)

Does it not have a sidebar of shame?

On the other hand… How influential is the Mail, really?

From personal experience, it seems depressingly influential and not only in the shires.

From various facebook posts by people I would have expected to have been centre/centre left, the more rabid the headlines the more they seem to lap it up and propagate the Mail’s hateful stories.

Ernie – as someone who works for one of the privatised utilities, but a part that remained heavily regulated, can I just point out that after allowing for inflation, our prices are 50% of what they were at privatisation, on safety our accident rates (though far better monitored now, or perhaps because of this) are a fifth of what they were at that time, we invest more in infrastructure, our reliability is better and our customer service is pretty good for a service industry.
Yes we can do better in all these things, but we haven’t done badly. Now areas that haven’t been as strongly regulated might not have shown the same benefits to the average consumer, but that’s a discussion about how you regulate a privatised industry, not whether privatisation itself is good or bad.

I read somewhere that about 25% of the Mail’s readership vote Labour, in the low 30% vote Tory and about 8-9% vote Lib Dem green and UKIP

Lots of people read the mail, a good percentage of them pay no or scant attention to it’s ranting editorials

My other half reads the Mail yet hasn’t voted all her life, does that help 🙂

While the Hate Mail is making a good case for press regulation.
Not sure I like press regulation – perhaps it could apply only to the Mail. And the Express.

Surely we can’t continue with the ridiculous situation where Paul Dacre is in charge of journalistic standards at the PCC.

The east coast mainline is a better example : better run, cheaper tickets, turning a profit since renationalisation, obviously the government want it back in private hands ASAP, where does Ed stand on that ? Imagine the mail would have a shitfit if it was kept nationalised

That’s the ultimate joke that dacre heads the pcc

IGM is right – privatisation of utilities has actually been pretty successful – we have energy at a lower cost than much of Europe (more so when you look at the real cost with VAT and green energy subsidy costs removed) but we also have good infrastructure and reliability of supply as well which quite a lot of Europe still doesn’t.

We also haven’t had to provide capital for investment (so tax savings for everyone) and the level of profit at 2 to 4% suggests the market / supply chain is reasonably efficient.

Labour are very good at trotting out the “privatisation of utilities has been a disaster” line and a lot of people are quite happy to repeat it but the facts just don’t support this – energy in much of Europe isn’t cheaper.

Kimbers – it’s not surprising it’s cheaper now as the government isn’t having to raise the £billion cost of the franchise through ticket proves that Alistair Darling and Co. Levied on the last franchise holder; National Express – whilst simultaneously criticising the cos of the service. Labour were spectacularly effective at imposing stealth taxes safe in the knowledge the public would blame higher costs on the provider and not the politicians – it’s the same with petrol where tax is now about 55% of the cost.

We also haven’t had to provide capital for investment (so tax savings for everyone)

Yet! The energy providers are asking for subsidy to ensure the lights don’t go out. Thames Water had a huge subsidy for the new sewer installation. Meanwhile lots of profit goes off-shore rather back into maintaining/improving the asset.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jNDsJq6az4[/video]

did anyone see this?

privatisation of utilities has actually been pretty successful – we have energy at a lower cost than much of Europe

It’s hardly surprising that UK energy costs are lower than much of Europe, much of Europe doesn’t have any gas or oil, it’s not necessarily because their energy suppliers aren’t privatised.

And it is very conveniently forgotten/ignored by those with an agenda that the UK is still more less self sufficient in oil, despite the fact that production has fallen sharply (the UK’s oil bonanza of the 1980/90s was criminally wasted on paying for unemployment)

Privatisation of the utilities has been a failure, it has not delivered lower energy costs to the domestic consumers which it was claimed it would. This graph is going the wrong way :

And it is nonsensical to claim that energy costs to UK consumers would be higher if the instead of “privatised” energy companies we had nationalised companies. French consumers with their state owned EDF do not pay more for their electricity than UK consumers, in fact they pay less.

Last year EDF increased their prices to UK consumers by twice as much as they increased French consumer prices. EDF made very healthy profits in the UK. EDF should be owned by the British people, not the French government. Sometimes I think the Tories really hate Britain – they are clearly deeply unpatriotic.

Labour are very good at trotting out the “privatisation of utilities has been a disaster” line

What’s the point of posting nonsense like that ? …..seriously ?

Every man and his dog knows full well that Labour has totally embraced the privatisation of the utilities, it has no desire whatsoever to reverse it. The Labour Party leadership is far too scared of the right-wing press/media to even hint that they would.

Unless of course you are talking about a Labour Party in another country/planet……are you ?

did anyone see this?

I did, it was beautiful. Nearly brought a tear to my eye. Seriously one of the highlights of my televisual life

I don’t think that graph says what you think it does Ernie – it’s showing you average household bills, so therefore doesn’t take account of raw cost, inflation, taxation and levies or increasing use.

Things like parliamentary briefing papers show quite clearly that gas and electricity prices dropped quite steadily after privatisation up to around 2007

The Mail won’t forget this …… he has humiliated them by highlighting just how nasty, dishonest, and vindictive, they really are. And to add to their humiliation senior Tory politicians have stepped forward to defend the honour of his deceased Marxist father.

the same could be said of the labour party… they may get back into power again, they may feel vindictive. Does anyone really believe that the news of the screws was the the only newspaper involved in phone hacking. Dacre could well find himself in the same position as Rebekah Brooks, well we can live in hope anyway.

I was going to pick up on this too:

Labour are very good at trotting out the “privatisation of utilities has been a disaster” line

WTF!?

I don’t think that graph says what you think it does Ernie – it’s showing you average household bills

It says exactly what I know it to be saying Z-11. Thatcher promised that privatisation would lead to lower household bills. It was a lie.

So French have lower electricity bills that we do. Why? Simple, the French government caps prices below the cost of production, And that’s a good thing?

Well, I will leave my views out of it and turn to the French energy regulator. Et la reponse….NON!

So now the French have authorisation to raise their prices by 5% pa for the next two years (versus current inflation of <1%).

France is a great example of balancing populism with the need to run economically viable energy companies. And
Populism isn’t working, but at least the French state is indirectly subsidising us for which we should all say a very big “merci”

I love it when right-wingers use the term “populism” to describe policies which enjoy wide public support.
It’s like “difficult choices” to describe crap ideas which have no public support 🙂

Ernie, that is a brilliant couple of sentences. To extend the electricity theme – very illuminating. Have a nice afternoon!

Hahahahahaha:

Still, what he said on QT is completely true. But then if you can’t attack the message…..

get a new log in?

Did i get the punchline right?
I am running a sweep on this
1. How long you last
2. How long the nice facade lasts
3. how long till you actually say something to someone who mentions your previous incarnations

Dont let me down fella i have faith in your indefatigability , your ability to ignore this post but none in your ability to play nice

Ps the author of the article that was anti semitic [ which is hardly the fault of someone else who works there and has no editorial control]and required an apology – can you guess which national newspaper she currently writes for …well can you …you will never get it. Imagine hiring someone with that reputation
step forward one Mr Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail
As for revealing information is this really a criticism of an investigative journalist 😯
There is some distance between revealing uncomfortable truths and claiming his dad was a traitor which is at best false and at worst libellous [ were he alive which the DM well knew]
You can have the other one that does make him look like a hypocritical tit.

Labrat to z11 to ninfan, ot I know but I right ?

Wrong

Cool glad to be .