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By Bellenden Belle · Posted
Hello! I would be keen to hear from parents of secondary-school age in state schools of the cost of school trips overseas. Particularly interested in Kingsdale and Charter but all examples welcome. many thanks! -
Or the government have it wrong. Certainly picking a fight with farmers, the very definition of working people, is probably not going to end well. The problem here is that Labour hung their hat on not taxing "working people" which was clearly the output of some awful focus group and clearly not the term they wanted to use. They failed to properly qualify what a working person is and it is now coming back to haunt them because the very definition of a working person is anyone who is, well, working and that covers a whole gamut of people and salaries. Don't pick a fight with farmers if you have stated you aren't going after working people because public opinion will be against you. Farmers are the backbone of any country and work so hard and yes, there are some that are incredibly well off but the majority are not and farming is a trade that gets handed down through the generations. And farmers will make their case very public in ways other groups won't. Labour's communication has been awful but they got a free pass before the election because everyone was so focused on how awful the Tories were. But now they are in power and they are tripping themselves up because in leadership you need more than soundbites. The "Son of a Toolmaker" is the type of thing that haunts politicians until the end of their career. Clearly someone decided to detach Keir from his grammar school, university (including Oxford), legal career, knight of the realm background. His face when everyone laughed when he mentioned it during one of the pre-election debates was a picture. He is the son of a toolmaker but you look a bit silly when people then say yes but your dad ran a tool-making company... Coming into power on a ticket of "look how they have been behaving" and then behaving in many ways the Tories were has been a disaster for politicians of all parties. The clothing funding and access to no.10 was just a nightmare for them and in these days where today's newspaper is no longer tomorrow's chip paper the comments made about Trump (which I am sure most people can agree with) are just embarrassing. Winter Fuel Tax has been a disaster. Yes, there are many pensioners who don't need it but those aren't going to be the ones talking to the media about how awful the winter is going to be and people only remember those shouting the loudest. The budget was an interesting one. I was watching Theo Pathitis on TV and he had swung from the Tories to Labour ahead of the election and was talking about the impact of the Employer NI and you could tell that he was very carefully choosing his words as he knew how hard this was going to be on business and what the implications are but clearly didn't want to be left with egg on his face as he was telling everyone to vote Labour ahead of the election. Labour were, understandably, happy to right the massive wave of Tory discontent and pre-election all of the world's ills were down to the Tories. The first speech Starmer gave after winning spoke nothing about the previous government but everything about global challenges that were going to make it tough. The challenge for Labour is they convinced people that every problem was down to the Tories and that removing them would solve everything but things are not as straight forward as that. I senses things changing when they announced the 22bn blackhole and many people said...but 9bn of that are based on decisions you made in relation to public sector pay rises. Labour are finding out, to their cost, that being in opposition is easy. Being in power is not. -
Adsl over copper is not obsolete, these are lines that are fed on exchange only and are still being installed now and will be for foreseeable, they are being changed to sotap which is basically no dial tone and will be voice over internet
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