THE BRITISH THREAD II

The second-last ship out was the Polish barque Dar Mlodziezy which we call Darn ma Jersey, followed by Christian Radich ...

-"Well you haven't got a housing problem, have you, you've got a family planning problem, or a self-restraint problem"

McTag wrote:

The second-last ship out was the Polish barque Dar Mlodziezy which we call Darn ma Jersey, followed by Christian Radich ...

Isn't the Dar Mlodzienzy a full rigged ship like the Christian Radich?

Mac quoted-

Quote:

-"Well you haven't got a housing problem, have you, you've got a family planning problem, or a self-restraint problem"

Maybe the lass has those problems but what about the five kids?

Is Ms Abbott a fascist? Did the audience not cringe Mac?

Private life
Diane Abbott married David Thompson, an architect from Ghana, in 1991 and divorced in 1993; she has one son from that marriage. Abbott chose as her son's godfather Jonathan Aitken, who had been her boss at TV-am and subsequently her 'pair' in divisions in the house. Her decision to send her son to the private £10,000 a year City of London School, which she herself described as "indefensible", caused controversy and was seen by many as hypocritical not least because she had previously criticised Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for sending their children to selective state schools. Fellow Labour MP Brian Sedgemore condemned Abbott for the "hurt and harm she had caused to local people in Hackney" who didn't have the means to make a similar choice. Sedgmore criticised the impact such a decision had on parents, children and teachers in the constituency and concluded that Abbott would "never be taken seriously again".


Controversies

Allegation of racism against white nurses
In 1996 Abbott was accused of racism when she suggested that "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" in her local hospital in West London were unsuitable as nurses because they "may never have met a black person before". Conservative MP Ian Bruce stated that he had "never heard such racist rubbish from a Member of Parliament in recent years". Moreover, Abbott was also accused of ignorance, as most Finnish people are neither blonde nor blue eyed; it also later emerged that one of the Finnish nurses was in fact black. Abbott apologised for her remarks.


Failure to declare earnings
In 2004 following a complaint made by Andrew Rosindell MP, Abbott was investigated by the Committee on Standards and Privileges regarding payment she had received from the BBC. They found she had failed to declare earnings £17,300 on the Register of Members Interests which had been received for appearances on the television programme "This Week". The Committee upheld the complaint and forced Abbott to apologise to the House.

I was driving down the M6 today, by down I mean going south, and I suddenly saw an overhead gantry light up. When I got nearer I could see it read "M6 CLOSED Junc 10 to 12 A"

It was of little interest to me as I was just taking a short-cut, the rat run the local rag calls short-cuts, but it struck me that a Scottish truck driver with n thousand bottles of whisky bound for the continent and booked on the ferry at 22.00 hrs might ponder the message.

What would you have done Mac given that you were 90 minutes from the incident, busting for a piss and the tacho had 2 hours to go.

Do you think they scour A2K for ideas? First A2K, tomorrow the world.

Are we the butterfly's wings?

Stone me I've just cut the grass, weeded the borders, cut the hedge....

I'm sweating like a Mathos.

It's very close today, feels like we might have thunderstorms, although that's not the forecast.

Just to counterpoint... it was minus 4 this morning and there is 2 meters of snow on the hill.

dadpad wrote:

Just to counterpoint... it was minus 4 this morning and there is 2 meters of snow on the hill.

Refreshing ...




... 24° now (10:00h)

I can see that from my front window Walter.... well I could if I had a high powered telescope.

A painter and decorator from Ceredigion says he is "dumbfounded" after being slapped with a £30 fine for smoking a cigarette in his own van.

Gordon Williams says he had popped to the shops earlier this month, when he was pulled over by council officials.

"I was told that because my van is my place of work I had broken the smoking laws," he said.

A council spokesman said Mr Williams had acknowledged the offence and elected to pay the fixed penalty.

"I am dumbfounded - the van is only insured for private use and to get me to and from work," added Mr Williams, from Llanafan, near Aberystwyth.

"It not my place of work - I decorate houses not vans."

The grandfather decried the on-the-spot penalty as the "Big Brother state going too far".