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Bots I don’t particularly like either. I would have thought it was in the long term interests of any exchange to try and discourage them (i.e. by looking at activity patterns etc) but they (or at least betfair) seem to actively encourage them by licensing their API at a cost.
thedarkknight it was a free vote so it can be attributed to labours massive majority in this case.
I agree with you completely though, labour’s massive majority and the lack of any credible opposition just means Blair can carry on being the smug prick that he is.
Anything is value if it wins empty.
The whole philosophy is based around accepting that you’re only human and you can’t expect to be right 100% of the time.
If you bet someone on the toss of a coin you’d have to be fairly naive to bet odds on. Similarly if you think a horse has a 50% chance of winning a race it doesn’t make sense to back it at below evens, and you’d ideally want odds against.
Quote: from marling on 9:42 pm on Sep. 15, 2004
<br>… the manner in which this legislation has been guaranteed is pretty unedifying. Whilst a majority of MPs might get very excited about this, the fact is that the vast majority of the country really don’t care too much either way.
The only reason the bill is going through (under the laughable pretext of national necessity demanded by the Parliament Act) is to allow Blair to placate the awkward squad in his Party and buy himself some breathing room after the Iraq debacle. As Steve says, this is democracy of a pretty unappealing nature – political expediency and prejudice.<br>
Hmm, the parliament act was introduced a bodge to overcome the old guard in the lords constantly opposing the will of parliament. A little history:
<br>In 1908 David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Liberal government led by Herbert Asquith introduced the Old Age Pensions Act that provided between 1s. and 5s. a week to people over seventy. To pay for these pensions Lloyd George had to raise government revenues by an additional £16 million a year.
In 1909 David Lloyd George announced what became known as the People’s Budget. This included increases in taxation. Whereas people on lower incomes were to pay 9d. in the pound, those on annual incomes of over £3,000 had to pay 1s. 2d. in the pound. Lloyd George also introduced a new supertax of 6d. in the pound for those earning £5000 a year. Other measures included an increase in death duties on the estates of the rich and heavy taxes on profits gained from the ownership and sale of property.
The Conservatives, who had a large majority in the House of Lords, objected to this attempt to redistribute wealth, and made it clear that they intended to block these proposals. Lloyd George reacted by touring the country making speeches in working-class areas on behalf of the budget and portraying the nobility as men who were using their privileged position to stop the poor from receiving their old age pensions.
With the House of Lords extremely unpopular with the British people, the Liberal government decided to take action to reduce its powers. The 1911 Parliament Act drastically cut the powers of the Lords. They were no longer allowed to prevent the passage of ‘money bills’ and it also restricted their ability to delay other legislation to three sessions of parliament. The bill also changed the maximum length of time between general elections was reduced from seven years to five and provided payment for Members of Parliament. .
When the House of Lords attempted to stop this bill’s passage, the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, appealed to George V for help. Asquith, who had just obtained a victory in the 1910 General Election, was in a strong position, and the king agreed that if necessary he would create 250 new Liberal peers to remove the Conservative majority in the Lords. Faced with the prospect of a House of Lords with a permanent Liberal majority, the Conservatives agreed to let the 1911 Parliament Act to become law. <br>
As it’s been 3 sessions now
The keywords here are "and it also restricted their ability to delay other legislation to three sessions of parliament".<br>I really don’t think there’s a choice here for Blair, he’d have to give to up the notion of parliamentary democracy altogether if he blatantly ignores the country’s only elected national assembly.
(Edited by blobby at 10:10 pm on Sep. 15, 2004)
Quote: from dilysb on 7:44 pm on Sep. 15, 2004[br]3. The vile Tony Blair, for whom I’m sorry to say I voted, fondly believing at the time that he was going to cleanse the corrupt, sleazy, political system, raked up the hunting ban in a TV studio to please a selected, Old Labour, studio audience and has now fastened on this as a means of placating his spiteful backbenchers. <br>
erm it was in the manifesto so you can hardly say he snuck it in through the backdoor. If anything he’s been trying to renege on it for years with the so called "middle way".
There’s a lot of issues people take exception to, like Iraq (which was never in any manifesto I know of), but at the end of the day we live in a democracy and have to live with the results.
