Lloyds Banking Share Discussion Threads

[mikemichael2] 10/1/2021 11:04

M2, I just can't resist winding you up, great fun in these boring times.

[minerve 2] 10/1/2021 10:57

I notice COVID has hit areas like Boston quite badly.

Lovely karma!

[asa8] 10/1/2021 10:33

He was on about the lockdown not working one question I asked two weeks
Ago what are they going to do about the millions of illegal migrants who live here who is going to vaccinate them or don’t they count and another thing the pirates who held up the oil tanker in the English Channel before Christmas police have said no further action will be taken
Against them you couldn’t make it up

[maxk] 10/1/2021 10:31

This story is not going to go away...

[scruff1] 10/1/2021 10:30

Something fishy going on between Salmon and Sturgeon

[utrickytrees] 10/1/2021 10:13

When I look at the pair of em I think Fred & Rose on benefits.

[utrickytrees] 10/1/2021 09:51

xxxxxxxxx Jock News xxxxxxcx

Scotland demands Brexit Billions in compensation but Boris tells Fatty to lard up & squeal like a pig.

[maxk] 10/1/2021 09:18

What did he have to say?

[xxxxxy] 10/1/2021 08:24

EU's demands for £bns more of UK money just keep on growingUpdate on UK paying for EU pensions – projected cost to UK is now £2.6bn higher?© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2021A Facts4EU.Org Sunday update and summary of the problems with the EU's "divorce bill"On Friday we published a report showing the enormous share of the EU's pension and employee benefits to be paid by the UK to the EU for the next 44 years. This is as a result of the EU's Withdrawal Agreement, agreed by Theresa May, and signed by the current Prime Minister in January last year.Regrettably the situation for UK taxpayers and the public is even worse than we first reported, as we suggested it would be on Friday. The OBR did not update its annual payments table in its usual Spring report in 2020 and so we used their 2018 Spring publication as the basis for our Friday report. We now know that the total has increased by £2.6bn to £12bn.BREXIT FACTS4EU.ORG SUMMARYUPDATE: £12 BILLION OF UK PUBLIC MONEYTotal pensions and employee benefits bill to be paid by the UK : £12 BILLIONThis has risen by £2.6bn in only two yearsThe UK will be part-paying the pensions and employee benefits of all EU staff, not just British staffBelgians form the biggest nationality group?© Brexit Facts4EU.Org - click to enlarge44 more years of continued UK payments to the EU - for this and for other EU fundsEach year it's the EU that will tell the UK what it owes for the previous yearWe always use conservative figuresThis vindicates what we originally wrote, that: "... these figures were calculated in 2018. We now know that the European Commission's financial accounts for 2019 showed a €17.2bn increase in the net liabilities of its pension scheme." We then calculated the UK's share of the EU's increase on a pro-rata basis.We always try to estimate conservatively when exact official figures are difficult to come by. In this case we only had total figures from the Commission and not the OBR. The true figure issued late last year is even higher.UK is now estimated to pay the EU £12bn for EU pension & employee benefits to 2064Since our report on Friday we have seen many people on social media saying that they don't believe our facts, or that this amount is for UK employees of the EU and it is therefore reasonable for the British public to pay.ISN'T THIS ONLY FOR BRITISH EMPLOYEES OF THE EU?This is NOT the case.As we made clear in Friday's article, the UK is paying for a share of the EU's TOTAL pension and employee benefits pot, NOT the amount purely for UK employees of the EU.In Friday's headlines we used the figure of £10bn as a minimum. That alone was bad enough. We are now able to update that figure to £12bn, using official sources. All we can say is that if readers thought that £10bn was bad enough, it is in fact 20% worse than that.No-one knows how big the overall EU 'divorce bill' will beThis £2.6bn increase in payments for the EU's pensions and employee benefits highlights the problem with the EU's 'divorce bill' as a whole. No-one knows what the final total will be – we can only estimate.It is the EU which gives the UK information on what must be settled, and these numbers will appear from them for decades to come. This could still be happening in 2064 – forty years from now.You will never be told the UK's total payments to the EUWe confidently predict that the British people will never be told the overall total of payments from the UK to the EU from the time the majority voted to leave, in 2016. Nor indeed since the UK first joined what was then the EEC, in 1973. One of the many reasons why we believe this to be the case is that the official figures for net annual contributions have only ever included payments to the official EU annual budgets.Facts4EU.Org has previously reported many times on the EU's "off-budget" funds which the UK has contributed to – and which the UK will continue to do for up to another 10 years. We refer to these payments as "off-the-books", because from the public's point of view this is what they are. They do not appear in the official tables of the UK's net contributions. Below are some of these "off-the-books" EU funds.BREXIT FACTS4EU.ORG SUMMARYPayments by the UK into the EU's 'off-budget' fundsContinuing payments to EU's €30bn 'off-the-books' EDF fundContinuing payments to EU's €6bn 'off-the-books' Turkey fundContinuing payments to EU's €3bn 'off-the-books' Africa fundContinuing payments to various EU programmes, eg Horizon2020Continuing payments for UK involvement in EU defence programmesFollowing years of us campaigning on this subject, these 'off-budget' funds are now mentioned by civil servants in official reports, but the sums involved are still never included in any of the overall totals of net contributions to the EU.Bodies such as the OBR and HM Treasury get around this by including these payments under other headings. For example, some of these payments appear as part of 'foreign aid'.

[smurfy2001] 10/1/2021 00:31

5 million have had the vaccine we don’t know if its related.

[k38] 09/1/2021 23:33

Latest news, no... andBut in personal tone I do not trust PFIZER vaccine. It's a Russian roulette. Too many cases...

[k38] 09/1/2021 23:23

A healthy Miami doctor dies 2 weeks after receiving PFIZER JAB.

[maxk] 09/1/2021 23:08

Zulu shows that even history’s darkest moments can inspire rousing cinema

If you haven't yet seen this dignified portrait of heroism, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism”


SIMON HEFFER
9 January 2021 • 10:00am






Michael Caine in Zulu CREDIT: Allstar Picture Library Ltd./Alamy



The recent ludicrous decision by the Royal Collection to label Lady Butler’s 1880 painting of the defence of Rorke’s Drift with the warning that it has links to “colonialism and violence” prompted me to do something I hadn’t for 40 years, which was to watch the film of this stirring episode in history, Zulu.

Shot in 1963 on location in South Africa, about 60 miles from the scene of the battle and with hundreds of Zulus as extras, its authenticity is striking. The Zulu chief was played by his own great-grandson, who would become the leading South African politician Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Watched on Blu-ray on an ultra-high-definition television, the picture is probably sharper than when first seen in the cinema: never have the landscapes of Africa looked so spectacular. And when the action starts, the viewer is gripped by its precision.

How it looks may be important for credibility but that is, of course, only one aspect of the film. It succeeds because the script is understated, vitally so if it is to comply with our received wisdom about how the Army undertook, and still undertakes, its duties.

This is all the more remarkable because of the preconceptions the director, Cy Endfield, brought to the project. He had been driven out of America a decade before he made Zulu after falling foul of the House un-American Activities Committee, which decided he was a communist. Endfield perceived Zulu as a Western, with the British soldiers as the 7th Cavalry and the Zulu warriors as native Americans; but few films of that genre have Zulu’s dignity. The viewer grasps that, while the heroism of the British defenders was remarkable and, importantly, is portrayed in the film without undue glamorisation, the heroism and nobility of the Zulus is just as overwhelming.

Endfield had been a nondescript director before the McCarthyites attacked him, but coming to England was the making of him. Zulu was the fifth of six features he would film with Stanley Baker, whose production company, Diamond, made Zulu. One previous collaboration had been Hell Drivers, a highly original, memorable but somewhat mad 1957 film about truckers for a crooked gravel company; another was Jet Storm, from 1959, a precursor of later airliner disaster movies. Endfield was always looking for something unconventional, and Baker’s persona lends stability to, or acts as an anchor in, his scenarios.

In none of his films is this more the case than Zulu. It is Baker’s film, not only because he is the star, but also because of the moral authority he brings to the role of John Chard, the Royal Engineer who, as the senior officer, decides to defend the field hospital and mission church at Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus. The previous day, between 10,000 and 15,000 Zulus had slaughtered more than 1,300 British and European troops at Isandlwana, 11 days into a British campaign to invade Zululand and effect a federation in South Africa; the odds were stacked against the defenders.

The truth of what happened – 150 British soldiers, plus perhaps another dozen or so walking wounded, holding off up to 4,000 Zulus of ferocious bravery who kept walking towards volleys of machine-gun fire – is stranger than fiction, but it is to Endfield’s credit that the action never lapses into the improbable.

As well as Baker’s level-headed performance, two others are intensely realistic, and help shore up the credibility of the narrative: Nigel Green as Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne, and Glynn Edwards as Corporal William Allen, both fulfil to a tee the stereotype of the by-the-book British non-commissioned officer, and quite possibly portray exactly the calmness under fire and in face of attack that the real defenders of Rorke’s Drift must have shown.

One divisive aspect of a film in which so much else is right is the casting of Michael Caine as Lt Gonville Bromhead, who in real life, like his brother officer Chard, was one of 11 men to win the Victoria Cross that day. This was Caine’s first starring role, and perhaps it is only in light of his later gorblimey screen persona, with which we are so familiar, that some of us find him less than credible as a languid toff in this.

Endfield told Caine that his was the worst screen test he had ever seen, but there was no time to replace him because the team were about to leave for South Africa; Caine told Endfield that no English director would ever have cast him as an officer. For all that, Zulu remains a great film: if you’ve never seen it, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism” and “violence”.