I've never heard them engage with the point at all. Nor with the amount of EU laws Switzerland has to obey. Nor do they say how long all these bilateral treaties would take to sign, nor what would happen in the meantime.

Britain is a bigger country than Switzerland, and they could argue it would have more negotiating power. But wouldn't member states show solidarity in not signing bilaterals until they conceded freedom of movement?

Joke party. If only the Tories took them on, they'd wipe the floor with them.

Absurdly Gove has said he'll investigate "personally". Is this a sensible use of the Secretary of State's time?

The extent of Gove's involvement in the outcry over the Rotherham decision is hardly the most important or the most disturbing aspect of this story. A little acknowledgement of how badly things can go wrong when idiots in authority get carried away with their culture of political orthodoxy.

Chooses to obey. It might seem like a minor quibble, but I think the difference is important. UKIP see the Swiss relationship with the EU as like someone picking and chosing things from a buffet. The reality is not like that, obviously, but as the Swiss are not EU each provision is still notionally optional. That some of them are not really options due to realpolitik is what UKIP doesn't engage with. But then, they have no power, so are able to gloss over such practicalities.

If it came to a straight battle between UKIP and the Tories, then the Tories would surely win, because for all their manifest faults they do try and interact with the world as it actually is rather than as they wish it were. However, it's not exactly a dynamic position to be in, saying essentially "Well, we would like to do that, but the damage it would cause more than offsets the advantages". I can see why the Tories prefer to ignore UKIP rather than engaging and defeating their arguments.

Malcolm Frost was left begging for food after he was evicted from his home in Ashmores Lane, Alsager, where he had failed to pay rent.

The 61-year-old was found dead in his garden shed around 10 days later by a neighbour who discovered he had been living there.

The death of Mr Frost, who was severly malnourished, has led to changes in Cheshire East Council's Adult Services department after it emerged staff failed to help Mr Frost.

His friend and neighbour Roy Edwards, yesterday told an inquest at Crewe's Municipal Buildings how Mr Frost had stopped working a few years before his death and rarely went out.

Mr Edwards said money worries had prompted his friend to sell his childhood home to a private landlord and pay rent to live there.

But the locks were changed after Mr Frost fell into arrears.

Mr Edwards said: "I started buying him food every day because he had no money at all.

"He was starving. You could see he was losing weight. In March he said he was going to be evicted and they changed all the locks so he couldn't get in. Then I found him living in the garden shed.

"He was lying on the floor, I think he was dying then. He asked me for a glass of water. That was the last thing he said to me."

Mr Edwards went to check on his friend a couple of days later, on March 23, and found him dead in the shed. A cause of death could not be established, but a pathologist said it was either heart disease or hypothermia.

Mr Frost's neighbour had called the council in December – when he was still living in his house – to raise concerns about his welfare.

But staff merely logged the details and took no further action.

Alan Gibson, from the council's Adult Services department, said an internal investigation was carried out after his death.

the corrupt local Labour party

Rotherham Councillors; 1 Independent, 4 Tory, 58 Labour (Not too dissimilar to OTF's voting demographic I reckon!).

tied up in knots wrote:

Details?

Some of them ought to split from the Labour party and try and get some opposition going.

That happened in Tower Hamlets and didn't get very kind media treatment.

Nowhere near that proportion of Labour on here either

A little acknowledgement of how badly things can go wrong when idiots in authority get carried away with their culture of political orthodoxy.

What does TLMG stand for? The Lovely My Girlfriend?

Why don't you just say Political Correctness Gone Mad and be done with it?

how badly things can go wrong when idiots in authority get carried away with their culture of political orthodoxy.