threegee

I don't believe that the LDs quoted £10Bn (per year over ten years) saving is a real one. There will be offsets negotiated as there are in all such mega-deals, and there will be UK jobs lost. There is also a likely cost in building up conventional forces unless we cease all overseas adventures forthwith. Also does anyone honestly think if we back out of paying our nuclear dues the USA is simply going to say fine, come sit under our nuclear umbrella for free! There's going to be a major price exacted one way or another. Then there's the knock-on on our defence contractors - a major earner for our economy. They currently enjoy a privileged position, but if we are out of the nuclear club they will face a host of problems which are near unquantifiable. Then there's our current position in the world. No, not past glories but how things are now! We'll inevitably be technologically downgraded. The loss of trade is another unquantifiable, but it will be significant and a one-way street! Technologically and politically downgraded too, as we'd find our seat on the UN Security Council very hard to justify. And there's one other major thing we'd be throwing away: a major bargaining chip in future arms reduction negotiations. No peace price exacted; nothing to show for sixty years of paying our subs to the nuclear club! An even worse deal for the country than Gordon giving away our gold reserves! As I've said before there's no one person or political party wise enough to handle this one without putting it to the public as a single issue referendum. The responsibility for getting this very wrong needs to be shared.

Did anyone here notice the deliberate Brown Lie? None of the commentators seemed to. And whilst Cameron mentioned his lies on funding defence he either missed the biggie of the night, or chose not to comment. Thing is Gordon could have spun this to advantage without a blatant untruth, but he just couldn't resist adding the final damning sentence! If Cleggie is ever to be taken seriously as a statesman he has to do something about the hand gestures, they just seem to get wilder and wilder! Nice to see some of his potty ideas on immigration challenged at last, and the LD love affair with Europe touched upon.

Didn't the Cameron undertaking that we will NEVER (that's quite a long time, even in politics) join the Euro get you? Anyway I will be joining you at the European elections. We've got to pack Brussels out with people who insult the European President. It's the only way anyone will ever learn his name! Malc: Do you honestly believe we will achieve 1.5 / 2.0 % growth this year, and 3 or 4% in each subsequent year? This is was the so called recovery is presaged on. No way under a Labour led govt, and Cameron is going to need a miracle even if he gets a majority. The Arabs are standing in the wings to mop up any earnings surplus, and the Chinese are going to take their toll too. The real "elephant in the room" is unfunded public sector pensions; I've never heard this massive govt liability even mentioned during the election debates.

And the lesson is: that the ice is a lot thinner than Gordon deludes himself it is! We can't go on running up debt under the illusion that "the recession" is coming to an end. It's not even a recession; it's a "repressed depression" - repressed by printing money which will, as sure as night turns into day, turn into roaring inflation. Cameron is right and Brown/Darling + Cable are wrong! We've got to stop spending and make a start at reducing the Brown debt legacy right away. There's no fairy-godmother around the corner, and Treasury growth forecasts are just plain potty! The best we can hope for is to bump along the bottom for several more years, with all that implies. I don't actually think that Darling is quite as deluded as Brown. If he were to continue as chancellor (which he wont now on any result as Gordon wants rid of him at the first opportunity) he'd already have started trying to restore some of our credibility. The election has got in the way; but then if it wasn't for the election he'd already have been side-lined for daring to disagree with our very own "Great Leader". A hung parliament with the LDs voting against tough measures and expecting their tax give-aways as a condition of support is the last (OK second-last) thing we need!

Damn! I like the look of the KLEGGI - but I'm pretty sure that the doors will fall off it in the first few months!

And... I thought it would be you who explained it to us all! It's very simple really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote Obviously why loads of other countries are rushing to adopt it (and those few who do keep tinkering with it).

I think it would work best in the house of lords. It would give them the moral authority to block really bad bits of legislation without this Parliament Act nonsense - where the govt of the day gets its way anyway, despite how appallingly bad its legislation is - and bad we have had! Getting rid of the PM's right to pack the lords out with his own failed cronies has to be good for democracy anyway. A lot of what Cameron says about decisive parliaments is correct, and he doesn't have anything like as much to gain by taking an anti position as Labour has. It currently takes 44,000 votes to elect a Tory MP, but only 26,500 to elect a Labour one. Of course the LDs have by far the most to gain, but is it really fair that when the majority of people in a constituency want either a Tory or Labour MP they should somehow be foisted off with a LD? The solutions to this problem all look bad for Joe Public, involving more MPs when we could probably do with about 10% less, as per Cameron's proposals. So beware of politicians proposing change, as it's very likely to involve an even longer gravy-train - all in the public interest of course!

Semantics aside it's a £17Bn cost (p.a.) in order to get £1.5Bn (p.a.) to people with under £10K salary. And... from a party that is telling us it can save money on unnecessary expenditure! And... from a party who believes we all want to pay higher taxes for more state "benefits"! Computer (+this voter) says no!

I heard it argued that they should sell some Greek islands! The point is what happens to any private property owners on said islands who relied on the Greek state - after all that's what they paid their taxes for. Do they find themselves paying taxes to Mrs M? Are they to be compensated? Sounds a bit crazy to me. Maybe the Greek govt. should retain some Native American lawyers to advise them? Good point! The slippery interventionist slope once again. Simples! Do what the UK did and drop out of the ERM. Print a few tens of billions more Euros before the ECB demands the printing presses stop, and quickly truck them off to creditor banks. After all they were stupid enough to authorise you to print the stuff. Think of it as getting back at Germany for the war! . If you lied to get into the Euro then a tiny bit of cheating on the way out should be lost in the general mess. The general principal of having to go bust is doing it in style, and at the maximum profit you can get away with. (A lot easier for a sovereign state than mere mortals!) Not in grovelling in front of some jobs-worth bank manager. Value the new Gruro at two Euros and let it slowly sink to parity to save a bit of face, then place all the blame the previous administration. Start a TV advertising campaign on how cheap Greece now is for holidays, and start a cut-price rival to the Olympic Games: you've already paid for the facilities and could claim first rights to the name and look & feel! Total lack of imagination in leveraging this sovereign state thing for all it is worth I say!

The problems here are: that governments are notoriously bad at predicting "current possible threats"; nor is it current threats we should consider - this is a no-going-back decision that should absolutely not be taken simply in the light of current events. This was the case even in WWII, but it didn't stop us having a major influence on the outcome. Of course if we hadn't turned our backs on our kith and kin, for this outdated (geographically based) EU nonsense, and morphed the Commonwealth into a Worldwide English Speaking Union things would be very different in the world today. Our politicians even managed to mess up the first successful attempt at a true European and non-political free market (EFTA) by turning our back on that too! These are not people who have any right to take major constitutional and security decisions without consulting the electorate DIRECTLY on the issue. Too easy to sneak this one past the electorate - "well, it was in our manifesto!". Name the country which poses a threat is always the argument of the unilateralist. It's always possible to propose a plausible workaround when you do. But the World doesn't work with such a simplistic labelling system. Current sovereign states fragment, regimes change, and all sorts of unpredictable groups and ideologies surface, often seemingly from out of nowhere. Relationships with our allies wax and wane too. Nor is it simply threat and counter-threat that has to be considered. A party which tells us that it was a good move to throw £45Bn of taxpayer's money at Northern Rock is now telling us it can pay for this or that promise if it redirects less than a quarter of that sum away from the basic duty of any government: defence of the realm! This is the same party that is telling us that is prepared to sacrifice £17Bn a year in tax relief in order to provide a £1.5Bn benefit to the lower paid! Why not GIVE the £1.5Bn to the lower paid directly by one excuse or another; pay the £10Bn for our basic defence (it has already been budgeted for by Labour anyway!), and apply the £5.5Bn balance to paying some of Gordon's credit card debt? We'd all be able to sleep sounder, and you never know: that £10Bn p.a. could very easily - rather like Gordon's "helicopters saving" - turn out to be yet another politician's false economy! There's also the argument that says that if we can't even afford to defend our own territory, then what the $%*$ are we doing spending billions in someone else's! If things are really so tight that we can't maintain current home defences, we should stop the military adventures first! Some historical precedents there too?

Here you are talking about £70 Billion per year? Whereas when the LDs talk about the Trident replacement cost they are talking about a figure that would be split over ten years. Seems to me that there's a lot of this bamboozle with figures going on. For the same reason we have an army, and a navy and an air force. For the same reason we fit locks on our doors knowing that they are really not a huge amount of use. For the same reason that we "throw away" money on insurance policies. For the same reason we have the Queen. Because they are a deterrent; because they've been proven to come in useful - often for the most unexpected reasons at the most unexpected times; because we'd be talking more risks than we need to take without them; because they contribute to the stability of ourselves, our Nation and our Planet; because we've always had them, and no one person or political party is wise enough to tell us exactly what we'd be letting ourselves in for without them. It's not that we can't find other things to do with the money, and it's not that we don't all wish they didn't exist or that all nations didn't say lets universally ban them - we'd be right at the front of the queue there! There's also a military case that says they allow us to have far less conventional forces than if we didn't have them! i.e. they are cost effective. AND because in the 1930's we made the same mistake of unilaterally running down our military by listening to the same sort of arguments. The bill for that "saving" is still visible in our public places. The Labour Party learned that lesson more thoroughly than most, because by and large it was their failed experiment (though it suited the general mood at the time)!

You forgot to mention that the Conservatives bayonet babies too! Did you get that garbage from one of the Labour leaflets that Gordon condemns for telling lies, but won't actually order the lefties that are writing them to stop putting the garbage out. The truth is that between half an million and a million public sector jobs that Gordon thought his tax and spend could sustain now HAVE to go. They have to go whoever gets in because there aren't enough wealth creators in the private sector to pay for them. They will go wherever they need to go, and it won't make a great deal of difference who is chancellor. The plans are have already been made by top civil servants, and the discretion available to ANY future government is really rather small. Darling has seen the plans but wont say what they contain - it would be electoral suicide! The other leaders haven't but they've had the briefings and their economists have made a fairly good guess at filling in any blanks. They wont say for exactly the same reasons. So who is kidding who here? Well, just about everyone is trying to kid everyone else. But no one is more kiddable than those who vote Labour in the belief that in voting for a bunch of greasy lawyers and spin doctors they are somehow furthering a "class war" that has had no meaning for most to the 20th Century and certainly no relevance in the 21st! Can there be any other reason for voting Labour when yet again a Labour Government has unfailingly landed us, our children, and maybe even our children's children, all at the door of the poorhouse? That the axe of inevitability will initially fall hardest in the North East is because we've made ourselves more dependant on public sector employment than most. There is no Dr Evil, only a Dr. G. Incompetent Brown!

Not even the worst of his barmy "policies" - he wants to give £6Bn+ of the Trident replacement "savings" to Brussels this year and £10Bn+ next. That's because the rebate Maggie negotiated has now run out, and from here on we are increasingly stuck with the full cost of subsidising the Brussels gravy train. So... make a big deal about clawing back the odd million from our own MPs, but a three-party conspiracy of silence about the thousands of millions we are now throwing at the European snouts-in-the-trough. And, the LD masterstroke on immigration: telling people who came here illegally in the first place what regions or towns they can and can not go to. Yeah, the illegals will pay some attention to that, and will be queueing up to pay their taxes too! Funny no one has thought to ask Vince Cable how much he has budgeted to police this idiotic idea! Even Gordo managed to call this one right; i.e. it will simply encourage more of the illegal immigration it is supposed to combat.

Westons Waggon Wheels - the original ones and not the tiny modern ones - from the general dealer West of Smails (which is now the lighting shop). Sweets from Bacchi's in the Market Place. 2d and 3d bars of Cadburys chocolate from Watsons Newsagents. (1d = 2.4p!) The Dandy, Beano, Topper, Lion, and especially The Eagle from same - even Film Fun (pretty dated even then!). Fish & Chips from Mrs Gates at the Market Place Chippy - never got food poisoning there!

Yes, but only for 15 minutes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

Aircraft with piston engines should be OK provided they stay clear of the worst and check air and oil filters regularly. They are also generally slower, so airframe abrasion affects wont be anything like as severe except to the propeller tips (which often go near supersonic). Props fairly regularly encounter small stones and chippings on less than perfect runways, so a bit of pumice dust here and there will be no big deal. Don't know enough about turboprops to call that one, but I suspect they'd be more or less as susceptible to this as high bypass jets. Pray for lots of rain to wash this stuff out of the atmosphere - hardly a tough call in the UK! My Nephew and his friend are stuck in Italy. Holiday extended by one week and then have to travel 100Km to another airport due to Ryanair rescheduling. That will be best case.

Any sensible person will avoid tax where feasible and the people who they are targeting can and will put their wealth outside of any governments clutches. I think we are already very close to what will be tolerated by many, so rather than increasing tax take it's possible that further grabs could be counterproductive. Either way any Lib Dem delusions on this score are doomed to fail miserably. Both the main parties know this, but the conspiracy we have to keep the bad news out of the debate lets Clegg get away with the Lib Dem nonsense. If it had been possible to "soak the rich" any more Gordon would already be doing it! As for the bigger picture: well... if the politicians are right about concealing the true picture we're doomed to government by the most skilled liars, and the best outcome we can hope for is that the most skilled liars are also the most skilled economists.

Thanks for taking time to let everyone know Maria. I had noted he'd been quiet of late - he's always got something valuable to contribute. Please let him know that everyone here sends their best wishes.

100% success for Unite - ALL planes grounded!

Clegg got far too easy a ride: "I agree with Nick". Actually they didn't but were jockeying to look the most consensual. Almost looked as if they were both making a pitch for an alliance, anticipating a hung parliament. Gordon was his usual master of BS, but got away with a lot of it due to Cameron being too rehearsed, and nothing like aggressive enough. Too many spin doctors on both sides, but Labour's probably earned their money just by advising Gordon to avoid going into his well worn routines, which Cameron is practised at poking holes in. Cameron would have been better off throwing away the script and being more reactive. The "None of the above party" currently leads in the debate! ITV easily the ratings winner: viewing figures will surely be a lot less for the next two!

Thankless task being a local rag reporter these days. Next to no one reads your work, and constantly worried for your job. Only an apprenticeship hoping for the "big-time" really. I'd be sorely tempted to slip something like that in - just to see if anyone noticed!

No they are not! This thread is DIRECTLY related to commerce. For the others the connection is indirect, or incidental. i.e. Vacant shop now occupied = Town News. Former vacant shop does great pies = Consumer News. The test: is the post about something - an article or service - being directly bought or sold? It gets a bit hazy when someone says why can't I buy xxxxx in Bedders, but if someone asks where can I buy xxxxx there's a direct intention to buy being expressed, so it's consumer.

What I said. BUT there's only one Labour candidate who openly supports a referrendum at the moment, and no LDs. This year we pay Brussels over £6,000,000,000 and next year it's set to rise to £10,000,000,000 odd when the rebate runs out. Any mention from the major parties about this? The cost of membership used to be an issue, now it's just too embarassing to talk about. Remember this when they are shutting a post office, or a library, or a community center, in order to save a few tens of thousands of pounds!

Monsta: I will follow your recommendation, but not a General election where UKIP themselves are saying go out and vote for another candidate who supports a referendum. BTW there's only one Labour candidate they support. He alone has enough clout to resist the party line. At this election it's the Tories who support local democracy, and Labour who wants to continue with the big government farce. At the European elections things are very different, and unless the Conservatives go a lot further than the current manifesto they deserve to lose badly then. Whilst the LibDems are often the best choice at the local level their thinking on Europe is completely barmy. Though Vince Cable is a decent guy he called it very wrong on Northern Rock. Also I don't trust them not to form an alliance with power-mad Gordon Brown. They've kept an unpopular minority Labour government in power before, and ambitious Nick Clegg could easily do this again. This didn't do the Country any good back then, and it would be read as a disaster by the markets now!

'cos I don't like difficult typing, even though I do like tiny machines with sometimes awkward keyboards. And, in this recent case, I got a brilliant Logitech Bluetooth keyboard (with track-pad) for next to nowt, on that auction site that's not as good as BedBay. Only problems are: that it's an Italian layout (fixed with the supplied key-top stickers), AND that it's customised for the Playstation! Now my (trackpadless) ancient netbook has a trackpad and a brilliant top-quality 102 key wireless keyboard that beats any modern hardware combination at any price. Even so, I can think of several Windoze keys I never use on other machines that would be a lot more use if changed to key codes I do use. For instance what would you do if say the return or CTRL key on your favourite notebook was dickey? Or if you didn't like the wonky key placement on an EEE PC (many don't)? The messages are: one size does not fit all, and that you'll never know there IS a better way if you don't experiment.