threegee

Not entirely a level playing field as it's rather easy to maintain customer satisfaction if you are on the sort of ridiculously high margins as Apple or "beauty products" shops are. Or, as the article puts it: The real poll is do people keep coming back for more, and in Tesco's case this must be true as there are plenty of other options for the consumer. And... I don't like them either!

Company version is that driver was told to drop them off at 5am but for his own reasons delivered them at 3am. Seized on by windbag Prescott to make political capital of the half-truth. Kids are still paid their dole and are offered a "real job" at the Olympics. Who would you rather employ Adam: someone who won't do it because they are being "exploited", or someone who welcomes the experience, sees it as a step on the employment ladder, and will get out of bed at 3am to prove their commitment? And... are employers never exploited?

It wasn't a cunning plan. It wasn't driven by economics. It was a doctrinaire political ambition, and a "social experiment" embarked on by people who thought they had "vision", but were in fact of rather low intelligence. Welcome to Bedlington: an early example of what always happens when you put doctrinaire politics and social experiments before hard economics! (added to maintain political balance - did I mention the LD's? )

EuTube, where else?!

Nothing too much wrong with the NUM before it was thoroughly infiltrated by revolutionaries, who's only purpose in life was to overthrow a democratically elected government, and hold the Country to ransom. Nothing very much wrong with the early Labour Party when they had some principles. It was the armchair socialists - who briefly marched behind the banners, spouted nonsense from the platform, then got back into their chauffeur-driven Bentleys and were whisked back to Hampstead until the next election year - that I had any issue with. Bedders has paid dearly for its gullibility and naivety. A proud history, but whatever happened to the "sunlit uplands" emblazoned on some of those fine banners?

Maybe if she got this large hula-hoop and...? No, no, totally stupid idea! The glimpse of that Charles Windsor guy's face @1:40 said it all about poor Cheryl, but he does seem to like Jessie J.

"But we still face some huge challenges" not the least of which is finding a £5 external mic to plug in, and borrowing a cheap tripod. The severe wind noise on the camera mic speaks far louder than any of the interviewees. Spend the Portas cash on windscreens, so people can actually stand on the high street. Full marks for doing something - anything - but when you are posting YouTube video it's not a good idea to put text at the bottom where the progress bar is constantly popping up and obscuring it.

Didn't we just blow £2M on a completely unnecessary revamp of the Marketplace? Not that I'm saying we shouldn't have grabbed what was on offer, but there were/are 101 much better things to spend just a tiny fraction of that on. I noticed that on the local BBC TV news last night they couldn't even be arsed to get on their bogie and shoot up to Newbiggin to cover the Portas Pilot thing. We had to make do with some shots of two empty shops in the centre of Stockton and a few quick interviews there. Stockton gets a whopping £92K!

..present company excepted!

Isn't "modern art" a sort of circular joke? You can have any take on it depending on where you choose to stop. If you choose to stop on the money then Warhol, and more recently Emin, are masters. Follow the money and everyone will be OK is Warhol's real message! In a wider sense it's a comment on "classical art" too. (A principle which will undoubtedly determine the innocence, or guilt, of Baroness Warsi).

At least you can tell us which party said representative belongs to Merlin! If you are reporting honestly and truthfully you don't need to shy away from naming names. It has always amazed my how candid some of our local politicos can be in private. You could call it utter contempt for their electors, but they'd see it as honesty, and an acceptance of the system as it is. In the end it's down to the voters, and their insistence on voting for the past, voting for continued failure, and reluctance to use their heads. When you've been fed half-truths all your life - and it seems all your community buy into them too - it's very hard to turn your brain on! Maybe the few that do simply become cooncillors, and ride the gravy train?

Ah, yes NCC, but The Beverley Sisters are able! AKA The Fat-Cat Song!

A real tragedy when there was so much hope he was recovering. Anything but "burned out" too; it's quite recently he was interviewed, at which point he was looking forward to producing more great stuff.

Ah, yes, different outfit then?

How? Easy, always use ixquick instead. Use this link to add ixquick to Firefox: https://addons.mozil...pver=&platform= (select the HTTPS version to avoid other snoopers) Once you've added it select Manage Search Engines in the drop down select ixquick and then move it up to the top. Their privacy policy: https://ixquick.com/...ct-privacy.html makes interesting reading.

LOL! Blair stumped for words! Long pause for thought then thinks, umm.. no counter arguments here, and too dangerous to go there anyway, so I need to isolate these people. "In my experience in politics there are three kinds of people. First there are the reactionaries...". In typical shyster fashion, once he has seeded the thought he has no use for developing a real argument, and so veers off into playing to a house packed out with Euro gravy-train'ers. Pity Nige hadn't got right of reply, as he'd surely have helped Teflon Tone as to what the other two types of politician might be! Yes, at six or seven years distance it's self evident to all what a load of hot air is coming out of Blair. It would though be interesting to dissect his calculation of when to quit while the going was good.

Apple drops '4G' from iPad adverts Next retreat to reality will be the launch of a much smaller tab (or much larger phone)! Could take a while though - which is what the competition is hoping.

Excellent! I don't suppose the "part-time lecturer in economics at a second-rate polly" got as far as Hayeck. He's defo long overdue reading for too slow, too shallow Microband though.

The flame went out briefly before being relit and transferred to the first torchbearer. Wrong kind of lighter fluid then?

...subject only to a successful Greek Govt. appeal for the cash to buy a couple of tins of lighter fluid!

What Malcolm says; but the clue is the start of the second sentence: The government maintained most of the wartime controls over the economy, including control over the allocation of materials and manpower... Which neatly fails to mention that the principal one of those controls was rationing - food rationing long after other countries had ended it! That's the main reason Labour lost the 1951 election.

Nope; way back in those days golf was highly elitist. You'd only find people like businessmen, trade union bosses, management of nationalised industries, and upwardly mobile socialist politicians, able to afford the private club membership fees! Shameful what that stuck-up club did to poor old Ramsay MacDonald though!

The true winner here is Marine Le Pen - for whom it is all working out beautifully. She knew she wouldn't win, and ordinarily she'd have put Sarky back in by telling her 6.4M voters to make the best of a bad job and vote for him. But she undoubtedly has a long-term strategy of moving her party more to the centre and splitting the UMP. Expect a re-branding and getting rid of the "Front" bit but likely retaining the National in the title. She is brighter than her father, and more street-wise than any male opponents. I think she's reading things right and is going to get power at some point; history is playing right into her hands. Likewise I think Nigel is now in the right place at the right time. I've no doubt that sooner or later he will win on the single issue of Europe, as he's pushing at an open door. But.. if he (or indeed someone else) were to judge the moment right and re-brand UKIP we'd see a new major party in domestic politics too. Too soon or too late wouldn't hack it, but done at the right time and in the afterglow of a major shift of UK policy on Europe... We've been suffering from a huge misalignment in UK politics for decades. Labour suffered a split when the SDP was formed, and the SDP should have been able to take pro-europe Conservatives with it as well as many Liberals, but failed miserably in this leaving only the present stunted LD mess. The Conservatives would have ultimately been better off following a split, but that split could still happen from the other side - indeed needs to happen. This is the true reason for the disenchantment with current politics: no one knows what any party actually stands for any longer! The Coalition of the Unwilling (Conservatives) combined with the distinct possibility of a humiliation of major parties by UKIP could easily spark off the needed realignment.

"only come into their own at European election time" is exactly my point! Though they are polling a decent number of votes in local elections now. At the last eurolections they polled more than Labour and now have the same number of seats - and that was a whole two years ago. The majority Conservative group must know that a lot of their supporters are going to jump ship to UKIP now that they are the second party, and at last have a real chance of becoming the majority one. Sympathetic Labour voters will also see that UKIP is now the real challenger to the Conservatives, and that in voting UKIP they can send a message to Milliband on Europe, and also give the Conservatives a bloody nose; whereas a vote for Labour would be a wasted vote. All UKIP has to say is "We are now the second party in Europe, and the only alternative choice the British people have. This election is the referendum the great majority of the people now want, and the other parties have conspired not to permit. Whatever you think or don't think of our other policies this is your one chance to make the other three parties sit up and take notice of what you are telling them. If you miss this opportunity it could take another five years or more for us to deliver a non-federal Europe for the British people. With a majority in the European parliament we will shame whatever party is running the country into doing the will of the people, and obstruct all their moves until they do deliver." Tactical voting? You ain't seen nuffin' yet! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17974787

I'm no apologist for Sarky, but if Hollande gets in - as looks quite possible - the French are going to repeat the Brown public spending driven boom into megabust scenario for sure. Won't sit well with the Germans either. The value of Sterling many even be reflecting this right now, so not the time to be holding Euros (and we've got as few as we can get away with here!). Greece has already defaulted, but in a way that they won't see the benefits! Only euro politicos could engineer such a mess! Here UKIP is going from strength to strength - where they can manage to get their actual name on the ballot papers! At the next eurolections they might not just be the runner-up, but the majority party representing our country. That will be giving left-leaning Dave a few sleepless nights! His only way out could be to find an excuse for that long overdue referendum - but how would this play with the party with "Democrats" in its name?