Thucydides

You all presume Downing Street is faithfully transferring all the emails on to the E-Petition site, but after they disabled viewers comments on the You Tube video of Brown's speech, I wouldn't put it past them. For all we know 500,000 have written in and petitioned him to resign.

Bad isn't it. I'm starting to get windy about the whole thing now. I thikn I preferred unaffordable housing. Actually, no.

You are right about having only one type of party to vote for, but some of the illiberal surveillance measures that came out of government could only come out of socialists. that they were all Scottish just livens things up. Also, US/toast/Yugoslavia - I think this could happen if they're not careful with the current mess.

A few points spring to mind. First, Scottish Labour did this to Britain, not English Conservatives. Second, British people cannot take their skills to the USA because the USA does not have a points-based immigration system. The only people that can get into the USA are illegal immigrants from Mexico, refugees from Liberia, those Europeans who get job transfers, those with very unique and unusual skills, or most common, those who marry fat women from Omaha who they meet online. Third, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I would put money on England still standing in one form or another long after the US has broken up into several pieces, which I speculate is closer than many would be comfortable with. Fourth, China, not the US, will be as close to global hegemon as is possible by 2100. Start learing Mandarin.

There may be trouble ahead. But while there's music and moonlight and love and romance. Let's face the music and dance ...

House prices down 40% from 2007 peak right across the country. Before the excitement begins - they wil stay depressed like that for years.

"Russia has become the first major country to call for a partial restoration of the Gold Standard to uphold discipline in the world financial system. "Arkady Dvorkevich, the Kremlin's chief economic adviser, said Russia would favour the inclusion of gold bullion in the basket-weighting of a new world currency based on Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund. "Chinese and Russian leaders both plan to open debate on an SDR-based reserve currency as an alternative to the US dollar at the G20 summit in London this week, although the world may not yet be ready for such a radical proposal. "Mr Dvorkevich said it was "logical" that the new currency should include the rouble and the yuan, adding that "we could also think about more effective use of gold in this system". "Russia is a major gold producer with large untapped reserves of ore so it has a clear interest in promoting the idea. The Kremlin has already instructed the central bank of gradually raise the gold share of foreign reserves to 10pc. "China's government has floated a variant of this idea, suggesting a currency based on 30 commodities along the lines of the "Bancor" proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1944." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/finance...ial-crisis.html

I'll say. Australia has much of the world's most overvalued property stock right now that Ponzi Brown's HPI game is over in the UK. After Sydney, Adelaide is now the least affordable city in Australia in terms of wage/house price ratio. When this happens you know it is all about groundless HPI because there just aren't the jobs in Adelaide to support such a ridiculous ratio. Its direct and exact equivalent in Britain was when houses in West Wales started hitting the £300,000 mark - and we all know what happened there. The bear sharpened his claws and savaged those prices down to £175,000 and still dropping. Claiming that Australian house prices will lose 30% from peak to trough is a conservative estimate, in my view, particularly in low employment states like SA and TAS.

Well, you know, feminism never really had anything to do with women. Women's rights were just used as a cover for getting women into the market so they could be taxed. Their cause was quickly picked up in the Western academies by marxists who used their plight to further their own goals.

China is doing well, but the problem is that China already cannot sustain its population. With the "essential second child" this problem will become critical.

Rudd will get his fingers burnt in China.

Two years ago sorry - Act of Union was 1707! What can we do? I know I will vote to get them out next June, but I think the damage that ha sbeen done will take years to repair. Britain needs to start thinking about what it can do to earn money in the future, for one thing. No more oil and London as a financial centre is now a joke because of places like the London AIG office, etc.

This is one of those things that people once said would be catastrophic if it happened, but that it would never happen. Now it has happened, and we wait to see what happens at the next auction. I can't help feeling some gentlemen from the IMF will be flying into London shortly to bail out the second Labour government in thirty three years. Quality.

I expected falling rents as soon as I realised the size of the number of people who couldn't sell their houses and decided to let them out instead. The over-supply of rentals was always going to drive down prices. I imagine about now a lot of those people wish they had sold their houses for what even today must seem like a huge amount of money.

Treasury fails to sell Government gilts for the first time in more than a decade raising doubts over Britain's borrowing ability - "Fears are growing on the financial markets that Britain may not be able to repay the billions of pounds in debt it is amassing to rescue banks and revive the economy. The Government admitted yesterday that, for the first time since 1995, investors had been unwilling to buy the full complement of its so-called gilt-edged bonds at one of its official auctions." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/finance...ment-gilts.html