Rave

You'd have to be monumentally stupid- or monumentally unlucky- to end up on the streets having lived in a house worth (debatably) north of half a mil. I don't buy it either.

If it's not too painful, do tell? Might be a useful counterpoint to all the BNP sympathisers on this site.....

Well quite, neither will I, and I'm one of the original 10,000 no2id signatories of the pledge to that effect. However, I don't think that 10,000 people refusing to carry an ID card would have taken down the Ba'ath party or Zanu PF- so what's your fallback plan?

After six months on the dole I've just got a job as a bus driver. I hope that all the MEW-ed up idiots being forced to sell their 325is and take the bus will keep me in work- if not then oh well, the redundancy payoff from my last job cleared my debts .

Alright O great defender of freedom and democracy, what's your plan if NuLab manage to pass the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill? What will you be doing to defend our parliamentary democracy, by force if necessary? PM me your plans, because I'll happily join in. Otherwise, I contend that it's piss easy for you to say. So surprise me.

Blimey, my brother lives less than half a mile from there, pretty sure an old colleague of mine lived in that road too .

Hmm, well I'll keep an eye on rates and grab myself some Euros if the exchange rate keeps going south. Nobody answered my question about whether there's a better value way of doing it that simply paying cash at a bureux de change though? Cheers for the good wishes re: job interview .

Since the wind seems to have fallen out of the sails of the macroeconomic debate on this thread, thought I'd bump it to ask the following rather prosaic question: My wife and I are basically poor. I've been unemployed for six months and the DWP have stopped my dole for the last month and a half as they decided retrospectively that I didn't have sufficient reason for leaving my previous job (long story). My wife earns about £100 a week working in a cafe. I have an interview next Wednesday for a job that pays well, but I may or may not get it. If I do, my cash worries are over. If not, then: We've been treated by my in-laws to a holiday in Spain in July. They've covered the accomodation and flights, we just have to provide our own spending money. We got £350 from generous relatives on both sides of the family for Christmas, which I stuck in a cash ISA as part of our holiday spending money fund. My wife has managed to get a second job for a bit of extra work over Easter, which will probably earn her a couple of hundred quid total. We were going to stick it in the ISA as well, but I wonder, given all this talk of Sterling tanking against the Euro, whether it might not be a good idea to convert it into Euros now as a hedge against a drop in exchange rates. My original plan was to transfer the ISA into our Nationwide account the week before we go and take it out fee free at a favourable rate from ATMs in Spain as per MSE advice . Is the pound likely to fall far enough by July to make exchanging £200 to Euros at Bureaux De Change rates now worthwhile? Should I go further and bung all our current funds into Euros? Edit: is there a better value way of holding Euros on a small scale than taking cash into a Bureax De Change? I realise by the standards of this forum this question is of piffling importance but we could be talking a loss of 50 Euros or more, which is a big difference to people of moderate incomes like ourselves, so your opinions are appreciated .

Just want to add my voice to the many who have said already- tax credits are infact a refund of the tax you've already paid, handed back to you by a vast army of badly organised public servants. I'm a moderate lefty and certainly have no problem at all with the concept of the welfare state; I do however have a problem with the government paying one set of civil servants to take money from you in tax, and another set to hand it back to you in tax credits. I cannot see how the system is anything other than ludicrously wasteful.

I really want an E38, but I reckon if you're going to buy a big posh car it should have the go to match the show, so I was thinking post Nikasil 740i (or iL if I can find one), probably 96-97 for £3k-ish (prices for them are still dropping by about 1k a year as far as I can see). I don't actually need a big fast car, but since I only do about 2-3000 miles a year I figure I might as well cover them in style. Are running costs really going to bite me in the ass given that I'll be driving it so little? Insurance isn't much more than my soon-to-be-scrapped mk1 MR2....

I doubt the house actually looks like that day to day, probably a bit more mess unless they lock the kids up in their rooms 24/7.The lighting looked pretty OTT to me too, but I reckon quite a bit of it might have been LEDs (albeit that the telephone-exchange-esque wiring bundles sugggested otherwise). I thought it looked amazing when the lights were on, but I'd not want to live there for more than a week or two a a time. It looked like a holiday home to me.

If the accusations of crying racist in order to stifle debate were aimed at me, I plead not guilty. I have posted plenty of detailed rebuttal in addition to my insults.

Outline your criteria then. I reckon they've killed a load fewer people then we British have for a start- and burnt a load less fossil fuels. Up to you where you want to take it.....

I didn't call you a racist in any previous posts. You probably are, but whatever, I didn't call you one because I had a simpler avenue of attack- that you're an idiot. Got actual proof that the people speaking Swahili are contributing less to the economy than your average dole scrounging white chav? This says you haven't. Well what are you then? It's either racist or xenophobic. Take your pick. What Australia? Reknowned the world over as one of the most racist nations there is, as it happens. I know several people who've gone there and been disgusted by the casual racism directed at 'chinks' and 'abos'. I sure as f**k don't want Britain turning into that. Guess what dipsh1t- speaking English hasn't been until very recently a legal requirement to become a legal immigrant to this country. All the people you're moaning about are almost certainly here entirely legally. So, be honest: do you have a problem with legal migration, or do you have a problem with foreigners? It must be one or the other. Well fine, if we're talking about illegal immigrants, fair enough. Since I personally am not competing for a job cleaning toilets for £3 an hour, selling pirate dvds £10 for 7 or digging cockles out of Morecambe Bay before either dying or going back to sleep 6 to a room I don't tend to worry about the poor sods impacting my way of life. Still, I guess they are all c***s for travelling halfway round the world to try and improve their lot in life.

Yeah, obviously. Despite the fact that his dad's English, he was born in London, English is his first language (which he speaks with the same accent I do), he's lived in London all his life, he's a British Citizen etc. etc. he's really desperate to fit in with the Bangladeshi comunity so he doesn't have to bother with any of us ******* white folk. Get a f*cking clue . In fact as it happens he doesn't like black people much, you'd probably get on with him quite well. Thing is though- I wasn't using him as the example, I was using his mother and her friends. His mother is a migrant from Bangladesh, but she came via Japan where she got her degree in architecture. Despite being a highly qualified to make loadsamoney designing buildings, she has worked since she got here for local government, working her way up the ranks in the process. I know we don't like council workers here either, but she's been doing it since long before the time when it became a piss-easy gravy train. She got an MBE for her service to this country- does anyone else here have one?- and yet the racists in this thread would decry her as a sponging foreigner because she still speaks Bengali when she's with other Bangladeshis. If you want more examples of Bangladeshis who aren't insular- how about the woman my wife works with. Left her husband by an arranged marriage because she didn't like him and wasn't prepared to put up with it any more, works hard for little more than minimum wage to get by, comes out drinking and smoking with us regularly. I personally can't claim many non-white friends, but I don't need a lot of friends full stop. I have many non-white "friends-of-a-friend" who we meet out drinking every so often. Thing is, I don't judge a potential friend on the colour of their skin, I judge them on whether I'd like to sit down and have a drink with them. Are you referring to me? I didn't call Xurbia a racist (although he undoubtedly is), I called him a Xenophobe and an idiot. He referred to people speaking Swahili on the street as "these f*ckers"- are you seriously trying to say that that's not xenophobia? Or was it "f*ckers" in the friendly cockney sense . Wrong. Some of us like to expand our horizons by talking to people with different backgrounds to our own. Well I've already found the dictionary definition of xenophobe, so here's the definition of racist: racism n. 1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. 2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race. So, really, you can use that to tell if you're racist and/or xenophobic or not. If you'd have problems chatting to a person just because of the colour of their skin, their accent or any other physical charectaristic then I'm afraid you are. If you take people as they come then you're not necessarily. I personally, as a rule, don't like coke snorting hooray henry city boys, or at the opposite end of the spectrum, the pikey chavs who keep trying to ponce a pound off me when I'm on my way to or from the pub. I do however reserve judgement until those people have had a chance to open their mouths and piss me off. You never know- I've met some very nice people who didn't initially look very promising.

I didn't call him a racist, I called him an idiot. I could reply at some length about how my best friend at school was half Bangladeshi, half English, and how his mother and their friends were without exception admirable citizens who I liked a lot, but I doubt you'd bother to listen .

No, it is xenophobia: xenophobia • noun intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries. You moan about people speaking Swahili when you can't even use English properly- what a cockend. How would you know?

A gold star to anyone who can get a similar letter published in the Express .

Quoted for absolute truth. I went to Southampton University (I flunked out after my second year, but that's beside the point). Apparently Southampton is one of the most strongly Conservative universities in the country. Whatever- by my second year, I could see that the union was very clearly not run for the benefit of the student body as a whole, so I got myself elected to the council as an ordinary member, simply by nominating myself for a vacant post. I couldn't be less of a natural politician. I'm pretty shy now- back then I was a pretty serious introvert. I only stood up to speak at meetings twice- both times I was literally shaking with fear, and both times I was roundly heckled as I made my point. Both points turned out to be correct, as it happens. I also went to the NUS conference as one of our elected delegates- and I was the only one to be on the floor for every single vote. Our president missed a fairly crucial one because he was in the hotel sauna. The only other delegate I ended up with any respect for was the Green party chap I shared my hotel room with- he was a hippy, and I don't have much time for the Greens, but at least he had a moral standpoint. Two months later, the tories hijacked our AGM and managed to pass a vote taking our union out of the NUS. To this day I chastise myself for not having the guts to stand up and call a procedural motion to sabotage the whole charade- had a count been taken of attendees they would have had nowhere near the required number to pass such an important motion. Next Semester a referendum was called which they lost spectacularly- but I could have prevented six months of nonsense just by raising my hand. The whole experience left me with the certain knowledge that politics was not for me- but my subsequent six years of post-uni life have disilusioned me so much that I now think I might have to have another go. Trouble is though, it's fairly hard to pick up council or parliamentary seats just by nominating oneself, and none of the parties seem to give a crap about the issues facing people like me. I used to vote Lib Dem but I haven't seen a great deal of liberalism emanating from them recently. Subsequent quote from Young Goat- can't figure out how to format it properly, and I've been using forums for 5 years, guess I just suck. Well quite, but my trust was broken when they broke their election pledge on tuition fees within a year of coming to power. I don't actually think that it's in our national interest to fund Media Studies and Golf Tourism as degree subjects, but a manifesto pledge is a manifesto pledge. I flunked out, and that's my fault, but I'm buggered if I can see why 9/10ths of the cabinet should get their degrees for free (including my personal nemesis Prescott), while today's young generation have to pay through the nose. A proper Labour Government would have introduced a retrospective Graduate Tax.

That is crazy .

If you're actually interested in bidding, I'd say the best place to stand is at the very back- then you can see full well if you're bidding against someone or if you're being played by the auctioneer. In my late teens/early 20s I used to be a regular at a police auction in Wandsworth- didn't take me long to get into the swing of things (albeit for far lower stakes).

It's all silly- today my wife suggested that we get a new cordless kettle for a fiver because our two year old one was looking 'a bit scabby'. I had to explain that that would be a dire waste of the earth's resources .

As an unemployed Englishman I would very gladly labour my ar$e off for £80 a day. I'd be considerably better off than I was on £16k p/a as a civil servant before I got made redundant. Where do I go and what qualifications do I need? PM me if you don't want to take the thread further off topic. I'm serious- hook me up please . As for the immigration issue- I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I think that if/when the economy goes to hell and the need for lots of low priced labour dries up, all the Poles/Slovaks/Estonians etc. will up sticks and take their profits back to their own countries. Good luck to them. I live in SE London and Eastern Europeans are prevalent here, and cause (as far as I can see) no trouble at all. I think it's very important not to blame economic migrants for taking advantage of an opportunity that has been presented to them. Whether the government has been short sighted in not enforcing migration controls from the new EU entrant states (unlike pretty much the entire rest of the established EU) is the question. I certainly can't see how it helps our dire current account deficit (or whatever it's called). I'll admit to being very against immigrant bashing for its own sake- because I know both personally and to a lesser extent professionally a number of Bangladeshis who have come here and been model citizens. I'd far rather have the employees of my local Indian restaurant as my neighbours than a stereotypical English chav family.

I don't think you'll lose a great deal by waiting to sell, although it depends whether you intend to just buy another place for yourself and live there happily ever after, or whether you'd rather sit on the money and try and call the bottom of the market. Personally I wouldn't bother doing any work on the house before you sell as you're unlikely to get your money back in a stagnant or falling market. Nor would I bother renting it out if the market appears to be saturated. Good luck:).

While we're being pedantic- it's thunder was actually stolen by another Jaguar designed by Tom Wilkinshaw- the XJR-15. Why on earth anyone thought that announcing an even more expensive and exclusive car before the XJ-220 had even made it out of the factory is quite beyond me. I was 11 at the time (and an avid Autocar & Motor reader) and even at that age I thought it was idiocy. The McLaren F1 didn't tip up until 1994.