Carry on ... I'm quite happy to have one, two or three, or more, take a Christmas break.

Or you could stick to the topic of the thread.

Your choices...

I think it has to be 'what now for all western countries', frankly.



I don't think we've reached the tipping point quite yet, but I do think that there will be a point where people say 'enough is enough' to constantly reducing incomes and a rising cost of living, increased job security, increasing poverty in retirement and old age and much more.

We need a vibrant mixed economy – not just in terms of public and private, but also in terms of a far better balance between service industries and manufacturing (it's around 75%-25% at present, if I remember correctly).

Now that isn't going to happen overnight, so in the short term, we do need to see the economy grow within the current balance. That's ultimately the only way to cut the UK's deficit, being specific to the UK again. You don't do that by making more people unemployed and by slashing wages – both of which remove money from the wider economy, with the obvious impact on those service industries, be they financial services, restaurants, nail salons or any shop.

I would certainly want to see some stimulus – and I think housing is the perfect vehicle, since we have a chronic shortage, plus (apparently) much of the older housing stock is in a dire state of repair.

At the same time, we need to get a grip on the City and big business – not least in terms of the deals that are being done to escape tax and even interest on unpaid tax – you only need to look at the recent revelations about Goldman Sachs being let off a big bill, with the story alongside it that the man who revealed this, to a committee of MPs (not a newspaper) is at risk of losing his job as a result. You can see why some people wouldn't want the populace as a whole to know such things.

And my personal opinion is that a UK transaction tax would also be enormously helpful at this time.

The UK has such a tax already, and bizarrely we still have the strongest financial sectorin Europe. We call it "Stamp Duty"..

But of course those nasty Johnny Foriegners are just trying to destroy the City.

It is an ideal vehicle for economic stimulus and for high (if short term) employment of skilled and unskilled labour.

The problem is that the vehicle either contradicts the clampdown on excesses or flies in the face of the current incumbents political beliefs - you can't announce yesterday that mortgages will be harder to come by in future with much more stringent income checks and at the same time hope to sell thousands of new houses, and you can't instead expect this government to finance the building of social housing, not without also expecting hell to freeze over.

I have said that the chancellor is economically illiterate.

And I'd add that social housing can include affordable housing to buy too.

Smug people (like the person who sits beside me at work) are happy to say that the only people who want affordable housing are scumbags, Where do you start?

*shrugs* When I see tabloid cliches repeated I must admit I tend to assume that the source was information from the tabloids. Were you aware that their exists a web site whose sole purpose is to debunk all the urban myths and downright lies told about the EU by the UK press over the years?


I think that all countries within the EU fight their own corner as best they can, and understandably so. It's meant to be a democratic organisation after all. And I've been critical of both the tendency to ignore certain rules and the current undemocratic direction of the EU. My problem was more with the nonsense about the UK spending it's whole time kissing up to Europe and blindly adopting every single directive put forward. That simply isn't the case, and even modest research at any point over the last 30 years or so would demonstrate that fact.

A smack in the chops sounds like a worthwhile opening gambit.

To be honest, I don't think I'd know where to start with that one!

Maybe using a hand to insouciantly sketch something passing over their head, accompanied by a loud 'whooshing' noise?

I'd agree with that too and as I have said several times before, a couple of years ago when we were looking at new build houses (2008) there was a mini-boom in new developments because most of the new estates had only been granted planning permissions with a pre-set percentage of "affordable" housing included, generally this meant properties that were on the then Governments "HomeBuild" scheme (part share housing) - literally every site we visited had already had their Homebuild dwellings built, sold and paid for long before they moved onto the rest of the site.

The demand for those houses was/is immense but requires funding and an element of social conscience from Government.

2012 will tell what flavour of politician we have right now, everyone I speak to in business is talking down their prospects for next year and no-one sees any sort of stimulus to their sector of the economy at all, the only boom that I can see is in employment agencies who rent out employees on an hourly basis, its desperation work and it certainly won't get you a mortgage and probably not even a reference for a rental agency.