The pencil on a string wouldn't quite reach very easily. So I had to use the next booth which had a longer bit of string.

Oh the humanity…

Some votes going missing at the bottom of pages again I think…

That could just show that the Conservatives always have bigger winning margins in the seats where they win.

Isn't it because of the poor turnout in most inner city Labour seats?

Labour 14
Conservative 6
Lib Dems 30
Green 1
Plaid Cymru 1
UKIP 0
BNP 2
NF 0
Respect 0
SNP 4
Spoiled/Void Ballot 2
Monster Raving William Hill Loony Party 0
Militant Greens for Clean and Tidy yet Independent and Frightfully Middle-Class Scotland 1

Isn't that Lib Dem policy rather like the Poll Tax then?

No.

for households with two or more working adults (sometimes 4 or more when kids live at home) this meant their local taxes would rise

Sounds fair to me.

He's right though… one minute weeping angels can't move when someone looks at them because they are "quantum locked", interesting idea…. next minute they can't move if they think you are looking. Eh?

It's full of this sort of thing – just forget what we said earlier as we have a plot issue to work around.

Still good family telly though.

+1 uponthedowns.

We need a real economy.

Anyone who thinks Brown is a fool, is clearly a fool.

Brown is a very intelligent man. That doesn't mean that he isn't a fool.

Good grief, ernie just said something I agree with!

Thankfully Gordon is a goner anyhow. I'm sure he'll earn plenty of money on the lecture circuit.

aracer – so a bullet fired into the wind would hit the ground later than it would on a still day?

Projects were started, then just petered out and nothing came of them.

I've worked in private sector companies where that happens too…

It makes as little sense to compare the modern day Guardian with the old Manchester Guardian as it does to compare Murdoch's rag with The Times as it used to be before he got his hands on it.

Hmm… Are people really saying that if the Guardian comissions a poll it will get a different result than if the Sun or ITV comission it?

Brown just said Labour are probably going to lose… Strange tactic. Last throw of the dice asking us not to let it happen?

Philip Ardagh's "Eddie Dickens" books should go down a treat…

There aren't many newspapers or TV news channels that don't have a particular political slant. Sky is definitely to the right of the BBC, but you could just as easily say that the BBC is to the left of Sky, it depends on your point of view really. Although Sky in the UK is pretty fair, unlike Fox in the US which is just a joke.

Anyway, clearly Sky is slightly right wing, but you're fooling yourself not to think the BBC (and Channel 4 news) aren't slightly left/liberal. What they are not is party political – but they do have a bias toward a certain viewpoint.

It does seem odd that a headteacher's PA would be paid more than most of the teachers.

Only 18 on the autism thing despite being a bloke who works in IT. Must be why they used to let me talk to the customers sometimes…

42 on the ADD one though, so probably only talking to customers 'cos I couldn't concentrate long enough to finish my other work ;-)

Honestly I'm wasted round here… I'm taking my early 90s indy dance related comedy stylings elsewhere… ;-)

Ernie – you're unbelievable!

There's a very good chance of getting rid of our awful system this time though, as long as we get what most people want which is a hung parliament.

I remember being forced to drink milk out of little bottles with a straw in that had sat around in the sun all morning, this would have been mid to late 70s.

Still can't face milk without adding Nesquik.

Edukator – can you clarify what you mean by Germany between the wars, and Argentina not so long ago, having "stable currencies" ? Because whichever way I read it, I can't get it to make any sense

Probably because he said the exact opposite of that. Oh well.

I've got an ipod connection for the car stereo, old ish stereo so you can't see all the track names, but the first 5 playlists on the ipod appear as CDs in the changer and you can move through the tracks in each playlist – it's just the best thing ever, definitely the way forward.

So, I can just drop my mp3 files on an iPod or iPhone and play them no problem?

Mmmm, sounds too good to be true…

Of course, why not? Unless there's DRM on the mp3 files, in which case you'll need to do something about that.

When you import an mp3 itunes will offer to convert it to aac format for you, but you don't have to.

ernie – you seem to have missed the point that taking interest rate decisions out of the chancellor's hands and into the hands of the Bank of England was precisely so that the BoE would keep inflation low, rather than politicians being tempted to reduce interest rates to fuel an inflationary boom in the run up to an election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England

On 6 May 1997, following the 1997 general election which brought another Labour government to power, it was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, that the Bank of England would be granted operational independence over monetary policy. Under the terms of the Bank of England Act 1998 (which came into force on 1 June 1998), the bank's Monetary Policy Committee was given sole responsibility for setting interest rates to meet the Government's stated Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation target of 2.5%.[8] The target has now changed to 2% since the Consumer Price Index (CPI) replaced the Retail Prices Index as the treasury's inflation index.[9] If inflation overshoots or undershoots the target by more than 1%, the Governor has to write a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer explaining why, and how he will remedy the situation.

The handing over of monetary policy to the Bank of England had featured as a key plank of the Liberal Democrats' economic policy since the 1992 general election.[10] A Conservative MP Nicholas Budgen had also proposed this as a Private Member's Bill in 1996, but the bill failed as it had neither the support of the government nor that of the opposition.

Of course, not including house prices in the inflation measure used, and exporting our manufacturing to China, allowed the most recent boom to go under the radar.

Tom – mac mini and iMac would be cheaper 'desktop' alternatives.

We used to have a mac pro tower at work, it was expensive but then so was the dell (I think) quad core machine it replaced. It was used as a build and test machine 24 hours a day, with wither mac osx or windows running. You wouldn't need that sort of power generally, it was a server not a desktop.

Edit – oops, I meant 8 core.

When people say MacBooks are expensive they generally aren't comparing like with like.

Go look at a top end ish well constructed small light Sony laptop with good battery life etc and they don't seem so pricey. You are getting what you pay for, they're nicer to use, and probably will last longer with lower cost of ownership.

"We" won't be lending them money, the other Euro zone countries and the IMF will. But only on the condition that they stop spending money and get things under control no matter how painful.

Like happened in Britain when Callaghan had to go to the IMF in 1976.

Plusnet is owned by BT but a bit cheaper. I've found them to be fine, but I don't know if there's much to choose between them really.

Their remodelling of Manchester city centre was better IMHO

I still don't understand. What do you mean?

uplink – that's a view you often hear expressed, but I have to admit I struggle to comprehend it.

Why was she doing this, do you think? For what purpose?

For those having a go at Thatch for closing the pits, a few minutes on the history section of the NUM website might be enlightening. Obviously they hate the Tories, but wait til you see the vitriol for Labour governments in the 50s 60s and 70s who closed uneconomic pits.

And besides, we'd have either closed a lot of pits or not signed Kyoto in the 90s anyway, think it through…

Thatcher was also responsible for the Dash to Gas, building loads of gas power stations that now leave us reliant on imports from Russia, whilst at the same time destroying our coal industry.

and allowing us to meet our CO2 targets agreed at Kyoto.

Some people are forgetting that although nearly everyone went round in the 1980s saying they hated the Tories, at election time people voted for them in droves.

The modern day equivalent I think is people paying lip service to green issues then jetting off to Prague or Barcelona every other weekend.

It was not including house prices in inflation that meant interest rates were fixed too low in the pre-07 boom.

But the entire sham economy required us to keep borrowing the money the Chinese were investing in London that we'd given them for making all our stuff so that we could feel rich and keep borrowing to buy more Chinese made stuff so that they would invest in London so that we could [repeat until inevitable crash]

The Tories wouldn't have sold the gold. Therefore we wouldn't have more money now.

But we would have more gold.