Verbal

You're mistaking modern capitalism for Trumpton. WPP are a multinational who, like a lot of multinationals, lay down the law with governments. As the link showed quite clearly, WPP made an explicit set of threats and demands, got Osborne to do their bidding (and actually say so!), and gave him the final sop of saying: okay, maybe we'll come back and pay a fraction of the tax we should and plonk our HQ back in London. Multinationals like WPP create and wipe out jobs at a whim. The economy is dominated by them. Democracy, for hem, can go hang: they'll get their way come what may. But if you want to persist with a breathtakingly kindergarten model of the economy that rests the simplistic distinction between nasty public sector employees doing absolutely nothing all day long, and firebrand, can't get enough of making this country grrreeeaaattt private sector workers, then be my guest. But one word of warning: if you ever have a fire, don't go calling for Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert or Dibble. They've all been sacked.

Police corruption strikes again.

Not really Benj. WPP are famous for stunts like this. Here are some books they cooked earlier. http://www.bnet.com/blog/advertising-business/ad-agency-wpp-now-so-powerful-that-britain-will-change-its-tax-code-to-please-ceo-sorrell/5111

Only if you consider it a major coup to attract companies back to Britain who always, even when they were HQ'd here, kept a substantial proportion of their profits (and hence tax liabilities) offshore.

And this in the Daily Mail, whose politics I need hardly describe. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369340/BUDGET-2011-Shocks-bonnet-middle-earners--youll-work-longer-pension.html

And it's a con anyway. The old Thatcher technique is at work here - changing the rules to eventually create a tax rise from a tax cut. Mary Ann Sieghart (an old tory herself) in the Independent yesterday: Meanwhile, a stealth tax will hurt us all more and more as the years go by. This is the use of the lower CPI inflation rate for increasing tax thresholds. By the end of this parliament, it will nearly wipe out all the gains from raising personal tax allowance by more than inflation. And in future parliaments, it will continue to scoop more money out of our pay packets and into Treasury coffers. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mary-ann-sieghart/mary-ann-sieghart-no-wonder-clegg-looked-miserable-there-was-little-for-the-lib-dems-to-cheer-2251291.html

Rocknroll said 'slightly' not 'significant'. Of course, the amount of gain depends on your circumstances - so 'slightly' clearly applies to him. The 'giveaway' itself is a bit of a con, of course, given what the 'squeezed middle' has lost in the last two budgets and between. It's a pale version of what happened under Thatch, when the tax burden was piled on under the banner of tax cuts.

Probably when a cut of 50p on a full tank was thought to be adequate compensation for the £10-per-fill-up rise since tory boy slithered in.

I noticed that too. I wasn't the biggest fan of EM's at the start, but he's growing into it quite nicely, and he's worked out that Cameron is all surface oil and little else.

Weird that an old tory like yourself should endorse such crude social engineering in education - attempting to use universities to 'fix' pre-existing inequalities in a way that damages universities and their international standing. And you are clearly very healthy or a BUPA refusenik, because you can't have encountered any doctors recently, the most senior of whom have complained about the wrecking ball being taken to the NHS by the coalition by that bumbling idiot Andrew Lansley.

Thanks. I can get on with my work now.

Just waiting for the closet god botherers on here to flap by and claim there are no morals without religion.

Most people talk of yelling at their TVs. Apparently your TV yells at you. Odd. I can see the need for body armour, by the way. You swivelly-eyes are so thin-skinned.

If I were doing that I'd go to Woolston.

Mali, Pakistan, Haiti. All in the next few weeks. Holidays from hell!

True enough. The human race though is probably an improvement on dribbling, bedroom-dwelling troglodytes. Back on message, it's going to be depressingly interesting to watch how Cameron and Johnny English Hague screw up a basically well-meant operation.

YOUR people? One day you will emerge from your bedroom into the real world and join the human race.

Damn. I've got something else on that day.

So when do we invade Saudi Arabia?

Under my previous nom de plume I ONLY posted on the main board. Then I changed my name and became a better person, selflessly dedicating my precious time to swatting the gitocracy on here with the sword of truth.

Now Cameron has fallen out with the British army. The genius rolls on. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/mar/21/libya-military-action-live-updates

Social skills are clearly not your strong point. If you were in the least bit mature you wouldn't spend your waking hours agonising over this (to you) insoluble and epic moral maze.

Me me me (I won't pay licence fee) me me me (I won't give to charity) me me me (I don't want 'my' money going to overseas aid) me me me (I want Britons first) me me me (I hate 'state television') me me me (I didn't laugh once) me me me, etc., ad nauseum. Those blinkers must be a really tight fit.

How odd. I'd expected gratitude from someone whom I regard as a kind of (operative phrase) intellectual among the swivel-eyed Right on here. (Which I know is damning with the faintest of praise - but take your complements wherever you can find them, benjiiii). And in answer to your question, no I had the happiest of childhoods which has clearly prepared me for seeing Cameron for the imbecile that he is rather more clearly than you and your swooning mates, in adoring thrall to every word of that absurd buttmunch.

I think you'll find dune isn't interested in humans, so using them as shields won't register on what is laughingly called his radar.