anothersaintinsouthsea

Have you ever known someone with a paranoid delusion? There fairly easy to spot.

Think you're over-egging things here. In any case from my point of view the health impacts of weed are neither here nor there. Prohibition is a costly failure and it makes no sense to potentially criminalise hundreds of thousands of people because they partake in consuming it. A different approach is needed so it will be interesting to see what Colorado makes of it in 2, 3, 5 or 10 years time.

I know loads of people who smoke regularly with no paranoid delusions or other health issues. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants.

the end of the world is nigh....

nice stream, will use that in future.

Anyone got a different streaming link to the one posted earlier (not working for me)

+1 more!

No, not from the video clips posted on the Guardian. Too lanky to be Sidwell. Got to be Kitson.

Never seen it.

Is that for real?

Oh Pap, I thought you were better than this. M&S policy, if you read the article, is that employees who have a problem handling alcohol can work in areas such as the bakery instead of working on the checkout. The instance in this particular shop was an error so no shoppers in future will need to go to a different checkout. Panic-ising over.

This only supports the notion that London is too dominant for the rest of the country.

Are you including the bail-out of the financial sector in that appraisal? You also don't mention how the scramble by the super-rich to own London property is skewing the housing market in the rest of the country.

A humungous crash in the property market

I would. It's declined in in importance to the UK economy.

One key to a successful economy is a balance across sectors to help you ride out economic shocks and how more consistent and sustainable growth. An advantage of having a sizeable manufacturing sector is that the opportunities for productivity improvements are much greater - you can increase the output of a manufacturing business dramatically through new and better technologies - whereas with Service industries the scope is much lower. Manufacturing is also wealth generating in a way that most service businesses cannot be as well as providing well paid skilled jobs even towards the lower end of a business's workforce. The UK is becoming ever more service dominated and as such future growth is being limited and we're moving towards a largely two tier economy of very well paid professional jobs at one end and very poorly paid manual jobs at the other with little in between.

...as a proportion of our economy (obviously)

You guys SHOULD meet up soon. I think you'd actually get on really well and this messageboard antagonism could be hiding something more meaningful. Maybe get some food at the same time. Obviously with Xmas on our doorstep so you should probably wait a few weeks => Valentine's day?

I think it does. There is always a chicken and egg side to things but I hardly think it is a coincidence that our manufacturing base has been shrinking for decades at the same time that "the City" has become ever bigger. We have a short term approach to business in this country that focuses upon quick cash and profits rather than long term investment and I think this is driven by the City. In the UK our financial sector, our politicians, our civil services, our national media, our major companies, our main airports are all based in London. With regards to HS2 I fear that this will have a contrary impact to that hoped for by Northern politicians. If HS2 makes it quicker and easier for people to get to the North it obviously also makes it quicker and easier to get to London. Businesses could figure that locating head offices in London becomes therefore more attractive.

True, it does help that they win more often than not. Not sure they'd be quite so good if they'd gone most of the last 20 years hardly winning away from home.

Hardly any Premier League club players, no City, Spurs, Arsenal, United, Everton, Villa or Saints.

What's with the stuffed toys and mannequin? disturbing.

It's surely a list put together based on fan votes from the UK. Camp Nou and Bernabeu are fantastic stadiums but the atmosphere is very poor except for El Classico or the latter stages of the Champions League. Similarly, Man U fans are brilliant away from home but Old Trafford is no cauldron of noise. I'm no football hipster but obvious exceptions are Boca Juniors, Dortmund, Shalke, and the big Istanbul clubs.

Would be an improvement on the current sh;te-club mentality ba-dum-tish

and ready to believe any ****e forwarded to him in an email or on facebook.