LondonLax

Standardisation, it's bloody brilliant.

So why the **** do Alliance and Leicester neglect it? Went to a cashpoint earlier, needed a tenner, go into that kind of autopilot mode while chatting to my mate (and also while vaguely under the influence of last night), shove in the card, punch the keys, ask for a receipt, press the button that ever other cashpoint I've ever used has for the £10 option.

Imagine my shock when the machine pumps out £100. Alliance and Leicesters cash points put £100 in the top left, where every one else puts a tenner. **** idiotsm it doesn't even make **** sense. I've now gonna have to head into town tomorrow to pay back in £90 having to deal with some bint with a fac elike a slapped arse in bloody Halifax.

Yes I think it was that sort of poor practice that made them ripe for takeover by Santander.

Standardisation is on its way.

Interest rates are staying low and growth is not stong enough to drive up inflation.

Not growth, but a devaluing Pound will surely?

That's already happened though hasn't it? It might continue to drop which would incease inflation but if it has found a level for a while then inflation shouldn't change either because of that.

There are a lot of people with large savings cheering for a big inflation rise to force up interest rates again (bringing inflation back down in the process obviously), the last couple of lines in that article suggest Hamish might be in that camp.

It depends on whether you have large savings or a large mortgage as to what you will be cheering for this year.

Fortunatly (or unfortunatly) I have neither

It's just the VAT jump back to 17.5% comming through the system.

Is it just VAT?

How did the return to a 17.5% rate manage to affect the inflation rates (both CPI and RPI) before January's figures?

RPI has gone from -0.8% (I think) in October to 3.7% in January and CPI from 1.6% in Oct to 3.5% in Jan.

And bearing in mind it wasn't exactly an unknown, it appears rather concerning that neither the BoE or the treasury were able to accurately forecast where CPI or RPI would be if the increase is just down to VAT.

Yes it is not entirely down to the VAT increase, the price of fuel is up also but everying I have read says that the main reason for the spike is the fact that everything has increased by 2.5% this month due to VAT returning to normal.

Infation will drop back down again next month.

Why? Are they intending to reduce the VAT rate again?

If talk of 20% VAT comes true after the next election then the inflation rate shortly after that might turn out to be horrendous (VAT rated goods will be, ceteris paribus, 5% higher than the previous year).

No VAT won't reduce but it wont rise either so prices will stay the same i.e. there will be no inflation due to VAT changes.

When the fuel price starts to fall again the inflation rate will come down even further.

If VAT is increased in 6months than there will be another inflation spike that month showing prices have changed more than usual that month, then it should drop back again as there will not be a similar price increase the month after.

It's just the VAT jump back to 17.5% comming through the system.

Infation will drop back down again next month.

Interest rates are staying low and growth is not stong enough to drive up inflation.

I'm guessing a "RINO" is a Republican In Name Only?

That make Cameron a Conservative Undertaking New Tactics.

Also, I spent a good couple of hours speaking to an Irish girl tonight, who had some interesting ideas on Welsh culture, but also did one of those things that often gets me for some reason - had a name I'd never heard before. Rosheen (undoubtedly spelt wrong). Never ever heard the name before. No idea but when I hear a name I'm unused to it puts me off a bit, slightly like you don't know the person quite as well as might have.

Odd.

Yeah.. that is odd.

Roisin would be the name, for the record.

I once knew a Roisin, she hated me, I was the best man at her wedding, I ruined it apparently. Miserable bitch she was

Róisín Murphy is a fairly famous Roisin. She was the singer in Moloko. I saw her doing a solo show at Glastonbury a couple of years ago and she was pretty good.

The TV Licensing company have now let me and the rest of my housemates know about our legal standing if we don't purchase licenses.

The carefully worded threatening letters are becoming farcical now, we rang up to tell them we aren't using TVs or anything (reception for this house is terrible, I actually can't put the TV anywhere that receives signal) and they said we'd been scheduled for a visit anyway.

Idiots.

I'd play that team in the replay at VP, if we lose who gives a monkeys, we have a squad bloody play it!!!!!

Er...I would care if we lost. We have a real good chance of making the Semis which would be another trip to wembley.

Anyway, I think todays performance was not a bad as some are saying.

It was a battling cup tie at a muddy selhurst park. We were never going to be stroking the ball around at will with them stomping on our feet and elbowing our faces in the mud and rain.

For all their battle they hardly created anything and they will have a much tougher time of it in a replay. I think we could make a few changes and put together a professional performance at home to go through.

I have my iPod on shuffle and the same song has just come on twice in a row. There are 3627 songs on the iPod, I'm wondering if any smart mathematicians can tell me what the odds of that happening are?

1/13155129 or 7.6*10^-8 - so close to the odds of winning the lottery

It's actually.... 1 in 3627... 1/13155129 is the odds of a pre-selected song coming up twice in a row but there are 3627 ways that can happen.

But it isn't because ipod shuffle is not actually random 8)

I blame the parents, how can they let their child drink Budweiser??

They should have introduced him to some of the lovely Czech or Belgian beers...

Just had a quick nose on a couple of spuds forums, you should see the shit their deluded fans are giving Redknob!

Most of it wouldn't get past our word filters :-)

So not much difference to the abuse MON gets when we lose then?

Heck he's copping it today after a draw with Man U.

The ipod shuffle is not compleatly random, the songs are programmed to not be repeated very often so the odds would actually be higher than the natural odds you'd expect.

As for inequality, things are not 'tickety boo' in that arena.

The thing with inequality is worth making a point on if you are talking about finacial/standard of living inequality.

There is much greater equality for women and minorities than there ever has been at any other point in history (true equality has not been achieved yet but it is heading in the right direction year on year).

In the general population the gap between the richest and poorest is greater than it ever has been but the large middle chunk, i.e. the majority of population, has a higher living standard than it ever has had. In other words, things were more equal before because everyone was poorer and that is not a desirable place to return to either.

Shame we didn't make the extra man count but 4 points off united is nothing to sneeze at.

We are only 2 points behind 4th with a game in hand, there is no way I thought we would be this close after the run of fixtures we have been through.

.. the clubs were there, they were just non league clubs at the time.

..

I see. It's "just" that the vast majority of current clubs were non-league clubs at the time.

So the fact that this meant they weren't able to compete for all these 19th century trophies is entirely irrelevant to Villa's winning them is it? Pull the other one.

M.K Dons were founded in 2004... ..

The MK Dons are essentially Wimbledon FC re-named and re-located.

So what, change it ot AFC-Wimbledon then or any other recently formed club. The point still remains.

"AFC-Wimbledon are as big a club as Spurs because they have won the same number of league titles and FA Cups as each other since 2004. You can't go back any further than that beacause AFC Wimbledon were not around then so that era can not be compared..." :bonk:

This really is the stupidest aregument you have come out with yet. I'm not sure why I am bothering posting a reply to it...

maybe we have to go back to the 60's or 50's?

Take the median age of the population.

Go back to when they were say, 6-12 years old.

That's when the good times were, since those were the years that a large block of the population viewed the world through the eyes of a protected child (especially if they grew up middle or upper class).

John Stuart did a good bit on that the other week on The Daily Show.

It's probably on youtube somewhere...

It's not Villa's fault all the Southern fairy clubs refused to turn professional. It's not like the clubs didn't exist.

Exactly, the clubs were there, they were just non league clubs at the time.

M.K Dons were founded in 2004, their fans don't go around claiming the trophies won before 2004 shouldn't be counted when comparing clubs because they were not around to compete for them before then.

The whole argument is completely stupid and could only have been thought up by a Spurs fan.

And they wonder why we think they are arrogant...

yeah I work with an Aussie and Kiwi, I just don't get why they came here other than having London on their CV!

It's because Australia is so far away from the rest of the world!

I can't go on weekend breaks to Europe from OZ

I am one of the 42 per cent trying to emmigrate. I am fed up with the nanny state, the corrupt politicians who are out of touch with the majority of us and the debt that is constantly sitting on our society as a result of bad decision making and relaxed banking laws. Change just isn't around the corner and I want out.

Amen. I'm off on Monday the 15th and can't wait. Literally dozens of the people I went to Uni with have left for Oz, the US, Canada or NZ in the last three or four years - loads of people I served with have done the same.

People who think that Britain is not broken, but bad and declining across many spheres of life (and have the option to leave) have been voting with their feet for a while now. It'd be interesting to know the main reasons given for leaving by recent UK emigres.

Yet so many Aussies, Kiwi's, South Africans and Europeans keep moving here, well to London anyway. Perhaps we could set up some sort of official exchange programme

Joey, Milner has been fantastic in the middle for us. The only player in the side who picks out through balls to the strikers since Merson was at the club, and he does it with both feet as well as getting more shots away (and scoring goals!) than when he played wide.

He doesn't dominate the game against the top sides but hopefully that is because he has only played the role for a few months. I think he will continue to grow into it the more experience he gets and I hope Capello's suggestion that he could be the new Lampard comes to fruition.

I think this part is quite revealing...

Newspapers were no less lurid a century ago. But there is one big change: a shift in readership from local papers to national ones. Mr Cameron’s comfortable Witney constituents are dropping the Oxford Mail in favour of national titles or the television, which report the most gruesome stories from across the country, not just the county. In this way local crises, such as an outbreak of teenage stabbings in London in 2007 and 2008, become national panics, causing fear even in regions where the problem does not exist. And bad news travels best: the fact that London’s teenage-murder rate quietly halved last year was not widely reported outside the capital.

There is a very interesting article in the Economist this week about how peoples perceptions of the state of society doesn't match up with the actual statistical data.

It is a long read but is very interesting.

Britain's “broken society”

Through a glass darkly

Crime, family break-up, drunks and drugs: the Conservatives—and apparently plenty of voters—think that Britain has a “broken society”. Does the claim stand up?

Feb 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Philip Wolmuth/reportdigital.co.uk

IT IS hard to believe that such appalling crimes could have been committed by anyone so young. Two boys in the north of England were subjected to a sadistic attack that caused parents across the country to shudder. The anguish of the children was awful enough. But in a grotesque twist, their tormentor was also a child, not yet even a teenager. The attacks had been carried out “solely for the pleasure and excitement” of it, the judge in the case said. What has society come to when such evil is found in those so young?

That was in 1968. Mary Bell, the daughter of a Tyneside prostitute and supposedly the victim of repeated abuse herself, became Britain’s most famous child-killer when, just 11 years old, she was convicted of strangling two young boys. Now, a similar case is causing people to wonder again whether society has gone to the dogs. Two brothers from the South Yorkshire village of Edlington, aged ten and 11, were convicted on January 22nd of torturing and sexually abusing two younger boys in an ordeal that left one of them close to death.

The case was highlighted by David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, who on the day the boys were sentenced launched a chapter of his Conservative Party’s election manifesto dedicated to dealing with what he calls Britain’s “broken society”. The Edlington case was not “just some isolated incident of evil”, Mr Cameron said. Connecting it to four other infamous examples of callous brutality, he declared that it raised “deep questions about what is going wrong in our society”. Britain is experiencing a social recession to match the economic one, he reckons.

Those good old days in full

Was Mary Bell’s Britain better than today’s version? An increasing number of people seem to think so. Opinion pollsters around the world find that people are usually gloomy about the future, perhaps because it is inherently more uncertain than the past. But Britons are getting even more downbeat. When Labour came to power in 1997, 40% of the population thought the country was becoming a worse place to live in. By 2007 that had risen to 60%. A year on, and a year into Gordon Brown’s spell as prime minister, the malcontents numbered 71%—and that was before the financial crash. There has been a “surge of nostalgia” for the good old days, says Ben Page, head of Ipsos-Mori, a polling firm.

Chief among people’s worries is their security. Under Labour, fear of crime climbed until by 2007 it had become the issue that pollsters identified as the main complaint among voters. (Since then worries about the economy have eclipsed all else.) The heightened fears are a puzzle to criminologists, who point out that over the past 15 years Britain has experienced a steady, deep fall in crime. The statistics are notoriously hard to interpret, but according to the British Crime Survey, the Home Office’s most reliable measure though still far from perfect, crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995. A big chunk of that fall is owing to reductions in vehicle theft and domestic burglary, for which alarm manufacturers and increased householder vigilance probably deserve as much credit as the police. But violent crime has fallen too. It is now almost half what it was in 1995, and no higher than in 1981 (see chart 1).

Looking more carefully, the big fall in brutality has been in domestic violence, which has dropped by a staggering 70%. (No one is sure why; the best guess is that an improving economy has kept men out of the house and given women enough money to escape if they need to.) Violence at the hands of strangers—the prospect that probably drives fear of crime more than anything else—has fallen by far less, and in fact rose in the most recent reporting period. Robbery has not gone down as much as burglary, perhaps because personal security has not improved in line with domestic security. But it too has been falling.

This sort of upbeat, wonkish analysis enrages those who insist that, for ordinary people, Britain is a more frightening place than it once was, whatever official statistics might say. In parts of the country, and some of the time, that is bound to be true. Until recently the Home Office crime survey did not interview under-16s. Nor does it weight serious crimes more heavily than mild ones, which means that a drop in bicycle theft could cancel out an increase in assaults. The Conservatives say that this has masked a rise in rare but serious crimes—particularly gun and knife crime.

The evidence is mixed. Gun crime has in fact been pretty flat nationwide. Data on knife crime are poor, but some doctors say that they are dealing with more stabbings, and the number of murders involving “sharp instruments” (bottles as well as knives) has risen slightly. Murders using guns increased alarmingly during the first few years of Labour’s time in office, but have since dropped back down. Indeed, the day before Mr Cameron made his “broken society” pitch it was announced that the total number of homicides recorded by the police was at its lowest in 19 years.

Children at risk

One of the clearest long-term trends relates directly to the Edlington question. Parents have probably never been more worried about their offspring, but the truth is that children seem to be less at risk now than in the past. The number of killings of under-15s has “collapsed” since the 1970s, according to Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University. Professor Pritchard calculates that in 1974 Britain was the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world. By his reckoning it is now 17th, following a 70% drop in child homicides. To be on the safe side, he did the analysis again, including cases where the cause of death was undetermined; even then the number of cases had halved. He credits closer co-operation between police and social services, which kicked off in a big way in 1979.

Children also seem to be committing fewer serious offences themselves. Martin Narey, a former Home Office big cheese who now runs Barnardo’s, a venerable children’s charity, points out that the number of under-16s being convicted of the gravest offences is at least a third lower than it was in the early 1990s. There are fewer Mary Bells about, not more.

If the world outside the front door is safer than it used to be, what of the world within it? Families have certainly changed: most obviously, marriage has gone from being the norm to almost a minority pursuit, in line with most of Europe. The number of couples getting married has halved since the 1950s; within five years, the majority of British babies are expected to be born to unmarried parents. Britain’s divorce rate is among the highest in Europe—though it is also at its lowest since 1979.

The marriage question has become an unexpected flashpoint of the election campaign, with the Conservatives vowing to promote it through a tax break for married couples and gay civil-partners, in contrast to Labour and the Liberal Democrats who refuse to favour marriage over unmarried cohabitation. Everyone agrees, however, that two nappy-changers are better than one. Here, Britain has a problem: single-parent families are about three times more common than they were in 1970, following a big rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

At the same time, parents have been getting older. The average age of first childbirth is now 28, driven up by people’s desire to settle down later. Teenage pregnancies have been falling too, though they remain among Europe’s highest. Despite a small uptick in 2007, the latest full year for which figures are available, rates of conception among 15- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales were almost 11% lower than in 1998, and among 13- to 15-year-olds they were almost 8% lower. Figures for the first three quarters of 2008 confirm the broadly falling trend.

The real eye-opener is a long-term series including older teenagers. Conception among 15- to 19-year-olds has dropped by nearly a sixth since 1969 though there are more girls of that age (oddly, the number of pregnancies has started to rise again since 2003). And fewer still are becoming mothers, owing to a steep increase in abortions after they were made legal in 1967. Today, only half as many girls between 15 and 19 bear a child in their teens as when their grandmothers were that age (see chart 2).

Getty Images

An under-reported fracture in the way Britons live has been caused not by fecklessness but by wealth and good health. Far more people are living alone. There are twice as many lone pensioners as there were in 1961, because the elderly are living longer and can afford to keep their home when their partner dies. The number of younger people who live alone has more than trebled since then because singletons are postponing marriage and earn enough to have their own place until they couple up. More wealth means less need for sharing accommodation with flatmates, so despite a big increase in unmarried cohabiting, there has been an overall drop in the number of households containing unrelated adults. Social patterns may indeed have become more fractured, but the biggest changes have been made out of choice.

The vice squad

That may not produce a happier society. Britons make plenty of appalling decisions in other aspects of their lives, including binge-drinking and drug-taking. But some bad habits are being kicked. Smoking is falling, among adults and children, and Britain’s rate is now one of the rich world’s lowest (see chart 3). Alcohol consumption rose alarmingly towards the end of the 20th century, even as it fell in many other countries (see chart 4). But Britons over 15 still rank a sober tenth in the OECD, and there have recently been tentative signs of a decline in drinking by both adults and children. That is not the end of the matter: Britons’ penchant for less frequent but more sozzling drinking sessions than most others leads to public disorder and violence. And years of binge-drinking have left a lasting health problem in the form of increasing cirrhosis of the liver and the like. But things do seem to be looking up.

Among teenagers an interesting trend is emerging: the number of young people who abstain completely from alcohol is rising, but those who do drink are guzzling more. Something similar is happening with the consumption of drugs. Over the past five years there has been a fall in overall drug abuse, driven mainly by declining interest in cannabis. But consumption of cocaine, a less common but more dangerous drug, has doubled, and it is now more popular in Britain than almost anywhere else in western Europe. It seems that while the majority are sobering up, a dedicated minority are partying on.

Less crime, less killing, fewer teenage mums, far fewer fags, perhaps a bit less drink and drugs: why is it that the idea of “broken Britain” rings true with so many, when it seems far from reality? Partly, it is because people’s ideas about the state of society are simply inaccurate: the average voter reckons that four out of ten teenagers have children, for instance, whereas in fact perhaps three in a hundred do. Official statistics to the contrary are viewed with suspicion after successive governments have relentlessly massaged them.

Another reason is that other countries sometimes seem to be dealing with their problems more quickly than Britain. It is galling to see Italy, say, cutting back fast on the booze. In America, too, voices of right-wing doom who once urged the righteous to set up firewalls against contagion from the Sodom and Gomorrah around them are now seeing heartening signs there of social “re-norming”.

The view from Witney

Yet Britons refuse to do the same, and for this their newspapers, which seldom look on the sunny side of life, are much to blame. “NAME THE DEVIL BOYS—WE MUST NOT LET THEM HIDE”, roared the Mail on Sunday on January 24th, quoting the parents of the Edlington victims. Newspapers were no less lurid a century ago. But there is one big change: a shift in readership from local papers to national ones. Mr Cameron’s comfortable Witney constituents are dropping the Oxford Mail in favour of national titles or the television, which report the most gruesome stories from across the country, not just the county. In this way local crises, such as an outbreak of teenage stabbings in London in 2007 and 2008, become national panics, causing fear even in regions where the problem does not exist. And bad news travels best: the fact that London’s teenage-murder rate quietly halved last year was not widely reported outside the capital.

Britain has plenty of things to worry about; it would be absurd to suggest the contrary. But the big ones are not sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. There is a statistically small class of people, including a number of underskilled young whites and Caribbeans, who are being left behind in a general march toward the light. Many of those who were already at the bottom of the pile are finding it impossible to get out from under and join in. And this is serious.

Household income rose by an average of 2% a year between 1996-97 and 2007-08, but on most measures it ended up more unequally distributed than at any time since at least 1961, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank. The proportion of young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs) changed little between the end of 2001 and the end of 2008 despite a (pre-recession) buoyant labour market and lots of government attempts to help them connect with a job. Though measured unemployment is relatively low, the number of those who do not look for work because of real or fancied incapacity is very high.

At the root of it all is an education system that has long failed to educate the great mass of children usefully. It is showing its limitations more than ever now that manufacturing jobs for the unskilled are vanishing. For all the government fanfare about better-than-ever national exam results (partly achieved by grading fluffier subjects more sympathetically), in international tests the trend is downward. Data collected for the OECD’s PISA study in 2000 ranked British 15-year-olds eighth among member countries in maths, with a total point score, 529, that was well above the average. In 2006, with a below-average score of 495, they came joint 18th. So too with reading: British pupils were seventh in 2000 with 523 points but joint 13th in 2006 with 495. The 2009 data are unlikely to show a radical improvement. The most sobering aspect is the persistent gap in achievement between the very best and the very worst. Despite that, in 2007 Britain was educating a smaller proportion of its 15- to 19-year-olds than it did in 1995, on OECD figures. Of other member countries, only Portugal recorded a drop.

Government can do a lot to improve education, partly by pushing supply-side reforms vigorously. New Labour started to do this, then flagged; the Tories, whipped ahead by Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, are now the ones with the forward-looking ideas about education. But what about the other things?

Expectations that the state can improve social behaviour across the board have increased sharply. Take crime. Tim Newburn and Robert Reiner of the London School of Economics point out that, hard though it is to imagine now, crime was not widely considered a partisan issue until the 1970s. It crept into political debate then and gained prominence from Margaret Thatcher’s accusation during the 1979 election campaign that Labour was “soft” on crime. Responding to the Tory challenge, Labour increased sentence lengths and sent more petty criminals to jail, swelling the prison population by a third to 83,000.

At the same time, the definition of crime has expanded. Labour has repeatedly vowed to squash not only crime but also “anti-social behaviour”, attempting to tackle it with measures such as the “ASBO”, a court order aimed at muzzling noisy neighbours and the like. Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has indicated that he intends to fight this year’s election focusing on the nuisance caused by anti-social youths, a target that a generation ago would have seemed a silly little thing for the national government to be worrying about. Hooded youths hanging around on street corners and their equivalents have always given people the jitters; it is only recently that the government has promised to banish them, and disappointed people when it discovered it could not.

Ironically, some government policies have helped the more mobile poor up the ladder at the cost of concentrating deprivation more strongly than before. The sale of much council-owned social housing, for instance, gave ambitious working-class families the chance to move out of impoverished estates. But it has simultaneously turned those areas into zones of uniform, concentrated, workless deprivation of a sort that did not exist at the beginning of the 1980s, when more than a third of British homes were council-owned.

It is in these small pockets that the social improvements of recent decades may have been felt least. Drinking is down overall, but a minority is drinking harder; most types of crime are down, but certain types of violence persist; total drug use has fallen, but some of the most harmful drugs are getting more popular. The evidence supporting the existence of a “broken society” is thin indeed: all the more reason to focus on those who languish outside mainstream society altogether.

The pretty graphs are on the economist website here

February 9, 2010

We're living in broken Britain, say most voters

(Richard Pohle/The Times)

Voters are deeply pessimistic about the state of Britain today, believing that society is broken and heading in the wrong direction, a Populus poll for The Times has found.

Nearly three fifths of voters say that they hardly recognise the country they are living in, while 42 per cent say they would emigrate if they could.

But worries over the pace of social change and dislocation are balanced by the belief that life will get better, according to the survey undertaken at the weekend.

It suggests that 70 per cent believe that society is now broken, echoing a Conservative campaign theme of the past two years, while 68 per cent say people who play by the rules get a raw deal and 82 per cent think it is time for a change.

The snapshot of Britain also confirms, however, that the battle between the parties has tightened with Labour two points up at 30 per cent.

Women, working-class people and Tory voters were more likely to say that they hardly recognise their own country.

Overall, 64 per cent think that Britain is going in the wrong direction and just 31 per cent believe it is on the right track.

This is a widely used measure of mood in the United States where 57 per cent of people think America is going wrong and 37 per cent believe it is on the right track.

It is not all gloom. Three fifths (60 per cent) of those polled say they look to the future with optimism, against 38 per cent who are looking forward with anxiety. While 45 per cent say Britain’s best years are behind us, 50 per cent say that they are still to come.

More than half the public (55 per cent) say that their children’s lives will be better than their own, while 37 per cent say that they will be worse.

Voters’ main fire is directed at political institutions: 73 per cent say politics is broken in Britain and 77 per cent say there are far fewer people in public life that they admire than there used to be. The poll suggests anger at MPs who have had to repay expenses. A third say that they will vote against their local MP if he or she had been required to repay money.

David Cameron claimed yesterday that his generation of Tories were better placed than the Government to “fix broken politics”, and unveiled new rules that would bar former ministers in the private sector from lobbying government for two years.

The headline in the Times doesn't actually match the poll question (but suspiciously does match the conservative party message), they never actually asked in the poll if people thought Britain was "broken" and left the positive news from the poll at the bottom of the story.

So I was wondering, what do other Villa talkers think about the state of British society?

A dragon god would be way cool!