Enjoy retirement Backwoodsman. Everyone I know or knew reckons retirement can be a bit too busy! (I "retired" when I sold up some business interests and resigned from the board, but within a short time, I started working again. I sincerely hope you are more clever than I and enjoy retirement instead!)

Al, point taken. Manton was of course a Yorkshire area pit physically in Nottinghamshire, so was a focal point for all. Hence criminal elements and radicals on all sides (Met and Merseyside being the constabulary criminal elements) focussed on Manton. My point was that some on these threads have been in favour of suspending democracy if it interfered with their ideology. I have little time for the naive at best, condescending at worst attitudes of the "arrogant posh boys" but also accept that many people voted for them, so they have at least as much right to govern as any if voting patterns are reliable.

I've just returned from South Africa where, on Robben Island, I spoke with Yasin Mohammed, who worked during apartheid in many countries, raising the profile of jailed civil rights activists and comrade of Mandella, and Sobukwe. He quoted Mandella in saying that to replace one system with another turns the oppressed into the oppressor, so what have you improved? These guys didn't want to govern, they wanted to ask the whole population who they wished to see govern for all.

So perhaps instead of questioning the right of "arrogant posh boys" to govern, perhaps stating that they would not get your vote would be a a bit better? Me? I'd vote for them tomorrow if they could deliver my idea of equitable government, same as I would vote for Screaming Lord Such if a) he could deliver and b) he was still alive to do it.

The trick is not to have a chip on your shoulder. Roots and heritage don't make good government, an economy that can and does deliver an equitable social program does that, regardless of whoever speaks for it and debates it.

Mind you, I treat Tory dogma with the same disdain as Bridge's barbecued donkey on the road to Damascus. (If you are sad enough to read everything he writes, you may recall he used to call himself a one nation Tory....)