what you sayabout inflation and printing money - of course is not drivel.

however theres such thing as priming the pump. In England we had a leader in mrs. thatcher who wouldn't prime the pump - if she didn't like the cut of your jib - weren't her sort of people. there was money for any number of daft right wing 'initiatives' - but anybody with dirty fingernails was personna non grata.

it cost us nearly all our manufacturing and heavy industry. In the short term the social problems that came in its wake were devastating- we had never had beggars on the street before, or a major hard drugs problem, or really much in the way of organised crime before that.

Now we've got the lot. Plus the chickens are starting to come home to roost. So far we have been lucky. People come to England and see it is a nice place to live. And the value of our houses has provided a lot of collateral that has kept the country afloat - albeit in debt.

We are about to discover the penalty for stopping producing items of worth to our fellow inhabitants of the globe.