The Credit Crunch: The current credit crunch precipitated by the selling on of sub prime mortgage debts was a disaster waiting to happen. For all the mathematical theory and fancy salaries, derivatives trading - which is what has spread the rot - is relatively unregulated and the participants should be regarded as street traders on a large scale. In fact this probably does a grave injustice to street traders. In view of this it would be nice if there were mortgage lenders and deposit takers that ordinary people could trust. One might have thought that the remaining building societies, which in theory are owned by their members were the answer. In as well as being prudent, one might have expected that the margin between the mortage rate and the deposit rate of interest would be favourable, as there are no dividends to pay. In practice it has been argued that building societies' performance in this respect is less than impressive. In practice the boards of building societies are accountable to no-one. The largest building society, the Nationwide has never elected member nominated candidates to its board. This is partly because the board have discouraged such candidates and partly because the law requires the use of the appalling multiple X vote voting system. Successive governments have declined to alter the law to allow the use of STV (see: Voting Reform), presumably because the boards of building societies don't want it. This is another example of government ignoring the interests of ordinary people.

Weymouth town centre Post Office is allegedly losing money. It is extremely busy year round, not just at holiday time. You always have to queue for at least five minutes. If it cannot make a profit then no post office in the country can. The government has done its level best to make post offices uneconomic by withdrawing from contracts for it to provide services. Post Offices are not a typical business. They are an integral part of the provision of a postal service. How else can ordinary people send recorded delivery letter to all those scummy companies who refuse to acknowledge any other form of communication? Now that the Royal Mail has lost its monopoly the days of a universal postal service are clearly numbered. And yet the law presumes that if a company or a law court sends a letter by ordinary non recorded delivery letter to a private individual, that individual is deemed to have received it. How can we say we live in a civilised society? It is not for nothing that the postal service was the first enterprise in the UK to be nationalised, that Rowland Hill invented the penny stamp, and that even the United States still has a nationalised postal service.

UK Arms exports not only fuel wars and atrocities all over the world, but are not in the interests of the vast majority of British citizens.The Government puts forward the following reasons for supporting the arms trade:

• Political: the UK government claims that it sells arms to promote international security and support its allies. But most of the 100-plus countries that receive UK arms are not allies and it is difficult to envisage situations where the unrestricted sale of arms (including to both sides of a dispute or conflict) will lead to an increase in genuine human security rather than have the opposite effect. The other main political argument is the catch-all ‘everyone has a right to self-defence’. Yeah right; but we dont have to subsidise them.
• Strategic arguments: the government’s primary official argument for arms exports is that they are needed to support arms production in the UK – the so-called 'Defence Industrial Base' (DIB) – which can then supply the UK’s military. But arms exports are not necessary for a DIB. If exports were ended, the MoD might have to pay more for some equipment because of shorter or disrupted production runs, but offsetting this would be significant savings due to the end of arms export subsidies. There are also serious questions as to the very existence of a meaningful DIB. There is certainly little security of domestic supply as arms production is dominated by international businesses that will move production away from the UK if this increases profits for their international shareholders. Some of the largest producers of arms in the UK are European- and US-headquartered companies. Meanwhile, the main UK-headquartered companies are increasingly focused on producing in and for the US.
• Economic arguments: the government and arms companies exploit the ingrained perception that arms production and export is a vital element of the economy. However, the truth is that it is now an unexceptional, and increasingly economically peripheral, sector. The major UK-headquartered arms companies comprise less than 2% of the FTSE index, arms exports account for only 1.8% of total exports, arms export employment comprises only 0.2% of the workforce (and is concentrated in the South East which has almost full employment); and technical innovation is dominated by the civil sector with even the MoD acknowledging that Research & Development "supporting the rapidly changing civil sector markets dwarfs that of defence".

• the arms companies, government and armed forces are intimately connected through a web of formal arrangements (such as DESO and the plethora of advisory quangos) and numerous personal relationships (often due to the ‘revolving door’),
• there is a militaristic approach to security and problem solving within government that makes it extremely receptive to the approaches of arms companies,
• the government, more generally, panders to large companies and the corporate agenda.