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Indeed, plus being starved of cash as I posted. Today we've paid three times as much subsidy and buy pendolinos from Italy. .

We did, the earliest being as far ago as 1560, but railways as we'd recognise them really commenced in the 1840s. But they've always been a failure since then, and our modern troubles with them are entirely due to governments failing to recognise that and insisting they should be profitable...

Excellent article. Below is one small error: Britain existed very long before the union with Scotland, even more so after King Henry the Eighth declared Wales a principality of England, making Britain a federation of two nations. The Union with Scotland created Great Britain, the word Great...

It was all about the Tories not losing votes to UKIP, as usual their blatant self interest taking precedence before all else. .

No vision involved, just reporting a couple of truths unpopular with all those who lap up the anti-left propaganda. .

Indeed, many former East Germans have been far from happy with reunification. And then there's Russia where a third of the population wish they were still in the USSR's communist system which had many benefits for everyone. .

My post was only about the risk to him. I've got friends who've been drawing benefits while working or earning in various concealed ways for very many years. One has been in that situation for almost 30 years. He has an older brother who left school at 16, is now 58, has never had an...

Yes the local councils teams are greatly reduced by budget cuts, but the national investigators working in the DWP have been increased through recent years. I get the impression that they prefer to make example prosecutions in areas, rather than going for numbers. .

But at risk of criminal prosecution for fraud. .

Agreed, and both were common on various cars at that time. I still think it looked like an oversize Mini that a giant had trodden on. .

I thought the 1800 a horrible car. There was one in a 140 strong mixed model company fleet that I tried a few times but couldn't get to like it. Its wide low Mini like stance just seemed weird in a car that size and it looked odd. I don't think upsizing a successful design works, the Mini...

Indeed they were terrible. The 1979 Allegro was the one with the A plus engine that later went into the Metro. .

Hydrolastic was actually intended by Alex Issigonis to be on the Minis from day one, but it wasn't developed enough in time so appeared three years later on the 1100 and five years later on the MIni. However it was another Alex who invented it, rubber engineer Alex Moulton, also of cycling fame. .

On a different political note, if you thought Greta Thunberg is an original, nearly three decades ago in 1992, 12 year old Severn Cullis-Suzuki addressed the delegates at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. She covered the whole environmental issue very effectively, not just climate change...

Oh I think every village enjoyed the cock fights, those were cruel days, to people as well as animals and there wasn't much entertainment about if there was no witch to drown or blasphemer to burn at the stake. I saw that too. A fair number of them do get very badly injured and sometimes...

Yes, the whole line of 1100s and 1300 had hydroelastic suspension, as did the Minis from 1964 on. In fact the Morris 1100 ADO16 was the first of their cars to get the system in 1962. The Allegro wasn't introduced until 1979. .

True, we weren't brave enough. We preferred to have cockerels fighting each other while we kept well out of the way in case we got pecked. That was of course after the bear baiting and before the otter hunting. That's all in the past of course, now we prefer to either stab each other or four...

I still remember as a car mad pre-teen momentarily wondering why there was no Austin dancing. .

Trouble is we are not proud of our heritage in the way the Spanish are. If we were, Strictly Come Dancing would be a a Morris Dancing competition. ;) .

This depends on how one sees the desirability of a single federal country of Europe. For those like myself who want to see that, the EU is acting at such a snails pace that any slower would be standing still. And standing still on progress to unity means there's no point to having the EU...