evil woman

I've no doubt that you are right, but I'd rather know who will be PM before I cast my vote for a Blair and wind up with a Brown again. I'm not about to vote for Miliband as PM and find out I've actually voted for Balls, or even worse some Scottish git who will sell us all out to Sturgeon in 18 months time.

Yes I spotted that. I thought Miliband was thinking "Am I really cut out for this?"

That would suggest that Nigel Farage is the only one with a credible solution.

Would you recommend leaving Christmas tree lights on when you go out or go to bed?

I have had 2 power packs blow in recent years. One on a monitor and one on an external hard drive. The one for the monitor went with a loud pop and blew sparks out from the socket where the mains cable plugged in. It left a few scorch marks on some papers on my desk. I turn all my transformer packs off at night. It requires one click. Phoning the fire brigade requires more effort than that.

I raced karts a few years back. There were ambulances on standby and a helicopter for emergencies. It does seem a bit odd that the BBC would send a film crew out to do daft things in cars on dangerous roads without taking a medical backup, particularly as Hawes is rumoured on here to be so far off the beaten track that sherpas are required should a car hit a wall.

Yes I can imagine how an interview might go.. "Oh I see you worked on Top Gear. What did that involve?" "It was my job to arrange the hotels and make sure the stars go fed." "OK. How did that go down?"

They could get hints from somewhere like Goldthorpe on how to really fail to progress and to deter all inward investment.

It did occur to me that if the names being put forward were likely to succeed then one of the other channels would be employing them. The BBC probably can't afford to ditch top gear. 90% of its shows cost money. Top Gear brings in revenue of £50 million and is sold round the world with Clarkson, May and Hammond as its anchors.

Who ever takes over from Clarkson is likely to be picking up the poison chalice. No doubt Clarkson is already well into getting a deal with a new company and that could well invlove Andy Wilman, James May and Richard Hammond. Who ever takes on Top Gear at the BBC is going to be faced with the expectation of attracting 5 1/2 million viewers at the same time as Clarksons new creation launches on a competing channel.

You do have a point. He did say if elected he would stay the full course. Folk thought they were voting for Blair and ended up with the nightmare of having Brown as PM. Imagine voting for Miliband and winding up with Balls as PM.

Would you rebook to see a rescheduled Rolling Stones gig if Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts weren't going to be in the line up?

Of course if all the UKs super rich gave away their wealth to feed the starving in Africa, and all the bankers waved their bonuses, the rest of us would have to pay twice as much tax to stop the country's debt spiraling out of control as happened in Greece. On the plus side the terrorists in Africa who be able to buy much better guns.

Have you ever thought that in a "scuffle" it isn't often easy for bystanders to say who hit who first, although it is often possible for them to say who hit who last.

Isn't that pretty much what I said. HSBC ( Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) is a multinational with operations in 80 countries and departmental offices numbering thousands. Sheffield has an IT centres. It is hardly going to alter the job prospects for Sheffield particularly as HSBC is in the myre and laying off thousands worldwide.

No they didn't. They set up an IT branch here. That's not quite the same thing. You may also have missed that HSBC is a bank and not a motor manufacturer. They don't actually make anything. They just seem to get fined a lot for fixing LIBOR rates, miss-selling insurance etc.

It is totally irrelevant. It wasn't a factory. It was just land. Land can be sold and land can be bought. If they had wanted to move to a different location it would not have been an obstacle. The point is they didn't choose to build in Sheffield. Nor did any of the others. If you walk around the east end of Sheffield there are massive amounts of vacant plots. There is even the failed airport. Why haven't investors come to build on these sites.

BMW built a complete brand new factory called Plant Oxford. It was a complete new factory on a totally leveled site so it could have been built anywhere there was space.

That was why I asked the question in the context of this thread. Why did such massive investments along with so many thousands of jobs go to these places rather than an engineering city like Sheffield. There are 60,000 students studying in Sheffield's universities at this moment. Surely they should be providing sufficient skills base for any venture that came along.

Which were the auto factories in Burnaston, Sunderland and Swindon before the Nissan, Toyota and Honda located there?

Well Nissan chose Sunderland, Honda chose Swindon, BMW chose Oxford and Toyota chose Burnaston for their factories. Why didn't they choose Sheffield?

But if he's given it all away he is no longer the richest man. You can't spend it or give it away twice.

The question has to be. "If you were a company director what would persuade you that Sheffield was the one place in the world to set up a factory, office or other outpost?"

It isn't surprising that so many folk with money choose to live in Monaco and similar places and spend their cash there.

I have a Morris Minor if that helps.