grrclark

I believe that the Navy have never placed any orders outside of the UK, the RN ships have always been built in British shipyards. The fact is that we require less warships than we used to and capacity exceeds demand. Other commercial shipbuilding in the UK was/is simply uncompetitive, hence it moved to more competitive parts of the world. The UK defence industry is still one of our greatest manufacturing success stories, although in some quarters that is seen as somehow being morally unethical. As for the argument that this decision was politically biased in favour of the Scottish independence referendum I am not convinced this is the case. It is really easy to reach that conclusion, but commercial studies from 2 years ago suggested that BAE retaining Portsmouth as a ship building site was no longer economically viable. I think had the decision been deferred then it would be more political, effectively it could have been used as a bride or incentive to the Scottish electorate, but the decision is made now. Had the decision been made to remove the capability in Scotland then undoubtably the SNP would have used that as an anti Westminster stick, but in truth they do that with absolutely everything anyway, instead they will still use the loss of 800+ jobs in Scotland as a political lever regardless of what happens in Portsmouth.

+1 to that I have no issues with immigrants who come to this country that are a net contributor to society, whether that be monetary, culturally or whatever. Sadly we have a sizeable population of indigenous people who could contribute, but through their life choices don't and are a net consumer. I would happily swap one for the other.

The fact that it continues to be promoted by the mothers who have gone through this demonstrate the power of cultural, religious and societal beliefs, they are held in much higher regard and importance than the individual. Although I agree that it is a despicable practice we have to be careful we don't attempt to impose our societal or cultural beliefs on other countries, fair enough in this country we absolutely should enforce the outlawing of this barbaric behaviour, but we need to be careful taking that overseas.

The point is though that this isn't a solution. If you were to put that legislation in place then the majority of already responsible dog owners will follow the rules, so not changing anything. Some already responsible people will take the hump and not bother muzzling their dogs as they are not problematic, so we now criminalise people, but still with no beneficial outcome. The irresponsible folk will still be irresponsible, there are already rules that say you're not allowed to let your dog bite other dogs or people. Taking photos of unmuzzled dogs to send to the rozzers is all well and good, but how do they know who that dogs belongs to in order to enforce anything? Fair enough if you know who the owner is and where they live, you can give that detail to the police, but you could do that now if you thought the dog was aggressive as there are rules already in place. I can understand the sentiment behind the argument, but the ultimate outcome is all you would serve to do is place an additional burden on the police and courts by putting in place legislation that would be hideously time consuming, you would criminalise a larger percentage of the population and people/animals would still get bitten. A more extreme example, it has always been illegal to murder someone with a gun and murder always carries a mandatory life sentence, so does the threat of also been caught in possession of an illegal firearm make any difference to criminals carrying guns and shooting people? Firearms laws just made it harder to get a gun and placed a more onerous burden on those that were already responsible. The dafties that want to shoot people still do. The truth is that idiots will always be idiots, whether it is with mad dogs, guns, cars, broken bottles, etc. Despite that they are still in a tiny minority and we need to be very careful not to negatively impact on the majority by putting in place more and more rules that bring no benefit.

The vast majority of owners are responsible for their dogs behaviour. Sadly the trend within UK society seems to be an abdication of responsibility such that we want to resort to imposing blanket conditions as a result of something that is completely in the minority. Examples recently would be the couple who are petitioning to have window blind cords banned as their child very sadly choked to death after falling inside the loop of one; or in a completely different example banning burkhas because of the lad absconding from his minders by dressing up in one. Bank robbers have been using stockings to cover their faces for years, should we ban those? What about gloves as they are used by thieves to stop leaving fingerprints? Yes those last two questions are stupid, but in essence that is what we as a society will ultimately promote. So many people complain that the state is too pervasive and intrusive, watching over everything we do, yet as a society we sheepishly follow in line and actually volunteer ever more control to the state as a result of what is a tiny tiny amount of bad things happening.

All persons drinking in pubs should have their wrists shackled, this would solve all the issues of people having punch ups after drinking too much.

I disagree that we are a broken society, rather we are an evolving society. Some of that evolution based around our own personal standards may be considered a decline, but some of it is certainly an advancement. I am also not so sure that we can look at the last 20 years and consider that dog human interaction has become more problematic in that timescale, undoubtably accessibility to news about this has become richer so it appears to be more of a problem, equally statistical record keeping has become much more advanced so there may be more recorded instances, but I would wager that there is no bigger a problem now that there has ever been. There are millions of dogs in our society so in real terms the level of problems are absolutely tiny, but a story of 'child left with dog, nothing happens' is not newsworthy in the least. It's fair that nobody can really know for sure what their dog may do in a given circumstance, but that is equally true about humans. My suspicion would be more infants die as a result of having a drunken parent taking them to bed with them and inadvertently suffocating them than die as a result of a dog attack. Typo edit*

you can visit www.checkmend.com/uk to see if the IMEI is reported as being stolen. Did you say that you had fitted a new battery to the iPhone? If I am reading your post correctly, it worked OK with your SIM before, but you replaced the battery then it didn't work. Suggests that you have dislodged something when splitting the case to fit the battery. If the phone is reading the SIM OK, but not getting any signal then likely you have disconnected the antenna. I am sure that in an iPhone 3 that the case is part of the antenna.

I just recently bought a Franchi Alcione One 20g and so far I have to say it is absolutely fine. It is a nicely finished gun but only had 150 cart's through it so it is very early days indeed and no measure of reliability or anything else at this stage. The barrel selector/safety is probably not as smooth as it could be, although by no means bad, but that would be my only real criticism so far. Time will tell how it holds up, but at the price point of £750 and with a 3 year warranty should anything mechanical fail it seems to be good value, hopefully the backup of GMK makes that warranty worthwhile should it ever be required. My other gun is a B725 and there is a clear difference in terms of quality between the two, but is that differential worth £1000?? Probably over a longer time and considering resale value, but the Franchi is great so far.

I find it terribly alarming when the line of 'legislation will/would have prevented something happening'. It seems after every incident, whether it is simply accidental, irresponsible or of wilful intent that the same old argument is spouted out that there should be legislation as that would stop this ever happening again. That is simply not the case, for every act of legislation ever conceived there are countless examples of people who have disobeyed it, some of which had bad consequence and some not. More legislation, especially ill conceived and inconsistently applied legislation, just serves to criminalise a larger group of people with no beneficial outcome for anyone. Legislation may help to deter an act occurring from the fear of the consequence of being caught, but in order for that to happen it needs to be easily and readily policed, so increasing the risk of capture and it also has to resonate with the conscience of the person considering breaking that legislation. Irresponsible people behave irresponsibly, regardless of legislation or social acceptability or anything else, that's why they're irresponsible. Regrettably people, adult or child, will always be killed by dogs, cows, window blinds cords, knives the pointy way up in dishwashers, madmen with swords or guns, drunken drivers, etc. Legislation may be part of a solution, although in this case I suspect education would be much more effective. That education should/could be delivered via mainstream media that take a rational and appropriate approach, equally animal rehoming shelters, pet shops, etc can perform a similar role.