Man in a Shed: Remember in 1997 when Labour wondered if the Queen should be allowed to open parliament ?

Remember the modernising musings of 1997 when Blair and Co wondered via the media if the Queen should even open parliament ? Blair and Cherie walking to the state opening, to help show up the monarch and milk political advantage from it.

What a difference 12 years makes. She's the sole representative of the state from prime minister, through governing party and even the former speaker to emerge with any integrity and honour at all. She is popular and respected, Labour is tired and rejected.

That's why the monarch opens Parliament as the embodiment of our nation, and why our Queen does it so well.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman