st nicholas,
You said: "2. This poor excuse of a country is bankrupt We cannot afford the £250 000 000 Libya has cost. (And we can afford to spend far more than that on the Olympics??)"
You clearly have no idea what the word bankrupt actually means have you?
The UK us still one of the wealthiest nations on the face of the planet. It has the third or fourth largest defence budget, is the 6th largest manufacturing economy and has financial capital investment on a truly global scale.
The Government is increasing Foreign aid, is increasing our contributions to the IMF by £9b and continues to fund such causes as the UN sponsored child immunisation campaign.
Hardly sounds bankrupt to me.
The fact that even the Tories do not want to spend more than £40b annually on defence is a fact that I suspect the majority of the population fully support. After all, we have as much actual need for defence forces as Ireland does, we have just chosen to spend an outlandish amount of money on pointless and totally futile foreign interventions.
What price all the blood and treasure sacrifice in Afghanistan when we are pulling out in 2014 and the US is going to be out by 2013 along with the French.
Is there any point fighting for that village/compound/province that we hold for a while, and then allow the Taliban back into, now totally pointless? What are the locals going to think when they know we will be gone in a few years time?
£40b per annum wasted.