It's been said on ConservativeHome web site somewhere that the death penalty will never be restored; the word "never", as has been rightly pointed out elsewhere on the site, should never be used in politics. So my question is this: "How many people have been murdered by convicted murderers who have served their 'life sentence' and have subsequently been released from gaol?" Supplementary: "When are we going to get justice from the Ministry of Justice?"

As someone who has been totally infuriated by the "Bott*x from Borsetshire" on soooo many occasions, I can't help but feel that this idea, to finance a sensible, parallel Radio 4 with the Brussels Broadcaster's own funds, could really go somewhere. Personally speaking, diverting most producers back to the dole queue would be a good start. 'The Archers' ought to revert back to its origins - i.e. it was set up to inform farmers of developments and the latest thinking in farming, give them a gentle reminder or nudge towards what they might be getting on with and generally to entertain them as well. To-day, the Archers seems to be more 'Claire In The Community' than farming community. I always snort in disbelief on a Friday night when the announcer includes "Agricultural Adviser" in the credits. What's he doing there?

Whatever happened to the people with "Rolls-Royce brains" who ran the Foreign Office?

Despite Polly Toynbee's remarks (that Brownie's prevarifications will all be forgotten in a fortnight), one thing in all the euphoria over Brown's bottling out of calling a GE seems to have been missed. He is still (our) Prime Minister of Great Britain, Northern Ireland etc. This will probably not be missed by the rest of the world. His bottling out is, of course, a gift for us, whenever the GE comes. But what about our mundane relationships with the world's leaders where decisions and negotiations are made? Bound to affect them, methinks. And not for the better.

Lindsay Jenkins is right; the worse possible outcome is to wait until the EU collapses. We should conduct a slow and orderly effective withdrawal. I am amazed that those running the EU still think we believe anything they say. Mr Barroso on R4's Today programme this morning reiterated the cavil that the Constitution was little more than a tidying up exercise, that the EU was not going to become a single, federal country and therefore the citizens have nothing to fear from the current 'constitutional conference' at all. Yet only last week it was peremptorily announced that anyone drawing £5000 out of the bank had to declare why they were doing so and where the money came from originally. This is now EU law (although it has been a banking requirement for a while). (Incidentally, if money is being taken abroad to purchase a holiday home, for instance, the customs officer can confiscate the money without reprieve). This is exchange controls under another name. What is to prevent ar*e-faced EU authority reducing the sum to £1000 or even less and asking you where you got it from? Malta is starting to question why they joined Europe (over immigration), when are our people going to? And, more importantly, when are those in charge of US going to listen?

I suppose the first question over museum charges is: what do other countries charge for entry into their museums? I think museums are places of wonderment to a small child. Anything to encourage parents to take their children to these halls of pure knowledge should be encouraged. Charging is hardly an incentive to do this. Sorry!

Tapestry @ 15:22 Good idea about 'delivered housing' but, if you are considering going into one yourself, please be warned. My late parents twice got caught when they tried to purchase a trailer and had the greatest difficulty in extricating themselves from the deals. Much would have to be done to regularise terms and conditions of tenure. Also resale of static housing needs to be put on a par with your normal housing. I think the difficulties arise because the plots are actually located on privately owned land and therefore do not come under the same legal framework as what we think of as normal housing, either outright owned, mortgaged or rented from a landlord. I make no mention of the obvious terms of endearment to 'Trailer Park' residents as my extremely limited experience of such residents leads me to believe that they are generally older, retired people who have down-sized and still have cash over after paying for their 'static home'.

We know that for normal people i.e. those of us down here on the floor earning our living as best we can, membership has been a disaster. There are no queues for food or medicines and shops are still packed with stuff to buy and houses are going up in value so that wealth filters down in legacies BUT the fish are disappearing (£15 for fish and chips for 3 of us), farmers are desperate (and have you noticed how there are fewer and fewer animals in the fields these days?) and behind the scenes we now know that millions of animals are going to be tortured with household chemicals we have been using safely for years and a raft of small companies are disappearing because of stupid petty regulations from Europe that put them out of business yet have no benefits to us at all (mercury in barometers and light bulbs being but the latest nonsense). Reading Paul Stephenson's article one understands the automatic duplicity with which the negotiations are conducted but one (or me, anyway) can't help wonder exactly why this official treason has been going on. What are they doing it for? Is it simply to get their mitts into a bigger toy-box of important meetings and bigger and better conferences? Or are there "wider issues" involved? The Norwegians shot Quisling for doing less than our governments have done. Comments under a recent Telegraph article called for insurrection over this constitution, something I have never seen before; patience is running out. When the bread runs out, as it surely must under the EU regime as it is currently being conducted, things will get nasty. So why are they risking it? Just a thought.