Contrast life today with that 100 years ago and see the new places your money goes to: insurances, telephones, TV license, broadband, motoring costs, various special taxes, service contracts, etc.

Even if you can persuade people to stop purchasing trinkets and baubles, there is still the cost of modern living, looming over everything.

Perhaps 'houses for everybody' is a luxury we can no longer afford. I rather like the idea of communal housing as an alternative. It is more friendly to the environment and provides a lot of social support. Imagine communal central heating, communal garden allotments, shared kitchen facilities, a broadband room, a laundrette, etc. There would be no problem finding babysitters, the elderly people would be supported by the younger people, maintenance tasks would be undertaken by the residents …

Needless to say, in a free society, communal housing is just another option, but it should be more freely available. Let us stop multiplying planet consuming, energy hungry items by k, where k is 10s of millions.

I would really like to hear how GreatGrandDad would go about changing attitudes of a modern society.

This country has survived without a civil war for 350 years: let's hope there is a better way.

I'm not a real tecnophibian, back of the envelope level only me !

Investment might not seem like a citical crisis issue. But I think it is. This country needs to have a medium term funding of science and technology that looks to issues we WILL have to solve.

We HAVE to solve energy issues. We should be investing heavily in Fusion. It is gioing to be done. It should be UK who reaps benefits. Not buys it from others later.

Same goes for Wave/tide power. We missed out of wind power. Wave poower qwe are well placed to take a world lead. We have good projects and great people. But the present political elite will bungle this one too if we let them.

We should invest much more in, be running trials for, stem cell applications. This is medium to near term stuff. At the moment we do very little. We have to do this or the NHS is doomed. At the moment we have are in the unsustasinalbe positiion of having prolonged life, but a long dissabled life. The cost of these long incapacitated twilight lives will cripple us. Stem Cell research aims to, and will, change long lives from costly ones lived in failed health, to long lives lived healthily and productively.

A new politics has to stop treating research as something anoraks do. It needs to be part of a coherent future view. At the moment our view isn't even incoherent. It is non-existant.

You are a tecnophibian!

I actually think a Basic Income is a good an workable idea. It would do away with so much of the ebenfits beurocracy adn endless form-filling filing and checking.

I would be in favour of it. The Green Party has argued for such an idea for some years now. It looks workable to me.

A Basic Income is one example . You take away most of the bureaucratic Welfare superstructure and those let go get … the Basic Income. Problem is you have the massive amounts of Housing Benefit subsidy which means you look at Rent Control which means reductions there, and then of course many people paying mortgages have less money to pay them ( no work ) and on it goes.

A nightmare .

Some borough in los angeles, has totally disbanded all staff to sub-contract out things to the neighbouring borough. Very drastic

We are going to have to be 'for' things as well as 'against'. The kind of change I have in mind will fail if it limited to punishing a few miscreants in the CIty. Fine as it will be to do exactly that. But if that is all we aim for we will fail and be back here in under a decade.

I firmly believe we have come to a point in the maturation of Western Culture and the ideas and beliefs which animate it, where we have to be prepared to question everything.

We have to be prepared to stand up, in a crowd of people sitting and shout 'NO'. The change we must have is of hearts and minds not just of debts and policies.

Don't get me wrong debts will have to be repudiated and wealth and power taken back. The whole smug, self -satisfied, dead-weight- class of managerial mediocrity, media crowd- controllers and political traitors have to go.

But it is not going to be enough to be willing to throw stones from with in a crowd. For the scale and profundidty of the changes we must make, that it has fallen to our generations to begin, we have to be willing to stand up and calmly walk to the front of the crowd, and stand out from them. To speak with authority and confidence to those who are looking for leadership. The rant and chant won't be enough. It is going to be up to us to inspire and convince.

Confidence in the market is ebbing away. So too is a deeper faith in the structures of authority and control in society more broadly. The tacit agreement of the people to allow themselves to be governed by the structures of power and authority, is being withdrawn. It is an almost invisible process that happens quietly in living rooms and quiet moments of dissapointment and reflection. But I think many of us can feel that it is happening around us.

Once withdrawn that quiet consent becomes a flowing, tumbling force looking for a new place to rest. Though huge and amorphous, it can move quickly and as it does so, it has the power to sweep away everything in its path, both the good and the bad.

We are entering such times I believe. We can move blindly with the flood of resentment and fear or we can create what that flood is actually looking for it in its mute and unknowing way.

I know the police are going to be showered with stones and bottles, but even though I think the old bill are a bunch of arseholes, they didn't cause this mess.

I'd like to smash Robert Pestons teeth down the back of his throat. He wowed us with his Northern Rock Scoop, then towed the party line and stopped rocking the boat. So much for the impartial BBC.

Are the Rioters just going to wander round the city lobbing bricks through Bank windows?

If you are a glazier from Dagenham, the futures bright.

This for me is the crux of the matter. Its a question that needs to be answered quickly (not too much debate or it will be too late!)
Any ideas? Creation of parallel economies? Default or refusal to pay taxes, debts or if not in debt, removal of all assets? Violent upheaval? I'm just asking, as I'm a bit stumped.
Excellent question and great post. Cheers.