It's a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.

I am married to a girl from Hamburg, so no one need tell me about the dangers of living in a German dominated household.

It's about businesses nervous about taking on school leavers because of a mass of red tape. It's about health and safety regulations and green fines.

I have been unsure, from the start, what the Occupy movement was all about, although I did suspect that it was just fatuous, anti-enterprise, left-wingery.

Having established that good ideas do indeed come in from the cold, start on the fringes and become mainstream, can we make any predictions about what the next move will be?

This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.

Minimum sales prices for alcohol are a startlingly bad idea. As with excise duties, the effects are regressive.