The Chinese 'Great Leap Forward', involving New Labour style box-ticking and trying to meet impractical targets, collapsed (if memory serves me well) around dodgy iron products.  Buying from the east was a joke even when I was a kid in the 60s, with every plastic soldier coming out of then British Hong Kong.  Most of the crap my daughter wears is from China.  I'm pretty sure this laptop was made there, thus rendering me even more of a bloody hypocrite - because, yes, it was affordable.  Right-of-centre historians like Ferguson tell us it will be a dark day when China rules the world.  Maybe Nixon saw what was on the horizon.  Meanwhile, academics and fat-cats - including, I think, Cameron's brother - are raking it in via collaboration.  We must be either insane or blind - or both.  But now educated people from Hong Kong tell me to give China a chance!  I boycotted South African fruit, even though I was indifferent to Mandela.  Obama's just a talky-talky leftie cookie pusher.  We're all in trouble now, politically, socially and economically.

In the UK, Labour, Conservative or coalition, it no longer seems to make any difference.  I'm an old Labour man at heart, but loathe Blair, Prescott, Mandelson etc.  I like Jon Cruddas.