[Kozak]

Beg to differ:

From Macleans Ca 3/18/2010 by Mark Steyn:

“In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, government spending accounts for between 73 and 78 per cent of the economy, which is about as high as you can get without embracing full-scale Sovietization. In the English city of Newcastle, three-quarters of the working population are employed by the government.”

[robowombat]

Newcastle is, of course, in England. It used to be the industrial center of the Tyneside. I am not surprised at the statistic. However, much of the adult population appears to not be working at all. I had an interesting chat with a young man in a used book store. He claimed he had been in the RA but was injured in a training exercise in his first year and discharged. He was slowly pursuing some sort of electronic certification although he said he doubted any jobs were available in the Tyne area. He seemed like a thoroughly decent fellow whose real passion other than trying to figure out how to afford to move out of his parent's modest house was collecting and reading books about the British military and the world wars. He belonged to some sort of history society that engaged in maintaining some historic graveyard. That seemed an eloquent statement as to what new castle and the Tyne Valley had become.