I suppose the other thing you need to think through is how easy it's going to be to find a postdoc elsewhere in this miserable jobs climate, and whether you want to have to uproot yourself from your current city. Do you know to what extent the pressure is generated by her and to what extent she's under external pressure herself? University managers are cranking up the REF pressure at the moment and everyone's scared about what the cuts will mean and it gets passed down the chain. Whether that's got anything to do with it, I don't know. Do you think the postdocs are actually productive or is she being mean with good reason?
I don't know - it all depends what you can and can't stand in the way of management as an individual. I personally would rather someone like your supervisor, who at least behaves badly in a transparent manner than someone who stabs you in the back all the time. And I suppose there's an argument 'better the devil you know'. But I think most of all you've got to ask what do you want career-wise and whether you need someone like her in your corner to get there. Has she got a good track record in ex post docs getting lectureships for example?

Mmm she's probably right that all this might help you get a job at the end (not least as it would add extra countries that you could job search in). From what I know from historian friends, because very few British PhD students nowadays have the high level language skills to work on non-anglophone topics, British history is probably the toughest area (except medieval) to get a job in. Are you prepared to do a PhD in your preferred area in the knowledge that the market is so bad that an academic job is fairly unlikely?
How important are foreign language source materials to your topic or one close at hand? All of my friends did have to learn languages, and I know it's usually compulsory for history PhDs in the USA to be able to read source materials in at least two foreign languages, so you might be as well to at least discuss why she thinks this is crucial before rejecting it out of hand. Just another thought if your German is only rudimentary, will archival work in Germany be possible without spending quite a while there to improve your German? I have used contemporary German archives myself and even though my German is fluent, I found it took a lot longer to do archival work in German than in English and I imagine, it would be much harder with historical stuff as you'd have all the old scripts to deal with. What I'm trying to say is that while I think you've got to be happy with the topic, I wouldn't just dismiss her advice even if it is unwelcome but try to find out more about why she's suggesting these things.

I'd agree with the comments below about the competition - it's really tough. But there is another factor - most funded places in social sciences are ESRC funded. Are you actually eligible for that type of funding? You have to have UK/EU citizenship and meet residency criteria as well as far as I know. Have you looked into scholarships aimed at people from your home country - there are all sorts of odd places that have funding - the British Council are normally quite good about knowing those possibilities.
The other thing I'm wondering about is could you get someone ffrom your masters university to read through your proposal? If it's not strong, that could be one reason why applications for unfunded places are not working - that or the fact that the only person who could supervise your topic has too many students already and can't take anyone else on.

williambriggs - for Politics your best chance to to target institutions with ESRC quota places, ahead of those who can only offer a spot in the open competition. The open competition seems to only be funding applications these day with an A+ score - so top marks for project, supervisory team and candidate, and it's then that people with 2:1s + distinction seem to be losing out to those with 1sts = distinction. If you can grab a quota place, it doesn't matter.

Good luck! It might be useful to really look into what people are working on there so that you can highlight any links between your work and theirs. Also if teaching is involved, it's worth making sure that you are aware of issues in HE e.g. the NSS. Every interview I had I was asked something about how I would help improve their NSS score for one or other aspect (whichever the dept had done badly on).

Agree too with everyone who's saying don't take rejections personally - I haven't heard of a single lectureship in Politics (my subject) that didn't have well over 100 applicants this year. My postdoc dept had a post and they got nearly 150 applications and practically everyone had the PhD in hand plus publications & teaching experience. I know my subject is notoriously overcrowded, and I doubt it's anything like as bad in yours, but if you're getting interviews at all, then you're likely to get something sooner or later as it suggests that there's something in your cv that people like.

I think you can yes. The question I suppose is whether you'd be able to get a job in the country you want to teach in with a PGCE. The last bit of this certainly suggests you can:
http://www.prospects.ac.uk/pgce_entry_requirements.htm

I might be wrong but I think you're perhaps OK as far as the degree is concerned. I think it might be the visa they're panicking about. Universities have to report regularly to the UK border agency that international students are in attendance (to prevent people who don't study but use a student visa to enter the UK to work). Now as your supervisor didn't tell them you weren't in the UK, they may have been returning false assurances that you were (I know international students here have to sign in with the faculty in person every few months for this purpose, so it's possible that they're now realising that they haven't got a good system in place). As your visa has expired in the meantime, there's a good chance the UKBA will notice this. Any university caught risks losing their licence to sponsor international students & staff. But if I'm right, it's the university not you that possibly in trouble. The difficult thing might be though getting a new student visa. Has your university got a visa advisor - it might be worth contacting them if there is one.

Could you arrange to have a chat with your supervisor about this? My own feeling would be that given the timescale you've outlined that the GTA post might be a good idea to apply for (but try and find out exactly how much teaching is involved so that you can judge whether it'd work - a friend got one and ended up covering the teaching of two members of staff who were on research leave and with so much new material to prepare and being inexperienced as a lecturer, she didn't get any of her own research done). But your supervisor is probably going to have a better sense of the job / funding market in your subject and what you would be best to do.

The only solution is to get some. You are never going to be able to convincingly answer the teaching questions at interview otherwise. It's perfectly fair - would you as a HoD want to appoint someone who'd never taught, given the importance of the NSS these days? Don't beat yourself up (although I'm pretty horrified that no-one in your supervisory team ever pointed out that this would be a problem), just concentrate on fixing it. I'd get a speculative application for hourly paid teaching in at all universities that you could commute to from your current base. This is the time of year when problems with teaching cover start to emerge, so you might get lucky. Don't be too picky in your letter about what you can/ can't teach, with Law you probably need to be able to offer one of the compulsory modules to stand much of a chance, so even if it's not your exact research area, think what you could competently offer.

Well the LSE says the lowest mark they accept from Greece is 7/10 and I don't think a pass grade at MA would change that. The Politics courses are competitive to get on (some of LSE's MAs i.e. the ones still accepting applications now are much less so).

As for the Politics Research MAs, you'd need to do some research into where staff are, who could conceivably supervise whatever topic you eventually want to do for a PhD, so that you could work with someone relevant for the dissertation and then hopefully persuade them to accept you onto a PhD or write a good reference for elsewhere. If I can offer one piece of advice, it's to not get too obsessed with prestige but instead look for a dept that suits your research interests. There are some excellent politics depts in universities that you'd normally not rank that highly eg Essex or Aberystwyth.

I'd still say though do your homework on what a PhD is actually like to do - read these boards for a start! It can be a very tough experience and unfortunately with Politics, the employment dividends are not what you might call large. I've struck lucky and got a postdoc and will start a lectureship in september, but a lot of my friends from the PhD years are really struggling to find any work and as public sector and NGO jobs (the usual alternatives to academia for politics phds) look to be very thin on the ground for the foreseeable future across Europe, I'd hesitate to self-finance a PhD.

Why do you want to do a PhD? Is there any reason why you think you haven't done that well in either degree thus far and so the marks don't reflect your ability? I'd just wonder about the wisdom of pushing further and further with a subject you've not been doing brilliantly in when your talents might lie elsewhere.

To be brutally honest you have very little chance of getting into Oxford / Cambridge / LSE with those grades - they are so oversubscribed that they can pick and choose from their MA/MSc applicants. A US university might be more achievable if you are extremely wealthy (the fees for MA programmes are very high) AND you do very well on the GRE (especially on the maths section as maths skills are very inportant for US-style political science). But again they're selective and your transcripts won't help. As far as the UK is concerned, I'd suggest looking at MA Politics REsearch courses i.e. the 1 bit of a 1+3 PhD as the next step (unless that's what you did in Bristol). But really do stop and think about why you want to do a PhD in Politics. I have one and I really can't think of any careers other than an academic one that it would particularly help with. And as you wouldn't get UK funding with anything less than a 1st / distinction at Masters, it's quite an expensive commitment.