Commiserations to all those in the Essex area still commuting...

For the last month I've been enjoying my new freelance lifestyle, which generally involves working at home and not going into London for work purposes unless absolutely necessary. The reduction in stress just from not having to get on that f***ing tin box of a train every day has been enormous.

And, looking at the chaos that's occurred on the main line out of Liverpool Street these last 2 days, I'm extremely glad I'm not going into London every day... and very sympathetic to you poor bastards out there who are still having to grin and bear it.

It's symptomatic of the regularity with which shit like this occurs that the BBC website is featuring it only very low down the list of newsworthy stories, buried here in the Essex section of the site. It's even below the story about a worm found in a chicken kiev from Morrison's, for f***'s sake.

So what's goin' down? Well, the overhead power line at Ingatestone. 1 mile of it to be precise. What happened - and what keeps happening every few months - is that one of the creaking 40-year-old intercity trains which crawl up and down the line to Norwich brought down the power line. The train is still stuck there and there is no estimate from Network Rail on when they'll be able to reopen that side of the line. So the commuters have to put up with a reduced service - on one of the busiest lines into London - for the rest of the week.

The Network Rail guy interviewed on the BBC's Look East local news show (well, local is pushing it a bit - why do I care what the hell is happening in Wisbech, for instance?) was a smug moron who ignored the issues completely and said 'underlying performance has been very good'. That's like saying that the guy in the office with a poor attendance record actually has an impeccable attendance record - if you calculate his average attendance based only on the days he was in the office. Seriously, this is the lameness of the crap they try to fob people off with. The funniest thing that happened was when someone turned the sound off on the Network Rail guy's headphones feed - so the BBC guy in the studio was asking him how Network Rail was going to improve performance on the trains and he just stood there on the video link, looking like the self-satisfied twat he truly was.

I hope Barack Obama will be able to sort this mess out when he wins the US election in November. In the meantime, commuters should commandeer the trains and run them themselves in association with the drivers' union - on time and without the corporate bullshit National Express and Network Rail try to diss us with.

As ELO once said to the power line... "Don't Bring Me Down".

Labour - Down, Down... Out?

Trying to make up for a shocking lack of posts during May with a sudden rally at the end of the month. So this'll be quite a long post, to make up some ground... I do have the excuse of having been on holiday last week, during which I missed the Crewe and Nantwich by-election results. No real surprise that the Conservatives won, but following the local election drubbing, it does make the punters start to think how long Gordon actually has left to run in his job.

Being Gordon Brown right now must be like having Status Quo's "Down Down" on repeat play on the iPod (he's probably more likely to have a 70s rock classic like that on there than the Arctic Monkeys, whatever the spin doctors say.) Deeper and down... 23% for Labour in the latest YouGov poll.

Whilst Brown is a duffer in many respects - an appalling bully at work (just ask anyone you know who has worked with him), obsessed with fiddly schemes that deliver good objectives badly (PPPs for additional public sector investment, tax credits for redistribution), mates with the editor of the Daily Mail, etc, infatuated with an unworkable and irrelevant obsession with 'Britishness' - it gives me no great pleasure to see him in this position. Tony Blair, a far more evil and dangerous figure, seems to have escaped relatively scot-free from the government's present morass and difficulties. He's off travelling the world, talking crap about faith, getting big money on the lecture circuit, while the remnants of the Labour party reap what he (partially) sowed. Some will say that's fair enough... Labour members voted in droves for Blair to become leader in 1994, what the hell did they expect?

But a crushing defeat for Labour in the 2010 election is unlikely to serve the interests of anyone on the left. My hope - and I think the hope of many anti-New Labourites on the left - was that the increased popularity of Cameron relative to previous Tory leaders would deliver a hung parliament, securing a Labour-Lib Dem coalition which would drag the country kicking and screaming into the political modern age with such innovations as proportional representation. But instead the Tories have climbed into a massive lead, and it now looks quite possible that the next election will deliver a 1983-style Conservative landslide which will destroy any chance of political innovation in the country for a generation. At least, unless the Tories prove to be so bloody incompetent that they get voted out after one term... but that's clutching at straws.

None of this is yet inevitable, of course, but I can't see how Labour can get out of this one without changing leader. Brown is out for the count. It's obvious to any observer (even The Observer!) that he hadn't ever expected to be in this weak a position - he thought he would have plenty of time to build on what looked like a good start in his first few months, finesse the position, and then kill off the weak Tory challenge, maybe in Spring 2009. Instead, his position collapsed completely over the winter as bad news on the economy was compounded by avoidable policy mistakes on stuff like the 10p tax debacle and 'discgate'.

The overall mood now is similar to the mid-90s. To use an old Malcolm MacLaren phrase, people are "sick and fed up" of the current govt and hence seem ready to endorse an alternative which offers almost exactly the same policies as the Blair/Brown years but just with a different set of faces. But to a large extent that's what they voted for in 1997, but the other way round.

The way forward must be a different set of policies which actually look appealing to anyone with a progressive bone in their body rather than the tired old crap being served up now. The campaign for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election was an embarrassment - an attack on alleged 'toff' Tories (including the Tory candidate) who were actually no more 'toffy' than their Labour counterparts. Blair and Ed Balls went to top public schools, ferchrissakes. Balls is the worst class war faker in the cabinet. Norman Tebbit - one of the most odious right-wingers ever to hold office in this country - is the product of a state school, as is the current Tory front bench's leading exponent of "hang 'em/flog 'em", David Davis. Tony Benn - perhaps the greatest left wing figure of the past 50 years in the UK - is an aristocrat who abandoned his heriditary peerage. Where someone is from, socially speaking, means f*** all. What matters is what they say and do now, and the struggle to create a society where these class distinctions don't exist. Both the Tories and New Labour have failed miserably at this latter objective, and there is nothing in either parties' programme to suggest that they will do any better next time round on current policies.

Well, I'd like to sign off for the moment by saying something about who I think should succeed Gordon Brown as leader if the Labour Party has the balls (no pun intended) to get rid of him before 2010, but I've already gone on long enough for now. So, more on that tomorrow. Hopefully June will be a more densely-posted month than May, which has been pretty skeletal. Sorry folks.

twat

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but just so you know for sure...

Tony Blair is a twat.

A quote:

"Faith is part of our future, and faith and the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalisation work."

If making globalisation work means bombing the World Trade Center in the name of Islam, or invading Lebabon in the name of Judaism, or turning the USA into a fascist state in the name of 'Christian family values', he's dead right. Except he's actually just Right (of centre). And it increasingly looks like we're dead.

Richard Dawkins is right (small 'r'), Tony Blair is hopelessly wrong. Religion is one of the greatest dangers we face in the 21st century, along with climate change and multinational corporate power. The (un)holy triumvirate, if you will. Dawkins goes OTT sometimes in saying that anyone with a religious belief is a dangerous imbecile - that's clearly B.S. - but it's a damn sight closer to the truth than Blair's vision of reality. And in particular, given that the Catholic church is one of the worst exemplars of Stalinist, Orwellian thought-tyranny in the religious pantheon, Blair's recent conversion to Rome is a clear sign he is mentally unhinged.

All the same, I'm kind of relieved about Blair's reemergence as a religious zealot as it at least provides some kind of respite from reading how badly Gordon Brown is doing in the polls. And reminds us that whatever Brown's faults, compared with Tuberculosis Blair Gordon is God. If that's not too religious an expression.

A tepid fightback - but a fightback nonetheless.

Well, my prediction that Ken would hold on in London turned out to be doggy-do, and now we have Mayor Boris. Lucky us.

In the end I think a combination of the number of people Ken had managed to piss off during 8 years (4x4 drivers, people who don't like bendy buses, etc.) and the fall-out from the general unpopularity of the Government finished him off.

And what unpopularity it is. The government is now plumbing depths unheard of since the 1982-3 period when Michael Foot was "in charge". Down to 23% in the latest polls, with the Tories on 49%... it's grim reading, for sure.

Hence the attempted fightback this week. A two-pronged strategy:

1. a £600 increase in the income tax personal allowance, meaning that any basic rate taxpayer will gain £120, hence being compensated for the abolition of the 10p tax rate.
2. a raft of new policy measures announced in Parliament yesterday.

So will any of it work? Most of the new policy measures are pretty lame, it has to be said. Proposals for 'elected police chiefs' look interesting but there is no detail on how they will be delivered, and the extra help for housebuyers is tiny in scale. The personal allowance increase is a good idea far too late - it should have been announced at the same time the 10p rate was abolished last year. Also, with no countervailing tax increases announced, the tax cut will have to be paid for by borrowing - and the government is already pretty much on the edge of the 40% debt-to-GDP level that its 'sustainable investment rule' specifies. £2.7 billion of additional borrowing makes it extremely likely that the rule will be breached.

But so what? It was a daft rule in the first place. While it's generally agreed among economists that if the ratio of debt to GDP were to rise steadily over time, eventually this would be become unsustainable, there's no reason why breaching a specific level of debt to GDP should have any adverse effects. 40%, 50%, 60% - it doesn't really matter provided there's some expectation that the ratio will stabilise at some point in the future rather than spiralling out of control. Really, the substainable investment rule always was dodgy economics, and the Government would do well to drop it if at all possible, and replace it with some looser criterion specifying that debt should be kept within 'manageable' levels or some such phrase.

Still, a fightback was certainly called for after the mauling the Government suffered in the local elections. No guarantees whatsoever that the apology over the 10p tax rate will have any positive impact, but it was the right thing to do. Now they need to put some sort of strategy in place so they don't keep making these basic errors...

Personnel-wise it's hard to see Alistair Darling making it past the summer recess. He is damaged goods, even though the 10p debacle wasn't his fault (it was announced when Brown was still chancellor). He will be thrown to the wolves as a sacrifice. Alan Johnson would be a good replacement - especially as, if there is a leadership challenge to Brown (not impossible if his poll ratings are static or get worse over the summer), it is Johnson who would be one of the strongest candidates. But more on that another day.

Local election disaster - Brown is lame, and it shows

Well, on current trends it looks very much like Gordon Brown is going to "do a John Major", but sadly, without emulating Major's teeth-pulling election victory of '92 first. Brown is going straight down, and taking the Labour party, all the way from the hard left to the Blairite crypto-Tories, with him.

For the first time since 1992 the Conservative party is getting a projected national vote share (44%) which would win an overall Tory majority if repeated at a general election, even given the biases in the electoral system. It's a savage prospect for sure, and Gordon is not in danger of overturning the nightmare any time soon. Indeed, his speciality is finding new holes to dig with one hand while his other hand digs the increasing number of existing holes deeper. And deeper.

Here's the condensed Gordon Brown guide to becoming Prime Minister:

1. spend a few months tweaking round the edges of your predecessor's policies whilst wandering about on camera trying to look hard.
   
2. when your poll rating inexplicably rises, toy with the idea of a general election (preferably for so long that even your best friends and advisers get bored).
   
3. At the first signs of a political response from the Conservative party, run back to the red corner with your tail between your legs.
   
4. Do an impression of the most tongue-tied, complacent moron possible.
   
5. Repeat until dead.
   

It's pretty f***ing lame, and the public realise it.

The problem is that the worst predictions of the dreadful anti-Brown crypto-Tories who surrounded Blair - Matthew Taylor, Phil Collins (not the singer, sadly) etc. are coming true. John Hutton famously said that Brown would make "a f***ing awful Prime Minister", and whilst he's almost never right about anything, that statement seems to be an exception.

Some of this is due to the dire position which ten years of Blair/Brown dual control of UK plc has left us. With the UK economy pumped up by an unsustainable asset and debt boom, when the credit crunch hit, we were stuck up slack alley with no reverse gear... just waiting for the economic collapse. When you've spent ten years talking about stability, to see it suddenly whipped away like the most flimsy house of cards in history must be a tough gig to handle.

Equally, the lunacy of many of the Blair/Brown public sector reforms - which involve paying as much money to private sector consultants and infrastructure companies as possible, to deliver badly built, overpriced schools and hospitals, and management consultancy whose productivity impacts are, if anything, negative - has now swallowed up so many of our tax pounds that, when it's combined with rampant inflation in essential goods like food and fuel, people are feeling the pinch.

Notice I've said "Blair/Brown" rather than "Blair" above and that's very important. The current crisis is partly due to the idiocy of Blair, but Brown was a willing participant in all of this (and in some cases the initiator of these crazy policies - tube PPP, for instance). That's why it's very difficult for him to make a clean break with the failures of the Blair years.

It would mean having to undergo a Blues Brothers - like instant conversion to radical politics - this could perhaps be stage-managed at the next Labour conference. A shaft of light appearing say, a third of the way through another lumpen Gordon speech, and then suddenly, he's a changed man. Out goes that f***ing awful blue tie and back comes the red tie of the 2003 Conference speech ("we're best when we're labour" etc.) He needs to start by emulating Nikita Kruschev at the 1956 Soviet Party Congress. Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin set the tone for the Cold War's "detente" years and Brown could spark a similar new era by jettisoning the whole Blair legacy in one fell swoop. The speech needs to go something like this:

(pointing to picture of Blair forming the conference backdrop) "see this guy here? You remember him from a couple of years back? Well, he was WRONG! And so was I. WE WAS WRONG!!! (huge red cross is superimposed over backdrop, which fades into collage of many of the dictators of the past - Stalin, Mao, Maggie Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Bowker, etc.) From now on it's NEW New Labour! Let a thousand flowers bloom. PUBLIC SECTOR PENSIONS FOR ALL! AN END TO PFI! etc. etc. etc.

Personnel changes would also be essential. The Blairite detritus currently clogging up the cabinet table would be summarily dismissed. Hutton, Blears, Purnell... all for the chop. And demotions for rubbishy Brownites like Ed Balls and Alastair Darling. Promotions for solid and trustworthy performers: Denham, Benn, Ed Miliband. Most importantly of all, a senior cabinet job for John Cruddas - I recommend Home Secretary. A replacement for Darling at No 11? It's got to be Alan Johnson. Trusted, respectable, comprehensible to people from the South.

Only a total relaunch - in policy and people terms - can save the Nu-Lab project now. What is least likely to save it is yet more sanctimonious, dunderhead b.s. about "listen and lead" (Speak and Spell?) and "tough decisions in difficult times". I know we live in environmentally conscious times but please, someone change the f***ing record on Gordon. The public are sick to death of hearing a Budget speech that was stale as far back as 2000, with the nouns slightly changed each time according to the policy area being discussed. And can we ban any talk of "Britishness" please? The BNP performed spectacularly poorly. So that's enough of that, then.

I could turn the situation around so that in 18 months' time Labour would have a narrow poll lead or at least level pegging - starting with that conference speech. But I won't. Partly 'cos they'd never give me the job anyway, and partly 'cos I wouldn't take an adviser job even if it were on offer. So go on Gordon... lose big time. See if we care. RIP.

(By the way... my earlier prediction of a Ken victory looks to have been pretty damn wrong, so I'm sorry if I spread false hope. All hail Boris the blond bombshell. So glad I got the hell out of London in 2000 now. Around the time that Gordon speech started to grate... more on London soon when we have the actual results, god help us.)

Don't believe the ES BS - Ken can (and probably will) still win in London

I don't read the gutter tabloid press much, but the Evening Standard's assault on Ken Livingstone is real back-to-the-80s Tory vitriol of a kind that no-one since Neil Kinnock has had to face with such ferocity.

Almost every single Standard headline for the last two months at least has been rabid anti-Ken propaganda. Ken is being bankrolled by some nasty bunch or other - tube drivers, Islamofascists, Mothers for Peace, etc. Ken is pissed on the job. Ken's advisers are communists. Ken eats live newts for tea. Ken is ten to fifteen points behind Boris Johnson on whatever bogus poll YouGov have made up next. And the BS goes on. And on. And on.

Now, I'm no slavish Ken supporter. Yep, I gave £50 to the 'purple' Mayor campaign of 2000 when he ran as an independent and kicked Frank Dobson's cuddly ass back to Camden. But I thought his decision to revert to Labour was a shame as it immediately meant he didn't have full latitude to denounce the many bullshit policies which the Treasury have saddled London with - Tube PPPs, anyone? - and that he would be vulnerable to being tarred with the same brush as an unpopular Blair (or now, Brown) Labour Government.

I was doubly worried by certain features of the Dispatches documentary screened on Channel 4 back in February. It was appallingly biased rubbish for sure, but there were certain legitimate criticisms. It's by no means a good idea for Livingstone to be drinking on the job, for example. (I know loads of MPs do the same, but no-one outside the Guido Fawkes blog and the Oliver Reed appreciation society would seriously endorse this kind of behaviour.) And Livingstone's decision to grant a platform to homophobic Islamic preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi was, as Peter Tatchell has pointed out, a disgrace.

But, on balance, who would you really rather have? Ken, who has made several mistakes but who may be the last serious left-wing politician left in any kind of major office in this country? Or Boris Johnson, who is either a flaky buffoon, a right-wing extremist, or (likely) both? It's a no-brainer.

If I were based in London my vote would be (1) Sian Berry (2) Ken and I think that, despite the increased discontent over the national government, he will prevail on Thursday. Forget the YouGov polls showing a 10 point lead (or more) for Boris - they're codswallop. I'm a YouGov panelist and I just enter complete garbage to get my 50p a survey. Literally, I enter complete random nonsense in the surveys. Also it's a self-selected sample - you actively apply to join YouGov, you're not approached by pollsters. Additionally, by definition, no-one without internet access is on the YouGov panel. So how the hell can it be representative?

YouGov are being used by the Evening Standard as part of an out-and-out war against Ken Livingstone. This kind of one-sided coverage presents the greatest danger to our free society (such as it is) since the Thatcherite media fascism of the 1980s. Really, during the elections the papers should have to follow a special rule: whenever a negative story is run on one of the mayoral candidates, the paper should have to allow an equal amount of space for reply by the mayoral candidate who is attacked in the story. Conversely, whenever a positive story is run on one of the mayoral candidates, the other mayoral candidates should get a right of reply equal in size to the original story. This rule could also be extended for General Elections. One way or another, rampant political propaganda and bias in our national newspapers has to be stamped out - whether it's pro-Tory, New Labour, or anything else. As Billy Bragg put it,

When you wake up to the fact that your paper is Tory
Just remember there are two sides to every story.

Been off the case for a bit but the news is still making me laugh...

Hi there - been so busy over the last month I've had very little opportunity to post but fortunately the news remains hilarious, so you've got plenty to entertain yourselves with. Two good examples from today's BBC website:

• Jails 'too comfy' to merit escape - Prison Officers Association spokesman Glyn Travis (named after the Blakes 7 character? Does he have an eyepatch?) reckons that inmates are happy to stay inside as they can get hold of drugs, mobile phones and sex. It's very similar to being at school or college, in other words - so why not run a story saying "universities too comfy to merit graduation"?. Reporting of this story strikes me as bizarre - for one thing, shouldn't we be pleased if inmates aren't trying to escape from prison? Also, if prisons are "too nice" for people to want to get out, isn't it some indication that the quality of the life experience outside prison needs to be raised, rather than making the inside even more f***ing awful than it already is? And isn't the prison service doing the country a favour by acclimatising prisoners to the conditions they will face when the UK turns into one big police state any day soon - "look guys, here's how it is. You have to get up early to work to an externally imposed timetable and you don't have any say in how your life is run, but look on the bright side: there's drugs. And sex. And mobile phones (perhaps all 3 in the same package?)"?
• Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is advising Scottish drivers not to panic buy fuel in advance of the Grangemouth refinery strike. Dunno about you, but I can't think of anything more likely to make me want to go straight out and buy a full tank (at least) than a leading politician coming on the telly and saying "don't worry. The fuel's not going to run out". Probably if Salmond went on and said "oh yes! You should panic buy! And you'll be helping the economy too as petrol stations have put prices up by 15p a litre to take advantage of your generosity!"... that would put paid to any shortages. Pychology, dear boy.
  

Proud to be British (or French) for once

In what often seems to be a tumult of news downers, I was very pleased that the Olympic torch relay was disrupted by pro-Tibet protests in Paris and London.

It could only have been better if the UK Government had impounded the Olmpic torch and said we ain't giving it back to China until they end the illegal occupation of Tibet.

But of course they won't do that because this isn't a 'progressive' UK regime, it's a bunch of apologists for a reactionary dictatorship whose action in Tibet makes Saddam Hussein look like Jimmy Carter. It's hilarious to see people like Tessa Jowell apologising for the Chinese regime and saying the protesters are degrading the Olympics... and where the hell are the neo-Cons when you need them? Why isn't John McCain out there saying 'invade China now'? Why isn't the f***er in the front line? Jesus, you can't rely on anybody.

...and some more worrying news (or is it?)

Finally some data comes through to back up the 'house price crash' theory... Halifax released data showing a 2.5% month-on-month fall in average prices. Don't all jump out the window at once, folks... the Halifax and Nationwide indices of house prices are notoriously volatile. Nonetheless it would have been pretty extraordinary if there hadn't been some kind of fall in the wake of the credit crunch.

But so what? Prices have been ludicrously inflated for years now. Restoring some kind of sanity to the market would be a blessed relief. We should be more worried about the increase in global food prices than the fall in UK house prices...

The credit crunch: worrying trends...

Flipping through the news to find the latest stories on the credit crunch is revealing a worrying picture. It's like watching a huge explosion in very slow motion - the bomb ticking under the global financial system has already gone off, but most of the fallout hasn't reached the general public yet.

But it is on the way... for example, in the last couple of days, First Direct and the Co-operative Bank have withdrawn mortgage deals from new customers. They say it's because they have been swamped with applications after other lenders have raised interest rates on mortgages for new applicants. Possibly... or it could be that they can't secure adequate financing at reasonable rates to make it economical to take on new business (in which case, expect FD and the Co-op to raise their rates soon too). Whatever, the outcome is that if you want a mortgage you're gonna currently be chasing an ever-shrinking pool of reasonable offers and you may end up having to pay much more than you would have done six or twelve months ago. That is going to hit the housing market very hard... after the crazy inflation of the last decade, we may now be looking at an early-90s style property crash.

At the same time, Wednesday's Evening Standard carried the headline 'Home owners in debt binge.' I eventually managed to find the story even though their website is complete crap, and although it claims to be based on new data released from the Bank of England I'm pretty sure that in actual fact, like most ES stories, it is recycled from something run on the BBC website a few weeks before, suitably distorted and exaggerated. (Quick aside: apart from the Will Self column, which is damn fine coffeeee, the Standard is hopeless rubbish populated by vacuous imbeciles without a writing brain between them. But anyway).

The gist of the story was that credit card debt and bank loans and overdrafts both went up in February according to the Bank of England figures, whereas given the shortage of credit, one would have expected a fall, other things being equal. But of course other things ain't equal... the Standard reckons that consumers are being forced into other lines of credit now that mortgage deals are getting harder and more expensive to come by. To quote, "the fear is that once borrowers have exhausted all sources of credit, many will be forced into insolvency or have to give up their homes." Quite possibly: still, seeing as insolvency only seems to last for about 2 weeks now before people are allowed back on the treadmill (an attempt to promote 'Enterprise Britain' apparently), will anyone care?

All the same, it is worrying. To use a (no doubt inappropriate) analogy, the data coming out at the moment make the UK financial sector look like a dying star running out of its basic fuel - hydrogen (aka mortgages) for fusion reactions, which is then forced to turn to the heavier elements - helium etc (credit cards and overdrafts) to prolong the show for a little while before the whole system finally collapses. We seem to be living on borrowed time. All this begins to make Gordon Brown's chances of re-election in 2010 (as it will almost certainly be, not 2009) slim as hell, although he could yet do a John Major and win in the teeth of everything if Cameron and Osborne contrive to look lame-ass enough.

For me, though, it is now time to do the Smart Thing... start betting heavily on the Tories to win in 2010. If nothing else, it provides a fighting/survival fund to endure what will no doubt be one of the most vicious and retarded periods of govt seen in Blighty since the last Tory accession of 1979. Hunter S Thompson would have died laughing at all this (if he weren't dead already... girl, you know the reason why.)

Heathrow Terminal 5 gets off to a great start

Could almost have guessed that this would happen, but it's still amusing. Thank god I don't fly any more than I have to (which is almost never. Those poor bastards. Our poor planet.

Olympics: boycott, or better...

Been out of action on the blog again for a week - apologies. I took a week off work this week and have been trying to keep away from dirty old politics and look round a few galleries and stuff.

But it's been hard to keep away from two stories - firstly the 'debate' over the embryo bill (if one can call it that, as it seems to boil down to a few reactionary Catholic clergy against the rest of us, who use our brains to think through an issue rather than relying on a Stalinist diktat from the Vatican) on the other); and secondly the debate over whether to boycott the Olympics - which is a little more nuanced.

Many, many people are now calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in protest at human rights violations by the Chinese government, most obviously in Tibet. I'm sympathetic - certainly if the US felt justified in boycotting Moscow in 1980 then there's just as much reason, if not more, to boycott in this case.

Having said that, there may be a way to express protest which is even more effective than a boycott. I don't know if the Great Britain kit design for the athletes competing in the games has yet been finalised, but if it were possible to include on the vests, in as large letters as possible, "FREE TIBET NOW" (in Chinese and English), this would be an effective way of getting the message across while continuing to compete. If every country attending the games included the "FREE TIBET NOW" slogan on their kits, in Chinese and their own language, this would send a big signal to the Chinese government regarding just what we think of the Tibet occupation. They would then have a choice of (a) cancelling the games to avoid the Tibet publicity - which would totally backfire; (b) arresting all competitors from other countries and continuing the games with Chinese competitors only; or (c) continuing the games and giving free publicity to the Tibetan cause. Either way, it would be a big statement. So how about it? Oh, sorry, I forgot, London is hosting the Olympics in 2012 and so we need to avoid pissing off other regimes, no matter what a bunch of bastards they are, so that they won't impose a reciprocal boycott and damage 'our' games. Silly me...

FSA: a pointless (and maybe counterproductive) search

The FSA is investigating whether false rumours are being deliberately spread to undermine the value of shares. They are pointing the finger at "short sellers" - people who sell stocks they don't have (using derivatives based on the stock's current share price) and then buy when the price goes down. Apparently these people are behaving irresponsibly, or unpatriotically, or something like that. (By following the maxim "buy low, sell high", which I thought the whole financial system was based on... but never mind).

This was sparked by the big fall in the price of HBOS (Halifax/Bank of Scotland) shares last week after rumours that the bank was in trouble. But, given that Bear Stearns was insisting it was in fine financial fettle until about 24 hours before it collapsed and had to be bailed out by the US Federal Reserve, can anybody blame financial traders for believing negative rumours? Might it not be more rational to believe bad news about banks than good news in the current climate?

How on earth are the FSA going to identify the people starting the rumours, anyway? Everyone will just say they were going on information they heard elsewhere and the whole thing will go round in a circle. So, short of fining all market participants, there doesn't look like much the FSA can do. Their statement looks like complete hot air to me, and if anything, is likely to spook the markets even more. In the current climate, if someone in authority tells you everything is all right, it almost definitely isn't. As soon as another UK bank gets into Northern Rock - style difficulties - which will probably happen soon - the FSA's stance will be blown right out of the water. Better to say "we are in uncharted waters, and caveat emptor" (or indeed caveat vendor) as far as financial transactions go". But they would prefer to bullshit people... so be it.

Anyone who is buying and selling in the current climate (rather than holding on for a reversion to normal market conditions, which will surely come at some point, even if a few years down the line - and if it doesn't it probably means the whole system has collapsed, in which case why the hell are you still bothering with stocks and shares when we've got a new society to construct - GET OUT ON THE STREETS!!!) is a moron in any case, and deserves what they get. (Or someone who has been very badly financially advised, in which case... SUE.)

Systemic collapse?

Obviously, the Bear Stearns collapse and fallout is the main headline at the moment. Some reporters are going a bit over the top perhaps... Bear Stearns was a large US investment banks but not the largest. If it had been Citibank or J P Morgan going under then that would have been worthy of some of the hyperbole which has been thrust in the markets' direction over the weekend. And the FTSE 100 is 217 points down in trading today; well, that's not tiny, but neither is it earth-shattering. It's been up and down like a yo-yo recently anyway.

No, at the moment the real news is the unease and suspense gripping the markets; no-one knows how big this credit crunch really is. Certainly the Federal Reserve is behaving like it's very big indeed; cutting interest rates every week, injecting billions and billions of dollars of liquidity into the market. It would be very interesting for someone to do an analysis of who benefits most from these market interventions. Is it encouraging even more reckless speculation? Is the Fed throwing good money after bad? Certainly J P Morgan, who acquired Bear Stearns for about $2, seem to be laughing all the way to the bank. The joys of being just a little more solvent than one's competitors are becoming more and more evident in the current economic situation - to those that hath, more shall be given.


The nagging worry is that the interventions are just delaying the inevitable - a systemic collapse with most of the financial institutions in the US going to the wall, not just one or two. If that happens then it may end up making the early 80s recession look pretty shallow. On the other hand Bear Stearns could be the bottom of the barrel. No-one knows for sure. Fun, innit?

Turning Britain into a Boy Scout fascist state

When I read this I thought April Fools' Day might have come a few weeks early:

School leavers are to be "urged" to swear an oath of allegiance to the queen.

This would turn Britain into nothing more than a glorified boy scout troop. Why don't we get people to go round wearing silly uniforms all the time with little badges on them while we're at it? (Of course, at school, we already do. But how long before someone from this moronic government suggests it for adults?)

I do not recognise the queen as a legitimate head of state for the UK as she has never been elected. As far as I am concerned, technically we live in a dictatorship. Who actually won the Falklands conflict? Because the people running this country (those of them that are visible, at least) look more and more like General Galtieri every day.

We are on the march towards tinpot fascism in the UK, and I urge every one of you to take a stand against it. Don't vote for anybody - of any party - who endorses citizenship tests and that kind of malarkey. Better still, stand as an independent so that you can point out the f***ing great wave of B.S. heading right towards us. (I am managing the campaign of a possible candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon - I'll tell you more as details become available. (i.e. when I can convince the guy to actually stand!)

Signing off - FOR NOW.

Democrats: getting ready for a major league "stitch-up"

I'm using the excuse that Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Wyoming Primary to file another report on the interminable struggle for the Democratic nomination. And it really is interminable, as the projections for the remaining 12 states now show that it is very unlikely that Obama will reach 2025 delegates based on elected delegates alone; which means that the 800 unelected 'super-delegates' - party officials - will be decisive.

Current projections show a split of around 60%-40% in super-delegates between Clinton and Obama but that's largely irrelevant when the Democratic convention comes around in August because they don't have to vote any particular way - they are guns for hire, perhaps literally. It is entirely possible that Clinton could somehow swing a majority of super-delegates around, even though she is very unlikely to have more of the elected delegate vote than Obama by then.

My worry isn't so much that this would be "unfair" - it's not immediately obvious that 100% election by caucus or primary (some of which involve independent voters who may be Republican sympathisers!) is the best way to choose a candidate, and an electoral college between party officials and voters (which is what they effectively have at the moment) might make more sense. It's more that, if there is such a deal and Clinton gets the nomination, a lot of Obama supporters are going to be so pissed off that they're not going to bother to turn out and vote in the presidential election in November. The same might happen in reverse with Clinton supporters if Obama wins the nomination, but I think that's less likely because he could at least claim he has the weight of "popular opinion on his side.

This struggle is dragging on and on - largely because Obama's support softened badly in Texas and Ohio when he ran into a wave of negative publicity about the corruption rap for his friend Tony Rezko, and he didn't handle it very well as far as the footage from the press conference I saw on Channel 4 news suggested. Of course the footage could have been edited to make it look like just about anything, but you can be damn sure that a successful Democratic candidate will have to be able to deal with the media onslaught and scandals both real and manufactured just to survive. Bill Clinton went from strength to strength largely because he was able to do that; Jimmy Carter got blown away after one term largely because he couldn't. The real danger is that Obama ends up suffering the same fate as Carter, rather than being able to combine the sense of resuscitating the corpse of political hope that both Carter and JFK embodied with the political balls of the Clintons. Both Bill and Hillary are real sluggers, as is Dubya Bush, and any successful president needs some of that. You can't biuild yourself up by cultivating a sense of hope in people and then fall apart when the going gets tough. That's the route to landslide defeat and condemning the Democrats to another generation of impotence (once again, look at Carter in 1980).

So, extra rations of bile and roughage for Obama over these next couple of months and he ought to be able to get through this. But if he looks too weedy or flaky then it's gonna be Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Should be interesting.

Somewhere, John McCain is rubbing his hands at the prospect of 5 more months of Democratic infighting. But as the poll ratings of both Democratic contenders against him in the election have risen since all this started, maybe the joke's on him...

...and so does the Daily Telegraph

More absolute bollox on school choice lotteries from the Telegraph - 'children have lost out', apparently, because in the most popular schools, less kids got their first choice of school than last year, before the lottery system had been introduced in any local education authorities.

But that statistic is meaningless because it's entirely dependent on how many children applied for the school in each year! For example, if a school has 100 places per year, and last year 150 kids applied for a place, but this year 200 kids applied, then last year a third of the applicants would have been disappointed, whereas this year half of them were. But that's nothing to do with the lottery system - it's to do with the number of kids applying. And if a lottery system encourages parents who wouldn't have tried to get their kids into the best schools under the previous system to give the lottery a shot - what's wrong with that? Surely it's what the scheme is designed to do.

They'll be running a headline next saying 'National Lottery - the ticket-holders lose out'...

School choice lotteries: Dave misuses the English language

Well, today was the day when thousands of kids in England found out which school they were going to. An increasing number of local authorities are moving towards lotteries as a way of allocating school places after the government's new Admissions Code banned some (although not all) of the practices that schools had previously used to discriminate between applicants (interviews, questionnaires, etc.)

Dave Cameron thinks that the lottery system is 'unfair and inequitable' and pledges that the Tories will scrap it if they get elected.

Well, Dave, I've got news for you: the lottery might be many things, but by definition it can't be 'unfair' or 'inequitable'. (Assuming, of course, that it's not rigged.) In fact, it's the only fair system if schools are oversubscribed, unless we expand all the oversubscribed schools so that they can take all the extra pupils. (Which maybe we should do...)

What Dave means of course is that it's unfair because middle-class parents can't 'play the system' like they used to. And where will we be if the middle classes can't stitch up social outcomes? Egalitarian society? It doesn't bear thinking about. Never mind, there's always the private sector for the really well-off...

The lottery system is not perfect. For one thing, it's optional - not all local authorities have introduced it. For another, there are still forms of selection allowed under the new Admissions Code - e.g. by parental faith (in faith schools). So a kid could get into a school just because his or her parents happen to be religious nutters (or even, sensible religious people) - or, as this article by Times columnist Alice Miles from last year points out, because their parents are hypocrites who pretend to be religious just to get them into the school. Also, grammar schools are allowed to select by ability, and private schools according to any old criteria. So, plenty of reform still needed, but we can certainly do without the likes of Dave Cameron and Micky Gove denying the fundamentals of the English language. Jog on...

More on the Rock... why George ain't got a leg to stand on

This is George Osborne we're talking about here (rather than Dubya Bush) but both are equally clueless, and from suprisingly similar backgrounds: Gideon Osborne is a trust fund kid, Dubya had plenty of funds from his family oil business to buy coke and booze, dodge the draft and set up disastrous companies with names like Arbusto (Spanish for 'shrub').

But we digress... I don't normally take a rabid pro-Labour line in this blog as who the hell wants to hear that? But the Tories are so unbelievably clueless on Northern Rock that it's important to weigh in to point out just how duff they are.

There's plenty in the Northern Rock crisis that the Opposition could justifiably criticise: the government's dithering about, the desperate attempts to court lame-ass bids to asset strip the company from private equity hawks and Richard Branson, the regulatory slackness that allowed Northern Rock to overextend itself so ludicrously in the first place (although hindsight is a wonderful thing - for most of the decade the rock was being lauded as an example of genius financial management in the northeast by 'expert' commentators in the financial media). And indeed, Vince Cable for the Lib Dems has been doing a very good job of asking all the right questions of the Govt's approach.

By contrast, the official Opposition - the Tories - have revealed themselves to be economically illiterate on this one. On Monday when the news was announced Dave Cameron called nationalisation a "disaster". He thus revealed himself as a Tony Blair clone in a very real sense - both of them know shit all about economic policy. Now, this isn't necessarily an obstacle to a future Cameron government being successful - after all, Tony Blair won three elections whilst being an economic ignoramus. But Blair had Gordon Brown to do all the sums for him. Whereas Cameron has George Osborne, who is just as much of a numbskull as Dave is.

Where is the alternative Tory plan for Northern Rock? What would they have done instead of nationalise it? Let the Bank of England take it over? I'm sorry, that's the same policy slightly redressed. Let it fail in September when it got into difficulty? Ballsy, but foolhardy - a banking failure on that scale could have taken other financial institutions down with it and let to a major slump of a scale not seen since the 1930s. Of course, economic failure on that scale would have probably let the Tories in at the next election - and that is probably the point. But don't tell me that these guys have the competence to run a men-only private members' club in Mayfair, let alone the economy. New Labour is deeply unpleasant in many ways but the Tories are a f***ing laughing stock. Which probably explains why they are only about 10 points in front in the latest polls and not 25 or so...

Northern Rock: the biggest step forward for industrial policy in 30 years

Hooray! They've finally taken Northern Rock into public ownership.

It's about time too. The Government spent far too long faffing about with private sector "rescue" packages which basically seemed to involve giving billions of pounds to either private equity firms or Richard Branson, neither of whom floated my boat.

Still, while the Government was faffing about the share price was drifting down and down... so they (we) got a bargain.

Not since the heady days of British Aeropace and Shipbuilding in 1976 has nationalisation been used as a policy instrument in the UK. And it's nice to see it back. Primarily because, if done properly, Northern Rock could be the template for a new kind of bank... one that actually treats customers with respect rather than ripping them off with sky-high charges and piss-poor customer service at every turn. Despite being ostensibly competitive, the banking sector's record for customer satisfaction is appalling, and an innovatively-run public sector bank would have a lot to recommend it.

We won't get an innovatively run public sector bank, of course: we'll get a badly run approximation of a private sector bank. That's because this is a strictly temporary move, until market conditions return to "normal", at which point the bank will be sold off to the private sector. Which makes some sense from a public finances point of view, but is a real missed opportunity from the perspective of industrial policy. In fact, it's the fact that they were run just as badly as the private sector companies they were intended to improve upon which eventually gave nationalised industries a bad name in the 1960s and 70s.

What does any of this mean for the customers? Very little, probably. But in a pinch, they're probably safer with a government-run concern than with RIchard Branson. Now then, how long will it take for the public to get its £50 billion back? Still, more chance of getting that back than all the money that's been pumped into the railways to go to National Express shareholders...

McCain, Mike's 335, and the small prospect of a backlash

John McCain is looking in a pretty strong position after the Republican Super Tuesday primaries. Although he didn't win most of the Super Tuesday states overwhelmingly, he benefited a lot from a split opposition - Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney were both courting the 'real conservative' vote, but Huckabee had difficulty reaching outside the hardcore evangelical Southern Christian base leaving Romney with a motley crew of everyone else in the Republican party who didn't like McCain. As most of the Republican primaries are 'winner-take-all' this meant McCain piled on delegates - he's now more than halfway towards the nomination.

The immediate result of this was that Romney threw in the towel last Thursday. Actually that's not quite accurate; he's "suspended" his campaign, meaning that his delegates will still be in play at the Republican Convention. I'll explain why this is important in just a second. But overall, many will be glad to see the back of Romney, so let's dwell on his misfortune for a second. A slimy cheeseball punk who made George Bush look like an honest man, he spent extraordinarily heavily to low great effect and his campaign ran second only to Giuliani's in its ineptness. To their credit, the Republican voters seem to know an unelectable turkey when they see one. McCain is definitely their best shot at the White House, despite the fact that he is older than Michael Foot was when he was leading Labour in the 1983 UK election. (Now that is an interesting comparison...)

Something weird happened in the primaries this weekend just gone, though. Mike Huckabee suddenly went back into overdrive, winning in Kansas and Lousiana. Could this be the start of a conservative fightback? Mike certainly knows how to strap on a Gibson (at 00:57 in the video), but I think it's all too late. Still, it all depends on how well organised the Christian anti-McCain hard right is (and how many of them actually don't want McCain to win; Bush and selected other right-wingers have already endorsed him so that may well be enough.) I'm still hoping we'll be hearing that 335 a while longer...

Obama moves into the driving seat...

...or very close to it, anyway. Almost a week since Super Tuesday, and I should have got it together to post earlier, but there was just too much stuff going on. Anyway, waiting a few days allows me to incorporate the results from the Democratic primaries in Maine, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington. Obama was some way ahead of Hillary Clinton in all four of these and unless Clinton can win by a substantial margin in Ohio and Texas in March, it looks very much like her campaign is gonna run into the ground.

That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that Obama is a shoo-in because a few hundred of the Convention delegates are local party appointees rather than being elected. Clinton is - currently - ahead in terms of the number of these 'super-delegates' who have come out in her favour. But it's impossible to know for sure how they will vote as they are representing no-one but themselves (and maybe the local party bigwigs). It's a weird overlay of cronyism on what is basically a democratic selection process, and it could mean that Clinton gets the nomination despite having less delegates than Obama. Which could tear the party apart at the Convention... the Obama camp must be hoping that Barack gets a clear enough lead by the summer that he won't need to rely on the super-delegates. That may well happen if the pro-Obama swing continues, but that's pure speculation at this stage. Next stops Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. It's a constant gravy train...

Typing this on my wife's new Eee PC!

Great stuff... the Asus Eee sub-laptop, mentioned last month, arrived today having been ordered a couple of weeks ago from play... I was beginning to think that this was 'vapourware' or that stocks had completely sold out, but then... there it was. I did find a stock-checker in the course of my travels, which might be useful for seeing who has one in stock... don't pay more than about £220 for the 4Gb model though.

It's great. Only 22cm wide... the screen has a diagonal of only 18cm (7" in old money) as there are speakers either side of it, but it's very clear, so seeing what you type isn't a problem. Typing on this keyboard is not the easiest for me but then I have big hands... I could get used to it. Anyway it's my wife who's going to be using this one most of the time so I'll get her opinion soon. I must mention the dinky sequence of 4 LEDs at the bottom right of the computer... the wi-fi one is blue, and looks extremely cool. why is it always the little touches that impress most?

I am gonna put a post together on the Super Tuesday results today or tomorrow but it's looking so tight that I want to wait until all the results are in before making comment.

Eee, by gum.

US elections - the fields thin out...

Big news from both US presidential races yesterday as dropouts were announced.

For the Democrats, John Edwards has thrown in the towel after failing to make much impact in any of the primaries so far, running a distant third behind the media frenzy enveloping Clinton and Obama. Despite making substantial criticisms of Clinton's attacks on Obama during the early primaries, Edwards is not endorsing either Clinton or Obama - for now. This is probably strategic - keeping his options open to cut a running-mate deal with whoever wins the presidential nomination. It's a pity Edwards didn't make more headway as he was the most radical of the candidates and the only one who made action to reduce the shocking levels of poverty in America the centrepiece of his campaign. To a large extent he has been eclipsed by the emergence of Barack Obama as the alternative to the Clinton dynasty in this campaign - although Obama's policy platform isn't actually that radical.

Meanwhile, after what has turned out to be the most strategically wrongheaded campaign in recent history, one-time favourite Rudy Giuliani has pulled out of the Republican race. Giuliani's campaign was a disaster, full stop ("period"). He didn't bother to campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan etc because he was concentrating on Florida because it had a lot more convention delegates. What he didn't take into account is that by failing to compete in those early primaries he looked like an also-ran time after time, and he missed out on any media coverage. The strategy might have worked if the early results had been a complete mess, with none of the other candidates gaining any net advantage, but the fact that John McCain was in the lead by Florida, and that McCain was also the candidate whose policy stance is closest to Giuliani's, effectively wrote him off. It's an extraordinary failure for the guy who was at one stage being touted as the great white hope for '08. Giuliani has endorsed McCain.

Good to see the Tories can still pull out a real turkey

The heat's been on New New Labour (aka 'New Conservatives', 'Stalin's Bean Feast', etc) for several months now, and sleaze has been a central element of that. But lest we forget, the Tories were the masters of sleaze under John Major in the good ol' days of the mid-90s, and it's good to see Old Bexley and Sidcup MP Derek Conway keeping up the tradition.

Conway paid his son Freddie about £40,000 for three years of employment as a 'researcher' although there is no obvious evidence that he did any work whatsoever. Now, that's not necessarily incriminating in itself - parlimentary researchers don't tend to publish huge great wodges of research reports, for example. They tend to be more occupied with day-to-day "bits and pieces" - looking up statistics and references, for instance. But £13,000 per year is, to my knowledge, a pretty high rate for a parliamentary researcher even if Freddie wasn't just taking the money and doing naff all. It looks a hell of a lot like a way of funding the kid through university at the taxpayer's expense. Well, I guess once the Tories introduced student loans in teh early 90s we were always going to be on the slippery slope to this kind of thing.

Dave Cameron has acted quickly and decisively by withdrawing the whip from Conway, which is probably a sensible thing to do unless this kind of thing turns out to be rife on the backbenches, in which case the Tory party could be looking a bit thin in a few months' time.

The most ludicrous stance came from fellow Tory MP Roger Gale, who said that Mr Conway was "an honourable man" who was being accused by a Labour MP (John Mann) with an "axe to grind".

Yeah, right. So presumably Roger would say the same about Peter Hain and Alan Johnson? They're the subject of "witch hunts" too? Twat.

In any case it's good to see Tory sleaze back on the shelves, selling next to the Labour variety. So when are the Lib Dems gonna get in on the act?

Cabinet '08: it's the march of the duffers...

...or in fact the January of the duffers.

First the resignation of Peter Hain three days ago, after alleged irregularities in donations to his deputy leadership campaign were referred to the police by the Electoral Commission.

This followed news coverage of alleged irregularities in donations to Harriet Harman's (successful) deputy leadership campaign back in November.

And now... alleged irregularities in donations to Alan Johnson's deputy leadership campaign.

Would Hazel Blears or Hilary Benn care to step forward now so we can get their investigation of donation irregularities over with? Or shall we just carry on doing them one by one?

(I think Jon Cruddas is safe as he didn't take up a ministerial post despite being allegedly offered one by Brown just after the handover in June).

Back in the spring when there was an extensive debate in the Labour Party over whether it would be a good idea to hold a deputy leadership, there were several arguments against having one: it was too expensive, it would distract from the key business of getting Brown established as the new PM, it would turn Labour's focus inward instead of outward, etc. One argument I can't remember anyone using was, "there shouldn't be an election because no-one involved will adhere to the rules on donations and so it will result in an avalanche of negative publicity and a police investigation." And yet this is precisely what has happened.

It seems to be the case that almost no-one involved in several of the deputy leadership campaigns either understood or adhered to the donation rules. WIth people this lame involved in the day-to-day running of the Labour party, is it any wonder Labour is behind in the polls?

Perhaps the worst aspect of Hain's resignation is that his place has been taken by James "Mr Photoshop" Purnell, a Blairite hack of the very worst kind. Hain may have been clueless, but he at least had a radical history, even if it was pretty distant. Purnell seems like the kind of guy for whom buying The Independent constitutes a radical act. It's a glimpse of the future of mainstream politics in this country, and it's depressing. One of the (few) consolations of a Conservative victory next time round is that Purnell would be out of the Government - unless he decides to switch parties, which, given that his political position is indistinguishable from David Cameron's, is quite possible.

The boys are back with the Barack

(with apologies to Alan Partridge...)

Good result for Barack Obama in the South Carolina primary. 55% for Obama against 27% for Clinton is a huge victory margin and it looks like Obama benefited from a backlash against the increasingly negative campaigning of the Bill and Hilary double act. Those two are pulling dirty tricks out of the bag as fast as they can, in a way that suggest they may be running pretty scared... and it's gonna be interesting to see what they pull out next in the run up to 'Super Tuesday' in 9 days' time.

I was surprised to see John Edwards not doing better than 18% of the vote in what is almost his home turf, but I think he's been squeezed badly in the Clinton/Obama crossfire. Nonetheless, if he stays in the race up to and including Super Tuesday he could still emerge with enough delegates to hold the balance of power at the Democratic Convention, if it's a close enough race.

I've not yet seen detailed polling from any of the Super Tuesday states so at this point there's not much more to say on this topic at this point in time - I'll come back to it later in the week.

Rogue Trader Plus

As if the stock market turmoil of the last few days weren't enough, news emerged today that 31-year-old Jerome Kerviel has just become the Nick Leeson of the 21st century, blowing a €4.9bn hole in Société Générale's balance sheet.

Details of what exactly happened are very sketchy but it looks like Kerviel was cultivating an increasingly large uncovered position - effectively betting that the market would rise, and doubling up when the index moved against him. Very similar to what Leeson did in Singapore in the early 1990s (his Rogue Trader is a pulp classic if you haven't read it.)

SocGen's losses are an order of magnitude greater than what Leeson inflicted on Barings in the mid-1990s - the difference is that Barings was tiny by international standards and collapsed as a result of Leeson's antics, whereas SocGen is a major multinational player and will, incredibly, still manage to turn a profit despite the huge losses on Kerviel's trading.

All of which makes the London Lite free paper's assertion that Kerviel caused the global stock market crash by spooking the market with huge volumes of unorthodox-looking trades somewhat hard to swallow, to say the least. €4.9bn is big money to most of us, but compared with the scale of losses from the sub-prime fallout, it's tiny beer. Still, if you get your news from London Lite you deserve to be misinformed.

Amazing, though, that over a decade after Barings, a major bank did not have basic safeguards in place to stop this happening (separation of front and back office operations, anyone?) More on this as more of the details come out.

The Fed takes a gamble (but the Bank of England may be taking even more of a gamble...)

The US Federal Reserve panicked yesterday in the face of a global stock market slump and cut interest rates by 0.75 percentage points (or 75 "basis points" as the guys in the City like to say). That doesn't sound a lot, but given that they were only 4.25% to start with, it's a huge reduction. Also it was a week before the Fed's normal Open Market Committee meeting - which made it look even more like a panic move.

The States is desperate to avoid going the way of Japan over the last fifteen years, where the collapse of the huge 1980s asset bubble was followed by a prolonged economic slump. At one point interest rates in Japan fell to 0.1% - pretty much the lowest practically possible. Hence, fiscal and monetary stimuli are being applied - the interest rate cut on the monetary side, and on the fiscal side Bush has lined up a $145bn stimulus package of tax cuts. Naive Keynesian economic theory suggests that both these measures should have positive effects by boosting demand for goods and services and making it less likely that high borrowing costs will force firms into bankruptcy. However, naive Keynesianism also ignores a lot of other factors (many of which would have been familiar to J.M. Keynes himself), for instance:

• if the interest rate cut and fiscal stimulus reduces investors' and consumers' confidence in the strength of the US economy it could have the reverse effect to that intended.
  
• the current crisis was partially triggered by an epidemic of bad (sub-prime) lending facilitated by low interest rates - so is it really a good idea to fan the flames by sending interest rates even lower?
  

On balance I think it would have been much better to go with a series of smaller reductions, month by month or quarter by quarter, rather than one big splurge. I also think that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn't really know what he's doing. Having said that, he more opportunity to at least have a go at the right solution than Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, who said today that the UK would just have to "tough it out" come what may. So even if the economy goes completely down the tubes (quite possible, if still unlikely), we won't be cutting rates for quite some time.

Why? Basically because King has a sole remit to keep inflation at a 2% target rate, whereas the Fed is tasked with maintaining a monetary environment conductive to "high and stable employment" as well as low inflation. This means that when times are difficult, Bernanke can (at his discretion) slack off on inflation to boost employment. But King doesn't have that flexibility. And he's worried that oil, gas and food price rises are going to feed through to inflation, which doesn't give the Bank of England any wiggle room on interest rates.

Now, the FT, Economist and many other commentators will tell you that taking risks with inflation is dangerous. They're almost completely wrong. There is very, very little evidence that an inflation rate of (say) 10% is any worse for economic growth or employment than a 2% inflation rate. Now, I say "almost completely wrong" rather than "completely wrong" because at some point, inflation does have big costs - look at Zimbabwe for example, where it's 4,000,000% (or something like that). But that's hyper-inflation, not 'regular' inflation. The idea that we would be taking huge risks with the economy if inflation had to rise to (say) 5% rather than 2% because of temporary price pressures on oil and food, is garbage. Remember that next time you're in the pub with an FT journalist!

Clinton vs Obama: close calls, stupid voting systems and stupid voters

Results from the Nevada Democratic primary show a narrow win for Hillary Clinton.

Or at least, the headline results do. The actual delegate figures show Obama with 13 delegates from Nevada to Clinton's 12. This is due to the idiotic first-past-the-post system of delegate selection by precinct (and that isn't a dig at the States because we have the same stupid system for our elections - it's how New Labour ensures a working majority with only 35% of the vote.) Overall, Obama has 38 delegates to Clinton's 36, with Edwards on 18.

What this means is that one has to 'read the small print', i.e. look at how the primary and caucus results are translating to numbers of delegates at the Democratic Convention in the summer, before making any predictions on who's going to get the nomination. Based on current evidence the Democratic race looks too close to call and it's entirely possible that neither Obama nor Clinton will end up with the necessary 2,025 delegates by the time of the Convention - which could leave Edwards as the 'kingmaker'. An interesting thought.

Also interesting, if a little spooky, is BBC North America editor Justin Webb's claim in his blog today that some people haven't been voting for Barack Obama in the primaries because they think he's a Muslim. Well, I guess if the American education system is set up to produce drones - both working and middle class - who get their entire info from Fox News, then this is the kind of crap you end up with. And that's not to say the UK system is any better - anyone who remembers the 1987 general election and the widely touted claim that if Kinnock won, Soviet Tanks would be rolling down Whitehall within 48 hours, will know there's no room for complacency.

Staying on a sci-fi tip...

Continuing my limited excursion into sci-fi blogging that began with Sunday's post discussing differences between Battlestar Galactica DVD sets in the US and UK, whilst following a BSG link I came across a blog post from a couple of years back by Wil Wheaton, who will be familiar to Star Trek: The Next Generation fans as the guy who played Wesley Crusher. I always thought he could have been called 'Ratings Crusher' as if I had a pound for everyone who had told me over the years that they found The Next Generation unwatchable because of that silly twerp Wesley, who managed to save the ship week after week despite being only about 14 years old and having no formal training whatsoever... and being an annoying whiny little bastard to boot... I would be able to afford at least one of the Next Gen season box sets.

Early Next Gen was the perfect example of a good basic concept hamstrung by a couple of characters so annoying you wanted to beat them up; Crusher, and Will Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes so cheesily that he made Shatner look like a vegan. If the original Star Trek series had had anyone as duff as these two in the cast it wouldn't have lasted six episodes.

It wasn't Wil Wheaton's fault that Wesley was crap, of course; the character was written to be an annoying jerk, and like Colin Baker in the ropey mid-80s Doctor Who era, Wheaton did the best he could with the dross he was given. Anyway it was a pleasant surprise to find his blog and it seems very good. He's recently got into Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, for instance. Additionally, I'm a sucker for posts which swear a lot, so I enjoyed this one. Although I would argue that five or six swear words is not "lots", Wil.


His book 'Just a Geek' looks interesting, too - great title. Must read that one.

Republicans '08: and the frontrunner is...?

The Republican primaries continue to provide electoral excitement here in dreary old blighty. (Well, at least to sad people like me who find the presidential race interesting.)

The Michigan primary yesterday resulted in a comeback for Mitt Romney, who got 39% of the vote to McCain's 30%, with Huckabee third with 16%. This means total confusion for electoral pundits already reeling from Hillary Clinton's surprise win in New Hampshire after being written off.

Romney's winning speech in Michigan was lame even by the low standards we've come to expect from this campaign. "Tonight marks the beginning of a comeback for America" indeed... the guy is a third-rate cheeseball - even by the low standards we've come to expect... etc. etc. It's quite possible he only managed to win Michigan because it's his home state.

Right now, one would have to be brave, rich or stupid (or all 3?) to put a bet on who's gonna win this Republican campaign. All this confusion is probably going to help Rudy Guiliani a lot as by targeting his resources on the Florida primary in late January and then a blitz on 'Super Tuesday' on 5 Feb, he may be able to exploit a divided field and emerge as the frontrunner. Advertising agencies must be having a field day - after all, the longer there are multiple candidates in the race, the more money is spent on advertising in aggregate. Good to see someone's doing well out of the current US economic collapse.

Battlestar Galactica: a guide to DVD Regions 1 and 2 for the perplexed

2 days ago Battlestar Galactica: Razor arrived in the post on US import. As soon as I have a chance - yesterday evening - I gave it a spin in the player. Great stuff, but I'm not going to say anything about the plot here. If you've already seen it plot analysis will be redundant, and if you haven't seen it, you don't need some idiot giving away spoilers in a blog that is only occasionally about TV. Instead I'm going to talk about the huge contrast between how BSG gets released on DVD here in the UK, and the US release.

Razor- which is a TV movie designed to fill the gap between BSG seasons 3 and 4 (18 months or longer) - was shown pretty much simultaneously on Sky in the UK and on whatever channel broadcasts the show in the US, and then rush-released on DVD. The UK DVD release of Razor is atypical because it seems to have the same extras - commentary, deleted scenes, etc. - as the US release. In all the previous BSG releases the UK extras have been minimal - in fact on Season 3 they're non-existent. By contrast, US viewers in Region 1 get commentaries for each episode from series creator Ronald D Moore. The UK version of the Season 2 DVD has the podcasts for the first 4 episodes but nothing after that.

Fortunately the episode commentaries are also available here at the Sci-Fi Channel's US website. However if you are watching the Region 2 DVD whilst listening to a downloaded podcast you need to bear in mind that PAL (Region 2) DVDs run about 4% faster than NTSC (Region 1) DVDs, so your podcast will drift out of sync with the video unless you use an editor like Audacity to slow the mp3 down.

Bizarrely, Season 3 is available here in the UK, but not yet in the US - which has resulted in some people who can't wait importing the UK Season 3 set into the US, which is unusual - normally it's the other way round.

Even more bizarrely, I must mention the flyer that comes with the US edition of Razor - apparently "BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ACTION FIGURES ARE AVAILABLE NOW!" They are available from Diamond Select Toys. The initial choice of figures is somewhat strange - why Hotdog, or Kat, before they've done Baltar, Roslin or Admiral Adama, for example? Also, none of the figures looks anything like their real-life counterpart. That'll be familiar to anyone who bought Star Wars figures back in the late 70s and early 80s... but what's the audience for BSG action figures? The show's not aimed at kids, so who's buying them? Sad thirtysomethings who want to put them on their desks at work? Maybe...

The big nuclear sell-out: a corporate cave-in disguised as environmentalism

Big news of the day in the UK was the Government's decision to give the go-ahead for a new generation of nuclear power stations.

This is an extraordinary turn around from five or ten years ago, when it was only really the nuclear industry - the companies that build, maintain and supply the plants - that were pushing nuclear. It was seen as an expensive and unpopular failure from the post-war era, along with things like Concorde. So what's changed?

Essentially the nuclear industry has found a new, 'progressive' argument to use in lobbying the government - which is that nuclear power can help the UK meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets. It could - but renewable energy sources like wind farms would do that just as well, without huge subsidies from the government, and without creating radioactive waste which we still have no long-term plan for disposal of. But of course wind power is still small beer at the moment and there isn't a huge corporate lobbying industry around renewables the way there is around nuclear.

The recent 'consultations' over the issue were, as usual, a complete fraud - the Government had already made up its mind. No wonder Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth pulled out.

The Tories, as so often nowadays, have parrotted the Government line on this (Except to say that there shouldn't be any Government subsidies for the new plants - of course there shouldn't, but how likely is that?) Of the big parties, only the Lib Dems have a sensible position. Good for them - I'm thinking very strongly about joining up. Anything to get rid of the two Conservative parties... 'New Conservative' and 'David Cameron's Conservatives'. Go Cleggie.

With any luck there are going to be massive on-the-ground struggles when they start trying to build these new plants. It'll make the Twyford Down M3 bypass protest of the 1990s look like a village fete. That's assuming, of course, that potential protesters haven't already been detained under anti-terrorist legislation...

Fight the power.

A Toshiba Libretto for the 00s?

And so to technology... I was flicking through Linux Format magazine today (somebody has to) and read a very positive review of the Asus Eee laptop.

For those who don't keep up with this sort of thing, the Eee is a very cheap, small and light laptop which runs Linux as the default operating system (although it is capable of running Windows), has a 4 Gb flash drive instead of a hard drive, a 7 inch 800x600 display, a built in webcam, and weighs only about 900 grams. As a concept it reminds me a bit of the Toshiba Libretto which was a 'sub-notebook' PC of similar size and weight from just over a decade ago; the main selling point of the Libretto was that, unlike the other sub-notebooks of the time, which were jumped-up PDAs, it was fully capable of running Windows 95. A good mate of mine who was very active in the IT industry at the time, bought a Libretto in about 1997 and says that it 'saved his ass' on more than one occasion. The Eee has much of the feel of the Libretto about it - except that, at £220, it is MUCH cheaper than the Libretto, even relative to current laptop prices (if I remember correctly the Libretto was about the same price as an average-spec full size laptop of the time.)

Anyway these things seem to be flying off the shelves - they're out of stock at most of the main online stockists (scan, dabs etc.) Given that you're effectively getting full PC functionality for not much more than a well-specified iPod, it's starting to look very tempting... certainly more exciting than an iPhone IMHO.

Ha! Clarkson PROVES he's a complete idiot

As the great Hunter S Thompson would have said, this is a "ho ho ho" moment... after saying that 'Discgate' was a fuss about nothing, and publishing details of his bank account in The Sun to prove it, Jeremy Clarkson has become a victim of identity fraud.

Always great when someone you know is a complete twat proves it voluntarily in so spectacular a fashion. In the inhospitable bastard of a month that is January, we need stories like this to raise a smile. Thanks Jez.

Barack Obama storms out of the blocks...

And so, as promised, on to the Democratic race, where, only 4 days into the campaign proper, Hillary Clinton is already starting to look like a lame duck. The general media consensus was that the amount of funds raised by the Clinton campaign and the support of Bill would be enough to propel her through the primaries with Barack Obama a creditable second, and John Edwards a long way back in the rear.

Instead, what seems to be happening - based on the results from Iowa and the latest polls in New Hampshire - is that Obama is surging into a big lead, with Edwards and Clinton fighting over second place. Obama got 38% of the vote in Iowa with Edwards and Clinton pretty much tied at 30%. One of the polls from New Hampshire puts Obama 10 points in front - and if the actual result goes that way, it would be an even bigger upset than Iowa.

The factor that seems to be propelling Obama to the front of the field seems to be a big surge in support among young activists and voters - see, for example, this BBC piece. It could be that, like George McGovern in 1972, Obama is going to cruise to the Democratic nomination on a wave of youth radicalism - but unlike McGovern, there is a strong possibility Obama has the charisma to go all the way to the White House.

This of course, doesn't mean in itself that he'll be any good. Democratic presidents of whom much was expected have been complete letdowns before - Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter (although his focus on energy policy now looks extremely ahead of his time) and, arguably, even JFK. However, Obama does have the advantage of not being George W Bush, Hilary Clinton, or Mike Huckabee, which, given the state of politics in the US, might be as good as any reason to vote for him.

To finish, a few words on John Edwards, who is unlikely to get the nomination - he doesn't have anything like the campaign funding that Clinton or Obama have, but his decision to mount a (relatively) left-wing campaign highlighting the appalling levels of poverty that exist in the US and a strategy to reduce them, is to be applauded. He may well decide to drop out if he has won few or no primaries by 'Super Tuesday' in February, but he'd surely be a good choice for running-mate if Obama does get the nomination. An Obama-Edwards ticket would be about as good as we can expect from the Democrats this year, and should be strong enough to beat anyone the Republicans can come up with.

I Hate Huckabee (even though I don't know him at all well... yet.)

The US presidential election kicked into life yesterday with the results from the Iowa caucuses. Whereas most news reports seem to have covered the Democratic results first, I'm gonna start with the Republicans in this post, just for the hell of it. And also because I didn't know who the hell Mike Huckabee was until this morning.

Looking like a morph between John Hutton and Robert Lindsay, former Arkansas governor Huckabee got 34% of the Iowa vote, 9% in front of Mitt Romney, who had expected to win after spending heavily. Everyone else was a long way behind.

A surprise result, according to most of the news sites, and especially to me, as the last time I looked at the Republican race in any detail (which was about October, I think), the front-runners were Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain, with Ronald Reagan wannabee Fred Thompson as a wild card outsider. Huckabee didn't even figure on the menu - he was out there with principled no-hopers like the libertarian congressman Ron Paul. But here he is with 34%.

Of course, Huckabee has God On His Side - his main strength seems to be that he is the 'genuine article' religious conservative. Evangelicals have serious doubts about the relatively late conversion of Romney to the anti-abortion platform, and Giuliani is viewed in certain parts as pretty much a Satanist for his pro-choice stance. All this plays pretty well with a certain constituency of Republican voters - who I guess are probably the same kind of people who can be bothered to turn up at caucus meetings in the middle of winter in Iowa. You know... the hardcore.

I checked out the Huckabee site and the initial quote from him on there is not promising:

I think the country is looking for somecody who is vertical, who is thinking, 'let's take America up and not down.'

A vertical candidate's probably preferable to a horizontal one - I'll give him that. But surely the vertical axis runs up and down? I mean, what is this cack? A click on 'learn more' takes us to the blog page, with a roll of about 200 Huckabee-supporting blogs. Jeez, Mick... "there's too many of them". I'll be restarting Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review as Huckerbee's Sunday Evening Blog Review (the day of the Lord) in a couple of days' time.

God-fearing Democrats and even the odd agnostic will probably be praying tonight that Huckabee continues to gather momentum to the extent that Giuliani's campaign pretty much collapses before 'Super Tuesday' in early February, where he's spending most of his campaign funds on trying to get a big result in Florida and other key states. If Huckabee can mop up the Romney and Thompson support he certainly stands a reasonable chance of getting the Republican nomination, and that would be the biggest help to the Democrats since the days of 1964 and Barry Goldwater. That is, of course, assuming that hardcore religious conservatism, making even George Bush look wishy-washy, is a big turnoff to a large enough section of the US electorate. If it isn't, then we really are in big Barney Rubble. But back to that sometime soon...

It should be stressed however that this is VERY early days. If Iowa turns out to be a complete freak-out and Romney does well in New Hampshire and the other primaries over the next few weeks, Huckabee will be out of the race probably by the end of February. However, no-one in the US (or UK) media predicted this result so I don't feel particularly compelled to stick to the form-book any time in the near future. Next post... the Democratic race.

'one'/Network Rail hate me and my wife... and if they get the chance they'll f*** up my life

Daylight dawns... you wake up and you're... not going into work today because the train station still isn't properly open.

Doesn't scan as well as Paul Weller's original but it's certainly accurate.

Some of you may remember the comedy last year with 'one' railway where Managing Director Andrew Chivers was dodging an interview with the local paper. He did eventually give that interview, and it was, for the record, complete bollox.

Anyway, this time 'one' and Network Rail have surpassed themselves by failing to re-open Liverpool Street station after it was closed between 23 December and 1 January for engineering works. TfL needed to demolish a bridge on the approach to Liverpool Street for the East London line extension, which is fair enough - it's a big job and it's gotta be done so why not do it over the quietest period of the year? What isn't fair enough is that thousands of commuters went back to the grindstone yesterday and were faced with no rail service whatsoever on the Colchester - London line... there was no replacement bus service (unlike the previous ten days) and passengers were simply advised not to travel. 'one' couldn't even be bothered to try to arrange alternative transport... we were told the station would be open at 10, then 11, then 4pm, and by now they have managed to restore some of the Colchester line into Liverpool Street but other lines (Southend and the Metro service) are terminating at Stratford until mid-morning. I'm working at home until I'm confident the station is completely sorted. Which will probably be March at the earliest...

The core balls-up here is from Network Rail - although 'one' are good at making a bad situation worse by failing to implement any sort of contingency plan. Network Rail say 'a shortage of skilled engineers' has been responsible for the overrun. That's a great idea... schedule a line closure and then find you haven't got enough staff to do the job. Maybe it's because loads of them got fired when British Rail got privatised... But why the hell not just hire in extra staff from abroad? That's what happens with most infrastructure projects.

Really, the managing director of Network Rail should be fired over this. Hitting the management hard is, at the end of the day, the only way to ensure a good quality of service from these monopoly operators. The poor bastards travelling on this line pay through the nose for an appalling service. Is there anything they can do? I guess the main practical measure is to buy some shares in National Express, who own 'one'. Analysis of the company's share price over the last five years shows that it's roughly tripled. That outstrips even the inflation in rail fares over the period... so buy some shares and get your money back! It also means you can turn up at the AGM and disrupt the bastards.

Greetings, Team '08

Happy New Year to all and sundry...



Hope everyone is doing well. I'm well aware that 2007 was not a majorly productive year for giroscope, most of the time. Posts were often sporadic and pithy, the Friday evening blog review project was abandoned, and everything seemed to lack focus.

In short, by the end of the year, giroscope was looking at bit like the Brown administration.

So the objective for '08 is to Do Better in almost every conceivable way... at least 2 decent posts a week for starters, some action (finally) on the "Golf Ball" blog (first proper post planned for Sunday 6th), and also more contributions to Dilate, BHappY... more of every damn thing really, and less falling asleep on the job. We'll have a look back at the end of this month and see how things are going but I feel quietly confident I can get my shit together this year.

Whether Gordon Brown can do the same remains to be seen. To paraphrase a lyric from a band I was in back at school, "he had it/ and he's lost it." One of the greatest absentees from the blog over the last few months has been a proper analysis of what the hell went wrong for 'Newer Labour' between September, when they looked on top of the world, and December, when things had collapsed to such an extent that I was wondering if Iain Duncan Smith was moonlighting as Gordon's chief political strategist. (The quiet man advising the clunking fist... strange days indeed).

There is little doubt in my mind that the idiotic build up to the 'ectopic election' of October was the major mistake that Brown and the so called "creche team" of Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander made. These guys marched the troops up to the top of the hill, banging the drum loudly, expecting Cameron and Osborne to simply fall over, and then, when the opposition showed some last ditch bite and balls, cut and ran - leaving the impression of being (a) cowards and (b) completely green incompetents. Which they probably are. It's quite probable that a November election would have been a toughie, although I think it's unlikely Labour would have lost. It's a much bigger possibility that they could lose in '09 or '10 now. The polls, for the first time under New Labour (bar about a week during the 2000 fuel protest) are pretty damn awful. Of course governments have come back from being this far down before (the 80s Tories spring to mind), but the election-that-never-was precipitated such a wall of adverse publicity, with bad news for the government arriving virtually every day and from every quarter, that one was left wondering what the f*** was left to go wrong next. Northern Rock! Discgate! David Abrahams! Vince Cable correctly identifying Gordon as a cross between Stalin and Mr Bean at PMQs!

Meanwhile, Dave Cameron, who had been in all kinds of trouble in July and August with internal dissent and complete confusion over policy, suddenly started to look like a possible election winner. He was partially assisted in this by the continuing freefall of the Lib Dem's electoral prospects at the tail end of the Ming Campbell era - culminating, of course, in Campbell's quiet assissination by Lib Dem MPs desperate to recover some chance of actually saving their seats (those guys must be REALLY pleased there was no election last year).

So what can Labour do to get the initiative back? In some ways, not doing too much would be good. I can't think of anything LESS guaranteed to dig them deeper in a hole than another wave of bullshit policy initiatives designed to cover up the fact that the extra public spending money has run out - without producing sufficient improvements to convince the public it's been worth it and what they have left is an economic straitjacket that no-one wants to wear, particularly with a recession probably around the corner. Rather, they need to get health, education and transport policy sorted (admittedly a pretty tall order), whilst abandoning plans to destroy our civil liberties with crap like ID cards. If a cabinet minister would go on the TV and it were to look, even for a minute or two, that they weren't lying through their teeth, it would be a start.

Gordon Brown needs to stop being a neo-liberal who talks a lot to Irvin Stelzer and Alan Greenspan, and start behaving like the progressive social democrat that he has spent the last years telling the Labour party he.is He's never going to be a Bill Clinton style communications expert but if he could at least act like a man who's held a conversation a few times before when he gets up to PMQs, it would be a start. Failing that, a well placed sniper with a tranquiliser gun and instructions to fire if Gordon starts to flail too badly would at least ensure damage limitation. This guy has dug his own grave and looks increasingly ready to walk into it... salvation is still possible, but there needs to be a complete change of tone from the last ten years, and pretty damn quickly. Doing a hatchet job on Tony Blair similar to what Kruschev said about Stalin at the 1956 Soviet Party Congress would be a good start. If Brown isn't prepared to say Blair was a disaster then Dave Cameron, or indeed Nick Clegg, will be quite happy to, as the public increasingly comes to realise that it has been sold a pile of doo-doo over the last decade.

More on this rather soon. Hope everyone's recovered from the hangover by now!