I met Arianna Huffington last week. Thoroughly decent woman, I thought, and sharp as a tack. Like Ivana Trump with O levels.

The nascent European Financial Stability Facility needs to be doubled in size and turned into a fund that can lend to EU governments and their banks.

Err, what?

They’ve been scratching around the world trying to find the money to fill the current sized fund. So this is a solution that depends again on that magic money tree thing so beloved of the left….

There should be a ¤250bn euro pan-European infrastructure programme underwritten by the European Investment Bank.

Ditto…..and I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks that more infastructure investment is what, say, Spain needs is simply mad. What the place is currently undergoing is the pain from a couple of decades of malinvestment in infrastructure: not too little but too much.

The European Central Bank should offer unlimited long term loans to eurozone banks.

And that’ll just boost the carry trade as banks borrow at 1% and lend into govt bonds at 6%. Which is great: except when the capital values of the bonds fall and all the banks then go bust.

George Osborne was dragged deeper into the furore over the Murdoch empire’s links to government as it emerged that he entertained Rebekah Brooks for a weekend at his country residence as Rupert Murdoch was planning to take over BSkyB.

….the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators.

No, of course I’m not suggesting brown envelopes stuffed with babki.

What I am suggesting though is that those screaming about how awful it is that a private sector company should try to suck up to those with political power is, well, what the fuck did you expect?

Your permission to run a newspaper business is dependent upon those politicians. Your spectrum allocation is dependent upon those politicians. How much domestic shite you’ve got to pump out over that spectrum is dependent upon those politicians. Which sporting events you’re even allowed to bid for is determined by those politicians. Whether you’re allowed to buy out the other shareholders in a company you already have management control of is determined by those politicians. Can you give TV viewers a free newspaper? Politicians.

When the politicians have this sort of control over an industry then the people in that industry will inevitably suck up to the politicians. And it’s no good arguing that it just needs my tribe of good politicians in charge and all will be fine for inevitably the Coke party is going to be replaced at some point by the evil bastards of the Pepsi party.

If politicians have these powers then of fucking course those affected by the exercise of those powers will spend their time kissing the hairy arses of those with the powers. If government ran the lettuce industry then we’d have to lick Osborne’s ringhole to have iceberg instead of romaine for tea.

Why can’t people understand that the politicisation of the media industry is because it’s politicised?

That, after all, is the point of this government. It exists to secure and enhance the position of the banks, the corporations and the rich. It exists to support the system of rentier capitalism – and the inherited wealth that arises from it – that made so many members of the cabinet wealthy. This is the plutocratic class that funds the Conservative party, whose air it breathes, whose interests and opinions it shares. Social justice would require the redistribution of its remarkably concentrated wealth. But that is, of course, structurally impossible for the party to contemplate.

Hmmm.

George Monbiot grew up in Henley-on-Thames in South Oxfordshire, England, in a house next to Peppard Common.[4] Politics was at the heart of family life—his father, Raymond Geoffrey Monbiot, is a businessman who headed the Conservative Party’s trade and industry forum,[2] while his mother, Rosalie—the elder daughter of Conservative MP Roger Gresham Cooke[5]—was a Conservative councillor who led South Oxford district council for a decade.

A Freudian might say that there are issues here which need to be discussed, no?

Now he stands wide-eyed with shock at the consequences, with eloquent pen to capture what he sees. The facts are neatly arrayed: chief executives’ pay in FTSE 100 companies rose from 45 times to 120 times more than the pay of average employees. Money didn’t trickle down, it was sucked upwards; the share of national pay going to the lowest earners fell steeply over the last three decades, half the population getting just eight per cent of a doubling in national income. Even after the crash, the pay packages of FTSE 100 directors soared up unabashed, rising 49 per cent in 2011 alone.

‘We did not expect this and most of us are at a loss to understand exactly what has happened,’ Mount writes. If globalisation destroyed the jobs and pay of erstwhile well-paid industrial workers, why is that same globalisation used to explain the inflation of top executives’ pay, instead of levelling them down too?, he asks.

Err, because globalisation increases in country inequality?

By exposing everyone to more competition: and those very few who win the global competition are raking in the winnings of having beaten global competition, not just national.

half the population getting just eight per cent of a doubling in national income.
….
On the falling pay of the bottom half of earners

Pay rising not as fast, pay rising unequally, is not the same as pay falling.

The evils of Cameron’s austerity, the joys of Hollande’s spending in a slump.

One thought: the UK deficit as a percentage of GDP this year is expected to be 8.3%. That of France, 5.3%.

It’s not immediately apparent who is doing the austerity here, is it?

But here I am, poised at the gangway of a 36,000 ton, 642 ft ship that has docked in Lisbon.
….
By the time we have docked at Cádiz, I am beginning to think that, while you don’t have to be obsessive to go on a cruise, it certainly helps.
….
And as I gaze out at the Med while taking afternoon tea,

You’re in the Atlantic love.

Every bit of my body tells me not to go on a cruise. The Costa Concordia. The Costa Allegra. Do I even need to write the word Titanic? The 350 passengers who caught the norovirus two years ago aboard a Caribbean cruise liner. The people who have just logged a complaint with Thomson over the ship they claimed gave them gastroenteritis; the one with a swimming pool that allegedly contained human faeces and food that was undercooked. And I am 31. Thirty-one-year-olds do not go on cruises. In my mind, 61-year-olds do not go on cruises.

Thus the cruise line giving a 31 year old journo a freebie if only she’ll write about it.

The problem with his argument is not that it’s even right or wrong. It’s that it is irrelevant. The tools that were available for regulation were sufficient if anyone wanted to use them. Adding more tools for regulation wouldn’t change the desire to use them.

Yes, the banking regulators did get it wrong, didn’t see the bubble clearly enough. But that regulators get things wrong is not an argument in favour of giving them more tools.

To put it another way, why give more power to people you know get things wrong?

And no, it isn’t a good argument to then say but if they had more power they wouldn’t get it wrong. That’s to walk down (only the very first baby steps of course) the Stalinist path where the failures of basic policy get made up for by being ever more beastly about the imposition of state policy.

The answer, if there is an answer at all, is to try and find a system by which it doesn’t matter if the regulators are wrong. Where the system itself becomes self-correcting without the requirement for the purity of bureaucratic decision making.

We do know where this miracle is to be found to: it’s called a market system. Sure, banking is different because of the confidence issue but our aim should be to produce as close as we can get to a market based system given that confidence constraint.

Which pretty much means getting rid of too big to fail and then letting failure in the market become the limiting constraint of bank actions.

And the real reason we need to do this is, well, is where do we find those regulators who are never wrong? The BoE, FSA and all’s behaviour in recent years does not show is that that is easy: or even possible. Willy’s policy suggestions over the years make it seem inconceivable that he knows either….

Additionally, the Commission has acted to cut the amount of money being spent on olive trees which have been criticised for being a waste of money.

The cost of maintaining the shrubs, which dominate the MPs’ new offices in Portcullis House, has been around £44m a year. The Commission says it has negotiated the maintenance deal of £18.5m which will include other shrubs on the parliamentary estate.

Substitute thousands for millions there laddies.

Jeebus, these Oxbridge humanities graduates just don’t grok numbers at all, do they?

If Murdoch were allowed to own all BSkyB, within a year or two he would package all his newspapers on subscription or online together with his movie and sports channels in offers consumers could hardly refuse, at loss-leading prices. Other news providers, including this one, would be driven out, or reduced to a husk.

Erm given that The Guardian is free online how can a loss leading subscription package by a competitor threaten it?

Miss Dorries should know that it isn’t where you come from, it’s where you are going. But then, perhaps that is the problem – sadly for Dorries, she is going nowhere, and sadly for us, she seems to be going nowhere very slowly.

You might want to think about that Bryony……

Why one’s occupation should matter at the scene of an accident – unless, of course, you are a doctor – is beyond me, but then, most of Dorries’s reasoning is.

A nurse I believe?

It’s interesting what the effect was:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/local-to-you/midlands/view-page/item727286/

“This iconic landscape welcomes hundreds of thousands of walkers and other visitors each year. Its popularity can unfortunately create problems such as erosion, we therefore need to manage Kinder Scout – and other areas of the Peak District – to preserve their beauty for future generations……..Overgrazing and erosion caused by people walking across the moors leads to areas of bare peat, which are then in danger of being washed away by heavy rain, forming deep gullies and releasing carbon into the atmosphere. ”

Gosh, you mean Garrett Hardin was right? You cannot have open access to a resource?

Such access must be limited one way or another? That the ramblers are wrong?

Cameron has already appointed 117 new peers, a third of the number in all Labour’s years. Half are former MPs or councillors, a further fifth special advisers or party staff.

Yup. Because Cameron was PM when all those Labour MPs, SpAds, Ministers and Brown’s resignation list got their coronets.

The end of a government always produces a surge in ennoblements but they are from that previous government even if the bloke doing the actual ennobling is the new PM.

Why not abolish it? Why bother with electing a new void? Lords buffoonery has to end.

Because we most certainly don’t want a unicameral legislature. Who knows what lunacies would be enacted without a revising chamber?

And quite seriously, a country without a written constitution really doesn’t want to give MPs the poower to enact anything at all that crosses their pea brains.

Two Welsh men have been charged in Australia with stealing a fairy penguin called Dirk.

Far more fun not to know what actually happened but to allow the imagination to try and construct the plot and story around those few details.

It’s the sort of thing that would be the leaping off point for one of Alan Coren’s feuilletons

I want Britain to aim for the social and economic balance that thrives in Nordic nations.

OK. Here:

Unemployment insurance

As opposed to all other forms of social security in Denmark, unemployment insurance is voluntary. Thus, you are not automatically insured against unemployment.

An unemployment insurance policy is taken out from an unemployment insurance fund, also known as an “A-kasse”. These are private associations that are associated with trade unions and other professional organisations.

Most unemployment insurance funds are affiliated to specific trade unions, but there are also a number of cross-industrial unemployment insurance funds. It is possible to become a member of an unemployment insurance fund without being a member of the associated trade union.

If that’s the way you want it Polly. Moves us back to the system of what, pre-1945?

Worse, Wen may wring his hands over his mistakes, worrying that the government can no longer support loss-making infrastructure projects to deliver growth – rapidly falling away to its lowest for years. But he did nothing to change things largely because as matters stand nothing can be done. China needs to become a “normal” economy with plural centres of decision-making, an indigenous capacity to innovate and less reliant on state-driven flows of credit and infrastructure spending.

This is the man who insists that the UK economy should have more of all such things. Especially state allocation of credit.

A murky corporatist economic model has been created in which insiders, especially so-called princelings – sons and daughters of former revolutionary leaders such as Bo Xilai and his wife (both are children of revolutionary generals) – feather their nests with impunity. There is no impartial law; no checks and balances; nothing can be trusted. Party officials can make no claim to being revolutionary heroes as a reason for holding office; they are corrupt administrators just about delivering the quid pro quo of rising living standards.

And a man who refuses to see that the two things go together. If politics decides who gets the money then politics will be about who gets the money and thus money will buy politics.

The Economist refused to comment on the row.

Well quite.

The fuming Scottish First Minister took to the airwaves……His Scottish Nationalist ministers took to Twitter en masse…..and now the Telegraph has written about it.

So what is the Economist supposed to say? Well, that’s £500,000 saved off our advertising budget for this year then? Job done?

Come along now mighty national investigative organ, do try to keep up.

So the bankers whose excesses helped land Europe in this mess then get to sit round the big EU table, like any other government, and decide who should pay for it. And the answer, unsurprisingly, is: not them. The bigger question is: why finance has been granted such power?

This isn’t the usual Guardian writer knows fuck all about finance. This is stark staring madness of the Eoin Clarke type.

First he tells us that the bankers only took a 20% haircut. He should have a look at the prices today: 80% is more like it.

Then he babbles on about how appalling it is that the bankers had a seat at the table when how much money they would lose was discussed.

Erm, when you can’t pay your creditors yes, you do sit down and talk to your creditors. Because you want to make an agreement with them. You want the whole thing to be voluntary.

And why did Greece want it all to be voluntary? Because they’re still running a primary deficit. Which means that even if they blew everyone off with an involuntary default, rather than a voluntary restructuring, then they’d still need to continue borrowing money.

Who will lend you money if you’ve just stiffed everyone? Not the private markets, leaving only the IMF and possibly the ECB. However, neither of those will lend to anyone who is in default. You have to be at least paying lip service to the idea that you’re negotiating with your creditors.

So, everyone negotiates with their bankers in order to get them to agree to the haircut. Because without their agreement you can’t go to the IMF. And you do need to go to the IMF because you still need to borrow money.

This is the sort of thing I would expect the economics leader writer of a great national newspaper to understand rather than filling his readers’ heads with Rosicrucian style nonsense.

Finally, if the bankers lost 80% of their loans, why hasn’t Greece’s debt been cut by 80%? Because the official creditors, the IMF, ECB, EFSF and all the rest did not take a haircut: and they owned the majority of the debt at the time of the haircut.

Seriously, this piece would be shamefully ignorant even if it were in Socialist Worker. If Alan Rusbridger actually knew anything about the subject himself he’d fire Chakrabortty for writing such tosh.

If the churchmen, with only historic precedent to justify their seats, can survive in a much smaller, reformed house, then a similar case can be made – and apparently is being made – for the continued existence of the Lords’ vast numbers of bumptious hereditaries, placemen, poltroons, soaks, spongers and, in a smaller yet equally tenacious way, perjurers and thieves?

Hmm.

Formerly married to Robert Sackville-West^[1] (1985–92), she is the partner of BBC journalist John Humphrys.^[4]

OK:

Robert Bertrand Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville (born 10 July 1958) is a British hereditary peer.

The eldest son of Hugh Rosslyn Inigo Sackville-West and Bridget Eleanor Cunliffe, he inherited the title of Baron Sackville on 27 March 2004

Missed out on being Lady Sackville did we Caro?