Shameless David Laws

Where the word "hypocrisy" pokes its ugly rear.

Today's Guardian treats its readers with the squalid spectacle of a Coalition supporter, David Laws, championing the mass cuts that have just been unleashed on the country.

And while there's nothing new in hearing a government cheerleader reciting the usual script, what makes it particularly grating is the fact only last May millionaire David Laws was caught red-handed claiming £40,000 to pay rent to his boyfriend.

Sure, Mr Laws was not the first MP who fiddled the system and defrauded the taxpayer. But he was certainly one of the most outspoken "hard-liners" when it came to pontificating on "the pay and perks of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers", which is where the word "hypocrisy" pokes its ugly rear into the equation.

So for him to smugly lecture ordinary people on why their nosediving standards of living (squeezed incomes, higher bills, higher VAT, mass redundancies and huge cuts to public services - from care workers to the police and from the NHS to food inspectors) are actually a good thing, that's just taking the piss.

This ruthless (as well as electorally suicidal) lack of empathy highlights the importance of not having a political elite stuffed, literally, with millionaires who are clueless when it comes to the price of bus fares or gas bills and the way they impact on ordinary people.

PS. Since we're at it. Laws writes that:

"in April the first Lib Dem-inspired increase in the personal income tax allowance will boost the incomes of basic rate taxpayers, and take hundreds of thousands of low earners out of income tax altogether".

This is a piece of LibFibbery that we're hearing time and again. What they rarely tell you however is that:

a) It won't be until 2015 that the increase will actually begin to cover the full £10K threshold. That's if it goes ahead (there are already reports of grumbles amongst Tory ranks);

b) The forthcoming £1K increase will be cancelled out by the VAT hike and galloping prices.

The toxic effects of job insecurity

From lower productivity rates to family dysfunction and from poor customer service to depression and lack of motivation. What lies behind David Cameron's calls for "less red tape".

David Cameron's recent plans to make it easier to sack staff in the first two years of their employment have sparked an intense debate over the nature of Britain's labour market.

After the "fluffy years", it was only a matter of time before the crook-eyed default Tory approach to the world of paid employment would resurface.

The problem for Cameron and the bosses' organisations, however, is that - unlike the Thatcher years - there's very little left in terms of workers' protection for the government to wade in with the axe.

Extreme job insecurity in the UK is already a growing reality.

According to the OECD, Britain is in the top three along with the US and Canada (and well under the OECD average) in the strictness of employment protection index (1985-2008), which measures "the procedures and costs involved in dismissing individuals or groups of workers and the procedures involved in hiring workers on fixed-term or temporary work agency contracts".

Given the companies' free access to casual staff on "zero hours contract", or the free use of "temps" (which, by law, can be hired repeatedly on fixed-term contracts for up to four years before any tie comes into place), the lax regulation on probationary period for regular staff, as well as some of the lowest levels of statutory redundancy pay in the Western world, the notion that Britain's employment regulations may be at the core of the current dole rates is simply comedy material.

If we carry on this way, soon the only crusade left for the British Chamber of Commerce and the Tories to embark upon under the guise of "cutting red tape" will be against the right for workers to empty their bladder or take a crap at work.

However, what the last few days also highlighted is the almost total abdication on the part of the left and Labour in the fight against the galloping job insecurity and its noxious effects.

This line from the normally commendable Stumbling and Mumbling blog bothered me to the extreme. While sceptical of David Cameron's proposals, author Chris Dillow also wrote:

"There’s good evidence that [employment protection] reduces workers’ effort and increases absenteeism. This suggests that - at the margin - Cameron’s proposals might increase labour productivity".

Now, the reason why the above quote bothered me so much is that it shows how toxic and widespread certain myths are that even well-informed and well-read people can buy into them without questioning.

In brief, the Daily Mailesque-fable that a permanent job or certain guarantees at work will automatically turn you into a slacker. They ain't gonna sack me, so why bother, basically.

And how can you dispute that if even the usually meticulous and pro-left Chris Dillow can cite "good evidence" on the matter?

Except that said "good evidence" points to three pieces of research from Portugal and Italy which are solely and exclusively focused on specific (and already obsolete) legislation passed in those two countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Those laws were extremely protective - overly protective in fact - in a way not remotely comparable to anything Britain ever experienced, not even at its unionised peak.

It's like saying "there's good evidence that January is not a cold month and in fact look at this link to prove it". Except that it points to average January temperatures from the Canary Islands and Dubai.

The fact is, instead, that there's literally a mammoth body of research out there warning of the toxic long-term effects of job insecurity (click here for a summary).

Over the years detailed studies took place around the world, from the US and Canada to Australia, Sweden, Korea, Germany and more. The findings leave room to no doubt: there is a clear correlation between excessive levels of job insecurity and a variety of negative outcomes.

The initial advantages of "increased flexibility and lower costs" for the employers are undisputed. But little is ever said about the long-term effects that "casualisation may have on important aspects of national economic performance such as skill formation" and, most importantly, the ticking time-bomb that is widespread casualisation as weighed against "long-term financial planning".

But the strongest and most consistent evidence is the one seen across firms, industries, and countries linking job insecurity with "negative employee attitudes, behavio[u]rs, and health" and with the fact - as noted by several researchers - that "job insecurity is more stressful than job loss itself".

Amongst the negative effects, a "powerful negative influence on motivation", "reduced effort" and "poor safety compliance by employees". Low levels of job satisfaction are also associated with negative employee attitudes, lower customer performance and effectiveness with customers as well as with -in turn- a detrimental effect on group morale.

And that's without taking into account what "the longer term negative effects on workers' depression levels", or "the systemic [relation] between job insecurity and marital and family dysfunction" or, even, the proven effects that "parents' job insecurity has on children's school performance as measured by grades" .

The fact that "job insecurity reduces job satisfaction is attributable to the uncertainty of not knowing how to predict or control job threats".

And that's because, while insecurity in the short-term may spur a worker to perform better if the goal is a latter stage of more protection and various perks, an ongoing perception of "precariousness" will start having an adverse effect, as the worker will feel increasingly uncertain that their persistence can be sufficient enough for them to retain their job.

For a worker with little to lose, the lack of ties will offer no incentives to stop them from slacking off or "looking elsewhere" altogether.

Cliches of 2011 #2

"You've GOT to own your own home".

This particularly simplistic cliche' shuns a series of complications.

For instance, in an ever unpredictable job market, what happens if your only hope of dodging the dole queue means moving from place to place?

Or, what do you do if you don't do your homework properly and you find yourself saddled with a structurally unsound home or with the family from hell living next door? If you were renting, you'd just tell the landlord and pack your bags. But if you bought it and don't have the extra dosh to sort it out, then you may be up shit creek. If not for the rest of your life, definitely for an awful long time.

But the most unpalatable truth is the one related to finances.

Of course, it's all very nice to own a house if you have the funds, but Britain's the place where an alarming number of people have fallen for the spell of "getting on the property ladder" and the illusion of "asset ownership" no matter how barely they can afford it.

The last 15 years have seen a ridicuous number of tv programmes turning home ownership into the nation's biggest fetish: Property Ladder, Location Location Location, Grand Designs, Homes Under the Hammer, One Year to Pay Off Your Mortgage, and god knows how many others. They all had one thing in common however: the notion that, yes, you too can own a house and point at it while hugging your smiling partner- that's what makes you a happy family. The ultimate dream. The be all and end all of existence.

One thing, however, is never mentioned: the simple fact that it's not your asset and it will not be until the final instalment thirty-plus years from now.

You can be paying back your mortgage religiously over decades, each and every month, easily in excess of hundreds of thousands of pounds of hard-earned cash. But if something goes tits up (i.e. you lose your job), that all goes down the drain and so does "your asset" - which means your home gets repossessed.

Did you know that in the last three years alone in excess of 120,000 families were kicked out of their "own assets" (details here, here and here)? Remember 120,000 is the number of homes repossessed, meaning that the average number of people affected since 2007, children included, may be knocking on half a million.

It's a national tragedy, but one that the media rarely talks about, perhaps because of its supremely depressing nature. Or, perhaps, because it may highlight the unpleasant story that lies behind the most inflated and speculative "industry" in the country, one where average house prices didn't double or triple, but quadrupled (QUADRUPLED), between 1995 and the pre-recession peaks of 2007.

Other cliches:
"Not everyone is obsessed with...";
"Why can't Britain cope with snow?...";
"Society benefits from extreme wealth at the top";
"There are jobs out there if you really want one";
"The Royal Family brings in tourism revenue";
"Iain Duncan Smith is a kind and honourable man".

Would we have 'cuts' had it not been for the bank bailout?

Read the papers and it's as if the real reason behind the "drastic" cuts in public spending, the big bank bailout, never happened.

Just a passing thought.

In the past few days, Prime Minister David Cameron and his coalition chums have been warning of "drastic" measures and "decades of pain" as the £6bn cuts get underway in an attempt to rein in the country's £156bn annual deficit .

Cameron admits that the decisions "will affect every single person" (though I'm sure he's hardly going to trade that radiator for an extra jumper himself). However, he's also very clear in laying the blame on the previous Labour government and their "reckless" spending.

But here's the thing.

Less than two years ago, at the height of the financial crisis, the Labour government pumped £37bn directly into the banks. Earlier on, an estimated £50bn had already been spent to rescue Northern Rock (fine purveyors of high-risk 110-per-cent mortgages) from disaster.

That alone would cancel out the forthcoming "drastic" cuts by a mile. Do you hear anyone talking about it?

Not to mention the gigantic £850bn announced at the end of 2009, the official cost to the British taxpayer that included - amongst other things - buying duff shares off banks, indemnifying against losses, providing guarantees and insurance cover for assets.

Yet - in a textbook case of collective goldfish memory - this now seems to have slipped away from public consciousness. It's been literally sanitised from the dominant discourse. It's as if it never happened. The only thing that happened, apparently, was a "reckless" Labour government living beyond its means and wasting homongous amounts of money.

That they did that to rescue "reckless" banks is not something David Cameron will remind you of.

David Laws: "The years of plenty are over"

A new politics, eh? Minister in charge of reducing government spending apologises after being caught red handed with taxpayers' money.

Remember last year's mega MPs' expenses scandal, the outrage and all the promises of a brand new politics?

Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws MP must be a clairvoyant. Four days ago he publicly pontificated that "the years of plenty are over".

Sure, he was only referring to the public sector, as he illustrated the "shockwave" of £6.2bn worth of cuts across government spending.

But look at the irony. The famously loaded former investment banker has now been caught red-handed using taxpayers' money (£40,000 over a period of five years- £950 a month) to rent rooms in two properties owned by his secret partner. He said he'll pay back immediately. Indeed, "the years of plenty" appear to be over for him.

For the record, David Laws is one of the LibDems' most prominent "orange bookers", that is to say the free-market wing of the party which strongly advocates a much smaller role for the state.

Like the Telegraph remarked, Laws is the man "charged with rescuing the Government's finances". Keep the faith.

Hold your bladder...

...greedy Ryanair are really going to start charging for toilet use.

The idea was announced last year, but at the time Michael O'Leary's company claimed they were only exploring the option. Now, it appears, the plan is really going to go ahead.

Ryanair are going to charge passengers £1 or 1Euro for using their onboard toilets. In fact we should say toilet, using the singular, because part of the plan is to actually to get rid of two out of three loos on each aircraft so that Ryanair can stick a few extra seats in, presumably with minimal leg room, and make an extra bob or two.

I know it's the Daily Mail who did the maths, but apparently that means one cubicle for up to 189 passengers. Bet that's gonna smell fresh.

The gobby airline has an explanation for everything. Their spokesman said: "by charging for the toilets, we are hoping to change passenger behaviour so that they use the bathroom before or after the flight".

Right. I see. So it's behavioural engineering they're interested in, and not squeezing your purse/wallet til literally your last drop of piss.

In which case, cancel that flight, thou who sufferest from cystitis, or who was blessed with a weak bladder, or who simply hast to go and take a slash more often than your steel-bladdered fellow traveller. Or a pregnant lady who tends to feel desperate for a wee every ten minutes. Or you who's about to shit yourself.

Whenever and wherever you can, do not travel Ryanair. Be a conscious consumer and look for the most suitable alternative.

Because what the bastards are not telling you is that it's not just the two-hour flight. There's the boarding, there's the sometimes unpredictable time on the tarmac. And there's also the bit where you wait to get off.

Like this chap rightly wrote here, this goes beyond the choice of paying for an extra bag or shelling £7 for a withered onboard sandwich. Needing a wee is not something you can opt for. There is no alternative. Especially when you're 30,000 feet up in the air. They might as well charge you for a sick bag and dress it up as "changing passenger behaviour". They probably will.

So perhaps you can do one thing. Hold it til the last minute before you get off and, while no-one's looking, piss all over the seat. If anyone asks, just say you didn't have any spare change for the coin slot.

Tracey Emin & Co: the "exile" that never was

Didn't Tracey Emin and other millionaires threaten to up sticks to dodge tax increases on the rich?

Time and again we hear threats from the rich, the greedy and the famous that, if taxation goes up by a penny or two, they will have to leave the country and bugger off elsewhere.

The most recent threat I remember was last November when Boris Johnson announced that Tracey Emin, Hugh Osmond and Michael Caine were already packing their bags. "The 50p tax rate that is beginning to drive these people away is a disaster for this country, and it is a double disaster that no one seems willing to talk about it", wrote the current London Mayor.

And only the most heartless envious leftist would not to see their point. Imagine the devastating psychological consequences of having to put off purchasing yet another mansion?

Either way, the simple question is: how long is it taking them to pack their bags? Have their travel agents been on strike for the last six months? What's stopping them from doing a Phil Collins, that is taking their quazillions to Lake Geneva?

It's the point made this morning by George Monbiot in the Guardian. "Sadly, most promises of self-imposed exile are empty", he wrote. "They seem to be intended, like Boris Johnson's warning last year that the City of London would be reduced to a ghost town by the new taxes, to dissuade the government from taking action".

Try and deny that.

The Telegraph: woe betide the rich

A remarkable piece of ideology-soaked thinking in today's Torygraph.

When the top rate of income tax rises up to 50 per cent in April, a person earning £1m in Britain will have to pay £491,278 in tax.

An article by Damian Reece in today's Telegraph ('Tough times for the rich') compares the situation with the equivalent in Frankfurt (£486,808) and Paris (£461,128), London's two biggest financial competitors in Europe. "We really are going backwards", is the concluding remark.

It's interesting how Reece only draws comparisons with places such as Switzerland and Hong Kong, but not with Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands, where the top rate of income tax ranges between 52 and 55 per cent.

Or indeed Denmark, described by US business magazine Forbes as the country with "the best business climate in the world" as well as one with the lowest levels of income inequality. And, don't say too loud, the top rate of income tax in Denmark stands at 58 per cent.

However, the above doesn't fit the Telegraph's ideological propaganda.

Otherwise they would do good to mention what the Institute of Fiscal Studies reported a month ago: the fact that "earnings from employment [are] the main culprit in driving up inequality [in Britain]", and that unequal distribution started growing dramatically in the 1980s.

Or they would remind the reader of what The Economist - hardly a mouthpiece for socialism - remarked in a special report in 2007: that "income is distributed more unequally in Britain than in almost any big rich country except America" and that "fat pay packets have helped London house prices to triple over the past decade".

According to IDS (Income Data Service), in 1988, the average FTSE boss earned 17 times the average employee's pay. In 2008 the figure stood at 75.5 and, in 2009 - sod the "credit crunch" - 81 times the average pay of full-time workers.

With all of the above factors put together, it seems only reasonable for the government to take small steps towards redistribution. Quite simply, if top bosses don't act towards establishing more humane wage differentials, somebody else will have to.

It makes easy headlines to say that higher taxation "makes the threat of a gradual exodus from London real" - and we keep hearing it time and again - but god alone knows how many young talents would be ready to fill the shoes of the same egomaniac financial barons that brought the country's economy to its knees.

Also, like Robert Peston remarked last month, "taxing bankers rather than banks would not weaken the banks themselves, at a time when they need to accumulate capital".

Finally, it looks like it still hasn't dawned on many that an over-inflated financial sector carries enormous side effects which is precisely the reason why the UK was so badly affected by the crisis.

And by the way, while that thrives safe in the knowledge that bail-outs will come if the going gets tough, and manufacturing keeps going down the pan, how many mobile phone and fast food jobs are there to sustain the country?

The handbag-full-of-manure theory

How can a society so heavily based on mass consumerism manage the long haul if, at the same time, reasonable wages are denied to so many people?

The decade that was ripped apart by one of the most biting crises since WWII is finally coming to an end.

What's more striking, however, is the fact that lessons are obviously not being learnt. In fact, quite the opposite. The last twelve months have been lined by one convenient red herring after the other, from MPs' expenses to bank bonuses (both no doubt outrageous, especially the latter), while the true roots of the recession seem all but forgotten.

What was kickstarted by the subprime scandal in the US, where hordes of desperados were fed the most toxic financial fodder, was symptomatic of the widespread economic management of the Western world, one based on a fast growing wealth gap on a scale not seen since Victorian times.

Like last week's knee-jerk reactions to Alistair Darling's pre-budget report demonstrated, even the feeblest and most useless attempts at redistribution are greeted by hysterical shouts of "envy", "class war" and "hatred for the wealth creators".

It's the same irrational fury that met the minimum wage, calls in favour of basic rights for agency workers, or any attempt at righting the wrongs of the most ruthless, unbalanced and ununionised labour market since the days of Charles Dickens.

Because beyond the howls that even a mini-tax relief for the low-paid is apparently tantamount to Lenin and Karl Marx doing a Lazarus, the cheerleaders for "filthy rich", "wealth creators", "bank bonuses" and "keeping the talent" are simply incapable of focusing on the broader picture.

During the Blair years, for instance, it was often said that exceptional wealth at the top would inevitably trickle down to the bottom of the pyramid.

The reality is that the only thing that trickled down was a shower of credit cards, insane mortgages and ridiculously irresponsible loans dished up to the desperate. But it was only a matter of time before the policy of further ripping off the most financially vulnerable was going to end up bursting like a swollen, pus-filled spot. The trite old saying that chickens come home to roost proved wiser than a hundred top economists lined up together.

Whether in catering, call centres, factories or shops, you can only have a mass of underpaid, unprotected workers at the bottom for so long.

How can efficiency, smiles, loyalty and professionalism be expected if the most casualised labour framework invites the exact opposite?

More to the point, how can a society heavily based on mass consumerism manage the long haul if, at the same time, reasonable wages are denied to, literally, masses of people? Sure, they can stick it on plastic, buy goods on HP, or get a 110% mortgage with a car thrown in for good measure too. And no doubt they'll feel parts of the vibrant professional classes for a while. Fantasy island, basically.

Yet it's the equivalent of stuffing a ton of manure into a handbag. For a while you may kid yourself that it's manageable, or even believe that a bigger shovel's gonna make the job easier, and yet in no time the handbag is going to be full to the brim, bursting at the seams, with nowhere for the dung to go except all over your hands, face and clothes.

We may keep ignoring all that, but at whose peril?

Hotel worker slavery exposed

Immigrant workers are paid half the minimum wage in some London hotels.

Last Thursday's Newsnight was a stunning piece of investigative journalism. Hotelcare, one of the leading agencies for hotel cleaners in the country, was caught red-handed with serious exploitation of foreign workers at some of London's top hotels.

To say that the revelations were a surprise would be on a par with feigning shock at the recent MPs' expenses scandal. The rumours that some London hotels are paying less than the minium wage had been circulating for a while. Indeed, back in 2005 hospitality website Caterersearch was already pointing the finger at Hotelcare's dubious employment practices but failed to cause the stir that it should have.

This time, the evidence against Hotelcare as uncovered by Newsnight is simply unbelievable - and it may be interesting to see how the greedy ones will wriggle out of it. They may have to do better than cliched press statements about "isolated cases".

Taking advantage of the foreign workers' poor grasp of English and the fact that they're often unaware of their rights, those workers are led to believe that they would only earn the minimum wage (£5-73 an hour) if they clean two and a half rooms per hour.

Except that, in Britain, the idea of linking the minimum wage to piecework, a replica of the old 'sweating system' of the 1800s, is against the law. The BBC discovered that hotel cleaners are routinely shortchanged. In some cases, they are paid almost half of what they should be entitled to, and £120 off an already meagre weekly wage of £250, especially in London, can seriously make a difference.

Hotelcare claims they employ 2000 staff nationwide. Imagine if they were up to the same trick with all of them: that would pocket them £240,000 a week on the back of vulnerable workers who carry out a very physical job on a daily basis. Last year, Hotelcare made £1.5m in profit and the three shareholders paid themselves a total of £1m on top of their annual £500,000 salary.

Following the BBC's revelations, Hotelcare issued a statement saying that they're "concerned and disappointed" and that "it is not Hotelcare's policy to pay staff less than the national minimum wage". And yet the evidence on the programme is embarrassingly obvious.

Similar practices are exposed by a Times investigation revealing that several migrant workers are often cajoled into making themselves self-employed, a situation that doesn't seem to bother Bob Cotton, chief executive of the British Hospitality Association. He said that: "if technically someone is self-employed and they wish to pay themselves £2 an hour - you might argue that that is their choice". Of course, Bob. Shall we ask some Romanian chambermaids if it is?

What is clear is that the government is not doing enough to monitor the situation. The murky world of temping staff, agency workers and outsourced services ensures that the culprits are very quick at passing the buck. For instance, while on Newsnight Hotelcare's area manager is seen blaming the dodgy timesheets on the hotel, the hotel itself later issued a statement feigning shock and oblivion.

In this manic quest to drive down costs and raking up more profits, the investigation also exposed dubious hygiene practices, including lack of proper cleaning equipment, a fact made more disturbing by Park Plaza's statement that they "recently had an unannounced visit by the AA Hotel Inspector [...] and received a four star rating" and by Hotelcare's website with its annoying collection of cliches about "quality service" and "ongoing training [to] provide the staff with excellent skills".

Like many times in the past, perhaps the best incentive can come from the customers. The same way many now judge an establishment or a product on the basis of information about customer service as well as ethical and environmental issues, hotel chains could also be pushed to regularly publish external reviews of their employment practices.

And those who appear fond of paying £2 an hour for an 8-hour working day will be quickly named, shamed and hopefully put out of business.

Drug pusher logic

The mother of specks, eyes and planks: "don't blame the banks. It's the little people who created the mess".

Some people out there are still unable to spot what the banks have been doing throughout the past decade.

Whether it's vested interest, default devotion to Big Money or genuine inclination for toss-arguing of olympic proportions, the old strawman that the banks are "not responsible" for people's incapacity to manage their own finances is still alive. Yes, even after the big collapse of that sandcastle built on virtual money.

A generalisation it may be, but you find that such statements are usually made by those who've never had to struggle to pay the rent or an electricity bill. Those for whom there is little pain involved in turning down five Barclaycard offers in a month. Perhaps those whose wages are enough to pay for their tooth extraction- but I suppose that's fair enough.

So while even Dave Bleeding Cameron said that "banks have partly collapsed under the the weight of their own irresponsibility", a blog called Banditry has decided to champion "a rather nice post" circulating elsewhere. It says that "nearly all the stick [the banks] get [is] from people who can’t be bothered to check whether they’re over their overdraft limit, and/or who’ve borrowed silly amounts of money so they can go to Ibiza and have a big TV…". Banks instead, should be praised for offering "goods and services".

So here we are: irresponsible little ignorant thickos with the big fuckoff telly who then blame it all on "The Big Conspiracy from the Illuminati". Does such a hideous statement deserve a reply?

Perhaps not, and perhaps it's not even worth bothering with the dull roll of honour of all the people each of us knows who were pestered with unsolicited virtual money, credit cards, overdrafts, summer loans and christmas loans from all directions, or those who were actively encouraged to go into the red to incur charges.

Because people like Banditry know about it, of course they bloody do. But they suffer from that ancient syndrome called double standards, speck-eye-and-plank, the one that makes you go all squint-eyed when information is processed and cue a succession of strawmen that put The Wicker Man to shame.

Clueless kids aged 18, people on the dole (!), casuals or part-timers earning £200 a month or less, people with a hair-raising credit history, desperate people with zero chances of paying back, and in the case of RBS, even dogs. The truth is that hundreds of thousands of them did not even ask for virtual money. They were actively chased, sometimes harassed, the carrot dangling in front of their eyes like there was no tomorrow. Some people may not have done their homework before signing, but the banks and their highly dedicated departments knew exactly what they were doing.

And guess what, not only did they fail to vet millions of financial backgrounds: they actively encouraged them, cajoled them, tempted them, using the most sophisticated marketing techniques, ranging from dangling carrots to outright lies.

Blogs like Banditry would probably tell you that it's all very well to moan now, but you did get that help when you needed it. Basically, what some people would call Drug Pusher Logic, especially in a country as extortionately expensive as Britain where over 35% of all adults admit that they're relying on overdrafts to make it til the end of the month.

And let's not even approach the subject of students. Most loaded aside, do you know a single one who isn't in debt? All idiots, aren't they?

That is how Britain became the Land of Hope and Debt in no time at all. Is it coincidence that in 2006 2/3 of all personal debt in the EU came from Britain? Are the French, the Dutch or the Germans better at managing finances or could it be that their population wasn't subjected to such a toxic, clinical bombardment?

Those who've lived abroad know that unless you have a steady income (not necessarily high- steady is all you need), there's more chance of water running upwards than your bank handing you virtual money. On the 'Continent', the concept of a person being 'invited' to visit their branch with the purpose of an "account review", that is a Christmas loan offer or one for a new car, is as alien as the notion that cricket may be enjoyed.

Tell a Frenchman or a Swede that 18-year-old students in the UK are still routinely showered with thousands of plastic money and "it's-your-own-fault-if-you-mismanage-it" and they'll laugh at you. Oh...Remind me, which country ended up bailing out the banks in the end?

And you don't need to be particularly sharp to figure out that you don't get a whole nation to increase personal debt to the tune of £1 million every four minutes without some concerted effort, or like John Harris said in 2006, "the most aggressive advertising and marketing environment ever known", as he wrote of today's Britons turning into "Generation Debt".

So why could some bank automatically stop you from withdrawing money if that would take you into the red while most would let you? Why is it that to open a standard current account, certain banks would make it mandatory to attach a £1500 overdraft and a £3000 credit card "and that's the way it is"? Why is it that so many people would have their credit card limit doubled only to find out later on?

All of these, dear Banditry, were not mistakes or isolated incidents. This was systematic: a routine way of conducting business for more than a decade.

Perhaps, just perhaps, because -like a man once said- if we all had our account in order, if no-one defaulted, missed a credit card payment or went beyond their overdraft limit, the banks would miss out on an awful lot of dosh.

Safe seats and corruption: a link

A blogger compared the MPs involvement in the expenses scandal with how safe their seat is. The correlation is striking.

We always thought that the First Past the Post voting system is a recipe for political and parliamentary contempt. If yours is a safe seat, you could be the biggest donkey or automata in Westminster. As long as you stay disciplined, go along with what your master told you and you don't walk around hitting old people with a wet plimsoll, don't worry: you have zero chances of losing the elections. It becomes, in fact, your personal fiefdom. You'll represent your constituency until retirement - or beyond.

That may be one of the reasons, just by chance, to explain the correlation between the latest MPs expenses scandal and safe seats. If you look at the dozens of MPs (of all colours) exposed by the Telegraph, the safer their seat, the dodgier the beahviour.

This is what blogger Mark Reckons found out. "Has our electoral system contributed to the MPs expenses scandal?", he wrote. And, to his credit, he's backed his findings with some meticulous figures. Mark analysed the majority in each of the constituencies of the 74 MPs involved in the scandal so far and he discovered that "there is a clear increase in the likelihood of an MP being implicated in the expenses scandal the safer their seat". As the seats get safer, there is in fact "a fairly steady progression".

So David Cameron and Gordon Brown can apologise for all they like. The only thing that is going to represent a clean slate at Westminster is a radical voting reform.

The Telegraph in 2006: 'GREED IS GOOD'

The queue of journalists, bosses and Chancellors who until the other day were defending "excessive City bonuses".

Not long ago you couldn't utter a single word against excessive City bonuses. Those who did were envious moaners clueless as to how financial markets work.

Take the same pious Telegraph that today is ranting against the "scandalous greed" of MPs. As recent as October 2006 they sported this proud headline: "Greed is good".

"Who benefits [from excessive wages and bonuses within the Square Mile]? All of us", the Telegraph's leader roared, along with the trite "It makes sense for banks to spend vast sums in order to secure the best available talent" and the oily assertion that "the country would be considerably worse off [if it wasn't for the City workers'] enterprise, ambition and, yes, their greed".

However, to be fair to the Telegraph, they weren't alone.

Back in December 2006, the Independent's Hamish McRae wrote that "like or loathe them, big City bonuses keep London at the top of its game" while Lord Mayor of the City of London John Stuttard argued in the Financial Times that the banks' colossal profits "provide the high octane fuel for the global financial services engine". For deputy CBI chief John Cridland, "in a world where UK companies face global competition it is vital they can recruit and retain talented executives to keep ahead of the game". And, let's not forget Gordon Brown's words of June 2004: “[i]n budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”.

This was the consensus until early 2008. A world where thousands of crumbs-seeking earthlings were keen to act as the official mouthpiece of billionaire bosses, insisting that Britain without the talent of Fred Goodwin, Adam Applegarth and their likes would have meant economic devastation.

Fast forward to last Friday and the Treasury Commitee investigating the credit crisis came to the shocking conclusion that "bonus-driven remuneration structures led to a lethal combination of reckless and excessive risk-taking", slamming the Financial Service Authority for "not taking [and] tackling this issue seriously enough".

Similarly, tomorrow Channel 4's Dispatches will screen a report called Britain's Bankers: still cashing in, shedding some light on the way leading bankers are still making millions in spite of what they've inflicted upon the economy - along with evidence of how much Britain's best talent kept inflating their pay packets (take for instance Fred Goodwin's entitlement to take a year off sick on his full £1.3m salary) even as it was obvious their knack for financial dexterity had plunged the country into a massive recession.

My Recession

"A tough time for the very wealthy", says the Wall St Journal. "They may not be able to have a new yacht the very second they want it", explains Mark Reed.

When is a recession truly a recession?

Is it when I hear about 1,125 billionaires becoming merely 793 billionaires? Or Forbes reporting their total net worth plummeting to $2.4tn from $4.4tn?

Is that poverty? Only the poverty of ideas, where all you seem to have as a goal is to make and keep money. Having £1,000,000,000 in assets is not a recession: it's the type of immense luxury that ensures you need not do anything you don't want to ever again. Apart from die. Not even money can conquer mortality. Yet.

If you're a billionaire, and you have, say £1,000,000,000 in assets, well, you're probably worth more than the total earnings – before tax – of around 50,000 people on the national average wage. Or, the lifetime earnings of a village of 800 people.

If you're a billionaire, you are 'worth' more than the whole of most corporations pay a year to all their employees.

If you're a billionaire, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. You may not be able to have a new yacht the very second you want it, but if that's the biggest of your worries, well, you haven't got any worries at all.

If you're a billionaire, and you've invested your money poorly, and your 1,000,000,000 is not liquid, then you're not a billionaire. After all, if I look at the value of the assets I have, I'm worth an awful lot more than my bank balance tells me. If you were a billioanire and held onto now useless shares and assets instead of selling them when the market peaked ('the bigger fool theory'), then frankly, your greed is your undoing, not a recession.

Money is no good unless you can access it. It's not about what you are worth – an imaginary figure you could possibly achieve if you sold everything – but about what you can get.

If a billionaire isn't a billionaire anymore, well, I have no sympathy. A billionaire is already worth 50,000 years what someone on the average wage earns. A billionaire, or a millionaire for that matter, may have some money worries: but not like most people do. Not eating, sleeping in the streets, not earning a penny: these are our worries. Not if I'm not worth £1,000,000,000 anymore.

Of course, billionaires, millionaires, gazillionaires all get rich through one of two ways: either they were born into luxury and they are (mostly) utterly useless, or they make their money by taking risks and staking money in order to make money through business of some form or other. The problem with the latter way of thinking is that ultimately, you get rich by gambling.

And the house always wins.

And so the billionaires, who gamble their money, they've always won, they think they'll keep winning. That whilst they may be on a losing streak – they've won before – and the tide will turn. They'll win again.

This is how billionaires feel a recession. A stream of losses, but not actually losing what is important.

But a recession is rather more vicious than that.

We don't just wear clothes we've worn before to social engagements. We buy often and small, because the fridge isn't that big. We cut the frays off our jeans because we can't always get the sizes we want in the sales. We live with wives or husbands we have grown to hate because we cannot afford to live on our own.

It might be "a tough time for the very wealthy", according to the Wall Street Journal. But that definition of a “tough time” is the definition of luxury to almost everyone else on the planet.

A tough time for me, and many of us, is juggling overdrafts and credit cards and debts so we can still buy food. A tough time is making sandwiches and eating them at your desk at work, and going to an all-you-can-buffet and eating once a day. A tough time is hoping your shoes don't get holes in when it rains.

A tough time is going to the supermarket at the hour they discount the stock and playing Russian Roulette with food.

A tough time is having two separate bank accounts with two banks so that your overdraft cannot eat your salary in 'offset'.

A tough time is hoping to God you don't get the invite into the Director's Office at 4.00pm on a Friday afternoon after a long line of heartbroken and unemployed workers have been before.

A tough time is living in fear of the telephone and the scream from your Mother as you Dad tries to invent another way to avoid repossession and / or bankruptcy.

A tough time is a pay off at 53 and knowing that you may never work again.

Billionaires do not face the problems the rest of us have. The very wealthy's problems are insignificant to all but them: they have homes, and food, and futures. They may have to give up the yacht and forego the unearned cruise, but they will be able to buy new clothes and food. The very wealthy may have to forego living in a 6 bedroom mansion in SW1, but they at least have the option of selling up, moving out, living quietly in a suburb and not working again if that is what they absolutely want to do and can look beyond such imaginary vestiges of 'status'.

They need not fear the knock at 11.00am, or cutting the edge off mouldy bread and toasting it in the hope that they can not taste the bacteria anymore.

They need not face the age of 65 without a pension. They need not work behind the counter of McDonalds at 70. They need not rent from abusive landlords and hope they die before they need to go to a retirement home, because they have properties to sell to fund a retirement home, and many of us lost these homes, and we will simply curl away, a burden and dying before we should in an act of invisible, corporate murder.

This is how the recession kills us: not with a weapon, but with a consequence, often many decades away.

This the recession, and it is brutal, and ugly. And if a billionaire is now only a merely millionaire, he is still richer than 99.9% of the rest of the planet will ever be. And in that way, the only poverty they will ever know is that of ideas. There is more to life than money. But when money is the one thing you don't have, it is the one thing you need.

The Sun lied over Alfie

Last month's biggest tabloid story was based on nothing, as it turns out.

Another humiliating development for 'the best press in the world'. You may remember last month's Sun front-page story about babyfaced 13-year-old Alfie Patten becoming a father. Without bothering to collect further evidence, the Sun jumped on the case like possessed hyaenas, prompting an investigation from the Press Complaints Commission about allegations that money had been paid to Alfie's family in order to secure an 'exclusive'.

Before you could even say it, the usual army of columnists were all out in force, Shaun of the Dead-style, wailing about 'Broken Britain' and 'the cracks in our society'. David Cameron had an excellent chance to be quiet but he too chose instead to "applaud The Sun for bringing this to public attention". Needless to say in the meantime the tabloid's circulation benefitted considerably, with The Sun's website jumping from number 5 to number 1 in the online charts and who gives a monkeys about any code of practice or Alfie's family.

Fast forward to the last 48 hours, and it's officially emerged that Alfie was never the father anyway. A DNA test proves that the whole fuss had been over nothing. The Mirror were the first to report it, but a gag order forced them to pull the item from their website, perhaps to spare The Sun and David Cameron some hefty embarrassment. However, look at the Mirror's URL you'll get the general idea. And, like it's often the case with the net, by the time the injunction came to pass, the news had already reached all parts of the world.

From the US, Thailand and Australia, there are now plenty of reports that a 'DNA test proves babyfaced Alfie not the dad'.

So here's what Cameron should have said. "Let's applaud the Sun for bringing their greed and ineptitude to public attention".

Max Hastings: "nihilist of the Left"?

Gall, hypocrisy and ridiculous contradictions in the wonky world of the Daily Mail.

In the wake of Tuesday's attack against Fred Goodwin's property in Edinburgh, Stephen Glover writes in today's Daily Mail that "we should all beware of the nihilists of the Left... itching to reduce this country to anarchy". "The potentially violent minority", he carries on, "[...]has been whipped up by people who should have known better", adding that "the publicly funded BBC" was particularly responsible for goading the public against Goodwin, to the point that "the Austrian Joseph Fritzl, who raped and imprisoned his own daughter, was scarcely portrayed as a more detestable creature". "Lay off the bankers. Stop exciting the mob", he concludes.

Indeed one article in particular-written by journalist and historian Max Hastings only FIVE days ago- did look like a seriously inflammatory rant. Titled 'Seize their Porsches and throw them in jail!', it lashed out uncompromisingly at bankers, derivative traders and the likes of Goodwin. "This is why we must stand outside their homes throwing rocks through the windows until they [acknowledge responsibility for the crisis]", was his clarion call, with the conclusion that "[m]orally, the Great Train Robbers, Heathrow bullion thieves and suchlike were more impressive. Although they were crooks, at least they knew it".

And guess which paper published Max Hastings' call to arms? The Daily Mail.

Related articles: Fred Goodwin and Situationism;

Does the Daily Mail believe in freedom?

Fred Goodwin and Situationism

The most surprising bit about the attack at the banker's home was the public reaction.

The attack on former RBS boss Fred Goodwin's home in Edinburgh may be a one-off or it could even mark a watershed in the current downturn. If there is something history taught us is that deep economic slumps often turn a more confrontational leaf.

An anonymous group issued a statement, claiming it was behind the attack: "We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning".

That may have surprised some, but nowhere near as much as the reaction of most Sun readers. A look at the tabloid's comment page suggests that the old Angry Brigade, an anarchist situationist group who carried out a spate of similar attacks in the early 70s, were simply thirty-five years too early. If it's true that The Sun hold the national pulse, then it appears that the national pulse have finally caught up with the Angry Brigade.

Just look at some of the comments from the Sun's page: "Nice to read good news for a change"; "Well, what a shame!"; "Fred you brought it all on yourself..."; "no worry got loads off money to get new widows" [presumably meaning 'windows' here- ed]; "one word: KARMA" and, the most upfront: "This could be just the start. Peoples own justice will be handed out to those who have robbed us. Next time it could be something more damaging. Others should be worrying".

Credit Crunch: The Directors Cut

The economy has been running on an illusion of money for years. Subsidised by debt – the good old never never – capitalism's central ethos – growth, more, More, MORE! - has stretched from the unlikely into the impossible. By Mark Reed.

Money is a cruel and unforgiving mistress. In these times of economic terrorism, though, everyone is talking about the current circumstances as a 'credit crunch'.

This is the work of spin doctors, and liars. There is NO credit crunch. No recession. What society is facing now, is that we are reaping what they have sown. They? There's always a 'Them'. But make no mistakes about this, society is currently victim of cruel financial instruments. Words such as 'fractional reserve banking' are more powerful in our lives than blasphemy.

What there is is a credit hangover.
Banks became drunk on money, and we were their date rape victims. They plied us with free booze all night, and now we have the headache. It was a rare week I didn't find a cheque addressed to me for £4,000 or a credit card with £7,000 sent to me unprompted, just waiting for me to spend spend spend. If I took up every offer, I'm fairly sure I could've borrowed £100,000 in a couple of years on an income a mere fraction of that. (Those letters have dried up recently. I wonder why).

In the olden days, geed on by obscene bonuses and outrageous targets, redundant bankers would buy houses because they didn't know what else to buy. Routinely, in the mega-bonus culture, these overpaid investors would buy houses and rent them back to the poor to ensure a steady income. Paying for houses in cash meant that, for the rich, a £260,000 flat would cost them £260,000. For the affluent poor – that is, those lucky enough to get a mortgage – that flat would, including interest cost £520,000 over a quarter century.

That £260,000 flat (probably bought at half the cost years ago), would ensure a relatively steady income of say £80000 per annum for life at a £100k-ish investment years ago. Of course, I see a conflict of interest here. It served the interests of the bankers to push house prices up, in many ways, and the underlying problem that society now faces is fucking outrageous house prices that are slowly being corrected. Because first and foremost, when house prices go up, that steals money directly from the rest of the economy. The money doesn't disappear, but is moved from the incomes of the many (businesses and individuals) into the channels of the few: the Super-Rich.

The proportion of income directed to maintaining something as fundamentally basic as somewhere to sleep leapt up. Where mortgage payments took 50% of two peoples post-tax incomes were commonplace. The other 50% had to go on everything else. Food, water, air, travel, clothes, mad ex-wives/husbands, you name it. And, of course, student debt. The average student – as of a few years ago – would graduate with an average of £30,000 in debt. Society is now geared to seeing debt as not only a legitimate lifestyle chocie, but mandatory if you want a degree or a home. The stigma of debt became marginal. After all, if it cost £30,000 to get a degree, when it came to a mortgage, the fraction of debt – an extra £10-20-30k – was inconsequential. Everyone needs somewhere to live. Why not pay a little more for somewhere you own instead of a little less for somewhere you will never own?

The economy has been running on an illusion of money for years. Subsidised by debt – the good old never never – capitalism's central ethos – growth, more, More, MORE! - has stretched from the unlikely into the impossible. The money never existed, and was all on a promise that they never thought might actually be kept. Even the Bank Of England are printing money now. Crazy, unrestricted, greedy loans and unrealistic targets made banks soft. Banking institution employees are often targeted with making a certain amount of profit per day. That is, selling a loan with a profit margin of a certain amount on it. Take your big bankers and your mortgage suppliers, and they have to make a certain amount of money to remain employed.

The easiest way to remain employed is to target the basic human need: a home. Justified and incentivised by enormous bonuses, the banks became soft. They became stupid, and lax. They relaxed guidelines for a 3.5 factor on mortgages to enable people to borrow up to six times their income. And not only did they allow a six-figure growth, they also commeneced 'self-certificated' mortgages.

A 'self-certificated' mortgage is where you tell someone how much you earn, and they don't check it: they just believe you. To extrapolate it out, let's take some simple maths. Now, this grossly exaggerates the numbers, but it is only a matter of scale, not ratio. For example, let's say I want to borrow £1,000,000 to buy a property. If the bank operates on a six-multiple, I need to earn around £178,000 at minimum to get that mortgage. Let's say my income is £100,000, but it has an impressive title. “Finance Director for Blah Blah Blah Dot Com”. That could earn £180,000. But I still earn £100,000. And I think that in five years I will earn £180,000. Let's gamble on the future. So, I self-certificate. I say I earn £180,000. And I promise myself that I'll just pay – say – 70% of my disposable income to the mortgage. That still gives me a couple of grand a month to live on, and a million pound house. These two factors mean that due to lax financials and careless application, I got a mortgage for ten times my income.

Banks didn't just do this for the big hitters. They did it for people on miniscule incomes. Under the 'right to buy' scheme, for example, American Social Housing Tenants took out mortgages for amounts they couldn't afford thinking they could afford it (due to 'trickledown economics', everyone thinks they'll be earning more money in future). They got their mortgage, the banker hit his target and got his bonus, and everyone was happy. Until people couldn't pay anymore.

And so Gordon Brown is extremely fucking clear on it, it is not 100% mortgages that are the problem. If they hadn't introduced a 100% mortgage, people on £40,000 a year would – in all probability – not have been able to get a mortgage on a £160,000 home, as they would have to save – say at 10% - £16,000.

So banks pushed up house prices by relaxing lending, easing controls, and lending high multiples. It didn't increase sales or the amount of homes available (though now there are dozens of abandoned, unfinished land developments and skeleton housing estates across the country). Not only that, but people in arrears find themselves homeless.

Due to the complex and fractional nature of reserve banking, a mortgage may be with Joe Bloggs Mortgages, but that mortgage has been sold by Southern Dock to Jimmy Twizters Investments. If you default, the bank can't simply recalculate the best way to keep the money. The Investment firm may simply kneejerk 'take the house'. The property is then resold at an auction for say £120,000 instead or the mortgage total of £360,000 (due to the loss of value in house pices, and also the loss of interest generated income). So a family lost their home, and the house sold for say half of what they paid for it.

Now, what if say, the family were to offer the bank the average auction price of the home, and the family don't get made homeless? Given the marginalised nature of shareholders, it would be impossible, and impractical to gain consent to revalue the moribund mortgage and enusre a family to keep their house. So you're homeless, someone else bought your dream home for less than you were offering to pay for it, and well... you're still homeless.

In one article, I read how a family said they felt bad for buying a repo auction home and thus 'benefiting' from the misfortune of others. The misfortune is not that the family could afford a house in a repossession auction, but that a family lost their home due to being financially abused by greedy bankers chasing bonuses. They made stupid decisions, lent money on 'self certificated' incomes, and a storm of circumstances made the house prices absolutely fucking crazy. Staff were incentivised to hit targets and took irresponsible risks. Everyone and their dog found themselves pelted with letters by banks granting instant credit limits, and encouraged to spend spend spend. And those who were responsible and able to control this didn't. They failed their responsibilities and have brought ruin on the nation and the lives of millions.

It is not 100% mortgages that destroyed the economy. It was when a normal two-up two-down terraced house in London cost £400,000 that destroyed the economy. The economy was built on an illusion of money that simply didn't and never would exist except as an invented figure on a balance sheet. After a while, a LONG while, it became apparent that someone telling lies would be caught out. This is where we are.

Gordon Brown found £500,000,000,000 to bail out the banks. Comic Relief raised £60,000,000 for the starving and dying of Africa. Imagine, if you will, thirty solid years of Comic Relief. Every night until 2038. Thats how long Comic Relief would have to run, were it Bankers Relief.

Gordon should not have rewarded failure, incompetence, greed and recklessness. Their imaginary bonus-driven economy has rained a flood of misery on us all. The banks gambled on our futures, and when they lost, we lost.

Unjust Rewards

The latest book by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, "exposing greed and inequality in Britain today".

Denial is a nasty bastard. It's almost caused more trouble and reaped more victims than plagues and famines. Denial is so toxic because it's invariably the easy route. It's the one cop-out that makes you go along with a world sewn up by the rich and the powerful without questioning a single thing. It's that reflex action that makes it possible for millions of heads to be buried under the sand as they get fooled by a swirl of "but at least", "cheers" and "we're all doing great".

And denial is what laid at the root of today's financial crash. For years we chose to turn a blind eye or two towards a culture of exorbitant excesses at the top. We had (and still enjoy) a political class that was at best naive and at worst conniving.

The masses were kept quiet in their delusion by tons of credit handed out like candyfloss at a fair, the cheap availability of bamboozling gadgets, and load of bullshit jobs thinly disguised by the growing culture of aspiration consisting of Big Brother, Pop Idol and Heat magazine. The masses were told that the gargantuan binge taking place at the top would inevitably trickle down to the rest of society. In the end though, what really trickled down were the most toxic bits, like an overflowing cesspit whose lids are no longer able to keep it out of sight. Cue businesses dropping like flies, bankruptcies skyrocketing and the number of those on the dole swelling up.

How many times do we hear "this is too complicated, I haven't got a clue about all that stuff happening at the top"?

Unjust Rewards is the perfect antidote if you wish to at least find out why all this is happening. The first chapter is exactly about the notion of denial. Toynbee and Walker started with a research into the opinion of some of the wealthiest people in the country. They were asked to express what they know about the nation's average earnings. Their ignorance turned out to be staggering. The overwhelming majority of those 'high flyers' are truly convinced most of Britain are living on income levels very similar to their own. Their grasp of poverty and inequality is as sober as tales of children delivered to families by storks.

Like her or not, Polly Toynbee deserves huge credit for holding on to reality at a time when everybody in Britain was busy flying on the seat of their pants. At the peak of the years of delusion, especially between 2000 and 2007, whoever warned Britain about its staggering excesses and growing inequality was being dubbed a nutjob.

It's a shame, however that, in such an apolitical country, Unjust Rewards is unlikely to preach past the converted. And yet its language is extremely accessible, a rare feat to accomplish for leftist commentators - a category often guilty of indulging in prosaic or overtechnical style that remains confined to an ivory tower. Toynbee remains one of the best antidotes to the Littlejohns and Kavanaghs of today's Britain. She is able to speak the language of ordinary people and relate to their real everyday problems without leaving a single stone unturned.

The authors' argument takes the shape of an exploratory journey through the plight of those straggling behind, looking into the effect of eleven years of New Labour's watered down redistributive policies, digging into issues of aspiration and proving that our attitudes to pay and standards of living have been completely distorted.

Avoiding their fair share, one of the final chapters, is a brilliant polemic against non-doms and tax avoiders. "The wealthy have nothing to complain about in Labour's treatment of their tax affairs", writes Toynbee, adding that "the rest of the EU looks on London's new status as the playground of the rich not with admiration but with a measure of disgust and anger at the opening of a tax haven [...]".

What needs to be done, to round it all off, is a set of suggestions to get Britain out of the current deadlock, including "the creation of an anti-avoidance culture", a radical reform of the Honours system, the closure of tax havens, and a series of measures to reduce inequality. "Policians must learn to say boo to the golden goose", is one of the final statements.

Unjust Rewards is a must for all those who wish to break the vicious circle of ignorance, denial and unfairness.

British bulldog or British pussycat?

Which is more outrageous: the banks continuing with their multi-million bonuses or the British people's lack of interest?

"Fury over £4bn bonuses at the bailed-out banks", writes the Daily Mail. Fury? Where's the fury? Can you see any?

A quick look around and it's quite apparent that, fair dues, the Express is alone in giving the scandal due coverage. Its front page goes "SCANDAL OF £1BN BANKERS' BONUSES", reporting Vince Cable's view that "This is unbelievably crass and irresponsible behaviour by people who have learned absolutely nothing and appear to have no standards of honesty whatsoever".

After digging the black hole that swallowed £37billion of our money (with plenty more on its way), and after the government bought up stakes to part-nationalise them, the banks are continuing to award themselves bonuses and act like nothing had happened.

According to the Times, "some of the worst-performing banks - notably the Royal Bank of Scotland, which last year delivered the biggest loss in British corporate history - are set to pay out close to £1 billion in bonuses". And every single day Alistair Darling warns. He announces reviews, he calls for inquiries. "The very fact that he has ordered a review suggests he has no clear idea what to do", writes Philip Johnston in the Telegraph. Last October, Gordon Brown said: "The government is bringing and end to rewards for failure". We're still waiting.

But aside from the Express, the issue doesn't appear to be given the relevance it deserves. Yes, there are columnists and financial analyses. But we're nowhere near Baby P-standards of public outrage. Which is why talks of British spirit and British bulldog are even more pathetic nowadays than they ever were. British pussycat more like.

In the US, Barack Obama stepped in quickly and decisely to cap executive pay and what he calls the "shameful" culture of bonuses. In France, where people showed their sheer anger last week with mass demonstrations, Nicolas Sarkozy announced that "there would be no 2009 bonuses at banks that have received state aid", while today French banks and the financial watchdog have agreed to cap bonuses and link them to performance in order to curb "overly-risky conduct".

In Britain the most radical act is, at best, an overpaid celebrity cretin poking fun at the Prime Minister for being "one-eyed" or, at worst, rage completely mis-directed at foreign temporary workers. That's where the famous 'British spirit of the blitz' is today.

If I was a banker I wouldn't worry in the slightest. I'd look around and see The Sun busy talking about Peaches Geldof's marriage "WRECKED BY VIRGIN" and the Mirror's revelations about Jade Goody's family feud. Then I'd conclude that the BAFTAs, or Tony Adams sacked by Portsmouth, are getting more coverage than our latest bonus-related news. And then I'd wear a big fat grin.