Could the future be John McCain?

It seems incredible, but as the Democrats gather in Denver to anoint Barack Obama, America could be on course to re-elect a Republican as their president. Not just any Republican either, but a belligerent 71 year old who can’t remember how many houses he owns, would happily nuke Iran and whose answer to global warming is to drill for oil in environmentally sensitive areas off the coast of America which don’t even have much oil. But according to the polls, John McCain is drawing level with Barack Obama, and even drawing ahead.

Really, America it is a strange, strange country. After a disastrous and illegal war, in which four thousand American soldiers have died, in the middle of an economic crisis largely caused by the investment houses that finance the Republican party, you would have thought it almost inconceivable that the Republicans could be re-elected. Could any political brand be more toxic? Has any party in history deserved to be thrown out at an election more than the Republicans in 2008?.

George W. Bush has been recognised even by many neo-conservatives as the worst US President in modern history. The country is going to hell in a handcart as banks fold and inflation robs Americans of their savings. Ten million people risk losing their homes over the next two years as a result of the credit crunch. Real wages have been declining in America for the last five years. The country is awash with credit card debt.

America’s image in the world, so vibrant after 9/11, has been seriously tarnished by a series of epic foreign policy mistakes under the Republicans, the worst of which is of course Iraq. Yet enough American voters believe that John McCain might have the answers for him to become a serious contender. Which is scary. McCain is not an unknown quantity - he is a highly excitable politician with a notoriously short temper, who would bring his impetuous and confrontational style into American foreign policy. With the world entering a global economic slump, and old enmities raging in Europe, John McCain as President would be like a flame-thrower in a fireworks convention.

I got an insight into the McCain view of the world last week at the Edinburgh Book Festival in a session I did with Robert Kagan, McCain’s leading foreign affairs adviser, and author of “The Return of History and the End of Dreams”. The good news is that the war against terror is past tense, it seems, because he didn’t mention al Qaeda once. The bad news is that America might be about to revisit, not the cold war, but the era of 19th Century great power rivalry, which is how Kagan characterised the current state of international affairs.

He believes the great fault line is between America and an axis of authoritarianism represented by China and Russia. There is new era of geopolitical confrontation, according to Kagan, as Russia rearms and China builds the biggest army in the world. America has to step up. “The future international order will be shaped”, he says “by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it”. No prizes for guessing whether John McCain is up to the military challenge. Europe, which Kagan dismissed as an irrelevant entity in the new world of hard power, would get trampled in the rush.

This is all profoundly disturbing, so what are the Democrats doing about it? Barack Obama has to share the blame for making McCain credible. It’s almost as if the Democrats expended too much of their intellectual effort, their moral energy, on the contest between Hillary Clinton and Obama for the candidacy. After Obama’s successful tour of Iraq, where to Republican dismay he won the backing of the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki for troop withdrawal, and then Europe, where Obama attracted 200,000 to his speech in Berlin, the campaign appears to have stalled.Certainly, the steam seems to have gone out of the Obama train.

Of course, the senator has been on vacation. He will likely be back in the lead by the end of this week, because candidates always get a poll boost after a party convention, and Obama will assuredly rise to the occasion on Thursday when he gives his acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” address to the civil rights movement. But Obama shouldn’t be struggling: he should be storming ahead, leaving an aged and confused McCain in his slipstream.

The Iraq war is part of it. Obama’s was almost a single issue campaign at the start; an anti-war candidate, until the fortunes of war turned in Baghdad. The apparent success of the US troop “surge” in 2007 in lessening communal violence in Iraq has taken much of the potency out of the war as an issue in domestic US politics. Body bags are still coming back, and the war is still regarded as a mistake, but Iraq is not headline news. McCain’s call for ‘peace with honour’ sounds to many Americans more attractive than plain defeat and withdrawal.

Then there is the economy, stupid. The credit crunch has morphed into a full blown recession, without anyone really facing up to the implications. It has happened so fast, with sharpest drop in property prices since the Great Depression, the virtual collapse of mortgage banks like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the entire US political establishment is in disarray and confusion. We keep being told that “the worst is over”, only for it to get worse.

Obama has not developed any economic answers yet, apart from a bit of job protectionism here, a bit of help to mortgage holders there. He supports tax cuts to middle class families and tax increases on those earning over $250K. This has been attacked as “socialism” by the right, but it is far to anaemic and incoherent to be called anything recognisable.

Meanwhile, McCain has gone for the six-pack vote by calling for offshore oil drilling to cut petrol prices - a simplistic policy which would not do anything to reduce oil prices, but which sounds good to the Nascar voters of working class America. He is also promising tax cuts, but to the rich as well as the poor. Though McCain is on record as saying that no one worth less than $5m can be called rich.

This should be an open goal for a politician of Obama’s gifts. Yes, race is an issue, but not as much of an issue as the lack of clarity and edge to Obama’s political programme. He needs to target the root causes of the economic crisis and show that only Democrats have the route out of it. Reawaken the idealism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal for a country ravaged by greed, irresponsibility and inequality. There is an historic opportunity to change the course of American history and bring the neoliberal era to a close. That’s the kind of change people really could believe in.

Alex and Maggie

“Linwood no more; Bathgate no more; Ravenscraig no more...Salmond no more” The First Minister has reacted with fury at the claim that he has praised Thatcher’s economic policies in the 1980s which inspired the Proclaimers' famous list of industrial closures. In an interview with Total Politics Magazine about Scotland’s attitude to Thatcherism the FM said: ‘We didn’t mind the economic side so much. But we didn’t like the social side at all.” Not an endorsement of Thatcherism, perhaps, but certainly a nod in the direction of her market-based policies.

But no one should be surprised that Alex Salmond is pro-business. Whatever else an independent Scotland would bring, it would not be socialism in one country. He has long made clear that he believes Scotland’s future lies in emulating Ireland’s low tax, low regulation economy, and its dash for growth through inflated house prices and attracting high net worth individuals.

A more important question than whether Salmond is embracing Thatcherism, is whether his support for Celtic neoliberalism may be obscuring his view of what is happening in the real economy. This is important because the inflated Irish economy has come to the brink of collapse as people have realised that house prices don’t equate to real wealth, and that greed isn’t necessarily good.

Now, like all First Ministers, Salmond spends a lot of his time in the company of bankers and financial types who dominate the Scottish economy. The Royal Bank of Scotland, is one of the biggest banks in the world, and practically owns the country. When you come off the plane at Edinburgh airport you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in a land called RBS such is the degree of branding around. The FM has come to support the RBS rather as if it were the national football team. A fortnight ago he issued a statement about their prospects which read like a Royal Bank press release. Dismissing the bank’s announcement of the second largest losses in banking history he said: “I am certain that the Royal Bank of Scotland will overcome current challenges to become both highly profitable and highly successful once again.”. Well, maybes aye and maybes no; but since when has the FM become the CEO?

I think this is carrying things too far. The Royal Bank of Scotland employs 8,500 people in Edinburgh and is a very important company in Scotland, but the First Minister should not be backing the banks uncritically. The reality is that RBS, under Sir Fred “the shred” Goodwin, has been behaving as irresponsibly as the rest of the banking world - perhaps even more so, given the scale of its losses in mortgage bonds and other assets and its purchase of the Dutch bank, ABN-amro. RBS piled into sub-prime lending in America in the craziest years of the boom and is now having to write down billions in losses. RBS has had to try to restore its books by issuing an emergency cash call for £12bn in June, the largest corporate rights issue in history.

The problem with a small country like Scotland is that big companies can exert a disproportionate influence on the political system. It’s not just RBS, but HBoS, Standard Life, all those ‘intelligent finance’ types in Edinburgh Park. They have colossal lobbying clout and produce much of the economic material that the Scottish civil service uses to frame its economic policies. The trouble is that these companies are not impartial observers of the economic scene - they are players who want their view of the economy to prevail. Politicians should be wary in case they turn unwittingly into their apologists.

The First Minister continued last week to show the influence of bank thinking in his comments on the housing market in Scotland. In his Donald Dewar lecture, at the Edinburgh Book Festival launch he said that house prices in Scotland were bucking the trend south of the border. “Scottish house prices appear fairly stable in comparison to other areas’”said Mr Salmond, “with prices in Scotland increasing by 2.9 per cent since the start of this year, compared to a fall of 2.8 per cent across the UK.”

There were two things wrong with this. First of all, he was wrong: according to the Register of Scotland, which is the only reliable source on house prices since it measures actual prices rather than estate agent spin, house prices in Scotland fell by 5.1% in the first quarter of 2008. That’s almost as precipitate a fall as in England. In Edinburgh new build flats are selling for less than 20% of their prices last year. It is a myth that Scotland is in some way immune to the credit crunch, and it is a myth that is being promoted by commercial interests who gain from it - principally the banks, who have been urging politicians to talk up the market. But not even Alex Salmond can defy the laws of economics.

The second problem with the FM’s speech is that he appears to think that high house prices are a good thing, and is calling for action to “support the housing market”. The FM is talking of bolstering house prices by spending millions on schemes for “affordable housing” and to “help first time buyers”. Actually, the last thing government should be doing is encouraging young families to enter a collapsing market. The best way to help first time buyers would be for the market correction to take place speedily, without government interference, so that prices fall by the 30-50% necessary to return them to sustainable, pre-bubble prices.

It was predatory lending by the banks - handing out 125% mortgages and the like - that pumped up the house price bubble in the first place. This was underpinned by central bankers who kept interest rates too low for too long to encourage an asset price spiral. On the basis of these unrealistic real estate values, banks like RBS and HBoS, built a huge structure of leveraged debt, which ensnared us all. Now the whole edifice is collapsing, leading to trillions in global banking losses and a severe tightening of credit.

Britain is now entering what is likely to be a long recession as the mess created by the banks is cleared up, and Scotland, like Ireland, is not well placed to weather it. We are heavily dependent on financial services, make very little and have high public spending. Alex Salmond is right to call for policies to counter recession, but he should be wary of asking the banks for advice. They have been responsible for what is emerging as an economic catastrophe, and the government should be thinking about how to help the thousands of people liable to lose their homes and jobs because of the irresponsible behaviour of Thatcher's children.

Everyone can have as many houses as John McCain

The Republican presidential candidate John McCain was left floundering last week over his property empire. Asked in an interview how many houses he owned “I think, eh, um, I’ll have my staff get back to you on that.”.

Well, it’s easily done. How can anyone remember how many houses they have now that everyone owns blocks of flats to rent out to illegal immigrants. I’m always mislaying the odd cottage here and there - well it’s remembering the names isn’t it. And with property so anonymous in towns, its hard to know your own front door these days.

Unkind people have said that at 71 McCain can barely remember his own name let alone how many houses he has. But we really mustn’t descend into the politics of envy and ageism His staff have been having a few problems with the numbers too. After the interview the senators staff got back saying the McCains own at least four houses including two beach front condominiums, an Arizona ranch and a loft.

But this was later increased to seven, once all his wife Cindy’s various holdings were included. Then it emerged that since mcCain has three houses on his Arizona farm, the total was really ten. But that may only be the start as McCain houses are now being discovered all over America. At the last count they were worth $14 million, or an average of $1.4 million per house, which is not bad going in a country where the average house price is only $200,000.

Now, it’s all very well for those moaning minnies here who say they can’t scrape together a deposit for a one bedroom flat in Glasgow. Anyone could have had ten houses if they really wanted them. I mean, just look around: there are houses everywhere - all you need to do is go out and buy them. Like Labour’s Michael Meacher who has seven houses or Keith Vaz, who has a property empire to make Donald Trump envious. Or those Tory MPs who sell their houses to a trust fund for their children and then buy them back again with their parliamentary allowances. Or is it the other way round.

Barack Obama says McCain is out of touch with sub-prime America where ten million families face losing their homes. But sub with US house prices down 20%, McCain may have lost millions He probably qualifies for emergency liquidity injections from he US Federal Reserve. We should organise a whip round.

And Obama isn’t so squeaky clean when it comes to real estate. A Chicago property developer and convicted felon, Tony Rezko, helped him buy his $1.6 million mansion in Chicago. In America, as they always say, the price of a man’s honour is only as high as his mortgage.

Wonder if you can take out a mortgage on the White House.

Talkin' Third World War

Great international conflicts have a habit of starting in ‘far away places of which we know nothing’: Sarajevo, Poland, Pearl Harbour, and now South Ossetia. The escalation of the conflict in the Caucasus into a kind of post-modern Cold War has been breathtaking. One minute, you are looking for South Ossetia on the map; the next people are talking of nuclear retaliation.

Fortunately, our diplomatic mechanisms are rather better at handling international crisis than they were in 1914. But that doesn’t mean we are out of the woods yet in the Caucasus. It’s a sobering thought that if George W, Bush had had his way and Georgia had been a member of Nato, we would now be at war with Russia. Nato is an alliance which, in theory at least, commits its signatories to react collectively to a military threat to any one of its members.

Would we really have been prepared to lay waste to Europe in support of the unstable and unreliable Georgian leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, who launched cowardly and brutal assault on the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali under the cover of the opening night of the Olympic Games? I hope not, but we can’t be sure. With someone like George W. Bush supposed leading ‘free world’, we can’t be sure of anything, except that it will be a mess.

The war in South Ossetia has been a huge error of judgement by the West, and further confirmation of the imponderable stupidity of the Bush administration. It was a gamble which should never have been made, on a conflict nobody wanted, and in the interests of a political leader who has no right respect or support. David Cameron will regret hot-headed dash to Tblisi to be photographed with Saakashvili once once it becomes widely known what actually happened in South Ossetia, where the Georgians used Grad missiles against apartment blocs and hospitals.

Now, I know that we are supposed to see South Ossetia as a brutal land grab but the Russian Bear, crushing gallant little Georgia under the Moscow boot etc.. The Western media has largely accepted the line put out by America that this was a brutal annexation of a sovereign country by an imperialist Russia - repeat of the Hungarian invasion of 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. But as always in war, truth is the first casualty.

The Caucasian war was launched by Georgia on August 7th in an attempt to crush the separatist movement of South Ossetia. While there was provocation on both sides, this was an act of bloody madness. It was like England launching a war against Scotland for wanting to leave the UK. I’m not saying that Russia did not have an interest in supporting a breakaway - it had been handing out Russian passports to Ossetians - or that Putin wasn’t playing politics in the region. But that did not justify an all-out military attack by Georgia.

The west - by which we mean essentially America - massively miscalculated in Georgia, supplying military hardware and expertise to Saakashvili without ensuring that he would behave responsibly. The Georgian leader thought would force the Americans to intervene militarily in support of his attempt to crush Ossetian nationalism. It did not, of course. Not even George W. Bush is stupid enough to launch a land war in the Caucasus. There is no evidence that the Russians plan to annex South Ossetia still less to invade Georgia with a view to forcing it into the Russian federation. The Russian military have been in no hurry to withdraw, but the evidence is clear that they are now preparing to do so. They don’t have the will or the means to occupy a country like Georgia.

Not only has Russia now restored its military self-confidence and credibility, it has exposed the West’s weakness, already evident in Iraq. But what is much worse is that America has handed the moral high ground to someone who certainly doesn’t deserve it: the Russian Prime Minister. Vladimir Putin. This authoritarian hard man, who has suppressed free speech in Russia and subborned its democratic system to ensure his continued rule, can now stand as a champion of the rights of the oppressed people of Ossetia. Protector of the weak against military aggression.

He can, with some legitimacy, compare his “humanitarian” intervention in Georgia with that of the West in Kosovo. And the truth is that his call for south Ossetians to be allowed self-determination like the former Yugoslavian province, is the only defensible one in the Caucasian context. The only solution to the confrontation there is for the people of South Ossetia to be consulted and allowed to chose their own destiny, under the inalienable right of all peoples’ to self-determination.

What must not happen is for the West, led by fools in the White House, is to compound this misjudgement by seeking to crush the independence movement in South Ossetia. Yet, by promising to defend the territorial integrity of Georgia, we are coming dangerously close to doing precisely that. We have no right to tell the South Ossetians which country they wish to live in, and after the brutal behaviour of Georgian troops in Tskinvali, it would be grotesque to try to force the South Ossetians to bend to the will of Saakashvili.

Putin played his hand very astutely, limiting his military action to destroying Georgian military positions around South Ossetia, agreeing to a ceasefire and abiding by it, and now by gradually pulling its military forces out of greater Georgia. Of course, there will be reprisals, communal violence, and stories of atrocities both by South Ossetians and Georgians. But eventually the West will have to recognise, when we see the pictures of the devastation in Tskhinvali (you can see them already on he internet) that Russia had - as the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov has said - very little alternative but to intervene in South Ossetia.

But perhaps the greatest mistake of all by the West was - as President Bush might put it- “misunderestimating” Putin and the Russians. Calling Russia “Saudi Arabia with trees” was more revealing of the decline of American diplomatic ..... Could you have imagined John F Kennedy calling Russia names? Placing missiles in Poland and arming Saakashvili were acts of provocation which no country could have ignored. Imagine if Russia had placed “defensive” missiles in Mexico and sent arms to Cuba? Well, it did of course, back in 1962 when Russia was the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev was arming Castro. The American response then, quite rightly, was to demand the withdrawal of Soviet arms from its sphere of influence. The roles are reversed today, and we have Bush rather than Khrushchev gambling with world security. The world nearly went to war over Cuba - let’s hope that we can stop history repeating itself.

Credit Crunch 11: The Abyss

Cheer up! It could be worse. At least estate agents themselves have been the first casualties of the credit crunch. The greatest collapse in the housing market since records began, with home loan approvals down 70 per cent on the year, has turned the high street into a killing field. At least 15,000 estate agents will lose their jobs this year alone, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. It may be the first time in history that estate agents become objects of public sympathy.
Britain, like the United States and Europe, is now entering a recession and it won’t be a shallow one. As the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King made clear in his latest exceptionally gloomy forecast, we have come to the end of the “nice” age – defined by “non-inflationary continuous expansion. Encouraged by central banks which kept interest rates too low for too long, the western banking system built a huge tower of debt on the uncertain foundations of inflated real estate values. As house prices plunge, this edifice is collapsing and the losses will be in the trillions.
Few will shed tears, though, at the impoverishment of the buy-to-let landlords, the other big early losers in the credit crunch. Britain’s one million amateur property tycoons are finding they can’t let their pokey flats at an economic rent and that the banks refuse to roll over their cheap loans. Thousands face bankruptcy as the value of their properties fall.
The good news is that once the correction has happened, houses will be affordable again. And, as owners dump unsold flats on the letting market, rents are also likely to fall. And who could resist just a little Shadenfreude at the news that Land Rover sales are down 32 per cent? We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the “Chelsea Hearses” – those big black monsters with smoked windows that clog our streets. Falling bonuses in the City are blamed. Mind you, even in what many are calling the worst financial crisis in 60 years, City firms still managed to increase bonuses this year to a record £13bn. It’s an ill wind, all right.
The more public money that goes into the banking system to beat the crunch, the more seems to go out to the private pockets of those who were responsible for causing it in the first place. The great survivors of the credit crunch are the bosses of the big high street banks, like Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, who have had to write off billions in mortgage-related assets and have seen their companies’ share price collapse, but keep their jobs and fabulous remuneration.
The real casualties are inevitably old people, and low-income families who have been hit from all sides as housing, transport, heating and food prices take off. But young professionals face difficulty too, especially those who threw caution to the winds to get on the “housing ladder”. Among these, 1.7 million recent home buyers will find themselves in negative equity within the year, according to Standard and Poors, meaning they will owe more than their houses are worth. House prices have fallen 11 per cent this year already, the steepest fall ever recorded. If house prices fall by 35 per cent, as expected, three million could be hit before the market bottoms out around 2010.
These families could be saddled with debilitating debts for at least a decade, for that is the minimum that it will take for house prices to recover. In the US, where house prices peaked in 2005, prices are still falling, despite interest rates being slashed to 2.5 per cent and hundreds of billions of federal dollars being pumped into the banking system in the form of “liquidity loans”. A third of all American homeowners who bought in the past five years are “underwater”, something that hasn’t happened since the Great Depression.
In Britain the slide has only just started. Many are still in denial. Moreover, the first year of the credit crunch has been something of a phoney war. Unemployment is rising (July saw the biggest jump since 1992) but most people are in work and hope to remain so. Students have come to accept debt as a way of life and remain unmoved by a financial upheaval that still seems remote from their lives.
Of course, there are lots of things you can do to protect yourself from the affects of recession. Simple budgeting for a start; that £5 lunch every day adds up to £100 a month. Turn down the thermostat and save hundreds more. If you can sell your house, do, and rent instead; it’s cheaper than getting a mortgage. Don’t take on more debts and consolidate those you have. Cut up credit cards or get an interest free one. Don’t get behind with bills because it will affect your credit rating. Avoid branded goods. In other words, be more prudent. The evidence suggests we can all benefit psychologically from giving up the frenetic shopping culture of the boom years.
Politicians, though, are living in the past, hoping that a miraculous recovery in the housing market will bring back the good times. MPs, like many middle-class, middle-aged people are largely insulated from the crunch by housing equity, index-linked pensions and other assets. But now that the days of easy credit are over, those under 40 are going to find themselves living in a very different world.

Day of reckoning

The bubble decade destroyed the last vestiges of the secure and predictable post-war society of ordered career paths, jobs-for-life, final salary pensions and steadily increasing prosperity. Even the Church of England is talking of abandoning its occupational pension scheme. People are having to learn to live with debt and insecurity (though fewer than half of us are saving for a pension and, according to the Pru, those who do are halving contributions because of the downturn).
People have become used to seeing their homes as pensions and as sources of easy cash through remortgaging. Now that this is being closed off, the day of reckoning is here. We collectively owe £1,400,000,000,000 in Britain and the banks want it back. Britain has one third of all Europe’s unsecured debt, so it is not surprising that personal bankruptcies are increasing ominously. The banks are using ever more ingenious means of relieving us of our funds, from credit cards with 25 per cent interest,to unlawful bank charges on overdrafts. Current accounts should bear government health warnings.
So, with easy credit and housing equity lost, people are going to have to learn to live within their means. The problem is that living standards are being eroded as wages and salaries stagnate while inflation rises inexorably toward 5 per cent, even on the government’s discredited CPI inflation index. According to the price comparison website mySupermarket.com, the cost of a basket of staple family foods has increased 20 per cent in a year, equivalent to £1,000 to an average family. Politicians warn of hyper-inflation if workers do not accept below-inflation pay settlements; but for people on low incomes, hyper-inflation is already here. Domestic fuel prices have risen by 19 per cent in a year, and petrol by 25 per cent. British Gas increased prices by 35 per cent last month and others will follow. Water companies have served notice that they too will be joining the inflationary spiral.
Yet only three months ago, the Bank was forecasting steady growth, low inflation and stable prices. One of the difficulties for ordinary people trying to cope with the credit crunch has been the failure of forecasters, private and public, to admit the severity of it. Central banks and financial analysts have been following events rather than forecasting them. We keep being told “the worst is over” when clearly it is not.
This leads to a kind of fatalism; a feeling that each of us is individually at the mercy of events. We live in a world in which the market has largely replaced politics and collective action. All those institutions of civil society – churches, trades unions, political parties, associations – that once sustained people in adversity have withered, replaced by the solipsism of the internet. Social networking sites offer a semblance of community, but are quickly invaded by commercial interests which, as with eBay, Google, Facebook, rapidly subvert the original social ideal.
What we need is a new generation of post-consumerist initiatives, like Freecycle and Gumtree, which allow people, by mutual self-help, to bypass the debt cycle.

Where is the left?

In the past, people looked to the state to protect them from the ravages of the market, but not any more. Where is the Left in the worst capitalist crisis in half a century? The government seems to have given up too. A defeatism about the credit crunch pervades Whitehall; a sense that there is nothing that can be done, apart from trying to use public funds to fix the holes in the financial system. One intellectual casualty of the crisis has been the myth of deregulation. Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, said recently: “I no longer believe in the market’s self-healing power”. Many financiers have echoed his view. This is a paradigm shift, but Labour has failed to keep up. It has been left to bankers like Sir Ronald Cohen to condemn the greed of what the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, calls “the new plutocrats”. It was the Governor of the Bank of England who condemned the “bonus culture” of the City, not a Labour minister.
Instead, the government agreed, in April, to an extraordinary £50bn bailout of the banks in exchange for their unsellable mortgage bonds. The deal was supposed to be that the banks would reduce mortgage rates and free up lending to first-time buyers, but they simply pocketed the money and put rates up even further for people who couldn’t put up large deposits. This was a humiliation for the government. At the very least, ministers should have secured something tangible in return for giving the banks privileged access to public funds – restraint on bonuses perhaps, or help for people about to lose their homes.
The government should also be devising regulations and protocols now to prevent another housing bubble. Government was not blameless. Concessions on home ownership taxes (capital gains and inheritance tax) encouraged people to save in houses instead of pensions. It was the egregious tax concessions to buy-to-let landlords, who can set mortgage interest payments against profits, that led to the building of tens of thousands of tiny city flats unsuitable for families.
Above all, it was the collapse of social housing, through council house sales and the ending of council house building, which compelled people to take on ever larger mortgages to get a roof over their heads. For many people in insecure and low paid jobs, mortgages are a seriously bad idea because they lose everything if they can’t keep up the payments. They should have had a choice. If the £50bn given to the banks in April had been used to finance council housing, the government could have begun to solve the housing shortage and saved thousands of jobs in the construction industry.
Instead of dithering about stamp-duty holidays and tax free savings accounts for first time buyers, the government should be addressing the central problem: risk. Bankers lost any sense of it when they began handing out mortgages of 125 per cent, loans on multiples of six times earnings, not to mention self-certificated “liar loans” where people were encouraged to inflate their incomes so that they could get mortgages they couldn’t afford.
In Britain, mortgage borrowers shoulder most of the risk when they take on a mortgage. They can lose all their savings and end up in debt for years. But in America, most home loans are “non-recourse” loans, which means the borrower has limited liability in the event of repossession. If there is any loss in the sale at auction of a repossessed home, the bank that takes the hit and the borrower can walk away. This is a simple measure which would make a difference to victims of the credit crunch. The banks would hate it but it would encourage banks to lend more responsibly.
Beyond that we need a government prepared to recognise that a stable economy cannot be built on debt. We need a return to productive investment instead of speculation; a savings culture instead of credit; sound money instead of inflation; redistribution of reward instead of socialism for the banks. The great challenges we face, like climate change, need an economy, in which science and technology are deployed to create new markets in areas like renewable energy, conservation, agriculture, information technology and sustainable transport. Wealth is good but it should be made out of making things, not making debt. The New Labour economy has been built on the dream of unlimited housing wealth, on money for nothing. It is time to wake up to reality. l

Prescott does have two jags

John Prescott really does have two Jags. He didn’t when he was Deputy Prime Minister, but he does now. His old XJS is too low slung for Pauline, his wife, to gain an elegant exit, he claims. So, he had to buy a second hand Sovereign to restore marital balance. Well you would wouldn’t you.

He’s also picked up a speeding fine, he told the Edinburgh Book Festival last week, because he’s so used to being driven around in a government car, he didn’t know about 20 mile an hour speed limits. Mind you, since he was transport minister when these zones were introduced that’s a pretty strange admission.

Prescott talks as if he had just been released been in prison, rather than the post of Deputy Prime Minister, but perhaps the two aren’t all that different. Government, like jail, is a total institution which insulates you from the outside world.

Prescott WAS the outside world to the “beautiful people” - as he calls them - who ran New Labour. He was meant to be the link with the party’s socialist roots. But after speaking to him at length last week I get the distinct impression that he feels he was used. He was excluded from strategy meetings; once invited to Chequers; kept in the dark.

But should we have any sympathy for Prescott who, if he was used, clearly allowed himself to be out of vanity?
Well, it’s hard not to like him as he tells stories about how he used to box for the entertainment of Anthony Eden. In the 1950s, merchant seamen were expected to put on a show for VIPs during the voyage. Prezza is of course a useful pugilist, as he demonstrated in the 2001 election campaign when he floored that countryside protester with the mullet.

Prescott is 50% Bernard Manning and he has well-rehearsed lines about everything, even that croquet match in Dorneywood, his official residence. He claims that sales of croquet sets increased by 40% and that British Croquet Association has given him a ceremonial mallet in gratitude for his services to the sport.

But is Prescott simply a refugee from a working man’s club? Well, he was Deputy Prime Minister for ten years - the longest serving DPM in history. He was marriage guidance counsellor to Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and probably prevented their relationship falling apart.

But the tragedy of Prescott’s long career is that he really did believe all that stuff about the “many and not the few”. He was one of the last socialists in Labour Party, but he ended up legitimising a project which erased all trace of socialism. I fear his image will forever be that Steve Bell cartoon depicting Prezza as a bulldog with its mouth zipped shut.

The Russians are coming! Again!

The world held its breath last week as Russia and America exchanged increasingly belligerent rhetoric over the crisis in South Ossetia, the worst we have heard since the end of the Cold War. Moscow has even hinted at possible nuclear retaliation for the siting of American missiles in Poland. Some see in the crisis in the Caucasus shades of Sarajevo in August 1914, when the world stumbled into war almost accidentally after the assassination of the Arch Duke, Franz Ferdinand (no relation). While there is little risk of South Ossetia igniting world war three, there is a risk of international relations becoming soured, not least by the intensely anti-Russian rhetoric of some in the West.

Russia has been accused by America of aggression against Georgia and of violating international law by interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. We hold no brief for Vladimir Putin, the hard man prime minister of Russia who has undermined free speech in his own country and manipulated the democratic system to ensure his continued rule. We are alarmed at the continued presence of Russian tanks deep inside Georgia and we urge Moscow to withdraw.

However, we are also appalled at the hypocrisy of the charges of from the Americans who so recently invaded the sovereignty of Iraq, with British help, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process. The Russians claim their intervention was humanitarian, so did we. This looks like a story of one law for America, another for the rest of the world. The Russian defence of the citizens of South Ossetia was strikingly similar to the actions of western countries in 1999 when we bombed Serbian army positions to protect the people of the breakaway province of Kosovo.

The Russians did not start the war in the Caucasus - it was the Georgian leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, who launched a cowardly and bloody assault on the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali on August 7th under cover of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games. There is evidence that multiple rocket launchers were used against a civilian population. This was a shocking act of war, and while the Russian claims of ‘genocide’ against the people of South Ossetia may be exaggerated, there is no doubt that the Georgian action killed many civilians and displaced thousands.

Russia has been accused of having territorial ambitions in Georgia and of wanting regime change in Tblisi, but we could have been accused of exactly the same thing when we bombed Belgrade and sought the removal from power of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, it is far from clear that the Russians do intend to annex Georgia, and act which Georgians would fiercely resist.
The Russians have largely kept their word on the ceasefire and have limited military action to the disputed provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Comparisons with the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 are wide of the mark. This has not been an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of Georgia or impose a communist system of government. As the former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachov has pointed out, the roots of the Caucasus tragedy lie in the repeated attempts by Georgia since 1991 to extinguish South Ossetian autonomy. The solution should be to establish some form of federal arrangement that gives the disparate communities of the Caucasus control of their own destinies, free from interference from ‘great powers’. Gorbachov has been a calm voice of reason amid the cacophony of recrimination and veiled threats.

There can be no question of South Ossetia simply being handed back to Georgia after what has happened. The population of the two dispute regions of Georgia have an inalienable right to self-determination. It is up to the people to decide their fate, not Washington or Moscow. In the meantime, could everyone please just ratchet down the rhetoric and stop playing cold war games.

Glenrothes: Brown's last stand.

It’s a measure of how much Scottish politics has changed in the past year that a constituency with a Labour majority of 11,000 is s now regarded as a safe seat - for the SNP. But such is the case with the Westminster constituency of Glenrothes in Fife. The nationalists require a 14% swing here to seize this Labour bastion, held by the popular MP John MacDougall http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7558573.stmwho died of cancer on Wednesday, but everyone assumes that the nationalists will walk it. The bookies already have them four to one on.

This is ideal territory for the Scottish National Party. They have been canvassing the constituency for most of the last year and have a strong local base. The SNP lead the coalition on Fife council and hold the Holyrood parliamentary seat which is largely contiguous with Glenrothes. It was much harder for the nationalists to win in Glasgow, where there is no real tradition of Scottish nationalism. Fife is on the other side of the country and has a very different political complexion from West Central Scotland.

Glenrothes itself was an invention of post war Labour regional policy -a new town built to compensate Fife for the loss of its coal industry. Even the name is new, having been created by adding “Glen” to the name of the old Rothes Colliery. Now the administrative centre of Fife, successive Labour councils had a good deal of success in attracting electronics and services into the area in the 1980s and 1990’s and today Glenrothes looks prosperous if a little soulless.

But Fife people have a proud and independent history. This was the area that elected Britain’s only Communist MP in the 1940s, and you still find echoes of the past in Fife street names, like ‘Gagarin Way’ celebrating Soviet achievement. The Scottish playwright, Gregory Burke, used the street as a setting for his acclaimed play of the same name at the Edinburgh Festival six years about the collapse of working class industrial culture and the dangers of political nihilism. But the decomposition of the old Labour vote in Fife appears to be benefiting, not anarchists and other political extremists, but the Scottish National Party, which has succeeded in capturing the imaginations of the aspiring middle class children of old Labour Fife.

There seems little prospect of Alex Salmond failing in Glenrothes, and he will dominate the campaign just as the SNP leader dominated Glasgow East last month. Which means a further hammer blow for Gordon Brown, who sits in parliament for the neighbouring constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and who, in accordance with parliamentary tradition, will be taking on the parliamentary duties of the late Mr MacDougall. Following the Glasgow East by-election, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7522153where the SNP achieved a 22 swing against Labour, the party is in desperate trouble in Scotland. A YouGov poll commissioned by the SNP http://www.snp.org/node/14146 this week suggested that Labour could lose up to 20 seats in Scotland at the next election, including that of the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, and the Defence Secretary, Des Browne.

The impact of Glasgow East was muted because of the holiday season, but the Glenrothes by-election will probably take place in the full glare of autumn, just after Brown’s conference relaunch and his much-heralded cabinet reshuffle. It will be a devastating verdict on his time in office that even in his heartland in Fife Gordon Brown cannot hold onto one of the safest Labour seats in Britain. David Miliband remains unapologetic about his recent Guardian article in which he staked his claim as a future Labour leadership contender, and it is easy to see why. Labour simply cannot go on losing by-elections like this. Something will have to be done; and Miliband looks like the only something around. We could have a new Prime Minister by Christmas.

But could Labour defy the forecasts and hold on here? Might Brown suddenly rediscover his form and hurl himself into a contest which he can scarcely avoid becoming a part of? Well, there is a strong Liberal Democrat presence in Glenrothes. They hold the neighbouring seat of North East Fife and share the council with the SNP. The Liberal Democrats were first to discover Gordon Brown’s political unpopularity back in 2006, when they won the Westminster seat of Dunfermline and West Fife from Labour in a by-election, on a 16% swing. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7492927.stm Brown’s
Scottish home home lies in that constituency and it came as a profound shock to Labour in Scotland to discover that the then Chancellor, apparantly at the height of his powers, was such a vote-loser.

But the chances of the LibDems splitting the anti-Labour vote and allowing allowing Labour to come through the middle look remote. Scottish voters are primarily motivated right now by a deep hostility to Labour and a sense - almost palpable in Glasgow East - of betrayal. In the midst of a credit crisis, when inflation is reaching 5% while public sector workers - and most workers in administrative Glenrothes are employed by the state - are being held to pay increases of 2%, people are feeling very sore. They want to send a message, and they will use the most appropriate vehicle so to do. The Liberal Democrats just don’t cut it, in this regard, and were squeezed into fourth behind the Tories in Glasgow East.

No - the target of their antipathy will be Gordon Brown who faces yet another humiliation, possibly his last as Labour leader. Fife has turned against its favourite son. The final tragedy of Brown’s short reign is that he is likely to meet his political end in his beloved “Kingdom of Fife’ where he was brought up and where his political career began.

Belladrum: cuttings from the verb garden

I didn't know what to expect from at the Belladrum music festival in Beauly near Inverness at the weekend - except for a good time. I'd been asked to chair a some debates in the Verb Garden - a big tent devoted to the spoken word. Would anyone be interested, would anyone be sober, would anyone be able to hear over the din of amplified music? What the heck - it involved a chance to see Jefferson Starship and the Waterboys.

It turned out to be quite an education with full audiences for sessions on energy, prison reform, even agriculture. Here's a video from the verb garden - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAnpN4sdKlg The Belladrum Tartan Heart is becoming one of the defining events on the northern cultural calendar and has shown that is capable of doing a lot more than just raising a racket and selling beer.

Belladrum is sometimes described as the “Glastonbury of the North”, but it is much broader in its appeal. People from all social and class backgrounds are here and you quite literally see three generations of the same family all jumping to the same infectious rhythms. It is becoming a real focus of community cohesion and not a little pride among the thousands who gather here that they can stage something like this in the Highlands. The food is pretty damn good too.

As to the chat - well, rock musicians are rarely sought for their political views, apart from those, like Bono and co, they wear them on their chests like medals. So there was an element of risk in mixing them with the usual professional talkers from pressure groups and campaigns. Perhaps we were just lucky, but the musicians who made it to the Verb Garden turned out to by pretty articulate commentators on contemporary politics.

Justin Currie of Del Amitri, showed that he has lost none of the wit and intelligence that informed the lyrics of those seemingly innocuous pop songs from Glasgow’s vibrant music scene in the 1980s. Like his hit “Nothing Ever Happens” which contains the immortal lines: “Computer terminals record gains in the prices of copper and tin, whlie American businessmen buy up Van Goghs for the price of a hospital wing”. Pete Wylie, of the Mighty Wah, a veteran of the parallel Liverpool music scene of the 1980s, blew everyone away when he came on with Gerry Conlan, of the Guildford Four and Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six to campaign against miscarriages of justice and against 42 day detention.

Earlier, sixty seven year old Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship gave a spirited defence of 1960s values as he lived them in San Francisco in the hippie era. Nor had he any apologies for making a record in support of the Sandinistas in the 1980s. There was a certain irony in this rock icon saying he still believed in the fundamental values of communism, but his optimism was refreshing in an age of fatalism and disillusion.

Politics was a lot simpler, I thought, in the 60’as, when the Cold War held the world in a relatively stable superpower balance. Not any more. As the amplifiers were fired up in Beauly, Russian fighters were bombing military targets in Georgia and hundreds were dying in the South Ossetian capital,Tskhinvali, at the hands of invading Georgian soldiers. Yes, the Tartan Heart festival at Belladrum is a long way, geographically and culturally, from this perplexing dispute in the Caucasus. But that didn’t stop people trying to grasp what was going on.

Who exactly are the good guys, when pro-Western, democratic Georgia resorts to military invasion to prevent a province, South Ossetia, from exercising its right to self-determination? We are conditioned to seeing Russia as the bad guys, though on this occasion they were apparently doing what we did during the Kosovo conflict in 1999: supporting the right of a province to secede and defending its people against aggression.

On the other hand, the willingness of hard man Vladimir Putin to use maximum force in response to Georgia's pre-emptive strike cannot but arouse fears that Russia may be returning to its old, expansionist ways. This is a very hard war to call, a kind of post-modern conflict in which no one occupies the moral high ground, not even the South Ossetians themselves who have been playing both sides against the middle.

There weren't any answers in Beladrum, just a sense of relief that in Britain we resolve our domestic territorial disputes with arguments not bullets. Here is Scotland with a nationalist government determined to secede - rather like South Ossetia - but there is zero prospect of Edinburgh being invaded any time soon by English tanks.

But then. we don't have a strategically vital oil pipeline running across the central belt which the United States of America wants to secure and which Russia wishes to control. Whatever else South Ossetia is about it is first of all about the energy crisis and a stark reminder that in a age of fuel depletion, oil and gas are becoming things to fight over. And we would do well to remember that Scotland, with 25 billion barrels of oil still lying under the North Sea, is delicately placed in the geopolitics of natural resources.

But many of the people whole turned up to Belladrum were concerned less with geopolitics that with the price of heating oil which has gone up 40% in the past year. Others were finding they can't afford to fill up their petrol tanks - a serious matter in the Highlands where people often have to travel long distances to work and where public transport is inadequate.

Perhaps that’s why some appeared to be impatient with the environmentalists and their elevated talk of micro-generation and renewables in the debate on energy. This is a difficult time for green activists, and not just because of the apostasy of the Guardian environmentalist, George Monbiot, who has come out with qualified support for nuclear power. People in the Highlands are as concerned about the environment as anyone, but they also want to heat their homes and get to work.

The environmental movement is always strongly represented in the stalls and fringe exhibitions at pop festivals and environmentalism is almost a religion in the rock industry. But one of the great strengths of Belladrum is the way it attracts what the politicians like to call “real people”. They are not impressed with people who expect them to buy costly organic food when they are finding it hard enough to feed their families, and they made their views pretty clear. All credit, by the way, to the Co-operative movement who sponsored the Verb Garden event, knowing that they would have to answer for their own purchasing policies and justify the environmental cost of importing fresh vegetables by air.

Of course, Belladrum is first of all about entertainment. But It is wrong to think that people aren’t interested in politics just because they don’t trust politicians. It isn’t just about the music. They listen to the words too.

Scottish Labour must declare UDI

I’m not sure of the origin of the phrase “elephant in the room”, except that it is American and applies to issues which are so large that only the most blinkered could fail to see them. Well, someone has finally spotted that that the world’s largest land mammal is sitting in the Scottish Labour Party’s living room. His name is Tom McCabe.

“No ifs, buts or maybes”, said the former Labour parliament minister in yesterday’s Sunday Herald. ‘Whoever takes over as leader of the Scottish Labour Party has to be in complete control of the organisation and policies that best suit Scottish circumstances”. In other words, the Scottish Labour leader has to become the real Scottish leader, with full autonomy and authority over policy in Scotland, without always having to look over their shoulders at Westminster. At last someone has had the courage to state the obvious.

You would think that, after Glasgow East, Labour MPs too would have started to notice the flapping ears and the tusks, but no. The leadership candidate, Andy Kerr, was accused of “nationalism” last week just for suggesting that the Scottish leader’s powers should be “beefed up”. London Labour want the Scottish leader to remain merely the titular leader of the MSPs in Holyrood, a docile and subordinate figure who has to lift the phone to Gordon Brown in cabinet meetings to be sure he isn’t getting out of line. And yes, that really did happen.

Tom McCabe isn’t supporting any of the candidates in the current contest and it’s just as well because he would never have been able to write his remarkable article, which is essential reading for anyone with the remotest interest in what happens to Labour in Scotland. He is reflecting the views of countless disillusioned Labour voters and activists in Scotland who have been yearning for a lead from someone of influence in the Scottish party and who are fed up with what Tom calls “the obscure language of prevarication that the public can see right through.”

McCabe as not had a reputation for strategic thinking or intellectual brilliance, but his analysis of the constitutional deficiencies of the Scottish Labour leadership is devastating in its directness and clarity. He has said what Wendy Alexander never managed to say. It is the most important Labour strategy statement in decades, and should be nailed to the door of every Labour constituency association in Scotland.

The kind of leader Labour needs, says McCabe, is one who is able to “say and do what is best for Scots, no matter who it might upset”. “A leader”, he goes on “who is prepared to publicly ask the government in Westminster, irrespective of its political colour, why companies such as Shell can make £8bn profit in six months, while Scots can scarcely afford to fill up cars and vans. A leader who wants to have responsibility for raising the money their government spends and be chastened by that accountability in the process. Finally, a leader who accepts that the council tax has become an unfair burden...[and set] a firm timetable for abolition” Wow! When have you ever heard any Labour MSP talk like that before?

McCabe will of course be monstered by his colleagues in Westminster for these heresies. But he’s ready for them: “For too long”, he says, “there have been Scottish Labour politicians at local government level and at Westminster who have been resentful, and even contemptuous, of the Scottish parliament. That behaviour needs to stop.” He’s absolutely right. This attitude goes back a long way, to the time when Labour regarded the Scottish parliament as little more than a device to undermine the SNP.

Labour MPs cling on to an anachronistic notion of their own constitutional superiority. But you have to ask, who are these people? The days when the Scottish Labour group in Westminster was composed of Donald Dewars and Brian Wilsons are gone. They should take a look at themselves sometime. In fact, the voters of Glasgow East did precisely that - took a long cool look at their own MP of thirty years, David Marshall, and decided that they wouldn’t be fooled again.

For the last decade, Labour MPs have sat round Westminster claiming generous expenses and feeling self-important, while most of the issues that concern their constituents are handled by the MSPs in Holyrood. The truth is many of the Scottish Labour group in Westminster would find it very hard to survive in the rough and tumble of the Scottish Parliament. Look at Lord George Foulkes, the former Labour cabinet minister turned MSP, who has just won the paranoid buffoon of the year award for claiming that painting Scotrail carriages in the colours of the Saltire amounts to “brainwashing” by the nationalist government. Labour’s MPs have very little cause for self-congratulation, and the fact that if Glasgow East happened across Scotland, the only MP left in Scotland would be Tom Clarke, tells you all you need to know.

Tom McCabe could probably do without my endorsement, since it will only help his critics to tar him with the brush of “proto-nationalism”. But I think he can look after himself - as he has done in nearly a decade in the front line of Scottish politics. One of McCabe’s achievements was making the case for the smoking ban, and putting backbone into Jack McConnell in his battle with the Labour establishment over the policy. The ban was opposed by many Labour MPs as an electoral liability. Turned out that the ban was the greatest single legislative achievement of the Scottish parliament, one of the few truly lifesaving policies that ha been implemented by either parliament, north or south, in the last thirty years. And of course, Westminster ended up following adopting it.

The former First Minister, Jack McConnell, could tell you of a dozen similar episodes, which didn’t end so happily - where Westminster vetoed his attempts to get Labour into contention in Scotland. Over Iraq, Trident, asylum, immigration, attendance allowances and many other policies, McConnell struggled to free himself from a UK party line which was politically ruinous in a Scottish context. Perhaps the greatest fiasco was the council tax fudge at the Scottish election campaign in 2007, when McConnell was forced to defend ‘reform’ of the policy which was so incoherent he couldn’t explain it at its press launch. The former First Minister wasn’t even allowed to recognise that Labour had lost the Scottish election in 2007, such was the myopia of his Westminster minders.

Well, al last a line has been drawn under all that. Tom McCabe has provided a rallying call for all those in the party who want to save Labour from itself. But the first thing they have to do is recognise the nature of problem. It’s time for others in the party to get out the elephant gun and take aim.

free festival fringe

Slouching around Edinburgh in the rain and it has been pretty thin Festival for politics. You’d have thought that the implosion of Gordon Brown would be a gift to satirists, and Barack Obama is a fascinating media construct waiting to be deconstructed. There’s a nationalist government in Edinburgh for Heaven's saek. But the shows seem stuck in the past.

‘Tony of Arabia’ (Pleasance Dome) is a sequel to lasts year’s hit “Tony - the Blair Musical’ . We now find our hero trying to make a new life in the Middle East, complete with whining Cherie. It’s well performed and amiable, but a little passe. Like Tony.

But the Fringe has itself become highly political even if the shows aren’t. Since the great Schism, when the big venues like the Pleasance and Underbelly set up their ‘own’ comedy festival, there has been war among the clowns. The ‘authentic’ Fringe, led by Tommy Sheppard’s undeniably excellent Stand comedy club, has been staging running battles against the Dark Side - the plutocrats with their PR budgets and fancy ticket prices. Comedians are being asked which side they're on, and some, like estimable Stewart Lee, are boycotting the Pleasance/Gilded/Assembly Underbelly.

Others have given up altogether and gone free. now, doing a show at the Edinburgh Festival for nothing might seem like complete madness, when most with debts running to high four figures. One comedian, Doug Stanhope, is highlighting the problem by staging a one person show, for one night, with one ticket costing £7,249.00 which is the average amount comedians lose at the Fringe every year. I may give it a miss this year

Instead I spent a damp Wednesday afternoon seeing what the free fringe festival was like at one venue. “Where’s Yak” is a two woman show about the fantasy lives of Wimpy burger-flippers, and the performances really had star quality, though let down by some weak material and noisy airconditining “Hurricane Katrina” turned out to be a leggy stand-up with a multiple-personality routine who was quite funny. She even brought her mum. Dean Scurry, a scurrilous Dublin comic, was a hoot - though the audience were almost a funny as he was. I think the audiences feel more involved because the shows are free.

You do pay, of course, since a bucket is waved in your face as you leave. They ask for a fiver and people seem to give two or three quid, on average, which sounds poor, but makes commercial sense for the performers. They don’t pay for the venues and therefore don’t end up with huge debts And even with fifty quid a show, they can eat.

I think this could be the future. It’s certainly truer to the original idea of the Edinburgh Fringe. Whether the army of festival reviewers will agree though is another question. They get their tickets for nothing from the big venue promoters. But at free shows, well, you just can’t walk out without donating something, can you?

Strange death of Scottish Labour

Black arm bands would not have been out of place. Something died in the Glasgow East on Thursday night, and it wasn’t just Gordon Brown’s hopes of winning the next general election. It was evident in the mournful faces of the Scottish Labour party workers as they grimly awaited their worst by election defeat in twenty years. Labour’s fifty year relationship with the Scottish voter is finally over. It’s time to move on.

The strange death of Labour Scotland has been taking place for well over a year now. In that time Labour have lost the Scottish government, two Scottish leaders, most of their councils, half their councillors and now the third safest Westminster seat in Scotland. If the Glasgow East result were to be reflected across Scotland at the next general election, Labour would be left with only one seat north of the border. And don’t think it couldn’t happen. The Scottish Conservatives remain the only party ever to have won a majority of votes and a majority of seats in a Scottish election, back in 1955. Yet in the 1997 general election they were wiped out in Scotland. When Scotland changes party it doesn’t mess about.

The trouble for Labour, and the reason for their black despondency, is that they can see no bottom to their current electoral recession. Gordon Brown is not going to go quietly, a housing slump is underway, a credit tsunami is looming and core Labour voters are suffering an unprecedented collapse in their material security. Real inflation, not the fantasy figures of the CPI, is really hurting those ‘hard working families’ Labour always talk about - just look at the latest breathtaking rise in domestic energy prices announced on polling day.

Meanwhile, Alex Salmond has forged a bond with the Scottish electorate which shows every sign of enduring. Labour hoped to wipe the smile off the SNP leader’s face in Shettleston and Easterhouse. They thought Salmond had finally overstepped himself, with his 12 pre-ballot victory tours and self-regarding declarations about Glasgow East being a battle between himself and Gordon Brown. But the Salmond smirk has got wider still. The SNP leader promised an earthquake and lo, the earth did indeed move. He can now say that no seat is safe in Scotland, and not even Labour can contradict him.

Yet, to everyone's credit, Glasgow East was a good clean fight, between able candidates, conducted without rancour, cynicism or dirty tricks. It was real honest street democracy. John Mason and Margaret Curran fought vote by vote, tenement stair by tenement stair, and while the margin of victory may have been small, only 365 votes, this was a great moral victory for the nationalists in the true sense of the word. The SNP fought a classic Labour campaign in Glasgow East, as the party of the people against the party of the establishment.

One thing Labour did get right: independence really wasn’t an issue on the doorsteps - not even after John Mason described himself in a TV interview as a “hard line nationalist”. But that is only because independence is no longer seen as a threat by Labour voters. The bogey of “separatism” is no longer enough to frighten them into the arms of Labour. The warnings about Scotland’s subsidies being cut off don’t work any more thanks to the oil price. The blindingly obvious reality is that, oil aside, London doesn’t give a damn about Scotland any more. The metropolis is another country with an increasingly alien political culture.

Gordon Brown’s determination placate this culture; to match David Cameron policy for policy in England, is killing Labour support in Scotland. The abolition of inheritance tax for the rich, the assault on incapacity benefit claimants, the ten pence tax band, the billions being handed casually to the banks. Brown tells the public sector workers to accept below-inflation increases while Network Rail bosses get six figure bonuses for ruining their own industry. John Hutton, the business secretary, tells us to praise millionaires while the living standards of Labour voters are shredded by commodity speculators in the City.

This is the fatal contradiction in the UK Labour party cannot resolve. Labour’s abandonment of social democracy in England makes it a loser in Scotland. Metropolitan political commentators in Glasgow last week just couldn’t grasp that Scotland really is different as they looked in vain for a Tory revival. And despite reports, there wasn’t one; no Cameron bounce, not even a spasm. The Tory candidate in Glasgow East, Davena Rankin, a black single mother, may have come third, but she actually managed to deliver a worse Tory share of the vote than in 2005.

Of course, Labour now try to portray the SNP as the “Tartan Tories”, and children of Thatcher, but it just doesn’t stack up, and Glasgow voters didn’t buy it. They can see that it is the SNP government which has curbed the right to buy council homes, abolished student fees, cut prescription charges, extended free personal care, frozen council tax. It is Alex Salmond who has moved to scrap PFI, end private sector involvement in NHS health care, save local hospital accident and emergency units, promote renewable energy, oppose Trident and the war in Iraq.

Meanwhile it is Gordon Brown’s Labour government which has increased taxes on people on low incomes while reducing capital gains tax paid by private equity pirates; has allowed executive pay to spiral out of control while delivering pious lectures about wage restraint. Britain has become a grossly unequal society under Labour, a haven for tax-avoiding plutocrats, a nation of property speculators and greedy celebrities who thrive in an economy which has switched from making things to making debt.

The people of Glasgow East are clearly sick of it - homeowners and benefit claimants alike. This long-suffering Labour community has been dismayed by the cynicism and sleaze of the Labour establishment. The machine politicians who are more interested in soliciting loans from tax exile businessmen than in promoting the interests of their constituents; who harvest hundreds of thousands in parliamentary allowances while turning their constituency homes into multiple occupancy business parks. The former Labour MP, David Marshall’s, parliamentary expenses did not become the dominant issue in Glasgow East in part because of the natural reluctance of politicians to throw the first stone. But the people of Glasgow East aren’t stupid; they know fine well what’s been going on.

For too long a London-dominated Labour Party has treated its core voters in places like Glasgow East as election fodder - to be graced by the occasional ministerial visit before polling day, and then forgotten for the next four years. They treat their own voters with contempt, thinking their quaint egalitarianism to be the anachronistic product of simple minds. But as this columnist has tried to argue, voters in Glasgow think and care very deeply about their politics: it is a question of moral propriety. People in Glasgow don’t vote on their pocket books, but on their consciences, and they have had it with Labour - at least in its present form.

For, the good news is that Glasgow East could be a kind of catharsis for Labour in Scotland. Labourites know now that they must change or die; that they cannot continue as a unionist tail to the London dog. Labour will have to reinvent itself in Scotland if it wants to restore its privileged position as Scotland’s national party, a role it occupied for five decades. This doesn’t mean becoming a national-IST party, at least not in the separatist sense, but it does mean restoring Labour to the moral mainstream of Scottish political opinion.


Labour has used by-elections before to change tack. After Winnie Ewing took Hamilton 1967, Harold Wilson set up the Royal Commission on the Constitution. After Margo MacDonald won Govan in 1973, Labour abandoned its opposition to devolution in the Dalintober St. Declaration. After Jim Sillars took Govan by-in 1988, Labour threw its weight behind the Scottish Constitutional Convention making the Scottish Parliament inevitable. Now, after Glasgow East, Labour must find it within itself the will to change again: to make itself an explicitly Scottish party, with its own constitution and leadership, committed to an autonomous Scotland with full tax and economic powers within a reformed, federal United Kingdom.

Wendy was right: there really is no alternative. Even the 39 Scottish Labour MPs, as they finger their collars this weekend, must realise that the game is up in Scotland. Many will be dreading the belated publication next month by the Westminster authorities of details of their parliamentary expenses. Their faith in Brown is long gone. The next general election in Westminster already is already lost, which means that they will be facing a Tory administration in London for the next decade.

Instead of sitting back and allowing the SNP to take-over their home territory, Labour MPs should be moving to merge with the Labour MSPa in Holyrood to form a new Scottish political organisation, a new cohesive political formation. The election of the replacement for Wendy Alexander should be turned into the election of a fully fledged Scottish leadership with functional autonomy from Westminster. The new Scottish Labour Party could then formally disengage from the UK policy-making process and cease automatically to take the Labour whip in the Commons. The Tories are anyway going to curb Labour’s voting rights in Westminster as their answer to the West Lothian Question, so might as well beat them to it.

Has Labour the will and the energy to make the change? I don’t know. None of the leadership candidates so far shows much sign of recognising the nature of the task ahead. But it is the only sure way of persuading Scottish voters that the Labour party, the party they have supported for the last half century, deserves to win their votes again. It is the only way that Labour can re-emerge from the grave they have dug themselves. Yes, there is life after Glasgow East, but not as Labour currently knows it.

Earthquake in Glasgow Many dead.

Glasgow belongs to Labour no more. Alex Salmond promised a political “earthquake” in Glasgow East, and once again he has delivered, on a 22% swing. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7522153.stm This is an astonishing result, tearing the heart out of Labour in Scotland and sending shock waves through Downing Street. Glasgow East was Labour’s third safest seat in Scotland, its twenty-fifth safest in the UK. It is the constituency of the great John Wheatley, leading figure in the first Labour government in the 1920s. If they can’t hold the line here, then Labour cannot hold the line anywhere.

Glasgow East is the SNP’s most stunning by-election victory since Jim Sillars took Glasgow Govan in 1988, overturning a similar 19000 majority, and kick-starting the constitutional process that ultimately led to the creation of the Scottish parliament. John Mason, the victor of Glasgow East, was a capable candidate but he has none of the flair and charisma of Jim Sillars - which makes this victory even more resounding.

It was an unvarnished triumph for the SNP - the party of government in Scotland - rather than for an individual candidate. And it is a person vindication for Alex Salmond. Many commentators believed that the SNP leader had been altogether too prominent in the campaign - he visited the constituency 12 times - and was in line for a personal rebuff. But, clearly, not even Glasgow is immune to the Salmond’s populist magic. Who dares, swings.

Of course, it also represents a massive protest against Labour in a constituency which has every reason to be disenchanted with this government. The dismal health and life-expectancy figures tell their own story. Glasgow East was also a protest at rising food and fuel prices and the abolition of the 10p tax band. In truth it was hard to think of any positive reason for voting Labour in this corner of post-industrial Scotland at this particular moment in the political cycle. But it is still a remarkable achievement for the nationalists to have successfully harvest the votes of the disenchanted and to have boosted the turnout to a respectable 42%, not far short of the general election. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats were nowhere in Glasgow East with 1,639 and 915 votes respectively.

Labour’s policy forum in Warwick today http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2008/07/11/tribune-comment-warwick-ii-must-rescue-labour/has been turned into a wake, mourning not just the loss of Labour hegemony of Scottish politics, but also of its core vote. There can no longer be any doubt that Labour is facing electoral oblivion under Gordon Brown. Of course, the Prime Minister is not going to resign immediately, and Number Ten is clearly hoping that Glasgow East will be forgotten by the time the party gathers for the annual conference in the autumn. But following the worst local election results in England since the 1960s, the humiliation of losing Crewe and Nantwich and being beaten into fifth place by the BNP in Henley, Glasgow East must surely be a wake up call to even the most complacent Labourites. Change, or die.

It is also a wake up call for the Union. If no Scottish seat is safe from the seduction of nationalism, then we must begin to take seriously the possibility that the United Kingdom may be finished, at least in its present form. The SNP minority administration in Holyrood, elected so narrowly in May 2007, has been immensely popular. Labour has been plunged into a terminal crisis in Scotland, having lost two leaders, half its councillors and now a crucial by-election. The other unionist parties are failing to provide any significant challenge to the SNP, which has grown in authority since it took over the reins of power in Holyrood.

While Westminster tinkers with Barnett formulas and the voting rights of Scottish MPs in the House of Commons, Scotland is already going its own way. It may still be possible to prevent complete separation by moving to a form of federalism, with Scotland given greater economic autonomy. But the way things are going, Scotland could be an independent nation within ten years. The entire UK will be shaken by the earthquake in Glasgow.

Why not turn all tyrants into holistic healers?

Healers with long flowing beards are reaching for the razors. The pigtails are being cut off and top knots are going the way of the mullet. Forget the financial crisis, it’s been a desperate week for the alternative therapy industry since the ‘Beast of Bosnia’, Radovan Karadzic, was discovered beneath a guru’s beard posing as a New Age practitioner in something called “human quantum energy”, which he claims to channel through his skull via his platted hair. A real head-case in other words.

That it is apparently so easy for a genocidal mass murderer to recycle himself as a benign mystic and lecturer in Ayurovedic medicine has been seen as a poor reflection of professional standards in complementary medicine. But perhaps we should be seeing in this inspired career a solution to the problem of what do to with dictators. A harmless alternative to homicidal megalomania.

Others may even have beat Radovan to it. Saddam Hussein was also discovered with a beard and long grey hair living in in a hole in Iraq. The assumption was that the Butcher of Baghdad was hiding from the American armed forces, but perhaps he was really on a hardcore meditation retreat, preparing himself psychologically for a future of spiritual leadership. He was certainly living a life of fasting and contemplation.

Maybe we should be discretely suggesting to other tyrants that it is time to make the personal political and start taking up alternative lifestyles. Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, would be a shoo in for assertiveness training. Kim Jong Il, the communist dictator of North Korea, already has the oriental appearance which would allow him to make a fortune in herbal medicine. Than Shwe of Burma could chill out as a specialist in Reiki foot massage and psychic channelling. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan may be a Muslim, but that shouldn’t prevent him doing his bit for holistic medicine by taking up aromatherapy and crystallography.

There are more than seventy countries in the world ruled by dictators, who suppress freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial. Far better to have them turn chiropractice than more conventional forms of torture. And there are also some pretty dodgy democrats too like Vladimir Putin, who with his KGB experience would be great as a life coach specialising acupuncture.

The possibilities are endless and, remember, turning dictators into quacks is a lot cheaper than invasion, sorry “humanitarian intervention”. Which brings us to one other really sinister character who is still on the loose and evading justice. Responsible for an illegal war and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, Tony Blair is believed to be posing as a Middle East peace envoy and promoter of global faith awarness. It’s surely time he too was exposed and sent to the Hague for a fair trial.

Financial crisis. How bad is it going to get?

So, just how bad is this financial crisis going to get? Well according to Bob Junjuah of the Royal Bank of Scotland: “A very nasty period is soon to be upon us. Be prepared”. It’s not like the RBS to go around making alarmist statements but it has warned of a “global equity and credit crash” this autumn. Morgan Stanley bank has forecast a “catastrophic event”. The hedge fund guru John Paulson says global losses from the credit crisis, currently $300bn, may reach $1.3 trillion.

Yet only a few weeks ago, everyone in the City and Wall St. seemed to be saying that “the worst was over”; that the fundamentals were sound; and that once the banks had owned up to the full extent of their losses, then things would begin to get back to normal. Clearly, they haven’t, as anyone who has tried to get a mortgage recently will have discovered. And with the oil price spike - which Gordon Brown is trying to flatten at the Oil summit in Jeddah - there has been a switch of sentiment back to deepest gloom.

You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? Well, let me quote an email I received at the weekend from Moneyweek Magazine. Under the heading “Bloodbath Britain” the magazine screams in bold type that “The UK is about to be battered by the biggest financial storm of our lifetimes”. It goes on to predict five forthcoming disasters. “Disaster one: the housing market crashes wiping up to 40% off the value of your property. Disaster 2: 1000s of businesses go bust as the credit crunch hammers consumer spending. Disaster 3: Unemployment leaps by 30-50% as a 1980’s style crisis devastates the job market. Disaster 4: Sterling collapses by 10% and the price of everything from petrol to food skyrockets. Disaster 5: shares investments and cash all lose value destroying wealth and crushing retiral dreams”

At first I thought this might be a spoof, or perhaps a posting from the Socialist Workers Party. But this is no leftist doom-monger warning of the collapse of capitalism but a hard-headed and practical share and property buying guide. Moneyweek goes on to advise on what stocks you should buy to hedge the stock market collapse, mainly commodities. It would be as well handing them a razor and some hemlock.

Now, we do not want to ‘talk ourselves into a recession” to use the current political cliche in Westminster. But it’s important to know what the financial world is thinking. It’s not just prophets like the billionaire George Soros, who has been warning that this is a crisis comparable to the Great Depression. Look at the work of Nouriel Roubini, the prolific New York University economics professor, whose “12 steps to financial Armageddon” is essential reading. Even Martin Wolf of the Financial Times said last week that “on the supply side of the world economy, almost every piece of news has been bad.”

Or try looking at website, The Market Oracle, which has been running increasingly apocalyptic posts from highly informed US financial commentators many of them on the political right. It’s UK editor, Nadeem Walayat correctly forecast the British housing slump, almost to the month, and continues to chart its decline, which he now believes will lead to a 50-60% drop in British property prices, peak to trough.

I’m almost tempted to say: lighten up guys, it can’t be as bad as all that. Warren Buffett, the “sage of Omaha” is said to be buying shares again. Employment is still high and retail sales actually jumped last month - to everyone’s surprise. Maybe all this hysteria is a temporary blip. But I think the warnings should be listened to precisely because they are not coming from the usual suspects, but from people who know the financial system from the inside.

What has spooked them is a complex of factors, of which the doubling of the price of oil is only the most obvious. The oil spike being seen as a consequence of low interest rates and the decline of the dollar, which has ignited a speculative boom in commodity prices, similar to the dot.com bubble which burst in 2000 and the real estate bubble which has been imploding since 2006. This is a highly unstable situation. It has arisen just as inflation has returned with a vengeance to Asian countries like China and India, the countries which manufacture most of what we buy. Inflation in Vietnam is 25%.

This inflation is feeding back into the West through import prices just at the moment when central banks are trying to head off recession by lowering interest rates. The fall in the value of the dollar and sterling (down 14% this year) has turbocharged imported inflation in the two most indebted countries in the developed world: Britain and America blitzing household budgets. Cash-strapped British consumers are sitting in houses which are dropping in value just as they are coming under pressure from the banks to repay some of their £1.4trillion debts.

As the British property market follows America into default and repossession, there is expected to be a collapse of consumer spending. The next wave of bank losses is expected to be credit cards, car loans and student loans, which are already defaulting in America, and corporate bonds which are looking highly vulnerable. This has caused further shock waves through the derivatives market - the collateralised debt obligations and such like - which are being marked down once again.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars worth of “liquidity” being pumped into the system by central banks, the credit crisis actually getting worse. The mortgage market is flat lined. Hedge funds are collapsing as their leveraged bets go sour. Libor - the rate at which banks lend to each other - is almost back to levels it reached last summer. Everyone is looking for the next big bank failure and wondering how long central banks can continue to bail out dud institutions.

Meanwhile, the world’s stock markets are falling: 50% in China, 30% here if you strip out unstable oil, mining and commodities. The commodities boom is due for a sharp correction and many banks are in deep trouble. Which is why analysts are warning of a further stock market and credit shocks this autumn. They believe we haven’t begun to recognise the scale and ramifications of this crisis. Until we do we, and the politicians, will remain passive victims, unable to recognise the need for concerted global action.
Sorry to ruin your breakfast - but there it is.

Glasgow East. Labour goes South.

It’s often said that people in constituencies like Glasgow East would vote for a monkey provided it was wearing a red rosette. I would not dream of comparing Labour’s capable candidate Margaret Curran to a sub-human primate, but I suspect even she would agree that her party have made monkeys of themselves.

Labour could hardly have got off to a worse start in this crucial by-election. Its Scottish leader, Wendy Alexander, resigning on the eve of the campaign over a Holyrood fund-raising scandal; the sitting Labour MP, David Marshall, resigning on health grounds amid expense account allegations, and Labour’s intended by-election candidate, John Ryan, resigning even before he had been selected. Margaret Curran hasn’t resigned yet, but she doesn’t even appear to know what constituency she’s living in so maybe she’ll get round to it.

Yet despite all this, the smart money is still on the monkeys to win in Glasgow East. If so, this represents quite heroic dedication to a lost cause by the good folk of Greater Shettleston. After a decade of Labour government, nearly half the population here is living on benefits, life expectancy is lower than in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed, and unemployment is running at nearly twice the national average. Loyalty is its own reward, they say, and Glasgow East is living proof.

But I don’t seek to disparage the voters of Glasgow for supporting Labour so doggedly over the years. Those who know this part of the city insist that the people here are not suffering from mental delusion or a chronic brain cell loss but from a kind of anachronistic altruism: they do what they think is morally right rather than what is in their narrow self interest. They’re a little like Robert Tressell’s “Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Residents of Glasgow East can see perfectly well what Labour has done, or not done for this broken community, but many believe that, in the end, Labour is still the party of the working man - even though most of the men are on incapacity benefit - and that voting Labour therefore must be the correct moral choice.

This is reinforced by the leaders of the influential Catholic Church - a third of Glasgow East voters are Catholic - which has traditionally looked to Labour in West Central Scotland to secure the interests of its faith community. There has been speculation that the goverenment has postponed this week’s debate on the Embryology Bill to avoid giving offence to local church leaders - a maneovre which, I’m afraid, sounds only too in keeping with the cynical standards of this administration.

But this moral imperative represents a problem too for the SNP. Many Glaswegians still regard the SNP is a selfish party out to line its own tartan nest by redirecting oil revenues to it Scottish business friends. Alex Salmond rather encouraged this view by making “Scotland’s Oil” and cutting fuel duty the centrepiece of its campaign launch last week, forgetting that most people in Glasgow East don’t actually own a car, and that many feel that the oil is a national resourse, to be used 'for the good of all’. You may laugh, but that’s the way they think in traditional Labour constituencies. Crude resource politics don’t work in places where people vote not on their pocket books but on their consciences.

And the SNP would be wrong to believe that the “Tartan Tory” tag can no longer be hung around their necks. We are about to discover that Labour is suddenly a party of red blooded socialists. They will be out and about in Glasgow parading their anti-capitalist credentials - at least until polling day. They’ll paint the Nats as the modern Thatcherites, in the pockets of businessmen like Brian Souter and Donald Trump; bent on cutting services and cutting business rates. Enough voters might even believe it.

So, what do you say to the people of Glasgow East? Should they continue to vote with their hearts or with their heads? By rejecting Labour they could place themselves on the map for the first time in Shettleston’s history. It’s no accident that nearby Glasgow Govan has been showered with infrastructure benefits, Garden Festivals, Science Centres over the last 20 years. Govan voted twice for the SNP in by-elections - in 1973, when it returned Margo MacDonald, and in 1988 when it returned her husband, Jim Sillars. The surest way to get noticed in the pork-barrel world of West Central Scotland Labour politics is to play the nationalist card. Otherwise you are just voting fodder.

Now, Glasgow East may be perfectly content to remain routine feedstuff for the great Laboru ruminant. That is a choice it is entitled to make and the voters deserve respect for their decision. But they should also reflect on whether Labour any longer deserves loyalty on this scale. Yes, this is the constituency of John Wheatley - health minister in the first ever Labour government in 1924 whose Housing Act created mass council housing and released thousands of Glaswegian families from the grip of the slum landlords. But is the spirit of Wheatley alive today? It is a grim irony that his former constituency now has some of he worst health statistics in the developed world, according to the United Nations, and that Glasgow housing is in a dreadful state.

Labour will try to argue that the stalled Glasgow housing stock transfer is in the tradition of John Wheatley, but that botched semi-privatisation has about as much to do with social housing as an interest-only mortgage. It is to Labour’s shame that it has taken a nationalist government to curb the right to buy, a policy which has diminished the quantity and quality of council housing by selling off the best properties at knock-down prices. New Labour is too committed now to Thatcherite economics to contemplate a return to council housing.

The SNP has no social democratic traditions to fall back on, but it has become a repository of the policies New Labour has discarded. . The Nationalists are wise not to compare themselves with the Independent Labour Party and Red Clydeside - as they did so disastrously in the 1990s. But they must somehow to demonstrate that they have become the inheritors of that social democratic tradition to win the moral high ground. The Nationalists should be highlighting measures like free prescriptions, abolition of university tuition fees, extension of elderly care and suchlike. A few attacks on the banks and big oil wouldn't go amiss either.

Still, Glagow East will take a lot of persuading. The link with Labour is more than just a question of political affiliation; it is almost an existential question about what this communty believes about itself. And there is one final point. This isn’t a normal by-election. Glasgow East voters realise that they could kill the UK Labour government on Thursday week by voting Labour out of its third safest seat in Scotland. Gordon Brown would probably be finished. Many voters here believe Labour deserves to lose Glasgow East, but more may decide that Britain doesn’t deserve a return of the Tories. Better the monkeys you know than the monkeys you don’t.

Wuthering Brown

Gordon Brown comparing himself to Heathcliffe from “Wuthering Heights” was bad enough, but having to listen again to the caterwauling of Kate Bush really was too much. Talk about bad dreams in the night.

Actually, Broon was fitted up over Heathcliffegate. He was clearly joking when he “agreed” in the New Statesman interview that he was like the Wuthering madman. The PM was trying to be matey; trying sound human and self-deprecating Unfortunately, Brown just doesn’t have the knack of sounding human.

The image of the dour and vengeful character from the northlands sticks too easily to him. And it has stuck in the minds of the metropolitan media now they’ve done with Stalin and Mr Bean. Yes, London increasingly regards the Prime Minister as a borderline psychopath so deranged by sadness and rejection that he is capable of digging up the dead. Who knows, after Glasgow East, it may come to that.

Actually, all the Wuthering diverted media attention from a more serious blunder. This was Brown’s proposal that we should all eat up our leftovers and not waste food. Why we could save eight poonds a week and ease pollution and waste. He didn’t actually mention the little black babies in Africa, but it was in that vein.

Not only was this patronising and economically illiterate as a solution to commodity price inflation, it occurred in the very week that Brown was off to the G8 jolly in Hokkaido, Japan for an eighteen course banquet. That this gathering of the world leaders regarded a feast of caviar, milk-fed lamb and sea urchin to be an appropriate working lunch for a convention on the food crisis tells you all you need to know about why the world is in a mess. Oh, and that G8 menu in full: Words “Anglais”, to be eaten with large helpings of humble pie in Brown sauce. Followed by hard cheese.

It was a bumper week for Brown-ups. He placed so many feet in his mouth that his face is turning into a boot camp. Road tax is turning into another ten pence tax row, with Tories and their well-heeled and well-wheeled media friends weeping crocodile tears about low income people in big cars who’ll have to pay more. How could Brown be so beastly, they wept as they climbed into their fuming Chelsea tractors

As usual the Treasury had got its numbers wrong, so that when the PM said that a majority of motorists would benefit from road tax changes, what he meant to say was that a majority would not benefit and 9 million would end up paying more. Exactly the same confusion arose over the numbers losing from the scrapping the ten pence tax band. Doesn’t anyone have a calculator in HM Treasury?