Reds at St Catherine's College, Oxford

I haven't the time - or resources - to explore this fully, but there does seems to be plenty to find about a nexus of Marxists and revolutionary socialists at St Catherine's College, Oxford, starting as early as the 70s* and forming the background for Peter Mandelson and others with connexions to New Labour. I should be grateful for more insights.

*With much deeper roots - e.g. Terry Eagleton was a protege of Raymond Williams.

Life insurance securitization

It seems the next bubble could be “life insurance securitization”. The idea is to buy other people's life cover, that maybe they would otherwise let lapse. So you then collect on the insured, face-value payout.

This will lead to problems. When setting premium levels, insurers factor-in the likelihood that the policy will not be maintained up to the point of a claim. This helps them cut the premiums in what can be a very competitive market, especially in term (limited-period) assurance. If insurers find that securitization leads to more policies qualifying for a claim, it will mess up their calculations and they will have to up premiums for similar new policies.

There is also a strong chance that existing policies that do not have fixed,"guaranteed premium" rates will be reviewed and repriced upwards. This won't help already cash-strapped households hang on to a vital part of their financial safety net.

Many policies are already being repriced because of the underperformance of insurance companies' investments in recent years, so overall it looks like a bad trend could develop in life assurance costs and consumer uptake.

There are other dangers, as UK investors in some Keydata Investment Services products have discovered. Their "Secure Income Bond" suite of investments was based on securitized "key employee" term assurance and following a tax investigation into their legal documentation, the plans were disqualified from certain exemptions. The resulting retrospective tax charge was laid at Keydata's door, and busted them. The incoming administrators, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, have found £100 million of underlying assets are now "missing". The situation is further complicated by the fact that the assets of the Secure Income Bond were held by a company set up in the secretive foreign tax haven of Luxembourg. Britain's Serious Fraud Office has been called in, and investors now await a ruling this week by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme as to whether they will be reimbursed for losses in what was supposed to be a safe, non-stock market-related investment.

The potential is huge - the New York Times reports $26 trillion in existing life cover policies in the USA alone, of which maybe $500 billion could be in the market for securitization. And the potential damage is equally huge. Will insurance companies end up needing bailouts like the banks? Could the US economy survive a second giant hammer blow?

Derivatives players pocketing the chips?

"... total money and credit are contracting, [...] the world of derivatives and leverage is contracting despite our government’s best efforts to flood the system with money."

Reds under the chaise longue

Why would someone concentrate his academic research on how America has tried to counter Communism within its own country? But (and I think it more telling) why would the Labour Party notice and employ such a person?

Andrew Neather's PHD and a follow-up article surface in several places on the Web, e.g.:

"Popular Republicanism, Americanism, and the Roots of Anti-Communism, 1890-1925"
Duke University Ph.D. dissertation, May 1994

"Twentieth-Century Communism and Anticommunism: the View After the Cold War"
Reviews in American History - Volume 23, Number 2, June 1995, pp. 336-341

Linkedin.com supplies details of Neather's experience - a year working for Dennis McShane; another doing editing work for the Labour Party; nearly 3 years with Friends of the Earth; a year speechwriting at the Home Office under Jack Straw and David Blunkett; a year speechwriting with Tony Blair; and now he's with the Evening Standard, writing on wine, cycling, travel and local issues, as well as editing comments. (There seems to be a lacuna of a year (1994-95) between completing the PhD and starting with McShane, but doubtless it was some sort of gap year-cum-looking for a career.)

I think he's probably harmless, and the track record suggests a touch of the Green idealist and instinctive-moderniser-against-the-wicked-Establishment. If he were a "sleeper", he'd not have blurted out the stuff about Labour's secret motivations regarding immigration policy.

But "as the twig is bent, so the tree will grow": we have to look at beginnings, try to find some of the warning signs.

I recall a tiny incident regarding Peter Mandelson's college, St Catherine's, Oxford, at the time he was there (1973-76 - why did Peter matriculate at age c. 20?). I'd gone over there one evening (summer '75) with some friends to see a Ken Russell film, and we had a drink in the student bar first. Noticing us, somebody at the other end called out "bleedin' poors". True, but why say it?

It's not what someone does that is most revealing; it's the context, the belief that what they're doing is acceptable. St Catherine's was rather nice - newish, and expensively-designed, right down to the knives and forks (I kid you not). We were impressed; it was time when we still wore thick jumpers because college rooms were cold, and drank beer from large Party Seven cans at parties. Ever get the feeling that you've been let in by mistake, and wonder when you can afford better-looking shoes and clothes?

Privilege and socialism went together in those times. Posh Marxist meddlers dined at the Elizabeth or the Randolph, wore expensive blue boiler suits as a political fashion statement, spoke contemptuously at the Oxford Union of "the talking professions" that, of course, they would soon join. In the street, I overheard two chaps discussing what they would do when they graduated; one said it was a toss-up between joining his father's stockbroking firm or the IMG (International Marxist Group).

Power is sexier than money. In the old days, bored toffs could shag debs at the Hunt Ball, knock the necks off brandy bottles at two in the morning, test themselves against professional boxers; but ah, the chance to lead Revolution...

Don't look for revolutionaries among the likes of John Prescott, a former "bleedin' poor" who knows which side his bread is buttered; look for them among the drawing-room drawlers, the tea-table traitors, the Kim Philbys.

Who is to say that forty years from now, one of our deadliest enemies may not turn out to have been in the Bullingdon Club?

More on Al-Collider

Terrorist bird shuts down particle accelerator with aerial bombardment.

Unless it just wanted a bit of Marmite on it?

The Pollitt Sanction

It's now reported that the bank bailout will (technically) add another £1.5 trillion to the UK's public debt, making some £2.3 trillion in all, as compared with GDP of maybe £1.4 trillion.

Time for conspiracy theory. Which of the following seems most likely?

Gordon Brown is authorising throwing more cash onto the bonfire because:

1. It alleviates a problem he himself, embarrassingly, allowed to develop as Chancellor
2. It will get us out of the mess, helping the economy recover
3. It will buy some feelgood leading up to the next General Election, limiting the damage to Labour
4. As a scorched-earth policy, it will leave Cameron nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat and as soon as Cam has heroically dealt with it, in will come another 1945-style Labour landslide as the population again votes for what it thinks it deserves
5. It represents an "Iceland strategy", so effectively ruining the country that we have to throw ourselves into the arms of our communautaire pals on the other side of La Manche
6. As (5) above, but part of a grander plan to advance the cause of international Communism.

There are little conspiratorial threads we can weave together if we wish. For example, we read this week that Brown's candidature for the Labour slave state (sorry, safe seat) of Dunfermline East was sponsored by the TGWU's Jack Jones, now revealed as a traitor in the pay of the USSR at a time of great danger to our country. Could this have been part of the entryist approach of Harry Pollitt? Is Gordon Brown a man of Pollitt's stamp?

Like the Communists, one-eyed Wotan may fantasise that the destruction is merely part of the process leading to the Millennium, for after Ragnarök and the ensuing Flood, "... the world resurfaces anew and fertile, the surviving gods meet, and the world is repopulated by two human survivors."

And if he's wrong?

Santa Fe railway: the new Coke?

After two-and-a-half years, Warren Buffet has bought the rest of his railroad. Reasons?

On democracy in Britain

Following the Czech ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, there's excitement over the widened split in the Conservative Party and the possibility of forming a new party or coalition to wrest power from the professional political elite and restore democracy to the people.

I believe this is completely mistaken.

You will find:

(a) the tremendous power of apathy (look how Karl Denninger has gone from making a personal fortune in equities to crying uselessly on the blogwaves about politics);
(b) when (if) you have split a log, it can be split further, until there is nothing but kindling and splinters.

We do not have democracy in this country, as the ancient Athenians understood the term. We have "representative" democracy, which ultimately reduces the population to two classes:

(i) practitioners
(ii) petitioners

The most we can hope for is to influence one of the two great power factions that take turns to rule us. As David Cameron and co. now feel their vulnerability, our maximum influence lies in the threat to his potential vote. By looking as though we may indeed shatter his support into a hundred pieces and so end with a hung Parliament or even another Labour government, we can make him listen, instead of pretending to listen.

But it has to be a simple, single demand, with the promise that the fragments will gather around it. I would suggest simply, a referendum on EU membership per se, "in or out", and purely on the issue of democratic legitimisation.

The arguments pro and con can come later; in fact, must come later: if you hear bletherskites like Ken Clarke (he so reminds me of ex-Bishop David Jenkins), they're always trying to confuse the referendum with the benefits of EU membership, so as to prevent you from asking for the vote.

Going for the split now uses the weapon without uttering the threat, and will be uselessly destructive.

Black holes and the collapse of democracy

Last night I watched a Horizon programme about black holes. Experts don't understand them, and every galaxy has a giant one in the middle, weighing typically 0.1% of the mass of its host. Nothing can escape it as it continually collapses, and at its heart is a singularity where all the normal rules break down. Anything can happen at the centre; nothing is impossible.

And then I saw the ten o'clock news. The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, with the unhappy face of a Neville Chamberlain, had caved in and signed the Lisbon Treaty, the enabling legislation that takes Europe over the event horizon and towards "ever-closer union". Klaus wrote to his country's constitutional court:

“Twenty years after the restoration of our democracy and sovereignty, we are once again dealing with the question whether we should — this time voluntarily — give up the position of a sovereign state and hand over decision-making on our own matters to European institutions outside of the democratic control of our citizens.”

And so the millennarian (it had been planned to be complete by 2000) madness sweeps another into the host. At the centre, now irrecoverably detached from the rest of the universe, the club gathers, surrounded by advisers and servants of every kind, all determined to live as high and as absurd as Marie Antoinette tending her washed sheep, as we career chaotically towards economic breakdown and the loss of law, freedom and security. The transfer of wealth and power without consent - without our consent - is crime and tyranny.

Centripetal forces create centrifugal forces. The overweening power-seeking of the mediaeval Papacy hastened the move towards a Europe of sovereign states and religious fraction. Now, the forced bureaucratic union at the top of our group of societies will lead to greater disunion lower down, of which the BNP's Nick Griffin is merely a small, scruffy symptom.

In the middle ages, the walled towns developed internally; there sprang up strong-walled houses for the wealthy elite, to protect themselves not only from each other, but from the desperate, hungry, half-naked mob outside.

In the dream is denial, and in denial is defeat.

Two to muse on

Comets, life and the unimaginably vast Oort Cloud

Do Smart, Hard-Working People Deserve to Make More Money?

Andrew Neather: social experimentation and education

Correction: when I said New Labour encouraged immigration specifically to spite their political opposition and alter British social identity, the word "specifically" may be inappropriate, if by that you understand it to be the only, or principal, reason.

Certainly Andrew Neather is using the Guardian to deny that it was the main aim. And I don't see the Labour Government as a sort of Doctor Evil, cackling over their latest scheme to ruin the country. It's not that simple, that cartoony.

But Neather has already admitted that:

• Mass migration to the UK was a "deliberate policy"
• It "especially" suited "middle-class Londoners"
• "A driving political purpose" was the fostering of multiculturalism
• He (Neather) had "a clear sense that the policy was intended... to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date", even though he himself thought that was going too far.

From what I've seen, read and heard, the political parties do relish giving each other one in the eye; perhaps that's why they can't clearly see the other consequences of their actions. And we need to be aware that driving motives are often not disclosed, even if they may have appeared in "earlier drafts". Indeed, the unstated motivation is often more important than the overt.

Education has always been a pit for these cockerels to fight in. In the nineteenth century, it was the Board Schools competing with, and seeking to supplant, the Church schools (and abolishing school prayers and hymns within my teaching career); in the twentieth, it was comprehensive versus grammar (since no-one dared go so far as to destroy the private schools). And, like Mao's Red Guard ripping up the bourgeois turf of parks, and Mao's peasants obediently exterminating the crop-eating birds (only to see the crop-eating insect population explode, disastrously), they bring in the reign of destructive ignorance and irrational hatred.

It is especially destructive in teaching, where individuals and society live with the consequences for generations.

When I came to Birmingham to train as a teacher, my first 3-week placement was at the George Dixon Grammar School. The boys' and girls' grammars had just amalgamated, and in the staffroom the women teachers still had their tea expensively served to them, whereas the male staff ran a separate, cheaper tea swindle. Two boys who gave another student teacher a mildly tough time (by the standards of that time) were instantly taken off the entry for English O-level as a punishment.

These decent, hard-working people could not have foreseen that within a few years, the Labour-controlled City Council would first build a new comprehensive smack on their cricket pitch (one of the finest in the Midlands), then amalgamate the grammar school with it, and then generally mismanage it with all sorts of fashionable political initiatives until it went into what is known as "special measures". An old-fashioned grammar-school-and-Cambridge-educated toughie, Robert Dowling (now Sir Robert) was brought in and the climb back began. I was interviewed by him shortly after he took over: the place was all echoes and empty rooms. 200 years of accumulated effort, expertise, tradition and dedication had come to this; for no good reason, and some bad ones.

I'm sure Andrew Neather is a decent chap - but both he and those he has worked with need to recognise that good intentions aren't enough. More and more, I see this government (and some before it) as resembling Homer Simpson, pushing a button on the nuclear generator console just to see what happens, and rewarded by the sight of people suddenly fleeing a wall of flame in the corridor.

You need, not just a good heart, but humility and caution.

Fears of a stockmarket correction

My trader's intuition is flashing warnings that the stock market might drop off a waterfall starting this week. - Charles Hugh Smith

But Marc Faber (htp: Jesse) thinks not - as the dollar weakens, the market adjusts upward. And he is convinced of the "Bernanke put", i.e. money will be thrown into the system to maintain the illusion that all is well. Longer-term, Faber (in that smiling way of his) gives it around 10 years before the dollar simply collapses as public finances run completely out of control.

Andrew Neather: privilege and principle

Andrew Neather is the subject of some fuss at the moment, since he revealed that New Labour encouraged immigration specifically to spite their political opposition and alter British social identity (Melanie Phillips is the latest prominent journalist to splutter a response).

To give the man his due, he is aware of the contradictions in his position. In the first article linked above, he argues for immigration, boasting of the mix in his children's school - but he does qualify it very briefly by a reference (my highlight) to the social exclusiveness:

"... in my children's primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit."

As it happens, I used to live in London - a flat in Mount Nod Road, Streatham - and I don't think Neather would want to send his children to the school opposite us, the way it was in the 1970s at least. My dad would regularly drift over to the bow window to check that his Morris Marina wasn't being vandalised. But maybe it's "middle class" now, what with the property bubble.

However, Neather doesn't live in that London, of course. He lives in a part where, according to nethouseprices.com, semi-detached houses have sold for between £400,000 and £900,000 this year. Melanie Phillips' comment seems justified: "In Neather's hermetically sealed bubble, the benefits of mass immigration were so overwhelming he couldn't understand why ministers had been so nervous about it."

I think the way that so-so socialists square the circle is to admit the contradictions cheerfully (brazenly) and ask you to concentrate on how things will be when they've finished. But what you do now, and its effects, are far more certain than a rosy, fuzzy future Golden Age. One might have hoped that a Cambridge education would have taught Neather not to think in that Johnny Head-in-air sort of way.

Alabamageddon

"People want to kill somebody, but they don't know who to shoot at" ...

Should I send this?

General Teaching Council for England

Whittington House

19-30 Alfred Place

London

WC1E 7EA

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Dear Sirs

GTC Registration Card

Thank you for my GTC registration card, received yesterday by post, which I return herewith.

The card appears to have no useful official function, other than to thrill the issuer, for I note its caveat that possessing it certifies nothing except the historic and now irrelevant fact of my registration with you at the date of the card’s issue. It serves no purpose for me personally, either: fortunately, despite advancing age, I still know who I am, who I work for and my teacher’s reference number.

For an English teacher, to be associated with this card is something of a liability. The motto on the obverse (“for children, through teachers”) is very modern in both literary and political styles, in that it conveys a fuzzy sense of generalized good intent and lacks verb, subject and any hint of how the undefined objective is to be attained (other than by treating teachers as instruments rather than as autonomous agents). I suppose we must be seen to keep up with the fashionable flight from literacy and from any disputable basis of fact or principle.

The reverse is embellished with a quotation from the “Code for teachers” (which, according to your media release dated 1 July 2009, has been created with reference to “an extensive process of public and professional consultation,” an exercise which had hitherto – and, I suspect, despite strenuous and costly effort on your behalf - escaped my notice). The excerpt reads, “Teachers’ knowledge, skill, judgement, creativity and commitment play a vital role in society.” As an example of stating the obvious it could scarcely be bettered. It is also infuriatingly patronising: I am forced to infer that my motivation is improved by jejune bureaucratic praise and recognition such as this. Its presumed intended effect is undermined by the fact that it is printed in two colours, as though, like my primary age pupils, I have such a short attention span that I cannot complete reading a sentence unless it changes its hue partway through.

Or is this chameleon-like transformation from maroon to blue intended as a political metaphor? In which case, the order of the colours should be reversed, for as you know, the GTCs were set up under an earlier Conservative government’s Teaching and Higher Education Act (1988), itself in part a response to the teachers’ industrial action of 1985, which in turn was a protest against the way in which the profession’s remuneration relative to that of other workers as established by the 1974 Houghton pay award slipped rapidly in succeeding years, to the extent that an article in Punch magazine in the 1980s, comparing workers’ pay, felt able to call teachers “dowdy underachievers” . A medical acquaintance told me years ago that the unstated purpose of the General Medical Council is to suppress and bully doctors, and some may think that the similarly-named General Teaching Councils have an analogous hidden agenda.

It is also regrettable that you should put yourselves (or should I say, us?) to such unnecessary expense when the country is running short of money. The minutes of the GTC for England’s meeting on 27 January 2009 reveal that, despite a registration fee of £37 per member and an expected total income of £21.44 million, your budget will be in deficit to the tune of £354,000. Surely it would assist your finances to desist from glossy, self-aggrandising mass mailings.

I think one could go further, in these straitened times: according to http://www.nethouseprices.com/ residential properties in Alfred Place have sold for an average £561,583 each in recent years, so if you happen to own your offices, the fast-recovering London property market should allow you to sell numbers 19-30, retain a healthy cash reserve and find a new location that would cost far less in staff pay, travel allowances and other perquisites. If you wish to be in closer touch with your unconsenting membership, you should know that the geographical centre of England is Meriden; but doubtless the Economic and Social Research Council could guide you to areas where wage levels are more competitive still. In the latter context, it is also worth remembering that there are some 200 million English speakers in India, where the average entry salary for a graduate is US$300 – 500 per month (E. Wayne Nafziger, “Economic Development”, 4th Edition, March 2006).

In short, while I must perforce acknowledge that I am obliged to be registered with you, please exclude me from every mailing possible, other than the one asking me for a cheque once a year; and please do what you can to be less of a burden on my, and my colleagues’, time and money.

Yours faithfully

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory

If only we could write the right rules, everybody would play fair?

In what may be an impish spirit of fun, economist Don Boudreaux argues the case for insider trading (and quotes Henry Manne, a law colleague at his university, on the subject). The article is published by "Chinese" Rupert Murdoch's WSJ (motto: "Making the world safe for men on yachts").

But what if you see your objective as, not fair play, but winning?

Alas, sporting teams are not composed of referees.

(Picture: An ivory tower, as symbol of Mary, in a "Hunt of the Unicorn Annunciation" (ca. 1500) from a Netherlands book of hours.)

Plantation

The Daily Mail and the Express splutter at some of the nuggets in the following article, which I reproduce in its insouciant entirety from the Evening Standard (if the latter insists, I'll delete it, of course, but to them I'd say, I am increasing your readership at no cost to you or financial benefit to myself).

What comes across to me, is how decisions with far-reaching consequences are taken, not for the country's general benefit or to help the suffering, sliding working class, but merely to spite the political opposition, or for a temporary tactical gain.

I am reminded of Henry VIII's "plantations" in Ireland - and after 400 years, they still haven't quite rubbed all the corners off each other.

Then there's Fiji, where indentured Indian labourers were imported for a minimum initial 10-year term, during which time (inevitably, and I assume, entirely foreseeably) they would marry, have children, become rooted. Would it have entered the calculations of the landowners, that such importation would also make it harder for Fiji eventually to throw off colonial rule and assume full independence? Who cared that tensions would build up, leading to coups in 1987 and 2000?

But then, the powerful elite have always treated us like the beasts of the field. Remember the Highland clearances, also. "Who cares for the future, as long as I can make a few quid and booze it up with willing lovelies?"

As a Spanish Classical scholar observes:

It seems that there existed in Greece an expression or proverbial saying which is preserved in verse in a fragment of a tragedy whose author has not been identified (Tragicorum Fragmenta Adespota, 513 Nauck):

ἐμοῦ θανόντος γαῖα μιχθήτω πυρί·
οὐδὲν μέλει μοι· τἀμὰ γὰρ καλῶς ἔχει.

When I die, let earth and fire mix:
It matters not to me, for my affairs will be unaffected.
___________________________________________________
Don't listen to the whingers - London needs immigrantsAndrew Neather

23.10.09

Amid the sound and fury over Nick Griffin, there's a sad but unnoticed fact: it has taken this fiasco to make politicians talk about the impact of immigration.

Yesterday MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames called for a 75 per cent cut in immigration and accused the Government of "clamping down" on any debate.

What's missing is not only a sense of the benefits of immigration but also of where it came from.
It didn't just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.

Even now, most graduates with good English and a salary of £40,000 or the local equivalent abroad are more or less guaranteed enough points to settle here.

The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It's not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners - although frankly it's hard to see how the capital could function without them.

Their place certainly wouldn't be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley - fascist au pair, anyone? Immigrants are everywhere and in all sorts of jobs, many of them skilled.

My family's east European former nannies, for example, are model migrants, going on to be a social worker and an accountant. They have integrated into London society.

But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London's attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.

It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it's pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.

Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.
But in my children's south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.

My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.

London's role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it's a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It's one of the reasons Paris now tends to look parochial to us.

So why is it that ministers have been so very bad at communicating this? I wonder because I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.

That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair's Cabinet Office think-tank.

The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.

Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the "social outcomes" it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour's 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.
But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.

In part, too, it would have been just too metropolitan an argument to make in such places: London was the real model. Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.

But Labour ministers elsewhere tend studiously to avoid ever mentioning London. Meanwhile, the capital's capacity to absorb new immigrants depends in large part on its economic vitality and variety. There's not a lot of that in, say, south Yorkshire. And so ministers lost their nerve.

I hope it's not too late now, post-Question Time, for London to make the case for migration.

Of course we're too small a country to afford an open door - but, by the same token, if the immigrants dry up, this city and this country will become a much poorer and less interesting place. Why is it so hard for Gordon Brown to say that?

Send the office cleaners into the City

Cleaning up the trading rooms physically could be the way to amend the traders' behaviour (htp: Overcoming Bias)

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study...

... The first experiment evaluated fairness. As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic "trust game." Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money...

Are the markets being manipulated?

I'm partway through a 1990s American TV programme (htp: Jesse) about the lead-up to, and aftermath of the Great Crash of 1929. At that time, share price manipulation was legal, everyone knew it went on and even the losers came back for more, hoping they would get out in time the next time round. And in the 1920s, buying on margin became possible, so that provided a fatal extra impetus.

You know all this, of course.

My question (and pardon my ignorance) is about the interaction of derivatives and stock trading today. A takes a huge bet with B that the share price of Widgetco will go down - what stops B from borrowing more cash, purchasing Widgetco in time to boost the price before the date of the bet, collects the cash from A and then sells his firm's holding in Widgetco? Even if now illegal (and I'm not sure of that), are there not ways and means?

And are there other tricks to catch the operator who goes long on a share, instead?

Lessons from history

The Debt Offensive began in 2007: Charlie hit us with everything he had. Cadres of underpriced risk were tunnelling under our lines, popping up when least expected and decimating our defences. We fought back hard, dropping cash from the Hueys, first $700 billion, then trillions, but it was no use. Sure, we beat him back for a while, took down a few banks; but the public couldn't take seeing it all on TV. It was the turning point. We had lost the will to win.