How will we stay rich?

Not many of us feel rich, but that's partly to do with who we have around us. Compared to most of the world, we are hugely well-off.

Let's make the comparison a little fairer. What matters is not only how much money we have, but what we can buy with it locally: this is known as "purchasing power parity" (PPP). So, here is a graph of the GDP per person (in PPP terms) of the most populous nations on Earth; I also include bars for the European Union and the world average (click to enlarge):

The vertical axis is in multiples of world average GDP: 11,800 US dollars. You see that the USA is four times as wealthy, Germany and the UK three times, and even Italy and Spain are doing terribly well, for now. Until recently, Greece (not shown) wasn't far behind Italy.

My question is, what's keeping us there?

If these countries were a series of locks on a canal, and all the gates were opened at the same time, you'd expect a lot of turbulence and then a settling-down to a uniform level throughout. We have world trade, so why shouldn't national wealth average out across the globe?

It is perfectly possible for neighbouring countries to have extreme disparities in per capita income - here's the two Koreas, separated only by a demilitarized zone around the 38th parallel:

Clearly the economic divide here is largely owing to very different economic and political systems. North Korea may not really be a threat to the world, but it's certainly a threat to its own unfortunate citizens, 150,000 of whom are kept in labour camps in scarcely believable misery. So yes, that inequality can be maintained given sufficient vigour and brutality on behalf of its rulers, who must continue to oppress because they have a tiger by the tail and a moment's weakness will finish them.

At $1,800 per capita, North Korea is far from the poorest country, according to the CIA World Factbook: Bangladesh, Kenya, Zambia and 30 other nations (mostly African) have less, bottoming out with the Congo at $300 (i.e. spending power about 82 cents a day).

But what, other than military dictatorships and civil and international war, accounts for some countries' failure to rise, and what prevents our own standard of living from falling?

Do we work harder?
Are we cleverer?
Are we - will we remain - better educated?
Do we have better and wiser rulers? Do they rule in the nation's interest?
Do we have special knowledge that nobody else can duplicate?
Is our basis of industrial skills thriving?
Are we using our human resources - our talented people - to best effect, in the best sectors of the economy?
Is it easy for our enterprising people to start up and run businesses?
Can we trust our money, and our banks?
Can we live forever off our patents - will they always be ours, and their validity accepted everywhere?
Are we blessed with inexhaustible natural resources?
Are we militarily strong enough to dictate terms of trade and hold everyone else down?

Not enough "yes" answers to the above, I fear.

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

News from tomorrow

201*

The Eid Agreement has been successfully concluded, thanks to the crucial intermediation of a former United States Senate leader.

202*

Mr Abu Hamza has been appointed Deputy First Minister for Wales and Mr Abu Qatada has been elected President of the Al-Qaeda Party. Although Al-Qaeda retains a policy of abstentionism towards the Westminster Parliament, it receives allowances for staff and takes up offices in the House of Commons.

The security service reforms proposed by a former senior Conservative politician have now been implemented. The police Oath of Service no longer includes a pledge of loyalty to the Monarch, and the intelligence services are now required to recruit a proportion of their employees from violent subversive domestic political factions.

203*

In his memoirs, Mr Cameron pays extensive tribute to Hamza and Qatada, saying they were "supreme masters of the distinction between tactics and strategy" and were "an extraordinary couple".

The former Prime Minister continued: "Whether you like them or not, and no matter how strongly you disapprove of their past actions, they had courage in abundance."

Anders Breivik: the view from the street

In legal terms, it would seem that the case of Anders Breivik is as uncontentious as it is possible to be. Politically, the picture is more confused and misleading.

Guilt

He intended to kill, and did kill. Under English law, that defines murder.

Insanity plea

As I understand it, you can have a personality disorder and still not be mad. That is, you can be answerable for your actions, even if they proceed from abnormal motives. Breivik's meticulous planning and prolonged rehearsal demonstrate his ability to control and order his behaviour.

Breivik  does not consider himself insane, any more than John Bellingham did. The excuse he is using, that of self-defence, is arrant garbage but a defendant can try any argument he likes in a court of law. What is more debatable is the decision by news media to let him use the court as a global public address system, but I'll come to that in a moment.


Sentence

Reportedly, he wished to do more than he had done, and would do it again. On that basis, and given the unavailability of a death sentence, he should be imprisoned for the term of his natural life as (a) a punishment for his crimes, (b) a warning to others and (c) a safeguard for society.

Reportage and implicit political agenda

So, why the nightly TV reporting of his case?

It could be simply because the case is sensational.

Or (and it may not be so) it could be because it's a useful stick with which to beat the Right. If the latter, the message is, he did these terrible things because he is a racist, therefore anyone who opposes unrestricted immigration etc should be tarred with Breivik's brush.

Counter

The Right could answer, this simply shows the importance of what are supposedly traditional family values. Breivik is the child of divorced, f*ckabout parents. Their failure to serve their child's development, in preference to servicing their own pleasures, led ultimately to the terrible events in Oslo and Utoya. As John Lennon said of Hitler, what if he'd been told he was loved, all his life? As a part-time teacher of special needs children, this has resonance for me.

Gut feeling

We shouldn't be getting this blow-by-blow coverage. Even the BBC news pointed out tonight that some Norwegian newspapers have chosen not to feature it on their front pages.

It was a crime, he should be punished, and discussion of tangential matters should not be stifled.

Spanish credit now 10th worst globally; UK and USA recovering?

According to CMA Datavision's Q1 report on the sovereign credit insurance market, out today, Spain has just entered the top 10 most risky countries, with a 32% chance of default within five years. Far worse is Portugal, with a 60% 5-year default risk (beaten only by Cyprus, which is a new inclusion in CMA's tables).

More surprising is the market's favourable assessment of the USA, which has recovered its insurance-implied AAA rating, and the UK, now listed as the 6th least risky country. It would seem that the credit insurance traders have bought the good news stories, in the face of continuing pessimism from a number of other economic commentators.

Norway, last quarter the only nation to have an implied AAA rating, retains pride of place, followed by the USA, Switzerland and Sweden with their newly reinstated triple-A grades.

Is the market's optimism at the top end justified, or mistakenly short-sighted?

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Spanish credit now 10th worst globally; UK and USA recovering?

According to CMA Datavision's Q1 report on the sovereign credit insurance market, out today, Spain has just entered the top 10 most risky countries, with a 32% chance of default within five years. Far worse is Portugal, with a 60% 5-year default risk (beaten only by Cyprus, which is a new inclusion in CMA's tables).

More surprising is the market's favourable assessment of the USA, which has recovered its insurance-implied AAA rating, and the UK, now listed as the 6th least risky country. It would seem that the credit insurance traders have bought the good news stories, in the face of continuing pessimism from a number of other economic commentators.

Norway, last quarter the only nation to have an implied AAA rating, retains pride of place, followed by the USA, Switzerland and Sweden with their newly reinstated triple-A grades.

Is the market's optimism at the top end justified, or mistakenly short-sighted?

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Voting reform and campaign contributions: a modest proposal

In the UK, political parties are discussing restrictions on campaign contributions. There is also concern at the declining numbers of people bothering to vote at all - a trend particularly noticeable among those aged under 40.

I suggest we:

(a) ban all financial contributions to political parties
(b) do not fund the parties from public monies
(c) remove the Inheritance Tax exemption for legacies to parties
(d) impose a duty on all mainstream media - including newspapers and political journals - to report without bias on all political matters - and make it work better than the BBC does
(e) change the pattern of General Elections - instead of a big hoo-ha once every five years, often influenced unduly by events shortly prior to Polling Day, let us have every year a ballot in one-fifth of all constituencies
(f) ban all political advertising - let each party and each prospective MP give a clear explanation of their plans and promises, on one common website. The entries should remain up for inspection for at least 5 years, so that voters can check the record before voting again
(g) institute a system of Swiss-style policy referenda, whereby if enough people sign the petition, the proposal must be put to people's vote. In Switzerland the minimum is 100,000 requests, proportionately in the UK it would be around 800,000
(h) recognise the present franchise is failing, but rather than coerce or bull***t the young into voting, embrace the reality and switch from one-person-one-vote to one-pound-one-vote. Each elector gets to vote only in the constituency where they live, but can buy as many votes as they wish - credit or debit card machines could easily be installed in voting booths. Let it be a tax on political enthusiasm - all proceeds to HMG

Any more ideas for plain-packaging the political system?

Urgent need for UK consumers to review pensions and investments

Changes on their way mean that it's high time to review your insurance - and pensions.

Gender-neutrality law to increase costs for both men and women

By 21st December this year, the UK insurance industry will have to comply with the EU Gender Directive, which insists that men and women must be treated the same when setting rates. Up to now, by and large:

• women tend to pay less for car insurance (typically, safer driver behaviour than men's) and life insurance (on average, women live longer than men)
• men tend to get better annuity rates when taking benefits from their pensions, and pay less for income insurance

You might think that the fair thing to do, where gender-related pricing is concerned, is "meet in the middle", but that means the insurance company takes the risk that it may attract more business from the gender that will ultimately cost them more in payouts. So it could well be that the policy adopted will be to "level-up" premiums.

Time to get a product with guaranteed (i.e. fixed) premiums?

Taxation of life companies likely to increase premiums

But there's another change that will affect premiums, and it's to do with tax. Until now, life companies have been able to offset some of their insurance costs against gains on their investment business; this will stop from 1st January next year, so insurance premiums will no longer be subsidised by investment profits in this way. Actuaries have told HM Treasury (PDF) that this could raise premiums on some term insurances by around 10%.

Time to get a product with guaranteed (i.e. fixed) premiums?

Spouse cover and contracted-out pensions: better options now available

From April 6, 2012 the law on pensions has changed. Up to now, if you were married and some of your personal pension was built up using money from contracting-out of State top-up pensions (SERPS/S2P), that part of your pension fund had to provide a continuing income for your spouse if you died before him/her. This restriction has now been removed.

This means:

• you can have a bigger pension income for yourself, if you opt not to include spouse protection (it may be that your spouse already has good pension benefits of his/her own), but alternatively...
• if you prefer, you can IMPROVE spouse protection - before April 6, the spouse pension based on contracted-out monies HAD to drop to 50% of the income you were getting; now, it can be anything from 0% - 100% of yours.

For men who want a single-life annuity, this may also be a window of opportunity to get a better rate, before the gender-neutrality law comes into effect in December.

That said, there is also the question of what may happen on the stockmarkets (quite possibly affecting the value of your pension fund, unless you're in cash), and the bond markets (which influence annuity rates).

Time to review when you want to take your pension, what it's invested in at the moment, and how you ultimately intend to take the benefits?

I suggest you contact your adviser soon!

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Urgent need for UK consumers to review pensions and investments

Changes on their way mean that it's high time to review your insurance - and pensions.

Gender-neutrality law to increase costs for both men and women

By 21st December this year, the UK insurance industry will have to comply with the EU Gender Directive, which insists that men and women must be treated the same when setting rates. Up to now, by and large:

• women tend to pay less for car insurance (typically, safer driver behaviour than men's) and life insurance (on average, women live longer than men)
• men tend to get better annuity rates when taking benefits from their pensions, and pay less for income insurance

You might think that the fair thing to do, where gender-related pricing is concerned, is "meet in the middle", but that means the insurance company takes the risk that it may attract more business from the gender that will ultimately cost them more in payouts. So it could well be that the policy adopted will be to "level-up" premiums.

Time to get a product with guaranteed (i.e. fixed) premiums?

Taxation of life companies likely to increase premiums

But there's another change that will affect premiums, and it's to do with tax. Until now, life companies have been able to offset some of their insurance costs against gains on their investment business; this will stop from 1st January next year, so insurance premiums will no longer be subsidised by investment profits in this way. Actuaries have told HM Treasury (PDF) that this could raise premiums on some term insurances by around 10%.

Time to get a product with guaranteed (i.e. fixed) premiums?

Spouse cover and contracted-out pensions: better options now available

From April 6, 2012 the law on pensions has changed. Up to now, if you were married and some of your personal pension was built up using money from contracting-out of State top-up pensions (SERPS/S2P), that part of your pension fund had to provide a continuing income for your spouse if you died before him/her. This restriction has now been removed.

This means:

• you can have a bigger pension income for yourself, if you opt not to include spouse protection (it may be that your spouse already has good pension benefits of his/her own), but alternatively...
• if you prefer, you can IMPROVE spouse protection - before April 6, the spouse pension based on contracted-out monies HAD to drop to 50% of the income you were getting; now, it can be anything from 0% - 100% of yours.

For men who want a single-life annuity, this may also be a window of opportunity to get a better rate, before the gender-neutrality law comes into effect in December.

That said, there is also the question of what may happen on the stockmarkets (quite possibly affecting the value of your pension fund, unless you're in cash), and the bond markets (which influence annuity rates).

Time to review when you want to take your pension, what it's invested in at the moment, and how you ultimately intend to take the benefits?

I suggest you contact your adviser soon!

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Plain packaging for political parties: the debate continues

How it might look:

Is there a limit to wealth inequality?

What would happen if one person in the USA finally owned ALL its wealth?

Not possible, I suppose, because two of the three functions of money would be impossible: there would be nothing to act as a medium of exchange, or as a unit of account, until the omni-owner started to spend. And why would he spend? He would already own everything. Having no property, everyone else would be a slave.

So what is the theoretical maximum degree of financial inequality? And how close are we to that point?

Source: http://aattp.blogspot.co.uk/2012_01_01_archive.html

Is this why the stockmarkets are stalling - there's not much wealth left to transfer to the upper crust, and what there is, the middle class are desperate to hang onto? Is that why, according to Tyler Durden, there's $8.1 trillion in cash holding off from investment - the rich won't put it back in unless they can pull out again at a profit, and the rest don't want to fall for the trick?

Why Britain is utterly, terminally stuffed

I live in Birmingham (UK), where our car industry was taken over first by the Germans and then (partially, though they also tried to raid us for other paperwork and designs that weren't part of the deal) by the Chinese. More could have been saved earlier, but the Rover crisis came to a head as the then Labour Government, facing re-election, chickened out of accepting a venture capitalist plan from Alchemy, since this would mean admitting that the plant had to shrink. The politicians lied that the land the factory was built on couldn't be used for housing and retail, because of ground pollution; now, the land has been cleared for exactly those purposes. Trust the British Labour Party to betray workers in order to get workers' votes.

We have also recently seen philanthropic chocolate makers Cadbury's fall into American hands (a company headed by a lady who reminds me of the frightening nurse in Mel Brooks' "High Anxiety"). And HP (for Houses of Parliament, ironically) Sauce has been bought by the US (Heinz), production has been transferred to the Netherlands and the factory here has closed.

Birmingham looks different, these days.

In today's Daily Mail, Alex Brummer paints the bigger picture of the national garage sale that is UK plc. Company directors, bankers and hedge funds have all made out like bandits (to use a Matt Taibbi expression) and the UK government has been happy to let them do it, cheered by the prospect of short-term revenue and the illusion of economic prosperity as the new rich shovelled cash into the stockmarket after buying up the best bits of London and the South-East. Brummer traces the Dolorous Stroke back to the Tories in 1979 (Chancellor Howe's relaxation of foreign investment rules) and 1986 (the financial services sector's Big Bang). Trust the British Conservative Party to betray the middle and aspirant working classes in order to get their votes.

The downside of this prolonged boss' jolly is the loss of future income to overseas interests, the withering of our patent base (now 39% foreign owned) and R&D activity, the decline in industrial skills and, inevitably, our country's ultimate ruination.

Elsewhere in the same edition of the Mail (a paper hated by bien-pensant comedians) is the reported displeasure of Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond (I sometimes call our cat I-Lick-Salmon) at a spoof in the Economist magazine, which suggests (as I have long thought) that independence for Scotland is a romantic and economically self-destructive dream. It's tempting to think that the rest of the nation would be financially better off without Salmond's land, but that's the same sort of flawed short-term analysis as the one Brummer describes. It's clear, is it not, that the EU plan for splitting and regionalizing the UK is a sort of long-brewed adolescent revenge for owing us their hastily cobbled-together postwar democracies, and they're now trying to haul us out of the jollyboat and onto the deck of the Euranic just after the funny-money (read Bill Black's latest) iceberg has slit their hull.

Action points:

• don't depend on the State being able to maintain public sector and State pensions in future
• prepare your children for life and a career abroad
• if you're young enough, consider leaving before the social compact falls apart

Syria and the Great Game

If all you go by is the radio and TV news here, President Assad is a bad man. This has only been discovered recently, which is why it's taken us until now to do something about it. Fortunately our friends in Turkey are joining in, and Gulf States are generously funding the struggle of the oppressed against him. The TV is showing us exciting but also horrid footage of things going bang, rifles being fired; please make it all go away so everyone can be nice to each other again, we say.

Or is this part of a bigger picture? Russia resurgent, China emergent, America's problems getting urgent. Oil getting short, allies being bought, civil wars being fought in non-aligned states.

Great nations are foolish if they take each other on directly - the cost is so high economically and socially that the ruling classes risk overthrow from within. What you do instead is draw other countries into your team, and if their leaders insist on standing apart, you undermine them so they'll be replaced with someone more compliant.

Isn't that what happened in Libya, and is going on in Syria? Maybe Tunisia and Egypt, too?

Kill people and save money: a libertarian proposal

Day after day, I read the same thing: government is evil per se, and we shouldn't have to pay any taxes. The old and poor are a burden on the rest of us.

So are the sick and disabled, but the time for overt Nazism isn't quite yet. However, we are making encouraging progress.

Since 1967, some 7 million unborn British children have been killed. Some of them on grounds of "serious handicap" such as having a cleft palate (shame they didn't get Lord Byron, with his club foot) - but the overwhelming majority of abortions are simply because the child is inconvenient. That's against the law as it stands, but who cares?

This old-style-Oriental solution to problems (Stalin would surely have approved) is weighted towards the lower social classes so, as the authors of "Freakonomics" pointed out, it has a beneficial side effect, in that we're executing common criminals before their career can begin. And compared with the cost of arrest, trial, appeal, imprisonment etc a little fake-objective "pregnancy advice" and a swish of the scalpel are so much cheaper, quicker and final. After all, since 1965 we can't kill adult criminals and despite what Parliament was promised in return for giving up the death penalty, "life" doesn't mean life in jail except in the rarest of cases.

Like so much other bad law and practice, self-deception, poor logic and inconsistency bedevil our approach. Apparently it's okay to terminate a foetus under 24 weeks old, because it doesn't feel pain and is therefore not alive; so with the prior use of a really good anaesthetic, we could make inroads on the prison population right now.

We're doing this already for the sick and depressed, but first we have to send them to Switzerland, sometimes accompanied by a popular children's author who lards his work with references to death and total spiritual annihilation. However, the courts are winking indulgently at those who top their relatives here and are now paving the way for advance carte blanche so the doctors involved won't be prosecuted.

Really, criminals are the glaring exception to our enthusiasm for the short way with those who trouble us.

And after that, we can have a really good go at all those born with deformities (not just the ones whose mum doesn't want them), plus cripples, orphans etc.  Worldwide, there's something like 5 million new cases of people permanently disabled each year because of road accidents alone, so there's much to do. And we could always reinstitute forcible sterilization, which was a policy in many countries but which the Germans did so much more thoroughly, as they do everything. In short, let us off anyone who costs more in taxes than he's paying.

Yes, death is not the end, it's the answer. After we have rid ourselves in this way of all social and fiscal burdens, we shall have a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Those who still have life will have liberty, and only libertarians will live.

And money, dear money, the fount and origin of happiness, the fifth element that creates and sustains all, will be safe at last.

Greece has defaulted - Dagong

Chinese credit rating agency Dagong has re-rated Greece to "D":

"The Greek government bond exchange action in March 2012 violates the will of the holders of the Greek law governed bonds, and inflicts substantial losses to them. Accordingly, Dagong determines that the Greek government has defaulted."


Emperor's new clothes, and all that.

Fun with sport

Following the suspension of the Boat Race, what other events - sporting or otherwise - would YOU like to see interrupted by The Swimmer?

Thick as a brick? No, much thicker: how Samantha Brick mugged Daily Mail readers

All that fuss about Samantha Brick's April 3 article, "Why Women Hate Me For Being So Beautiful". Mail readers obviously didn't do any research at all before keying in their bilious online comments, for if they had they'd have come across one of hers from almost exactly a year ago: "I'll always be that fat girl: Samantha Brick has always obsessed about her weight... all because she was a chubby child".

The latest, controversial hit was published two days too late, for it's made fools out of millions.This is about beauty versus brains, and brains win hands down every time.

What clever Brummie (and there's another preconception exploded) Samantha has discovered is what Malcolm MacLaren said years ago: you can make much more exploiting yourself than exploiting others. I'd like to know who at the Mail gave her the space to do this one, but I guess it's enough of an obvious coat-trailer to justify publication on its own meretricious merits, without having to speculate on the possible use of her feminine wiles at the workplace, delicious journalistic follow-up though that might be.

Can men do the same? You may care to copy and paste her article, and swap the sexes to make a comic spoof. The exercise is comically revealing, because male attractiveness is measured differently in a woman's eyes.  They say a woman is what she is, and a man is what he does. He does confidence, action, aggression  - like Lord Flashheart in the Blackadder series:  



... and again here (from about 4:07 in):



Traditionally, the strategy for women is to have a sponsor, and to be set in a context of focused admiration, as Roger Vadim did for Brigitte Bardot in the cinematic launch vehicle "And God created woman":



But a young, slightly chubbier in those days Madonna broke the mould - it became "look at me", not "look at her", though again it's be piquant to know the who and how behind getting her the film deal:



Like Madonna, what's smart about Brick is her use of brash self-assertion - and if she hasn't really got the confidence, she's faked it very well for the purposes of her piece. She's played it the man's way.

Good luck to her.

Patenting the debt bomb

It's only occurred to me today that Collateralized Debt Obligations might actually have been patented, and thanks to Google's patent search option here's one, by George H Butcher III, which he sold to Goldman Sachs. The application was filed in 2000, but the patent was finally granted in September 2007.

And here's one of the drawings:

I suppose they patent Ebola-derivative viruses, too.

Guaranteed HUGE gain for UK investors!

 A repeat of last year's opportunity, but even better: postage stamps without a stated face value represent a great buying opportunity.

"From 30th April First Class stamps will go up by 30.4% from 46p to 60p and that Second Class stamps will rise by 38.9% from 36p to 50p." - Economic Voice.

This is at a time when interest rates on variable-rate cash ISAs are 3% or less, so even allowing for the opportunity cost of leaving money in secure, tax-free deposits, you can make a rock-solid net gain of 26.6% - 34.8%.

Buy NOW (I just did) for this year's birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas - and all your business postage.

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash, and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

"Lockerbie bomber" Al-Megrahi "innocent"

Back in 2009 (see here, here and here), as the authorities prepared to release the so-called Lockerbie Bomber to return to Libya, ostensibly on compassionate grounds, I came across a blog by Scottish law professor Robert Black. The latter, together with Jim Swire (father of one of the victims) smelt a rat.

Some suspect that not only was the wrong man accused - the wrong country, even (the operation may have been Iranian) - but that there was a deliberate miscarriage of justice and a cover-up, and that Al-Megrahi was sent home to prevent a retrial that would blow the whole affair wide open.

Now (hat-tip: Ian Parker-Joseph) Scottish newspaper The Sunday Herald has published a 5-year-old, hitherto secret legal review of the case, which they say contains evidence that could well have led to Al-Megrahi's conviction being overturned. The link to the (slightly redacted) 800-page text is here.

This is a bad day for the reputation of the Scottish legal system, especially when (as Parker-Joseph does) one is tempted to rope in outstanding concerns about the 1996 Dunblane massacre and alleged child abuse victim Hollie Greig.

Time for a full public enquiry - no "safe pair of hands", please, no cripplingly narrow terms of reference, full power of subpoena, all evidence on oath and no prior indemnification against prosecution for perjury or other perversion of the course of justice. And later, possibly, a huge action for damages by Al-Megrahi and his family.

And then let's see what else needs to be cleared from the Augean stables.

Why the UK should join the EC immediately (look at St Kitts)