Melrose

Another longish gap since last posting. On a positive note, the latest opus has gone off to the publisher.

On the whole I've enjoyed the latest book and I'm dead keen on the subject matter. I definitely plan to take it further.

I've had two great walks since last posting and a trip to the beach (first sight of the sea since the holiday in Scotland).

Walk No.1 was from near the top of Blackdown to the village of Northchapel and back again via a different route. The only problem with this walk is that the way out includes a steep downhill and the way back an equally steep up. I wouldn't attempt it today because it's too hot but two weeks' ago was just perfect. The way out was a new route for me and the start was confusing. The National Trust have put wild cattle on the top of Blackdown to maintain the heathland habitat etc. etc. This means that there's a fence to stop the cattle walking off the hill. There are also several gates which - I now know - have no relation to public footpaths.

At Northchapel I had a pint of bitter in the Half Moon and read about Noah Mann, landlord, who was a famous early cricketer and famously tall. Apparently, he died young from carousing in his own inn and then falling into the embers on the hearth in the small hours.

The way back linked up with a previous walk from Lurgashall.

walk No. 2 This started from a lane just past the Lickfold Inn and went up to the top of Bexley Hill (close to the TV mast). Most of this walk was along the north (scarp) face of the hill and a lot of it was under the trees. According to the map it's all woodland up there but there's an extensive open area. This walk's refreshment was taken at the Duke of Cumberland at Henley. I chose Staropramen because it was a hotter day and took it outside to the pub's enormous garden.

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We've been digging up our crop of salad potatoes - very tasty - and yesterday I was picking the beginning of the blackcurrants (maybe beginning and middle would be more accurate).

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I've read a couple of good books lately. Firstly, Alan Furst's 'The Spies of Warsaw', which is another in his series of convincing espionage stories set in the late thirties. However, there was one anachronism; he refers to embassy staff in Singapore but surely Singapore was a colony at that time and would only have had consular staff.

The second good read was Stephen L Carter's 'Palace Council' which is a thriller woven around a group of influential mainly black Americans from the fifties to the seventies. This excellent, educative if you want to learn some American modern history but somewhat long.

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I don't have a lot to say about the political situation except that I hope that David Cameron and the political correspondents are able to pin the government down about its spending plans. The next election has got to be all about spending cuts and tax increases and complete openess about government finances.

It seems as if the Prime Minister sees vision as synonymous with spending to bring about change; but doesn't allow much room for everyone's native wit helping to bring things around.

Personally, the future looks more like an age of people being well versed in all sorts of interesting subjects and ideas, lots of creativity and rather less consumerism.

I've been completing my latest book which has meant a lot of research on one of the appendices. This week I'll be working on the index - much more straightforward.

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With the government looking seriously at proportional representation, I wondered briefly if my expectation (or desire) for a coaltition might come to pass. Gordon Brown would slip in a referendum about PR before Parliament is dissolved. He goes to the country with the message that he (and Alistair Darling) saved the country from a financial melt down. Naturally, the Labour Party don't come anywhere near an overall majority but they manage to convince the Liberal Democrats or the SNP that the Conservatives are ready to withdraw from the EU and scrap the NHS and, hey presto, we've a coalition government.

The only flaw with this scenario (in terms of likelihood) is that the media doesn't believe that there would be enough time to bat around the ideas about PR systems before the general election HAS to be called.

Actually, a coalition that leaves out Labour or the Conservatives is highly undesirable. It needs to be Labour AND the Conservatives to have enough nerve (and moral authority) to restore the country's finances.

Even allowing for the media's appetite for novelty, it's surprising how quickly the news has moved away from the reform of the MPs expenses and how quickly the parties can try to return to the normal business of throwing misleading slogans (about government cuts).

Another idea that seems, as a deliberate attempt to distract everyone, to have been thrown up for the media and the public to chase after is MP recall. It seems like a device that's designed to thwart the electorate. How would it work? If you happened to vote for the sitting MP and support his/her party, a recall would mean that either your preferred party is bound to lose (because its candidate is soiled goods) or the party of the sitting MP would sack him or her and put up another candidate - which doesn't seem very just. And what would happen if a PR system was in place; would all the MPs who had been elected in that constituency's previous election have to stand again?

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I took the time to read President Obama's Cairo speech and was duly impressed. Of course, it doesn't, of itself, change anything, although it was neat to have it on the same day as an election in Lebanon. Just how little difference it made has been demonstrated by President Ahmedinajed's post election clamp down. Although, it could be argued that progressive's in Iran were bolstered by President Obama's calls for a thaw in relations and that this made it more likely that Iranian conservatives would need to 'affect' the results of their own election.

The situation is highly problematic. Ahmadinajed (without the legitimacy of a properly conducted election to validate his position) will probably become more aggressive and keener to have nuclear weapons up and running. America and others condemning abuse of power in Iran will simply be confirming Ahmadinajed in all of his prejudices.

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Since last posting, we've had one visit to a garden (lake and rhodedendrons) and I've had one good walk. This started on a new path (to me) on the outskirts of Chiddingfold. The middle section was in Tugley Wood and Pear Tree Piece and the last section in Prestwick Copse and along Vann Lane. There's a large chunk of to the west of the A283 and down to the county boundary with hardly any rights of way so, what with the main road, walks to the south of Chiddingfold can't be made to join up with ones to west of the village.

We've been away for a two week holiday, which, with time out to get ready and more time making things ship-shape on our return, was the main reason for the long gap in posting and commenting. And, before going away there was an incident involving a dog and my right leg. This misadventure took up time unexpectedly. Thanks to A&E at the Royal Surrey the leg is now - five weeks' later - almost back to normal and hopefully the dog is wearing its new muzzle every time it goes out. It could all have been a lot worse than it was. In particular, dog-log contact time cannot have been more than about 10 seconds. I was supposed to have a 'speaking part' at church that day and my no-show triggered several kind enquiries, which bucked me up.

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The holiday was a return visit to the beautiful island of Coll in the Hebrides (previously visited and posted about almost exactly two years ago). We stayed in the same house next to the airfield. The airfield is now in use with scheduled flights twice a week and a few private planes landing and taking off while we were there - which we could watch from outside the kitchen door. We had plenty of sunny weather but rather windy with it. The main activity was visits to the superb beaches and we had opportunities to watch seals, basking sharks and an otter do their thing.

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The last time I posted I was expecting the Prime Minister's Youtube appearance to sort the allowances scandal (as it's since become). I can remember being more surprised at his choice of medium than shocked at the MPs' claims on expenses. Presumably, Gordon Brown was hoping to head off the public relations disaster that has overtaken Parliament and his government. And maybe David Cameron wouldn't play ball because he had a clearer strategy worked out for when the news broke.

Years ago I can remember someone pointing out that ninety per cent of morality was lack of opportunity; you can imagine the snigger that that remark produced in an audience. My first reaction was to think it was unduly cynical (the ninety figure is just pulled out of the ether, of course) but then you have to concede that the remark has more than a grain of truth in it.

A big part of the fix that the MPs find themselves in is that, collectively, they are responsible for failing to shut down the opportunity (that the current allowances regime allows them). As Martin Luther said, you can't stop birds flying overhead but you can stop them nesting in your hair.

That said, now we've all had an opportunity to digest the news about the MPs' claims, which were genuinely surprising, it seems that there is too much readiness to cast stones and there's a danger of a destructive mood being unleashed.

In my view the government has made the wrong call in planning to take away MPs' full responsibilityf for the future expenses regime. The MPs should be responsible for the kind of expenses system, the administration of the system and (on an individual basis) their own right use of the system and freedom of information should ensure that they fulfil all these responsibilities satisfactorily.

Overall, the government seems to have lost it since the scandal broke. There never has been a time when the government had so little to say for itself, not even in the last few months of the Major government. Then the mood that it was time for a change was well and truly harnessed by New Labour, but this time around it seems as if it's the British Constitution that's on sufferance.

The news that Nick Clegg was calling for the resignation of Alistair Darling gets close to the heart of Mr Brown's dilemma. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has coped well with the credit crunch on the whole and coping with the economic crisis is the only thing that the government has going for it at the moment. Without him, the government will probably crumble.

Apart from more revelations about how the allowances data was leaked and better insights into how the Fees Office went about its business the scandal itself has little more potential to affect the direction of change - the stones are as it were already rolling down the mountainside. It's what we already know that will decide how many 'heads will roll' and how soon a general election will be called. However, it's difficult to join up the expenses scandal with all the constitutional reforms that have been given an airing. How do the expenses relate to the abolition of the House of Lords or proportional representation? Nor does it seem like a good idea to have a referendum on something like PR at the same time as a general election; surely people need to know the voting system well before they use it.

Like most people it seems, my hope is for an autumn election.

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How come political and financial commentators have been so shocked by the 50 pence in the pound higher rate of income tax? Why do the same commentators keep on comparing it to the marginal rates of income tax that prevailed in the nineteen seventies? I remember reading an article by an elderly lady who grown up in an aristocratic household in the years before World War One (it may have been her take on the world of 'Upstairs, Downstairs' as it really was). One of her reminiscences was Papa's foul temper the day Lloyd George announced his 'People's Budget' and raised super tax to two shillings in the pound. Like Lloyd George's two shillings, Alistair Darling's 50 pence will be the thin end of the wedge and surely the commentators must have realised that more is to come. There's going to be more taxes AND spending cuts. The only alternative is runaway inflation. That's what the next government will need a mandate for and that's why the massive loss of authority on the part of the politicians is so dangerous.

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While away I spent more than the usual amount of time reading. This included George Soros's 'The Crash of 2008 '. This is both a highly interesting book and highly irritating one. The reason is that Soros has added four chapters since the Lehman Brothers stage of the crisis unfolded last autumn. He would have done better to have recast the book more radically when the extra material was added in.

That said, the main idea - that neither economists nor financiers can be objective about finance because what they say has an effect on what they're talking about - is full of possibilities and Soros is a thought provoking writer.

I'm still reading 'Rome & Jerusalem' by Martin Goodman, which as a study of the lead up to the Jewish revolt of AD 70. This is highly interesting but historians of ancient Rome have a lot of material to work on and this can make Roman history seem somewhat dense.

Finally, I enjoyed 'A blood Dimmed Tide' by Rennie Airth. Pre-war England seemed slightly over-idyllic but I'll certainly look out for the other stories in the series.

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Finally, how come the minor scandal over George Osborne and Lord Mandelson meeting Oleg Deripaska on his yacht or at his Corfu villa hasn't been gone over again now that he's involved in acquiring a share in Opel - Vauxhall?

Next time I post we'll probably be past the European elections but one good reason for treating the EU seriously is that it seems to be the only way to prevent the Russians from playing us off against each other.

I've been mulling a post for a few days but it's been a bit busy and we've been under the weather with some kind of virus.

I've had a couple of walks but in public access woodland (rather than commons). The first was a walk in a bluebell wood. This is an almost annual 'pilgrimage' for us because the place is so stunning. Last year we didn't make it because we were still getting back to normal after our Australia trip and days off and fine weather didn't coincide around the right time. To see bluebells it needs to be sunny and in the morning. This year the wood didn't let us down. I'll (try to) put up a photo to give you some idea.

That was a short wander, then on Thursday I went for a proper walk around Hambledon and saw a whole lot more bluebells. The route was the top leg of Vann Lane (nice and quiet that day), Prest Wood, Packford Farm, Lord's Copse (bluebells) and Hambledon Hurst. I saw and heard some hawks a couple of times; to high up to be sure but I think they may have been buzzards. There was a crow flying around - protecting its young maybe.

I had thought of making a detour for a drink at the Winterton Arms at Chiddingfold but I contented myself with a choc ice from Hambledon village shop instead.

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Gordon Brwon's announcemetn of radical changes to the allowances of MPs on Youtube has to be the greatest humiliation of the House of Commons for a long, long time.

Parliament and especially the Commons finds itself at the heart of a crisis. Instead of being the country's chief agency for improvement, for making things right, the Commons has become, if not 'the Problem', certainly one of the problems. And, ideally, trying to put it right ought to be one of the main debates of the 2010 genereal election - and the one after that, too, possibly.

The real answer to the question of what's wrong with Parliament doesn't relate to MPs' allowances in the main; it's that we're in danger of losing sight of how a representative democracy should work in the internet age. There's too much information zapping around for a single, non-internet institution like the Commons to keep up with. The YouTube announcement was a sign of the times. MPs have risen to the challenge by starting their own blogs and websites and no doubt political parties are busy trying to capture (record, interpret and mould) internet opinion but neither the parties nor the individual MPs have woken up to the need for a completely new model.

It's been recognised that issue politics have grown in importance in the last half a century. Although this has been at the expense of party programmes, there's been little debate about what this signifies for the British constitution.

In theroy it might be possible to replace MPS with some form of pure democracy taking advantage of the internet. the public may not dislike the MPs so much that they want to sweep them away entirely but full democracy over the internet is becoming a benchmarek that the Commons has to beat if representative democracy is going to stay in good health.

It's not easy to find hard evidence of the course of the Commons' decline but it is easy to sense it. The kind of grandstanding that you hear in Commons committees, some of it bullying and ugly, suggests men who are grasping for publicity and relevance - and they don't always seem on top of their brief either. In the Commons there are some great orators - Cameron and Hague come to mind first - but you don't hear 'catching' ideas very often. Quite a few MPs get broadcast coverage to comment on what their colleagues are up to and these ones often seem intelligent, personable and 'insightful', but talking on the radio or TV isn't their day job - it's time out as a media type.

Where MPs emoluments come into the picture is not just that exploiting the current system is very provoking for the rest of us. The way in which MPs are rewarded seems designed to disqualify them from important parts of their job. (You suspect that) their pensions make it difficult for them to understand the scale of the problem for ordinary people, owning two homes gives them a particular interest in the housing market and not many of them have the opportunity to understand public transport from the point of view of someone commuting for, say, three and half hours a day.

It's the lack of ideas in the Commons that is becoming the House's most serious weakness.

If pure democracy seems extreme, what presentative kind can the internet promote and what are the parties able to do to help or hinder that?

Part of the Commons' identity crisis has already begun to be worked out by proxy in the debate over the reform of the House of Lords, though, tellingly, the debate (and the reform) seems to have become stuck. Assuming that the House of Lords has to be elected, it seems obvious that only one house can be elected on the basis of a territorial franchise. At first glance it seems equally obvious that the Commons should be the chamber that represents the 'places' - as it has always been. But if the Commons is supposed to remain the real seat of power, does that still make sense? It mightbe time for a more dynamic system where (stage 1)the electorate chose the issues - and they wouldn't have to be the same issues each time; (stage 2)the candidates had to demonstrate they were a) competent to decide on the issues b) representing/leading substantial amounts of public opinion on the issues.

Maybe not but, as I said, more of a debate is needed.

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I'v been reading Niall Williams's 'Boy in the World' and greatly enjoyed it.

There's been no time for posting for over a fortnight; I've run into two deadlines and as well as having family commitments, there's been lots to do in the garden and to the outside of the house. There's still a lot to do but a start has been made.

The good effect of the G20 summit seems to have lasted, the stock markets haven't taken fright again (yet) and there are hopeful signs (five consecutive months of people's interest in house-buying increasing). Of course, the unwelcome consequences of the demonstrations are also rumbling on with the mobile phone film 'footage' of the police attacking the demonstrators and the public.

It's becoming clear that (relatively) new technology has more of a effect in undermining established powere structures than physical demonstrations. It's as if the establishment has become hell-bent on self-destruction by indiscretion - indiscrete e-mails, indiscrete expenses claims and indiscreet behaviour in front of the camera. The individual are having devastating effects but in reality the scope of the damage is much greater than those - more like a slow motion revolution. Powerful institutions and corporations are losing their 'cloaking' ability. It's a if great stone buildings have become steel and glass all of a sudden so that the public are able to look inside and see what's going on exactly.

On the whole this seems like a good thing. It could be destructive in a wasteful sense but on balance it looks as if it's going to empower ordinary outsiders. Authority's response is likely to incline to clamping down on internet freedom and freedom of information. In the immediate future the most potent reaction will probably relate to the importance of big corporations, public and private, as employers of thousands. One manifestation of their fight back seems to be rigid discipline within the ranks and harsh measures for any who step out of line. It'll be interesting to see if the institutions turn on one another or whether they close ranks.

Another interesting question hangs over the Prime Minister's attitude towards these institutions. He's seemed like someone who never questioned the way these big institutions were run.

The future of the big corporations is clouded because some of the social forces at work are having a slightly different effect. Damien McBride, for example, has been exposed by e-mails trickling through to where they were never meant to go. But he couldn't be said to be engaged in typical corporate behaviour and nor does his political adviser role fit into any of the normal corporate castes. It looks as if some of the staff at No. 10 have been allowed until now to behave as if they worked for some sort of weird PR outfit, and it seems clear that the Prime Minister had to take some responsibility for that - as he now has.

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I've been struggling to find anything good to read lately, especially in the fiction department. I started Elmore Leonard's 'Up in Honey's Room' but although the dialogue was superb, i couldn't be bothered to wait to find out what happens. Instead I've fallen back on John Masters's 'The Deceivers', one of his Savage sequence of Indian historical novels. This one's set in the 1820s and has some interesting ideas about setting aside due process by going 'under cover' in order for a deeper justice to prevail.

I've also been reading 'Nudge' by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. This has a great idea - nudging people to use freedom to behave wisely - but nearly all the examples are American ones. I couldn't be bothered to transpose them into a UK context, so that's going back to the library unfinished, too.

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Finally, it was my birthday on Tuesday. We went to the theatre at Chichester to see 'Hay Fever'. Very enjoyable.

Posting again after a longer than usual gap, not because I've been away; just busy.

Some kind of watershed in the recession seems to have been reached; a point when matters could move in one of several directions.Saturday's demonstration in central London captured the mood of the moment with the calls for help for those affected by the recession AND to combat global poverty AND for progress in combatting climate change. There were uglier tendencies, too, such as the calls for bankers to be burned or hung from lamp posts and the support for the window smashing at Sir Fred Goodwin's home in Edinburgh.

Politicians seem to be at their own cross roads with the talk of division between the fiscal stimulus camp and its opponents and the talk of the G20 summit being a 'damp squib'.

Presumably, we'll have to wait until Gordon Brown and Mervyn King are both out of office (and some) to find out everything that's been going on behind the scenes between the two of them. The media's coverage of the Governor of the Bank of England's 'No' (to fiscal stimulus) has left a lot of unanswered questions. Amazingly, the media seem to have made too little of the extraordinary timing of the Governor's remarks and of the possibility that the Chancellor and he may have ganged up on the Prime Minister.

while the 'ganging up' seems undeniable, there is always the possibility that Mervyn King waited until the Prime Minister was out of the country because they both knew that, while ruling out a further fiscal stimulus would be humiliating for Gordon Brown, they also knew that public expectations had to be trimmed. Once he was out of the country, at least the Prime Minister was able to get away without having to answer the Governor's case in full. Whatever, the facts about the timing, the Prime Minister must have known before last week that further fiscal stimulus ran the danger of provoking a Sterling crisis.

So what has been Mr Brown's plan? In part he seems to have been workig to weaken the effect of European opposition to fiscal stimulus. Since the French and the Germans didn't want to pay for more stimulus and much of Europe, the UK included, couldn't afford one anyway, maybe Gordon Brown was just trying to make it old hat and to prevent the Europeans from trying to make the matter more contentious than it needs to be. The end result of Europe getting bolshie about stimuli would be to make it easier for the US to become more protectionist - and there's enough danger of that.

If Gordon Brown can achieve a repeat commitment to combat protectionism together with a restructuring of the IMF along with more funding for the same to help developing countries, he'll have beaten the 'benchmark' 1933 London conference. he can't really claim the credit for it but some signs of trust on the part of China that the US won't try to inflate its way out of its huge deficit would also help.

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Gordon Brown has been leading the country on a wing and a prayer for a long time now. He's benefited enormouslyform haing 'steady' Alistair Darling as Chancellor and for the scandals affecting Jackie Smith, Tony McNulty and Lord Myners and now from the Conservative Party's divisions over Inheritance Tax and the EU. In view of the immense loss of wealth across the country as result of plummeting house prices and shrinking share portfolios, it seems odd that the Conservative should be worried that the threshold for IT isn't rising.

Lord Myner's political career has become a kind of bell wether of the changing climate. Only a year or 18 months ago his businesses with offshore holdings might have drawn some criticism but the media would have thought they were unexceptionable. I'm still inclined to think that he's one of the good guys and to cut him some slack over the Fred Goodwin pension on account of his being new to his ministerial post and having a lot on his plate at the time. He's done good work on improving the UK's financial system when he was in business and he should have a lot to offer. It's intriguing that other politicians seem to believe automatically that Sir Tom McKillop's version of events surrounding the Goodwin pension must be the correct one. Although I don't actually read the Guardian (of which Lord Myners was the boss), it seems unlikely that any of the rest of the UK's media are completely spotless when it comes to offshore funds, non-dom status etc.

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I've had no time for any long walks since last posting but have made progress on the new veg patch. found some frog spawn in the watering can the other day. I checked on the Internet about what to do with it and found a helpful thread on Mumsnet on just this topic. So yesterday, we took the watering can round to the nearest pond. When I came to carry the can, I realised that the frog was still in there with the spawn so she's been moved to the pond, too.

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We borrowed the dvd of 'The Counterfeiters' on Saturday. It's all about an ace counterfeiter, Sal Sorowitsch, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and made to fake pound and dollar notes. Not bad but it was a little frustrating plotting the moral dilemma of Jews assisting the Nazi war effort when the main character (a long term 'professional' counterfeiter)plays his cards so close to his chest. Also, a scene of Bank of England officials wondering where all the money is coming from would have been good.

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Having said that we're at a watershed, in just the last two days the signs have been good. UK consumer confidence rose slightly in February, apparently, there are signs that the housing market has passed its lowest point and the stock market has improved. In fact, until this week, investors seem to have been stuck in a swamp high up the mountain with huge amounts of cash surging in and out of UK bank shares almost every day.

It's difficutl to interpret David Cameron's apology. My first reaction was to be pleased; the Conservative Party have been pretty dreadful in opposition and some recognition of that is a good fresh start. Who knows, they may apologise for failing to oppose the invasion of Iraq next, or for failing to make more of a fuss about extraordinary rendition.

The media's predictable conclusion about the apology was that it was designed to embarrass Gordon Brown. The commentators couldn't say this outright because they don't know it to be true - but the implication was pretty clear. Curiously, the commentators seem to have concluded that the Prime Minister will be embarrassed, but David Cameron doesn't seem to be running any risk of being accused of opportunism for his apology.

Benjamin Disraeli is quoted as saying that those in public life shoud 'never complain, never explain'. I thought this was a helpful principle for school life when I first heard it. In a way, David Cameron has flouted that principle but Gordon Brown has continued to abide by it. I'm not sure why Disraeli worked with his 'never explain' rule but one reason might have been that, in the tumult of events, you can never truly explain; likewise, it's difficult to know what an apology truly means. Full scale admissions of culpability - 'resigning matters' in politics - are one thing but more generalised apologies for 'messing up' don't necessarily help. For example, if a political party makes mistakes (as it assuredly will), presumably a primary cause of these arises from their desire to please the voters.

This leads on to interesting ground as far as the Conservative Party's first decade in opposition is concerned. Because the New Labout project ahd stolen the Conservatives clothes and were making themselves out to be the natural party of businessmen, the Conservative Party were in quandary - if they had stayed to true to their constitutional role, they would have questioned the wisdom of Labour's fiscal, financial and spending policies more and in so doing might have moved to the left of the government - sometimes. This might have seemed absurd but the alternative certainly didn't work out as a power gambit.

The real problem with apologies is that they don't really help to get to the bottom of the matter. The Conservatives can apologise for not being a very effective opposition and everyone can hope that they might try to do better. But, if the government were to apologise, they would need to tell us precisely which policies were the wrong ones. If they can't tell exactly what went wrong, the apology is certain to have one result; it'll set us all facing in another wrong direction. For instance, the government could apologise for bribing us with so much of our own money to keep us sweet after the invasion of Iraq but in fact now wouldn't be the best time to reverse that policy.

So David Cameron's apology looks fine as far as the Opposition's THINKING goes but I'm not at all sure that it's an example for the Prime Minister to follow. Now isn't the best time to start trumpeting the virtues of thrift. Alistair Dalring and Mervyn King would probably say that it would have been a good idea earlier in the decade but not for just now.

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Thrift is going to come up in the context of the G20 preparations, too. The US wants Europeans to spend more money to try to restart the global economy. the problem with that is that some countries can't afford to pump more money into their economies because investors are becoming leary of buying thie sovereign debt. Italy, Ireland, Greece and Austria seem to be in this bracket already. The UK Treasury is presumably concerned that it might end up in this unenviable position, too, even though we're outside the Euro zone. This problem with governments not being able to persuade anyone to buy their paper looks as if it has the potential to become the tragic flaw that causes the plans to combat depression unravelling. The Euro zone Europeans who still have credit need to agree to more money for the IMF to help East Europeans and countries like Greece.

In fact, they need to stand up for Barack Obama because the Americans really seem to be thrown off balance by what's happened to them and ready to protect themselves from East Asian imports.

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I was listening to Desmond Swayne on Broadcasting House this morning and he seemed to be suggesting that we should have some kind of national event to celebrate the homecoming from Iraq. He seems to have interpreted the outcry about the abusive placards displayed at the Luton march of the Royal Anglian Regiment as some kind of vindication of the invasion.

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No walk this week but lots of digging to prepare some rough ground for an extensio to the amount of home-grown vegetable growing this summer - chiefly potatoes, runner beans and tomatoes but also sprouts for next winter. I've also had a trip to the dentist to have a tooth out. This was last Wednesday but I still feel sore.

I've read one good book - Oleg Steinhauer's 'the Vienna Assignment' - about a trustworthy East European secret agent trying to get back into the good graces of his masters in an unnamed eastern bloc country. It's set in 1967. It's like (and likened to) Alan Furst's books but the hero is less of a 'camera'and more interesting from a moral perspective.

I’m not sure where go from here. The stock market is down a lot since the (relative) optimism about a share recovery around the New Year and fear in general just seems to keep on growing. Not much tlak of how stock markets are a leading indicator of economic recovery now. Yesterday’s Observer had a two page spread about the likelihood of various economic disasters coming to pass.

Lloyds Bank’s takeover of HBOS has –apparently – turned into a disaster. It seems as if Eric Daniels and Sir Victor Blank knew much less about the HBOS liabilities than anyone imagined – except, maybe, the government. The size of the Lloyds – HBOS insurance plan makes Lord Myners’ failure to stop Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension (the HBOS takeover and the government rescue of RBS were happening at roughly the same time) understandable.

These schemes for the government to insure the toxic assets of the banks give some more pointers to the scale of the economic crisis. The insurance scheme for Lloyds/HBOS alone would be enough to rehouse a city of 3 million (by buying them houses not by building them).

There are important questions that are not being answered such as how much of HBOS’s bad news was known by the bank when it asked it’s shareholders for more money in a rights issue last summer. Presumably, the bank must have had information to hand about how many of the bond issuers of bonds it held were defaulting on the interest payments. Clever people were saying as far back as 2007 that regulators and central banks needed to know more about the toxic debt situation and that pressure should be brought to bear on bankers to make them divulge it. But as far as a large part of the media is concerned toxic debt might as well be the Bermuda triangle or some kind of freak storm.

Clearly, the Treasury and the Board of Lloyds have been doing some hard bargaining and it looks as if the bank has had the worst of it. Does this mean that Eric Daniels and Sir Victor Blank will be forced to resign?). What made the government negotiate so hard when their very success looks like a failure – the public is even more convinced that HBOS is bad news and Lloyds has been virtually nationalised. The most likely answer WAS that the government thought that it needed to look tough. However, now that it’s acquired a controlling shareholding in Lloyds, it looks as if it was only being tough with itself.

In fact it looks as if Eric Daniels and Sir Victor Blank will stay. The shareholders they let down (if they let them down) are no longer in control. Why they wanted the merger to go ahead is a puzzle. Granted that events moved so quickly that Mr Daniels didn't have tome to go through the accounts as thoroughly as he would have liked but they must have realised that HBOS was on the table because it was in dire straits. So the argument that they didn't realise that they needed to do their homework on HBOS all over again seems unconvincing.

Whether the government was a tough negotiator because it needed to look tough or because of the danger of the toxic assets breaking Lloyds, the only conclusion to draw is that these are desperate times for the government. Coupled with the comments on quantitative easing to the effect that it’s the last throw of the dice for recovery plans, it looks as if we could be closer to a political crisis, as well as an economic one, than we yet realise. In a few months’ time we may look back on Lloyds’ talks with HMG and be amazed that they received so little coverage.

In fact, to return to the detail of the Lloyds asset insurance plan, the Chancellor of Exchequer did say something along the lines that the plan was a vital step in clearing up banks’ balance sheets and getting them lending again, so maybe the worst of the crisis is over. Unfortunately, not many seem to have taken up that tune.

Perversely, it may seem, I wouldn’t particularly blame the government if there was a political crisis. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are, as it were, attempting to fly when air pressure is very volatile, so some turbulence is to be expected. The Conservatives don’t sound as if they would be happy or prepared to take over the government tomorrow and a lot of the business and financial comment reads as if no one has any ideas save a return to normal at some unspecified date in the future. That Observer feature on the crisis getting worse talked about the effect of slumping share prices on pension funds and a lost decade for shareholders – meaning that share prices (and unit trusts) are back where they were 10 years ago. This seems like sloppy thinking, though. Investors will have lost out if they hadn’t sold any shares before the price fall last year but a lot of shares will have been sold – that’s why the price fell. Of course, a lot of the selling was done by the undeserving super-rich but some of the shares would have been sold by more ordinary people paying for weddings, special holidays or annuities (so hardly just money down the drain).

There are two points that follow on from this. Firstly, the sell-off of 2008 must mean that there are substantial piles of cash sitting around, waiting for investment conditions to pick up. Secondly, and more importantly, societies that have seen real destruction, can climb back relatively quickly. To take an extreme example, Germany in 1946 was in ruins literally and ideologically but within the 25 years the situation had been transformed. Moreover, in some ways the journey towards wealth was probably better than the arrival. Likewise, the current situation needs creativity; just bemoaning financial losses is exactly the way to see the problem to ensure that solutions won’t come to light.

Now that the G20 summit is getting close, it’s beginning to look as if the best policy would be to expect nothing, so as to leave some space for a pleasant surprise. Apparently, the US government and regulators have indicated that they don’t think changes in regulation are the top priority. This makes sense but the Europeans may decide that the US (and Chiina) can do all the kick-starting and they’ll come in later.

If the US and the EU are going to try to close down the tax havens, they might get around to trying to re-introduce fixed exchange rates – maybe not in April but further down the road; that really would be the end of globalisation as we know it.

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I’ve been on one excellent walk since last posting. This was a walk around Brook more or less, including using the only footpath to cross the Witley Park estate for the first time and a walk across Holmen’s Grove. Apart from a stretch on the A286 it makes a good round walk – if rather long. that was 10 days ago.

Last week I had a short walk at Tilford – after very tasty asparagus and goats cheese risotto at the Barley Mow. This walk runs parallel with the last stretch of the northern branch of the River Wey to Tilhill House before turning back towards the village.

Long time working but today's post will include something on the following:

1. Coalition government
2. The media
3. Embezzlement
4. The station
5. Byzantium

Tuesday's news about disagreement in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP)over the part privatisation of the Royal Mail made cooperation between the government look more imminent than I had expected. A couple of days later the possibility of the government being rescued by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats looks less likely but it set me to thinking some more about how a coalition might come about.

I can't see the discipline of the PLP breaking down completely because the government AND the rank and file both want to keep on spending huge amounts of money - and that, to me, does seem the right way to go or a while. In fact, theoretically the BIG SPEND could carry on for as long as there were no financial interests with sufficient clout to call a halt to it by announcing that they had lost confidence in the government, the UK economy and Sterling.

Right now there don't seem to be any obvious candidates - powerful financial interests that are inclined to give the Uk economy yet another kick. Jim Rogers expressed a pessimistic view of Sterling a few weeks back but it's not clear that talking down the currency will do any investors any good now.(It might if there was a real panic as money would flood out looking for safety someplace else and whatever it went into would benefit. At the moment that doesn't see to be happening; the low value of Sterling is causing investors to stick with cash or invest at home. As a result the London stock market seems to be doing slightly better than the US one.)

The likely flash point in this benign scenario of the UK government(and others)spending their way out of recession and collaborating with one another for the greater good is some kind of global shortage. This could be an oil shortage triggered by some conflict in the Middle East - though that seems unlikely. Alternatively a food shortage great enough to give a really big boost to the cost of living might be the spark. Any event causing a spike in inflation would cause a real flight from weak currencies and then spend, spend, spend would have to be reined in. That would trigger a political crisis (pretty quickly) and a coalition government would start to look a lot more likely.

Earlier today I was reading another doom scenario that involved the Chinese refusing to buy sovereign debt from Eurozone countries whose finances are in bad shape (like Italy and Greece). This would lead to a Eurozone crisis and a sharp fall in the value of the Euro. I think this would be a dollar shortage crisis instead of commodity shortage crisis. It wouldn't do the UK any good either as there would be a sharp drop in the demand for London hotel accommodation, whisky, shortbread and other items we export.

This is all scare-mongering in a way but the point is that the individual countries and nations collectively need to work really hard at making sure these things don't get out of control. This takes us back to the idea that the government has too much to watch out for to be able to indulge in normal party politics.

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One of the surprising trends of the last few months is just how negative the media have turned out to be about what's happening to the economy. There's a lot of sober analysis that's helpful but on the whole objectivity has flown out of the window.

Another feature of news coverage in 2009 has been the media's lack of interest in what's going on (and going wrong)everywhere else. The hearings of the Treasury Select Committee and news about Sir Fred Goodwin's pension may be interesting but they tell us precious little about how the UK is going to get out of this mess - recovery and stimulus packages in China or America tell us more. And protests in Eastern Europe show us more about the shape of things to come.

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We've been mesmerised by the Madoff and Stanford scandals but they don't really tell us a lot about what the future holds. JK Galbraith in his book on the 1919 crash pointed out that embezzlment(s) came to light after bubbles burst because fraud was easier to hide when money was easy.

Accountability works best as a check rather than punishment.

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No walk this week so far but one item of local news is the car park at the local station has been extended. The station is about 13 minutes walk away or 10 minutes from the edge of the village. Consequently, there are relatively few people who can conveniently walk there - the road has street lamps and a (very narrow) pavement but it's also liable to floods in wet weather.

Recently, I had occasion to park in the car park at lunchtime but discovered the cheap rate for a ticket only started at 4 pm (instead of 10 am)and the cost of an ordinary car parking ticket had gone up to £4.50. This means that most people who want to catch a train to Guildford in the middle of the day are paying as much to park a car as for a cheap day return ticket.

Clearly, it's worthwhile for Network Rail to make the car park as big as they can though whether there are that many more folk who can afford to use it is another matter. It doesn't look as if the car park extension has gone quite according to plan. A four foot high bank has been tarmac-ed over and markings painted over the top but at present there are plastic barriers to stop you using this section, presumably because it's too steep to drive up.

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The train ride was actually to go and see the Byzantium Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Interesting stuff but rather gloomy setting. The best items were the humble glazed pots with a peacock motif. The valuable Christian works didn't appeal so much; it seemed the artists and craftsmen were just too sure they knew what was what so I ended up feeling crowded out of the spiritual space.

Probably a fairly brief post after a long day's writing.

I've been watching the Bloomberg page with the FTSE 100 on it today to see what happened to Lloyds Bank. It carried on going down first thing this morning and then started rising so that for quite a lot of the day it was the day's top riser. Now it's started falling again and, last time I looked, it was the index's biggest loser.

I was taken by surprise by the massive sell off on Friday. After all, what's £1.5 billion of losses for a modern banker? In fact, in the case of Lloyds it was about 10% of its market value at friday lunchtime. Hopefully, this talk of Lloyds' superior and stricter valuation method (compared to HBOS's) is true but they could have done with preparing the ground for the announcement.

My view is that the government shouldn't take Lloyds over but, of course, we all now know that things can be much more dire than we realise. incidentally, the current government in general and Gordon Brown in particular have ben given a lot of stick for not doing enough to protect final salary pension schemes. The Lloyds/HBOS merger could be another nail in the final salary coffin if it doesn't come right because in effect Lloyds TSB shareholders stepped in to save the government from having to take over HBOS outright and most of those shares are in the hands of pension funds and life assurance companies (presumably).

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After all the gloomy news over the weekend, it's beginning to look like the politicians haven't quite risen to the enormity of the challenge facing them. True, Ed Balls has warned us that the economic situation is the most serious in a hundred years and we can assume that he wasn't completely off message. On the other hand, the Treasury Select Committee's interrogation of the bankers last week didn't shed much light on possible ways forward. Apologies, sincere or not, really don't cut it as a solution to the problems the world faces now. And even Mervyn King is saying that the government can't start saving revenue now, which is what the Conservatives appear to want.

Aside from the fact that no one can remember the Conservative Party minding about banking models before 2008, the underlying problem is that the UK's political establishment don't seem to realise that public don't entirely believe that there's enough talent among all the parties to sort out all our difficulties. They need to start thinking that the alternative to the present government should possibly be a national government.

Although, I don't believe the blame game is going to get us very far, I do see one exception to this. The Tories shouldn't be taking too much heart from Gordon Brown's falling popularity; the fact of the matter is that popularity is really what's needed now. Everyone can all enjoy moaning about the Prime Minister but the important thing is the belief that he and the Chancellor aren't in a panic.

Mention of a coalition government brings to mind wing collars and pince nez, appeasement and failure to help Republican Spain. In particular Labour politicians see it as a wilderness period. However, it also saw the beginning of successful rearmament and a long period of above trend investment in industry.

If UK politicians and their counterparts in other democratic countries don't work together more, not only will they not have enough collective wisdom to sort out the economic problems but they won't have the capacity to face down (or merely solve)threats from abroad either.

The likelihood is that we won't see a coalition government but the main political parties should at least act as if it was a sensible next step.

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The same need for working together is evident in the US, too. Tim Geithner's plan has come in for a great deal of criticism but adversarial politicking doesn't seem to be the right environment for the clever ideas to rise to the top.

My own view is that the federal government should just guarantee everyone's mortgage payments against the threat of unemployment. that would remove a lot of the fear that's paralyzing America and solve a big proportion of the toxic asset/debt problem. It also gets around the trust issues that come up if plans to insure the banks against their toxic assets or have a 'bad bank' buy them are considered. Of course, there are different trust issues but they involve ordinary people rather than bankers.

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I've had one good walk, in the vicinity of Chiddingfold. Very pleasant but also very muddy. It connected two walks I've had previously.

On Saturday we took off to the beach which was great. The vehicle access to West Wittering is going to close for road repairs today, for 3 weeks, so we were glad we didn't postpone our visit for another week. While we were there we saw what appeared to be a German Shepherd club having a communal walkies - a very odd sight - like a tribe heading off to celebrate the solstice.

Sadly, the Squirrel Inn at Hurtmore, great for beer and grub, has closed all of a sudden; I'm still trying to find out what happened. The Wood Pigeon at Wormley has also closed but longer ago, I believe.