Not sure about the contents of this post as I start but it will include the following at least:

1. The sad state of the Labour Party
2. The economy
3. More on Afghanistan
4. Personal news

Having voted Labour only a few times in the last 30 years, I can’t say I’m devastated by their current travails. This 10p tax band affair seems to have been an accident waiting to happen. Credit should be given to Gordon Brown for turning out for a ‘Today Programme’ interview at a time like this. It seemed that Tony Blair disappeared off the airwaves for a good part of his premiership.

However, the credit is awarded for courage and perseverance rather than astuteness. Despite the makeover in Gordon Brown’s appearance in the last couple of years, he still doesn’t seem to have mastered the communications angle. Whenever he’s annoyed or defensive, he starts hitting us all over the head with facts. The facts are not interesting, they’re nearly all shorthand for statistics and they mainly have to do with the government’s achievements over the last 11 years. Folk are not generally going to be interested in facts like these; they want to be talked to about what they feel. Even if the Prime Minister is talking about something that affects you personally, it goes over your head. Every time he seems to forget how preoccupied most people are about their own fairly immediate future. Talk about achievements just doesn’t hit the right note and it keeps reminding people how long the Labour government have been around.

The commentators are always saying what a masterful politician Gordon Brown is but he seems to be good at scheming and alliance building (like a Thomas Cromwell or Lord Burghley). That’s not necessarily bad but the connecting skills needed for a democratic leader are missing. Until he’s better at communicating, he could do with saying less for a while. When he starts making speeches again, he should concentrate on what the country is doing and what that means instead of going on about what the government has seen fit to do FOR us. And if he can’t see that the whole country is doing anything, he needs come up with some ideas.

Although, it now seems that Mr Brown was profligate with the nation’s finances in the second half of his chancellorship, he does have some of the credentials for a safe pair of hands in these worrying times. He’s got the contacts with the big banks, central banks and regulatory authorities, he knows what good housekeeping means (he can stand up to special interests), he has an instinct for helping people. If government was just a committee that needed to get things done, he’s the obvious choice to be chairman. The danger is, that after Thursday’s bleak election results, the Labour Party are going to be too concerned about saving their own skins in 2010 to be able to play their part in solving the gathering economic crisis.

So rise above that, please, Mr Brown.

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I’ve been trying to fathom just how serious the credit crisis is for mortgage borrowers. As someone who’s been on a very expensive variable rate mortgage for the last 22 years, I hadn’t got to grips with what happened when fixed rate mortgages came to the end of their term. To believe some of the press you would think that all the banks and building societies simply asked for their money back when a fixed rate mortgage came to an end. The fact is that they can (and will) always switch you into a variable rate mortgage when this happens. The trouble with this is that the variable rates are nearly all in the region of 6.5% or higher.

The second thing I’m having difficulty understanding is what the powers that be want to happen. It looks as if the government is getting really worried about mortgage affordability; Alistair Darling called the chiefs of the high street banks in a couple of weeks ago to talk about lending. Yet, the Bank of England seems to be a lot less keen on easy terms for householders. The bonds for mortgage backed securities deal with the banks was designed to free up inter bank lending rather than help out the house market. Now, it looks as if the government will have to get the banks to try harder to help home owners, otherwise the economy could seize up. If the commercial banks prove to be really obstinate about lending (because they’re so scared of a liquidity problem), the government could always reverse its decision to shrink the Northern Rock and decide to make it grow instead. The other banks wouldn’t like it but a lot of people would.

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I’ve finally reached the end of Sarah Chayes’s ‘The Punishment of Virtue’. Her distinct, personal style of writing won me over eventually. Basically, the book boils down to an accusation that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, has been meddling most successfully in Afghanistan’s affairs ever since the allied invasion and has completely duped the US military. The means that the ISI has been managing the Taliban to do all their mischief making by proxy. In view of all the rumours and accusations about relations with the Taliban (the expulsion of Marvin Patterson and Michael Semple and the more recent order from President Karzai for allied troops to stop arresting Taliban), this seems very likely.

Sarah Chayes makes the distinction between her interpretation of events and the view that chaos prevails in Afghanistan because the Taliban are anarchists and, because the people like anarchy, remain a potent threat to the allies. She makes the valid point that, in fact, the people are traumatised by so many years of conflict and have lost their courage. However, the fact remains that the North West Frontier has been anarchic for centuries before Pakistan came into existence. The Pashtuns living on either side of the Afghan-Pakistani area may collectively be exercising leverage on the workings of the ISI (and the Pakistani state as a whole) as well as sometimes being the puppets of the spooks.

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On a personal note, it’s been a busy week with work and a wasted trip to London for a meeting. This was a ‘Waiting for Godot’ experience for me. I waited for 90 minutes in a Covent Garden restaurant; they were very nice, they even bought the evening paper in for me to read. I guess that waiting around for someone else who inexplicably doesn’t turn up sums up the fathomlessness of life. The misunderstanding has now been cleared up and the meeting is due to be rescheduled.

No walks this week but I’ve been out in the garden a lot. I’m switching over to summer living with breakfast outside, lots of grass cutting etc. etc.

We’ve been bothered by an alarm going off repeatedly across the road from us. We contacted the owners and yesterday, after two occurrences in the night, we rang the caretaker. They didn’t know that the alarm had gone off. This leaves us wondering what the alarm is there for. The ‘contractor’ is going to be called in (again) to work out what’s going wrong. The noise carries on for about 25 minutes and doesn’t allow you to think about anything else once you pick up the frequency. As it’s unlikely that the contractor will agree to spend a night locked in these premises, I’m not sure how they are going to work out what’s going wrong. I thought it must be set off by passing foxes or cats but the caretaker said it had to be something inside the building – a big rat?

Thank you for reading and have a good bank holiday.