"It is mad, mad, mad, yet much of Britain's economic structure and culture are invested in the madness"

"The government will build no homes itself: it confines itself to measures such as build to rent or Help to Buy, where new homes are a hoped-for consequence of its guarantees and measures. But it will take no direct action. A useful stimulus, but I am told George Osborne only endorsed Help to Buy, with its Keynesian overtones, when he was assured it would help create rising house prices and a feelgood factor for Tory voters. Disappointing.

Almost every dial on housing policy is on the wrong setting. A government that wanted to break into a saner world would move on a number of fronts. It would devise mechanisms to wean the financial system off its addiction to residential property lending, probably setting overall limits to the growth of categories of credit, such as mortgages, and controlling mortgage loan-to-property price ratios. It would revalue properties to today's values and then introduce a graduated system of taxation".

Will does however suggest that it isn't really, as some suggest, bonanza time for Landlords ...

"But because house prices are so high, the buy-to-let company Paragon – speaking for most private landlords – complained, in evidence to the select committee on communities and local government, that the yield it gets is a mere 6%. Although these figures may be higher than the yields gained from investing in stocks and shares – so Paragon should complain less – they are hardly at profiteering levels. To end up in a situation with both close-to impossibly high rents for tenants and moderate returns to landlords takes some doing".

... before returning to 

"The taxation of property is stuck at 1991 values because no politician will entertain the political fallout of organising the council tax on proper, up-to-date valuations, let alone entertain introducing a rational system of property tax".

Ooooops - terribly sorry about that eagle eyed Daily Mail readers (unlike the picture desk staff)

Update (approx one hour later) : gosh, fancy that, the image on the D M website has miraculously been amended - rather drastically, because everything to the right of the landlady, including the portrait of Sir Francis, has disappeared ... but the url remains the same: Sir Francis Drake's 16th Century pub ordered to paint over signatures left over the years by sailors

Letter From Marie Antoinette

A Lib Dem member forwarded me an email he'd received from head office (see below), adding that:

Cleggie’s advisors have clearly not heard of Marie Antionette, who built a pretend rural idyll called Hameau de La Reine where she would dress up as a milkmaid. No doubt she would have said (but in a Frenchified way) "It’s about practising what we preach and selling the benefits of apprenticeships to young people and employers. Check out that delicious cake!"

As Wikipedia remarks, “The extravagance and subtle mockery of peasant life did not help Marie Antoinette’s already suffering image.”

"the key ingredient of cigarette lighters"

Abuse of lighter fluid 'is killing record numbers'

Last week campaigners released a report revealing that butane was now the leading "legal high" killer in the UK and is claiming the lives of more than 40 people a year.

"In the early 1990s, we showed deaths [from 'volatile substances' - glue and aerosols, etc.] involving mostly youngsters had reached a peak of more than 150 a year," analytical toxicologist John Ramsey, of St George's University, London said.

Following the release of these figures, the Department of Health launched campaigns to help parents to pinpoint adolescents at risk. Adverts were put in women's magazines and leaflets distributed in doctors' surgeries. The campaign worked well and deaths from volatile substance abuse fell to about 50 a few years later.

However, the numbers of deaths from volatile substance abuse – of which butane sniffing forms the vast majority – have remained static since then, Ramsey has found, although there has been a significant change in the pattern of deaths.

The problem now affects far fewer teenagers and has instead become an issue for young adults.

"The problem with a substance like butane is that it gives you a quick hit that leaves you wiped out for a couple of minutes," said Ream.  "Then you recover in another 10 or 15 minutes. In addition, it is very, very cheap. It's just lighter fuel, after all. The trouble is that every so often it will simply kill you."

As a result, groups like Re-Solv are pressing supermarkets to limit sales of butane to single purchases. 

"The trouble is that it is very difficult to control sales at little corner stores," said Ream. "We really need better government controls – and the restoration of funds so we can keep monitoring this problem."

"Dozens of 'outstanding' schools downgraded"

From the BBC:

More than 100 schools previously rated "outstanding" by Ofsted inspectors have lost their top rankings after changes to the system in England.

The schools have been reinspected since September, after changes aimed at putting more weight on teaching. The heads of the downgraded schools have been told to go to London and to "wait outside in the corridor" until Education Secretary Mr Gove is ready to see them.

After they have been ushered into the room, Education Secretary Mr Gove will stand looking out of the window with his hands clasped behind his back for several minutes while the errant principals become increasingly fidgety.

"Your parents are going to be very disappointed with you, you know," Mr Gove will start, "You're not just letting down the Department, you're letting yourselves down."

This will be followed by exhortations to pull up socks and apply noses to grind stones followed by murmurs of assent and furtive sideways glances. The heads of two inner-city academies will later given detention for playing on their mobile phones while Mr Gove is speaking.

"I'm especially disappointed with you two," Mr Gove will add, "You could do it for Mr Blair but why not for me?"

The punishment for the whoever scribbles "Scots git" on the front of his desk in felt tip pen will be decided once the culprit has been identified and apprehended. The precise severity of the punishment will hinge on the wrong-doer's response to the eternal dilemma: "Would you behave like this at home?"

Stuart Hall's jail term 'did not reflect gravity'

From the BBC:

Stuart Hall's sentence for indecent assault did not adequately reflect the gravity of his offences, the astronomer general has told the Court of Appeal.

Martin Rees, Baron Lees of Ludlow, made the submission at the start of a hearing in London. The judges are being asked to rule on whether or not Hall's 15-month sentence was "unduly light", bearing in mind the notional acceleration of the 83-year old's body at 9.8 m/s/s at sea level, where some of the offences are assumed to have been committed.

Former BBC broadcaster Hall, 83, of Wilmslow, with a body mass of 100 kg, was jailed in June after admitting 14 counts against girls aged from nine to 17 between 1967 and 1985, which multipled up by the factor for acceleration equates to a jail term equivalent to 980 Newtons.

Baron Rees told Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Lady Justice Rafferty and Mrs Justice Macur that the sentence "when the 980 Newtons are converted back into seconds using the universal constant, any physics undergraduate would have calculated a jail term of 1.3 million seconds, or at least twice the 15-month sentence originally handed down... which failed adequately to reflect the gravity of the totality of the offences or justifiable public concern about the quality of science education in this country."

... Crispin Aylett QC, for Hall, said the notion of a sentence reflecting gravity was a nonsense for two reasons

"Not only is there an open debate about whether gravity is an independent force or merely a distortion in the space-time continuum, it is always an additive force pulling or indeed pushing in the same direction and cannot be 'reflected' or redirected in the same manner as light or radio waves.

"Believe me, I checked with the optics and astronomy departments at MIT and they should know. Although admittedly gravity can bend light or radio waves. But that's a whole different topic."

Further submissions were heard on whether the fact that the last offence occurred 27 years ago would exert a diminishing or magnifying force on the gravity of the jail term.

Massive Blue Cock in Trafalgar Square

Also, someone's put a statue of a bird on a plinth.

Debt-for-equity swap of the week

From City AM:

Yellow Pages is given to lenders in a £2bn swap

Long-suffering shareholders, who have seen shares plummet from a high of 603p in 2007 to just 0.17p yesterday, have been wiped out...

Loss-making Hibu had a debt pile of £2.3bn, equivalent to the GDP of the Maldives. Owners of the debt will take control of the business in a debt-for-equity swap.

Debts will be reduced to £580m in the form of five year senior secured debt and lenders will own a further £920m in ten year payment in kind notes, which will convert to stock later.

It's a misleading headline of course, the lenders were not "given" ownership of the business, they paid £2.3 billion for it.

It turned out the business was worth less than £2.3 billion but still appears to be viable (making the best of a bad job, I suppose), so the lenders chucked out the shareholders and took control of the company themselves. The assets side is unaffected and the book value of the debts is adjusted downwards accordingly (or converted into share capital at the stroke of a pen, plus a few forms SH01 to Companies House and so on).

It's the same general principle as the Dutch Tulip debt cancellation referred to earlier. Cancelling financial liabilities and assets has no impact on overall wealth. And it's a great pity that we didn't apply this principle to the banks (with a few notable exceptions).

"Yet the really interesting thing about the tulip boom is that it did not end in universal disaster..

From Andrew Marr's A History Of The World (not the best book ever but well worth £4 if you can plough through it quickly enough so as not to get confused by the fine detail):

... or even in the widespread bankruptcy of Dutch speculators. The Estates General which ran the republic refused to take special measures, and passed the problem back to the civic authorities.

Many towns, in their turn, refused to process or hear any court actions involving the tulip trade, carrying on as if none of it had really happened and allowing the paper losses and the paper gains to wipe each other out.

If the dreams of sudden enrichment were snatched away, so were the nightmares of destitution.

This concept is of much wider application of course and I have alluded to it often enough.

The Spokesperson is of course obliged to report as "fact" what the Boss says "he truly believes to be true .."

The DWP said "there is no doubt that this department is pursuing and delivering an aggressive reform agenda. We've already successfully launched the benefit cap, universal credit and the new personal independence payment, and the work programme has got over 320,000 of the hardest to help into jobs. We're bringing in our reforms safely and responsibly, and our ability to deliver these changes cannot be questioned following our well proven track record for delivery."

To take one of those claims at random the suggestion that the Work Programme has really got 320,000 of the genuinely "hardest to help" into real long term jobs is a real lulu .... knowing what we do about the WP if they had claimed it had got 320,000 of the easiest to help into genuine long term real jobs we would probably be justifiably suspicious.