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on Money I have heard various reports of people being arrested over the months relating to sub prime loans. Is that going to uncover anything exciting?

DOING A NUMBER

The trouble with money is: whilst it was once gold or silver, now it becomes just numbers. There is a similar problem with cosmology: they turn everything into numbers and then think they can see things in space that have NEVER BEEN SEEN.
Money has no human dimension. If I tried to sell you a car on the assertion that I had lent it to some bloke who was going to bring it back, would you pay me? Yet debt is traded. It is all part of the bonkers world we have made. The only taboos we now have are taboos against being discriminatory (to which one blogger recently referred). In the West, few people now do primary work, and those manipulating money are best rewarded. Meanwhile we are doing a number on 3rd worlders (who can still survive by their own efforts alone) to get educated and 'a proper job' so that next time the crash will include them! That's progress for you.

When is Stephen Smith returning to Bury St Edmunds as promised to witness the town council's slow decline into obscurity?

The town clerk who vowed to 'soldier on' has soldiered off in the wake of a blisteringly critical independent report - an uncut version is available to Newsnight on request - and at its last meeting on 18 June, only 5 members bothered to turn up.

As this was one less than a quorum, a sixth member was hauled out of his nearby retaurant to allow the passing of such vital resolutions as: BSTETC/091/18/Jun/08: That the bottles of red and white wine be retained for use as appropriate but the one bottle of Rose wine be disposed of as waste.

CHARLES WHEELER AND THE SANDWICH ERROR

I remember the great Charles Wheeler being sent to the Sandwich Islands to report on the last tree being felled to make the eponymous boards. His distress at seeing an ancient tradition coming to an end was palpable, and it was only his good British bearing that saved the whole report from dissolving into a French Farce. Ironically, it was not until his return to these shores, that he learned the boards were named after the Earl of Sandwich's distant cousin, who not only walked the London streets flatly pronouncing doom, but was even mooted as a contender for Jack the Ripper. The final blow came when Cliff Michelmore confided that the tree felling was another 'spaghetti stunt' for the ´óÏó´«Ã½, who loved a merry jape - as , indeed, they do to this day.

We need a report urgently on why the ´óÏó´«Ã½ has virtually stopped covering the Glasgow East by-election, where the fun has now properly started yet Brian Taylor has been missing for a week - see the latest
/blogs/thereporters/briantaylor

STV are giving it some proper coverage including the latest poll - see


It puts ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland and the ´óÏó´«Ã½ website to shame.

Glasgow East will have a much greater impact than Davis' brave stand and deserves NATIONAL coverage, if only because it could determine who leads NuLabour into the next general election or even whether the union splits.

Too late for tonight but please give it a mention and some real coverage next week.