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As if bailing out their mates in the financial sector wasn’t brazen enough, now ministers are poised to exempt MPs and peers from having to publish details of their expenses.

Next week’s move, announced yesterday by leader of the Commons Harriet ‘Starvin’ Harman, reverses hard fought victories won by journalists and campaigners to force MPs to reveal the details of their expenses under Freedom of Information rules.

Details to be disclosed included claims for office staffing and equipment, furnishings, maintenance, travel, rent and even mortgage payments.

With the introduction of the new rules, members of both houses of Parliament will now be the only paid public officials who will not have to disclose full details of their expenses.

According to reports, Harman pressed for the changes to the rules after being lobbied by the Tories’ backbench 1922 Committee and the parliamentary Labour Party Committee.

Although, in theory, MPs are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents, they have shown time and time again that they are first and foremost interested in looking after themselves as a class.

Recently, David Cameron had to abandon plans to force Tory front benchers to give up their second (and third, and fourth) jobs, after realising the potential for a fierce backlash from his own party.

Conservative MPs are, of course, notorious for cynically lining their own pockets through whatever means necessary – a habit that has, unfortunately, spread throughout the entire Commons in the last couple of decades.

One Tory claimed, unconvincingly, that he and his colleagues needed to moonlight from their day jobs as representatives of the people in order to maintain their ‘middle class’ lifestyles.

Also recently, the government reformed tax rules to make the cut off point for the top rate of tax just above the rate of pay for a cabinet minister.

Consider the idea that politicians represent anyone beyond themselves and those who can enrich them comprehensively refuted.

The speaker promptly invoked some archaic ritual to ban McDonnell, whose constituency includes parts of Heathrow Airport, from the house for five days.

John Snow’s blog wondered whether the outburst really warranted such a harsh penalty. It’s all down to the historic rituals and traditions of Parliament, which are in themselves rather like the rituals and traditions of mid-range English public schools.  Indeed, I bet McDonnell feels as though he has been suspended from school for a trivial but highly totemic breach of procedure – like stealing the school mascot.

Parliament’s mace is the symbol of the British sovereign, in both senses of the term.  Constitutionally, all power resides in the monarch, ie the Queen.  But in effect all power is exercised by the government through their majority of parliament; the Queen is in the rather envious position of being able reign without having to rule.

Due to complicated reasons of English history and the English tendency toward conservatism we never got to have a real republic in the UK, so the mace represents the power of the monarch devolved to parliament.  Parliament can’t properly sit without the mace.  Every morning when parliament opens the Serjeant at Arms brings the mace in, and every evening she takes it away again when they shut.  It is hugely symbolic; it is the power of parliament.

So McDonnell was actually making quite a bold statement.  In picking up the mace and carrying it to the labour backbenches he was actually questioning the government’s legitimacy.  The symbolism of his protest suggests that he feels the government is no longer worthy of its control of the sovereign constitutional power of the state.

I took a look at McDonnell’s blog.  I can’t understand why this guy is a Labour MP, as he seems to disagree with everything New Labour stand for.  Still, it’s nice to see someone in Parliament who has a conscience, rather than the slick-fuck snakeoil salesman types that have become the new ‘political class’.

Unfortunately, the media have a way of deliberately ignoring those who present radical views, so I’m not too optimistic we’ll see that much more of McDonnell in the future.

Two years ago who would have thought that the government would have taken control of such a massive chunk of the banking system?  Who would have thought that businesses would be shedding jobs by the thousand every day?  Who would have thought Woolworths, Land of Leather and Zavvi would have disappeared from our high streets altogether?

Actually it was all completely predictable, except anyone who made such predictions was shouted down by a chorus of neolib talking heads all over the media spectrum.

Maybe I should get back on it, eh readers?

Today, a Muslim British teenager was sentenced for two years for downloading and possessing information of a similar kind two or three years ago.  I bought Fight Club from Waterstone’s a year or so ago, completely openly.  I’ve not heard of any mass book burnings to take my copy down to recently.  What’s going on?  I just don’t understand.

It’s no wonder that British Muslims feel victimised.  According to the rationale supporting this conviction, surely everyone who owns a copy of Palahniuk’s novel – or even perhaps a copy of the popular Brad Pitt and Ed Norton movie – should be locked up for the safety of the public.

Am I missing something here?

Blimmin ‘eck.

Wall Street takes it up the arse

AIG, the grandly named American International Group, is the latest Wall Street financial giant to be taken into public ownership.  In return for an $85bn loan, the Federal government has taken a 79.9% share in the insurer.  How deliciously ironic: the US government taking companies into public ownership.  An admission of defeat?  Of course, there has always been a much stronger element of planning to the American economy than its leaders like to admit.

It’s funny, in my limited research -  I remembered that I had a subscription to the Financial Times website – I haven’t come across any commentator who even mentions this little irony.  I first picked up on it in a book called Supercapitalism, which talks about the role the US government played in regulating major industries during the Cold War.

Of course, this isn’t the first time in the past couple of weeks that the US government has taken a giant financial institution public.  The two federal backed mortgage providers, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, were taken into public ownership last week. That was kind of different, I thought, because they were started as Federal Government schemes and were highly regulated – although they did have public shareholders.  In any case I was too busy to care last week.

As befits the arcane workings of the financial system, AIG is a supremely complex institution (check out this .pdf).  It has some four divisions offering various types of insurance and financial services, all of which are reporting an operation loss.  So they’re perfectly positioned to feel the effects of both global warming and credit crunch.  But the US government has decided that AIG is to important to go down.  It’s tendrils snake their way in to pretty much every aspect of financial life in the US, it’s collapse could lead to an almighty systemic shock.  But are they just postponing the inevitable?

Taking companies into public ownership gives no guarantee that they won’t fail.  And lots of financial institutions are failing – just look at the fiasco at Bear Stearns or Lehman Bros.  With the world’s biggest mortgage book on their hands already looking like a risky investment, can the US government bear the brunt of the cost of climate change through the world’s biggest insurance book?  Remember Lloyds?  (Actually I don’t, I was too young.  But people have told me about it).

The other Lloyds, Lloyds TSB, today announces that it is in final stage of merger talks with HBOS.  In fact, actually Lloyds TSB is buying HBOS.  HBOS of course lost a spectacular 77% of its share price over the last.  I’ve been too broke to buy newspapers, so I haven’t brushed up on the facts; but I must admit that I was secretly quite pleased because my overdraft with them is maxed out.  It made me think of a Fight Club-esque scenario where we were taken back to economic year zero, but without the conflicted machismo.

not sure what's going on here, this is the geezer from the halifax ad

HBOS has the UK’s biggest mortgage book, by far.  It’s collapse would be like Northern Rock times a million.  But just like Northern Rock, HBOS relied on wholesale money markets for much of its funding. Their mortgage book doesn’t look to be in particularly good shape either: about a third of their mortgage customers own less than 20% of the equity in their homes – leaving them in all kinds of shit if house prices tumble (as seems inevitable).  The numbers are vast, and rather difficult to understand.  Read for yourself.

Apparently, because they’ve been comparatively sensible and didn’t join in the with the credit gold rush, Lloyds TSB would be able to absord HBOS’s vast liabilities.  But their merger would create such a massive financial institution that it would constitute a threat to efficient markets – one BBC reporter terms it a ‘Banking Collossus’.  The government has said it will legislate to make sure the deal avoids the attention of the Competition Commission, but what about the EU?

And is it really a good idea to make institutions larger?  Whatever about efficient markets, a combined HBOS and Lloyds TSB would have a massive structural role in British financial life.  Is it wise to have profit motivated organisations playing such a major role in society?  Perhaps they are trying to maneuver themselves in to a position that they are too big to fail.  But the larger they come, the harder they fall – see above.

Oooh.  The boards of the banks are apparently meeting now…  Watch this space

This is a funny one.  Well, kinda frightening funny.  The Daily Mail reports today that police hope to catch graff artists by snooping on kids’ schoolbooks to try to match their doodles up with pieces up around town.  ‘Doodle Squad’, the Mail dubs it.

probably not by a school kid

Apparently they’ve already had some success with the strategy, a police press officer reporting a ‘series of positive arrests’. Because like, arresting kids is really positive.

I am incredibly sympathetic towards children, they take a lot of shit from older generations.  Now they’ve got the pigs inspecting their school books just in case any display any artistic promise, which can then be summarily quashed with a community service order.  Graffiti is no bad thing, graffiti artists like Banksy and their work have become socially accepted, even celebrated in the last few years.  We should be encouraging kids to be artistic, and teaching them that expressing themselves is a good thing.

Most kids scrawl all kinds of shit on their school books – I remember getting bollocked for it at school all the time.  Kids are naturally creative, at least until the weight of conventional education and cultural indoctrination kills their imagination once and for all.  But they’re not stupid; as soon as they work out that the police are going to be inspecting their exercise books then they’re just gonna stop drawing on them, and probably accelerate the deaths of their own creative sides in the process.

Contrary to popular belief, most graffers are a little too old to be sketching on school exercise books anyway.  While graffiti is popular amongst a lot of youngsters, their interest rarely extends beyond sketching a load of outlines and maybe doing a couple of dubs in out of the way places.  It’s the older guys who are really prolific. Maybe the police should try targeting them, or is that too hard?

In any case, I’d rather see the city covered in graffiti than all the crass advertising currently emblazoned across available flat space.  People complain about graffiti, but it isn’t as offensive as the advertising shoved down our necks practically everywhere we look.