Borg triumphs for Sweden again

Apologies to tennis fans, but Sweden's Anders Borg has been named EU Finance Minister of the year. I learned this piece of earth shattering news last night on the way home from an orchestral meeting. Mr Borg was interviewed on The World Tonight on the day Britain's unemployment figures reached their worst level for Lord knows how many years.

What, Robin Lustig, asked him, was Sweden's secret? How come Sweden's unemployment levels were so benign in comparison with Britain's? Ah, said Mr Borg, that's because we were more careful with our spending. We ran a surplus in 2006 and 2007, so that when the crisis came we could put that money into our economy.

Somewhere, I fancy, the corpse of JM Keynes gave a twitch, and in his long sleep the great man dreamed that someone in the world of the living had finally listened to him.

Lustig persisted. Did Mr Borg think that Britain was right to be cutting its deficit? Yes, said Borg. When the deficit is so bad you have no alternative. But what, Lustig went on, his desperation now becoming palpable, was Sweden's experience when it tackled its spending? Was Britain right to be cutting so fast? Yes, said Borg. We found in Sweden that it was helpful to front-load the spending cuts.

So there you have it. Someone who thinks George Osborne has got it about right.

Oh, and it turns out that Sweden isn't going to sign last weekend's Euro treaty either. Not without some changes. We are not alone!

Alex Salmond, Euroland and the Groat.

I watched Newsnight last night, mindful of wails from the Torygraph about the BBC's pro-EU bias. From the point of view of someone essentially well disposed to the EU but sceptical about the single currency, I found it pretty disappointing.

As usual with these matters, it's very hard to put your finger on bias, because the presenters never come out and say, "Well I think . . . .". Bias is something you have to infer from the questions that are asked, from those that aren't asked, from the tone of the interviewer (in this case Emily Maitlis), and from the attitudes and assumptions that underly the programme. It was this last which I found striking. Maitlis's questions, presumably scripted by her and her producer, seemed to assume that David Cameron had lost something fundamental by not signing up to a really important treaty which has a good chance of saving the Euro.

But a 6th Form economics student could tell you that the Treaty has no chance whatever of doing that. It contains fiscal rules which will not be obeyed, attempts to impose austerity measures which will make even less likely that countries will be able to grow their way out of trouble (and which there are now some signs that electorates of individual countries won't accept), makes no provision for transfers between rich and poor regions of the EU and does nothing to make the ECB a lender of last resort.

The failure to grasp this context coloured Maitlis's questions, both to the solitary Tory MP and the European politicians on the programme. She didn't ask the Eurocrats any questions about utility of the treaty, and when they accused Britain of acting selfishly she didn't point out that Britain is not in the Euro, or that in any event the Germans are effectively holding the whole continent to ransom by refusing to allow the ECB to print money. Now there's self-interest for you. Where was the question to the Dutch MEP about the transfer of Holland's surpluses to the struggling south? The EU apparently always makes good, gradualist decisions, whereas Maitlis's questions to the hapless Tory were tinged with what sounded like real anger at Cameron's impulsive mistake.

As a BBC lover I found it made uncomfortable viewing. You don't need to be a genius to see that, whatever Cameron may have got wrong, the Eurozone leaders are in a different class of incompetence altogether.

In the Autumn the EU tried to impose a haircut on Greek bond investors. "No", cried economics geeks (including me): "If you do that to Greece, that'll just push bond yields up for bigger countries like Italy". And thus it came to pass. So what does the Group of 26 promise now? That in future there will be no more haircuts for bond investors. The words "stable door" and "horse" spring to mind. But the idea that the gilt markets will believe a promise, enshrined in an EU treaty or not, that there is no chance of them losing any of their money in a future default, is laughable.

We are dealing with a group of people, mostly unelected, incapable of understanding that if you impose losses on the bond markets it might make them wary of investing in other insolvent countries, but, that having come comprehensively to pass, capable of believing that a promise that it'll never happen again will make bond investors come running back waving their hands in the air like guests at a Happy Clappy wedding.

What does any of this have to do with Alex Salmond? Well, for a long time the SNP's policy was to join the Eurozone. That's a policy which has looked more and more difficult to justify as the imbalances thrown up by the one-size fits all interest policy have brought first Ireland, then Greece and now Italy and Spain into the maelstrom. And so it comes as no surprise to find Salmond saying, on the Today programme this morning, that post-independence the SNP will "keep the pound" until conditions are right for Euro membership. "Keep the pound"? That's big of him.

I have always thought the currency issue might be the Nats' achilles heel, and strains in the Eurozone have now brought the problem to the surface. If the Scots become independent, that means independence from the Bank of England. No doubt some accommodation could be reached about ownership of the actual notes and coins in circulation. But the Bank of England sets interest rates for all the UK. Post independence it will not be setting rates for Scotland. Or rather, it will not be taking into account the Scots economy when it sets rates. I'd be willing to bet that won't happen because some English Tory MPs will make sure it doesn't. If Scotland uses the pound for any length of time (and there will be a strong feeling in England that it shouldn't), it will be on England's terms. And that will mean interest rates suitable for England and the rest of the UK, not Scotland. In practical terms that probably means a rate that is too high for Scotland, and which will quickly strangle the Scottish economy.

Salmond had better hope that the Euro is still surviving in workable form when independence day dawns. Because Scotland could fairly quickly be setting up its own currency. How about the Groat?

PS - A couple of headlines, one on Radio 5 and one on Radio 4, two days apart, both pretty much identical - "David Cameron has vetoed a treaty to stabilise the Euro" was the gist - and both thoroughly misleading. Cameron has not prevented a treaty taking place. He has used his veto to prevent Britain having to sign it. The treaty is set to be signed next March by 26 other countries. Secondly the treaty has as much chance of stabilising the Euro as I have of conducting the Berlin Phil. Hours before the time of the second headline - last night - Italian 10 year bonds had reached record levels. Some stabilisation.

Eurogeddon in slow motion

So David Cameron has wielded the handbag and, according to whom you believe, given Merkozy a biff on the nose, or missed by a mile and ended up striking himself on the ear.

This blog is faintly sympathetic to Cameron. As per previous posts, the Euro crisis can, I think, only be averted, even in the medium term, by a combination of fiscal union and a massive injection of funds, this money to come from either the Germans coughing up themselves or permitting the ECB to act as a lender of last resort. Obviously the Germans don't want to do this, but I have had a bet with a friend that they will crack in the end. I think it will happen because the markets will get more and more nervous of lending to countries and Berlin will be faced with the choice of seeing its beloved Eurozone break up or agreeing to set the printing presses rolling.

In this context the weekend's summit seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to reach a solution which defers that German decision. The idea that there will be strict rules in place - rules which will be actually enforced - to make countries restrict their borrowing strikes me as preposterous. I remember the Stability and Growth Pact, which was broken with impunity by France and Germany among others. You can hardly see fines being imposed under a regime of Qualified Majority Voting. Countries will let each other off. I doubt very much that the markets will take this seriously for long.

I am also staggered that European leaders are apparently so eager to subscribe to a system which subjects their budgets to EU scrutiny and approval. What makes them think that their electorates will put up with that? And do they not think it might be an idea to ask them first? When this kind of thing goes through on the nod you know that politicians have lost the plot.

But should we have signed up to it anyway? Clarion voices are telling us that we should. We need to have a voice at the discussions, they say. But getting our views heard is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The end is getting policies which are good for us. Cameron found himself in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to avail himself of the means (being able to take part in the decision making process) even though it meant swallowing policies which he believed were bad. His decision not to do so doesn't seem on the face of it unreasonable. His critics have mistaken having a voice as an end in itself. It isn't. The true goal lies elsewhere.

Another friend has sent me an email reading, "Rejoice! Rejoice! We're on our way out of Europe!" I think she's being a bit premature. Some of the Euro leaders hate us because we said the single currency wouldn't work, and we were right. Some of them are jumping up and down because Cameron refused to go along with their hollow and temporizing attempt to paper over the cracks in their grand project. But that'll pass. I'd be willing to have another bet: that in chancellories across Europe apparatchiks will soon be saying to one another, "Actually, it's a shame that we couldn't keep the Brits onside". I don't believe Merkozy or their associates ever actually believed that we would refuse to sign up; and they were unprepared when Cameron did just that.

Watching Eurogeddon unfold is like I imagine watching a train crash in slow motion. It is terrible, terrifying and fascinating in turn.

PS - As of 16th Dec it turns out that Hungary and the Czech Republic are having doubts about signing up too: annoyingly for Merkozy they are dubious about giving up autonomy over tax. And the Irish think they may have to have a referendum. Moreover, British officials are apparently to be invited to further discussions on the treaty early next year. So maybe we are not so alone after all.

Oh no not more Jeremy Clarkson

Once more into the breach, dear friends, and let's appal the bien-pensant with our funny remarks about homosexuals, foreigners and trades-unionists. Yes, it's Jeremy Clarkson, doing what he does best (his talent in other directions, to be clear, being modest).

Actually I have some sympathy with Clarkson. He was clearly trying, not very successfully, to be funny; in fact, as I've written here before, that is Clarkson's biggest problem. As his defenders have pointed out, there has been over the years a good deal more left-wing near-the-knuckle humour on TV than the reverse. It's actually quite hard to think of a right-wing comic who has got anywhere near TV recently. Bernard Manning? Jim Davidson? But just because the likes of Ben Elton were funnier (oh go on, a bit funnier) doesn't mean that Clarkson was wrong to make his attempted joke. As I weary of saying, it's much better that people are able to say appalling things than not. If you doubt this, just Google the responses of the po-faced anti-free speech Trades Unionists condemning him. Watch them and ask, who do you prefer, the rumbustious scatter-gun Poujadism of the former motoring correspondent enfant-terrible or the tight-arsed dreariness of the union apparatchiks? If the latter, I fear for you.

Anyway, about the strikes. Good or bad? As someone who quite likes the markets (with some reservations) I applaud - as surely Clarkson would - that people have the right to withdraw their labour if they like. I do slightly wonder though whether they are wise. How many people in the private sector have lost their jobs in the last five years? How many people in the public sector have lost theirs? I'd be willing to bet that private sector casualties outnumber public by ten to one, minimum. Free movement of labour means that public sector workers are free to try and get a private sector job if they like. I don't think many of them are risking it. If I was a public sector worker I'd be hunkering down and watching the cold winds blowing outside my windows with a certain amount of relief.

This sense of the wider economic context isn't one I saw widely replicated amongst the strikers. A wonder if any of them will have changed their minds after watching Robert Peston's How the West was Broke last night. My wife, for whom matters economical matter rather less than they do for me, asked afterwards, "How did this happen without anyone noticing it?" Modesty prevented me from drawing her attention to the following, written in February 2007, eighteen months before the Credit Crunch struck: "We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. . . We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times." Or this, from April 2006: ". . .the spending there's been in the last decade has partly been of borrowed money, by consumer and government alike. So for things to carry on it looks as if we'll have to keep on borrowing. How long can that carry on? IMO not much longer. . . it looks as if further spending growth might be difficult. That's why the end of the decade looks dodgy to me. . . Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Keynesian idea was that you borrowed during the downswing of the business cycle and paid it back during the upswing. Seems to me that we (meaning HMG and consumers) have borrowed during the upswing (HMG to put money into public services, consumers to buy Chinese imports), and I wonder where growth will come from now it looks as if the pendulum might be going back the other way."

Some of the most telling footage in Peston's programme was the grainy newsreel stuff of Mrs Thatcher, and the mass walkouts at UK car plants like Longbridge. I remember my Dad saying at the time, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs". How right he was. But it seems to me futile to blame either management or unions. Both sides were swimming against a tide which would have washed British manufacturing industry away in the end no matter what we did.

Peston did a pretty good job of explaining how the East lent money to the West to enable it to carry on buying its products. I thought a couple of things were missing. The first was that if Gordon Brown hadn't run a deficit from 2001 onwards (when Britain was 8 years into the longest period of economic growth in its history), we would have been at least a couple of hundred billion better off when recession came, and better able to fight off the downturn without recourse to the markets. But maybe that was too party political. The truth sometimes is. The second was that all the bankers catastrophic risk-taking did was to postpone the point at which the party came to an end. It would have finished anyway at some point, with the consequences for our living standards which we're all going to have to deal with for the forseeable future.

I have strayed some distance from Jeremy Clarkson. Perhaps that's the best place to be.

How I wrote Playing Bogart

A friend emails with a link to this blog - http://louderthanwar.com/blogs/top-12-underground-records-i-wish-i-had-released. The writer, record producer Dave Parsons, has named Playing Bogart by 23 Jewels as no.9 on his list of top 12 underground records. Reader, I wrote that song and released that record. Over thirty years ago. Only a thousand copies were ever made, and they regularly appear on Ebay now, going for £50 plus (I don't have one personally).

How did this happen? And why?

I left school in 1977, just as punk was kicking off, and in my gap year, whilst other people were doing useful and interesting things, got a job in WH Smith's storeroom and joined a band, Idiot Rouge (Yes, I know; terrible name). In the course of that year we must have done 50 gigs round the North West - Liverpool, Manchester of course, Sheffield, Stoke. Through them I met Clive Gregson, singer of the pub rock band Any Trouble, and my memories of that year are of endless journeys with The Trubs, as we called them, in unreliable vans to far flung venues where we or they, or both, would play to three men and a dog for thirty quid; that and laughing quite a lot.

I also wrote a song called Playing Bogart. I was living with my parents; I was due to start a law degree at the end of 1978; I didn't want to be a lawyer; I wanted to be a pop star (more accurately a famous guitarist/songwriter of the brooding Tom Verlaine type); I didn't have a girlfriend; I was probably quite lonely. I remembered going into Manchester for the WH Smith works do around Christmas 1977, and looking at all the traffic, and the people going out, feeling like an outsider, contemplating the area where romance meets disillusionment from the windows of the 101 bus. I was a bit young to feel like this, but I'd been feeling like it for years and I suppose part of me still does.

Playing Bogart was one of the more popular items in Idiot Rouge's set, and when I left for University and our drummer, John Doyle, quit to join Magazine, the rump of the band, now called the Cheaters, carried on playing it for a while. At Nottingham I met some other musicians, Geoff Powers, Mark Buckle and Simon Harris, and we had a band called Sneak and the Previews (yes, I know; terrible name). It didn't take me long to get fed up of Simon, no doubt more my problem than his, but without him there was only the rump of a band and Mark Buckle, unhappy with my hissy fit, declined further involvement for a while. Meanwhile all around Britain bands were making their own records on a shoestring and I was desperate to be involved in this resurgence. I therefore hatched the plan of recording Playing Bogart and another song, You Don't Know Me, and releasing the resulting single myself.

There had to be other musicians involved, so I got together with Sneak and the Previews drummer Geoff Powers, Paddy Russell, a bass playing friend from school, and a guitarist I knew from Manchester, Neil Roberts, who was now at Nottingham too. We all met up in Manchester at my parents' house. The band photo was taken on the staircase as my Mum called us down for tea. I had positioned my Grandfather's Zeiss Ikon bellows camera on the stairs so that I was in full view, trying to look as much like Tom Verlaine as possible, and the others could be seen by means of carefully positioned mirrors. I taught Paddy the songs the night before the session. He had never heard them before, and in fact never played with the band again. I had decided we would be called 23 Jewels (yes, I know; terrible name). It was something written on the face of my watch.

The recording was chaotic. Nowadays the average PC has far more sophisticated recording equipment in it than did Pennine Studios, Oldham in 1978, and underground records are no longer made in the same tearing hurry. But we had paid for the studio time between us, and the first rule of recording on a budget was Be Prepared. Or to be more accurate, Be Well Rehearsed. We weren't. Notwithstanding that, the only real hitch came when we were trying to record Neil's guitar breaks at the end of Bogart. Neil was a great player, someone who came at the instrument from the angle of his heroes, guitarists like Jan Akkerman and Larry Carlton, rather than the basic thrashing fashionable at the time. As Clive Gregson, who produced the record, said, Neil always played as if he was just about to do something amazing; and sometimes he did. But he had not worked out what he was going to do, and faced with having to do something now, he was badly affected by nerves. In the end I played the first break, and for the fade out we actually put two of his solos together, one on top of the other, and it worked fine.

About the process of getting the records mastered and pressed I remember almost nothing. I do remember that Geoff, the drummer, and I hired a car and drove to London to collect them. At one point we found ourselves driving down Regent St. It was the first time I'd been to London, and finding myself somewhere familiar from all sorts of fiction was a thrill; within five years I was living there. Afterwards we took a box to Rough Trade records on Portobello road. Geoff Travis, the proprietor, listened to the record gravely and bought a hundred from us on the spot. We couldn't believe our luck. Later I sent the record to John Peel and to the NME. God love us, Peel actually played it, not once but several times; and Tom Robinson made it single of the week in the paper.

Clearly, we felt, it was only a matter of time before the record companies came knocking. We would obviously show our disdain for the majors before perhaps signing for one of the trendier minor labels. But in fact that didn't happen. A journalist interviewed us for the NME, but the story was spiked.  23 Jewels, now with Mark Buckle back on bass, did the rounds in Nottingham and further afield through 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards, but the big time never came. Astonishingly, we were a cult band, although at the time it felt as if we were just not very popular. On the Youtube Playing Bogart page someone has kindly written "The finest, most unique sounding band to come out of Nottingham". Unfortunately not many people said that kind of thing at the time, and anyway we never did really emerge from Nottingham. Things might have been different if we'd been from Manchester or Sheffield.

After a while Playing Bogart was quietly dropped from the band's set list: I didn't like playing it because it was too poppy. Our friends Any Trouble recorded it on their first album. At the end of 1982 I moved to London in pursuit of a girl, and fame and fortune. My own interests were shifting slowly but irreversibly towards classical music, and by the end of '84 I was at Music College doing a composition diploma.

So how does it feel to see this record, made on a whim by a bunch of 20 year olds in the sketchiest of circumstances, praised to the skies? Do I mind that other stuff I've done subsequently has made only a fraction of the impression? Well, no, not really. I think it is a good song, and the recording, no matter how crude, captures a performance that, as Tom Robinson said at the time, has an enthusiasm and passion that cannot be faked.

Do I mind that I didn't become a famous guitarist/songwriter in the Tom Verlaine mould as per my aspirations then? No, not much. I am happy to be doing what I'm doing now, and aware of how lucky I am in so nearly all aspects of my life that it would seem churlish to complain about any of them. We are in any event the sum of our experiences. Who is to say that if that had been different, the other things would have been just as good? Still, it's quietly pleasing to see the song remembered in Dave Roberts' top 12 (even if it is only at number 9).

To finish, I recommend that you listen to the Trubs's own version of the tune here and watch the hilarious video which goes with it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95KYEoheL1E.  Alternatively, you can have a look at this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxM0tn7R_JM - from their November 2013 reunion gig. Who is that mystery guest guitarist?

Messing with the German Requiem

A marathon day on Sunday, conducting the Athenean Ensemble in the morning in Didsbury and then off in the afternoon to help out with the Manchester Bach Choir's German Requiem. I was forcibly reminded of the joy of live music, both because of the packed house for the morning concert, an event put on and enjoyed by people who care passionately about classical music, and because of the things that went wrong over the course of the day.

Even the greatest musicians make mistakes. That is part of the pressure of having to get it right now. The pianist John Lill, a man who is said to have memorised Beethoven's piano sonatas by the age of 12, once went off into the wrong key in the Emperor Concerto. A friend recalls playing 2nd Bass Clarinet in the Rite with the BBC Phil and being horrified when the 1st player began a complex duet passage a bar early - should he follow suit and spare his colleague the humiliation, or join in and risk chaos elsewhere in the orchestra? Players are quite good at covering up these things: another friend was playing in a scratch professional orchestra at a concert featuring the tenor Alfie Boe. Mr Boe came in not one but four bars early. His accompanists seamlessly and undetectably advanced four bars to cover him.

I personally never mind too much when new things go wrong in concerts - it's the old mistakes that piss me off. So when on Saturday one section of the Athenean unaccountably missed a cue at the beginning of the Clementi symphony, that seemed just part of the unpredictable thrill of the event. You can bet no-one in the audience noticed.

I said I had gone to "help out" with the Brahms German Requiem, but I'm not sure how much help I really was. "We're short of tenors, can you come and help?" is an appeal to charity which might well have been met with, "Unfortunately I am not a tenor". But this would be to ape the scene in the Clouseau film where Peter Sellers goes into a bar and is growled at by the dog in the corner. "Does your duurg bite?", enquires Sellers of the landlord. "No", replies the landlord. The dog duly comes over and bites Sellers on the ankle. "I thought you said your duurg did not bite", complains Sellers. "That's not my dog", the landlord replies.

So although I am not a tenor, I went anyway. Now there are tenor parts and there are tenor parts. Some lie mostly in the middle of the stave with the occasional foray into the upper regions. These I can manage, because during an average day I can sing several top Gs, and once, recording a jingle for a radio advert (for a housebuilding company, since you ask), managed a top A. But the Brahms Requiem is unforgivingly high, with top As aplenty, and at least once, a top B flat; I seemed to spend three hours of the afternoon and two hours of the evening shouting, increasingly hoarsely.

However bad this was, the nadir of my contribution was reached in the second fugue, where a storm of confusing information comes your way: the pitches, awkward and non-intuitive, the rhythms, irregular and non-intuitive, the register, generally out of my reach, and lastly, the language, German. I had managed this alright in the afternoon, but now, head buried in part, resolved to go for it fearlessly, bellowing my way through for two minutes, aware that it wasn't quite going as well as previously but determined to see things through to the end like a musical George Osborne. When finally the smoke cleared and the last entry had been dealt with, I looked up. The conductor was regarding his charges with an attitude of mild rebuke. I had been a crotchet out with him throughout. No wonder it didn't sound quite right.

My wife says I have been slow to admit responsibility for this. I think that's unfair. The problem is that in music no-one quite knows what's happened. The process is mysterious, and that is part of the attraction. Some performances, note perfect, are wooden. Some have flaws but come to life in a way you cannot predict. That is why the Athenean's leader told me that she found herself on the verge of tears during Siegfried Idyll on Saturday morning; and telling me about it three days later she had to wipe her eyes again. As for things going wrong, you could call in the crash investigators like they do for a motorway pile up, and still be unsure of the cause of the musical accident.

So it might have been just me that was out.

On the other hand, I could have been note perfect. Perhaps everyone else got it wrong.

Valuing Aditya Chakrabortty

"Last week", writes Aditya Chakrabortty in the Grauniad, "you, me and every other taxpayer in Britain each handed £13 to the billionaire Richard Branson". Funnily enough I heard one of Chakrabortty's colleagues, John Harris, say exactly the same thing on Any Questions last Saturday. Now I am no fan of Branson, who is just a capitalist like any other, but this is wrong. Actually it's more than wrong, it's revealingly wrong.

Chakrabortty gets his figure by taking the amount of money the Government put into Northern Rock, subtracting the amount by the figure Branson paid for it and dividing the result by the number of taxpayers. Now he clearly isn't saying that we really paid £13 each to Virgin. What he's saying is that we've given something to Virgin which is worth £13 more per taxpayer than Branson has actually paid.

Chakrabortty's mistake lies in the assumption that Northern Rock is worth now what the UK government paid for it in 2008, and that mistake in turn lies in a misunderstanding of what value is.

When my mother in law watches the Antiques Roadshow and some becoiffed smoothie tells a gasping matron that her 18th century heirloom might be worth £20,000, what he means is that somebody would probably be prepared to pay that sum at auction. That's the best way of attributing value: the figure someone else is prepared to pay for a thing. In fact it's the only way of attributing value.

Now turn to Northern Rock. The Government has been trying to sell it for some time, but no one else was willing to pay more than Virgin. The sum beardie paid represents its value now. Moreover the value the Government paid for Northern Rock did not just represent its status as a bank in trouble. Its value was increased drastically because if the Government hadn't bought it the knock-on effects in the UK's banking system would have been profound and severe. So Chakrabortty is attributing a false value to Northern Rock, not only because in the real world no-one was prepared to pay any more than Branson; but also because what the Government was paying for was the continued survival of the UK's banking system. And before you say, well we'd be better off without that, ask yourself how much rice and pasta you have stored in your cellar. Because if the cashpoints run out, you won't be buying any for a while.

Chakrabortty could have argued that George Osborne should have waited longer; that in a few years we'd have got more for it; that Osborne should have sought to remutualise the bank. But no. He chose instead to say that the taxpayer has given money to Richard Branson. Which is not true.

Who is Aditya Chakrabortty? He is chief economics leader writer for the Guardian. But he doesn't know what value is. Go figure.

PS A few days ago (in mid-May 2012) the National Audit Office completed its investigation into the sale of Northern Rock to Virgin.  Although concluding that the Government lost money on the sale, it said that this loss "should, however, be seen as part of the overall cost of securing the benefits of financial stability during the financial crisis".  BBC Business Editor Robert Peston commented, "For the NAO, that notional £2bn loss is probably a price worth paying: it prevented a banking collapse that could have been contagious and could have led to the demise of other banks".  I am still waiting for Aditya Chakrabortty to acknowledge this in his Guardian column.