... alas, too much work. But not enough work is worse. This is, while not totally surprising, still food for thought : The CIA is now running its own agent networks on an unprecedented scale in the British Pakistani community. A British security source told me that somewhere between 40 and 60 per ce...

So HBOS was in the doo-doo. It was "too big to fail". So it would have to be nationalised like Northern Rock. But wait ! There was a better answer. Why not steer it into the arms of a bigger, financially sound bank - like Lloyds. OK, that would create a "much too big to fail" bank and breach all kin...

David Pilling in the FT (registration may be required) reports that Japanese are looking back nostalgically to the Golden (and pre-industrial) Age before the arrival of Commodore Perry's squadron in 1852. On a visit to Tokyo this week, on more than one occasion when I asked how Japan should tackle t...

Those Martin Kelly dubs the Bought Priesthood ('the constellation of technocrats, columnists, pundits, university professors, public intellectuals, business lobbyists and so on who are said to benefit from the political status quo and use their position to defend and support it') are doubtless wholl...

The FT finished on Friday only about 50 points above its November low, the Dow's just hanging on above 7000. Yesterday it dropped another 5% to a new low for this crisis. But given that the 2003 bottom (3300-ish ?) was caused by evaporating dot-com illusions, whereas this one's more down to various ...

The Telegraph reports that Ed Balls suggests that school admissions lotteries may be scrapped because they are unfair. I’ve dug around to find the actual speech, but can’t find it anywhere, and don’t entirely trust the report (or the Observer report, which makes him seem less hosti...

'Anti-racist' Lib Dem councillor blots her copybook. Her 'coconut' jibe is doubly offensive - to the (Asian) Conservative councillor at whom it was directed, and in its implication that white = bad. She's accusing Ms Jethra of being a traitor to her skin colour - an accusation that levelled by a whi...

This is one of those weeks if we find out if there's anything at all left worth preserving in the Labour Party. The Royal Mail pension fund is in danger of collapse if ministers do not press ahead with plans to sell a stake to a private company, trustees say. In a letter seen by BBC News, Jane Newel...

Oh no! A hundred and forty members of parliament have signed an Early Day Motion expressing their opposition to the part-privatisation of the Post Office. The government must be shaking in their boots, yes? What do you think? Early Day Motions are merely a much more expensive version (they cost on a...

Labour left-wingers Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas 'could unite to replace Gordon Brown' - Telegraph As part of his defence of Miss Harman, Mr Cruddas wrote in the Independent: "Their personal attacks, anonymous briefings and confused diagnoses are symptomatic of......