There are many – myself included – who often yearn to wreak revenge on Labour for its crimes, cowardice and craven appeasement of the rich. But in the light of the alternative, revenge is a luxury the low-paid couldn’t afford. It’s a miserably weak reason to support Labour, but don’t imagine things couldn’t get worse: oh yes, they could. Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.

Nicolas Sarkozy has had buckets of British ordure poured over his head for his attack on the “excesses of freewheeling” Anglo-Saxon financial capitalism, asserting that the European economic model has not led to the same mistakes, and for calling for the British to adopt some good old-fashioned EU regulation. He is a little Napoleon trying to do down our greatest national asset, it is declared. He must be resisted to the last. Unfortunately for his British critics there is a small problem. Sarkozy is largely right.

The City of London is now too big and too risky for a country our size. It is not just that bailing it out has cost £850bn, as the National Audit Office reported, and that the recession it imposed has led to the biggest ever increase in peacetime public borrowing. For years it has crowded out exporters and manufacturers. Money has flowed into the City forcing the pound up to crazy levels, and making it hard for exporters to compete, while at the same time generating credit flows that have made property, construction and financial services the routes to quick profits. Under City influence the alpha and omega of business life has become keeping up the share price. Innovation and investment can go hang. Will Hutton, The Guardian.