The last two general elections were textbook in the way they highlighted the enormous disproportion between popular vote and allocated seats. In 2005, Labour received only 35% of the popular vote but were handed 55% of the seats. 22% of the electorate cast a ballot for the LibDems but all they got in the Commons was 9.6% of the seats. Claude.

Charity used to be something you did quietly, unostentatiously. We attended a breakfast for high-net-worth individuals organised by the Charities Aid Foundation and hosted by the Lord Mayor of London. The main speaker was Stanley Fink, chief executive of Man Group plc, the hedge-fund managers. Charity, he made plain, is now a way to fame

“I want to talk about what charity can do for us,” he told his audience, describing giving as the ultimate door-opening lifestyle accessory. “What do you do now you’ve got all the toys?” he asked. “You’ve already got all the houses, yachts, cars and jets you can use, so what comes next is charity.” It’s not just the joy of giving, but opportunities to meet celebrities: “I get invited to places I’d never have seen otherwise.” Charity is the passport to the in-crowd: he listed the eye-popping names and places his philanthropy had taken him, from No 10 upwards. Give and ye shall meet celebs. David Walker and Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.

Slices of cooked sausage made from reformed Turkey and Pork

Ed Mayo of Co-operatives UK, former head of the National Consumer Council and co-author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children for Profit, recently has said: “Today’s marketing assigns simple and very separate roles to boys and girls, and whips up peer pressure to police the difference.” Just picture the packed lunch scene as one child proudly reveals the Fairy Hearts bursting out of her roll, while her embarrassed and envious dining companion has to make do with plain old cheese and pickle. Saba Salman, Pink Stinks.

There are many questions a population asks itself before a General Election, and the one that many people are asking before the one this year is, “Which of these rancid heaps of sewage will be slightly less repulsive than the other?” Maybe that’s the way it should be phrased on the ballot paper, to increase turn-out. Mark Steel.

Instead of demoralising teachers with his ill-informed comments about what makes a good teacher, Cameron should commit himself to putting proper money and time into training the existing teachers in the system. Instead of paying for the training of a “brazen elite” of graduates, he should improve the wages of all teachers so that we are all treated like an “elite”. His current policy, if implemented, won’t improve the standards of teaching, and will instead further dishearten an already deflated profession. Francis Gilbert, The Guardian.

How did it come to this? I’ve just been called an anarchist in a live radio interview by a woman who works for a company that head-hunts financial high flyers. Why? Was I suggesting that we should abolish all forms of centralised authority? Was I calling for the overthrow of the capitalist system? What exactly had I done to suggest to her that I wanted to tear apart the very fabric of society?

I had told her that I am withholding my tax until the chancellor of the exchequer acts to curb the bonus payments to investment bankers at RBS. “What if everybody did that?” she cried. “We’d have anarchy!”

There isn’t much chance of everybody doing that, given that most people’s tax is taken directly from their wages via PAYE. However, some of us will have recently received a reminder to pay our tax online by the end of the month. I came across mine the day after seeing RBS executive director Stephen Hester smirk as he told a commons select committee that, rather than explain to the public that he was about to pay his staff an estimated £1.5bn in bonuses next month, he’d avoid the ensuing rancour by sloping off on holiday for a long while.

Never mind that RBS posted the worst corporate losses in British financial history last year. He’s had his empty coffers replenished with taxpayers’ money and now he’s going to fill his boots. Watching Hester’s “let them eat cake” moment on TV, I felt both outraged and at the same time powerless.

Outraged because we’d spent the week being softened up for painful public service cuts by both the government and opposition and powerless because I knew that neither party has the will to do anything about excessive bonus culture.

Googling RBS, I found that, as part of the loan they took from the government, the chancellor has the right to veto the bank’s bonus payments. That loan made us all shareholders in RBS. By rights, that veto belongs to us. So I wrote to Alistair Darling telling him that I would be withholding my taxes on 31 January unless he used our veto to limit the RBS bonuses.

What if everybody did this? Perhaps some form of anarchy would ensue. But if we are going to bring “what ifs” into the debate, then what if we lived in a society that heaped financial rewards on teachers and nurses and soldiers rather than bankers? What if we had a financial system that encouraged fairness rather than greed? Too utopian for you? Well how about this: what if we had a political party capable of winning power at the next election? Billy Bragg, The Guardian.

Satan’s terms and conditions must have got worse in recent times. America’s most prominent TV evangelist, Pat Robertson, announced that the Haiti earthquake was a result of a “pact with the Devil”, made when they overthrew slavery 200 years ago. But in the old days a pact with the Devil brought you a life of fame and riches and earthly pleasures. Now you get a few years of life in the world’s poorest country and then buried under a pile of rubble.

…

Maybe someone should consult an expert on theology, but I’d say there’s a chance that if the Devil’s still doing pacts, there’ll be something way off the Richter scale soon passing right under Wall Street. Mark Steele.

Steven Major, HSBC’s global strategist on sovereign debt, believes the rating agencies and the markets are systematically under-valuing Britain’s debt.

“The chances of Britain defaulting are zero. Yet the only thing a rating measures is that chance. There will not be a downgrade,” he says.

He believes the methodologies of the agencies are open to question. Above all with Britain, he believes, a “true sovereign” country can tax, print money or devalue its currency to avoid default.

While this poses risks to some investors, above all the roughly 36% of UK gilt holders who are based abroad, it is not the same risk as that measured by the agencies. Paul Mason, The BBC.

‘Is it fair that a wife abandoned by her husband loses her marriage bonus, while he takes it with him to marry for the second or third time?” I asked David Cameron at a press ­conference last week. ­Uncharacteristically he ­muttered rather crossly that the “details” had yet to be worked out. PollyToynbee, The Guardian.

The move, of course, places a major question on Gordon Brown’s table. By comparison the Banking Bill going through parliament is not so far-reaching. But you’ve got now Mervyn King and potentially Adair Turner pushing at the edges for a more decisive solution to the “too big to fail” problem. And the Conservatives and Libdems. Plus serious, non-ideological voices in the economics community, like former IMF man Simon Johnson.

Wierdly, after 18 months of the most minimal and timorous reform moves, we now not only have a bonus tax here, a levy in America, but suddenly the philosophical outline of a Glass-Steagall type solution coming out of Washington and the Tobin Tax on the table in Europe

And none of it was pushed by activist groups or mass demonstrations: it’s arisen out of the simple realisation that the capital cushion idea is not going to stop another boom-bust cycle on its own; and that cycle has already begun; and if another bust happens there is no ammo left in the clip. And that populations and electorates are going to be, mad as hell and are probably not going to take it anymore.

In the face of this the state, and politicians have quite simply decided that the banks will have to be restructured and finance made to pay for the risk free business environment it enjoys. The main political debate now will be about how you make this happen. Paul Mason, The BBC.

Joe Glenton might have escaped arrest if he’d been prepared to keep his opposition to the war quiet, rather than speak about his experience openly. Because, as a soldier, he’s not supposed to air an opinion about the war. But every week there are reports in which soldiers tell us we’re slowly winning, and none of them get court-martialled. So the real crime wasn’t to voice an opinion but to voice the wrong opinion.

In any case Army leaders make statements about every aspect of the war, to the extent that Richard Dannatt, head of the whole force, criticised the Government just before announcing his allegiance to the Tories. Maybe there’s a formula that goes, “Officers of the rank of Captain or above shall he be entitled to thoughts. (However, ranks down to Sergeant-Major may be permitted certain impulses, at the rate of up to three per calendar month).” Mark Steel.

Today’s figures show that where there were 1600 secondary schools – one in two – that failed to reach this benchmark in 1997, there are only 247 today, including a drop from 439 in 2008. Remarkably, London now outperforms other regions. That is a spectacular success that is unmatched in reform programmes in other countries. The danger is that the Tories in their zealous idelological opposition to targets – even where they so clearly work – will take this pressure off schools and they will only realise its damaging impact only after it is too late. For today, though, it is time to recognise this signal achievement by headteachers and schools that has resulted from a Labour policy. Conor Ryan.

Combine the mini retail boom with rising house prices and a return to risky lending in the City and you have all the ingredients for a very similar bubble bursting in another few years. For some – particularly politicians looking to rebuild our public finances – a short term spending splurge might be exactly what is wanted. It is certainly likely to help keep unemployment under control, which few would deny is a good thing. In the long run it might not just be the planet that suffers – investors too should be cautious about the sustainability of a consumer-led recovery. Dan Roberts, The Guardian.

Speaking to his congregation on Sunday, Father Jones said: “My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.

“I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

“I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses, but from national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

“When people are released from prison, or find themselves suddenly without work or family support, then to leave them for weeks and weeks with inadequate or clumsy social support is monumental, catastrophic folly.

“We create a situation which leaves some people little option but crime.” BBC.

as every other internet smartarse pointed out, both tracks are owned by Sony BMG – so no matter which one sells the most, Simon Cowell wins. In other words, even by raging against the machine, you’re somehow raging within it. Charlie Brooker, The Guardian.

It is a cliché of current punditry that Labour has bought into the Thatcherite settlement on free markets, while the Tories have adopted centre-left positions on social issues and on private morality, and the Lib Dems seek out distinctive niches in this broadly centre-right ecosphere.

At the level of values, there is a lot in that generalisation. That is not to say that there are not differences of substance, especially in the crucial field of macroeconomics. For instance, Brown has fought the recession by deploying Keynesianism for the wealthy, stripped of any social democratic content.

While such measures get few socialist pulses racing, they remain preferable to anything the Old Etonians are likely to come up with. Watch what will happen to GDP once the wingnuts return to the Treasury, and you will soon find yourself nostalgic for good old 0.2% a quarter falls. Dave Osler, Libral Conspiracy.

If he knew he couldn’t actually deliver on the policy, why make pledges in such concrete terms? Is he a con-man, or someone who simply can’t see two steps forward to the consequences of his decisions? (His trip to Georgia during the Georgia-Russia war, to promise them Britain would send troops to fight Russia suggests the latter. What sort of idiot wants to send Britain to war with Russia? What sort of idiot makes these pledges without checking who is in the wrong (the UN concluded that far from being a victim, Georgia had provoked the war)). If Cameron can’t keep cast-iron guarantees to his own supporters, then will he also dump mere promises to look after the NHS? What does he actually believe in? Is he sunshine, is he austerity, is he a weather-vane who can be blown all over the place by people more powerful than him? Snowflake5.

The Conservative party chairman, Eric Pickles, is from a working class background himself, and insists the class system is “as dead as a doornail”. If so, why does the party’s official website mention the state schools attended by three members of the shadow cabinet, but not the private schools that educated the rest? Jon Dennis, The Guardian.

During the Blair years, it was often said that exceptional wealth at the top would inevitably trickle down to the bottom of the pyramid.

The reality is that the only thing that trickled down was a shower of credit cards, insane mortgages and ridiculously irresponsible loans dished up to the desperate. But it was only a matter of time before the policy of further ripping off the most financially vulnerable was going to end up bursting like a swollen, pus-filled spot. The trite old saying that chickens come home to roost proved wiser than a hundred top economists lined up together. Claude, Hagley Road to Ladywood.

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.

It is never a woman’s fault if she is raped: not if she’s drunk, not if she’s sober, not if she’s standing on a table wearing a thong and baby oil. The responsibility for rape lies, always and only, with the minority of men who rape. Laurie Penny, Liberal Conspiracy.

Stephen Greenhalgh, Leader of Hammersmith & Fulham Council and head of the Conservative “Councils Innovation Unit” let rip at a round table event run by Public Finance Magazine and Zurich Municipal, saying, “My mates are all in the shadow Cabinet, waiting to get those [ministerial] boxes, being terribly excited. I went to university with them, they haven’t run a piss-up in a brewery… They’re going to get a department of state, in one case running the finances of the nation”.

In a prophetic expectation of Tory doom, Greenhalgh added “If you’re going to fail, fail running Alabama, fail running Texas, fail running the city of Paris – don’t just take over the country.” Recess Monkey

Cameron is not hiding his £10bn worth of tax cuts that suck wealth upwards from poorer to richer.

Raising inheritance tax thresholds to £2m for couples costs £1.2bn, money from the Treasury to the top 2%. Non-doms will pay, Cameron says, but official figures show the tiny £25,000 contributions from the likes of Goldsmith will cover only a fraction of the cost.

Cameron’s marriage tax allowance will cost the Treasury £4.9bn. Who benefits? The richest will get 13 times more than the poorest. He dare not ditch it when the Daily Mail’s leader column is sending out blasts about the “worrying noises” they hear. “What could be more important than standing up for marriage?” they warn him.

His third pledge is to abolish the new 50p tax rate – not while public sector pay is frozen in their first year but soon, in the first term. That will put money back into the pockets of just the top 1%. Less headline grabbing – but of great value to the wealthy – Cameron promises to uncap tax relief on top pensions – a bonanza for the top 1.5% who already have splendid pensions. Taken together, never in the history of postwar taxation will so many citizens be obliged to pay so much to so few. Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.