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I suppose it's probably a very long time since The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was required reading for a Labour minister. And maybe my initial calculations are wrong on the "budget"...

But am I right in thinking that those of us who labour all our lives but can't afford to buy a home are now going to be paying more in tax than the rack landlord on his buy to let investment he's fleecing us to occupy? In another era even the most liberal of economists would have recognized this as robbery of the returns to labour.

Nice one Dahling! New Labour, New Rentier.

I just noticed Nick on BBC being interviewed for his opinion on the latest data losses, saying something to the effect that it's part of a systematic incompetence of this government. Tribal type "they're bad" politics.

I'd much prefer him to say that this is evidence of a more general problem with government as an institution, that no political party would be able to control this particular beast and that we would be looking at ways not simply of being more secure about data but at ways of dismantling some of the bureaucracy that wants to keep such data in the first place. That "government has no business holding much of this data let alone carrying it around in laptops or posting it on disks".

I don't normally get to see the Daily Politics, but I'm on a week off at the moment and saw today's after PMQs. There was Yvette Cooper being grilled by Brillo who was asking whether Britons' status as the most personally indebted population in the G7 was anything to do with our current travails.

She kept avoiding the point, as usual, insisting that it was an American thing from which we had got infected. For your benefit, Yvette, you lying cow, here's what Eddie George said just eighteen months ago:

"In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade... external demand was declining and related to that, business investment was declining," he said. "We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward - one was public spending and the other was consumption.

"We knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending. We knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that, the UK economy would have gone into recession just as the United States did."

He said he was "very conscious" that stimulating consumer demand could give rise to problems in the future. "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out'," he said. Under Lord George's governorship, rates were slashed from 6 per cent in 2001 to 3.5 per cent in 2003, pushing house price inflation above 25 per cent and high street spending growth to its highest since the late-Eighties boom.

I hardly expect tomorrow's papers to cover the news of Mrs Balls's resignation - but she is deliberately misleading the public and that would be the honourable course. I understand that you can only really begin to tackle a problem if you admit to it in the first place. Eddie George did; it's time this government did too. Disgusting, lying bunch of shit-crocks.

Just what did she study at Balliol, Harvard and the LSE?  Does she really believe we will just think she is stupid or mistaken?  What the fuck have the people of Pontefract done to deserve her?

BBC reports that the police and suggesting that Flag-burning could become crime:

Police chiefs are urging the government to make flag-burning a new criminal offence, as part of a drive to crack down on Islamic extremists and others preaching violence and religious hate, the BBC has learned.

The proposals also include action to ban demonstrators from covering their faces to avoid police scrutiny, and tougher powers to arrest demonstrators seeking to inflame tensions.

It might be funny if the call didn't come a few days before half the country goes out and burns a token Catholic, or, as Lewes sometimes does, an effigy of the Pope.

They seem to find it significant that the call has come from the country's most senior Muslim police officer. So bloody what?

Maybe we should have a National Flag Burning Day tomorrow just to assert our liberties. Some might want to burn a blue flag with some gold stars on it, AA members might burn a Green Flag. It could be any flag. It doesn't need to be personally significant. Perhaps you could burn a flag from somewhere you went on holiday and found your hotel half built and had your wallet stolen. Maybe an old apartheid era South African flag. It doesn't matter.

But do it with a balaclava on. Remember those? I had one. Nothing to do with hiding my face, but Aberdeen was perishing when I was a first year infant school pupil and it seemed like quite a fashionable thing at the time.

Jeez - when will these people learn that if we curb our freedoms, the bastards are winning. We do not "pledge our allegiance to the flag". It's a piece of cloth for God's sake. And I resent the police videoing perfectly peaceful demonstrations, like people coming out to protest their pension cuts - you end up with a "file" and a mugshot for complaining that Gordon Brown's shafted you!