One nice side effect of my encounter with the BBC's Robert Peston the other day was that he kindly gave me a copy of his latest book, How Do We Fix This Mess - and I am very grateful that he did. Like, I suspect a lot of people, I have struggled to understand just how the banks got into the mess they did, what is happening to try to untangle it, what is going on in the Eurozone and more. And thanks to this book I now have a much better feel for what it's all about. It's the sort of thing that is very difficult to put across on the TV news, requiring a more detailed, sprawling approach possible in a book, and Peston really does make things a whole lot clearer. He also makes it clear that there hasn't been enough done to prevent this happening again - the regulatory system still encourages the bankers to dream up byzantine mechanisms to get around the rules and increase their bonuses. What's more as a bonus (the acceptable face of the bonus) there's an exp...

I get a touch fed up when we hear people on the radio woffling on about how we need to help small businesses employ more people, or how the government should rescue big businesses that are floundering. It's not that I have anything against these measures, but there is hardly ever any mention of self employed people, or those who run family companies with no other employees. Unfortunately, the image the term 'independent trader' conjures up is probably that of the picture shown here. But we aren't all Del Boy Trotters. Vast numbers of people work for themselves, have no intention of employing others, but are still very valuable to the economy. It's 15 years since I worked for a big company. But in those 15 years I have not been a drain on the state. Instead I have been contributing taxes, and even collecting VAT on behalf of HM Government. Yet all we hear about is aid for the big boys and concessions for small employers. At the moment there are very few incen...