Crunching the credit

One of the key ways that could be used to combat the insiduous effects of credit which the government could use to make life a little easier for people at the sharp end of the current economic crisis is very simple: introduce capped rates.

But as this report shows, the government considered it then quickly discarded it, citing false and unjustified concerns about people being forced to rely on unregulated loansharks. What a joke. What the white shirts in government don't get is that the legal and regulated doorstep and payday lenders are loansharks, some charging interest to the tune of thousands of percent, while proudly waving their consumer credit licenses.

The decision to simply ignore capping, especially without referring to countries where capping has proved to be successful in limiting the excesses of some lenders, is a decision that favours only the scum like the pawn shops and high rate check cashers, the gold scrapers and doorstep voucher men, pond life who profit out those at the bottom end of the income scale.

But capping won't work on it's own. So many people need to be helped out of the clutches of the blood suckers on the fringe finance industry. This is a time when the government needs to show some serious support for finance organisations like credit unions, who in some places are the only experts in finance in disadvantaged communities. Credit unions' provision for lending to small social enterprises and local businesses, a bedrock of the economy, could be expanded to encourage more local entrepreneurs onto a self reliant route to a sustainable economic success.

South Tyneside Credit Union

Brown's Sugar

The clever rats don't join sinking ships, so why is Alan Sugar joining Brown on the bridge? I can see why Brown chose Sugar - Susan Boyle is having some problems at the moment.

Sugar was already in the engine room of Gordon's business brain trust, and as his company Vilgen won a £30m government contract to supply computers to the NHS, association with Brown so far has been painless.

Of course, as someone who enjoys the 'Suralan' tag, a peerage must be very attractive, especially since the telly bully will only have to tip his forelock to Brown for another year at most.

It seems only right that a wealthy man, who is given a job to help the rich stay rich, will be called a 'Tsar'. Now what happened to the last Tsar?

Poopy power

Whilst our local councils are trying to get 'value' from our waste stream, Treehugger has reported on this research for the National Grid which proposes harnessing sewage, animal and food wastes to produce biogas.

Biogas is nothing new. I've got a book from the 1970's by self sufficiency guru John Seymour where he described a design for a home anaerobic digester to produce your own biogas, and he tells of farmers using such simple designs since the Second World War. As well as producing the gas, the digesters also leave solid and semi-solid materials which can be used as fertiliser.

Much of our natural gas comes from foreign lands so such an initiative would be ideal to reduce our reliance on gas imports; a win in political, sustainability and economic terms.

Given the billions budgeted for ID cards, foreign wars and nuclear weapons, not to mention the welfare payments given to the feckless banking and car industries, £10bn seems like a small price to pay and with a tangible return.