Members of the US Tea Party should have been with me yesterday when I walked through the Manchester (UK) suburb of Ancoats. This was the world's first industrial district - which started to develop in the last half of the 18th century. It was largely a place of cotton mills driven by steam and jerry-built houses for the workers. For around 150 years it represented huge profits for the mill owners, who didn't live there, and a living hell for their workers who did - a place permanently shrouded in smoke, grime and poverty.

When UK manufacturing collapsed in the 20th century, so did Ancoats. For nearly all of the time that I have known it, it has been a wasteland - a vast, empty, brick-strewn acreage dotted with the decaying hulks of cotton mills. But in the opening years of this century a decision was taken to re-develop it and property developers bought up huge swathes of the empty acreages. But Manchester planners take a completely laissez-faire approach to planning (they appear to exist purely to 'rubber-stamp' the excesses of property developers) and now Ancoats is randomly dotted with extravagant architectural creations - mostly empty - and, in an odd way, it even more bleak and depressing than it was before.

Ancoats demonstrates, to me at least, that unregulated capitalism is malign and insane - and sorely in need of much more regulation - not less!