Keith, I like my village, but genteel it is not. The local name for it is not "Lower Stoke", but "Lower Coke". It is a couple of miles from Allhallows on Sea with its caravanparks, and the slipways from which a fast boat can be in Amsterdam in an hour. Amsterdam, the home of iffy drugs and iffy diamonds. Go to the boat park, any day of the week, and apart from the boats that are at sea you will be able to count half a dozen of those giant semirigid inflatables that the cigarette smugglers use off Gibraltar. Most of them have FOUR Mercury 100s on the transom. The estuary's equivalent of a Mitsubishi 300FQ. The "Q" stands for "Quick".

I know a couple of bods formerly of Fleet Air Arm who are rebuilding an MTB which will run 4 bloody great v8s. They approached a friend of mine formerly of Special Boat (when he came out of the nick after his stretch for attempted murder - a crock if there ever was one: if he'd wanted someone dead they would have been dead) to do the navigation.

This is not the gin and Jaguar belt.

Yes, the left should stand up for the low paid and unskilled. I do. But I do not do that by discriminating against the even lower paid and even less skilled.

The rate of immigration is not rising. It is falling. But yes, funding the building of housing would be another good way to palliate the effect of bankers' recession on the real workers.

There are plenty of empty houses - kept empty by speculators. Some in Chelsea. One right behind my house. An ex-pub that could have housed 6 next door and partly demolished by a speculator. Even some in Chelsea owned by Russian emigres who stole that country's wealth.

Some, too, are in the North. Indeed many.

The empty north.

So, if the government had the balls, it could legislate to make bankers advances recoverable, to make derivatives losses recoverable, to make the bail-out finds for banks recoverable loans, to prevent banks paying dividends (or bonusses) out of profits that had not been held for 5 years, to render its bailouts recoverable loans - with debenture rights to take over management of the banks.

Before that it would have to re-impose Exchange Control, which Thatcher abolished as a wholly doctrinaire move to help her oppress the working classes (oh, sorry, what did she call it "Impose commercial discipline"?).

Then the funds repossessed from the banks could be spent on creating industry where we need it.