“Sarah, the reason car insurance is compulsory is to ensure that victims of accidents where you are at fault can be compensated. No-one else is hurt if you default on your mortgage.”

More than a bit oversimplified. Even if you live by yourself in the dwelling, your loss and homelessness affects others. If you’re a non-resident landlord and your tenants are evicted as a result of your default, lots of people may well be affected at great personal and public cost. Just one of the reasons why we need a new legal framework for landlord crime.

“Wouldn’t it be infinitely more pleasant to live in a society where the state kept its nose out of the market place”

Cranmer, do you think this statement actually has any meaning?

A market is a human institution that operates under the rule of law. Without the state there would be no markets.

“Globalisation is NOT working.”

Globalisation is giving millions of people the opportunity to become workers instead of peasants.

The very definition of an oxymoron, surely?

Oh, OK, I know it’s an imperative, not a factual statement … but you know what I mean.
It simply won’t happen. It is a physical impossibility.

Brown is a Stalinist. Globalisation is NOT working. All power to the wildcat strikers, I say. Brown needs to think again, bargain harder with the EU and the international forces of globalisation.

He said he would defend British jobs, so do it, Gordon. Don’t replicate the old army system – where everybody gets to kick the cat.

Your grandfather is right, but there were grades of farm labourers, from boys aged 14-18, who got half wages, to skilled jobs like ploughing, which required knowledge of horses. Ploughmen (in Scotland, anyway) got £30-35 pa. I suspect your grandfather’s anecdote is based on his starting pay as a young lad.

Plus farm workers got board and lodging, and some food and coal thrown in. Then I suppose there was also what you could fish, poach and scoop up from the wild. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingham is just building on country lore of recent generations. So much so, that even though agricultural wages were acknowledged to be pretty dire, they were often able to save their meagre earnings – away from the temptations of the town.

But prospects were awful. Farming was becoming more mechanised, and there was zero possibility of buying a small-holding, even a heap of stone with a cabbage patch. Landowners wouldn’t sell tiny patches of land.

Was there not an encounter towards the close of The Ragged Trouser Philanthropists in which Owens met an old acquaintance (name eludes me) who was then writing speeches for some ruling-class grandee. Appalled, Owens asked why.

Because I need the money.

As has been said, although there is a lumpen class, they are not representative of the unemployed or, I dare say, millions strong. My mother, until she reached retirement age, was L.T.U. despite her best efforts to make use of her university education and teaching experience.

For every Madoff in custody, there will be a wheen of other ‘banksters’ who made off with bonuses after pension funds were frittered away. I recall as this was happening in the 1990s, or explicitly during the Enron debacle and wattknot, ordinary working or lower middle-classes were told, in perfect seriousness, that placing all their chips on one horse – that is, company pension/shares schemes which directors and stockbrokers had made wads from – was reckless.

In other news, is this the Powellite strikes against immigrant labour of 40 years ago, or are the non-white faces being kept off the screens?

“The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists …….. seen as a socialist classic and it’s certainly an eloquent attack on labour/welfare conditions at the time it struck me that the novel could be read as an endorsement of quite conservative policies. Nearly all the characters in the novel are more than willing to work and only suffer because there is almost no welfare or health provision of any kind. They wouldn’t understand, I think, why welfare shouldn’t be held back from those who repeatedly turn down opportunities to work.”

Rights and responsibilities go together. Socialism gets into trouble when it drifts away from those values into liberal mush.

I haven’t read the book, but when I saw the play at the Theatre Royal Stratford, they painted the set every performance.