Previous polling on higher taxation at the top provide good evidence to believe there will be strong majority support across voters from all classes, all regions and all parties for a new top rate on the highest earners.

Mind-boggling sums of money summoned to recapitalise Britain's banks take some explaining. There are inevitably calls for total nationalisation from the left. Tomorrow morning's papers are reporting at least two more UK banks, RBS and HBOS will be taken into majority public ownership.

Basking vicariously in the joys of Britain's continuing Olympic successes, as I hope we all are, the role of Lottery funding is being extolled by media commentators.

We're in a hole. It's a pretty deep one. And ways to get out of it are in short supply.

Save the Labour Party and Labourhome combined to contact their campaigning networks and encourage questions to a live webcast by Gordon Brown about the adverse effects of the abolition of the 10p tax band on people with low incomes.

According to BBC Newsnight last night many questions submitted by test and eMail were on this issue and to the Labour Party's credit it led the questions.

This is a follow up to one of the ideas ventured about how compensation to the 5.3 million hit by increased taxes could be administered - through the new 10p tax band!

This post was started before last nights newsnight hustings, the timing seems quite appropriate now. A few thoughts on taxation....

The fairest "green tax" would be to significantly increase taxes on all fuel (including red diessel and aircraft fuel) and increase VAT on domestic power to 17.5% to whatever figure is needed to reflect the CO2 that they produce and damage to the environment etc (assuming that anybody knows what the true cost of this is - I certainly don't).

The government should then distribute the total receipts per capita to everybody in the UK as a Universal Benefit.

Individual carbon allowances would allow those using less to sell credits to others who continue to use more. Green taxes are flat rate taxes which do not take income into account, and so could hit the poor hardest.