Philobiblon

John Pilger gets stuck into John Howard.

…the regression of this social democracy into a state of fabricated fear and xenophobia is an object lesson for all societies claiming to be free. In power for more than a decade, the Liberal prime minister, John Howard, comes from the outer reaches of Australia’s “neocons”….Howard rejoices in his promotion of “Australian values” – a very Australian sycophancy to the sugared “values” of foreign power. The darling of a group of white supremacists who buzz around the Murdoch-dominated press and radio talk-back hosts, the prime minister has used acolytes to attack the “black armband view of history”, as if the mass killing and resistance of indigenous Australians did not happen.

Anatole Kaletsky writes in The Times on how class makes a difference to your inflation rate:

Rich people spend much more on expensive services such as private education, entertainment and health than the poor, who spend most of their money on food, clothes and other essential goods. This means that inflation tends to be higher for the rich than it is for the poor. In other words being rich has never been so expensive. Conversely, it has been getting cheaper to be poor.

A measure, really of the growing inequality in British (and other) societies.

And the trend is even worse, in that inflation in essentials, as Kaletsky says, has started to rise, which is going to hit the poor hard.