The collapse of planned democratic elections in Bangladesh is one of the great under-covered stories of recent weeks. Bangladesh is, by its standards, doing quite well economically at present, but so sad that the politicians are unable to achieve any sort of accommodation among themselves. Particularly since there are female politicians at the core of the conflict.

The Guardian reported:

Analysts say the rivalry between Sheikh Hasina and the last prime minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, has irreparably damaged politics in the country. The pair have not spoken to each other for more than a decade.

Democracy isn’t any easy business.

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.