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The Ledger's previous outburst of sunny optimism didn't last long.

Crowding on to the economic weather map is evidence that there are plenty of storms ahead on the economic front.

The obvious element this week was the anaemic nature of the recovery, as measured by the UK's figures on gross domestic product.

The 0.1% figure was only pushed over the zero mark by short-term elements such as the VAT cut, which was coming to an end in the last quarter, and the car scrappage scheme, which ends a month from now.

And to underline the extent to which Britain's recovery is lagging, the US has figures out today which are startling in how positive it suddenly looks.

At a 5.7% annualised growth rate for the fourth quarter of 2009, that's the fastest rate of growth in six years.

Yes, it may have some illusory elements, but note that confidence is driving a return to business investment.

Amazon boost

Compare that with the latest release from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

It has taken the temperature from its consultants around the UK, and the results looks distinctly chilly.

From Scotland, the "regional trends" report (I'll leave others to make the obvious comment about regions and nations) shows a particular concern about the impact of the public sector.

On one hand, all the effort made over the past year, in quantitative easing and in cutting VAT, has not appeared to have much effect.

On the other hand, the looming withdrawal of public spending is harming the confidence of Scottish business about its future prospects.

From England, the more frequent complaint from business is that government is too big and a rise in taxes is bad for business.

There's a telling observation from the north of England on the state of the high street - that previous recessions have seen vacant shops fill up again, but that was before supermarkets moved beyond food sales and before the internet's challenge.

On the latter count, note the Amazon figures released last night: turnover up 42% in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with the same Christmas sales period the previous year, with profits up 71%. On Christmas Day, for the first time, it saw more sales of e-books than of the printed variety.

Lending still squeezed

Some comments from the administrators of a now defunct Scottish company specialising in the removal of asbestos are worth noting too: Whiteinch Asbestos of Bishopbriggs couldn't compete with its rivals' quotes for tendered contracts.

According to Bryan Jackson of PKF: "The directors felt that they could not compete with contractors who, they believe, are operating at a loss simply to gain work so they decided to close the business."

And he warned there will be more to follow.

Returning to the PwC report, it's nothing new to find client companies complaining about bank lending.

But from what I hear from other business advisers, with a knowledge across a broad sweep of the Scottish economy, that remains a big and real worry.

If the banks don't relax their lending, the next phase of recovery is going to see more companies going under.

Indeed, they would expect that at this stage of a recession anyway, and they fear the banks' special problems are going to make that worse this time.

Go hang

The way it has tended to work is that during the worst of a recession, lenders keep companies afloat while the asset value remains submerged.

But when asset values begin to rise past the exposure levels of the banks, that's when the companies are at risk of the lenders' plug being pulled: the banks get their money out, and the business and other creditors can go hang.

If that's where we're heading, it could meet resistance from the dominant shareholder of both the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group - which is, of course, the UK Government.

That could be one of the next tests of the relationship between commercial banks and their political masters.

The Bank of Scotland, meanwhile, has said today it's "refreshing" its branding, and cutting the Scottish high street presence for the Halifax brand.

This may produce a few splutters of indignation from customers, and looks ripe for satire, but the new advertising slogan is to be "With you all the way".

The idea is that it will stress the return to traditional relationship banking and empathy with customers.

The makeover of logo, with branches also to be refurbished on a rolling programme, has been done by London agencies, with the contracts for Edinburgh advertising agencies at an end - a sign of the times when headquarters move away.

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• - What's this?

It's supposed to be not too difficult to spot the difference between a Scotsman and a ray of sunshine.

Yet the latest findings from Nationwide Building Society's confidence index show Scots to be brimming with optimism - back to the same levels as the start of 2008.

Two cautions though: the comparison is with other parts of the UK, and the numbers need to be treated with a large health warning, as the sample sizes for the breakdown of Britain's nations and regions become rather small.

If the data for the fourth quarter of 2009 is to be trusted, there may be a northerly thing going on.

Second and third ratings for confidence are north-west and north-east England.

Feel gloomy

The grimmer sense of pessimism is to be found at its strongest in the Midlands, both east and west, and Northern Ireland.

Given its proximity to the Irish Republic's economic troubles, it has good reason to feel gloomy.

Nationwide also asks a range of questions on attitudes to savings, and again, Scotland comes out of that as most positive in its attitude to putting some income aside.

But in the last quarter of last year, fewer than half of the small Scots sample said they save regularly, and one in five said they don't squirrel anything away at all.

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• - What's this?

Letter from America, the Proclaimers' first big hit, made a link between the industrial clearances of Scotland following the 1980s recession and Allan Ramsay's lament for the Highland Clearances written 260 years before, Lochaber No More.

Bathgate no more, they sang, Linwood no more, Methil no more, Irvine no more.

Were they right? The scars of the 1980s are still there to see, both in gaps in opportunity and in the social cost still carried by communities and families.

Around Bathgate, West Lothian's metal bashers and truck-builders were replaced first with Silicon Glen jobs, many of them since gone, and more recently with retail parks.

Linwood, likewise, features a huge Asda, plus showrooms for foreign-built cars where once the Hillman Imp was manufactured.

Irvine's skyline is dominated by a gigantic paper mill, but Volvo trucks are long gone. Lochaber is carving out a niche as Britain's tourism honeypot for outdoor recreation.

Energy jobs

And Methil no more? I was there for much of today, reporting for television on the way it looks on the day Britain just makes it across the line that marks the end to recession.

The Fife town's not short of its challenges, with welfare dependent families and household debt, as I was hearing from the boss of Fife's Citizens Advice Bureaux.

Further east along the Firth of Forth coast, towards Dunfermline, their caseload is more from new types of client - such as the aspirational middle-class who over-extended themselves with debt and fell foul of the downturn in the financial sector.

But Fife and Methil have a grand plan to confound the Proclaimers, with £11m of Scottish government money so far and more to be announced imminently backed up by European cash.

The idea is the Fife Energy Park, clearing 56 hectares of shoreside land to tap into the potential for renewable energy. The quayside, soon to have a £3m upgrade, used to be Scotland's biggest port for exporting coal.

That's the same ground where some of the largest steel structures ever created were assembled, as jackets for North Sea oil platforms. The biggest reached a colossal 26,000 tonnes.

The third wave of energy jobs is seeing BiFab (Burntisland Fabricators) take the lead on constructing jackets, or platforms, for offshore wind turbines.

The company is churning through its current order for 30 jackets, each weighing nearly 500 tonnes, at a rate of one roll-out a week, and destined for the Irish Sea.

Scotland's yards

Drawing on its knowledge of producing sub-sea kit for the offshore hydrocarbons industry, the company is producing the enormous steel structures on an assembly line, with minimal scaffolding, proving an efficient advantage over bespoke structures.

And they're having to do so with extraordinary requirements for the strength of the structures - not only facing the familiar challenge of offshore weather conditions, but adding to that the repetitive strains of a 130-metre wind turbine placed on top.

The imminent announcement of government support is to help BiFab expand its capacity to 120 such jackets a year.

Scottish Enterprise, the government's development agency, also hopes to build up the supply chain locally, as BiFab currently has to source many of its components from around the world.

When you consider there are plans to erect 8,000 such wind turbines around Britain's coast, you can see there's going to be a lot of work to go around.

BiFab has yards at Burntisland in Fife and Arnish near Stornoway.

And you can see why there is concern that the American owners of the Nigg yard in Easter Ross - similarly a hive of oil platform construction activity in the 1970s and 1980s -are so reluctant to commit to developing the site for renewable energy potential.

If Britain doesn't build up its capacity for such work, the potential economic boost could easily go to competitor countries.

The fact that the turbines atop these jackets will be made in Denmark and Germany is a reminder of what happened as a result of throwing away Scotland's technological lead in wind energy during the 1980s.

Another striking aspect of the business: given the scale of the ambitions for offshore windfarms, they're going to have to go some to compensate for the very large carbon footprint in places such as Methil where the structures are being created.

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• - What's this?

There is an attraction to removing the risky, casino-style roulette wheels of banking from the utility bits on which we all rely. So says Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, pointing out that he's not following , but has been arguing this since last July.

He's right. There is an attraction to that. But it's not clear that a break-up is the solution to the problem of banks that got into trouble over the past three years. Was it because there was too much risk linked into the mainstream retail banking facilities that no government could be allowed to fail?

In the case of the Royal Bank of Scotland, that may well be so. But was size or too much proprietary trading (risking the bank's own assets) when Northern Rock got into trouble? On the contrary, its problem was a lack of savings to fund its risky lending, and its dependence on wholesale borrowing, at a time when it became much more scarce and expensive.

Halifax Bank of Scotland, now part of Lloyds Banking Group, was taking some risks in its trading. But the giant hole left in its accounts resulted primarily from risky mainstream lending to corporate customers and mortgages for home-owners.

Unexpected tax

And Lehman Brothers? It didn't have a significant retail presence, and specialised in investment banking. But when it collapsed, in September 2008, the shockwaves ran and continue to run through every aspect of the financial system.

So the case has yet to be made for creating walls between necessary retail banking and risky investment. There's risk involved in lending to ordinary customers, including those Americans who were encouraged to buy sub-prime properties.

The core of banking is, or should have been, about managing risk, rather than pretending it can be avoided completely.

The implications of the policies favoured by President Obama, Would-Be Chancellor Osborne as well as the Lib Dems' Vince Cable could start by seeing the Royal Bank of Scotland forced to sell either its Citizens' Bank retail operation or its investment business in the US, before it is forced to split in its UK home market. It could also see changes in ownership of the US banks with significant employment presences in Scotland.

RBS already faces a sizeable unexpected tax bill if the president's proposed Bank Responsibility Levy is introduced. That would be spread over ten years to pay back the support given by the US taxpayer.

And that brings us to a crucial difference between the American and the British position. President Obama is taking a populist stick to the banks, to get payback.

Trade-off

But Britain's payback is very different. Taxpayers have collectively sunk more than £60bn into equity stakes in RBS and Lloyds. That isn't to be paid back in taxes. The plan is to get the banks back into a profitable state, so that share prices rise and those stakes can be sold off at a profit.

Those who wish to break up those banks run the considerable risk of reducing their profitability, thus making it more difficult for the taxpayer to turn a profit on the investment.

So, unlike the American position, there's a likely trade-off in Britain between cutting the banks down to size and maximising the public's financial return.

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• - What's this?

Newspapers have been shedding readers at an alarming pace recently, with many going online for their news and comment. Venerable old titles have also been shedding journalists.

Put those two factors together, and you could expect to find journalists setting up news websites. So it is that several names familiar to readers of The Scotsman will be launching a new Scottish newspaper on Monday.

As newspapers go, this one won't be top heavy with news, and nor will it involve the paper industry greatly.

The idea is to focus on analysis rather than news takes on developing stories. It's not seeking to be comprehensive, instead focussing on areas where it has reporting and writing strength.

And every month or so - perhaps every quarter - the team will produce a printed version, including its best articles and more besides.

Heritage and outdoors

Those areas of strength are to include politics, with Hamish McDonell, who left The Scotsman last year, and Robert McNeil, who wrote a much-read Holyrood sketch for the paper. He's going to revive that online.

Jennifer Trueland was health correspondent in print, and takes that online as well. Entertainment and music is to be covered by John McKie, former editor of Smash Hits and Q. There will also be coverage of heritage, outdoors and an overseas element.

Despite the number of names, it's being done with a tiny core staff and very little start-up funding - only editor Stewart Kirkpatrick, who was head of scotsman.com, plus technical and marketing directors, at the website-building consultancy they already run.

It's not easy to make money out of news. Their target is to get around a tenth of the page imprints of The Scotsman, which has led both the Daily Record and The Herald in its online readership. That can bring in some advertising, but sponsorship is more likely to be the key to making such a project viable.

How do you read it? Well, you can't. Not yet anyway. The site is up there somewhere, but they're not saying what the name is yet, and without that, there's not much chance of finding it.

Subscription System

The launch, on Robert Burns' birthday, happens to coincide with the 193rd birthday of The Scotsman itself. And although it has limited funding, the new venture says much about the challenge to find a new business model for old news organisations.

Today sees the New York Times starting to charge. One of the News International papers controlled by Rupert Murdoch - a small one in Massachusetts - is trialling a subscription system, ahead of a target date for the empire going fully paid-for in March.

The relatively good news for Scottish newspapers is that the precipitous declines of the past few years have stabilised in the past year, at least to the extent that they're falling at much the same rapid rate as the rest of the UK market. It's cold comfort.

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• - What's this?

The Globespan story unravels further. E-Clear, which handled its online transactions, has just had an administration order by Mr Justice Vos at the High Court in London.

That's after administrators for the Scottish travel agency and its FlyGlobespan airline, sued it to recover £35m it says was being withheld by the London company.

E-Clear failed to provide proof that it has the money by the deadline of last Friday set by the High Court. So that's another company grounded, and those waiting for their credit card payments advised to contact their issuer.

Regular readers of The Ledger won't be hugely surprised at this turn of events. E-Clear has been less than clear about its finances since it was put firmly in the frame for the collapse of Globespan on 16 December.

It said it wanted to focus on repaying customers, and it says it had begun to do so. But its efforts to find a financial backer from Germany didn't come to much. Chief executive Elias Elia had the backing of Deutsche Bank, but that link ended more than two years ago.

Through E-Clear, Mr Elia bought a controlling stake in NordFinanz, a small German bank, but regulators there denied him the ability to use that to bankroll E-Clear in London.

It's since been reported in the specialist travel media that Pago, a German firm specialising in online transactions with Deutsche Bank as its largest shareholder, was the last best hope for helping out E-Clear with funding. It's further reported that the best E-Clear could muster was an assurance that Globespan's money was not held in a dedicated trust account, but in "sub-accounts in various currencies".

That wasn't enough to satisfy the High Court today, and we'll soon find out how many other companies, travel and otherwise, are creditors of E-Clear as it withheld their millions.

It brings back the question I've asked before: how come this company could handle hundreds of millions in transactions and withhold them at will without any oversight by the Financial Services Authority? That oversight only began two months ago, and full registration and regulation won't be in place for such companies until next year.

With lots of uncertainty created there, it's also worth a look at what's happening to Scottish air travel. FlyGlobespan left a gap of, very roughly, 700,000 seats flying out of British airports, most of them from Scotland.

Industry sources reckon only a tiny proportion of those have been taken up by other airlines so far. Thomson, Thomas Cook, Jet2 and, yesterday, Kiss Flights, are picking up some of the routes, but with much lower frequency.

So far, they are all intended to take people to the sun. Significantly for Scotland's tourism industry, few of these new and revived routes are designed or likely to bring many foreigners into Scotland.

BAA, owners of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen airports, which were the main bases for FlyGlobespan, are very keen to secure new companies to fill the gaps, but they don't have much to show for those negotiations so far. For Edinburgh, FlyGlobespan had been its sixth biggest operator, so it left a sizeable gap in BAA's financial plans as well.

With so much capacity and lots of Scots now booking their summer holidays, one result could be that they find prices are going to be much higher.

There are those that reckon prices had to go up, as they have become unsustainably low. While Ryanair continues its bombast, this feels like a crucial moment as we lurch towards the end of the low-fare era.

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• - What's this?

What will the finance sector look like in 20 years? It's a question being asked by a survey of sentiment now marking its 20th birthday.

The 20/20 vision has seen 20 leading figures (can you see a theme
here?) mark the second decade of the CBI/Pricewaterhouse Coopers Financial Services Survey.

The answers are compiled from some of those who may have lost public trust, so these opinions could merely serve to invite a barrage of abuse. But for all the mistakes and greed which brought the financial sector so low, they still know their business and they're some smart people.

So give them a hearing, but don't give yourself any prizes for guessing the top findings:

- Too much regulation is bad, and the financial crisis has given regulators an opportunity to boost their interference.

- Any kind of regulation from Brussels seems to be bad, and intended to do down the City of London.

- Asia is the Next Big Thing, and China in particular. Chinese banks are going to edge into the world top 10.

- UK banking could see the emergence of new competitors such as Virgin and Tesco. And it's going to be less exciting and profitable.

- Financial innovation will have to prove its worth, and will have to meet customer scepticism about products they don't understand.
Transparency will be valued.

- London will continue to be important as a financial centre, not least in asset management, so long as regulation and tax doesn't scare away activity to Switzerland, Ireland or further afield. No other part of the UK gets a mention. No great surprise there either.

Unexpected

And what bits of the survey catch the eye as, well, a bit out of the ordinary? Here are four:

One: Graham Beale, chief executive of Nationwide Building Society, says there's an appetite from the tripartite regulators (Financial Services Authority, Bank of England and HM Treasury) to boost the mutual sector with one or two more "big-ticket" players to sit alongside his own Swindon-based giant.

He says it's early days so far, but the model being considered is in the Netherlands, where Rabobank is a collective of around 150 institutions. "We're at the very early stage of exploring opportunities in the UK to mirror such arrangements," he told the CBI/PwC surveyors.

There may be the start of something bigger form the merger of the Co-operative Bank and Britannia Building Society, says Mr Beale. The same could come from Yorkshire and Chelsea getting spliced.

Bigger banks

Two: So you think banks are too big? Think again. John Varley, chief executive of Barclays, sees consolidation in his crystal ball. It is fragmented at present, he said, with the top 20 banks having a market share of around 25% - far lower than in industries such as pharmaceuticals. (Do we want our banks to be like Big Pharma? Not me.)

The Barclays boss's argument goes that customers around the world have similar requirements in wholesale banking, and it's going that way in retail too. But he adds, with some humility, that banks will have to get better at explaining themselves and their usefulness: "From the point of view of some stakeholders [I think he means 'most of the public'] banking looks powerful, amorphous and self-serving.

"The reality is that what banks do is important to the economy and to society, but the banks need to do a better job of making that case."

Hedges grow higher

Three: Casino banking for the masses. The least socially useful bit of finance is arguably the hedge fund sector, driving the derivatives market, leveraged to the hilt to deliver astonishing returns on investment.

As with private equity firms, they're not noted for being much bothered about who or what gets trampled in the process. And as banks are pushed into reducing their exposure from the risks of proprietary trading, there will be opportunities for this less regulated, higher risk sector to take over business from the mainstream.

One of the contributors to this survey is one Peter Clarke, chief executive of Man Group plc, which includes hedge fund activities while, unusually, listed on the London Stock Exchange. He wants to make it easier for retail investors to protect themselves against the volatility of the stock market: "Hedge funds should be for everyone.
Hedge funds are seen as high risk, but there is almost no strategy with a higher risk than equities long only."

Pension timebomb

Four: Problems with pensions will dog corporate and personal finances for 20 years unless there's a change of direction at several levels.
The new boss of Edinburgh's Standard Life, David Nish, foresees consolidation in different aspects of life insurance, while Tim Breedon, of Legal and General, sees an opportunity in removing pension risk from company balance sheets.

It's Maggie Craig, of the Association of British Insurers, who gives us healthy food for healthy financial thought, with her critique of Whitehall's pension reforms, kicking in from 2012: "The problem is that the Government is setting no targets for pension savings. We have targets for eating five portions of fruit and veg a day and on alcohol consumption, but no-one says how much people should be saving and what they need to save."

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• - What's this?

Scotland is supposed to have a quarter of Europe's potential for generating electricity from wind and tidal power. In Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels, there is enthusiastic government alignment in favour of boosting Europe's renewable generation.

So why is it that it costs £21.58 per kilowatt to connect a wind turbine in Lewis, Orkney and Shetland to the national grid, while there's a subsidy of £2.70 in Greater London and £6.68 for connecting to the grid in Cornwall?

As the SNP administration in Edinburgh has been saying for a few years now, it's odd to give a subsidy for a wind turbine in Hyde Park where the wind doesn't blow much and it wouldn't be very welcome, while creating such a big disincentive to erecting one in the Scottish islands or offshore, where it blows a whole lot more and there are fewer people to object.

The Scottish government has an audience for this argument in Glasgow on Monday, as Holyrood's energy minister Jim Mather plays host to regulator Ofgem and National Grid, the company that runs most of the electricity transmission system.

Present also will be Scottish Power and Scottish and Southern Energy, the companies that both generate and transmit power north of the border. They've been making common cause with the Scottish government on campaigning against the charging regime.

No evidence

So the case for change is; incentives are needed to boost renewables in remote places where potential is best: and the European Commission wants all countries to demonstrate what they're doing to meet demanding targets.

Scotland is at just over 20% of electricity generation from renewables, and is aiming at 50% by 2020: for Britain as a whole, the current figure is 6%, and the target is to get beyond 30%.

I, for one, have heard lots about that argument for years. But I've heard little of the response. Until now. On ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ1, The Politics Show in Scotland on Sunday had Lord Hunt, the UK minister, giving a robust response.

"We see no evidence to suggest that the transmission fees are acting as a prevention for developments," he said.

"If you were to change those charges and reduce those charges to generators, someone would have to pay, and that would be the customer."

And how about the European Commission? "The Commission is convinced that the way in which this has operated in Britain is entirely consistent with European legislation. So I'm very relaxed about it."

Power loss

Three points there. On there being no hard evidence of development being stifled ... actually, there is. A consortium in Orkney, including Norway's state-owned renewables company, Statkraft, explicitly said last March that's the main reason they'd abandoned a plan.

And if there is no other "hard evidence", as Lord Hunt puts it, that could be because companies are not bothering with non-viable projects, at least until charges come down. After all, the case presented by the industry body, Scottish Renewables, and the country's two main generators, seems to be hard evidence of pent up demand.

Second, on consumer charges, it's worth understanding the two main reasons it costs more to connect at a distance from the major market.

One, that it's expensive to put in all those cables, and particularly with a whole lot more links to connect up remote wind, wave and tidal
turbines: two, that power is lost over distance, and the longer the distance, the more is lost.

It's not a huge loss. About 2.5% of demand throughout Britain is lost through cabling and transformers. But the National Grid reckoning is that any marginal extra generation in the North of Scotland offers less than 90% efficiency, while in the south of England, it's more than 110% efficient in financial terms.

On the expense of those new cables, a new, scary figure was introduced a couple of weeks back. A leaked document from National Grid suggested a 120% increase in connection charges in Scotland. The explanation?

That was a scenario where all the costs of new, multi-billion pound sub-sea cables were loaded on to the current formula. But we're not to be alarmed, goes the reassurance: it was just accountants having fun with their spreadsheets. (The way they do. Well, it's a dull job - you would too.)

The view from National Grid is that it's a creature of UK regulatory statute. That requires the regulator, Ofgem, to prioritise the best value price to the customer.

Customer bills

And at present, according to Lord Hunt, the customer pays about 73% of the cost of connecting to the grid, while generators are expected to pay 23%.

In other words, if the regulator is to be required to give priority to the drive for more renewable generation, it will compromise the drive to deliver price efficiency to the customer.

It is further argued that there are already proven alternative financial incentives in place, without which the renewables industry would not have got started; renewable obligation certificates, and further subsidies to Scottish generators reckoned to be worth around £100m a year, nearly half of that in lieu of hydro.

On Lord Hunt's third point - European law - Commission officials have, indeed, said there's no legal objection to the current charging regime. But that's not the point that's been made.

It's about policy and perhaps future law, in that Brussels has told member states to increase their renewables generation. And with its current charges, you can argue Britain's not doing all it could in that task.

South to north

There's a final twist in this high voltage tale. National Grid plc bases its calculations on transmission on an average winter day, when electron traffic is from north to south. But in summer, with the wind lower, that could be reversed.

Indeed, if Scotland loses the baseload of its nuclear power stations because the SNP opposes replacements, the country could rely even more on that south-to-north transmission.

And if it does, the grid companies would get better use out of their cables, thus bringing the connection charges down.

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• - What's this?

Jeremy Clarkson, I'm not, and never wish to be. But I did get to live briefly in his petrolhead world for Reporting Scotland.

The mission: to examine the role of the 4x4 in an ice-gripped Scotland, and specifically the question of whether the government has jumped on the green bandwagon too fast with sharp increases in vehicle excise duty starting in April.

The big beasts of the road have kept the country moving, particularly the countryside. Because of those of us struggling to get a grip with traction on two wheels, I'm told it has led to a surge in demand for 4x4s. According to John McGuire, managing director of Phoenix Car Company, half his used car sales have been of the off-road or "soft-road" variety over the past few weeks.

He says he can't get enough to meet demand, and claims the social pariahs with the Chelsea tractors have now become everyone's favourite neighbours, as they're the ones able to get you to work, school or the shops.

That's why Douglas Robertson, chief executive of the Scottish Motor Trade Association, is calling on the government to think again about its showroom levy. Linked to the emissions of each model, it is pushing the first year of road tax for the worst polluting cars up to £950.

That figure comes down by about half in the car's second year, but it still leaves vehicle excise duty at a level that will make even the most enthusiastic petrolhead think twice.

Mr Robertson wants either a Treasury re-think or a compensatory grant for those who don't have much choice about whether they run a 4x4.

The costs of running one continue to mount up. In central Edinburgh, the resident's parking permit is going up from an annual £160 to £320 for the worst environmental offenders, while the least polluting cars are cut to £30.

One of those supporting that change, Steve Burgess, a Green councillor in the capital, concedes there is a case for 4x4s in the emergency services. But even if you get 10 days usefulness out of that extra traction on the ice, he says it does not justify the extra damage done during the remaining 355 days of the year. The big cars simply aren't necessary for most people - and that goes for those on the school run in particular.

I've learned a few things. One is that there really isn't that much of a thrill from driving a Mitsubishi monster with the words "Raging Bull" prominent on the driver door.

Another is technical: that the emissions belching out the back of an automatic car are far higher than its stick-shift equivalent. For instance, the showroom tax on the biggest of the Land Rovers will cost you £950 for automatic, while non-automatic on the same model is £750.

My third lesson is economic: how quickly manufacturers are responding to these tax signals. It is wrong to say that all 4x4s are in or even near those top bracket emissions and tax disc costs. The so-called CRVs, or compact recreational vehicles, can be in much lower brackets, and there are more options for them coming on the market.

It's probably all the more irritating for those who hate higher taxes to find they're doing exactly what was intended.

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• - What's this?

Don't be surprised that most attention to today's appearance before the Treasury select committee by Stephen Hester is focussed on his talk of banker bonuses.

There's an election coming, and bonuses are the bit of an otherwise complex story that the public can latch on to. Angrily.

On a basic salary of £1.2m, and nearly £10m more if the chief executive can turn around the Royal Bank of Scotland's share price over a sustained period, even Ma and Pa Hester think he earns too much.

He wasn't saying how much bonus will be paid out, until it is calculated and confirmed late next month. But asked how he was going to face the public backlash, he admitted "I thought I might go on holiday for a long time". That was a joke, I think.

The rationale for continuing big bonuses is that it's the market rate.

RBS is "a prisoner of the market", though he didn't quite add that he's also a prisoner of the government as his majority shareholder. And it's tricky to be in two prisons at once.

The chief exec said he had not negotiated his pay when he joined as a battlefield promotion in October 2008.

But he did take the time back then to insist that his bonus shouldn't be seen as reward for failure. Great was the talk of deferred share payments for his staff, and clawback if targets are hit but business then unravels.

The RBS are truly world leaders at deferring bonuses.

Handsomely exceeded

Worth noting also was what Mr Hester was saying about other aspects of RBS business.

He's got a cautious manner, but this was the boss sounding relatively upbeat about the prospects of getting back into the black during this year. The balance sheet is down by £500bn, he pointed out. That's half a trillion pounds less exposure.

For all the complaints about a lack of lending, he said you've got a nine in 10 chance of getting a mortgage approved, and an 8.5 in 10 chance of a business loan.

Mortgage lending targets will be "handsomely exceeded", not least because so many other lenders have departed from the market.

But business lending doesn't look like it's going to hit the targets set by his chief shareholder.

Meanwhile, the slackness of demand for credit from debt-averse existing customers has £30bn of arranged overdrafts sitting in the RBS vaults without being used.

For those in a whole lot of trouble, debt has been converted to equity. As a result, how many companies does RBS now own? Stephen Hester didn't know. A thousand? Probably lots more.

The bit that tends to get forgotten amid the public fury at billions being distributed to top RBS staff at the end of next month, is that Mr H has got a bit of a morale challenge on his hands, with well over 100,000 still on his payroll.

Keeping them motivated, when they feel they're being held to a different standard when compared with other banks, is his "single greatest business problem".

What I sense when I watch bankers being grilled by their new political masters is that the politicians seem to think the humbling of the banks should come with some sacrifice.

They struggle to understand that bankers don't have a strong sense of public service, and being publicly owned hasn't created one. They're in it for the money - which happens to be what many people think of MPs.

Assets under pressure

Meanwhile, down the tram track currently under construction between RBS HQ and Edinburgh city centre, there's an another unwelcome type of bonus emerging from the international response to the financial crisis.

So says Scottish Financial Enterprise today, representing not just the troubled banks but also the less troubled insurance and asset management sectors. They're subject to the law of unintended consequences.

Chief executive Owen Kelly has today fired off a lobbying volley at Brussels, criticising its plans to regulate hedge funds.

This is seen as being aimed at the vast and under-regulated sector mainly active in London's Mayfair and off Wall Street, which was driving the leveraged asset bubble.

Edinburgh (with a growing big player in Aberdeen and another in Dundee) failed to attract much hedge fund activity through the boom years, but Scotland does do asset management rather well.

The Scottish concern is that that strength is going to be severely undermined by the additional unwelcome burden of duplicate regulation.

The claim is that the draft directive, if it stands, could affect savers, pension holders and investors, and while it might level the playing field across Europe, it would limit European finance houses' ability to do business with Asia on competitive terms.

According to Owen Kelly: "While it would have a negative impact in the City (of London), it could do even more damage in Scotland because we have a particular strength and expertise in investment management.

"It is not better regulation - just more, overlapping, regulation that would bring restrictions without benefits".

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• - What's this?

Two takes so far this month on the so-called Noughties and the first decade of devolution show Scotland has quite a good story to tell.

That's at least until recession hit. We've got another indicator from , out this morning, showing contrasting signs between Scotland and the rest of the UK.

One of the new takes on the past 10 years is a comparison of growth rates.

We're often told, mainly by SNP ministers, that Scotland's growth rate has lagged behind that of the UK. The Scottish Government's Purpose, with a capital P, is to close that gap by 2011.

One analysis of growth rates carried out for the Financial Times bears out that analysis, at least for the 1990s.

UK growth in that decade ran at 2.2% in the average year, while Scotland was at 1.9%.

And the Noughties? UK growth in the average year was at 1.7%, according to this reckoning, and Scottish average growth was 2.2%.

In other words, if you take the past 10 years, Scotland has already achieved The Purpose.

The only areas to register better average growth rates were London, at 2.7%, and East Anglia at 2.4%.

North-west England and the West Midlands had the most subdued Noughties.

That comes with a statistical health warning: a neat 10-year period, whether a decade or not, is no way to measure the economic cycle.

The other take on the past 10 years comes from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

That think tank's main interest is in poverty, of people and place. And it's been asking how 10 years of devolution has changed inequalities within the UK.

The answer is that Scotland has done not too badly.

The approach was to take 16 indicators of poverty, unemployment and mortality rates, and to compare how the three devolved nations compare with the nine regions of England.

The gap between the parts of the UK faring best and worst narrowed on most indicators but widened for early mortality, with Scotland seeing a particularly poor performance in mortality among those under 65.

It's improved, but very slowly, and it still lags behind the position occupied by much of England 10 years ago.

Scotland did well on improvements to child and pensioner poverty rates. And across the 16 indicators, it was Scotland that was most consistently above average.

So the north-south divide got smaller, though at a modest pace.

And can that be put down to the impact of devolution? Not much of it.

Scotland's biggest improvements were on issues most directly affected by Westminster's reserved powers, including unemployment and welfare payments.

And the north-east of England has a similar story of improvements to tell, without devolution to explain it.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has some recommendations worth noting.

Most of them centre around one theme: Westminster and the devolved administrations need to work more closely together, even while their policies diverge.

That goes for sharing information, evaluating how they are doing against the targets set for reducing poverty, and for discussion with devolved ministers before tax and welfare changes are imposed from the centre.

Professor David Bell, from Stirling University and a contributor to the Rowntree research, suggests Scotland may need to have some of the welfare system devolved, as changes afoot could undermine the policy choices already made on care for the elderly.

This Rowntree evidence is supposedly the source of the headline "Scotland 'the most affluent country in Britain'", trumpeted in one of our Sunday papers, together with calls to cut back on the Barnett formula block grant to Holyrood.

It's a great headline, but hard to see that it has anything to do with the report.

Then again, the headline "Scotland relatively less poor, but still dying too young" wouldn't sell so many papers or confirm so many prejudices.

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• - What's this?

The questions about what grounded FlyGlobespan last month are being asked more widely. And as I detailed in three takes on The Ledger last month, they keep coming back to E-Clear, the company that handled the online transactions for the Edinburgh-based airline.

Its chief executive, Elias Elia, denies responsibility for Globespan's demise. But he remains the focus of Globespan's administrators, who have lodged a legal action asking for E-Clear itself to have administrators called in.

This is a manoeuvre to get Mr Elia to show the £35 million they say he withheld from Globespan. You may recall Globespan's administrators said more than half of that money was for seats on flights that had already landed, and therefore no longer at significant risk of being reclaimed.

Prove it, responded Mr Elia. So he received a disk with the booking information this morning. And the administrators await any evidence to the contrary.

E-Clear has claimed that most of the £35m (a total figure that doesn't seem to be disputed) was due for flights not yet taken, and legitimately withheld because it was subject to credit card holders reclaiming the money for tickets purchased. If that were true, the average passenger would have paid more than £300, which seems quite a lot for a low fare airline.

Mr Elia's answer: lots of them were on package holidays. But are package holidays not covered by the ATOL industry insurance scheme?

Zoom grounded

Another legal action, asking courts to wind up E-Clear, was lodged in the hours before Globespan's directors had to call in the administrators three weeks ago. The directors no longer have any legal standing. But the administrators, PricewaterhouseCoopers, have not withdrawn that action.

Mr Elia's problems spread across the Atlantic. In Canada, Scots exile Hugh Boyle is pursuing E-Clear for £300,000. This is for money paid through E-Clear for holidays booked by Canadian snowbirds heading for the winter sun with Go Travel Direct. That company is now dormant, and hasn't had anyone on its holidays for more than six months. But there's still 500,000 loonies (Canadian dollars) due to be passed back.

Mr Boyle lodged a legal action pursuing his loonies, equivalent to £300,000. In response came a lawyer's letter, saying that E-Clear is entitled to withhold money as long as 12 months after flight tickets have been used.

What I'm now told by Hugh Boyle is that Mr Elia has since been back in touch, unhappy about the publicity all this is receiving and wanting to settle. Mr Boyle reckons there were roughly 20 phone calls and 10 texts to Ottawa on Tuesday alone.

The same Mr Boyle was on the board of Zoom, the airline chaired by his brother John, which went under in August 2008. Zoom also used E-Clear for online transactions. Hugh Boyle isn't saying the withholding of money was the problem then: it had more to do with the sky-high cost of fuel during that summer.

But he does recall Mr Elia being enthusiastic about saving Zoom by investing in it, holding out prospects of support which never materialised. Perhaps by coincidence, that's exactly what was happening when Globespan had to call in the administrators last month. Mr Elia was lead negotiator for a Jersey-based trust, Halcyon Investments, which was offering to put 15 million euros into Globespan. That didn't come to anything either.

Stranded travellers

Another development today is a travel trade report that Allbury Travel is now in administration. Trading under several brands, including Libra, its parent company was controlled by Mr Elia, and it used E-Clear for online transactions. It ceased trading on December 19.

Mr Elia has subsequently been quoted as saying this was a "strategic" move. A report that Allbury Travel was in administration turned out not to be true at the time. It simply revoked its ATOL insurance, and left the Civil Aviation Authority to bring home 100 stranded travellers and pay back a few thousand forward bookings. But now, we can look forward to hearing what Allbury's administrators have to say about the role of E-Clear and what is still owed.

Talking of the Civil Aviation Authority, it raises the question of who was and is overseeing the activities of E-Clear. The airline regulator says it had no direct role beyond running the ATOL industry insurance scheme, while licensing FlyGlobespan and other airlines.

So what about the Financial Services Authority? E-Clear is a company which, until its clients started going bust, was handling several hundreds of millions of pounds each year. It looks very much like a financial services company. Yet I'm reliably told there was absolutely no regulator of how it handled that money, beyond recourse by its clients to the courts.

Happily, that situation is changing, but only as of two months ago, when a European directive required national financial regulators to begin overseeing those who deal in "merchant acquiring" - that is, credit card transactions. Indeed, it won't be until April of next year before the FSA has to approve and licence all such companies. All it can do now is to oversee so-called "conduct of business", but not to second guess the contractual relationship between transactions processor and vendor.

Goodwin spokesman

Most such transactions are carried out by banks, with Barclays and our old friend the Royal Bank of Scotland as major players. To a very controversial extent, they already have the FSA on their case.

Banks typically hand over the money to vendors five or six days after the transaction, meanwhile making a bit of margin on that money with short-term deposits. But E-Clear has been hanging on for months, and probably earning a bit of income from investment of, or interest on, that money. Insiders at FlyGlobespan say it was facing an average delay of payment of at least 70 days.

The Economist magazine has also been looking into E-Clear's affairs, and this week raises questions about which banks are backing E-Clear's transactions processing. It seems this used to be Deutsche Bank.

But that link was broken in 2008. Mr Elia isn't saying which bank he works with now, even though E-Clear actually has a controlling stake in another smaller German bank, Nord Finanz.

There's good news for those of us trying to hear Mr Elia's point of view. He has slightly improved his communications with the outside world.

He's hired a spokesman - the same bloke, as it happens, who speaks (or doesn't) on behalf of Sir Fred Goodwin.

Update - 1730 Friday

There's more - confirmation today that the Serious Fraud Office is asking questions about E-Clear. It responds to complaints lodged with it, without saying who's done the lodging.

And it carries out some intelligence-gathering before deciding whether a formal investigation is required. That's why it's been asking what is going on at E-Clear.

Ridiculous, says E-Clear. This is not worthy of SFO investigation: it is merely a problem of contractual differences.

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• - What's this?

Just a bunch of metal monsters striding through a barely populated bit of the Highlands? Or could today's decision on the Beauly-to-Denny come closer to home for us all?

It's part of a plan - possibly the most controversial part - drawn up by the energy industry working with the UK Government to upgrade and renew the creaking electricity grid, and to orient it to the places the power is now coming from.

The other phases of the work will mean putting bigger capacity onto existing pylons, including the two big lines across Scotland's border with England. Add to that two very expensive sub-sea cables, one from Peterhead to north east England, and the other connecting Hunterston in Ayrshire with Merseyside.

Leaving aside the North Sea network that could take Scottish renewables to a continental market (and also allowing power to come from continental source, such as nuclear, when the wind drops), the cost of the necessary UK upgrade is put at £4.6bn.

That gets added to your household bill. An industry estimate is that it could put £60 on the average annual power bill. There's a dispute under way between those companies and their regulator about how much they can expect as a rate of return, with Ofgem wanting it to be less.

But that's just one of the additional elements being added to your power bill by changes being required by the regulator and the government. The most recent estimates for other add-ons, as calculated by Ofgem, put £24 on last year's average bill to pay for the EU emissions trading scheme. That's the cost of energy generators exceeding their allowance for climate changing pollution.

There was £45 to help companies meet the requirements of the carbon emissions reduction target. That pays, for instance, for those free low-energy light bulbs and subsidised insulation.

The average domestic bill includes around £12 to pay utility companies for the expense of developing renewable energy sources, and there was £3 to provide for schemes aimed at helping low-income households.

Take out all those add-ons and VAT, and it seems that actually generating your electricity and some corporate profit accounts for only 69% of your bill.

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• - What's this?

I don't have much in common with Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, but her focus on the issue of confidence brings together the world of the novice nun and the recession watcher.

We've got more data on that out this morning, and it's running counter to the first batch of retail figures from Christmas sales.

The tills may have been ringing at John Lewis and Next, but the monthly survey for Nationwide Building Society suggests that consumer confidence may be short-lived.

It has found a steady improvement in the British public's levels of confidence from a dismal low registered last January. But the survey carried out for the month to 20 December saw that trend given a sharp jolt.

Consumer confidence saw a five point decrease, the biggest one-month drop for 14 months.

The survey breaks that down into an understanding of what people think of the current situation, and how they view things six months away.

Throughout the past year, the Nationwide survey has registered the public's very dim view of how things feel at the time people are surveyed.

It found only 2% of people thinking things were 'good' last February, rising to 10% by October. That fell back to 6% in the most recent figures.

But that has contrasted with future expectations, which helps explain why the recession has not been as bad for falling demand as had been feared. Last January, a majority of people thought things would get worse over the next six months.

That fell to 14% in November, as evidence the public thought the corner had been turned.

But by last month, those fearing worse to come are on the rise again, to 19%, while there was a fall in those foreseeing the economy will be in better shape, down from 41% to 34%.

What lies behind this jolt?

Perhaps a realisation, with the Pre-Budget Statement, that the state of the public finances presents the threat of a new downturn.

Nationwide's chief economist, Martin Gahbauer, suggests "that an element of caution may have begun to creep back into the minds of consumers over the Christmas period... Although it is still early days, these lower expectations may foreshadow a more sluggish consumer outlook in 2010 as stimulus measures are withdrawn".

And how does this compare with other countries? In America, for instance, where consumer confidence is seen as the key to bringing recession to an end?

A similar survey carried out over the same period in the USA found confidence still rising, slightly.

The 'present situation' index for The Conference Board survey saw a fall from November to December, and it now sits at a 26-year low.

Expectations of the next six months were on the rise, but consumers are pessimistic about their short-term prospects, which is seen as a likely downbeat indicator of the way money is spent or hoarded in coming months.

Across the European Union, the best indication of the public mood comes in the six-monthly Eurobarometer. Its most recent survey, carried out during autumn, shows unemployment has risen above the economic situation as the main public concern.

In autumn 2008, only 26% thought the economy was one of the two most serious issues affecting countries, but that's now at 51%.

In Britain, concern about the economic situation was among the biggest concerns for 28%, with unemployment registering 38%. That puts its mood in mid-range among European nations.

There's no surprise that Greece, Latvia, Ireland and Spain registered the biggest concern, though they are all finding people think things have improved from the spring survey.

What is really striking about that list of priorities is that Britain's concern with immigration, at 29%, is nearly double the rating of any other EU country with the exception of Malta. Don't be surprised if that factor feeds into the Westminster election campaign.

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• - What's this?

Scotland's five major daily newspapers, and a bunch of local weeklies, have declared themselves to be in the television business. They're bidding as part of the consortia that want to provide the Channel 3 half hour of news for Scotland's central belt and north.

Other consortia are going after a franchise for TV news in the south of Scotland, teaming up the Daily Record with the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and the independent TV company that already produces GMTV news bulletins for Scotland.

That's because the model for local commercial news since the 1950s is broken - or so ITV plc says. The "licence to print money" no longer applies.

With audiences fracturing to other stations or going online, STV, formerly Scottish Television, says it can only continue to fulfil that part of its franchise commitment if it is funded to do so.

Its confidence in the future can't have been helped by TV audiences when the bells tolled at New Year. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ1 took 63% of the audience share, while STV only managed 9%, even falling behind ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ2 (with Jools Holland's Hootenanny) for the first time anyone can remember. It's not a comfortable time to be in commercial television.

So why have the bosses at the Scotsman (Johnston Press), The Herald (Newsquest), Dundee Courier and Press and Journal (both DC Thomson) today announced they're joining forces with Tinopolis, the independent production company behind ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Question Time, to replace the current 6pm offering on STV?

And why is it in competition with ITN, the London news broadcaster behind News at Ten in league alongside STV and Bauer Radio stations, which include Clyde, Forth, Tay and Northsound?

One reason is that the newspapers' commercial business model is also broken. They are trying to make the move online, while preserving the printed word.

But compared with London-based competitors, they've left it late and they're trying to do it cheaply.

The strategy also fits with newspapers' moves to put more audio-visual content on their websites. And while the newspaper industry complains the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ is using its dominant and privileged role in news media to encroach on online markets, the print news media is becoming ever more convergent across airwaves and online platforms.

Innovative

Clearly, this is getting close to home, so let's state the obvious: the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has an interest in all this.

It also has a declared aim of co-operating with commercial broadcasters and print publishers, providing some of the news footage that will go into this new style of commercial news.

The Government's pilot scheme, in Scotland, Wales and north-east England is aimed at driving new ideas into newscasting, seeing if there are ways of getting to a more local level, drawing on newspapers' strength in journalist numbers at local level, and being innovative by working across online and broadcast.

That north-east English trial is largely because the attempt to put together Tyne, Tees and Border news under ITV plc management has been particularly unhappy, leaving the south of Scotland with a much depleted service recorded from Gateshead an hour before it is broadcast.

Advertising

The pilots are being set up in something of a rush, with bids in by last Wednesday, a shortlist next week, beginning a dialogue on what can be provided and how much subsidy it might take, a preferred bidder by late March and then the service running from summer this year.

Why the rush? Perhaps it's because there's an election looming, and Labour either wants to offer something to three of its heartland areas.

Or because it can see how sceptical the Conservatives sound, so Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw wants to embed the idea before it can be blocked by an incoming Tory administration.

That haste has left a lot of questions around the idea of consorting newspaper, radio and TV companies.

Funding, for instance. There are various ways of funding this if it rolls out beyond the three pilot areas; a share of spectrum funds flowing to the government from mobile operators, direct funding from UK or devolved governments or by a levy on broadband, such as the one already proposed by the Government to fund its continued roll-out.

The pilots are to be funded with around £20 million annually from the £130 million surplus taken from the programme of digital switchover from analogue TV signals.

But it's not clear how much money each consortia will want, or need, and they don't know how much they should bid for.

The process involves dialogue, so it's only when Whitehall's Department of Culture, Media and Sport sees the proposals and talks over them that they can discuss how much subsidy there might be.

But what about advertising? If STV isn't part of the winning consortium, how will it share out the revenue from advertising in and around the 6pm news - if at all?

Indeed, if STV isn't part of the winning consortium, will there be much point left to it?

Sexism and Ageism

And what if there are benefits to be had from subsidised TV operations, potentially feeding back into private media companies and newspapers - if, for instance, TV reporters do the work that newspaper reporters would otherwise be doing, because they are publicly funded to do so?

Wouldn't that be an unfair advantage for some newspapers over others?

Looked at from the journalists' point of view, if the publishers of the papers in Scotland's four main cities are collaborating, couldn't that be the thin end of a shared newsroom and cost-cutting drive?

Then there's regulation. Newspapers come under the Press Complaints Commission, a voluntary code often seen as toothless. That applies too to their audio-visual online content.

But commercial broadcasters are regulated by Ofcom, which has legal teeth, clear regulatory guidelines, and penalties at its disposal. So what happens to election coverage, for instance?

If the Daily Record continues to pursue a pro-Labour line editorially, and it is putting that into its audio-visual online content, who is ensuring that the broadcast content is free of that political bias? The same campaign report could be subject to two different regulators.

And if these consortia are really going to be innovative, how about the people they employ?

The Herald's editorial today criticises the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ for its failure to hire older women newsreaders. "As a public service broadcaster which prides itself on reflecting the diversity of its audience, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, in consistently denying both sexism and ageism, has simply not grasped the reality that in all other areas of life, dynamic women in their fifties and ­sixties are running businesses, schools, hospitals or local authorities".

Can we therefore take it that a TV news consortium including The Herald will put that right? Judging by the newspaper's current personnel, I wouldn't bank on it.

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• - What's this?

This time last year, you probably hadn't heard of quantitative easing and Sir Fred Goodwin's pension? - well, that was personal to him, wasn't it?

So what will we have learned about the way of the world's economy by this time next year?

The crystal ball - heavily discounted in a pre-Christmas sale - says the world will be back to growth - some bits faster than others.

In China, it may already be back to growing far too fast, creating new imbalances and instability. International tensions with Beijing look a safe bet, particularly over its currency.

You could also expect problems with growth driving inflation. Energy prices could lead a year of renewed volatility.

Some bits of the world economy will be lucky to grow at all. Ireland, for instance. And Scotland's growth prospects are slim.

Forecasters say a modest lift for Scottish growth early in the new year could be followed by another dip by year's end, with unemployment still troubling and some companies buckling under prolonged corporate stress.

That pattern has held for previous such slumps.

But then, we haven't really had such slumps before. This has been unique, in its severity a year ago, and in the steps taken to avoid a depression.

That avoidance has been a job well done, so far.

The next test is to exit the so-called Great Stabilisation with a not-so-great reckoning: unwinding the boost to money supply, lifting interest rates off the floor and cutting those deficits.

The Bank of England will have to turn off the new money taps. February looks good timing for that.

But as the UK economy stumbles back to growth, the central bank must pick the right time for reining in monetary policy to choke inflationary pressures.

At the heart of the Westminster election campaign is public spending.

We know there's going to be pain, but lots of people seem to think it can be applied to someone else, whether it's bashing a banker or having a bonfire of the bureaucrats.

Whatever gets said before the election and whoever wins, the subsequent occupant of 11 Downing Street will soon be telling us: it's even worse than he thought.

Expect the application of pain to nearly every part of the body public over the next 12 months.

Oh, and I nearly forgot, a very happy new year to you.

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• - What's this?