Playing out is good for 'em.

A report by the National Trust highlights the decline in children "playing out" as we used to call it. The National Trust draw heavily on work done by Play England and come up with some alarming findings. Can it be true that more kids are taken to hospital as a result of falling out of bed than from falling out of trees? Has the "radius of activity", the area that kids roam about in, really declined by as much as 90% since the 1970s? Concerns about safety are cited as the main reason why kids are increasingly confined to their homes and I'm sure that this is true. Whether or not these concerns are justified is another matter. I think that in towns at least, roaming about tended to be an activity of the working class child with middle class families looking down on this freedom as being associated with "street urchins". This is a generalisation of course and in rural areas things may have been different again. My own kids played out and survived more or less unharmed. Of course the reality is that left to their own devices kids will frequently be a general pain in the arse to the adult world and I think that in the past this was held in check by a cohesion of the community that has long since all but disappeared. Truth is that last summer there were plenty of young people roaming about and having adventures but the adventures had little in common with anything dreamed up by Enid Blyton and I suspect were roundly condemned by the average National Trust Member.

On and on and ..................

From the pasty shop she has run in Helston for more than 25 years, Ann Muller sounds a similarly warning. "This is basically a tax on the working man of Britain," she says, "and on the many elderly and unemployed people who come by here for a pasty every lunchtime.

"My hot pasties would go up by 50p from £2.75: for some people, that will make a big difference. I'm planning to put a sign up in the window: 'Hot for the rich, and cold for the poor.'"

On and on ran the pasty tax war.

Anarchist Media Project pull it off again!

Pasty War Hots Up.

The pasty tax fiasco looks as though it will run and run. Cameron favours VAT on pasties and a large hot one. Miliband is up for a Greggs. Clegg probably can't make his mind up but will most likely make his a Ginsters. Ian Bone has really started something here and if sensible political analysis is yr bag have a look at Johnny Void. Forget about Greggs, they don't sell pasties anyway, they only think they do. Truth is that when the dust has settled what we will be left with is a price rise on a basic item of working class grub. Governments have fallen for less.

It's not personal - just business.

It's difficult to say for sure when exactly "business" became the established religion of this country but certainly the Thatcher-Blair project, the deregulation of the City, the rise of the business schools and the triumphant march of the spivs can all act as historical clues. About the same time that young people were beginning to see "business" as the new rock'n roll we also witnessed the emergence of a completely new type of employee, the professional manager. The manager of the past might have been a reasonable person or the prick of history but having spent years in railways, baking, the manufacture of knicker elastic or whatever, probably had a pretty sound grasp of what the job was all about. This new product of the business school knew nothing but the art of management and was convinced that this pseudo skill was transferable anywhere. In my final years of employment I worked as a lockkeeper on the Thames and at one stage was confronted by a fairly senior manager who proudly assured me that he knew nothing about the river but that it didn't matter as he "employed people to know that". His expertise was in the dark art management itself.

This is the world that we now inhabit and despite Cameron whining about the punters continually putting business down, there are very many kids who are not involved in Occupy and who genuinely aspire to being something in that world so well epitomised by the FT's nauseous weekend supplement, Spend It. Kingston Business School is actually expanding and a new extension is being opened next month by that managers manager and scourge of the organised workforce Willie Walsh. Now we hear that the Somali pirates are operating to a business plan and that the more successful ones are products of the British MBA system. So what exactly is the relationship between the business schools, a certain airline CEO and the pirate strongholds of East Africa. I think that we should be told.

The Cruddas Affair Explained.

Listen very carefully. I will say this only once. Political parties claim to represent certain sections of society, certain interests. In order to ensure that their electoral campaigns are well funded parties collect money from their supporters. The Tory Party represents the interests of business and the landed aristocracy whilst Labour claim to represent those of organized labour. LibDem are not sure who they represent and for that reason collect very little money. This Cruddas geezer was simply doing his job, getting money for his party from people who thought that their interests might be better served. The job of the party is simply to get/keep power. Our job is to vote and go back to sleep. It's how they do. Get over it.

Posh Zak bigs up Red Ed shock.

Will Zak Goldsmith prove to be a millstone round Cameron's neck - or the kiss of death to Ed Miliband? Or has the Old Etonian green stoner non-dom shot himself in the foot? Time will tell.