Recently by John Clancy

Land ownership is (literally) part of the bedrock of any nation and certainly its economy; and yet very little attention (beyond that of the domestic residential market) is given to it by politicians in this country .

Politicians and think-tanks simply don't understand it (land law is for lawyers) or take the view that if there was 'anything in it' it would have been 'done' by now. Alternatively, 'land policy', such as bringing land into public ownership, is regarded as something from a state socialist past or is the domain of Zimbabwe's Mugabe.

Of course those who do own the land surface (and below) of the UK are very much delighted by this approach and have no interest in the issue moving up the agenda.

The Emperor Nero fiddling and Pontius Pilate washing his hands - only Peter Mandelson could bring both these images to mind at yesterday's Business select committee appearance, commenting on yesterday's industrial coup d'etat at Cadbury's.

He was sawing out the same old tune on the importance of globalised trade with one hand, whilst washing and wiping away any responsibility to act with the other: quite a feat.

The hedge funds (without which the raid could not have happened) and, as importantly, the shareholders who recently sold their shares to them, acted out of a destructive short-termism which is hard-wired into the whole economic and industrial system of the UK.

There is no industrial policy or strategy in existence, or even in sight. The reason is that to have a strategy means intervention. It means government guiding and investing directly. It means creating pathways of industrial activity. It means laying out long-term seed beds for industrial growth. The present financial, banking and private sector structures will not and probably cannot do these things.

If Northern Rock stays in state ownership and current Chief Executive Gary Hoffman remains in charge, I have every confidence (as Hoffman says he does not see any need to rush the bank into the private sector ) that Northern Rock is the Number One safe place in which savings should reside for the foreseeable future.

I've just watched Gary Hoffman give evidence to the Treasury Select committee and I have to say I was incredibly impressed with him. Especially after having just seen the conversely incredibly unimpressive Stephen Hester from RBS/NatWest who was up first and justifying his £9million salary plus bonuses in shares package (even under criticism from his own parents, he admitted).

Hoffman was down-to-earth, straightforward and honest: an outstanding choice to take care of this precious state asset as far as I'm concerned.

What was interesting was that although he let us know that the recent re-structuring was designed for an eventual policy of a return of the Northern Rock's non-mortgage book to a private sector purchaser, there was no timetable that he was aware of for such an event.

Specifically, he said that, "There is no good reason to rush it."

I received an e-mail this morning from Gary Hoffman, Chief Executive of Northern Rock. It tells me that my paltry savings (all of them) which I hold with them have been transferred to a new company called Northern Rock PLC.

The e-mail tells me that Northern Rock PLC is "is a new, well-capitalised bank that will hold and service all customer savings accounts and some existing mortgage accounts, as well as offering new mortgage and savings products to new and existing customers."

This is the 'Good Bank', of course.

I'm not sure that anyone resigns over anything much these days in government (or its quangos or non-ministerial departments), but there can be no better case for resignations than those of the Director General and the Chief Executive of the Office of 'Fair' Trading, following its humiliating throwing in of the towel today over the issue of the fairness of Bank Charges.

This is now apparently because it would take too long for the OFT to take the case back to court and because the Banks would insist that the legal fees of any future test case would be borne by the loser, so this is too big a risk for the non-ministerial department and beyond its remit. As for the consumer - well it's up to you to sort it out yourselves, the government appears to be saying. Not our problem. Perhaps you could gang together and bring a class action against the banks? Costs? Fees? Er...well that's a risk you take! Good luck, though.

As I said at the time of the Supreme Court decision, the OFT has shown itself throughout this case to be utterly toothless as a consumer protector and a total waste of taxpayers' money. It has absolutely no point in existing and should immediately be shut down.

It can't even live up to the actual words in its name, specifically enabling unfairness, assisting it like an alcoholic's drinks assistant, through staggering incompetence. The biggest players in big corporate business, due to the actions and inactions of the OFT, now legally can't even be subject to 'Fairness' rules in their charging policies or business practices. The Office for the Enablement of Unfair Trading is a better new title for this bunch of hopeless legal has-beens.

The OFT was set up to protect the consumer and enforce competition. It has failed on both accounts and has thus been shown to be not fit for purpose.

One of the possible outcomes as a result of the test case was that the OFT would at least still publish its 2-and-a-half-year long enquiry into to the fairness of how retail current accounts are run by the banks. That would at least shame the banks (although I think we have learned this year that they are beyond shame) and be useful to every individual with a bank charges' case in court.

The enquiry has been dropped, binned. It cost, I suspect, many £millions and the OFT has skulked away and shredded the report on advice from their lily-livered, spineless lawyers (who were so rubbish in their legal advice and representation that they bungled up the whole case on behalf of consumers leading to this whole mess in the first place).

I hope that the legal team they took advice from as to whether they should continue with their case (they have been advised that they would definitely lose - whichever point they argued on) was not the original team who advised and represented them in the bank charges case. They should all have been dumped and a fresh team consulted at the very least. Perhaps it was the orginal team, which would obviously mean they would advise not proceeding, because if they did proceed and win then that would show how incompetent the original legal advice, strategy and representation was. I think we should be told whether this was fresh advice from a fresh team of lawyers. I wouldn't trust the first lot with a parking ticket.

We, the taxpayers, who have paid for that enquiry will not now see it. The truth about how the banks operated their cartel and how unfair the system is will be denied to us. Mandelson should order its publication by the end of the year, next week. That's what the OFT have promised us for the last 2-and-a-half years. It would be produced by the end of 2009. Make it so, Mandy.

Let's call a spade a spade: the reality is that the big banks and one building society operated a cartel . Due to government policy favouring big business over the consumer leading to deregulation, the cartel itself was put beyond the reach of any determination by a government quango or department, ministerial or otherwise. That is the reality of today's announcement by the OFT.

Peter Mandelson can't deny this - the old legal maxim res ipsa loquitur is wholly applicable here: things speak for themselves. It doesn't matter how much the government says it is on the side of the ordinary person, the ordinary consumer, the facts speak for themselves here. The system built not only fails to prevent unfairness, but promotes it; actually enables the consumer to be royally stuffed by unregulated, unreformed corporate cartels. If the government is on the side of the ordinary person, on the side of the consumer, it would act on this matter, to force justice and fairness to have applied. They should not wring their hands and blame the OFT, they should actually do something. If we can retrospectively tax bank bonuses we can retrospectively enforce fairness. Publishing the report is the first step.

As the Supreme Court Judges made clear, the reason the Court and the OFT could not protect the consumer was because this government deliberately chose not to protect the consumer. Other EU countries went further than the skimpy, fall-back, fail-safe consumer protection measures provided by the EU legislation. They beefed up protection.

The Supreme Court justices specifically pointed out that it was within the power of this government to have put in place legislation some time ago to stop the kinds of cartelised actions of the banks identified by the case. It is not enough to say that Blair, Major and Thatcher could have and didn't. This government could have and did not. The consumer is left naked in the contract chamber. The corporate big boys are dressed in the best tank-resistant, uranium-depleted armour the lack of legislation can buy.

Dubai World - NASA

So the Dubai government has, unlike our government, decided that Moral Hazard rides again and refuses to guarantee the huge debts built up by Dubai World, bringing a possible exposure of at least $50billion in the region to....guess who? The British Banking system.

Well, it looks even more like the OFT just blew it. Their legal advisers, solicitors, Q.C.s, junior barristers, the lot between them, managed simply to mess up big time. At great cost to a lot of people, but at no great cost to the lawyers themselves, I'm sure.

Bearing in mind you and I are paying the OFT's legal costs, and are effectively paying the legal fees of all of the banks in the case we own (that's all apart from Barclays, HSBC and Nationwide) and all of the actual day-to-day court costs of the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court themselves, this was a very costly mistake indeed.

There now seems to be a general consensus of opinion around what I said yesterday: that the OFT simply argued too narrowly in the case and ended up making a huge legal technical error. To be put right will involve possibly another year or two's legal time and...of course....a year or two's legal fees and costs.

The Supreme Court in one of its later judgment paragraphs is very clear that, as I said in my last blog, it's not all over.

It even goes on to blame, as I did, succesive governments for not strengthening consumer protection. It implies that other EU member states have gone on to strengthen consumer protection beyond that provided by the European Regulations, as national governments were entitled to do so.

But that in a "light touch" era of regulation in the recent past governments decided not to.

Now, from a Supreme Court Justice that is a withering attack on government policy along the lines of my last blog-but-one.

On reading the full judgement, it is looking very much like every case that is in court will now proceed as normal and the court dealing with the case will have to address the issue of fairness as argued before them; even though the OFT cannot determine the matter, a court can.

Contrary to what the immediate media reporting has been, the Supreme Court judgement has not let the banks off the hook.

Even the OFT could come back to court: effectively, the Supreme Court has simply said that the OFT cannot address the issue of fairness under one specific rule under the regulations that was the specific subject of the appeal (but hinted they might be able to address it under another regulation, but they hadn't been asked about that one!).

The Supreme Court has decided that Overdraft Charges and Returned Item Fees do form part of the core terms of the banking contract and therefore form part of the 'fair price or remuneration' under the contract.

I got the prediction wrong on this and am very surprised indeed. The arguments of all of the justices in the Court of Appeal was very persuasive (lawyers, eh?).

Perhaps being charged overdraft and returned item fees has never entered into the life experience of those sitting in the Supreme Court?

We may no longer be able to refer to the charges as unlawful, that doesn't mean that they were not fundamentally immoral and constituted the unacceptable face of capitalism.