Tonight:
5°c
The Financial Services Authority chairman Lord Turner has raised the possibility of a special tax on the City to curb excessive risk-taking.
There can be no doubt that banks took too many risks during the boom years.
The rest of us are now paying a steep price in the form of taxpayer rescues and a harsh recession.
Now, reduced competition means big profits once again for many of those institutions that remain.
But a special levy on their profits - beyond the existing corporation tax and stamp duty take - would be the answer only if they stayed in this country to pay it.
Financial institutions can move with ease. New York and Geneva are already pitching for those troubled by Labour's planned 50 per cent tax rate and tougher regulation.
Relocations that stripped London of hundreds of thousands of jobs, tax revenue and all the economic activity that goes with them, would be a catastrophe for this country.
We might wish for a better balanced economy but driving City employment away will not itself make jobs grow elsewhere in Britain.
Besides, much of what the City does in channelling the world's deposits and savings to companies that need capital, is not "socially useless" but essential.
Unpicking the "casino" activities from necessary financial intermediation is hard.
Lord Turner acknowledges that his idea - like the turnover tax once proposed by US economist James Tobin - depends on international agreement to impose it globally.
The levy would be needed only if present plans to increase the cushion of capital held by banks as an insurance policy against risk did not succeed.
The suggestion has real value as a threat, though the Treasury was today giving it no support.
A few very big international banks, with few competitors, will emerge from the credit crunch. Every government will need to ensure these don't ride roughshod over consumers and borrowers.
Bank boards need to know that if the increased capital requirements now being proposed within an international framework do not curb the excesses, other measures will be taken. Lord Turner is right to make that threat.
GCSEs vs diplomas
Among the 600,000 pupils receiving GCSE results today are a few hundred who have taken the new diplomas combining academic with job-related learning.
The Children's Secretary Ed Balls today says the innovation could break the divide between academic hurdles and less respected vocational ones.
However, saying these new qualifications are as good as GCSEs and A-levels won't make them so. Of course, good vocational training options are vital.
But Mr Balls seems more interested in pouring scorn on his Conservative counterpart Michael Gove than in making the case for a new qualification, which exam boards themselves acknowledge can be complicated and expensive to provide.
The credibility of the qualification system cannot be taken for granted, now that many high-achieving schools are abandoning the GCSE in favour of its international alternative, the IGCSE.
There are some positive changes in the pipeline, including a reduction in the amount of GCSE coursework done at home, which should cut down on opportunities for cheating.
Mr Balls should be banging the drum for those improvements, instead of obsessing about his counterpart.
A very polite protest
The climate camp on Blackheath common is a model one.
Responsible, sometimes even middle-aged protesters are promising to teach one another about environmental issues, arrange their tents in straight lines and pick up their own litter.
So far, well-heeled local residents seem sympathetic.
But will anyone in the Canary Wharf skyscrapers opposite take any notice?
