Blowing it

Harman has it wrong on lap dancing

Harriet Harman, Labour's equalities minister, has "declared war" on lap-dancing clubs. The Treasury must clamp down on these dens of iniquity, she thinks.

"Why should you be able to get tax relief for a night out at a lap-dancing club where effectively you are discriminating against women employees in doing so?"

But what tax relief? Harman has clearly never run a small business, says Heather McGregor in The Observer. "There is no tax relief on entertaining clients." McGregor, who does run a small business, quotes HMRC Notice 700/65: VAT incurred "on the provision of business entertainment is blocked from recovery under a special legal provision".

The Notice helpfully defines business entertainment as "provided to persons who are not employees of your business" and "provided free". Taking clients to a lap-dancing club certainly meets those criteria. So what's Harriet fussing about?

The ruin of Brussels

It's a while since I've been to Brussels, and my memory of it is of an anonymous place with the odd pleasant square and a few nice restaurants. Boris Johnson has similar memories. When he first went there 20 years ago, he told us in The Daily Telegraph, the Gare du Midi was "a wonderfully dingy place with feral cats and trod-on chips and Turkish taxi drivers snoozing in their battered Mercs".

How different it all is now. Returning the other day, Johnson found a "vast, space-age Eurostar terminal" louring over the ancient quartier, and while the British developers in the Fifties may have given Brussels a pasting, it was nothing to the destruction now taking place in the name of Europe.

"As you get to the sites of the burgeoning European institutions, it is as though gigantic alien motherships of glass and steel have crash-landed on the city, dwarfing the cobbled streets and crushing out the patisseries and gloomy little bars I used to love."

In the old days, the Euro-parliament was a pokey office on the Rue Belliard. There may have been a bar, but no one ever went there. Now the place is heaving, as "are all the innumerable places of refreshment, pullulating with animated young thrusters of both sexes, their Christian Dior spectacles glittering with lust for – lust for what? Power, that's what."

For while Westminster feels the pinch, with MPs shell-shocked by the expenses scandal retiring in droves, MEPs in Brussels are riding higher than ever: "Attended by every possible comfort, they have minimal interaction with their constituents, and in general the great Euro-gravy train rolls on at tres grande vitesse."

Is this all a gigantic waste of money? Of course, but it also, as Johnson says, reflects the modern reality. It is in space-age Brussels, not dessicated London, that our laws are made now, by sleek, self-confident, overpaid, overfed MEPs who make our own MPs seem penny-pinching models of economy by comparison.

Tabloid money… let's hope City cowboys choke on their pink champagne

Baroness Scotland, the attorney-general, is fined £5,000 for breaking her own law on illegal immigrants, says The Sun – "peanuts to a woman with three homes. She says she 'inadvertently' hired a Tongan housekeeper who had overstayed her visa. But, as one of our top law officers, Lady Scotland knows better than anyone that the law insists employers must verify claims of residency. She just couldn't be bothered. Communities minister John Denham warns that uncontrolled immigration could lead to 'street riots'. If he's right, why is Baroness Scotland still in her job?"

John Humphrys describes his salary for chairing Mastermind as "money for old rope", says Ann Widdecombe in the Daily Express. "Most of us would say the same about Bruce Forsyth's £500,000 for hosting Strictly Come Dancing, Anne Robinson's pay for The Weakest Link and some of the ludicrous earnings by newsreaders." Yet when Carol Vorderman was axed from Countdown for refusing to take a cut in her £800,000 salary, she was replaced by an unknown and the programme survived. "I admire Humphrys, Forsyth and Robinson, but it is a nonsense to suppose that nobody else could do their jobs."

The collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the world financial crisis, says Fiona McIntosh in the Sunday Mirror. "So how did Lehman's bankers, most of whom have since landed well-paid jobs, mark the anniversary of Black Monday? By swilling pink champagne in a London bar." Whoever says the decade of greed and arrogance is over is wrong. Not an ounce of remorse has been shown by the cowboys who ran our economy into the ground. "They are only interested in toasting their personal greed. Let's hope they choke on it."