Tax the Rich, Says David Cameron

No, you're not dreaming, and neither am I. He really did say it, and point out that the tax base shouldn't be the ordinary citizen without the means to avoid paying his or her fair share.

The Pakistani fiscal position was a serious one because "too few people pay tax. Too many of your richest people are getting away without paying much tax at all – and that's not fair".

Unfortunately, he said it in Pakistan, about Pakistan. Back at home, his brutal assault on the Inland Revenue's corporate and High-Earner units, his obsession with beggaring the poor and grovelling to the rich continues. He's even employing the worst tax avoiders: such as Philip Green, who paid his Monaco-dwelling wife £1,500,000,000 tax-free!

As you were.

Howzat?

Distracting me from work today will be England v. Pakistan cricket, live here. There's an extra edge to it, thanks to Tory Scum David Cameron's decision to stand up in hated neighbouring India and shout 'Pakistanis are all terrorists ner ner ner' (I paraphrase, but that's roughly the gist of it).

Googly to silly mid on

Ireland look like they won't quite make it against Pakistan - required run rate of 17.something. Oh well - we mixed it with the big boys quite convincingly.

President Strangelove, I presume?

Just back from a swim (good job I have flexible work hours). Despite possessing the hydrodynamic qualities of a brick with an eating disorder, I managed my 40 lengths of backstroke in 27 minutes, so I'm feeling triumphant. And sick.

I see that everybody's jumping up and down about Ahmedinejad's re-election (if such it is). Plenty of people are screaming that Iranians shouldn't vote for a man hellbent on nuclear weapons. Er… isn't that what the UK has done every four years since 1950? That the US electorate has done since 1945? Etc. etc. I happen to be a CND member - and all the NPT-compliant states have signed a treaty committing them to abolishing nuclear weapons. Just as I do absolutely nothing to help, so do the big states. Worse than that, we allow India, Pakistan (mmm, stable relations), Israel and several other states to have them without any commitment to abolishing them.

What steps have we taken to abolish them in our own countries? Well, Obama's actually talking about reductions, but that's about it. The UK is about to spend £20-30 billion we don't actually have, on replacing Trident. Apparently, the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people in a few minutes isn't quite enough. We need more, bigger, missile to deal with… er… those pesky guerillas in Afghanistan. No, that isn't right. There's a definite threat from, well, someone, which can only be dealt with by turning entire cities to molten glass, whole civilisations to rubble, sterilising huge chunks of the earth's surface. It's just that I can't think of one right now.

Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons? They're caught up in an insane race with Israel. The intellectual justification's very simple. It's all about having a huge, barely metaphorical penis. When Labour MPs and others objected to Britain pursuing a nuclear weapon in the 1940s, Aneurin Bevan, the British Foreign Secretary, clearly saw the ability to kill millions of people as a replacement for the British Empire, a justification for Britain remaining a powerful state rather than becoming a calm, civilised Scandinavian-style democracy: without nukes, he said, 'you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber'.

So there you have it. Without a nuclear weapon, Iran is another weird country holding the oil we all depend on. With it, they can negotiate on a slightly more equal footing. I know this is the politics of the madhouse, but we're all inmates…

What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?

Asked C L R James. Very little, if we're talking about Australia, humiliated! I hope England and Wales (usually known as England) go out next. Today: Holland v. Pakistan live here. Can Holland beat Pakistan? Well, they beat England convincingly. Ireland, of course, qualified for the Super 8s already, by beating Bangladesh. This is how they did it:

Tamim's run-out was a comic affair. Niall O'Brien dashed around the stumps to collect Mahmudullah's nudge, Tamim was sent back and dropped his bat, and O'Brien's throw to the bowler's end deflected on to the stumps off the ample stomach of William McCallan.