AND ALSO GREAT NEWS FOR...

...Gordon Brown, saviour of Britain and the world economy.

Okay, it's a little early to make such a prediction, but the man has proved once again that he knows how to come across well in a crisis. Makes you wonder if all that stuff he did since 1997 - handing over interest rates to the Bank of England, deregulating the city, allowing dodgy mortgages - was solely to give him something juicy to solve once he became Prime Minister.

Those of us who've been calling for some sort of vision, a setting out of ideals and ideas as to what the Labour Party, post-Blair, is really about, have our answer now. This is the kind of stuff that Tony Benn's been advocating for years. Does it matter that it's taken a world financial crisis of such proportions to bring us here? Probably not.

Insignificant as this blog is in my own life, let alone the great scheme of things, the reason for its existence just seems to have become even more pointless. I might as well give up and turn this into one of those 'life of a writer blogs' that seem to be appearing by the bucketload. ('today I found it hard to write my new script').

But...

I wonder if this fundamental change in how the government looks after our money might not be just the sort of spur we need to engage the vast majority of people in politics again. When times are average (we never see them as good until they disappear), nobody is really bothered enough to get worked up about schools and NHS funding. But now that every penny of funding is going to mean something to us all, now that we all have a personal stake in the economy - and, we're told, may even benefit from it - might more and more people sign up and join a political party... or am I simply trying to create a record for the world's longest sentence on the internet?

I rang my local Labour Party three days ago, and still haven't heard back from anyone. Who knows if anyone will ever get back to me, and if I can begin my plan for world domination?

In the meantime, I should leave this now and get back to my script. It's about a procrastinating writer who sets up a blog about how difficult it is to be a writer...