Outlook: Following my generally positive note yesterday on the Government's proposed mortgage-relief scheme, a banker calls to tell me I'm talking nonsense and to point out that the largesse of the taxpayer in underwriting a two-year moratorium on mortgage repayments for the unemployed is far from free.

Outlook: Good news. Interest rates are going down – for millions of borrowers. Bad news. Interest rates are going down – for millions of savers. While falling interest rates make profligate borrowers better off, it makes those who have laboriously saved for a rainy day worse off. As a nation, we have become so seriously indebted that reducing the cost of money puts more back into the economy than it removes from those who rely on their savings for all or part of their income.

Outlook: A high-level group of entrepreneurs, business leaders and scientists, including Sir Christopher Evans and Sir Richard Sykes, is warning that the financial crisis threatens meltdown in Britain's once-thriving biotech industry unless the Government steps into the breach with alternative funding. Welcome to the club. Just about every industry in the land is holding out the begging bowl right now.

How can the Speaker continue? He’s been butchered. His reputation has been rendered. If you remember, we left him on Wednesday, flailing for his life on the Speaker’s throne. He offered two parliamentary remedies to the arrest of that Tory MP – a debate, and a committee appointed by himself.

A British couple who have spent the past 12 years working as Christian missionaries in the West African state of the Gambia have been jailed after being charged with sedition.