Cabinet? Yes. National salvation? Hardly.

Talal Arslan was a minister today for about 60 minutes

Trying to look at Lebanon’s latest government without cynicism is like trying to pass a Cabinet with no female or opposition representation off as progress.

It may have taken more the best part of half a year to form, but Najib Mikati’s 30-strong administration looks like it could have been scribbled on the back of a cigarette paper, a list of no names and partisans that will struggle to implement the thousands of badly needed legal reforms crippling the country.

It also appears as depressingly backward-facing. After having covered conference after conference on the need for electoral development – particularly the necessity of greater female representation in national and local government – it’s hard not to feel betrayed by the male-dominated line up. It’s not surprising, so much as extremely disappointing, but it’s not as if Lebanese politicians have ever truly cared for much other than themselves and their sect.

Government leaves customers out in the cold

So the government acted slowly and the treasury foolishly with its bungled nationalisation of Northern Wreck. You’ll forgive me if I refrain from gasping and holding my cheeks in disbelief.

It has been always painfully obvious that this is the case – and it is becoming more painful with every passing day, particularly for those poor mortgage holders who were enticed by the supposed competitiveness and security of a state run institution.

That a government run bank was still offering 125 per cent mortgages as recently as last Spring is awful, but hardly surprising. We know that at the time Brown was imploring banks to “return to 2007 levels of lending”. Chief exec Gordon clearly still believes that in order for people to keep afloat, they need to be in debt.

Tread carefully, Mr Brown

From the smallest acorn the mightiest oak may grow.

There once was a miner from Worsbrough Dale, Yorkshire. He worked hard, as his father had, in Woolley Colliery. Disenchanted with the deal he perceived British miners to be getting, he joined the Young Communist League in 1955 – a minor leftist sect at the time. That man was Arthur Scargill, organiser of the miners’ strike of 1973-4 which lead to the slaying of prime minister Ted Heath.

Our current PM has never been one to shy away from an argument. But Gordon Brown ought look very carefully over his shoulder to the annals of time before accusing striking workers of “xenophobia” as his government did yesterday.

Predicting the unpredictable

On Monday, the Government predicted the percentage of national debt will reach 57% by 2013 and that the country would be back to ‘borrowing to invest’ by the beginning of 2016.

The obvious question is how on earth can they know that? Darling has been wrong before, forecasting a wildly optimistic national growth in his last budget. And compared to these days of wildly fluctuating markets, the last budget was a put-your-house-on dead cert to predict.

Yet he still was wrong. Now, at the same time as Bank of England suddenly decided that 5% interest was acceptable in a faltering economy one day and then 3% was better the next, how can Darling hope to predict anything accurately? It simply cannot be anything other than wild speculation or blind hope.

Mervin King’s favourite book in times of need is by a man called J. K. Galbraith, a sort of Nostradamus on Lithium. In Crash of 1929, Galbraith says:

There are two kinds of economist, those who don’t know what will happen and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Now Mr. Darling is no economist. But he could at least have the courtesy to admit that he knows more about Margaret Beckett’s underwear draw than he does about the economy.