So now Dorset House is finally open in its new incarnation what do we think of it? Here are my thoughts.

Although it’s a modern modular construction with all the student rooms prefabricated and delivered to site ready to drop into position, I think it looks quite good. From the London Road the four stories don’t look overbearing and I like the way Berkeley have kept the trees to soften the appearance of the buildings. The stone facings in yellow brick, or honey-coloured if you prefer, continue the Oxford tradition although rejecting the redbrick of the previous building. Cost saving is evident though in the standard off-the-shelf landscaping features such as the pathway lighting posts.

My main quibble is the use of wooden strip cladding on some of the facings. While I think this Scandinavian styling is well-suited to a woodland or forested setting it doesn’t work for me in a suburban city environment. The mix of vertical and horizontal strips is particularly messy: it might be justified if there were a need to distinguish buildings with different functions, but as far as I can see this isn’t the case here. It smacks of the cheap pastiche approach often seen in buildings from large-scale developers and I think the whole ensemble would look better if the brick facing had been used throughout. However, the wooden strips will weather (in fact they already seem to be changing colour) and the weathering will be different on different aspects so we must wait and see how the whole development looks in a few years time.

On balance I think it works reasonably well and I’ll look forward to seeing how it matures.

This post has nothing to do with Headington!

It doesn’t seem clear yet how Vince Cable’s Business Bank is going to operate. Leaving aside the dubious practice of making a headline-grabbing policy announcement at the party conference before the details have been thrashed out within the coalition, the idea that seems to be emerging sounds like yet more of the failed policy of throwing cheap money at the banks.

According to a report I saw on the BBC, the Business Bank won’t be lending directly to small and medium businesses. Instead it will use money from tax revenues to buy debt from the regular commercial banks in the hope that they will use the cash to lend to businesses. I would love someone to explain how this differs from the failed policy of quantitative easing, which printed money to give to the banks and which they have failed to use to finance business expansion, other than instead of printing the money they’ll be giving our taxes to the banks – presumably instead of spending them on public services and public investment. Why would the banks behave any differently with this money than with QE money?

If any economist or LibDem supporter can reassure me I’d appreciate it. And while you’re at it perhaps you could clarify how Nick Clegg’s promise that future cuts won’t target the poorest and most vulnerable reconciles with his agreement to abolish the 50p tax rate. Thanks.

I don’t normally do rants, but just this once —

As the story of Barclays’ attempts to rig the LIBOR rate broke, the FSA’s Director of Enforcement Tracey McDermott was reported by the BBC as saying such behaviour was “completely unacceptable … the market needs to have confidence that those who are involved in submitting numbers to set Libor are thinking about the integrity of the market, and confidence in the market, and not their own interests”.

It’s about time this myth about the ‘integrity of the market’ was exposed as nonsense and news media stopped reporting as if it were true. ‘The market’ is not some neutral impersonal force that in some mysterious way decides the financial destiny of homeowners, small businesses, banks and governments. It’s people and institutions around the globe whose sole interest is to make money (not real money, just electronic profits). It’s sovereign wealth funds moving billions of dollars at the click of a mouse. It’s hedge fund managers gambling millions of theirs and other people’s money in the hope of making a killing at someone else’s expense. It’s derivative traders worried about their exposed positions. These people are not neutral. They will happily screw one another if they can make profit for themselves, but they will equally collaborate to fix and rig if that’s profitable too – as we see with Barclays. Do we really think that a country like China isn’t aware of the impact its financial transactions have on other countries? If a country acts in a way that upsets China, or Russia, or whoever, do we think they won’t use their financial clout to put pressure on the offender’s economy? Of course they will. It used to be called ‘economic warfare’.

So when ‘the market’ decides that Spain, say, has to pay 7% to borrow over 10 years it’s not some oracle that decides, it’s people who have vested interests of their own to promote and protect. Some of them will have taken bets that Spain goes down the tubes and they’ll do what they can to make that happen – or get someone else to pay if it doesn’t. Integrity? What integrity?