Over at Politicalbetting.com Mike Smithson is encouraging the punters to vote on who they think is going to win the Glenrothes by-election – Labour or the SNP?

Over on Betfair the punters are putting their money where their mouths are and making the SNP odds on favourites. Back in July the punters made fools of the pundits over the outcome of the Glasgow East by-election. The pundits are as fickle as teenage girls, the punters are more calculating.

The London based punditry are out of touch, they talk too much to each other. Our old friend Tom Watson has been briefing the press that Labour will win Glenrothes and this will be a great victory for Gordon. He has convinced Gordon to stake what little political capital he has on a Glenrothes comeback campaigning in the constituency. However, as Ben Brogan has detected, so chronic is the shortage of local activists and supporters Labour are press-ganging English Labour MPs and Northern CLP activists to trek past Hadrian’s Wall to help in the constituency. Not exactly a sign of a forthcoming resounding victory.

Guido thinks the punters not the pundits are right, again. Gordon’s personal visit should, if the curse of the one-eyed son of the manse still holds, have doomed Labour’s candidate. Labour are throwing the kitchen sink at this, heck the 10p tax bailout cost a few billion during the Crewe by-election, this time the bailout of Scottish banks cost tens of billions for this by-election. It will be close…

Is Guido the only one who finds it a bit of a cheek that Will Hutton and Polly Toynbee are media millionaires who make their money out of condemning other rich people? They both have homes in the country and in London? Polly famously also has her home in sunny Tuscany, yet they endlessly tell us how they deplore inequality. They both sell books in large numbers and their columns are well rewarded beyond the dreams of the average and minimum wage workers they cry tears over.Guido is not going to plead personal poverty, risk brings rewards. What have Hutton or Toynbee ever produced besides words on paper, how many jobs have they created, how many businesses have they financed? Have they ever had to make payroll at the end of the month? Worried about how they were going to pay staff?

Why is making millions from pontificating (as they do) morally superior to making millions from investing in and running companies? It seems that out and out capitalists are the wrong kind of rich whereas out and out media pundits are the right kind of rich, akin to how the aristocracy of old always looked down on those in trade. Remember their own substantial wealth when they condemn capitalism.

Who really has unjust rewards – those who create wealth and jobs or those who condemn them?

Toynbee has now realised that Gordon is staying and that her flirtation with David Miliband was just a passing fancy. Her tune has changed, now saying (once again) that Brown is the man for our times when only weeks ago she was telling the cabinet they were spineless not to get rid of him. Laughable.

Polly’s advice and economic genius is as suspect and as reliable as her loyalty to whichever politician she is championing this month. At the beginning of the year she was still loyal to Gordon and chiding Cameron for his new year message which she claimed

smacks of callow point-scoring, with his five repetitions of “Labour’s hopeless” – and it will look even thinner in retrospect in a year’s time if Brown has steered through economic rapids without most voters feeling any adverse effect.

She was confidently predicting

A minor slowdown with neither inflation* nor unemployment rising will see Brown’s old “no boom or bust” boasts triumph this time next year.

Guido suggests we leave Polly and Will to their studio soundbites and ignore their siren voices – they have been advocating their brand of redistributive social democracy as the solution to everything for decades. If policy makers are looking for guidance on avoiding a depression (alas a recession is upon us already) they should dust off the works of Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman – Mises wrote the seminal “The Theory of Money and Credit“. If this book had been read by more central bankers outside the Bundesbank we would not be in this mess. Guido once listened to an LSE lecture by a Bundesbank board member speaking in reverential tones about Mises’ thinking. He is the high priest of monetary theory.

If history is not to repeat itself then reading Friedman’s “The Great Contraction, 1929-1933” should be a priority. If you think this is irrelevant to the state we are in you should note that the current Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, pays tribute to this work and is quoted in the introduction to the current edition. Whereas Mises is heavy going, Friedman and Schwartz are essential reading.

Guido can summarise the primary policy response to the situation we are in succintly : cut interest rates, to lessen the pain of the inevitable reckoning.

The Guardian Diary mocked the Daily Express for recommending investing in Icesave last week on the very same day that the firm collapsed.

Those in ice-houses should be careful, for only a fortnight earlier where was the so smug and told-you-so financial pages of the Guardian telling readers to put their hard earned savings?

Harvey Jones picked ten of the best places to put your cash, guess which was his number one destination?

Do you need a clue? You’re getting colder….

Cameron’s Conservatives seem to be fair weather friends of capitalism, even the FT’s in-house free market philosopher, Martin Wolf, has abandoned free enterprise for banker bolshevism. Besides Guido only Heffer in the papers remains a strident capitalist tool, managing to quote Ayn Rand approvingly this morning.

Ruth Lea, once a Thatcherite free market scourge of wet Conservatism, seems to have taken a surprising turn for the worse in the last few months:

Polly is whining again about the verbal kicking she gets after almost every column:

…my most constant hate-swipes on Comment is Free and in rightwing political blogs is for being middle class.

Guido frequently questions her judgment, but he has never accused her of being middle-class, for the simple reason she is not. Mary Louisa Toynbee is in fact part of the rarefied metropolitan media elite, she has a comfortable six-figure income and a villa in Italy to go with the London townhouse and house in the country. She is not middle-class by any stretch of the imagination.

Her income is not middle-class, it puts her in the top 1% of earners.

The great grand-daughter of the Earl of Carlisle was privately educated (Badminton), went to Oxford (St Annes) and on to the BBC. A classic metropolitan elite career path. Toynbee is the daughter of the literary critic Philip Toynbee and grand-daughter of the famous historian Arnold J. Toynbee, his uncle was the philanthropist and economic historian Arnold Toynbee after whom Toynbee Hall is named. She was born into three generations of metropolitan elitists.

She is perfectly entitled to point to the toffs on the Tory front-bench, but Guido is not going to let her pretend to be middle-class. She is the enemy of the aspirational middle-classes, the high priestess advocate of taxing them to pay for her social democratic utopia.

N.B. See also this for an example of Polly’s consistency, prescience and judgement over Gordon Brown. This “rightwing blog” must have got under her skin…

Once he was Polly’s “towering intellect” and the greatest politician of our time. A year later and now “Unseating Gordon Brown may be Labour’s last chance“.

Polly says Guido is no good at writing about politics because he is unsympathetic to politicians. Perhaps, Polly, being over-sympathetic to a politician blinded you to his faults. Good to see you completely coming round to Guido’s point of view on the Prime Mentalist at last.

UPDATE : “Bogeyman” reminds us in the comments of Polly’s consistency and prescience:

So he has written a few bonkers articles recently, lost the TV job and missed out on the editorship of the New Statesman. Still think the headline this morning was a little unjustified.

Steve Richards is supplanting Polly Toynbee as Guido’s favourite comedy commentator. Today he has a piece not quite as good as his genius three word summary of Brown in four words. Nor is it up there with his only stupid people will vote for Boris. Whereas Guido can guess and probably even write a Polly column, Richards is so much funnier than Polly, his ideological eccentricities are unpredictable.Today he makes the claim that Britain’s gold medal tally at the Olympics proves that we need higher government spending. Does it?

The Fabians took the lesson of World War II and the centrally controlled state war machine’s victory and drew the wrong conclusion. They thought a centrally controlled economy and centrally planned health and education would triumph. Ignoring that it was the free market economy of the U.S.A. that was the arsenal of democracy which brought victory over the totalitarian and rigidly controlled Nazi war economy.

Higher investment in sports training has brought results. The money raised was raised without resort to taxation, did not end up in Whitehall or in the hands of state bureaucrats. John Major loved sport and it is his strictures that have produced the golden results. Higher spending on education and health will produce better results, but not productively if the spending is made in state controlled schools and hospitals. Blair realised that eventually, the Tories single best policy is to encourage Swedish-style “Free Schools“. That policy will do for aspirational parents what council house sales did for aspirational tenants – free them from the failing clutches of the state.

Richards’ tax and spend thinking would not result in gold standards, just more government waste.

UPDATE : John Major has just made the point on the Today show that the government has been diverting money away from sport towards New Labour’s pet projects.

Fresh from underestimating how much their editor makes (the paper reported Alan Rusbridger making £143,000 less than £544,000 the annual report stated) they have just reported the polling intentions of 101% of the population.

Ladies and gentlemen, the ever reliable Grauniad…