I really can't understand the fuss over Red Ken's deal with Chavez. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like good business to me. There’s no embargo on trade with Venezuela. As far as I know there isn't even a campaign to impose an embargo. Awful as Chavez is, Venezualan oil is traded openly and legitimately. We must be using their oil anyway, just through normal purchases in the market.

So if there’s a chance to buy Venezualan oil cheap and save lots of money for Londoners, in return for a perfectly proper and legitimate export to Venezuala, why ever not?

UPDATE: I am delighted to report that I am wrong. There is something instinctively awful about a deal between Livingstone and Chavez, but for the life of me I couldn't see what was actually wrong about it. But then I received this email from someone who knows more about these things than I could ever hope to:

It’s a long argument, but you need to bear in mind that Chavez uses oil as a means of coercive diplomacy (or buying friendship in international forums). It hurts other nations (Trinidad & Tobago, e.g., is a hydrocarbons producer which loses business because it isn’t in a position to sell below market price) and subsidises rich-world consumers at the expense of poor Venezuelans.

It’s particularly disturbing that the deal is in the form a barter rather than a market transaction, because there’s no way of properly comparing the services that Venezuelans will receive.

The strong suspicion is that Chavez is using the country’s oil wealth, which ought to be stored against future fluctuations in the oil price, for securing services of value to him but that are not transparent. The poor financial nature of the deal doesn’t affect him, but it’s a way of obtaining services that are quite plainly going to be used against his political opponents (see article in Times business section on this today).

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Salil Tripathi destroys the anti-globalisers' World Social Forum nonsense in a piece about the Indian economy.

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You can hear a first class discussion on globalisation from Saturday's Talking Politics here. (You need to click on the link to the latest programme.)

It begins with an interview with Johan Norberg, author of the outstanding In Defence of Global Capitalism which I would easily make my book of the year (a slight cheat, since it's been available since 2001, but only made it really big this year).

The discussion afterwards is well worth a listen, too; my friend Helen Disney , calm and full of sense against the rather pompous Robert Fox and an archetypal cliche-ridden but intelectually empty academic called Ian Linden.

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