Sovereign Establishments and financial media which ignore informed comment are signing their own death warrants.

“The leveraged EFSF may still turn into a bazooka, but so far it looks more like a water pistol,” Joachim Fels, Morgan Stanley’s chief global economist in London, wrote in a note to clients yesterday. While ministers may furnish some detail on how the fund operates, “don’t hold your breath,” he wrote.

This opinion (widely reported this morning) is highly representative of the markets….all the markets. It is symptomatic of an EU crumbling slowly into dust – of which more in a minute. I think Bloomberg had it first, but what’s getting interesting now among the financially-biased news sources is the intense competition between them. This morning, Reuters was first out of the blocks with the Papademos story. Of all the sectors, financial media represent one of the few areas left where the scoop is still very important: for their readers, information is power….and in high-speed trading environments, money.

However, some of the more canny journos in that trade are increasingly tapping specialist blogs for leads….and as sources. Here too, there is more expertise and experience than across the piece of the blogosphere.

So given this white-heat of competition, I continue to be baffled as to why all the big boys are, gradually, banning blogsite urrls from their comment threads. The Murdoch-controlled Wall St Journal disallowed them from Day One, but that’s just Murdoch and his secret-squirrel approach to life. Unable to grasp the spirit in which the internet took off ten years ago, he is now – as usual – trying to bend it to his own model. The main opposition, The New York Times, blocks any and all urrls put in comment threads. The FT allows them, but only makes a small number live.

Bloomberg have an equivocal policy, but I’ve never yet had referrals from there. In a given month, however, I probably get in the region of 500 referral hits from Reuters. This explains why they decided to ban me from commenting there last Saturday. I contacted one of their Oped writers Felix Salmon, and he kindly gave me the explanation. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed with the corporate manners involved in Reuters doing this. More to the point, yesterday I ran a check on how many referrals I gave them in October. The number was 973. Words like nose, spite, and face spring to mind.

The other problem with dissuading intelligent comments is that any value added to the site by them is lost. I have a sense that this is why the Daily Telegraph still let me comment there as much as I want; but either way, on the same quid pro quo basis, I do better out of the Torygraph than they do out of me. That said, I praise their better journalists on an almost daily basis. It’s all swings and roundabouts in the end.

Ultimately however, any medium that cuts out the semi-pro feedback like this is going to suffer – and the same goes for political/media Establishments generally. In no subject area is this more true at the moment than the issue of Britain’s EU membership. As our ‘deal’ with the EU worsens every year – and the implosion of it becomes more apparent with every week – Camerlot is still playing this deadly game of ‘wait and see’. There’s no point in waiting to see if a house in flames is going to burn down: the key thing is to vacate the premises.

But more deadly still is the volcano bubbling away under a UK Establishment that has gone out of its way to ‘frame’ everyone in favour of secession as, variously, mad, racist, and unrepresentative Little Englanders. In particular, David Cameron’s jibe in 2009 about ‘BNP Lite’ in relation to UKIP was appalling, even coming from an oaf like him. Only 25% of British adults now want to stay in the Union, and around 40% of the Tory Party wants to leave. Two weeks ago, David Cameron cynically stood on the fingers of Democracy’s hand. The next time, he might find himself dealing with a fist.

The business case for departure from the EU is extremely powerful, but blocked at every turn by pols and bureaucrats who can talk only in terms of fear: how would we cope? where would we sell? What would the penalties be? Nobody can give all the answers to these weak-kneed questions, but what we can do is point out that with £118bn less to find each year (and another £40bn bill about to be dumped on our welcome mat) we’d be off to a flying start. The fact of the matter is that redistributionist Europe and its chocolate soldiers are history: the future lies in making added-value products, and selling them to a bottomless market called Asia.

Between mad pc on the one hand and the BNP on the other, there is a largely untapped area of the electorate called Decency & Common Sense. I think we have reached the stage now where one major defection of a senior Tory or a leading media figure to UKIP just might prove to be a game-changer. UKIP now has the same level of Opinion Poll Support as the LibDems. A joint Tory/UKIP ticket in winnable seats would produce a comfortable majority in many of them; but that would require wholesale regime change in the Conservative Party.

Dave really will have to watch his step – whatever the pundits say about his position being safe. In the aftermath of a general election where the swing to UKIP and against the Coalition was enough to put Labour back in government, his chances of survival would be near zero. As indeed would those of Great Britain as we know it.