Sure, it’s a good thing that people are buying more books. Apparently even Posh read one. Once. But let’s have some context here. The non-fiction bestseller listings are currently topped by the autobiography of Wayne Rooney’s girlf.

When Prospect starts outselling Heat, and Newsnight beats Celebrity Big Brother in the ratings, then I’ll start to give Brown’s claim credence.

Remember the aftermath of 9/11? Several commentators solemnly reassured us that never again would newspapers be driven by vacuous celebrity and consumer drivel. It didn’t take long for most to revert to type.

These days, the first task after purchasing the Saturday papers is to weed out superfluous supplements, which usually amount to over half the bundle. Why bother with investigative journalism, when you can put on readers with a freebie gardening mag instead?

For a short period under the editorship of Piers Morgan – journalistic pedigree: Sun showbiz writer – the Daily Mirror made a credible effort to provide serious news in an accessible manner. Circulation fell, and after a scandal involving faked pictures of squaddies urinating on Iraqi prisoners, he got the chop. The celebs returned to the front page.

Some time after his ouster, I coincidentally happened to be in the Islington branch of Borders while he was holding a book signing. Let’s just say the queues weren’t snaking all the way down the Pentonville Road back to Kings Cross, so I decided to have a word with the guy, albeit without purchasing his tome on footie.

I said some nice things about the Mirror under his tenure, and told him I had consistently bought the paper while he was at the helm. He glared back and snarled at me: ‘Shame you didn’t get your fucking mates to buy it too.’ Zero out of ten for personal charm, Piers.

It’s the same story with television. Bruce Springsteen recorded the album track ’57 channels (and nothin’ on)’ in 1992. Some 15 years later, the main problem with The Boss’s prognosis is that he was out by a factor of ten.

Of all the criticisms that can be levelled at capitalism, its deleterious effects on the mass media and culture in general are probably way down the list. But the persistent drive for market share inevitably brings a generalised dumbing down in its wake.

I think it was Christopher Hitchens who – asked his opinion on the personal life of some starlet, or perhaps another matter of equally pressing importance – responded with a quip along the lines of: ‘Actually, it’s good of me to even notice her existence’.

I don’t particularly care whether or not Paris Hilton gets a 45-day stint in accommodation somewhat less luxurious than the kind that build the family fortune, or whether a 23-year-old bloke I’ve never met - and almost certainly never will meet - splits up with his girlfriend. Sorry, I really bloody don’t.

Multinational corporations have many powers in this world. Thankfully, these do not include – at least, not yet – the right to dictate the meaning of words in the English language.

The prerogative should not be conceded. Otherwise the next move from the company Ray Kroc founded will be to get the term ‘McLibel’ excised from legal texts and history books.

The authority to write newspeak rests solely with the Ingsoc Party in George Orwell’s 1984. And that was a work of fiction.

Whether or not ‘McJob’ is an insult to the 67,000 McDonald’s employees in the UK is beside the point.

In the 1950s, the term ‘words that can’t be found in the dictionary’ was an established euphemism. It isn’t in 2007, because there are no such words. Rightly so.

The words ‘nigger’ and ‘cunt’ remain offensive to many, including me. But they mean what they have come to mean through the spontaneously determined processes of the free market in words. Nobody maintains they should not have a place in the OED.

So here’s a suggestion for Mr Betts. If you really want to do something to further the lot of McDonald’s workers, why don’t you instead pressurise the business to stop sacking employees who try to unionise burger flips?

Celebrity – at least in the modern sense of the word – is a recent phenomenon, created by the movie, television and popular music industries.

It now constitutes an organised system, which remains in place even as individual celebrities come and go. The cult of personality may have been one aspect of Stalinism, but it required capitalism to take the cult of personality and commodify it in the way that it has succeeded in doing.

There is a real danger of politics - not for nothing jokingly dubbed ‘showbiz for ugly people' - becoming an offshoot of the celebrity business.

Politics is increasingly bereft of meaningful ideological differences. There is no clash of ideas. Accordingly, most of the media reports it as such, building a soap opera around it. Tony hates Gordon, Gordon hates Tony. The trivial is the political.

The negative experiences of the last decade underline the reasons why the left should be careful when venturing anywhere near this territory. It’s hard to think of a single sitting Labour MP that would genuinely merit the label ‘charismatic’, but Derek Hatton, Arthur Scargill, Tommy Sheridan and George Galloway could all be so described.

These days, charisma is political gold dust. It’s no small part of the reason the latter two were able to secure seats at Holyrood and Westminster respectively. But clearly they share more negative personality traits as well, especially an unwillingness to be bound to the democratic norms of a labour movement tradition that somehow fosters the creation of identikit union officials and whip-subservient backbench MPs by the truckload.

This, I guess, is a dilemma. We can and should harness the talents and electoral appeal of men such as these, provided it promotes the goals of the serious left, and provided that their egos are not given unlimited room for expansion as a result. But it beggars coincidence that three of quartet have ended up as dodgy talkshow hosts. They were capable of better. And better the left deserved.

If you want to see how the average Briton responds to the imposition of a politically-themed bank holiday, you only have to look back to this year’s first May bank holiday Monday just a few weeks ago.

It was a Labour government that introduced the occasion back in 1975, officially so that the labour movement could celebrate international workers’ day at a time most convenient to employers. And how dull and typically British a reformist compromise is that? Any transgressive symbolism is instantly stripped away.

As the derisory turnout on official trade union-sponsored May Day marches underlines, for most people it is just another day off work.

Note the use of the words ‘most people’. Around one-third of the workforce – from those in essential services to many retail and service sector employees – have to clock on anyway.

Of course, celebrating workers’ struggle is not exactly a top Labour Party priority right now. Instead, Ruth Kelly and Liam Byrne are calling for an annual Britishness Day.

Nothing wrong with that, in and off itself. British workers get few bank holidays than most of their counterparts in continental Europe anyway, so another one won’t go amiss. But within the context of current overall New Labour discourse, it’s another milestone in the drift towards increasingly strident nationalist rhetoric.

The BNP will probably seize the opportunity to wave the Union Jack on a few parades. But much as Gordon Brown would like to see sink estates emulate American picket-fence suburbia by flying the flag in every other garden, this just isn’t going to happen.

Kelly and Byrne simply haven’t factored in such traditional British values as ‘can’t be arsed’ cynicism. See you down the pub.

What are you like, petrolheads? Like the law of the land doesn’t apply to you or something?

Worst of all, far too many people sit behind the wheel after having had a few drinks. And the thing is, they usually get away with it.

Yet their subsequent pedestrian roadkill end up just as dead as if their lives had willfully been taken. I have never understood why causing death by dangerous driving is not taken just as seriously as manslaughter. Because that’s basically what it is.

It now looks like the government will reduce the drink-drive limit from 80mg to 50mg per 100ml of blood, in line with European standards.

Normally I pride myself on being one of the most libertarian people on the left, and always start from the presumption that the state should not restrict the activities of grown adults when it comes to sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, or booze for that matter.

Yes, I suppose it is legitimate for the government to set down – and widely publicise - guidelines for alcohol consumption, based on expert medical opinion. But it’s up to the individual whether they take a blind bit of notice or not. I, er, like a drop myself.

However, some things are justified, even if the Nanny State says they are justified. Tougher controls on drink-driving are a case in point.

But I do know that it costs roughly £40,000 a year to keep a prisoner behind bars for 12 months. So if those cells are to be filled, the implied additional annual expenditure is £200m, on top of the capital outlay.

That's a lot of money, and yet a lot more is likely to be needed still. Britain's prison population has almost doubled from the 41,000 seen in 1993, and on present trends, is likely to hit six figures some time in 2012.

Yet we are consistently told that ‘prison works’, just like we were under the Tories. A progressive government should frame a slightly more rational debate, rather than recycle Daily Mail headlines in a manner that makes Paul Dacre the de facto man in charge of Britain's incarceration strategy.

The idea that prison works is pure nonsense, of course. From any rational standpoint, prison fails. Some 57% of male ex-prisoners are reconvicted within two years, and 68% within four. Nine out of ten of teenagers that serve time in youth custody centres are reconvicted within two years.

It is well established that the effect of incarcerating minor offenders and abandoning serious attempts at rehabilitation is to make them more likely to become repeat offenders. According to the government's own Social Exclusion Unit: ‘By aggravating the factors associated with re-offending, prison sentences can be counter-productive as a contribution to crime reduction and public safety.’ Translation: prison actually encourages crime.

Three-quarters of people in prison have a reading age of ten or less. More than 40% are mentally ill, with 10% schizophrenic. Prisoners are 13 times more likely to have been a child in care, 14 times more likely to be unemployed, ten times more likely to have been a regular truant.

If we really want to get tough on the causes of crime, let's put money into education, training and drug rehab rather than into the pockets of the private prison industry.

If the first few days of the Brown government have demonstrated anything, they have underlined just how far British politics has become deideologised, as party loyalties increasingly blur under an embryonic national government.

No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.

Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media

That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for the left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of 'golden mean' to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.

On the other hand, the entire history of the twentieth century shows that political attitudes do sometimes - perhaps once every few decades - change rapidly and dramatically.

It would surely take 'something big' to discredit current cross-party orthodoxy in the eyes of policy makers or, more importantly, the electorate as a whole. Yet it is difficult to imagine what could bring about the sort of shift in the tectonic plates evidenced by the elections of, say, Attlee in 1945 or Thatcher in 1979.

The usual Marxist answer has been predict a 'slump around the corner'. That idea has been a mainstay of perspectives documents at least as long as I've been politically acgtive, and presumably even before that.

Yet even if we were to witness an economic rerun of the 1930s - and one or two rightwing commentators have speculated on just that possibility in recent weeks - the lack of a mass leftwing movement and the decline in elementary class consciousness would be rather more likely to favour the nationalist right than the socialist left.

For now, democratic socialists are in a situation analoguous to the Institute of Economic Affairs-style free marketeers in the 1950s. The times are against us, and there is little we can do about it.

We need to take whatever opportunities arise to propagate the notion that there is an alternative to neoliberalism, and we should be doing that both within the Labour Party and the trade unions, and outwith them. There is currently nothing better on offer.

Health secretary Alan Johnson has commissioned Sir Ara Darzi – one of his ministerial team – to undertake a ‘once in a generation review’ of the National Health Service.

As a medical man himself – a practicing surgeon, indeed - Sir Ara probably prides himself on his ability to tell the difference between causes and cures.

But I am fearful that he will prove unable to make precisely this distinction. His eventual prescription is unlikely to be anything other than a further injection of market forces into the NHS.

Quasi-market revolutions in Britain’s healthcare have been tried twice since the start of the 1990s. The Tories called their version the purchaser-provider split; New Labour has taken a slightly different tack with the creation of Foundation Hospitals.

What both experiments have underlined is that healthcare and market forces are not a natural fit. It is not a good that most people want to see allocated by wealth. And few of us would want to see hospitals charged with maximising shareholder value rather than patient welfare.

Critics of the recent schemes are accused of ‘wanting to go back to the old centralised model’. And that is said like it’s a bad thing.

The NHS of old wasn’t perfect. Of course it wasn’t. But I am unclear what benefits the quasi-markets have created anything superior.

Meanwhile, a copy of Allyson Pollock’s book NHS plc sits on my bookshelf and is slowly making its way up the reading list. It apparently offers an incisive critique of market forces in healthcare, and I’m looking forward to reading in.

The current UK floods may or may not be a direct result of climate change. It’s always impossible to attribute any given ‘extreme weather event’ – as politicians euphemistically dub flooding and the like – directly to global warming.

Certainly, there are precedents. In a single day in July 1955, a full 12 inches of rain fell on parts of Dorset, three times the downpour seen last Friday.

But what does seem clear is that climate change will increase dramatically the incidence of extreme weather events, both in the UK and across the planet.

As we witnessed in New Orleans, the poor are usually the worst hit. Of the estimated 500,000 or so people without power or water as a result of the recent deluge, most of them will be working class people, and a good chunk of them won’t have insurance.

Action is clearly required. Yet the political complacency of the mainstream parties is astonishing, given that nothing less than the future of the earth itself could be at stake.

Public opinion dictates that New Labour, the Tories and the Lib-Dems talk a good game on green issues. Yet none of them propose convincing policies to tackle the environmental crisis. And no, having a chauffeur ferry your briefcase behind your pushbike doesn’t count.

Blair in particular was often capable of one minute arguing passionately that climate change is the most important issue facing the planet, and the next calling for three new runways in the south of England, so that air travel can double over the next two decades.

If the current inundations increase the pressure for meaningful action, or even simply kick-start some serious debate, they will have served some purpose. It’s just a pity that such a high price in human misery has to be paid to ensure something is done, when the need to do something has been persuasively argued by so many for so long.

Rosemary McKenna - Labour MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East - is to step down at the next general election. After entering parliament in the Labour landslide of ten years ago, she is in no doubt that a decade of Blairism has transformed the postwar new town and associated former mining communities that she represents:

She said the highlight of her Westminster career was its very beginning. "It has to be May 1997. It was a new dawn. Over the years, I have seen the towns of Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch change. I now stand outside supermarkets and see the prosperity among the people compared to 1997. This community has virtually no serious unemployment whatsoever. In 1997, there were third-generation children in families that never worked. That's been eradicated. That to me is the greatest thing we have done."

If what she says is true, it is indeed excellent news. Wikipedia seems to confirm the claim that the constituency is doing more or less OK, although it is less than complimentary about the area:

[Cumbernauld] has a reputation as grim and isolating, and finds itself in the bizarre position of having above-average income and below-average unemployment and child poverty rates, yet also below-average house prices for the region.

But reading Ms McKenna’s remarks has set me thinking about the social impact of a decade of Blairism on different parts of the UK.

As a soft southerner, I’d be particularly interested to hear the opinions of readers with knowledge of the Scottish coalfields and other mining areas. Are former pit villages the smack-devastated wastelands depicted in popular culture, or has Blairism really made good the damage that Thatcherism wrought?

Any thoughts on the inner cities? The East End of London is clearly a far more prosperous place than it was ten years ago. The parts of it in which I live, work and drink have changed beyond recognition. That strikes me as being more down to yuppification than government or local authority policy. Or am I being unfair to the regeneration efforts of predominantly Labour councils?

What about Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow? Northern Ireland? South Wales? Is the widespread talk of rural hardship overblown or more or less on the money?

And what should be the verdict for the UK as a whole? Better or worse for New Labour in Number Ten? Your impressions and anecdotes, please. This could be an interesting discussion.

Fancy spending four weeks in the Netherlands getting caned and being paid for it? This is a genuine advertisement from a website for journalist jobseekers. Spelling/punctuation as in the original.

Sadly I’m too old to apply for the vacancy. Maybe I could sue the company under the age discrimination laws:

Ricochet - Looking for journalists for a new Channel 4 documentary

Following the RSA drugs report which came up with a scale of harm listing alcohol as more harmful than cannabis and ecstasy in that order. Hannah Lamb Assistant Producer for Ricochet is looking for journalists in their 20's or early 30's who are happy to admit to the occasional or more regular use of one of these substances and allow us to follow the effects that it has on their body over the period of a month.

They would take the journalists to Holland where there would be no legal repercussions and where they have a great university who will be monitoring the effects.

Hannah wants journalists who would be interested in this type of experiential journalism and would like to have a further chat about the project

Hannah can be reached on +44 (0)1273 224 800 and hannah.lamb@ricochet.co.uk

UPDATE: This post has achieved an unlikely honour for Dave's Part, namely a link from the Adam Smith Institute website. The devotees of the 18th century philosopher and economist observe acidly:

An offer to journalists of booze, dope and drugs, to provide the raw material for a monitored experiement upon their effects. Judging by what's written in some newspapers, wouldn't it be easier to study them in situ, in normal daily conditions?

Old stereotypes die hard, don't they?

Anyone advocating radical social change to a system that has put all that within reach of the majority of the UK population better have a bloody good reason.

The Tories won the 1959 election on the back of Supermac's 'you've never had it so good' slogan. That's famously the favourite phrase of those who've always had it better, of course. But factually he wasn't wrong. And what's more, living standards for the bulk of the working class have increased exponentially over the last half-century.

They are now way above anything my parents - a railwayman and a housewife who did part-time cleaning jobs - could have aspired to when I was growing up in the 1960s, when a telephone and wall-to-wall carpets would have been luxuries. Higher, too, than anyone on the left would have thought possible under capitalism when I first became politically active in the early 1980s.

There is simply no comparison with the world described by Manchester textile factory owner Friedrich Engels in his classic 1844 volume, The Condition of the Working Class in England, pictured left.

This has not been achieved by paying workers more. Indeed, last time I saw any stats, the share of wages in UK GDP has been in secular decline in recent decades. Instead, these goods have declined dramatically in value, as measured by the Marxian standard of socially necessary labour time. It's a neat conjuring trick.

The contrast with the relatively recent past is dramatic. If you're in a steady job, you can eat out routinely. You can afford to drink far more than is good for you, and still get high at the weekend if you want to.

It seems to me that the left - especially that section still trying to sell the classical Marxist vision of an alternative society of material abundance - hasn't thought a lot of this through.

The current lack of combativity and consciousness of British workers is all too often attributed simply to the labour movement's failure to overcome the legacy of defeat following the miners' strike of 1984-85.

But that was now a generation ago. The younger portion of today's workforce either wasn't born at the time, or cannot remember the period. So isn't increased affluence pretty likely to be one of the factors at work?

There are differences of opinion in just how far Marx regarded the 'absolute immiserisation' of the proletariat - a theory he inherited from Ricardo - as a key driver of revolutionary change. But the evidence is that, in the advanced capitalist countries, it ain't happening anyway.

Of course, the notion of what sociologists call 'embourgeoisement' dates back to before the first time a prole installed a washing machine, paid for on the never-never, in her council flat.

Twenty years ago,Neil Kinnock, rhetorically asked the 1987 Labour Party conference what should be said to dockers earning £400 a week and in possession of a holiday home in Spain. The punchline, delivered in an embarrassing mockney accent, was this: 'You do not say "let me take you out of your misery, bruvvers".'

Two years later, the Tories abolished the National Dock Labour Scheme and effectively recasualised the job. So much for that point.

OK, maybe I should get out more. There surely is plenty of poverty across Britain. As someone who regularly visits major cities worldwide, but has never been to Preston, Carlisle, Swansea or Derby, it might be that I am just not seeing it.

On the other hand, there's a large council estate visible from the window of the room in which I write this post. But even there, plenty of satellite dishes are in evidence. However attenuated our welfare state, life on benefits isn't destitution and it isn't the workhouse.

Those excluded from Good Time Britain 2007 are a substantial minority. But the operative word is 'minority'. Welcome to the two-thirds/one-third society.

Again, social inequality is on the increase. The super-rich are getting obscenely super-richer. But that does not seem to inspire the moral outrage it rightly should. Most ordinary people seem to accept this as the way of the world, so long as capitalism continues to deliver the fast-moving consumer goods.

Some questions, then. Can the Marxist left still campaign on the basis that our idea of socialism means a higher standard of living for the majority of the population, and is therefore in their direct self-interest? If not, how should we pitch revolutionary socialism?

And is it possible instead to appeal to altruism, to stress that 'free' mobile phone/camera/MP3 players with radio and bluetooth and G3 technology are only made possible by sweatshop labour in China?

Or should the appeal centred on environmentalism? Or have I got all this plain wrong anyway? Responses in the comments box, please.

Maybe it was because he was so damn young. Maybe it was because he happened to be white. Or maybe just that the slaying happened in a slow news month.

Whatever the reason for the publicity, the killing of Rhys Jones - pictured left - has touched a national nerve, and forced the politicians to offer analysis and solutions.

David Cameron – allegedly egged on by new spin doctor Andy Coulson - sought to make political capital from the tragedy with his facile ‘anarchy in the UK’ and ‘broken society’ soundbites.

There was even an attack on magazines that glorified ‘getting wasted’, a pastime with which Mr Cameron is sometimes said not be entirely unfamiliar, and on music firms which ‘grew fat on the profits of exploiting black youth’.

Labour’s Jacqui Smith responded in the manner of home secretaries since time immemorial, promising a specialist national police unit and a new ministerial task force on gun crime.

Whatever the merits of either approach, both seem to want deliberately to avoid the big picture. If society is indeed broken, who or what broke it? And what can fix it?

Liverpool, like all British cities, has always had its share of poverty and it has always had its teenage gangs. What it hasn’t always had the toxic level of permanent long-term unemployment that stems from the deliberate policy of successive governments to deindustrialise the UK economy.

These are points well made by Tony Mulhearn, one of the key leaders of the Militant-dominated Liverpool council in the 1980s:

Work [for residents of Liverpool district Norris Green] was found in the factories that lined the roads leading from the estate. Plessey’s, CAV Lucas, English Electric, bus manufacturers, and the Kirkby industrial estate, three miles up the East Lancs Road, provided work for tens of thousands.

In addition many continued to work as dockers, shipbuilders, merchant seaman and the plethora of trades connected to the thriving maritime industry, as well as finding trades in the construction, printing and the supply industries.

And now? Some 41% of Norris Green's population is out of work, compared to a Liverpool average of 34%. Meanwhile, 45% of Norris Green youth have no educational qualification.

Such jobs as are available are badly paid. Average income in Norris Green is £17,000 compared to a Liverpool average of £22,500, and a national median wage of £23, 244.

A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2000 revealed that in parts of the Croxteth area where Rhys lived, and usually considered more affluent than Norris Green, between 50-70% were in poverty, and unemployment has been consistently around 36% since the 1970s.

Throw cheap drugs and almost as cheap handguns into the mix, and the corpses of 11-year-old underline the result. Is that not enough to give rise to second thoughts from those on the left who advocate full legalisation of drugs and an unrestricted right to bear arms?

And yes, this post is from the keyboard of the same blogger who recently wrote about the growth of working class living standards and the problems posed by the two-thirds/one-third society.

I don't think the piece above contradicts the earlier one. It's just that the excluded one-third constitute a faraway England of which Cameron, Smith and London-based journalists know little.

Gulf War Syndrome? Doesn’t exist. First world war victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, executed by British officers? Guilty as charged. The Deepcut Barracks dead? They killed themselves.

Today the House of Commons defence committee adds to the charge sheet with a report on services accommodation that throws the effusive verbal gratitude for the work of ‘our boys’ into sharp relief. Here’s how the BBC sums it up:

Some armed forces housing remains in an "appalling condition" and could take decades to be brought up to scratch …

And these days it goes without saying that some of this is down to yet another privatisation success story:

In family housing, repairs had been sub-contracted to a private company, but the level of service was "unacceptably poor", the committee said.

Within the left there is a range of ideas on the attitude socialists should take to the armed forces, including outright pacificism, the traditional Marxist slogan of ‘not a penny, not a man for the system’, and the ‘workers in uniform’ stance that insists squaddies are intrinsically part of the working class.

Before the usual suspects launch into a predictable hard-core ultraleftist ‘let the bastards rot in their army slums’ posturing binge, can I just remind everybody that one or two service personnel seem to read this blog and have left comments before now. What can the socialists sensibly say to them?

I’ll start by suggesting rapid withdrawal from Iraq, and democratisation of the forces, including the right to trade union organisation and decent living conditions for all ranks.

Britain should drop its ‘world power’ imperial pretensions and give up its seat on the UN security council, while still maintaining the capability to patrol its borders and to participate in peacekeeping missions. Any other ideas?

In October last year, 150,000 low-income families lost a total of £45m when dodgy Christmas hamper racket Farepak collapsed. As a result, some of Britain’s poorest yet most thrifty people – the very people who don't whack a few hundred quid on the plastic to pay for their Christmas, because they can't afford to - saw their festivities ruined. No government bail out for them.

About 125,000 workers and pensioners have lost some or all of their pension entitlement after their employers went under or shut down insolvent occupational pension schemes. No government bail out for them, either.

Of course Alistair Darling was right to guarantee the deposits of Northern Rock customers this week. But why the selective treatment? Building society savers have no more intrinsic merit than Farepak punters or pension contributors.

In round numbers, seeing the Farepak clientele alright would have cost exactly 1% of the £4.55bn value that the taper relief tax break extends to venture capitalists every single year.

As Nick Ferguson, head of SVG Capital, pointed out recently, venture caps pay a lower rate of tax then their cleaning ladies. And cleaning ladies are the kind of people that save with Farepak and who at best have a couple of grand in savings. A Labour government should consider their interests too.

Time was when building societies gave the English language the expression 'safe as houses'. It was only during the Thatcher period, when the conscious decision was taken that most people were going to become homeowners whether they wanted to be or not, that housing became politically dangerous.

Even though council housing was flogged off en masse at hefty discounts, somebody still had to fund the asking price. Meanwhile, more people needed to finance 'starter homes' and then hopefully work their way up to more desirable properties.

Hence the 1986 Building Societies Act, a classic piece of Thatcherite deregulation that enabled first Abbey National and then most of the rest of the big players to convert into banks.

Building societies started out in Victorian times as locally-rooted mutual organisations, enabling people to get together to fund the purchase of their properties. And although their formation flowed from the self-help ethos of Samuel Smiles, mutuality is an ideal of non-statist socialism too.

This all worked well enough. In the 1960s, for instance, my father was able to pay for the purchase of a two-up two-down terrace on a blue collar railway worker's wage.

Building societies were not profit maximisers and did not have to pay shareholders dividents. Instead, they balanced a desire to pay savers as much as possible while keeping interest rates as low as possible for borrowers.

It goes without saying that this didn't entirely please the monetarist wingnuts. How dare these people behave so irrationally?

What's more, the building societies operated a de facto cartel, leaving the more inefficient no incentive to cut costs. Moreover, none of them faced the discipline of the constant possibility of hostile takeover.

Worse still from the avaricious stance of Thatcherism, the funds they had available to lend were limited. Loans were effectively rationed,through low loan:income or loan:value ratios. If home ownership was to be maximised, Malcolm X style, by whatever means necessary, the only thing for it was to let the market rip.

Building society managers spotted the opportunity to get rich quick by become PLCs. And if at first savers and borrowers could see little point in altering arrangements so palpably beneficial to them, such opposition was easily enough overcome by the offer of tempting 'conversion bonuses'. Nobody ever says no to free money, do they?

Fast forward 20 years, and the outcome is some of the structural problems the British economy now faces, from absurdly over-inflated house prices to the heavy dependence of consumer spending on equity withdrawal.

If the housing market slumps over the next year - as it well might - Gordon Brown is surely going to regret his bottling ways.

When socialists discuss housing policy, the dominant demand is for more and better high-quality social housing. I'm all in favour of that, of course. But owned dwellings will still make up the bulk of the housing stock. In order to facilitate their sale and purchase, the revival of mutual building societies should be encouraged.

I am currently paying a fair chunk of my income to one of the major mortgage banks, because that was the best deal on the table at a time I needed to put a roof over my head, But I am aware that a small number of remaining building societies are committed to mutual status, and it is to them I will be looking when I come to refinance.

It would have been a meeting between an old man and a young boy, at some point in the 1960s. He'd be dead by now, of course. But I might have met him in person. I might be carrying a memory of him based on something more substantial than a couple of sepia photographs.

What did he think about the cause for which he fought and ultimately died? Was he a conscript or a volunteer? Family history doesn't record.

There's nothing to suggest George had a political consciousness any more advanced than an average agricultural labourer caught up in the patriotic fervour that dominated the country at that time.

Star billing for World War One heroics goes instead to my grandfather Willis Osler, who came out of the conflict with some decorations, and in 1920 married a German woman. I presume some of her relatives must have been on the other side. Maybe some of them were killed too.

My mother's family are German-speaking Swiss nationals, and one aunt and one cousin also married Germans. One of the husbands - a Lutheran pastor by the time I knew him as a young lad - had been a Wehrmacht conscript in World War Two. A reluctant conscript, he always used to tell me in impeccable RP Queen's English. But it remains true that he fought for Hitlerism.

A second aunt married a Sudeten-German communist, who after a period in a concentration camp eventually found himself fighting with the Free Czech Forces in the UK. He became a British national, but he stayed a diehard Stalinist until his death a few years backs.

My father's half-brother did his national service in Korea. He is happy to boast of having killed 'communists', as he sees the matter. I suspect he regarded the fact that they were Asian communists rather white communists as, if anything, an added bonus. No reluctance there, then.

I'm sure all of the men mentioned above - irrespective of the army in which they found themselves lined up - were 'brave' as individuals. And all three of the ones I have discussed the issue with had political ideas about why they found themselves called on to kill other men.

Few families will not have been touched by the massive conflicts of the twentieth century. But in these times when more and more people living in Britain can trace their recent ancestry to multiple countries, some of the patriotic narritive surrounding Remembrance Sunday inevitably erodes.

I do respect the memory of George Osler. How do I feel about the uncle fought for Hitler? I'm not sure, really. Much as I hate fascism, ultimately I cannot disrespect him as a person. As a conscript, he didn't have a meaningful choice. Let's just say that me and Korea vet don't really speak to each other these days.

So even before I became a socialist, my feelings on Remembrance Sunday were always ambiguous. Because members of my family fought on both sides in both world wars, subjectively I have never wanted to 'glorify' the dead on one side alone. That is why I have only worn pacifist white poppies.

I think the far left needs to handle these issues with a delicacy with which it is not customarily associated. We shouldn't belittle the emotions people inevitably feel on these occasions.

What we need to stress is the class nature of war, and how only our brand of politics is capable of ensuring that there will not be repeat performances - again and again - across the rest of human history.

Originally posted November 12 2006

There is something rather distasteful about New Labour’s attack on the Tories’ appointment of Jonathan Aitken as head of an inquiry into prison reform.

Yes, the former cabinet minister is a convicted perjurer. But his is a spent conviction within the meaning of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.

Unnamed Labour sources claim that giving him this job is an example of the Nasty Party returning to its ‘disgraced, scandal-ridden past’. But it is pretty incongruous for Labour to attempt this seizure of the moral high ground after all that has happened over the last decade.

This government’s record in office is littered with private sector rip-offs, scams, dodgy deals, downright flops and standard issue sleaze.

After the cash for ash, cash for access, cash for passports, and cash for honours affairs – to name but a few instances - there are a number of Labour politicians who should by rights have spent some time as guests of Her Maj. One peer in particular somehow springs ineluctably to mind.

Who knows? A spell in the remand wing of a PFI jail might even give some Labour MPs grounds to reconsider their support for prison privatisation.

And who better to look into the urgent need for prison reform than an old lag like Aitken?

However, it is probably too much to hope that the Tories’ inquiry will lead to any break from the bang ‘em up mindset that has long dominated the outlook of both major parties.

It may have been Michael Howard who first patented the ‘prison works’ theme, but every New Labour home secretary since 1997 has been happy enough to vamp on the riff.

If Britain is stop short of an inmate population that reaches six figures, we need an assault on the inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and racism that lies behind the majority of crime

Money needs to be spent on prison education, health services, and drug rehabilitation, rather than lining the pockets of the fat cat proprietors of the Doncatraz Archipelago.

I’ll judge Aitken’s conclusions on whether or not he has the balls to say any of this, rather than stay lazily trapped in the comfort zone of Daily Mail editorial-speak.

In case you missed them, here are two news in brief items, reported back-to-back on last night's edition of Radio Four's The World Tonight programme without further comment.

Two employees of Network Rail - the company that maintains Britain's network of railway tracks - have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with the Grayrigg rail crash in February, in which an 84 year old woman died.

Meanwhile, the Health and Safety Executive has decided not to bring a criminal prosecution against the management of Stoke Mandeville NHS trust, despite two outbreaks of superbug clostridium difficile between October 2003 and June 2005, which killed 33 people.

The message here is quite obvious. Only manual workers have to account for the consequences of their negligence. Wear a decent suit and - nine times out of ten, anyway - you'll get away with it.

An evangelical group has today launched a High Court bid for the chance to bring a private prosecution against the producers of satirical show ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’.

Michael Gledhill QC - representing Christian Voice - made mention of the violent reaction seen after the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in the Danish press and the first and only performance of the play Bezhti, which depicted a rape in a Sikh temple. Yes, I think we understand your subtext here, Mr Gledhill.

‘This is not just about protecting the rights of a section of the Christian population’, he told Lord Justice Hughes and Mr Justice Collins. ‘It is about protecting the constitution of the nation which is built on the Christian faith.’

This is an historical point, at best. Last time I saw the statistics, only 48% of Britons regarded themselves as belonging to any religion at all - let alone Christianity. Some 14% said they did not know who Jesus Christ was, and a further 22% believe him to be 'just a story', according to a one poll.

There is an essential democratic point at stake in this case. Of course it is vital for the left strongly to support freedom of religion. But that cannot entail allowing any minority - including Christian, Muslim or Sikh minorities - to dictate to everyone else what can be performed on a stage. That way theocracy surely lies.

Logically, the line has to be drawn when freedom of expression is called into question. That’s because freedom of religion, as itself one aspect of freedom of expression, cannot meaningfully exist without it.

Football long ago stopped being primarily a sport and became just another branch of capitalism. Today it is a global $250bn-a-year industry.

No surprise, then, that players such as John Terry – salary: £130,000 a bleedin' week – are paid the same sort of whack as chief executives of FTSE 100 businesses. They are no more worth the money than the fat cats are.

On some estimates, the players who made up England team that crashed 3-2 to Croatia at Wembley can be valued at £200m or more; the Croatians were ‘only’ worth an aggregate £80m. Who seriously doubts Marxist notions of the commodification of labour power in this context?

Despite that, England could not manage even the draw that would have seen it qualify for the 2008 European championship. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland didn’t make the cut, either. This will be the first major tournament without a British team for over two decades.

I am sufficiently immune from either nationalism or sporting fanaticism not to particularly care. But the fate of footie is yet more evidence that the deregulation and neoliberalisation of absolutely everything does have its natural limits.

I would never go so far as to argue that the pre-Murdoch game I remember as a Georgie Best-idolising schoolboy in the 1960s and 1970s represents some kind of golden age.

It’s just that there is something to be said for locally-rooted clubs, based on working class support, that represent more than substitute trophy brides for dodgy Russian businessmen.

Far from being on the margins of British life – as Conservative MP Mark Pritchard weakly tries to argue – Christianity maintains a prominence far in excess of that merited by its number of adherents.

However much the Tories would like to see the emergence of a cohesive ‘religious right’ core vote in the UK, the evidence is that the social base for such a phenomenon it simply does not exist in this country.

Last time I saw any statistics, only 48% of Britons described themselves as belonging to any religion at all. Some 14% said they do not know who Jesus Christ is, and a further 22% believed he is 'just a story'.

Yet one Christian sect has been singled out as an official state religion, with its leadership given a voice in legislation through seats in the House of Lords. Christianity alone enjoys the protection of the blasphemy laws.

Extensive government funding is available to schools with a ‘Christian ethos’, even if that entails the teaching of creationism in science classes.

Nor is anybody seriously arguing, pace Pritchard, that we should forget the Christian contribution to the arts, science, and culture. But this is best achieved in examining the ideas that inspired Milton or Newton in actual context.

To judge by his website, Mr Pritchard is an enthusiast for nuclear weapons and Israeli membership of NATO, although his concept of Christian charity seemingly does not extend as far as immigrants.

But oddly enough, he bases his spurious 'Christianophobia' claims on the same tenet that most of the secular left would also use as a starting point: ‘Freedom of speech and of religion are fundamental principles of any liberal democracy.’

This is exactly the point. A true liberal democracy can only be premised on a separation of church and state. Precisely because we all want freedom of speech and freedom of religion, it cannot be right for the state to compromise such freedoms by privileging any one religion over any other.

Christianity competes in the free market for ideas on the same basis as other ideologies, and stands or falls by how far it succeeds. As many intelligent Christians would surely agree, believers cannot rightly ask for any more than that.

I’ve long regarded airports controlled by private sector monopoly BAA as essentially overgrown shopping malls with the odd runway attached.

But it looks like Heathrow’s terminal five – which opens next March – doesn’t make much pretence of being anything much more than a glorified Bluewater Centre with good airline connections.

Here’s Nick Ziebland, ‘retail strategy director’ of BAA, which is now own by Ferrovial, a Spanish company that started life as a construction firm building barracks for fascist armies under the Franco dictatorship:

"Come early; tell your friends. I think we need to bring back some of the glamour of travel and make it almost a destination its own right." …

"I want to be the first airport to sell a sofa," said Mr Ziebland, dodging shopfitters at the Paul Smith store, which is waiting for doors from a French chateau.

Look, if I want to go shopping, I can always hop on a 73 bus to the West End. Now that duty free has been abolished, and fags and booze are no longer cheapo cheapo, what’s the point of buying things at airports and then having to lug them halfway round the world before getting to consume them?

OK, airports should offer the chance to pick up a cup of coffee, and maybe a few pairs of Y-fronts if not enough clean undergarments were to hand during packing. That’s about it. No retail opportunities in the world can compensate travellers for hanging around for hours with only a £1.75 food voucher from BA as compensation.

In my book, a well-designed airport is one that maximises passenger throughput, and minimises time spent waiting, either off or on the aircraft. With a delay record like BAA’s, selling sofas should really be the last thing on its mind.

The standard case against any form of redistributionist or egalitarian politics is that Britain today is – more or less – a meritocracy. Never mind if you’re old man’s a dustman and he wears a dustman’s hat; he probably made a killing after he bought that council flat of his, after all.

OK, so the public schoolies have still got a bit of a head start. But never mind, son. Concentrate on your studies, put the graft in, and one day you too will be on a middle management wedge with a Ford Focus to round off the compensation package.

In the meantime, chill out and tune in to the classless society, brought to you courtesy of capitalism rather than communism.

On a superficial level, it is true that there have seen major changes in the class structure of Britain in recent decades. The traditional ruling class is in decline. That is not down to the rise of the proletariat, but rather the increased power of the corporation and the state.

Many white-collar jobs have been objectively proletarianised, to use the sociological jargon. However, class consciousness and organisation has lagged far behind this development.

Working class communities – previously often based around a single large employer – have been atomised. Solidarity is even more out of fashion that flared trousers.

But other than in appearances, little has changed. Here’s the Independent’s take on a story that made it into several newspapers today:

Class divisions in the UK are just as wide as they were 30 years ago, according to new research published today.

Indeed, the proportion of children from the poorest-income homes dropped from 11 per cent to 10 per cent between the early 1990s and 2002 – while those from the richest groups rose by four percentage points.

I haven’t seen the full report. But presumably the Sutton Trust doesn’t point out that this 30-year stasis roughly coincides with the switch from the social democratic post-war consensus – which, however much the left criticised it at the time, did actively seek to bolster social mobility – to neoliberalism.

Thatcherism, for all its enrichissez vous rhetoric, did not actually provide greater opportunities to ordinary people. Nor, shamefully, has ten years of New Labourism. And if social democratic government doesn’t at least achieve that, what is its purpose?

Some feminist opinion sees the commodification of sexuality as undesirable, considering it intrinsically degrading to all women, especially participants, and to those men who view it. Porn is the theory, rape is the practice. You've hear the slogan.

The libertarian left strongly believes that all expressions of consensual adult sexual behaviour should remain unregulated.

Whether or not one actually approves of porno, the latter argument surely has to win the day. Pornography is clearly not the cause of women’s oppression, which long predates the invention of the printing press. Sexism is rooted in wider inequalities of wealth and power.

Women’s oppression dates back thousands of years, and is premised on the rise of class society, private property, and the family as an institution of social and economic control.

It's also worth noting that the very definition of what constitutes porn can shift dramatically within relatively short periods of time. Historian Mark Garnett makes the point well in his new book, From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975. Full review to follow.

In a chapter examining how attitudes to sex have altered over the last 30 years, Garnett points out that the whimsical 2003 film Calender Girls - based on the true story of small town Women's Institute members stripping off for the camera to raise money for charity - was given a certificate allowing anyone over 12 to watch it. Yet the actual content, and the extent of the nudity, was just as explicit as many X-rated movies of the seventies.

What really has changed is the sexualisation of popular culture. With mainstream pornography, everybody involved - from the models to the publishers to the consumers - knows what the deal is, and consciously opts in. Walk down the High Street, and you simply don't get any choice about what you see.

In an age where ice cream sales are routinely promoted by symbolised oral sex, there is no opt-out from 24/7 bombardment by erotica, on magazine covers and billboards and in music videos.

Even Daddy's Little Princesses - aged four and seven - were moved to snigger by an advertisement for The Sun newspaper on the side of a bus, which featured a page three girl with 20p coins strategically covering her boobs. We used to call those organs thruppeny bits when I was smutty schoolboy, but I suppose we have to take inflation into account.

Because of its sheer extent, and because of the non-availabilty of avoidance, the ubiquity of meretricious consumerism is infinitely more corrosive than any amount of tit and bum DVDs can ever be.

[Hat top: this post inspired by debates on A Very Public Sociologist and Splintered Sunrise.]

Star ‘useful’ present this Christmas was undoubtedly a brand new decent quality black and silver pop-up toaster. This was something I actually wanted, having lived an existentially crippled toasterless existence for many months since the demise of a £6.99 cheapo number from Woolies. My 2008 breakfast times will be revolutionised accordingly.

The downside is that I am have been reduced to a state of shock by the full-scale questionnaire Morphy Richards expects me to fill out in order to qualify for a guarantee.

So keen are they to build a detailed database on Britain’s Xmas toaster recipient community that they even offer the additional incentive of entry into a £10,000 prize draw for punters ready to tell all.

I can understand why MR might want my email address. That way they can bombard me with spam, in the hope that I will eventually be browbeaten into coveting one of the firm’s deep fat fryers or breadmakers. Sadly for them, I – and I suspect most people – delete such sales pitches unread.

But why exactly does this company wish to know whether my home is a flat, maisonette, terraced, semi-detached, detached or bungalow property, and how many bedrooms it has? Or what my household income is? Or whether I or my partner play golf or do charity work? Or details of our occupations?

Look, guys. I want you to guarantee me that your bloody toaster will reliably grill sliced bread, and maybe the odd crumpet, for the next few years. That is hardly a lot to ask.

I do not expect to have to part with personal details as a precondition of your promising me that. Any more of the Big Brother stuff and I’ll switch my custom to Russell Hobbs.

As a socialist, I still feel oddly guilty in confessing this. But like many middle class people, I get an annual full medical from a well-known private sector health care provider as a perk of my job.

I’ve thought about foregoing it on principle, but what would be the point? It’s essentially part of the wedge.

The contrast between such a service and the way the NHS handles me is more then marked. Perhaps the most obvious difference is the amount of time and attention I get from the doctor.

The last time I saw a GP, I didn’t feel that my worries were even listened to; she seemed mainly intent on chiding me as an overweight alcoholic hypochondriac, and was generally keen to get me the heck out of her surgery within the minimum number of minutes possible.

In contrast, at my private sector check-up I get an hour or more to go over the results of every single test. Any worries I have are assuaged with personally-tailored advice. I still get told to drink less and exercise more; it’s just that the bollocking is administered rather more politely.

But it remains reassuring to think that, if anything serious was about to go wrong, the likelihood is that it would be picked up while there is still time to do something about it.

Again speaking as a socialist, I have long believed that this the kind of medical MoT should be available to everybody. I’m no health economist, but surely the maths stack up on any cost-benefit analysis. Prevention is nearly always cheaper than cure.

So on the surface, Gordon Brown’s announcement today that he intends to increase the availability of screening for early signs of heart disease, stroke and kidney disease on the NHS marks a major step forward for health equality. As the old trade union maxim has it, nothing’s too good for the working class.

Unfortunately, I am still going to need convincing that this is more than a gimmick, as New Labour and the Tories slug it out over the title of ‘party of the NHS’. Doctors’ leaders point to a certain lack of joined up thinking:

Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the GPs committee at the British Medical Association, said: "What I do find extraordinary is just two or three weeks ago the prime minister insisted that funding be taken away from the treatment of patients with heart failure, hardening of the arteries and kidney disease - the very conditions that he's now proposing to screen for."

The Tories add that there is no proper timetable for delivery, and it remains unclear where the money will come from.

Moreover, New Labour makes it clear that much of the work involved will be carried out by the private sector. At the risk of sounding a monumental hypocrite, I’d still make the case that universal screening would be better and more economically achieved as part of a properly-funded, fully integrated, comprehensive public-sector health care service.

I really do hope we’ll soon see the day where a full screen medical is no longer the sole preserve of those in better-paid employment. But it remains to be seen whether the standard of service on offer be anywhere near comparable to my annual trip to Harley Street.

Celebrity is a relatively recent invention, created in the twentieth century by the movie, television and popular music industries.

It now constitutes an organised system, which remains in place even as individual stars come and go. All of this is distinctly capitalist; I suppose you could accurately describe all this as the commodification of personality.

Increasingly it infects politics, which is not widely dubbed ‘showbiz for ugly people’ for nothing. Even politicians considered in some quarters as leaders of the far left appear on reality TV or become talk show hosts.

However much they justify doing such things in terms of ‘getting the message over’, the truth is that the producers filter out 99% of the politics involved, drowning it in birdsong if necessary.

So the suspicion remains that ostensibly any flirtation with celebrification on the part of ostensible socialists is chiefly motivated by ego gratification and the sizeable cheques they pick up before their 15 minutes is over. They are in it for the chicks and the charlie, just like every other wannabe.

There were a few years in my life in which I was vaguely interested in the private lives of rock and movie stars. But broadly speaking, I had grown out of all that stuff by the time I made it to college.

The closest I get to starstruck these days is the perusal of the occasional musician biography. Robert Gordon’s 'Can’t be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters', for instance, is more than worth checking out if you are at all into the blues.

But this is a work of social history; it tells you as much about race and class in twentieth century America as it does about the man himself.

There’s also a slim volume concerning the jazzer Ornette Coleman sitting on my ‘waiting to be read’ shelf. The man who invented harmolodics has been something of a fixture on my CD deck of late, and I’m keen to know more on this musical revolutionary.

But these are both artistes of substance. I fear that the same cannot be said of either Amy Winehouse or Paris Hilton, even though I understand that the latter lady is a firm favourite with Britain’s premier ultraleft blogger. Frankly, I think it is good of me even to notice their resoundingly talentless existences.

As a man who only ever sees Heat or Hello! magazines during my sporadic visits to the dentist, I freely confess to being more interested in the doings of Lindsey German than I am in the activities of Lindsay Lohan. At least the former has a marginally greater impact on the state of the British left than the latter.

So claims by supposedly sensible commentators that ‘we would all have blood on our hands’ if ‘Britney did destruct’ leave me frankly bemused. The picture shows the singer, who apparently suffers from bipolar disorder, being carted off to a lockdown at the Cedars-Sinai medical centre in Los Angeles.

I am in no way responsible for her fate. Other than whatever vague fellow feeling I can muster for another other human being that I do not know but who may be in pain, her life is an utter irrelevance to me. Nor do I have any opinion as to whether or not K-Fed should get the babies; J-Lo can have 'em, for all I care. Or any other 'star' with a stupid set of initials.

That is why I object to the assumption that ‘we’ – as in all of us – somehow ‘have to’ give a damn about Ms Spears. It is no more compulsory than having any interest in where Posh Spice ranks in the latest fashionista polls, however much play either story gets in what were once serious newspapers. Sorry.

In 2008, it is the turn of Liverpool to hold the title, an honour it will share with Stavanger in Norway. Naturally, local politicians hope the designation will prove an economic boost to what may well be the poorest major city in England.

But will it? The shindig doesn’t come for free. There is reportedly a £29m shortfall between what the council plans to spend next year and what it will receive from central government, and £20m of that is related to the Capital of Culture events.

As a district auditor’s report warned last month, Liverpool is already running a £25m deficit on its council tax collection fund account, which is significantly higher than for other metropolitan authorities.

The counter argument is that Capital of Culture status will act as a catalyst for urban renewal. But on the available evidence, that outcome is not certain. Although Glasgow’s 1990 stint in the role was widely judged an artistic success, proven direct economic benefits were few.

The regeneration claim is similarly advanced as justification for bringing the 2012 Olympics to East London. But the question has to be asked; given the importance of urban renewal, why try to bring it about as a side-effect of another project entirely?

Why not plan measures for job creation and economic redevelopment rationally, instead of leaving them to the vagaries of the market? It might be nice having world-class sports facilities on your doorstep, but that is not a legacy that will necessarily change Newham permanently for the better.

The success of New Labour’s regional development agency strategy since 1999 has been obscured by the detachment of financial services-driven London from the rest of the economy. That’s the claim of business minister Stephen Timms, speaking at a Fabian Society event yesterday, anyway.

I guess this argument runs in parallel with the idea that Britain’s poor are becoming less poor in absolute terms, but poorer still by comparison with the super rich.

According to Timms:

[T]he economies of the English regions had grown much faster than those in other European countries over the last 10 years, sparking a “dramatic renewal” in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.

Now it was approaching parity with the 15 countries that were then members of the EU. “In 1997, only two English regions had GVA per head above the EU15 average,” he said. “By 2004, over half of them did.”

OK, I’ll ‘fess up here. I’m one of those Londoners who spends more time in European capitals and/or the Middle East than elsewhere in the UK. I have set foot in Derby once in my life, for a football match my dad took me to in 1970; I have not visited Bradford since 1983; and I have never been to Preston or Carlisle or Swansea.

For much of middle class Britain, it is cities like these that are today’s faraway countries of which we know little. I think this is a political problem; exchange rate decisions, for instance, are taken to suit the City rather than what is left of the manufacturing industries of the Midlands and the North.

But my sporadic forays into what still condescendingly get called ‘the provinces’ have not left me with the impression that it is non-stop runaway economic party time outside the south east. I’d be interested in hearing what readers around the UK think.

On the Sunday afternoon, I even took the love interest for a romantic stroll along the banks of the Seine. One of the road tunnels had been closed; must have been a nasty traffic accident, we guessed.

Only on boarding the Eurostar that evening did we overhear a British passenger remarking to another: ‘It’s a shame about Diana, isn’t it?’ And still my curiousity wasn’t piqued.

But as a journalist, I do get withdrawal symptoms after any extended period of time without headlines. As soon as I got back to my flat shortly after midnight, I switched on Ceefax and all was revealed; Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in, yes, Paris.

Much has been written of how Britain came to a standstill the following week, as a nation quite literally mourned. I have to say I didn’t experience the days that followed quite like that; in bien pensant London N1, it was something of a non-event. Nobody in my immediate social circle – which presumably includes an atypically high proportion of republicans - seemed particularly to care.

The posh but thick woman the Sex Pistols could almost have had in mind when they penned ‘Pretty Vacant’ snuffed it on account of a pissed chauffeur, Blair copped a bunch of populist brownie points with the ‘people’s princess’ soundbite, Her Maj was finally strong-armed into an only semi-convincing broadcast expression of pretended sorrow. The corpse got a state funeral, with Sir Elton leading the singalong, and that should pretty much have been that.

Except it wasn’t. Eleven years later, the incident continues to reverberate in the media. The internet is awash with conspiracy theories, mainly to the effect that the poor love was bumped off on the orders of Prince Phillip, although the evidence seems even less coherent that that advanced in support of ‘9/11 truth’.

Even in 2008, millions of pounds of public money is being spent on an inquest into what actually happened that day. What’s the point? Even if it could be slam dunk proven that this was a state assassination at the behest of the Prince Consort, it’s ludicrous to believe that such an inquiry would result in anything less than full exoneration.

Meanwhile, testimony from Diana’s servant Paul Burrell underlines the purulent racism of the social layer that still likes to style itself as Britain’s upper class. Speaking of her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who died in 2004, this is what the butler saw, or heard, anyway: ‘She called the princess a whore and she said that she was messing around with 'effing Muslim men' and she was disgraceful and said some very nasty things.’ Nice.

It’s great front-page splash material for the red tops; even the once middle-market Express has turned itself into the Diana Daily in the hope that the princess can arrest its circulation slide from beyond the grave. Think Britney meltdown story on steroids and you’re getting there.

Still, at least it’s keeping Afghanistan, Iraq, an increasingly likely US recession, flooding in the West Country, Darfur, Peter Hain and even falling house prices off the front pages.

New Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, speaking as an individual politician, last month announced that she backs the Swedish system of making it an offence to pay for sex. Right or wrong, at least that is a coherent policy.

On balance, I favour the other main proposal put forward by reformers, namely that of legalising and licensing brothels. But that doesn’t appear to be even on the government’s radar screen.

Despite the widespread public sympathy evident at the time of the killing of Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol, Annette Nicholls, Anneli Alderton, and Paula Clennell - three of them pictured left. -prostitution is still sometimes described as the world’s oldest profession; in reality, it is not a profession of any description. Nobody would want their sister or their daughter to go on the game.

The reality is that an estimated 95% of street prostitutes are using heroin or crack, and most are also subject to multiple social problems. Many of the foreign women trapped in ‘massage parlours’ have been trafficked; their customers are de facto rapists.

As the Ipswich murders - for which a man is currently standing trial in that town - underline, sex work can even prove fatal for the women involved. Worryingly, some of them are not yet old enough even properly to be called women. Continuing criminalisation has led to a situation where girls as young as 12 and 14 are on the streets for the benefit of organised crime.

Licensing and inspection would make prostitutes safer, cut out pimps, reduce violence, trafficking, diseases and drug abuse, and the end exploitation of underage girls.

At the same time, there should be a strategy for getting women out of prostitution, and that strategy will have to be backed up with money to be effective. It could be paid for from the proceeds of taxing legal brothels.

This is not a matter on which I claim any expertise. Although a licensing system seems to me commonsensical, I would happily listen to a grown-up debate on what should be done. The key thing is that something should be done.

All I ask is that participants skip either prurience or moralism, and come up with something resembling effective and workable social policy.

For many years, anyone in this part of London without a car - and that's most people around here - has pretty much been dependent on the large Sainsbury in Kingsland shopping centre. Grumbling about the place is a staple of local bus-stop small talk.

The stock control seriously sucks. Go in there with twelve items or more on your shopping list, and it is almost certain you will not be able to tick them all off. It remains shabby, even after a recent refit. And for those of us who work irregular hours and need to fit the purchase of groceries around such a schedule, the opening times are not particularly convenient.

Tesco will remain open after five o'clock on a Sunday, offering an alternative to the manky fresh produce and ramped up prices on offer from what I think is technically known as the independent retail sector.

Maybe - I mused to myself as I picked up a packet of new potatoes, a pint of milk, Tesco own brand bog cleaner and some antiseptic wipes - Sainsbury will even get its act together as a result of the competition. As the guy on the till handed me change from a fiver, it occured to me that would once have been considered a heretical thought for a socialist.

On one level, the logic of competition is obvious; if customers have a choice, those in control of an enterprise have to do what they can to pull in the punters. Prices have to be lower, or service better, or quality higher. This works to the benefit of consumers, whether Trotskyist or a Tory.

But there is a class dimension to the process. You are only going to care about this if either you own the gaff, or there's a sizeable bonus riding on it for you. For most workers at the retail coalface - disproportionately women, disproportionately black - neither condition applies.

I secretly like to be served by a surly old bag who quite patently would rather not be sitting on a checkout of a late evening, and can only just bring herself to mutter the lines she has been scripted to recite by some dickhead junior manager. I know that's what I would be like in her shoes, and after all, alienation in the workplace is the starting point of class consciousness.

The idea that 'the left has historically neglected choice' has been a core mantra of New Labour. But while most people do want the positive benefits of competition, 'choice' as an abstraction doesn't seem all that important. In many cases, competition can be positively wasteful.

Once we move beyond supermarkets, this becomes rather more obvious. It doesn't matter to me to which electricity supplier I make out a direct debit; I just want to say 'let there be light'. Creating an artificial market for what should be a natural monopoly is a bureaucratic waste of time.

Similarly, it is irrelevant to me which train operating company charters trains from which rolling stock company; I just need an affordable and punctual railway service. If I had to have an operation in a hurry, having a choice of which hospital performed it wouldn't be nearly high on my list of priorities as New Labour seems to assume.

Even to get back to shopping, there is also the 'Tescopoly' critique to bear in mind; Supermarket chains are screwing British farmers by paying them less than a quid for a lamb, and are responsible for all the greenhouse gases that go with rerunning the Berlin airlift for the sake of putting Kenyan mangetout on UK dinner tables. Consumers don't get any meaningful choice about any of that, do they?

Prompted by something she'd either read or more likely seen on television, a few days ago my seven-year-old daughter - pictured - asked me what nuclear weapons were. And so I found myself explaining that some countries have huge bombs that can kill every human being and every animal on the planet, and indeed enough of them to do so many times over.

As I was saying those words, the absolute madness of this state of affairs struck me with a clarity I haven't had since I was a Youth CND activist back in the 1970s.

I will never forget the look on the poor girl's face, either; it was a sort of mixture of disbelief and disgust. Then there was the inevitable follow-up questions; but why would anybody want to destroy the world, dad, and what is the point of being able to destroy it more than once?

These things are patently immoral by any ethnical standard and will surely be regarded as futile by a future rational humanity.

When I was younger, I always used to be scornful of middle-aged peackniks who insisted that they were seeking nuclear disarmament for the sake of their children and their children's children. I guess it's only now I am a father that I finally understand.

Three young men in the same age group - pictured left - were yesterday jailed for life for the murder of Garry Newlove, kicked to death outside his Warrington home in August last year after remonstrating with them for damaging his wife’s car. They were drunk and spliffed up at the time of the crime; Teenage Kicks, 2007 remix.

Meanwhile, one of today’s top stories in the British media is the controversy over ‘the Mosquito’, a device that prevents young people congregating in public places by emitting a high-pitched noise audible only to those aged under 25. The Children’s Commissioner for England and human rights group Liberty want it banned.

Violent or otherwise unruly behaviour on the part of youth is a real issue for working class communities, in inner cities and smaller towns alike. It is also one that many on the left – I’ll include myself here – feel instinctively uncertain about tackling.

The difficulty is avoiding the twin dangers of coming on like either a ‘Gee, Officer Krupke' parody or some deranged love child of David Blunkett and Melanie Phillips, manically demanding the return of the birch.

Yes, we can always advance a standard radical sociology critique. Of course these kids – socially formed under Labour governments, let us underline – are both products of the society around us and obviously deeply alienated from it.

Yes, some of the blame for teenage binge drinking surely lies with the directors of the giant booze companies that endlessly seek out new ways to encourage young people to guzzle their products, from ever-tackier sugar-filled alcopops to expensive advertising and promotional giveaway campaigns.

And no, the iniquities of ASBOs and the de facto return of the sus law – to which I was regularly subjected as a council estate teenager myself – don’t seem to have solved the problem, either.

I can’t honestly say that I know the answers. But if socialists ever want to be taken seriously be the people at the sharp end of this one, we need either to put forward some joined-up social policy thinking or risk leaving the field to the demagogues of all parties. After all, it's not kids in Belgravia or the posh bits of Cheshire and Surrey that are doing the dying.

I’m old enough to remember the 1968 controversy when ‘coloured’ cricketer Basil d’Oliveira – fresh from making a superb 158 in the final test against the Aussies – was scandalously dropped from the England team about to tour South Africa, for instance.

Two years later, a younger and better Peter Hain first made a name for himself by leading the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign against the Springboks’ rugby side, while 1980 saw a 64-country boycott of the Moscow Olympics.

More recently, the England and Wales Cricket Board has again been the focus of attention, this time with demands that it refuse to play in Zimbabwe.

Throughout the last 40 years, one repeated refrain has been heard on occasions like these: ‘keep politics out of sport’. It has been notably selectively deployed, though, depending on a commentator’s evaluation of the regime in question.

Old school rightwingers had significantly fewer problems with South African apartheid than Soviet communism, while for the fellow travelling left, the priorities were the other way round.

Now the question is back in the headlines, after Steven Spielberg yesterday quit as ‘artistic adviser’ to this summer’s Beijing Olympics. This is supposed to be a protest against the Chinese government’s complicity with the mass slaughter in Darfur.

What brought that sudden outburst of political principle on, I have no idea. It’s not as if he didn’t know what was happening before he signed the contract.

Meanwhile, eight Nobel peace laureates have banged out a letter to China’s ostensibly Communist government, calling on it to bring its mates in Khartoum into line.

Their cause is, I believe, a right one. There’s a strong case to be made in favour of external military intervention in Sudan, if that it takes to stop a slow motion rerun of Rwanda.

I’m only surprised that the liberal Hollywood and massed ranks of the beneficiaries of dynamite largesse are getting wound up over Africa rather than Tibet. It seems that concern for the Roof of the World is like, so 1999, darlings.

Inevitably, calls are growing for an Olympics boycott. That would amount only to gesture politics, Olympics minister Tessa Jowell pictured - effectively told The Times this morning.

Spare me the moral grandstanding from the woman who paid off her mortgage on the proceeds of the bung her old man copped for money laundering on behalf of Silvio Berlusconi.

As a paid-up business-friendly New Labourite, Ms Jowell cannot be expected to say anything that could effect the profitability of what is now more of an extended commercial sponsorship opportunity than a meaningful sporting event. It's the same logic that leads the government to turn a blind eye to BAE Systems' sustained bribery of the House of Saud.

Incidentally, I presume your generous family friend’s pay TV stations will be among those televising the proceedings, Tessa?

Be that as it may, the main thrust of Ms Jowell’s argument is absolutely right. Boycotting the Olympics would be a gesture. But then, gestures - without any illusions about likely outcomes - are sometimes not just worth making, but mandatory.

UPDATE: Hak Mao puts this one nicely over at Drink Soaked Trots.

So the idea that Prince Phillip ordered the assassination of Princess Diana and Dodi al Fayed (pictured) in a staged car crash in Paris eleven years ago almost makes the monarchy seem like any other dysfunctional family.

I mean, who hasn’t fantasised about bumping off an obnoxious relly at some point? After the way that gold-digging trollop of a former sister-in-law of mine shafted kid brother in their divorce settlement, I can kind of see where Buck House might be coming from on this one.

Yet even after the proceedings at this week’s inquest into the affair, I remain unpersuaded that what occurred resulted from anything more sinister than a driver slamming into the wall of a French underpass, which is easy enough to do when legless. Moral: don’t get in the back of the car if the chauffeur is visibly pissed, stupid.

Of course the British state is more than capable of taking out anybody it thinks is getting in its way; the record in Northern Ireland clearly fully makes this point. But in this instance, what would it have to gain?

Let’s say that Mohamed al Fayed was right and that Di was up the duff to a different bloke from the father of her first set of kids, making her just the kind of serial mum subsisting on state handouts that Caroline Flint would deprive of her council tenancy.

Let’s even grant that the happy couple were about to sell the rights to photographs of their glitzy engagement party to some tawdry celebrity mag or other. And? What difference would that make to the ruling class?

Never mind all that talk about mysterious white Fiat Unos, discrepant accounts of Henri Paul’s drinking habits, the French paparazzo found with his throat cut or even Diana’s ostensible premonitions that The Firm were about to do for her.

Much as it pains my republican heart to say it, in terms of hard evidence actually adduced, this one is right up there with ‘9/11 Truth’ in the Talking Baloney Things stakes.

Reports stress that some of the dead had ‘issues’; they rowed with their parents, split up with their boyfriends and girlfriends, worried about exam results. But then, what teenagers don’t?

There is speculative talk of some sort of suicide cult, with social networking sites taking the place once reserved for backmasked Satanic messages on Judas Priest LPs.

Meanwhile, local residents blame extensive media coverage for making it cool to slip a noose around your neck; that way you get to be on television, even if you don’t make it through the auditions for Big Brother.

But few analyses I have read ask what - if anything - this succession of tragedies tells us about the state of UK society.

Bridgend can plausibly be portrayed as a Legoland version of postwar Britain, undergoing in the most concentrated and accelerated form the deep social upheavals experienced across the country as a whole.

Long a prosperous market town, it was shaken up out of rural torpor when Ford and Sony built plants there in the 1970s, after which vast estates of identikit private homes sprung up on adjoining farmland to accommodate the workforces.

Then came the Tories’ deliberate devastation of the coal industry; unemployment still runs at twice the national average, largely as a result. Welcome to Thatchersville.

All of this brings me to the work of Emile Durkheim. In his book ‘Suicide’, published in 1897, the founding father of modern sociology looked at how apparently individual decisions to take one’s life actually reflect declining social solidarity.

Make people desire what they have no means of getting their hands on, and the result is what Durkheim calls anomie, a condition of normlessness that seems a pretty acute description of the fortnight in Thailand and 42-inch plasma screen television consumer society we have today.

The Bridgend deaths might look pointless; that, perversely, is precisely their point.

PLANS to allow a supercasino to be built in Manchester are to be scrapped, Gordon Brown is set to announce today. Expect multiple pronouncements from the newspaper rent-a-moralist squad, praising the son of the manse for his Presbyterian rectitude in overturning the decision of his meretricious Romanist predecessor.

Then read the small print; even though the flagship project will be binned for the sake of a few favourable headlines, 16 smaller establishments – all at least four times larger than anything currently seen in the UK – are getting the nod.

And why not? There really are vices far, far worse than recreational gambling, which alone of all the viable alternatives does no damage whatsoever to your lungs, liver, nasal membrane or waistline.

By way of declaring an interest, I myself am a small stakes punter. I sometimes have a fiver or tenner on a horse, and show a modest profit most seasons. In addition, I have played poker and backgammon for pecuniary considerations.

I like the intellectual challenge of studying the form or calculating pot odds. I like the adrenalin rush of watching a race when I’ve got money on. I like the winnings when I am lucky enough to pocket any.

And when I lose? I’m paying for my chosen entertainment. You prefer to spend your disposable income visiting National Trust properties or the English National Opera rather than William Hill? Fine by me. Just no lectures either way, please.

All of this brings me to Polly Toynbee’s opinion piece in the Guardian today, which argues against the new casinos being built. She expresses all the familiar concerns about the addictive nature of casino betting, and the propensity of the less well off to gamble away the kids’ food money.

I don’t think her case stacks up. For a start, it not as if there are not plenty of opportunities to gamble already. Walk into any newsagent and you can often find someone charging an electricity key – a sure indicator of poverty – at the same time as purchasing multiple Lucky Dip selections on the National Lottery.

Perhaps we can all agree that this is not a good thing. But the simple libertarian logic that escapes far too many on the left indicates that - short of banning an activity in which a clear majority of British adults choose to participate - little can be done to prevent this happening.

Sorry to break it to you Polly, but it is most unlikely that the wasted cash would otherwise have gone on organic Tuscan sausages and fairtrade extra virgin olive oil, or even invested in a tax-free ISA.

What’s more, on mathematical considerations alone, impoverished gamblers should positively encouraged to place their stakes on the roulette wheel (odds: from 1.111 to 1 upwards) rather than the National Lottery (odds: 56 to 1 for £10, 13,983,816 to 1 for the jackpot).

There’s more. For Ms Toynbee and the paternalists to be consistent, they would have to demand immediate prohibition of alcohol. Booze is many times more addictive even then slots, and puts plenty of people on Skid Row, not to mention six foot under.

Gambling at any level above self-organised office sweepstakes on the Grand National is, of course, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise. The killjoy tendency on the left will make much of that.

But it is a legal industry that provides jobs and pays taxes, and no more or no less abhorrent to socialist principle than any other type of private business. If you really want to tackle casino capitalism, look to the City rather than actual casinos.

Help can and should be provided to problem gamblers, on the same principle that it is offered to problem drinkers. But adults must be treated as adults, free to have fun any which way they choose, provided only that is not demonstrably detrimental to others; if consequences range from a bad hangover to being skint until pay day, that is their lookout.

One other thing. Why the hell is it necessary to couch the casino question as one of ‘regeneration’, in much the same tones are used to justify the Olympics? If an area needs regeneration, spend the money to regenerate it. Any left-leaning economist will provide ample Keynesian justification for doing just that.

Because if there is just one thing that should never, ever be reduced to a game of chance, it is the future of working class communities.

When a man murders a woman - or two women, or five women - simply to gratify some unimaginable sexual urge, what can the left say about his actions and about what should happen to him as a result?

Despite the recent headline-grabbing trials of Levi Bellfield (pictured), Steve Wright and Mark Dixie, I haven't seen the issue tackled anywhere in the radical press or blogosphere.

But cases such as these present obvious questions for both anarchists and the many Marxists who argue that once the state is out of the picture, humanity will be able to organise its affairs largely without crime and thus have no need for mechanisms of punishment.

No crime if there ain't no law, as we used to sing. No cops, no prisons; anybody of instinctively libertarian bent should find such a vision instantly philosophically inspiring. Ask Brian Paddick.

Yet these notions will win few converts unless we can supply answers to the objection that once the state has been smashed or has withered away, there will be no limits on violent killers. OK leftie boy, we know you don't like banging offenders up; got any better ideas, then?

There's a class dimension to the current spate of sex murder convictions, as well. Bellfield was a sometime wheel clamper and bouncer, Wright a former seafarer who drove a forklift truck, and Dixie a pub chef. All white middle-aged men, all members of the class we want to elevate itself into a ruling class. At the very least, it underlines that not all proles are good guys.

As a result of their convictions, Bellfield and Wright will spend the rest of their lives in prison, while Dixie will serve a minimum of 34 years in jail. The judges' decisions were undoubtedly popular.

Most people - not least the families of the victims - understandably feel these men should be punished. Whatever doubts one raises about the value of long-term incarceration, it is impossible not to sympathise with their sentiments.

These guys are off the streets, and that is good. Yet their imprisonment will not have much of a deterrent effect, one of the purposes it is classically supposed to serve. The next sex serial murderer is already out there, jacking off to online snuff movies even as I write.

He will kill and won't even think about the consequences until he's standing in the dock, wheeling out some cowardly and contemptible pack of lies in the long shot hope of acquittal.

Meanwhile, inside Britain's perpetually expanding prison system, I hope Bellfield, Wright and Dixie will be treated with the humanity they denied others, and get the help they need with their psychological problems. Somehow I doubt it.

PS: Joan Smith offers a worthwhile feminist take on all this in the Independent.

But in truth, you could – well, in London, anyway – always buy what was colloquially referred to as ‘a livener’ at any time you wanted or needed one.

A small annual fee would buy you membership of a club that would pull pints between the hours of three and five in the afternoon; nightclubs served until 2am, and many boozers would do a lock in until even later, with the full awareness of the local constabulary. I can remember one place next to a cop shop, where the boys in blue would go for an illegal libation at the end of their shift.

Many hotels would let you pretend to be a guest, provided you were knocking back enough to make it worth the bar staff’s while. There were even places near Smithfield Market that were allowed to sell alcohol at breakfast time, for the convenience of shift workers. Getting a bevvy was, in short, never much of a problem, even if the procedure for doing so was sometimes perforce a tad surreptitious.

Labour’s 2005 decision to bring order to this confused situation and put de facto 24-hour drinking above board was clearly the right one, even though the impact is still being debated.

The more lurid predictions of the morality brigade have not come to fruition. It seems that general youthful yobbery is more prevalent in the centres of some provincial towns, and that’s just the women (pictured). As a review published today concludes, there is a rise in drink-related disorder in some places.

But mass al fresco juvenile copulation and micturition on all available street corners just isn’t happening. Crime and alcohol consumption overall are actually down.

The ostensible target of a ‘continental café culture’ might not have been attained. But I am glad that, on the occasions I get back from a gig in the West End around midnight and still fancy one more locally before turning in, there are bars I can prop up without going through any silly little charades.

If loutish behaviour has become a problem in some places, that is an enforcement issue; this time the government should ignore the Daily Mail editorials – difficult as that is for them – and allow grown ups to decide when they want a drink.

OK, I've never actually read the Douay-Rheims Bible on which I presume Cardinal Keith O'Brien bases his teachings on. But according to the King James Version that I am familar with, Christ cured dozens of people with ailments ranging from unspecified fever, leprosy, menorrhagia and/or haemophilia, withered limbs, dropsy, deafness, blindness and paralysis. What's more - unlike the average NHS general practitioner - he didn't even have a problem with Saturday call-outs.

All of this makes Christ a tough act to follow. But humanity could be on the verge of doing just that. Thanks to stem cell research, for the first time in 2000 years, it may be possible for those with broken spines once more to walk. Soon doctors might be able to inject insulin-producing cells into diabetics, and treat effectively for the first time multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease. I mention MS and MND for a reason; the first killed my mother, the second a friend only a couple of years older than I am.

Yet the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church - basing itself on 13th century Thomist natural law theology - is effectively saying that those in the future with the diseases from which my mum and Richard suffered so much for decades before dying lingering and painful deaths should be denied a possible cure.

As things stand, scientists do not have enough fully human stem cells to research on in order to ensure the necessary medical breakthroughs are achieved. That is why they are asking to be allowed to take animal eggs and inject them with DNA. We are talking cells in a test tube here, nothing more grotesque than that.

Yet there are those ostensibly on the left who believe that the very Catholicism that would forbid this qualitative leap offers some kind of 'moral compass' for Britain today; for me, any moral compass that postulates a morally perfect God - and that is an essential tenet of all three major monotheisms - would dictate strong backing for the Embryo Research Bill.

Surely Catholic MPs of all major parties - not least leading figures in a Labour government who purport to be torn on this question - can see that? For the record, I do favour politicians having the right to abstain on legislation on conscience grounds, not least because in the entirely hypothetical event that I ever hold public office, I expect that I would routingly invoke it.

However, I must agree with one leftwing blogger, who points out that few enough 'pro-life' MPs utilised such an obvious get-out when it came to trooping through the lobby in favour of mass slaughter in Iraq.

Never mind liberation theology. The left should be fully in support of what science writer Ronald Bailey has called liberation biology against both bioconservatives and bioluddites.

As his book points out, the biotech revolution promise even those of us who are healthy an additional 20-40 years on their lifespan. Catholics, evangelicals and other such confident believers in an afterlife are perfectly free to turn down such an opportunity.

As I expect to be a long time dead - and given that I am in a final salary pension scheme - I'd jump at that chance. The sooner the boffins do the business - and the picture illustrates them doing just that - the better.

A 17-year-old youth has appeared in court today, charged with murdering Rhys Jones, who was shot dead last August while walking home from football training in Liverpool. I’m republishing a post I wrote at the time, making some criticisms of the responses that came from leading politicians at the time, and some background on the social conditions in the area.

Maybe it was because he was so damn young. Maybe it was because he happened to be white. Or maybe just that the slaying happened in a slow news month.

Whatever the reason for the publicity, the killing of Rhys Jones - pictured left - has touched a national nerve, and forced the politicians to offer analysis and solutions.

David Cameron – allegedly egged on by new spin doctor Andy Coulson - sought to make political capital from the tragedy with his facile ‘anarchy in the UK’ and ‘broken society’ soundbites.

There was even an attack on magazines that glorified ‘getting wasted’, a pastime with which Mr Cameron is sometimes said not be entirely unfamiliar, and on music firms which ‘grew fat on the profits of exploiting black youth’.

Labour’s Jacqui Smith responded in the manner of home secretaries since time immemorial, promising a specialist national police unit and a new ministerial task force on gun crime.

Whatever the merits of either approach, both seem to want deliberately to avoid the big picture. If society is indeed broken, who or what broke it? And what can fix it?

Liverpool, like all British cities, has always had its share of poverty and it has always had its teenage gangs. What it hasn’t always had the toxic level of permanent long-term unemployment that stems from the deliberate policy of successive governments to deindustrialise the UK economy.

These are points well made by Tony Mulhearn, one of the key leaders of the Militant-dominated Liverpool council in the 1980s:

Work [for residents of Liverpool district Norris Green] was found in the factories that lined the roads leading from the estate. Plessey’s, CAV Lucas, English Electric, bus manufacturers, and the Kirkby industrial estate, three miles up the East Lancs Road, provided work for tens of thousands.

In addition many continued to work as dockers, shipbuilders, merchant seaman and the plethora of trades connected to the thriving maritime industry, as well as finding trades in the construction, printing and the supply industries.

And now? Some 41% of Norris Green's population is out of work, compared to a Liverpool average of 34%. Meanwhile, 45% of Norris Green youth have no educational qualification.
Such jobs as are available are badly paid. Average income in Norris Green is £17,000 compared to a Liverpool average of £22,500, and a national median wage of £23, 244.

A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2000 revealed that in parts of the Croxteth area where Rhys lived, and usually considered more affluent than Norris Green, between 50-70% were in poverty, and unemployment has been consistently around 36% since the 1970s.

Throw cheap drugs and almost as cheap handguns into the mix, and the corpses of 11-year-old underline the result. Is that not enough to give rise to second thoughts from those on the left who advocate full legalisation of drugs and an unrestricted right to bear arms?

And yes, this post is from the keyboard of the same blogger who recently wrote about the growth of working class living standards and the problems posed by the two-thirds/one-third society.

I don't think the piece above contradicts the earlier one. It's just that the excluded one-third constitute a faraway England of which Cameron, Smith and London-based journalists know little.

- witness to the Mark Saunders shoot-out.

Here are the stories of two deceased men who probably briefly lived contemporaneously in London, but who – until their dying moments, anyway - had little in common otherwise.

One was a public school and Oxford educated barrister on £500,000 a year, who resided in a £2m town house in Chelsea, one of the capital’s richest districts. The other was a Glasgow-born painter and decorator who lived in a council flat in rather less salubrious Hackney.

Imagine a second-rate novelist concocting characters purposely to symbolise given social classes, and you get some idea of the CVs Mark Saunders (pictured) and Harry Stanley.

On Tuesday this week, Saunders – described as ‘a binge alcoholic’ and reportedly prone to depression - knocked off work early began drinking heavily; one evening in September 1999, Stanley – just out of hospital after an operation for colon cancer, incidentally – stopped off at a handy boozer and ordered a lemonade.

Saunders got home and ended up having a bit of a domestic with the missus, another high-earning barrister. Neighbours heard raised voices and then the sound of gun shots. At least this was a genuine firearms incident.

By contrast, Stanley hadn’t had a row with anybody and wasn’t in possession of any weapon. He was, however, carrying a table leg which he had just picked up from his brother who had just repaired it; for some reason, another pub client rang the police to warn that an ‘Irishman’ was concealing a gun in a plastic bag.

As Stanley neared home, he was challenged by two armed police officers. As he turned to fact them, they shot him dead from just 15 yards. He didn’t have time to leave any words of farewell to his partner.

A jury at a second inquest in 2004 returned a verdict of unlawful killing, which was overturned in the High Court the following year on grounds of insufficient evidence.

There is still much to be explained about the Saunders case. But what we do know is that after a five-hour standoff - during which he threw into his garden a cardboard box on which he had written ‘I love my wife dearly xxx’ - the decision was reached to take him out.

Was there really no alternative but to kill? Doubtless we will learn more from the Independent Police Complains Commission inquiry and the inquest. But from the facts as reported in the press today, the move seems strangely precipitous. Couldn’t negotiations have gone on longer? Would not the use of non-lethal weapons have been more appropriate?

Realistically, there are occasions on which the police must be armed. There are even circumstances in which it must be right for the police to use those arms. Surely few would argue against shoot to kill where it would prevent terrorist carnage.

But that does not give the Metropolitan Police free reign to take lives on the basis of caprice, whether the victims be ordinary blokes from Hackney, Chelsea yuppies that suddenly go postal, or immigrant electricians trying to catch a tube on the Victoria Line.

It will be interesting to see if Saunders' social standing makes a difference to the way subsequent developments are reported. At this stage, we need some convincing explanations from the Met. And – unlike the Stanley and de Menezes cases – if somebody made a mistake, he or she should carry the can.

Heck, I must have missed that meeting. Let’s just say that if the local vicar has been sneakily slipping a few transitional demands onto the end of his sermons each Sunday, it’s a new one on me. Funny, you never see any paper sellers at the end of the service. Still, anything’s possible in Stoke Newington.

The occasion for such a surprising claim is a magazine article by the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali – pictured - in which the Bishop of Rochester pronounces that the collapse of Christianity is wrecking British society.

Family life has been destroyed! The country is defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum! Unless we turn back to the Christian values of humility, service and sacrifice, all is lost!

Church of England office politics is a closed book to me, of course. But as an ex-Trotskyist, I recognise a down and dirty faction fight when I see one. This seems a rather crude boot aimed between the legs of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. To what end, I’ll leave those in the know to say.

But to carry much weight with the rest of us, the Right Reverend really does need to get his facts straight. For a start, it is difficult to argue that Christianity is ‘marginalised’ in Britain today. After all, if it were, no one would give a toss about Nazir-Ali’s opinions on anything in particular.

Indeed, the bishop’s own denomination of choice - the Church of England - enjoys all the prerogatives of an established state religion. Nazir-Ali is one of 26 of Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords as so-called Lords Spiritual.

No other religion - or even any other denomination within Christianity - benefits from such anachronistic privilege. Surely it will have occurred to him to ask why he is an unelected legislator? It’s not a bad little perk simply for holding down a job with a supposedly marginalised entity.

Church of England schools, and education establishments of other faiths, enjoy huge subsidies from the state, effectively enabling them to propagate their doctrine at the expense of taxpayers, atheists and agnostics included. Anybody got any stats for the extent of the handout?

And even if the outlook were as Nazir-Ali describes, what does he expect anyone else to do about it? Religions – like political parties – have to secure their own support base in the marketplace for ideas.

It is not the role of a democratic government to manipulate the intellectual climate in the interests of any given faith. The state should limit itself to holding the ring. Christians should favour the separation of church and state, an arrangement that is fair to all religions and none; after all, contrast the state of Christianity in the US, where it is implemented, with the state of Christianity in Britain, where it is not.

Nazir-Ali is also wrong on the big picture. The authority of all organised religions is in longstanding decline. If it is the case that a minority of youth of Muslim extraction are moving towards radical forms of Islam, it is equally true that the majority are only nominally observant. Let’s put it like this; I live in a predominantly Muslim area, and there are no shortage of Turkish bars that will serve you a bevvy.

Before I get written off as an ‘atheist fundamentalist’, let me stress how strongly I believe in freedom of religion, including the right to proselytise. But judging by his intemperate and implicitly authoritarian outburst, I suspect that if Nazir-Ali had his way, he would not be nearly so tolerant of the beliefs of others.

UPDATE: Bishop N-A does seem to have explicitly aligned himself with the Conservative hard right. Details in rather a good post here.

That did not stop us donning our best Brutus shirts, splashing on gallons of Brut 33, and heading into licensed premises and demanding to be served Watney’s Special Bitter, a concoction so foul and chemical-laden that production ceased years ago.

The stuff cost 22p a pint at Wellingborough Co-op Club, which meant I could get rat-arsed for a quid. Cigarettes could be had at 10p for ten from street-based vending machines.

As I was pulling down a massive £3.50 a week from my pre-school butcher’s round, I was thus ensured a full beer and fags-based social life, just like a grown-up. If only I could have found a girlfriend, I would have been well happy.

Looking back, it is remarkable how seldom we were refused alcohol. Eight or nine times out of ten, the booze would be handed over without any problems. Occasionally the bar staff would ask us if we were eighteen. ‘Yes, of course’, we squeaked in adolescent unison, and tried not to give the game away by blushing.

What the point of that exercise was, I cannot say. Maybe having asked the question offered some degree of legal protection, but I suspect our inquisitors were mostly having a laugh.

Inevitably, bad things happened in the years in which I learned to drink. More than once, the streets of a fine Northamptonshire town were washed with regurgitated WSB. And – I only admit this given the existence of the statute of limitations – I was responsible for a certain percentage of the local graffiti problem.

As for that evening in the summer of ’76 featuring Sally Marshall and a half-bottle of voddy in the local park, I’m not even going to go there on a public blog.

Remembering all this, I am struck by the spate of recent news stories centred on young people and alcohol abuse, ranging from the rowdy scenes at Saturday night’s tube booze party to today’s announcement that the government is to produce guidelines for parents as to how much their children should be drinking.

What difference this particular New Labour brainwave will make, I haven’t a clue; no seventies teenager asked their mum’s permission before getting pissed, and neither will any teenager today.

Mobs of rowdy drunken youth are not a pleasant sight, as anybody returning from a civilised evening out on the tube on Saturday doubtless discovered. Such behaviour should rightly be discouraged; on balance, I don't have particular problems with the Boris booze ban - even on libertarian principle - although the RMT union is right to argue that it should have been consulted.

But a new issue this one is not. Let’s keep a sense of proportion on this one; the kids of today will grow out of this kind of stuff, just like the rest of us did.

Supporters of abortion rights – and let me make it clear from the outset that I am a supporter of abortion rights – would have had no problem with a termination even hours before delivery, had the handicap been detected. As early as possible, as late as necessary, after all.

But let’s tease out the logic of that position, in the way that Peter Singer – probably the best-known living moral philosopher, and also a supporter of abortion rights – does in his book Practical Ethics.

If it is acceptable to abort a full-term foetus, Singer asks, why is it inadmissible to practice infanticide against newborn children who are severely handicapped? Or to take the logic one step further still, what is wrong in principle with killing a perfectly healthy baby?

Feminists often present abortion as being entirely unproblematic morally. It isn’t; there are genuine ethical considerations involved at any point after a foetus become potential viable, and it is disingenuous to duck this point.

So I can understand why several leading figures on the left are ambiguous on the question. They are, as feminist detractors frequently point out, usually male. This has generated huge controversy on the hard left of late, following Tory MP Nadine Dorries’ recent attempt to reduce the time limit for legal terminations in this country.

Respect MP George Galloway – on record as being completely against abortion, I believe – abstained after consultations with pro-choice party activists. A number of MPs signed up with the Labour Representation Committee actually backed the proposal, to subsequent protests from the LRC-affiliated Left Women’s Network.

Incidentally, Dorries – pictured - is likely to try again after the Cameron landslide of 2010, and seems likely to succeed. As an article in the Daily Telegraph reports today, nine out of ten Tory parliamentary candidates back her position.

Any final position can only come down on one side after taking all arguments into consideration and arrive at some sort of compromise, as Singer does himself. Ultimately, the life and wellbeing of a self-conscious and rational mother has to count for more than the life and wellbeing of a foetus that is neither.

For me, the debate comes down to a choice between the clinic and coathanger. The rich will always be able to find a private doctor to sort things out for them; it is working class women that will be forced to resort to the backstreet abortionist, at considerable risk to their own lives.

If one British woman in four – probably more – is going to have an abortion at some point in her life, it is essential to ensure that the procedure is both legal and safe. That much is non-negotiable. But with abortion rights likely to face further salami-slicing in the years to come, this is a case that the left actually will actually have to sell, because the public doesn’t take it for granted.

Britain is in the grip of [insert scare story X, preferably utilising words like ‘crisis’ or ‘epidemic’]; one of the things they teach you at journo school is to avoid clichés like the plague, but sadly young hacks today so often fail to adhere to this basic tenet.

This is particularly the case at the Daily Mail, which sometimes reads like the sub-editors have been instructed to insert the phrase into reporters’ copy more or less at random. In the last month alone, the paper has run stories premised on the propositions that ‘Britain is in the grip of an economic crisis’, ‘Britain is in the grip of a knife-crime epidemic’ and ‘Britain is in the grip of a wave of militancy in the public sector’. The latter claim provided the opening sentence for Monday’s front page splash.

The Daily Telegraph has it that ‘Britain is in the grip of a major house price slump’. For the News of the World, ‘Britain is in the grip of a meltdown of public disorder.’ Logically, wouldn’t a ‘meltdown of public disorder’ lead to more order, and therefore be a good thing?

Over at The Sun, we are told that ‘Britain is in the grip of Sex and the City fever’, while bizarrely, the Yorkshire Post has it that ‘Britain is in the grip of a fig-roll crisis’. What the grounds for that contention are, I could not rightly say.

Google the term and you will finds that Britain is in the grip of a mumps epidemic, a cycling revolution, an escalating road rage crisis, a wi-fi revolution, rampant Islamophobia, a gay mafia, an alcohol crisis, an epidemic of cannabis-induced psychosis, a teen sex crisis, and an epidemic of rudeness and anti-social behaviour.

What, all at once? It’s a wonder that any of us find the courage to venture beyond our front door of a morning, and make it into work without being knifed by a spliffed-up infectious disease-ridden drunken gay Islamophobe, tipped over the edge by a lethal combination of other people’s poor driving skills, negative equity and a general paucity of fig roll availability. Probably a public sector trade unionist, as well. Worst kind, that lot.

Look, I’m a hack by trade myself, and I realise that the temptation to sex up non-stories on slow news days sometimes proves overwhelming to the average newsdesk. Check out the statistics and often the hyperbole is easily exposed.

But there is a political problem with the recurring tendency to leave Britain in the grip of crisis X and/or epidemic Y. It helps to generate a climate that facilitates the passage of legislation deleterious to civil liberty.

My real concern is that Britain is the grip of an authoritarian government that is seeking to introduce 42-day internment without trial, and is likely to get away with it tonight. Now that really is something to be scared about.

HE'S ON £110,000 a week, so he can easily afford to treat his shell suited mates to stag jaunts in Ibiza, at least when not knocking off fiftysomething hookers in Merseyside massage parlours.

She’s a shopaholic airhead WAG with a sideline in best-selling body workout videos and writing witless columns for celeb mags, and we can’t have brickie’s daughters from Croxteth doing stuff like that, can we now?

Wayne Mark Rooney and Coleen Mary McLoughlin were joined together in holy matrimony on the Italian Riviera yesterday, with the nuptials securing extensive coverage in tabloid and broadsheet alike. Perhaps the press was hoping for a re-run of Coleen’s 18th birthday party four years ago, which culminated in a punch up between the two families.

One can’t help being struck by how much coverage comprised of rather ugly middle class sneering, marked out by sheer determination to paint all those involved as real life extras from a Goldie Lookin Chain video.

Here, for instance, are the words of Natalie Clarke – a woman of whose social origins I know nothing, but suspect I can pretty easily guess – in the Daily Mail:

[T]he brutal truth is that Coleen has very little style and never will have, no matter how many zeros on the price tag of the frocks you put her in. But then, at the risk of being sour, if this wedding circus tells us anything at all about Britain, it's that we're a nation caught up in the worship of mediocrity. And vulgarity, as symbolised by the crass yacht they've hired, complete with its umpteen suites and hair salon.

Oooh, spot the little green-eyed monster, Natalie. If it really was all too, too tacky for you, Ms Clarke, ask yourself this; what were you doing in Portofino anyway, and why is your newspaper devoting one-third of its front page this morning to a photo of the bride, and the entirety of page eleven to covering the event?

Every last little detail is recorded in print in the newspaper of choice for the class-conscious petit bourgeoisie, right down to the live butterflies, the £200,000 wedding dress and the Christian Louboutin shoes. Hey, if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect a little envy at work here.

What really seems to get the Daily Mail’s goat is that a working class couple should have the kind of money that enables them to spend £5m on a wedding do. Now, I am not a sports fan, and there are issues around footballers’ salaries.

But given that the publication concerned regularly justifies the astronomical wedges and bonuses paid to editor Paul Dacre and other executives with the line that talent finds its own price in a free market, why should it have a problem about that?

It may be that Rooney is no better than he ought to be. But at least he earned his money by his own efforts, unlike Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a billionaire who inherited a chain of newspapers from daddy.

And if Coleen is really a talentless bimbo coasting on the back of being his missus, that doesn’t make her different in principle from Diana Spencer or any other dim rich chick with two and half GCSEs and an NVQ who bags a wealthy hubby.

Anyone would think Ms Clarke had never been to a working class reception wedding before. Come to mention it, she almost certainly hasn’t. Well, given the outlay, the Rooneys' bash is bound to have been a step up from a room over a pub with £200 behind the bar, but I bet it was there in boisterous spirit.

I truly hope that the girls started dancing round their handbags after a couple of Flaming Sambucas, their spotty underage cousins threw up in the corner following one Stella too many, and at least one dodgy uncle got his face slapped for getting fresh with a bridesmaid half his age. Some working class traditions have to be upheld at all costs.

MICHAEL Dosunmu – a 15-year-old church-going schoolboy – was sound asleep in a bedroom at his family home in Peckham when two young men he had almost certainly never met burst in, aimed a submachine gun at his heart, and pulled the trigger.

Mohammed Sannoh and Abdi Omar Noor have today been found guilty of this February 2007 murder, even though they denied the charges. Just 19 and 22 respectively, they will get life sentences, and that decision will enjoy widespread support.

The Old Bailey heard that the two men had mistaken Michael for his older brother Hakeem, whom they had decided to execute in revenge for a gang-related knife killing three days earlier. But their intended target was out at a club that night, dealing drugs. So the poor little kid got wasted instead, entirely by mistake. Just one of those things, right?

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The court heard that when Sannoh was arrested he told officers: "I don't care about the murder. **** the murder. I don't care what happened to that boy."

Noor fled to Ipswich before drunkenly confessing to a fellow Somalian, who said he laughed when he saw a report of the killing on the BBC News and said "my boy did that".

This was a dreadful crime by any standards, an act of wicked criminality so shocking that it automatically invites a reactionary response. That makes it exactly the kind of case the left finds difficult to address within its traditional frame of reference.

Peckham is one of the most deprived areas in all of Britain. Social exclusion – to use the currently fashionable euphemism – and racism both blight the area. But collectively they constitute neither sufficient explanation nor sufficient exculpation.

Of course the left is correct to call for a determined assault on inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, rather than further erosion of civil liberties. Of course money needs to be spent on education, health and drug rehabilitation rather than lining the pockets of private prison contractors.

But at the same time, it is important to take on board that Sannoh and Noor did have other options than to do what they did. No social factors predetermine the actions of individuals to that extent.

When teenagers are routinely slain in the name of ‘respect’, it is impossible lightly to dismiss aspects of the conservative critique, which holds that the problem of black-on-black violence is to a significant degree culturally generated.

But if the right’s diagnosis is partially correct, the wrong prescription follows. Banging up Sannoh and Noor for a long, long time isn’t going to solve anything either. Maybe they are capable of rehabilitation, maybe not. If they really are mindless irredeemable thugs - and they do sound like nasty pieces of work - the problem is simply warehoused.

Meanwhile, even as the thoughtful left and the thoughtful right both struggle to develop adequate analysis and to come up with workable solutions, ordinary working class people in ordinary working class areas become ever more insistent that politicians ‘get tough on law and order’.

That is unsurprising, given that they are the people most directly impacted by the kind of crimes that somehow never seem to happen in Richmond or Chelsea.

The existence of such sentiment on a mass scale leaves the law and order agenda open to manipulation by authoritarian politicians. New Labour has sought to erode the right to trial by jury, allow hearsay evidence, and scrap the double jeopardy rule. Hang‘em and flog ‘em Tories can only but approve.

What, you don’t want to get tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime? Are you a social worker or something? Its 1960s-style middle-class bleeding heart liberal wusses like you that let down hard-working families that play by the rules.

It is vital that Britain avoids the purchase of a one-way ticket to Blunkettville via Michael Howard Junction. But if we are to succeed in not going there, we had better come up with some ideas that can persuade the electorate otherwise.

There is an equal age of consent and gay marriage exists in all but name, and rightly so. The Tories’ vindictive and pointless Section 28 legislation has been scrapped, while discrimination against gays in housing and employment has been criminalised. No government could have done more.

All of this stands in refreshing contrast with New Labour’s shameful readiness to pander to backward sentiment on asylum seekers or benefits for single parents, for instance. Just for once, it is happy to hold opinions in advance of those of society in general.

But if you doubt that anti-gay prejudice still exists, consider the case of my old friend Iain Dale, a strong candidate in one of the Tories’ most winnable seats at the last general election, who makes no secret of being a ‘confirmed bachelor’ in the great Ted Heath tradition. The Lib Dem majority went up from 483 to 10,000-plus. For goodness sake, find the guy a more open-minded urban constituency next time round.

Then look at the press coverage of the recent mock wedding ceremony – how camp can you get? – involving two Church of England priests and officiated by a third. Britain’s established church and its extended franchise is tearing itself apart on this question.

Indeed, the Anglican Communion looks like it is about to undergo its own equivalent of 1953 split in the Fourth International, with deviationism of the homosexual rather than the pabloite variety the issue at stake. Given that it has 77m million members rather than just a few thousand, the consequences stand to be a great deal more severe.

The Daily Telegraph has even obtained a copy of the oppositionist platform, an 89-page internal document titled The Way, the Truth and the Life, which reportedly socks it to the liquidationists. Details here.

I guess that logically I have to be neutral on this one. Yet I recall being against Tory legislation – never repealed by New Labour - that forces trade unions to accept any member that wants to join, without being able to bind them to observe strike votes, on the simple premise that organisations in civil society should be free to write their own rulebooks. I would exempt most denominations from any requirement to conduct services of blessing for civil partnerships on straightforward libertarian grounds.

The anomaly here is that the Church of England, being integrated into the state, is not properly part of civil society. But hey, this is an inter-Anglican faction fight. I’m sure they can sort it out among themselves.

Ironically, while all this is being thrashed out, Little Britain’s ‘only gay in the village’ star Matt Lucas is in the process splitting up with his civil partner Kevin McGee - that's the couple in the picture - after only 18 months. Just like a hetero break-up, McGee is entitled to a financial settlement and can expect to be awarded a fair chunk of Lucas’s £15m fortune. And how boringly like normal coupledom is that?

Gay marriage and gay divorce underline the spread of conservatism – not radicalism – within the gay community. While hardline Anglicans and the electorate of Norfolk North fear the homosexualisation of society, what we are seeing instead is the socialisation of homosexuality.

That much must have been obvious to onlookers who saw him bleeding profusely from multiple kitchen knife wounds in a park in Thornton Heath in broad daylight on Thursday, crying for his mum and pleading that he didn’t want to die.

He did die, making him the 18th teenager to meet a violent end in London this year. And – let’s not dodge the reality in the name of misguided political correctness – the majority of both victims and perpetrators in these cases are black.

The tabloids will demand that the politicians ‘do something’, and so the politicians will oblige with ‘knife summits’ and ‘crackdowns’ that will garner some favourable coverage but achieve little on the ground.

But this problem goes deeper than anything that can be encapsulated in an easy headline. The processes involved are social, and ultimately the answers have to be social, too.

These killings are not happening in Hampstead or the leafier bits of RBKC, but rather in some of the most deprived parts of the capital. Social exclusion – to use the currently fashionable euphemism – and racism are a large part of the explanation, to be sure.

The left must continue to make its longstanding case for a determined assault on inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, and against further erosion of civil liberties.

But when children as young as nine or 10 freely talk of ‘shanking’ each other over any kind of ‘beef’, is that the limit of what we should be saying?

Some – predominantly those on the right - speak of a crisis of masculine identity in the black community, with single motherhood so pervasive that few young men have any kind of stabilising relationship with their father.

That idea is obviously open to all sorts of moralistic interpretations, centred on glorification on the standard nuclear family as the only acceptable child-rearing arrangement. But it isn't necessary to buy in to the spurious corollary to accept the underlying point.

Use of drugs far more potent than those available in my teenage years, by children at an age when only the more advanced of my contemporaries experimented with alcohol and the odd sneaky fag, is also reportedly commonplace.

The most popular musical subcultures among young black kids promote ‘thug life’, in which the most important thing is to get rich or die tryin’, all the time bossing the hoes and the bitches around. Boom bye-bye in a batty boy's head, like the song says.

But the frightening thought occurs to me that it is becoming cool to kill, in much the way it is cool to top yourself in Bridgend. For a layer of inner city youth, it may no longer be enough to carry a blade; ‘respect’ will only accrue to those prepared to 'waste' somebody to demonstrate their adolescent macho bravado. And ‘waste’ is exactly the right word for deaths like the one met by young Shakilus Townsend.

Picture credit: News of the World

UPDATE: A number of young people have commented on this post, presumably after finding this blog by googling for Shakilus's name. Listen, I really am interested in what those closest to the situation have got to say about it. So ... if this describes you, please tell me how you see things.

But following on from a comment in the Shakilus Townsend thread below, I am rather taken with a possible parallel between 50 Cent (pictured) and Paul Dacre, namely the role they wittingly or otherwise play in popularising 'knife culture'. Are these two evil men mounting a pincer movement or something?

Fiddy, of course, routinely glorifies violence for commercial reasons, because that's what sells records. For his part, Dacre regularly ramps up the reportage of the latest moral panic, becauses that's what sells newspapers.

And as a commenter using the name Asquith points out:

I think the media's relentless focus on 'knife crime' is having a terrible effect, because it sends a message that carrying knives is cool and street and will piss off the Daily Mail, your parents, teachers, and twats of that variety. A vicious circle.

This point inevitably puts me in mind of my own youth, especially the media furore that surrounded a Sex Pistols' interview on London Weekend Television back in 1976. Several of the band used four-letter words.

The resultant outrage was spectacular. Before the incident, the Pistols - yet to release their first single - were unknown to those who did not read New Musical Express. Thanks to front page coverage across the tabloid press - 'Must we throw this filth at our pop kids?', the Daily Mirror famously wondered - they became the most controversial group in the country. The more the press urged teenagers to hate them, the deeper a generation fell in love.

Of course, both rappers and newspaper bosses will insist that they reflect social conditions and do not create them. Moreover, both popular song and popular journalism have treated crime as suitable subject matter for centuries, so there are traditions at stake.

As an ex-punk, I would never join the array of politicians - from Tipper Gore to David Cameron - that argue for the censorship of music deliberately designed to shock parents. Such a step would only be counterproductive, anyway.

But just maybe one practical means of defusing some of the tension that really exists on the capital's streets right now would be to keep the reporting straightforward and the four page spreads to a minimum.

Among the allegations made by this newspaper in recent years are claims that Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten pays rent boys to poo in his mouth and that Tommy Sheridan - former Scottish Socialist Party leader – is a habitué of swingers’ clubs. The latter contention is shortly to be tested in a perjury trial.

Now formula one boss Max Mosley – son of British wannabe Führer Sir Oswald, of course - is contesting the details of a story that he indulged in a sado-masochistic ‘sick Nazi orgy’ with five German hookers.

Somehow, the News of the World reported those details like they were they were a bad thing. That naughty, naughty boy Maxie – take that, you worm! - does not deny the article’s main thrust. What he objects to is the suggestion that he was acting out some kind of concentration camp fantasy.

Having sat in on trials at the Royal Courts of Justice during my journalistic career, I have to admit that this one does sound rather more engaging than standard RCJ fare. According to one middle market tabloid:

At one stage, the courtroom was filled with the sounds of slapping and thwacking as an audio tape featuring a woman speaking German was played to the judge.

Too much information or what? I must confess that I do draw momentary prurient amusement from revelations such as these, in much the same childish way I delight in hearing occasional rumours of a one-night stand between two workmates over the Friday after work beer.

But to be grown up about it, it is none of my business how Oaten, Sheridan or Mosley (pictured) get their jollies as consenting adults in private. Even if it is true that the offspring of a prominent fascist gets his rock off by playing commandant of Auschwitz – and it is Mosley’s denial of this intuitively repulsive idea that forms the basis of his libel action – this should rightly be a matter between him, his missus and the working girls.

Yet the Mosley case does raise a number of wider issues. Briefly put, is it possible to combine support for the right to pay chicks to dress up in Luftwaffe uniforms with maximum defence of press freedom?

Firstly, should we allow newspapers to publish this sort of stuff anyway? I guess the answer has to be yes. This case is being brought under article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. If it succeeds - and media lawyers think it is likely to suceed - it will add to a growing body of case law that could ultimately stifle serious investigative journalism.

Whether or not a politician is a keen amateur swordsman is neither here nor there. But sexual shenanigans are sometimes properly a matter of undeniable public interest. If it comes to light that BAE procures prostitutes for its Saudi clients, or City Hall staffers have affairs with recipients of public money, than that should rightly be public knowledge. In the interests of getting the balance right, it is probably best to err on the side of permitting kiss 'n' tell.

Additionally, the NotW’s case will reportedly centre round the point that whipping somebody until they bleed constitutes the criminal offence of wounding, whether or not the victim consents and/or paid for their pains.

This brings to mind the Operation Spanner case of 1987, which resulted in 16 gay men being found guilty of assault occasioning actual body harm for engaging in entirely consensual sexual activity. From a civil libertarian standpoint, this is clearly a nonsense.

Whether or not he wins or loses the case, there is one thing for which Mr Mosley deserves credit, and that is the way that he has not hidden the fact that, yes, he hired the hookers. Instead of denying such conduct, he is making a proper appeal to the maturity of the British public on these issues, and may well be rewarded for that. That should serve as a lesson to some on the left.

And let’s admit there is an issue here; although a welter of sometimes contradictory statistics makes it difficult to say definitively whether things are getting worse or better out on the streets, there is agreement that around 14,000 people need treatment for knife injuries in NHS hospitals each year.

Given a UK population of about 60,000,000, it seems that your chance of getting stabbed works out at about one in 4,286 in any 12-month period.

That is unacceptably high, especially as knife attacks are concentrated both geographically and by age group. They will be more common by a sizeable factor in the poorer parts of inner London and deindustrialised areas of the north than they are in the nicer areas of the Home Counties, especially for teenagers.

On the other hand, even the above figures do not tell the whole story. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of how many such woundings result from domestic violence rather than street assault.

The question is, what should be done? Even scanning the offerings of the rent-a-quote criminologists in the tabloids today, it is difficult to detect a consensus. I’m not saying I know what the answer is, but I do have some suggestions as to what the answer isn’t.

Tory leader David Cameron has called for a ‘presumption of jail’ for anybody found carrying a knife, which basically translates to a demand for automatic prison sentences, albeit with wriggle room.

I guess that’s what the public wants to hear right now, so it is unsurprising to here the leader of the opposition talk tough. But the facts basically fail to support the Tory catchphrase assumption that ‘prison works’.

Last time I saw the stats, some 57% of male ex-prisoners were reconvicted within two years, and 68% within four. Nine out of ten of teenagers who served time in youth custody centres were reconvicted within two years. The reality is that prison actually encourages crime.

Jacqui Smith’s idea of forcing those found carrying a knife to attend hospital A&E departments is at least a piece of lateral thinking. But a moment’s reflection shows that it is utterly unworkable. Getting gawped at by a bunch of doped up hoodies is the last thing to which anybody still in a state of shock after being mugged would want to be subjected.

Yet in principle, forcing young offenders - and potential young offenders - to face up to the realities of knife crime has to be the beginning of wisdom. It is very rarely that this blog calls for cross-party consensus that eschews populism in the name of joined-up social policy thinking that will result in a long-term strategy. But if this problem doesn’t justify that stance, nothing does.

Then consider the prospect of slowly bleeding to death after getting run over by a chain store-suited ad salesman closing a deal over the mobile from behind the wheel of the company car after a three bottle lunch. Would it matter to you too much either way?

So why is advocacy of a bang ‘em up policy for killers in the first category practically mandatory right now, while populist commentators feign horror at the thought of tougher sentences for causing death by dangerous driving?

As a non-driver, I have always been puzzled as to why petrolheads act on the operational understanding that the law of the land somehow doesn’t apply to them. Who do they think they are, BAE Systems or something?

Let’s face it, most motorists are not just criminals but serial offenders. They regularly lapse into illegality, feeling free to text the missus while driving, mistake the A10 for an autobahn without speed limits, and generally ignore such inconveniences parking restrictions.

To cap it all, a minority of drivers don’t seem to see any problem with driving after knocking back a few bevvies; for instance, a reported 74% of 15-29 year olds think its OK to drive after two pints.

So word that the Sentencing Guidelines Council is recommending that motorists who kill on the roads by driving dangerously or under the influence of alcohol or drugs should be jailed for at least seven years is actually encouraging. This is one case where community service or a driving ban just is not enough.

The main difference is that when I was growing up, boys only ever wore sportswear when they were actually doing sports, and that was an activity I consciously avoided whenever possible.

But until this week, I have never thought twice about using the new C word in speech. Indeed, I have even applied it to myself. Only with the postmodern irony that befits a well-paid journalist, of course.

The point is that this is a neologism that has entered everyday British English in recent years, and seems to describe an identifiable social type. And if I don't have a problem with it, why should anyone else?

Well, Tom Hampson - editorial director of the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society – does. Writing in the think tank’s quarterly magazine, he opines:

Some uses of some words fall below the threshold of acceptability and some are definitely above it.

It is sneering and patronising and - perhaps most dangerous - it is distancing, turning the 'chav' into the kind of feral beast that exists only in tabloid headlines.

In many cases, Hampson’s points are beyond dispute. Take midmarket tabloids, for instance. Daily Mail subeditors are much like Humpty Dumpty, in that when they use a word, it means exactly what they choose it to mean.

And in Dacrespeak, the designation ‘chav’ is always and exclusively one of triple-distilled petit bourgeois contempt, deliberately deploying a stereotype to display savage distain for the working class as a whole.

That’s why Stephen Glover’s contention that the word is essentially free of class connotation – printed in that very newspaper this morning – is particularly disingenuous.

Glover weakly attempts to argue that Prince Harry has ‘more than a touch of chav about him’ or that Chelsy Davy is ‘authentically chav’. But Hooray Henry behaviour is hardly the imagery the word conjures up. Readers are expressly expected to think of Vicky Pollard - pictured - and then praise the Lord for their social superiority.

Mind you, I do have more time for his suggestion that the left should devote its efforts not towards inculcating new linguistic taboos but instead take up the real issues raised by the persistence of ingrained poverty in places like Glasgow East, even if he formulates it in a reactionary way.

As a general rule, socialists should use language carefully and always bear its intended audience in mind. Pieces of a journalistic nature will inevitably require a vocabulary different from an article in a heavyweight theoretical magazine. Alas, some far left groups often don’t get this fairly basic point.

Sometimes things can get a little bit too precious for my liking. Some blogs debar commenters for using mental health-related terminology as insults. But can it really be offensive to brand this or that government policy ‘mad’, for instance? Not by the standards of quotidian banter where I work, that’s for sure.

Everything depends on context. Take ‘nigger’, for example. Today considered an open and shut case of racist abuse, it was still commonly heard as recently as the 1970s.

Thankfully, it isn’t any more, although it may still legitimately crop up in ironic usages, especially when parodying the attitudes of the right. John Lennon wrote lyrics like ‘woman is the nigger of the world’ to make a forcible political point, and it would be difficult not to get the message.

Interestingly, I absorbed enough 1970s feminism to find ‘cunt’ unacceptable as an insult to this day. But it seems to have been widely rehabilitated.

To my mind, Hampson’s point should be noted in as far as it is valid. Yet I don’t feel he has established the case for a blanket ban. As a father, I do tick off Daddy’s Little Princesses when I hear them using rude words. But shouldn’t the left treat each other as grown ups?

Over half the UK population – 53%, according to recent stats – is now classified as either overweight or obese, putting them at increased risk of a range of health problems, from diabetes and cancer to heart attack and strokes.

But does either the health secretary or the leader of the opposition have any business addressing the nation’s battle collective slimming efforts, or indeed the lack thereof?

True, the Magna Carta did not expressly specify that freeborn Englishmen have the right to clog their arteries by overdosing on Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey until their aorta explodes, but this is supposed to be an open society.

Should the Nanny State even try to stop us eating all the pies – and all the large doners with everything, mate, and all the double whoppers with additive-laden vaguely cheese-ish crap, come to that - if that is what we want to do?

Well, obesity is clearly a legitimate public policy issue, if only because of the cost to the public purse. You can hear arguments – mainly from the right - is that the consequences of being overweight, drinking too much booze, smoking tobacco and abusing drugs are ‘lifestyle ailments’ and not truly deserving of treatment at NHS expense.

Re-reading the recent Cameroon speech, it is not fanciful to imagine that this sentiment informs Tory thinking. Consider this piece in the Daily Telegraph today:

Figures showed more than than 1.23m prescriptions were written for obesity drugs last year at a cost of £51.83m, a rise of 8.5 per cent on the amount spent in 2006.

And drug treatments used to combat alcohol addiction, drug misuse and to help people quit smoking also rose to more than 5.7m prescriptions at a cost of £111.2m last year.

On top of this millions of people are receiving medicines to control cholesterol levels and high blood pressure which can also be helped to a certain extent by exercise and diet.

Let’s not even go there. On this logic, it would be consistent to maintain that playing Rugby or going mountaineering are lifestyle choices as well, and that the NHS should not patch up those who come a cropper as a result.

Nor is there much point in arguing this one out on a cost-benefit analysis. Tax revenue from tobacco benefits the UK Treasury by £10bn a year, so smokers alone pay for the entire NHS shopping list above ten times over.

Likewise, moralism seems beside the point. As Johnson rightly pointed out, browbeating people for the way they live is historically proven to be ineffectual. Simply pointing at people and chanting ‘you fat bastard!’ will not cause them to hit the gym.

But it is right that the public is provided with the information – and the encouragement – to make the sensible choice. It isn’t logical for the NHS to be spending hundreds of millions of pounds on problems that are far better prevented than cured.

New Labour needs not only to be tough on obesity but tough on the causes of obesity, and that means tackling the huge industries that push unhealthy food. Johnson has arm-twisted the likes of Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, Mars and Nestle into stumping up more than £200m for a propaganda campaign ahead of the London 2012 Olympics.

This is a good move in as far as it goes, but it clearly won’t be enough to tackle the problem. If anybody reading this is a trained nutritionist, I’d be interested to hear what they have to say. In the meantime, shouldn’t we act immediately to get the most horrendous nasties out of food served up for mass consumption?

For instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger – a conservative Republican, remember – has just outlawed trans fats in California. Now that the business bribes have dried up anyway, why can’t New Labour force the National Association of Junk Food Manufacturers to do the same over here?

A new dossier compiled by the Conservatives details the horrifying extent of rat, mice, cockroach, flea, bed bug, silverfish and maggot infestation in Britain’s hospitals. On average, every NHS trust in the country needs to call in the pest controllers once a fortnight.

Many newspapers picked up on the findings this morning, reporting them in suitably outraged terms. Rightly so, because this situation is an outrage; as the party that founded the NHS, Labour should be ashamed of itself for allowing such conditions to prevail.

But it remains rather more pertinent to ask how this state of affairs came about, and what can be done to reverse it. At this point, shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley will – if he has any sense – keep his trap firmly shut.

When the Daily Mail runs the block caps splash headline ‘OUR FILTHY HOSPITALS’, what it doesn’t tell readers is that serious problems with NHS hygiene only started after Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to privatise hospital cleaning services.

The ‘let the market rip’ squad assured us that such outsourcing would free up resources, enabling hospitals to get on with their core business of treating patients.

But they didn’t stress the small print, which specified that contracts must automatically go to the lowest bidder, whether they could guarantee high standards of cleanliness or not. And given the labour-intensive nature of cleaning services, the only way meaningfully to reduce costs was to staff numbers, wage levels and cleaning frequencies.

What a masterstroke. Costs were indeed reduced. The snag is, hospitals became dirtier than ever before. Even where contracts stayed in house, the internal bid was subject to the same pressures – sorry, I mean ‘market disciplines’ – as the private sector bids. The result was a race to the bottom that pushed standards down all round.

Understandably, many loyal cleaning staff upped and outed for jobs that - while still poorly paid – at least paid more than scrubbing the floors of A&E. On some estimates, Britain now has only half the number of hospital cleaners it had 20 years ago. Yet, with higher numbers of patients being treated every year, we probably need more than we did before.

The conclusion is obvious; the renationalisation of NHS cleaning – with employees guaranteed decent terms and conditions and union representation if they want it – underlines just how popular some moves to extend public ownership could prove.

OK, full disclosure; I have been plastered in Paris and seriously stoned in Switzerland. I even once got laid in Leningrad, even if the woman in question was from Loughborough.

Back in the 1980s, I regularly visited Amsterdam with the express intention of getting ripped on cheap hallucinogenics. And yes, in those days I would always take a 12 pack of condoms when heading to a beach destination, in the hope – nay, full expectation – that they would at some point come in handy.

My point is not that any of this is in any way commendable, but the rather more obvious one that teens and twentysomethings do stuff like that. They call it ‘having a good time on holiday’, if I remember correctly.

Accordingly, I find it difficult to join today’s tabloid angst over a Foreign Office report that young Brits are prone to drunken and loutish behaviour when on holiday. Why wouldn’t they be? Many of their oh-so-respectable mums and dads certainly were at the equivalent age, even if they no longer care to admit it.

If the ‘shame of binge drink Britons abroad’ – thank you, Daily Mail – is statistically on the increase, that may largely be because far more foreign travel takes place. Visits to other countries are no longer the once-every-other-year luxury that once they were. So instead of drinking too much and puking up all over the pavement in Basingstoke, you have more opportunity to do it in Ibiza instead.

The platitudes that the document dishes out as guidelines are just the kind of common sense that comes fitted as standard with most savvy travellers. I believe I do have some younger readers, so all I can say is, have a nice time wherever you are going this year. And if you can’t be good, be careful.

Yet at least I have visited these places once, which is more than I can say about Preston or Swansea or Wigan.

These days, I have a job that regularly takes me to various European capitals, parts of the Middle East, and sometimes further afield. Thus it is that I have twice been to Cairo, but never to Carlisle.

This is, I think, indicative of a wider problem. For most of the political, media and business classes of the South East, it is ‘the provinces’ that represent today’s faraway countries of which we know little. And regional policy has long reflected that.

It’s fashionable to talk about ‘Britishness’ these days. Indeed, Gordon Brown is going to write a book about it, apparently. But while the focus is on how better to integrate Scotland and Wales into the United Kingdom, the reality is that England became two nations during the Thatcher period, and has never since cohered.

The Tories of the 1980s gave every impression of not giving a damn about the North; the overweight whippet-breeding bastards tended to vote Labour, anyway.

Exchange rates decisions were taken to suit the City rather than the manufacturing industry. Mining was decimated and then decimated again, not because the destruction of the coal industry was in Britain’s interest, but because putting the National Union of Mineworkers in their place was a key class war priority.

Perhaps the Conservatives thought they could get away with it by cynically lobbing a few tens of millions at Japanese car companies and German companies looking for cheap labour to staff microchip assembly lines, thereby inducing them to set up shop in deindustrialised areas.

But the strategy didn’t work; the call centres did not fill the vacuum left by the shut down steelworks, as can be seen in the social problems these places still face today.

Very sensibly, much of the North learned to reciprocate the loathing. To this day, there remain entire conurbations in which Tories in elected office are rarer than condom vending machines in the Vatican.

As recently as 2004, Old Etonian Boris Johnson – at that time MP for Henley, a town just about as affluent as it is possible to be – merrily attacked Liverpool for ‘wallowing in its victim status’, which he found to be indicative of its ‘deeply unattractive psyche’. There is only one word for an attitude like that, and that is contempt.

But today this process has reached its apogee, with the publication of a Policy Exchange report called Cities Unlimited [pdf] that calls for mass migration from Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland to the bottom right-hand corner of the country.

Where to begin? I mean, the cost in elocution lessons alone is going to be colossal, for starters. Joking aside, the impossibility of developing the necessary additional housing and attendant infrastructure in a region that cannot keep pace with the needs of its own natural population expansion is enough to relegate this proposal to the whackjob far right stupid idea file.

The reality is, if population transfer were to occur on the sort of scale authors Tim Leunig and James Swaffield envisage, less affluent internal migrants would gravitate towards the parts of the South East where the problems from which they would ostensibly escape are already rife.

They identify real problems, of course. But their own party caused many of them. If the free market economics Leunig and Swaffield espouse was capable of delivering solutions, surely the Invisible Hand would have done the business already.

In reality, the less prosperous parts of the North needs the sort of systematic regional planning that only a government of the left could conceivably deliver.

But just before you write these guys off as hapless wonks, remember this; in less than two years from now, the lads and lasses of Policy Exchange – David Cameron’s fave thinktank, no less – will have a real input into government policy.

This is just a foretaste of what we can expect after the imminent wingnut takeover. Come back IPPE, all is forgiven.

UPDATE: It's been pointed out in the comments box that Leunig is actually a Lib Dem. But given Policy Exchange's ties to such Tory figures as Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Charles Moore, the main thrust of the post still stands. The Orange Book brigade strike me as pretty much part of the hard right.

THE DAILY Mail this morning describes Colin Stagg as ‘the man cleared of murdering Rachel Nickell’. Get that? Not ‘the man wrongly arrested and prosecuted for murdering Rachel Nickell’ or even ‘the man fitted up for murdering Rachel Nickell after a shameless police honeytrap operation’; just the man ‘cleared of’ the crime. Nice.

As a journo myself, may I offer forthright professional admiration for the pure technique on display here? There’s just enough careful ambiguity to leave the matter in doubt while staying on the right side of the libel laws. Who says reporting isn’t a craft?

What’s more, this is the ideal first par to cue up a veritable barrage of moral outrage at the news that Stagg has been awarded £706,000 compensation for the 13 months he spent in custody and the years of subsequent speculation that he is not entirely innocent; speculation, you’ll note, that Paul Dacre is happy to sustain in Britain’s bestselling tabloid.

Inevitably there follows an unfavourable contrast with the £90,000 Ms Nickell’s son got for the trauma of seeing his mother murdered, while a dependable rentaquote Tory MP is rolled out indignantly to remonstrate that servicemen injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are also paid little by comparison.

What is not mentioned is the £4.3m recently awarded to young Manchester United hopeful Ben Collett, after a high tackle sustained in his first game for the reserves put an end to a potentially promising career.

Stagg is not a sympathetic character, of course. He is described – as was Barry George – as ‘a loner’. Perhaps the letters he thought he was writing privately to the undercover policewoman, detailing his own most intimate fantasies, reveal him to be what we in the everyday vernacular refer to as a sick puppy.

But that isn’t the point at issue. The point is that what the police did utterly destroyed his life. He spent more than a year behind bars, and has not been able to work since leaving prison. Stagg claims to have attended countless job interviews over the last decade, but unsurprisingly, has yet to find an employer willing to hire someone with his degree of infamy.

To use the same yardstick applied to Collett, £706,000 sounds about reasonable for loss of lifetime earnings. Colin Stagg deserves the money.

It seems that six out of the 14 medal winners on the cover that newspaper yesterday were privately educated. They include oarsmen Zac Purchase, schooled at King's Worcester, and Steve Williams, from Monkton Combe in Bath; sailor Ben Ainslie, educated at Truro School; cyclist Chris Hoy, a former pupil of George Watson's College in Edinburgh; and the Yngling winner Sarah Webb, who attended the Catholic independent girls' school St Maur's in Weybridge.

Yet while fewer than 10 per cent of all British schoolchildren go to fee-paying private schools, they accounted for more than 40 per cent of our weekend Olympic golds - a vastly disproportionate total.

One recent study found that 60 per cent of British medallists at the 2004 Olympics in Athens were educated at fee-paying establishments, an increase on the 58 per cent figure for the 2000 Olympics.

Hey, isn’t it great being middle class, or what? Rule number one in selling lucrative pieces like this – I had a couple in the Daily Express myself once, and earned the price of an extremely flash wristwatch for an afternoon’s work – is to find and massage the readership’s prejudice, and I can only take my hat off to Mr McK on that score.

Unfortunately, though, his follow-through doesn’t quite stack up:

The British record is a sad indictment, not of class divisions, but of the sorry complacency, ineptitude, low standards and lack of enterprise in the comprehensive system.

What utter rot. For a start, most public schools – tax exempt charities, don’t forget – enjoy top notch sports facilities. By contrast, the inner city state school next to my workplace has just sold most of the limited area it had available for games to a property developer, who is knocking up a block of jerry-built yuppie flats as we speak. Lack of enterprise? No, this is private enterprise in full swing, mate. And working to the detriment of the social good.

These days, ownership of a playing field – something that was taken for granted for secondary schools when I was growing up – is something of a rarity. This is a huge issue, the result of a Tory policy that New Labour in opposition promised to reverse and then didn't. But for McKinstry it rates just a single sentence, presumably because it doesn’t fit well with the main thrust of his case.

Nor does class privilege mysteriously disappear at the school gate. Middle class parents alone can afford to nurture the talent of their offspring, picking up the tab for private coaching.

And while promising young athletes from less privileged backgrounds usually have to fit their training in around a full-time job, their better-off counterparts can rely on mumsy and dadsy to support them in their sporting endeavours.

Probably the most serious criticism I have of capitalism is the way it systematically denies and wastes the talents of the majority of people in society. Posh boys and girls picking up more than their fair share of Olympic metalware is simply a very minor example of a much wider phenomenon.

Eton and Harrow, and their small-scale two bob wannabe joints up and down the country, remain state-subsidised manufacturers of educational and social privilege. The least that these businesses - and that is what they very clearly are - could do is pay their way in society. Or don't the rules of the free market apply to some?

My ancestors and rellies include a bent copper who fathered multiple children out of wedlock, a Methodist lay preacher who put the emphasis on the ‘lay’ aspect of that calling, any number of minor league crims, an oh-so-respectable self-made millionaire businessman who died of a heart attack while on the job with his secretary, sundry druggies, pissheads and ship-jumpers, a diehard Stalinist, a much-married nutty inventor and one or two right old slappers to boot. Worst of all, my brother is a chartered accountant.

I love them all dearly, of course. Luckily, nobody within the clan has done anything sufficiently stupid as to lead to detailed scrutiny of Osler/Gaberthüel moral fibre, such as running for the vice president of the United States.

If it wasn’t such bad news for a political party I heartily despise, I might even feel slightly sorry for Sarah Palin, the running mate chosen by GOP’s John McCain. The candidate and her wholesome family – I’d call them all-American if at least some of them didn’t favour Alaskan independence – are pictured above.

I even admired the way she turned the revelation that her 17-year-old daughter has been knocked up by some thick jock to her political advantage. Soundbites like ‘Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realise very quickly the difficulties of raising a child which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family’ must really play well with the religious right constituency, and that is after all what she is doing on the ticket.

But stop and think about what is being said here. It doesn’t really sound like either the poor girl herself or her ‘don’t want kids’ Fuckin’ Redneck boyfriend have much say in the matter, does it? I mean, a termination would rather have gotten in the way of Hockey Mom’s once-in-a-lifetime shot at the number two job in the White House, wouldn’t it?

It is widely being reported that McCain really wanted either ex-Democrat veep wannabe Joe Lieberman or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to fill the number two slot. But both were vetoed on account of their pro-abortion views, leading to the last minute panic selection of Palin. Yes, the issue really is that definitive for a large slice of the American electorate.

McCain himself backs the overturn of Roe v Wade – although he has sometimes fudged the issue - and would only allow abortions in the exceptional cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is in danger.

As I have said before, this is an issue of some moral complexity, and not as open and shut as some on the left would have it. But essentially it boils down to a choice between safe, legal termination and a return to the coathanger, and there is no room for ambivalence on the part of progressive politicians.

The slogan ‘a woman’s right to choose’ is the only correct one to raise in this instance, and it applies to schoolgirls in Alaska just as much as to career women in the major metropolitan centres.

Maybe Ms Palin and Levi Johnston want to go ahead with the pregnancy. If that’s the case, congratulations, mum and dad. But it would be nice to be reassured that young couple have been able to take this life-changing decision entirely of their own accord and not in the light of all the political pressure arising from the most important electoral contest in the world.

The de Menezes killing happened on Sir Ian Blair’s watch, yet the worst consequence for the Metropolitan Police was a conviction for breach of health and safety regulations, as if the offence was of no more import than leaving packing cases blocking a fire escape.

This, despite the fact that Blair breached his statutory duty to refer the incident to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

As to the accusations that he favoured his white mates for promotion over better-qualified black and Asian officers, it’s not my job to take sides in Scotland Yard office politics.

On the basis of what I’ve read, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But ultimately the issue will be decided before the relevant industrial tribunals, as is proper in such cases.

Then again, it does seem that he bunged another pal a lucrative public money PR contract, which while not necessarily improper, is bloody silly thing to do when you know that the political heat is on. That provided just the pretext Boris Johnson needed to administer the sack.

But Blair had plus points, too. The most important of these - in the wake of the 1999 Macpherson report, which blasted the Met’s ‘institutional racism’ - is an apparently sincere commitment to what is known as anti-racist policing

Many on the left have got difficulty with the phrase ‘anti-racist policing’, so let’s put it another way. Blair at least made it plain that open racism would no longer be tolerated in London’s police force. That was something that needed to be done.

As it goes, the Met is the closest thing I have got to a family business. My grandad and two uncles were all plods. The degree of overt racial prejudice they displayed was shocking. One of them - a licensed firearms officer, now thankfully retired - routinely referred to black people as ‘sooties’. Macpherson didn’t hear the half of it.

As a poster child progressive copper, Blair is said to have made inroads into the Met’s so-called canteen culture. Good. Yet his reward was to get himself branded ‘politically correct’ in the Daily Mail. That is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody in public life.

Another thing in Blair’s favour is that he succeeded in cutting crime. This or that statistic may be subject to quibbling, but all point in the same direction, and that is downwards. Surely that’s the final yardstick of what policing is all about?

In the end, all of the above considerations are irrelevant. Blair was too close to New Labour, which meant that in the new scheme of things at City Hall, he had to go.

Ken Livingstone - writing in the Guardian today - holds up Blair as a ‘hard working and impressive public servant’ who fell victim of a sustained hard right witchhunt, and there is enough truth in the suggestion to merit a partial defence in the face of a nasty and reactionary media onslaught that is preparing the way for a BoJo placeman.

As ever, the Daily Mail has been leading the way on this one. Melanie Phillips is particularly splenetic this morning. But last time I checked, Paul Dacre wasn’t actually constitutionally entitled to decide on senior police appointments.

Let’s just say Sir Ian did himself no favours along the way. All the Tories had to do was give him enough rope.

LIBERAL – and not so liberal - opinion is falling all over itself to defend Australia-based holocaust denier Fredrick Töben, who remains under threat of deportation to Germany following his arrest at Heathrow last week.

Töben, of course, was imprisoned for nine months in Mannheim in 1999 for propagating his execrable views, and was one of the star turns at the Tehran holocaust denial conference in 2006.

This is a man who considers the claim that Nazi Germany slaughtered six million Jews to be a straightforward ‘lie’, and moreover a lie perpetuated by ‘the holocaust racketeers, the corpse peddlers and the shoah business merchants’.

As far as I am aware, such a stance is more extreme than the public pronouncements on this issue of any leading European fascist party leader.

In language that parallels that of some publications of the left, Töben also maintains that ‘the current US government is influenced by world Zionist considerations to retain the survival of the European colonial, apartheid, Zionist, racist entity of Israel.’

Yet Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, insists that his arrest runs contrary to Britain’s tradition of free speech. Huhne maintains: I come to this as a good, classic liberal. It is a fundamental part of our system that we believe in freedom of speech and, like Voltaire, I may disparage what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

As far as I can make out, Melanie Phillips’ opposition to extradition – in a full page article in today’s Daily Mail – is largely motivated more by the hard right’s europhobia than concern for any abstract consideration of freedom of speech.

The extradition request, you see, comes on the back of a European arrest warrant. Thus British nationals can in theory be arrested here and shipped to other EU countries that accuse them of committing a crime, even if the alleged crime is not a crime according to British law. Philip Johnston, writing in the Daily Telegraph, makes much the same case.

But need those against Töben’s extradition be particularly worried? It’s just that my mind goes back to October 1998, when former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet - in London to seek medical treatment at a private clinic off Harley Street - was arrested on a Spanish provisional warrant for the murder in of Spanish citizens during his free market dictatorship.

Five days later, he was served with a second provisional arrest warrant, charging him with systematic torture, murder, illegal detention, and forced disappearances. These are matters incomparably more grave, of course, than the online inculcation of holocaust denial.

Spain’s case was largely founded on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which is the idea that certain crimes are sufficiently serious to constitute crimes against humanity, and should thus be open for prosecution in any court, anywhere in the world.

The British House of Lords ruled that Pinochet had no right to immunity from prosecution as a former head of state, and could be put on trial. And New Labour’s response?

After placing Pinochet under house arrest - during which he received ample visits from many of his Tory fan club, such as Lady Thatcher - the then home secretary Jack Straw in March 2000 ruled that he should be released on medical grounds.

To put it mildly, this craven display of cowardice, motivated in part by Straw’s inability to stand up to the pressure exerted by this murderer’s monetarist admirers, was not this government’s finest hour.

Just how ill Pinochet was is open to question. On his return to Chile in March that year, his first act on landing back in his native country was to rise up from his chair to acknowledge the loud applause and cheering of his supporters.

The caudillo died peacefully in his bed in December, 2006, without having been convicted of any of the undoubted crimes committed during his dictatorship.

For the record, I think Huhne is on balance right, and Phillips and Johnston are correct, in so far as the narrow point of law they raise goes. For exactly the reasons they state with varying degrees of eloquence, Töben should not be sent to his country of birth. But after the Pinochet case, that somehow doesn’t seem much of a risk.

I REMEMBER Phil Woolas’s unsuccessful campaign in the Littleborough & Saddleworth by-election of 1995. His victorious Lib Dem opponent - knowing that the Labour candidate was a former president of the National Union of Students - decided that ipso facto Woolas must have smoked a joint or two, and argued that Labour was therefore ‘soft on drugs’.

Woolas went on television to protest that not only had he never touched cannabis – no way! – and added that he had never even had a cigarette in his life. Here I laughed my head off; he used to scrounge plenty of fags off me and others at Labour Students meetings in the mid 1980s, as multiple witnesses can attest.

It’s a little point, of course. But I guess it was an object lesson in the readiness of politicians to lie blatantly about small things when under the least pressure to do so. Such incidents hardly fill one with trust when they go on to make pronouncements about infinitely bigger issues.

These days Phil is Home Office minister of state with responsibility for immigration, and has spelled out how he sees his role in a newspaper interview last weekend. He’s absolutely definitely not a racist, you understand. Indeed, it was active anti-racism that originally inspired him to get involved in politics in the first place.

It’s just that, well, the most effective form of anti-racism these days is talking up impending crackdowns on immigration. It has been “too easy” to get into this country in the past, Woolas patiently explains. On his watch, it's only going to get harder. He has been brought in to be “tougher” and to “change perceptions”, and so he is intent on doing just that.

Here’s the most worrying soundbite of all: We need a tougher immigration policy and we need to stop seeing it as a dilemma. It's not. It's easy.

What Woolas knows full well - but of course doesn’t say - is that the only “easy” way to limit further immigration is to single out black and Asian would-be immigrants for the kind of treatment that is openly discriminatory.

Nothing will be done about the one million or more South Africans that have the right to live in Britain because they have one British [read: white] grandparent, when many children born and brought up in Britain by non-British parents do not.

Moreover, hundreds of millions of EU citizens are able freely to live and work in the UK. Short of withdrawal from the EU itself, there is no way that right could be curtailed. Thankfully for Phil, they are again very largely white, and tend to congregate in the south east anyway. No need to get tough on them.

Remember also that in 2006, 50,000 foreign nationals married British nationals, while 25,000 claimed asylum. To stop either group living in Britain would require dismantling human rights conventions and withdrawal from treaties.

Still, there is one aspect of immigration policy that truly is colour blind. Millionaires are allowed automatic entry into Britain, whatever their passport. No word from the minister on how he intends to put a stop to this particular abuse.

There is a crucial difference between confronting racism and meeting it half way, as all the mainstream parties tend to do, and as Phil has done in this article. When Labour prime ministers advance catchphrases such as ‘British jobs for British workers’ and Tory parliamentary hopefuls proclaim that ‘Enoch was right’, they boost the fears the BNP thrive on.

Enoch was wrong. The River Tiber isn’t flowing with much blood. Britain hasn’t built its own funeral pyre. It is today a far more tolerant and less racist place than it was three or four decades ago.

I don’t for one minute believe that Woolas is racist personally; it’s just that he’s a politician desperate to strike a populist note, and just as happy to prevaricate on what is involved in restricting immigration as to dissemble about his erstwhile Silk Cut consumption.

UPDATE: Some commenters argue forcefully that I may have got details of the by-election mentioned above wrong. It's quite possible that my memory is playing me false on the exact circumstances, but I do clearly remember Phil's 'never touched a ciggie' quote.

I’D LOVE to qualify as the type of person Jack Straw once derided by the generic label of Hampstead liberals; the trouble is, I can only afford to live in Hackney. And there was me thinking that New Labour was not in the business of dampening down aspiration.

Eight years after the famous speech in question, the justice secretary has returned to his favoured pastime of beating up on do-gooders like yours truly. But I do not know know if I am more or less of a middle-class wanker in his eyes, simply because my housing budget extends only to N16 and not NW3.

By way of full disclosure, I have to admit to being a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties. And I’m more than happy to pay the dues that – according to New Labour insinuation, anyway - indirectly fund Shami Chakrabarti’s hot ‘n’ heavy night-time phone sex with David Davis, largely because I support the organisation’s aims.

And while I haven’t joined either, I am sympathetic to what the Howard League for Penal Reform and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders are trying to do.

This is despite the fact that I have been both mugged and burgled myself. Now, being a victim of crime is enough to make anybody – yes, even an Independent reader – seriously bloody angry indeed. Rationality on law and order issues flies temporarily out the window.

For about two weeks after each incident, I would have applauded any politician making the kind of ‘some day a real rain is gonna come’ speech Straw has ventured today. Introduction of SWAT squads to enact 24/7 lockdown on the Kingsland Road? Mass internment camps for hoodie-wearing yoof? Bring ‘em on, I would have said.

I guess this natural reaction accounts for why both Tory and Labour figures have for decades repeatedly recycled the same dumb speech that promises to get tough on offenders and lock more people up. It resonates with many voters, that cannot be denied.

But what exactly would they do any differently from what they have been doing? Britain’s incarceration policy is already as tough as they come; about 147 people per 100,000 are in prison in England and Wales, the highest proportion of the population for any country in Western Europe.

We have already got more life prisoners in England and Wales than the rest of the EU manages collectively. There are ten times as many lifers as there are in France, and three times more than in Turkey.

Some 10,000 people are imprisoned every year simply for the possession or sale of soft drugs. Which reminds me, Jack; doesn’t one member of the Straw family have some previous on that score?

New Labour has been relentlessly putting crims away as fast as they can build the jails. More than 17,000 prison spaces have been created since 1997, with a further 8,000 are planned. On present trends, the prison population will reach 100,000 by 2012.

Moreover, by eroding the right to trial by jury, allowing hearsay evidence, and scrapping the double jeopardy rule, the government done everything in its power to make it as easy as possible to secure a conviction.

Yet the fact remains that it costs £40,000 a year to keep a prisoner behind bars, and it’s not clear that the end result is value for money. Forget the familiar platitude that ‘prison works’; it very plainly doesn’t.

Some 57% of male ex-prisoners are reconvicted within two years, and 68% within four. Nine out of ten of teenagers that serve time in youth custody centres are reconvicted within two years.

For some reason, prison life is routinely caricatured as something out of 1950s holiday camp sitcom Hi-De-Hi!. Here’s yesterday’s Sunday Mirror, trailing today’s Straw speech, for instance:

Prison officers told earlier this year how crooks were breaking INTO cushy jails, where they could get drugs, prostitutes, breakfast in bed and satellite TV.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I mean, I haven’t got satellite TV. And if I want hookers and charlie, I have to go down Shacklewell Lane, which is all of five minutes walk away. That’s pretty inconvenient when it’s raining.

The reality is rather different. Our penal establishments are so grim that each year, over 100 people kill themselves rather than finish their sentences.

If you want to know why, look at the sort of people that are being imprisoned. Three-quarters of people in prison have a reading age of ten or less. More than 40% are mentally ill, with 10% schizophrenic. Prisoners are 13 times more likely to have been a child in care, 14 times more likely to be unemployed, ten times more likely to have been a regular truant.

In short, the idea that the solution to rising crime rates is to bang ‘em up, and if that doesn’t work, to bang more of ‘em up, has been a spectacular failure. If pointing this inescapable conclusion out makes me a softie who uses ‘language that doesn’t chime with the public’, so be it.

Straw’s speech was a shameless piece of paint-by-numbers sub-Michael Howard vote-grubbing, entirely of a piece with Phil Woolas’s recent outburst on immigration.

I guess that’s always going to be the way for just as long as New Labour allows the parameters of the acceptable to be set by Paul Dacre.

FUCKING a satanic slut is about par for the course when you get lucky in a dodgy Hackney boozer on a Saturday night. And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing; I'm sure some of my most fondly-remembered old girlfriends would revel in the designation.

It's just that adding to the all-round embarrassment by leaving messages boasting of the deed on the voicemail on her 78-year-old grandfather’s mobile, while the conversation is being broadcast nationwide, would normally not be considered sexual etiquette comme il faut.

Unsurprisingly, there seems to be a widespread consensus across the political spectrum that the now-infamous ‘prank’ phone calls made by radio presenters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to actor Andrew Sachs should lead to their sacking by the BBC. Politicians from Respect’s George Galloway to prime minister Gordon Brown and Tory rightwinger David Davis have been unanimous in condemning the incident.

They are correct to do so. I’m not saying this because I have any problem with controversial entertainers pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, or because I am prudishly shocked by the F-word, or anything like that.

My argument is simply that, despite the huge salaries enjoyed by these two guys - and Ross is said to be on £6m a year - they should still be subject to some element of restraint while they are on the job. So to speak.

I have been a journalist for over 20 years, and although dirty jokes spectacularly studded with the crudest of traditional profanities are no longer as common in the average newsroom as they were in the long lunch 1980s, they remain not entirely unknown.

Again, as a union rep, I once defended a workmate who described his line manager in terms that rhyme with the name of Tory media spokesman Jeremy Hunt, albeit in the pub after work. In those circumstances, I successfully argued, what was said was none of the company’s business.

But if me or any of my colleagues were repeatedly to leave outbursts of sexually explicit braggadocio pertaining to family members on a colleague’s voicemail, and did so in work time and on work premises, we would instantly be out the door for gross misconduct. I can see no reason why double standards should apply.

Incidentally, Ross once justified his stupendously inflated pay packet with the line that he was ‘worth a thousand BBC journalists’. The latest antics of this guy and his pal underline just how far that claim was off the mark.

THE standard case against redistributionist or egalitarian politics today is that the Britain of 2008 is more or less a meritocracy. Never mind if you’re old man’s a dustman and he wears a dustman’s hat; he probably made a killing after exercising the right to buy his council flat and lives in prosperous retirement in Essex.

OK, so the public schoolies still maintain something of an edge. But never mind, son. Concentrate on your studies, put the graft in, and one day you too will be on a middle management wedge with a Ford Focus thrown in. If you’re good enough, you’ll get there.

But hard evidence that this is the case is inconclusive, to say the least. As recently as December last year, one report found that ‘social mobility in the UK remains at the low level set in 1970 when the country was bottom of an international league table. Only the United States amongst Western democracies is on a par with the UK.’

The odd thing is, New Labour has – within certain limits far below what many on the left consider adequate – enacted policies designed to tackle precisely this issue. More money is being spent on schools in real terms under the Tories, more young people are going to university, and even parents I know on the far left whose kids have been through the SureStart programme seem agreed that the scheme is good in as far as it goes.

Hence the apparent confusion surrounding another report, this time from the prime minister’s strategy unit. Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, it seems to suggest that things are looking up. But the reception it has received varies dramatically from newspaper to newspaper.

The Daily Mail inevitably seizes the opportunity for some autopilot Labour bashing. The story leads page 10 and the spin is that prospects for poor children are now no better than 30 years ago.

Equally predictably, David Aaronovitch in The Times – a journalist habitually ready to put the best possible gloss on whatever the government does, even if that entails cheerleading for war – engages in a spot of New Labour boosterism. ‘Be patient’, he recommends. Read between the lines and you will see that ‘Britain is gradually getting fairer’, he insists.

Somewhere between the two takes is Nicholas Timmins in the Financial Times, a man with decades of experience writing about social policy and not openly politically aligned. His verdict is that that any claims of improvement are at best ‘premature’ and that more evidence is needed.

They can’t all be right. For those of us who are not social policy specialists and who have no time to study the documents – and that includes me – I suppose you pays your money and you takes your choice. But on grounds of what I do know, and because the judgement of journalists with expertise is usually preferable to punditry, my hunch would be back Nick Timmins’ verdict.

At the emotional level, this whole question is hugely important to me. One of the things that still motivates me to engage in politics is social class and class inequality; as far as I am concerned, this is something up close and personal.

I embody some of the changes that came about as the result of the social democratic consensus before Thatcherism wrecked it. As the son of a railway worker and a nurse, I was the first person in my family ever to get into higher education, let alone qualify for a postgraduate degree from a leading university and thereafter land a solidly middle-class job.

The idea that these opportunities have been stripped away from the generation that followed mine is still capable of making me angry. For instance, I still think that New Labour’s (now partially reversed) decision to abolish student grants was the single most retrogressive step taken by any postwar British government.

After more than a decade in office, I would really have liked to read a study that proved that New Labour had made measurable headway in taking on the engrained privileges that still seem to come automatically with a public school education.

But the obvious conclusion here is that attempts to tackle the negative social impact of the class structure without attacking the class structure itself are condemned in advance to inefficacity.

THE PROPOSITION that newspapers run with shag ‘n’ tell stories principally as a means to uphold family values and promote the moral betterment of the nation somehow – how can I put this? - fails completely to convince. Such limited moral rectitude on the matter as they may possess runs little deeper than the desire to sell tabloids by the truckload.

Accordingly, the speech delivered by editor of the Daily Mail to the Society of Editors on Sunday night, in which he actually does push this argument, has to be dismissed as cant of the most breathtaking proportions.

You can read Paul Dacre's full text here, although I wouldn’t recommend it; most of the content is the standard self-promoting guff to which one unfortunately readily acclimatises if forced to sit through industry conferences of this nature.

A long way into his peroration, Dacre finally gets into his swing. His target is then revealed as Mr Justice Eady, the judge who gets to take the overwhelming majority of privacy cases that come before the High Court:

Two years ago, Justice Eady ruled that a cuckolded husband couldn’t sell his story to the press about another married man – a wealthy sporting celebrity – who had seduced his wife.

The judge was worried about the effect of the revelations on the celebrity’s wife. Now I agree that any distress caused to innocent parties is regrettable but exactly the same worries could be expressed about the relatives of any individual who transgressed which, if followed to its logical conclusion, would mean that nobody could be condemned for wrongdoing.

But the judge – in an unashamed reversal of centuries of moral and social thinking – placed the rights of the adulterer above society’s age-old belief that adultery should be condemned.

Dacre is here conflating two topics. There is the issue of whether an extramarital affair in which one of the parties is in the public eye constitutes a suitable subject for journalistic treatment, and then there is the entirely separate issue of what entitlement newspapers have to pass judgment on the deeds of the Love Rats involved.

On the first point – and being a journalist, I would say this, wouldn’t I? – it is important that newspapers are able to print whatever stories they see fit, provided only that they are true.

Ultimately, one cannot divorce the freedom of the press to undertake serious investigative journalism and the freedom of the press to big up shock horror football star hotel room spit roasts. Beyond that, the argument gets somewhat tenuous.

A large proportion of the population can’t get enough goss on the sex lives of the rich and famous, although it is too often forgotten that substantial numbers couldn’t care less if a superstar pulls some bimbo in a nightclub. Good luck to him; and if she makes a bob or two from the subsequent red top buy up, good luck to her.

Yet even those who are fascinated by this kind of stuff are increasingly less likely to go tut-tut than once would have been the case.

Few would argue that adultery is commendable in any positive sense. But it remains a popular pastime. Some of my friends are at it, and it would be surprising if some of Paul Dacre's friends weren't at it, too. On some estimates, a full one-third of over fifties are having affairs.

What’s more, two-thirds of unfaithful over 55s reportedly do not feel ‘any regret about straying’; I read that fact in the Mail of Sunday, the Daily Mail’s sister paper. That alone would seem to indicate that Dacre is seriously out of touch with his readership base.

And here’s more from Paul, this time on the recent Max Mosley vs News of the World case:

Recently, of course, the very same Justice Eady effectively ruled that it was perfectly acceptable for the multi-millionaire head of a multi-billion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him.

But what is most worrying about Justice Eady's decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being 'amoral'.

I hold no brief for Mosley or how he gets his kicks. But simple libertarianism demands we defend the freeborn Englishman’s right - enshrined in the Magna Carta - to pay chicks to dress up in a Luftwaffe uniform and thrash seven shades out of him.

The interesting point is that however ‘perverted’ and ‘depraved’ our self-styled defender of decency and civilised behaviour considered Mosley’s conduct to be, that didn’t stop him running a series of circulation-boosting salacious front covers, accompanied by two double page spreads inside and some angry opinion pieces to boot.

OK, it was all done - Kenny Everett style - in the best possible taste. But if that doesn't qualify as amorality in the dictionary sense, it’s difficult to know what would.

BOTSWANA brought in a 30% levy on alcohol at the start of this month. Local media reports suggest the country virtually came to a standstill on the day before the ruling came into force, as huge numbers of people skipped work and joined the long queues eager to seize the last chance to stock up on reasonably-priced booze.

According to one newspaper, only a few doctors clocked on at the African nation’s hospitals. But that was OK, because many patients discharged themselves early, expressly so they could stand in line outside a handy offie. Football matches were cancelled, because the stadiums would have been empty.

Justifying the move, president Ian Khama argued:

The above measures are consistent with recognition by government and other stakeholders that alcohol and other forms of substance abuse contribute to a wide range of anti-social, risky and criminal behaviors in society including child abuse, violence against women and homicides, as well as death on our roads.

And - in further bad news for Botswana’s pissheads - he added that if the levy did not succeed in substantially reducing alcohol abuse within three months, he will slap on another 30% increment to boot.

Meanwhile, here in Britain, the home affairs select committee yesterday argued that happy hours should be banned, while supermarkets should not be allowed to retail the demon drink below cost price. The grounds for these policies are much the same as those cited by Khama. Britons, it seems, are increasingly becoming drunk and unmanageable.

If they are at all serious in their concerns, the committee must surely realise that half-baked tinkering with the UK’s boozing predilections are bound to prove ineffectual; either they should have the courage to follow the Botswanan lead, or else simply drop the pettifogging moralism and let us get on with destroying our livers.

Economists have often studied the response of alcohol demand to changes in price levels, and while findings have been contradictory, the consensus appears to be that, yes, making the stuff more expensive does slightly reduce consumption.

But like many consumer goods, alcohol is now far cheaper in real terms than it has ever been before; a bottle of wine can be had for a full quid less than a packet of cigarettes.

I’m hazarding a totally unscientific guess here, but if a £5 bottle of perfectly ghastly cabernet sauvignon were to cost £7.50, most people - those of us in work, anyway - would pay up without a second thought. You’d probably have to double prices before making any real inroads, a move that would cost the next election if any government were dumb enough to actually try it.

And even if they were that stupid, we would inevitably see an upsurge in hired vans making day trips to the hypermarkets of Calais and coming back laden with plonk for discrete distribution back home, while all manner of hooch, moonshine and home brew would suddenly come back into fashion. Don’t forget, too, that substitute goods are readily available; it is little more expensive to get high than it is to get legless.

None of this is to deny that rowdyism is an issue in many town centres. But such problems are as much down to social and cultural factors as they are to inexpensive booze. That’s why the drunken brawls do not occur in continental countries in which alcohol is even cheaper than your local branch of JD Wetherspoon. Unless the Brits start the punch up, that is.

Britain introduced the Gin Act in 1751, the Bolsheviks banned vodka after the revolution, and the US tried prohibition from 1920 to 1933. All of these experiments failed utterly. History has clearly spoken out on this one; you cannot stop entire countries getting drunk.

IT IS only the heartbreaking details – the broken back, the eight fractured ribs, the ripped ear, the injuries to lips and tongue, the missing fingertip - that makes the Baby P case appear as something unimaginably extraordinary. But it isn’t.

Sadly, the death of a pre-school child at the hands of its parents or carers in Britain today verges on the commonplace, with an average of 47 incidents each year, or almost one a week. So blasé have we become that few of them are deemed sufficiently newsworthy to make the national media.

Only the truly gruesome examples - the Maria Colwells, the Jasmin Beckfords, the Tyra Henrys or the Victoria Climbiés – actually have the capacity to shame us anymore.

Each and every time they happen, the search for an instant scapegoat is never far behind. For the rightwing media, the most popular caricature targets come in the shape of politically-correct Guardianista caring professionals with their earrings the size of dustbin lids, and/or 4x4 welfare mamas with their endless succession of booze and crack-addled short-term boyfriends.

The reality is that child protection is a hugely difficult job, and the workload for those involved at all levels is inevitably immense. Everybody makes errors of more or less gravity in their professional lives, and those in the most stressful lines of work most understandably so.

David Cameron’s cut-price grandstanding call in the Commons for the head of Sharon Shoesmith – boss of Haringey’s child services department – was as disgraceful as it was opportunist. As Shoesmith argues, nothing that she and people like her can reasonably be expected to do can ultimately stop a parent if he or she is determined to brutalise a helpless toddler.

But although the natural inclination of the left to defend anything the right attack, full exculpation cannot be on offer here; there obviously are questions to answer.

Health professionals and social workers made 60 visits to the poor kid’s ‘home’ - if where he lived can be said to merit that designation - which works out at two per week for the nine months he was on the child protection register. Did none of them clock that something was amiss?

A professor of social work comes to the defence of the trade in the Guardian, arguing:

[T]he mother and her male associates were remarkably skilful in concealing the child's injuries, to the extent of deliberately smearing chocolate on its face and cream on its scalp to hide injuries.

That sounds to me more like an elementary concealment ruse than any display of ‘remarkable skill’. Are not such ploys easily detected? I am genuinely asking, in case any readers have got direct experience in such matters.

How is it possible for a qualified paediatrician such as Dr Sabah Alzayyat to fail to spot the paralysis that inevitably ensues from a broken spine?

There is, too, the issue of the guilt of the perpetrators; the unnamed mother, her boyfriend and lodger Jason Owen. Kelvin MacKenzie in the Sun jumps from that valid point to a nasty spot of a straightforward chav bashing, aimed squarely at the mum.

She came from a family of drunks, never worked and watched porn all day. Her council house — she had to have one, didn’t she? — stank.

Fabulously for the tabloids, the timing of today’s anguished editorials segues nicely to the coverage of the latest feckless state-funded baby factory of choice. Karen Matthews is currently on trial for her role in a hoax child kidnap scam involving her nine-year-old daughter Karen. The idea was lifted straight from a plotline for one episode of Shameless.

Given his readership base, Mr MacKenzie should be among the last to equate social housing with social inadequacy. The reasons that people act in these kinds of ways defy simplistic explanation, and will be rooted in their individual upbringings and in their individual psychologies.

There is to be an inquiry into how the Baby P case happened, and in the circumstances that has to be the right decision. But it is difficult to see how its findings will differ from those of earlier inquiries into earlier outrages. If the solutions were that simple, we would have found them by now.

HAVING a bit on the side in cyber reality is now grounds for divorce, it seems. Married couple Amy Taylor and David Pollard - sorry, I meant to say ‘Laura Skye’and ‘Dave Barmy‘, obviously - are going their separate ways, after she found his Second Life avatar engaged in a spot of virtual nookie with some pixellated hussy who goes by the moniker of Modesty McDonnell. I only hope the online adulterers were using a computer-generated condom.

Much of the resultant publicity has cruelly concentrated on the disparity between the glamorous and wealthy alter egos these two created for themselves and the rather more quotidian reality; both Taylor and Pollard are morbidly obese and physically unprepossessing, and live on benefits in Cornwall.

It’s all too easy - but actually really nasty - to laugh. The entire point of Second Life is precisely the pretence is sells its 15m players, who can be anybody they dream of being and ‘own’ anything they dream of owning.

In that kind of set up, you might just as well make out you are a hunky twentysomething nightclub owner or a drop dead gorgeous club DJ with a penthouse just like Madonna’s, rather than face up to being some fat chav from the back of beyond.

Significantly, Taylor and Pollard wanted precisely those qualities and possessions that the very same media so quick to belittle them routinely hails as the epitome of what is desirable. They aspired to just the lifestyle to which they were told they should aspire, but all too obviously never will be able to reach.

Reading the story put me in mind of some of the 1840s work of Karl Marx, dating back to the time before he was even a communist. Still under the influence of Hegel, Marx built a critique of first religion and then the state on the back of what he called alienation.

In a heartless world, he insisted, it is only natural for humans to idealise their own best qualities, project them onto a giant screen, and then let those creations come to dominate their lives.

‘Religion,’ Marx wrote, ‘is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again … It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.

‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

The parallels with Second Life are plentiful. Sure, at one level, this virtual reality world is harmless fun, no different in principle from any other form of the escapism in which all of us sometimes indulge.

But at another, it represents the vicious commodification of people’s felt inadequacies, for the benefit of a software developer that makes a handsome cut in ‘Linden dollars’ from the likes of Taylor and Pollard, thank you very much.

Unlike religion, Second Life isn’t even accompanied by a more or less intellectually rigorous belief system with the ability to inspire both the better and the baser human instincts. These days, it looks like even alienation has to be dumbed down for mass consumption.

PROSTITUTION is still half-jokingly celebrated as the world’s oldest profession; in reality, it is not a profession of any description. Nobody in their right mind would willingly see their sister or their daughter go on the game.

But it hardly follows logically from that elementary proposition that prostitution should therefore be outlawed. The question of to what extent - and in what manner - the state should restrict, manage or otherwise control the sale of sex raises real dilemmas for anyone approaching the issue from a left libertarian point of view.

In the debates of the past, many of us will have raised the slogan of ‘keep the state out of the bedroom’ in relation to, say, gay rights or consensual sado-masochism.

Does consistency therefore demand that the proposals to criminalise paying for sex with prostitutes ‘controlled for gain’ – as unveiled by home secretary Jacqui Smith today – should be opposed?

It is interesting to note here that the government has not gone ahead with the full Swedish system of making it an offence to pay for sex in all circumstances, despite the support this idea has from a number of leading New Labour figures. Right or wrong, at least that is a coherent policy. The government has instead chosen to water it down.

Equally conceptually coherent, of course, is the free market right demand for a completely deregulated free market in sexual services, on the grounds that the trade is no different in principle from selling baked beans.

In the end, much comes down to the specifics of each transaction. It maybe – as the self-appointed spokeswomen such as the English Collective of Prostitutes insist - that there are any number of happy hookers out there, more than happy to act as sole traders in full control of their own means of production.

But the suspicion has to be that these women are in the minority. What about all the unhappy hookers, such as the five Ipswich streetwalkers who ended up dead? An estimated 95% of street prostitutes are using heroin or crack, and most are also subject to multiple social problems. They work as prostitutes to support their habit.

The irreconcilable Hayekites out there might want to make the case that what they are doing is still somehow still ‘consensual’, but it is difficult to imagine how that can be true in any meaningful sense.

It is moreover clear that a high proportion of the foreign women trapped in ‘massage parlours’ have been trafficked; this is modern-day slave labour, and their customers are de facto rapists. Remember also that some prostitutes are not yet old enough even properly to be called women. Continuing criminalisation has led to a situation where girls as young as 12 and 14 are on the streets for the benefit of organised crime.

Liberal responses concentrate on how sex work can be made safer, while conservatives demand that it be suppressed or stamped out. As yet, the government has contrived to attempt neither, and Smith’s latest initiative continues its distinguished track record in prevarication.

On balance, I favour the main alternative proposal put forward by reformers, namely that of legalising and licensing brothels. But that doesn’t appear to be even on the government’s radar screen.

Licensing and inspection would make prostitutes safer, cut out pimps, reduce violence, trafficking, diseases and drug abuse, and the end exploitation of underage girls.

At the same time, there must be a strategy for getting women out of prostitution, and that strategy will have to be backed up with money to be effective. It could be paid for, at least in party, from the proceeds of taxing legal brothels.

This is not a matter on which I claim any expertise. Although a licensing system seems to me commonsensical, I would happily listen to a grown-up debate on what should be done. The key thing is that something should be done.

All I ask is that participants skip either prurience or moralism, and come up with something resembling effective and workable social policy. But by all means tell me I am wrong.

IF YOU are in the business of finding out and publishing things that somebody in a position of influence wants kept quiet – and that’s a business all good journalists should try to be in – then these are heady times. Secrecy, official and otherwise, is being undermined as never before.

It actually used to be hard work prying information out of people. Back in the 1980s when I started out as a hack, the best tactics included the careful cultivation of union activists and middle management awkward squad types with grudges against their bosses. Frequently this ‘contact building’, as we used to call it, entailed having to buy people beers.

Otherwise, it was largely a question of diligently rooting through council agendas and court records, although on a few memorable occasions each year, a plain brown envelope with incriminating material used to land on your desk. And boy, weren’t you pleased when that happened.

The advent of the fax made things a damn sight easier. Your friends no longer had to photocopy documents, smuggle them out of work and then send them to you by post. Instead, they could just whack them onto a fax machine and magically they would reappear in your office.

With modern information and communications technology, leaking has never been easier. What’s more, organisations that were formerly super-secretive have become slightly less so; I can now ring up NATO and get a quote from a spokesperson if I need one.

New Labour has even brought in Freedom of Information legislation, although its practical impact has been pretty limited from the muckraking point of view.

In general, the overall trend has made my life easier, and moreover has to be a good thing for the public’s right to know. Let it rock, say I. But I should add a few qualifications here.

Take, for instance, a text message identifying those responsible for the death of Baby P, which even as I write is circulating the mobile phones of Britain. The originator urges people to pass it on to ‘name and shame’ the couple, branding them ‘cruel vile killers’.

That is just what they are, of course. But reporting restrictions in court cases are usually imposed for good reasons, including the need to ensure that the judicial process is fair, and to avoid a hysterical lynch mob atmosphere that could see innocent relatives or even people with similar surnames beaten up or worse.

Earlier this week, the entire membership list of the British National Party went on line. It soon disappeared from the original website on which it was posted, but has now been widely disseminated, and can readily be googled up in minutes.

I’ve got no brief for the fash, of course, and far right outfits such as Redwatch have long been in the habit of posting the names and home addresses of trade unionists and socialists on their websites. I am one of the ‘reds’ that stands thus exposed.

But the BNP is a legal political party and its members should have the same rights to data protection as members of all other legal political parties.

What we really need is more revelations about the things that really matter. If you do get made redundant in the next few months, don’t forget to copy your boss’s hard drive and pass it on to your friendly local hard news merchant. Not only does the bastard deserve it, but you’ll have a friend for life.

IN PROFESSIONAL life, we all make mistakes from time to time. This is more of an issue in some jobs than others.

Rightly, air traffic controllers and brain surgeons don’t get cut much slack. But a missed sales target is just a missed sales target, and genuinely accidental damage to company property will be picked up by insurers.

If you are a financial adviser and the share portfolio you manage for a client tanks, a bookmaker that overprices a cert, or the publisher behind a hardback that doesn’t recoup advance royalties, that’s just life. Sure, do it too often and you will be out the door. But most of the time, the boss will put the odd balls-up down to experience.

In two decades as a journalist, I have written tens of thousands of stories. Only a small handful have contained what turned out to be significant errors. In one particular instance, an ‘exclusive front page splash’ was – how can I put this? - dramatically wide of the mark.

It wasn’t libellous, it was just plain old-fashioned wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, all this was seriously embarrassing for me. I got justifiably chewed out by the editor, and the newspaper concerned was left with a certain amount of egg on its face.

The chocolate on Baby P’s face, by contrast, was there to hide the tell-tale signs of child abuse that went unnoticed, despite 60 visits from healthcare professionals and others charged with looking after his best interests.

For Haringey Council to lose one infant may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. Precisely because the deaths of Victoria Climbié and Baby P occurred in the same unfashionable patch of North London, it was always inevitable that whoever ended up carrying the can would face sudden career termination, with extreme prejudice.

Just to make sure on that point, the rightwing press launched a full-on propaganda drive against the local authority in question and its social services department. I mean, look at the dramatis personae here: Social workers! Labour councillors! Feckless single mums on benefit! Every habitual object of tabloid ridicule and scorn, brought together in one great obvious target for Five Minutes’ Hate.

Ofsted, the Healthcare Commission and the Chief Inspector of Constabulary joined forces, just to underline the message that the government got the message. Their joint report reiterates that many of the procedures in place were ‘inadequate’, ‘unacceptable’, ‘poor’ and ‘unreliable’.

As a direct result, council leader George Meehan and cabinet member for children Liz Santry have resigned; Sharon Shoesmith, director of children's services, has been removed from her post; and two other officials have been suspended, while three social workers are subject to review.

This case happened on their watch, the argument will run. And so it did. But unfashionable though it will be to say this, I am not sure that placating Daily Mail - to which New Labour seemingly at all times defers as the definitive voice of reason on social policy – is the right thing to do here.

Yes, Baby P is dead, when his life could have been saved, in circumstances where competence was an issue. But it is important to stress that no one person was directly culpable. It was a systems failure.

Jean Charles de Menezes is also dead. Yet the Metropolitan Police have been found culpable of nothing worse than health and safety offences, and Cressida Dick is still in post. An inquest jury was today directed that it could not return a verdict of unlawful killing. Meanwhile, no-one at the Ministry of Defence was sacked - or even disciplined - for releasing the name of David Kelly. He’s dead, too, by the way.

If there remains a standard by which we can justify when it is necessary for someone in public life to fall on their sword, as the euphemism has it, it has to be applied evenly or not at all. Otherwise we are reduced to the age old expedient of sacking the manager every time the team undergoes a losing streak.

Sometimes I’m thankful that I’m just a simple hack.

PURE EVIL. That’s how one senior police officer branded Karen Matthews, the woman who rigged the kidnap of her nine year old daughter Shannon in the hope of pocketing around £50,000 in reward money.

Without exception this morning’s newspapers lay into her in the crudest possible class-ridden terms, revelling in the multiple stereotypes provided by some council estate chav slapper from Dewsbury who spent most of her benefits on fags. With seven kids by six dads, she clearly shows up Ulrika Jonsson for the lightweight she is in the multiple-father fecundity stakes. But no one's lashing out at the posh birds this time round.

It’s as easy for the tabloids to attack her as it apparently was to get her into the sack. ‘Lazy, sex-mad’ Ms Matthews – the Daily Mail headline writers tell us – represents ‘a pathetic symbol of broken Britain’. Much more of this sort of stuff, and before long they’ll be forced to start asking who broke it.

The coverage of the case was slanted from the start, with even the initial reports of Shannon’s disappearance injected with a certain element of doubt. The contrast with the treatment of those nice Middle England McCanns could not have been more complete. They were too tight to hire babysitters, perhaps, but otherwise completely morally exonerated.

Together with accomplice Michael Donovan, Karen Matthews has been found guilty of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice, and can justifiably expect a substantial custodial sentence.

No-one can for one moment possibly excuse what she did. But it’s worth noting that her whole amateurish and half-baked project – transparently ripped off from the plot line of a widely-watched TV sitcom – was hardly the work of a sophisticated criminal mastermind.

To bandy a term like ‘pure evil’ about for the doings of an intellectually-challenged small-town scamster lacks any sense of proportion. If we are to deploy it, what words can we then use to describe some of the grimmer pages of modern history? ‘Desperately social inadequate’ sounds somewhat closer to the mark.

LORD Mandelson – back when he was just plain Peter, and resolutely still in the closet – used to write a column for FHM. Given that this publication is known chiefly for its annual rundown of ‘the world’s 100 sexiest women’, I always found that idea amusingly incongruous.

That Mandy’s sexual preferences were other than those glorified in the glossy in question was open knowledge at Westminster at the time. Yet there was Bobby, month after month, trying to send the electorate the subliminal message that he was just a regular red-blooded fashion-conscious skirt-chasin’ kinda guy at heart.

But not all Labour MPs view lads’ mags as a straightforward media opportunity; Claire Curtis-Thomas is campaigning to get them reclassified as pornography. I fear that she is entering a world of pain, and all for no good purpose.

We have been here before, more or less. Back in 1987, Clare Short – then a backbencher on the Labour left - introduced her Indecent Displays (Newspapers) Bill into the Commons. The target of her ire was the topless pin ups that used to feature prominently in The Sun and – if I remember correctly – the Daily Mirror, too.

The Bill stood no chance of making it onto the statute books. But that didn’t stop the Murdoch press launching a sustained campaign of sexist vituperation against ‘Killjoy Clare’, openly branding her ‘fat and ugly’ and ‘Short on looks’.

I fear that Ms Curtis-Thomas’s drive to get FHM, Zoo, Nuts and Loaded on the top shelf will meet with no more concrete a result, and is bound to win her the moniker ‘Killjoy Claire’ to boot.

Ms Curtis-Thomas maintains, not without justification, that the content of lads’ mags … is barely distinguishable from recognised top-shelf pornography. Women in these publications are shown only as cheap, contemptible sexual commodities, fit to be subjected to a range of exploitative, violent and degrading activities.

Quite. I am not a reader of any of these titles. But from what I understand, the content is largely limited to tit ‘n’ bum pictures and endless features about the joys of a night on the piss that are surely as dreary as they are leery.

The reality is that sexist images of women – from advertising to pornography – do not cause women’s oppression. They are themselves products of a society based on gender inequalities of wealth and power.

Women’s oppression dates back thousands of years before the printing press, and is rooted in the rise of class society, private property, and the family as an institution of social and economic control.

With ‘adult shops’ such as Ann Summers and Harmony on every High Street, sexually explicit advertising a standard feature of the average bus stop, and widespread availability of pornography to cater for every taste within instant reach of any kid with an internet connection, the shelf on which Nuts sits in W.H. Smith is neither here nor there.

JUST four months before New Labour took office, Bernie Ecclestone – the former secondhand car salesman who now heads Formula One, the world’s most lucrative sport – gave the party a cheque for £1m.

Shortly after Blair’s election victory, Bernie and a team of his F1 mates met the new prime minister in Downing Street. The way Ecclestone tells it, the gathering was simply ‘a general discussion about life’. You know, exactly the kind of tittle-tattle chinwag for which PMs so often make time in their busy schedule.

Most of the talking, reportedly, was done by the Formula One Association marketing man, a certain Max Mosley. That’s right, the son of Britain’s most famous fascist and a former far right activist himself, earlier in this year much in the headlines after the News of the World rumbled his predilection for five-hookers-at-a-time Luftwaffe-theme spanking orgies.

The government, which had no plans to make Ecclestone’s six-figure generosity public knowledge, almost immediately afterwards exempted Formula One from its proposed ban on tobacco industry sponsorship of sporting events. It has persistently denied any link between the donations and the helpful opt-out ever since.

The truth is, governments of all parties have long been profoundly ambiguous about the issue of tobacco, which every year both kills lot of people and raises shedloads of tax revenue.

The evil weed could have been outlawed decades ago – and that’s not something I am advocating, by the way - had the political will been there. Instead, the ineffectual tactic has been to counter smoking by repeated salami-slicing of promotional efforts.

A ban on television advertising of tobacco was introduced in 1965; today plans to end the display of cigarettes in shops and supermarkets from 2013 have been unveiled. That’s not exactly rapid progress in 48 years.

Even now, there are reports that Lord Mandelson scuppered calls to scrap vending machines, now as in my teenage years by far the easiest source of supply for the underage smoker, on the grounds that it would hurt small businesses.

So here’s a suggestion for the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, the Tobacco Retailers’ Alliance and all other organisations opposed to the latest development. Have a whipround, and you can almost certainly get this date pushed back further; helpfully, the going rate has already been established.

FALINGE, you say? Never heard of it, at least not until this morning. Turns out it’s an area of Rochdale. Not sure exactly how the place name is pronounced, but presumably the enunciation is not dissimilar to 'falling'. Or maybe you say it something like ‘failing’.

I do know all about Rochdale, though. Never been there – I am a consciously hip North London media type after all, why would I bother? - but I am vaguely aware that it is up north. Somewhere. It was once the home of Gracie Fields, while the local football team has played in the bottom division of the Football League continuously since 1974.

But those are not Rochdale’s only claims to fame. Falinge, according to the Manchester Evening News, has the distinction of being ‘the sick note capital of the country’. And that’s only the start of its social problems. Of 4,500 people living there, just 250 of them hold down a job:

New figures show more than four in 10 of the working population in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale are too sick to go to work.

Earlier this year the same ward was identified as having the highest level of unemployment in the country, with over three quarters on benefits.

It sounds, in other words, just the sort of place James Purnell has in mind with his latest valiant assault on dependency culture. Not for much longer will those malingering northern scroungers and their feckless feral offspring fund their fast food diet and perpetual fag smoking lifestyle choices on the backs of the taxes of swing voters in marginal southern seats. Oh no.

From now on, virtually everyone will have to do something in return for their benefits, Mr Purnell told the Today Programme this morning. People in places like Falinge are going to have to live up their obligations, he stressed.

The odd thing is, Rochdale was once a pretty prosperous kind of place. It has even been described as ‘a boomtown of the industrial revolution’. There was no shortage of employment opportunities in the hey-day of the Lancashire textile industry.

More recently, the infamous Turner & Newell asbestos factory provided the backbone of the local economy. Nasty business, that mesothelioma, but musn’t grumble. A job is a job, after all. I would ask Mr Purnell for confirmation on that sentiment, but with a CV that shows effortless progress from public school to the ministerial benches, via Balliol, a spot of policy wonkery and a sinecure at the BBC, I’m not sure his knowledge would be firsthand.

But even T&N is now long gone. Probably the chief reason that thousands of people in Falinge don’t have a job is because there are no jobs to have. If there are no jobs, threats to cut benefits are simply to no avail. But hey, they’ll make for great headlines in the Daily Mail tomorrow morning, and that’s what counts, isn’t it?

POLITICIANS are banging on about the white working class again. Hazel Blears - daughter of a maintenance fitter from Salford - at least knows the milieu in the firsthand way Harriet Harman never will.

Even so, she has managed completely to misinterpret the results of a survey that shows many ordinary white working people on council estates express fears about immigration, and feel a sense of unfairness at the way they are treated. Then again, so has almost everybody.

In some quarters, the notes of bien pensant contempt are readily audible. ‘These people’ simply do not understand what integration means, we read in several newspapers.

Further to the left, those that stress the middle class nature of the British National Party after the recent leak of its membership list will be outraged at the very notion that workers can possible be racist.

Still others reject the concept of a white working class, separate from the working class in general and with a distinct identity, often regarded as implicitly reactionary.

But if the general point is well taken, simple observation suggests that outside of a relatively limited number of melting pot areas, an undeniable white working class cultural identity exists in this country.

Political commonsense over the last two decades has insisted that elections are won and lost in a small number of key marginals, and manifestoes have been geared exclusively to swing voter concerns. If there are millions of ordinary people out there who think that New Labour has written them off as mere voting fodder with no viable electoral options, they are not far wrong. That, of course, potentially represents a colossal opening for the far right.

Now, I was born in east London and am the son of a railway worker. Culturally - if hardly socially these days - I remain white working class. First generation middle-class white working class, if you want to put it like that. Top university-educated white working class, even. White working class, despite now knowing which fork to use in an overpriced restaurant. But I will never forget that I didn’t used to be a poncey tosser.

As a result of being brung up proper, I have managed to avoid the all too frequent romanticisation of ’the workers’ to which upper-class lefties are sometimes prone. It has always been the case that many proles are politically rightwing and viscerally racist. I don’t have to go outside some – but only some - of own family to know that.

On the other hand, there is something new in today’s situation, something different about today’s racism, that has made the growth of the BNP possible. It is no longer a racism based a deliberately-inculcated mass ideological basis for imperialism, which I noticed in an uncle sent to Korea in the early 1950s to shoot at gooks, for instance.

This is instead a racism rooted in the collapse of social housing, a racism born of the disappearance of blue collar employment and grassroots trade union organisation, a racism of benefit cuts, a racism centred on the perception that nobody in a position of authority really gives a shit. You might even want to call it a racism of desperation.

But whatever you call it, it is ugly and festering and dangerous, and Labour’s conscious decision to snub the white working class in favour of Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman is no small part of the explanation. In her heart of hearts, I suspect Hazel Blears knows that.

ON MONDAY evening, the fifth-richest man in Germany wrote a note for his family, and then took a walk down to the railway track in his home village of Blaubeuren. His body was recovered some time later.

I am at the human level naturally sorry for those close to Adolf Merckle, whose photograph dominates the front page of The Financial Times this morning; they do not of course deserve the degree of pain his action will inflict.

Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding the incident remind me of Marx’s famous description of individual capitalists as ‘capital personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will’.

Merckle controlled companies with a combined turnover of £27bn, and was personally worth about £6bn. He could have chosen never to work again, and to live out his days in luxury unimaginable to most of us. Short of immortality, there is nothing he could conceivably have wanted that he could not easily have had.

But as Marx put it, when we are dealing with a man who becomes capital personified, ‘appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations’.

So last year, Merckle borrowed vast quantities of Volkswagen shares he did not own, and went on to offload them. This is an example of so-called short selling, which is a means of betting that an equity will fall sharply. Then you can buy replacement shares at a lower price, and profit from the difference.

Why would you want to do that when you already have more than you could ever spend sitting in your bank account? ‘Appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract’ sounds to me just about the only imaginable spur.

But Merckle’s wager went spectacularly wrong when VW’s share price quadrupled in just two days. Facing ruin, he decided he would rather die than go broke. Never did the old aphorism ‘it’s only money’ sound more apt.

The thing is, Merckle will not be the only suicide to result from the current economic climate, as recent research by the Samaritans indicates:

Economic recession, especially when it is sudden and severe, can lead to an increase in suicide rates. This is not only because more people become unemployed and, as a result, more psychologically vulnerable, but also because those in employment feel threatened too. The fear of losing one’s job and pressures caused by a downturn in business, demotion or pension plan cutbacks can be bad for mental health and therefore increase suicide risk.

The charity adds that the unemployed are two or three times more likely to kill themselves than those in employment, leading to the obvious conclusion that the suicide rate will rise sharply in 2009.

Recession and the consequent mass unemployment it inevitably brings are in the final analysis another face capital’s drive to accumulate. Working class people rather than billionaires are many times more likely to end up dead by their own hands as a result.

If the recession of the early 1980s is anything to go by, few of their stories will make it into the FT or any other national newspaper. They are just as much victims of capital, nevertheless.

THE ONE-TIME workshop of the world has transformed into a country content to leave provision of key job skills for young people in the hands of franchisee burger-flippers; McDonald’s will shortly become Britain’s largest provider of apprenticeships. You can almost hear the mocking laughter emanating from Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie HQ this side of the North Sea.

Time was when an apprenticeship meant training to be an electrician, plumber, shipyard worker or brickie. True, leaving school at 15 to take one up was an admission that a kid was ‘not academically inclined’, as we used to say back then.

But that didn’t mean to say they were thick. These are real skills, and in the words of millions of working class fathers - my own included - ‘learn a trade, son, you’ll never want for work’.

That was before Thatcherism criminally destroyed Britain’s industrial base. Instead of trying to regenerate it, New Labour took that as a fait accompli, and embarked on a headlong rush to fill the training gap by dramatically expanding the number of graduates.

In principle, everybody on the left fully supports the idea that university education should be open to all who can benefit from it, and supported by payment of a grant sufficient on which to live, come to that.

But three years of degree-level study just is not right for everybody. It wasn’t right for me at 18, for instance, although I was able to take advantage slightly later.

The trouble is, the ‘all must have degrees’ mentality cruelly dashes the expectations from those with 2.2 in poorly-regarded subjects from poorly-regarded institutions, who have little chance of securing what previous generations regarded as ‘graduate’ employment.

Now, you could argue that the advent of the McDonald’s apprenticeship is simply a sober recognition of where we are at right now. But at a time when the alumni of one school in particular are making comeback in their rightful role of leading the Conservative Party, the reality is that they will simply act as mechanism for reinforcing a massive existing educational class divide. Here’s how the Financial Times reports the story:

Up to 6,000 of McDonald’s 72,000 UK employees would be offered apprenticeships this year ‘providing staff with the opportunity to gain a valuable, nationally recognised qualification that is equivalent to five GCSEs grade A* to C, it said.

Equivalent to five good GCSEs? Leave it out. To the extent that there is any skill whatsoever in grilling patties of reconstituted cattle testicles, the knack presumably doesn’t take that long to teach.

Worryingly, McDonalds already has its own vocational equivalents to A-levels. The thing is, a history A-level will teach you about such themes as German unification, the rise of imperialism, world war one and the Russian revolution. Study economics in the sixth form, and you will get a grounding in the basic question of ‘who gets what’, while sociology will introduce you to concepts such as social class and even elementary Marxism.

The last thing a business built on systematic deskilling – a business such as McDonald’s, in other words - wants is a workforce that thinks critically about such topics as alienation in the workplace.

True, I haven’t actually seen the McA-level syllabus, but I doubt if it goes large on dangerous ideas. I’d also take a modest wager that nobody has yet gotten into Oxbridge on the back of this particular piece of paper, ‘A-level equivalent’ or not.

Equality of educational opportunity will never be achieved while social inequality continues to grow. But palming off teenagers from poorer backgrounds with fourth-rate pseudo-qualifications further entrenches their disadvantage. Is it any wonder that drug dealing starts looking like an attractive option?

After all, his great granduncle was an open fascist sympathiser suspected of passing secrets to Hitler’s Germany, while his granddad routinely berates Chinese people for their ‘slitty eyes’ and Indians for their inability to wire a fusebox.

Attitudes bordering on the white supremacist are truly second only to a collective lack of education attainment as distinguishing characteristics of the House of Windsor.

Yet only last year, a report written by Lord Goldsmith, on behalf of Gordon Brown, argued that all school-leavers should swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. Even by New Labour standards, that is one seriously dumb idea. How can any Asian teenager be expected to hold anyone from that family in any real respect?

However, republicans do themselves a disservice if they restrict any critique of the monarchy to the foibles, gaffes and idiosyncrasies of individual royals. To do so misses the crucial political point.

Britain’s unwritten constitution is centred around the notion that ‘the crown’ - to which Harry Wales is third in line - is sovereign. Accordingly, the government is ‘Her Majesty’s Government’, representing the interests of Elizabeth Windsor rather than the people that elected it into office.

Using the so-called royal prerogative, ministers can conclude treaties, appoint anyone they please to any public position, award honours and peerages, manage the civil service, introduce delegated legislation and even declare war without approval from parliament.

If demonstration be needed that Britain is a long way from being a meritocracy, the constitutional monarchy provides it in full. Our racist royal family’s continued existence – as an institution rather than as individuals, I should stress - is an insult to democratic and egalitarian values. I only hope that I live long enough to see this country become the republic a forward-looking and self-confident nation would have declared itself decades ago.

IF YOU want to get some idea of how hard it is to be a teacher these days, take a look at the titles of some of the books available in the education department of your local Waterstones.

For a start, there is ‘Getting the buggers to turn up’, which just about says it all. Other volumes include 'I'm a teacher, get me out of here', 'Teacher on the run; true tales of classroom chaos' and even 'Guerilla guide to teaching'.

Guerilla guide to teaching? I mean, I knew things were bad and that Class A drugs have probably overtaken fags in terms of behind-the-bikesheds popularity. But can year eight really be sufficiently forbidding to merit Baader-Meinhof tactics? Is it entirely necessary cruelly to execute little Johnny simply because he didn't hand in his homework?

Personally, I have nothing but admiration for those able to earn a living by teaching in Britain's toughest secondary schools. It is not something I feel I would be able to do myself.

Various people I have known have tried and failed. One mate had a nervous breakdown after his first term in the job. Another former drinking buddy – a strapping Geordie bloke of working class origin, and certainly no wimp - spent a year doing supply teaching in Newham before jacking it in to become a painter and decorator. The money was better and the work was far less hassle, he explained.

On the other hand, I did once date a Cambridge languages grad who claimed some success in drilling Spanish irregular verbs into the consciousness of the youth of Harringey. So obviously it can be done.

Nevertheless, volunteers aren’t queuing up to fill the many vacancies in the establishments Alastair Campbell once frankly branded as ‘bog standard comprehensives’. Things are so bad that the government is now stumping up £10,000 bonuses to teachers who can hold down the job for three years.

The money will be available to around 6,000 teachers in around 500 so-called ‘National Challenge Schools’, where fewer than 30% of the pupils achieve five good GCSEs and more than 30% are on free school meals.

As far as I’m concerned, they more than deserve the extra cash. But as the National Union of Teachers points out, offering individuals a sum of money equivalent to what Linda Evangelista used to charge for getting out of bed in the morning will not ultimately make much difference.

There is a close correlation between educational attainment and the dominant social class of the surrounding community. The best-performing LEAs include Richmond Upon Thames and Surrey, while the worst include Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney. Go figure.

Moreover, the simple act of designating a school a ‘national challenge’ cannot help anybody’s morale; it sends a very public message to heads, staff, parents and pupils alike that their schools suck, despite the best efforts of everybody who works in them. Any lingering hope of attracting cute and clever middle class kiddies simply evaporates.

And not only is 10k over three years not that much of a carrot, but the stick is pretty draconian, too. The penalty for failing to live up to government targets – often entirely arbitrary - is either ‘special measures’ or even closure. How about spending some real money on reducing class sizes instead?

Because when it comes down to it, not even putting inner city teachers on six-figure salaries would abstract from the brutal reality of class-divided Britain.

LET’S not be hypocritical here; like most Londoners who go on holiday, take weekend breaks, and sometimes travel for work, I do use Heathrow from time to time. Not when I can possibly avoid it, though.

I prefer Eurostar for meetings in Brussels and Paris, and as I live only a short bus ride from Euston, it works out quicker to catch the train to Edinburgh or Glasgow. When I need to visit Rotterdam, London City comes in handy. If I have to pay for a flight from my own pocket, I normally end up with one of the cheaper carriers operating out of Luton or Gatwick.

But for intercontinental routes, there is often no realistic alternative to a 30-mile taxi schlepp across the capital in the early hours of the morning, in order to arrive - bleary-eyed and the mandatory two hours ahead of departure - at LH Bloody R.

Frequently I find myself propping up the bar [noises off: my heart bleeds for you, Dave] or buying stuff I don’t need in some of the numerous ‘tax free’ retail outlets, largely out of sheer boredom.

Yes, as you can probably gather, I am not a fan. The logic of the proposition that making Heathrow any bigger will in any way make it better - or, in the jargon, ‘enhance my passenger experience’ - is beyond me. BAA is patently incapable of ensuring the smooth running of the five terminals that are there now.

The government’s proposal to give the go-ahead for a sixth terminal and a third runway is misguided on a number of levels. Let’s start with some baser political considerations. Yesterday’s decision is tantamount to Labour kissing a number of marginal constituencies in west London very firmly goodbye.

That is presumably the explanation for John McDonnell’s Heseltine Moment, which incidentally secured a glowing write-up in the Daily Mail, a feat hitherto way beyond the grasp of any of Labour’s diminishing coterie of backbench Trotskyists. Hopefully he has just secured his re-election.

More importantly, bang goes Labour’s environmentalist credentials, which have long been shaky at the best of times. It would be physically impossible to rip up Sir Nicholas Stern’s 2006 report on how to save the planet, simply because that document is 700 pages thick. But metaphorically speaking, weedy Geoff Hoon has done just that, gifting BoJo and Cameron a popular cause in the process.

The reality is that, rather than facilitating ever growing numbers of flights - and a third runway at Heathrow will boost capacity by 222,0000 flights a year - the government needs to be looking at ways of slashing back the demand for air travel.

Some of the means that this could be achieved - ranging from promotion of videoconferencing to the construction of high speed rail routes - are relatively painless. Others, such as rationing entitlement to flights, will hurt. But to avoid the necessity altogether is simply grave political cowardice.

FOR JUST a few awkward seconds this morning, I was worried that Bel Mooney had finally twigged that the forces of Marxism have long wielded secret control of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston and Haut de la Garenne children’s home, as part of their drive to bring down patriarchy.

What else, I anxiously asked myself, could justify the headline on her sizeable op-ed piece in the Daily Mail this morning: ‘Why do the Left hate the family?’ If she knew my lot, of course, she wouldn’t have to ask. But wait. Hear the woman out:

‘Yet again, a major new report confirms a child fares best with a mother and father. And yet again the Left will denounce and ignore this simple truth,’ the standfirst continues.

She refers, of course, to ‘A Good Childhood’, a study published yesterday by the Children’s Society, which concludes that today’s kids are getting a rough deal. And the Trots are bang to rights on this one:

What will offend liberal Leftwingers most of all is the conclusion — wait for it! — that children thrive best of all within what used to be called the ‘nuclear family’, with a father and a mother.

Except that this is not what the report concludes at all. Here are the key findings, as summarised by the Press Association:

Members of the panel that drew up the report said they believed children's lives have become more difficult than in the past and that "excessive individualism" lies at the root of this problem.

The "me first" society produces more family discord and conflict, more pressure to own things, excessive competition in schools and "unacceptable" income inequality, the report found. The 11 expert members said "excessive individualism" needed to be replaced by a value system where people seek satisfaction more from helping others than pursuing private advantage.

That’s rather a different story, isn’t it? In other words, the alienation of children in our society is a product of the values of the free market and the Thatcherite doctrine – now accepted by all major parties – that the pursuit of self-interest is the route to the social good.

Of course no one with any sense denies that – other things being equal – life under one roof with a loving mum and dad is the best thing for a kid. Problems arise because all too often, other things are not equal.

Remember the horrifying case in Sheffield last year, in which it was revealed that a man had fathered seven children by persistently raping his daughters? Can that be adduced as evidence that the nuclear family is the only environment in which kids can ‘thrive best of all’?

I know that the following suggestion will cause apoplexy among Daily Mail readers, but surely even they concede that gay adoption would have been preferable in this instance?

Such circumstances are thankfully exceptional. Far more commonly, relationships between parents break down irretrievably. As the son of a couple who decided to ‘stick together for the sake of the children’ – not an unusual situation in the 1960s – I remain convinced that a civilised divorce would have been the best thing for everybody concerned.

But if you want to know the main reason for the breakdown of the nuclear family in Britain, look to the way in which capitalism has forced more and more mothers into the workforce, by pushing down wages to the point where both parents have to work to make ends meet. How is anybody supposed to be a good parent after putting in a 70-hour week?

In short, it is hardly the left that undermines family structures; it is the capitalist economy. In wilfully distorting the research and ignoring some of the basic reality about the way our society operates, Ms Mooney comprehensively fails to make her case.

IF YOU work for Silver Ring Thing – the pro-chastity group that encourages teenagers to pledge virginity until their wedding night – and you get caught on camera at a popular local dogging spot, you can reasonably expect to be asked to consider your future with the organisation.

Likewise, an employee sneaking a large doner with everything into the offices of the Vegetarian Society can expect to be hauled up on a disciplinary. And if you are on the staff of the League Against Cruel Sports, but spend your weekends foxhunting and use your water cooler conversations to proselityse, you boss will doubtless want words.

Common sense suggests that what people do for a living imposes certain obligations on them, as well as restrictions on their behaviour. The trouble is, the nature of the obligations and restrictions varies from case to case, making hard and fast guidelines difficult.

Let us consider three recent stories that all highlight the question of how far employees should be allowed to express opinions – especially those of a contentious religious or political nature - in the firm’s time and on the firm’s premises.

Carol Thatcher has been sacked from her television job for calling a black tennis player a ‘golliwog’; Christian nurse Caroline Petrie was temporarily suspended after offering to pray for a patient; and now the Church of England is considering a ban on clergy joining the British National Party.

There are obviously dilemmas for the left here. After all, we should take maximisation of liberty, including freedom of speech, freedom of association and the right to join any legal organisation, as our basic starting point.

But the reality of wage slavery is that capitalist social relations of production in the workplace sometimes trump all other considerations. You either do what your boss tells you, or you collect your P45.

Many companies restrict the number of fag breaks an employee can take in a day, and ban the consumption of alcohol at lunchtime. Indeed, airline pilots and train drivers face limitations on drinking in what is otherwise their own time, to ensure they are not hung over when they clock on. Quite right, too.

The upshot for most of us is that until 4.59 pm, we must endure sobriety and nicotine deprivation; come 5.01 pm, those so inclined can be found outside the nearest pub with a G&T in one hand and a B&H in the other. None of that should concern management.

Nevertheless, I do think Thatch Jr was bang to rights. Despite the despicable contortions of the rightwing columnists that rushed to her defence – Richard Littlejohn laughably suggests that that the woman referred to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga as a ‘huggable golliwog’, in a touchy-feely kind of way – the racist connotations of the remark are as obvious as they are unacceptable.

Had she cut to the chase and called the bloke a wog, they matter would have been beyond doubt. There is a rule of thumb here; if you are in your workplace and you are addressing your workmates, you are not engaged in a ‘private conversation’.

Unlike the bigoted daughter of our erstwhile prime minister, Ms Petrie doubtlessly meant well. But she needs to bear in mind that Christianity is now a minority doctrine in this country, and that she cannot know in advance that such suggestions on her part will be well received.

Had I been her line manager, I would have taken her to one side and told her: ‘Do it again, love, and you’re on second written; now piss off and scrub out the old biddy’s bedpan’. But clearly she did not deserve the sack.

Finally, I am firmly of the opinion that voluntary organisations should be able to chose their membership. That principle was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2007 in Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen v. the United Kingdom, which ruled that trade unions may exclude members of the BNP.

This does not imply a call for a British berufsverbot. Clearly employment proscriptions on political grounds should be avoided where possible. Again, it is necessary to judge job by job. How would a devout interracial CofE couple that wanted to get married feel if they knew the local vicar was in the fash? Sorry, but that’s just not on.

However, these are difficult issues and I’m willing to listen to other takes. Let me know what you think in the comments box.

AT LEAST seven former Tory MPs – some of them hardline rightwingers in the Thatcher years – have defected to New Labour in recent years, collecting an impressive haul of ministerial portfolios and peerages on the way.

My guess is that no more will be coming over, and that the traffic will now be in the other direction. Funny how the one way street always seem to run from the party on the wane towards the party in the ascendancy, and never the other way round.

A harbinger on this one is surely the decision of Sir David Freud, the erstwhile City banker and the intellectual inspiration behind James Purnell’s workfare plans, to sign up with Cameron’s outfit, on promise of both a seat in the Lords and a seat on the Tory frontbench. There are at least a couple of Labour MPs who would not find a similar switch too much of an ideological shift, especially if a safe seat or two were on offer.

Freud was in 2007 commissioned to draw up a long-term review of New Labour’s ‘welfare to work’ efforts. Famously, he boasted of spending just three weeks on the task, from start to finish, despite having no previous knowledge of social policy. Some of us would be hard pushed to put up a garden shed on that timescale; obviously a bloke who likes to do things thoroughly, then.

Among his findings were the contention that two-thirds of the 2.6m people on Incapacity Benefit are fully capable of holding down a job. If need be, they should be subject to ‘hassle’ – that’s his choice of word - if they do not pull their finger out. This can be achieved by paying private companies ‘masses’ – his word again – to find them employment, on a payment-by-results basis.

Blair was reportedly enthusiastic, Brown not, so the ideas were not initially implemented. Freud went off in a huff to become an adviser to Tory shadow work secretary Chris Grayling. But when James Purnell got the cabinet gig last year, he lured Freud back into the New Labour camp and adopted his ideas wholesale in a white paper published last December.

If you want a demonstration that Labour and the Conservatives lack any differences of substance on this question, you surely have the proof before you.

What should the left say on this one? Remember that throughout the 1980s, we routinely insisted that the Tories dumped many long-term unemployed people on disability benefits in order to massage down politically sensitive joblessness figures. It would be inconsistent to retract that claim now, and if only out of inertia, the same charge can be laid against New Labour.

Nor should we have any problem with the idea of helping those on IB to find work that they are able to do. All the research underlines that most people are indeed better of working if they have the opportunity, for reasons of self esteem as much as income.

Yet obvious objection is that if you offer private companies large sums of money to get IB claimants into any damn job going – Freud suggests that anything up to £62,000 a throw would be ‘economically rational’ – then they are not going to be overly scrupulous about the use of strongarm tactics to secure a result.

But more damagingly, it is already clear that Freud’s schema simply cannot work in the current climate. As Alex Barker notes in his FT Westminster Blog, the blueprint was designed for a period when jobs were readily available and funds easy to come by. Neither condition applies any longer.

Under the Freud-inspired Pathways to Work programme launched last year, for instance, private companies have already been taken on to find work for Britain’s 2.6m Incapacity Benefit claimants. They are struggling to hit 25% of their targets. With the dole queue about to hit 3m, that proportion can only fall further.

Most tellingly of all from the private sector’s point of view, nobody is making money from all this, and several providers want to throw in their contracts unless they get more money upfront from the government.

As anyone who has seen the latest opinion polls – which put New Labour on just 25% - there is little doubt that our party-hopping friend will get the chance to roll out his precise take on workfare under the imminent Cameron administration. How much that will help the people it is intended to help is another matter altogether.

Political anorak corner: Tory MPs defecting to New Labour include Peter Temple-Morris, Alan Amos, Alan Howarth, Shaun Woodward, Anthony Nelson Robert Jackson and Quentin Davies. Anybody know of any others?

IN A limited sense, the rightwing commentariat are bang on the money; yes, the case of Alfie Patten, Chantelle Steadman and the daughter born of their one-off adolescent legover does tell us much about morality in Britain today. It’s just that it doesn’t point to quite the things they would have us believe.

The evasion tactic these writers habitually employ – essentially, laying everything from teenage knife crime to the death of Baby P at the door of some inchoate ‘liberalism’ – does not and cannot wash in these instances, because by definition, every aspect of contemporary British culture is of rightist provenance.

Under the Tories and New Labour alike, the morality that has dominated this country in the three decades and more since the collapse of social democracy has been the morality of the free market.

Interestingly, our self-satisfied pundits are happy to glorify that economic system in every other manifestation, particularly when their buddies are getting rich off the back of it. Yet in contrast to the boys queuing up for a DNA test after sex with Chantelle, they are not particularly keen to acknowledge parentage of their offspring.

Alfie might not know what the word ‘financially’ means. But Max Clifford certainly does, and that’s what really counts. Unsurprisingly, all of the sordid adults that have had anything to do with three sorry little kids from Eastbourne have been acting just like the utility-maximising rational economic agents straight out of the pages of a neoclassical textbook. Pimp that big-eyed 13-year-old boy; all aboard for the payday of a lifetime.

Naturally, the Sun got the buy up. What is the morality of Britain’s biggest circulation tabloids splashing the story to add to Rupert Murdoch’s coffers? Is it OK for Britain’s top publicist to make a nice little drinkie out of it? Oddly enough, Melanie Phillips doesn’t bother to raise such points; perhaps she’s just out of sorts because the Daily Mail didn’t get there first.

Likewise, David Cameron was quick to take political advantage, with a nicely-crafted soundbite about ‘children having children’. But how moral is it for a politician to exploit children having children in order to propagandise on behalf of morality? I’ll leave that one to the ethicists among you to sort out.

If Britain does have a structural morality problem, it essentially emerged during the hey-day of Thatcherism. What housing minister Caroline Flint sneeringly derided as ‘the culture of no one works around here’ is rooted in the deliberately-generated mass unemployment the Tories caused in the early 1980s. Nobody worked around many places, because there were not any jobs; often there are still not. The legacy has been social corrosion on a previously unimaginable scale.

Meanwhile, nothing was allowed to stand in the way of the promotion of consumerism, and visual imagery from advertisements to pop videos has become saturated with blatantly commoditised sexuality. If tweenies are running around with sweatshirts emblazoned FCUK in large letters, don’t be surprised if the end up FCUKing rather sooner than earlier generations.

New Labour could have done much to reverse all this. Instead, it has famously been ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting filthy rich, leaving it poorly placed to criticise those who choose unorthodox means.

The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, the Great Royal Bank of Scotland Swindle, the Private Finance Initiative; it matters not to Lord Mandelson. By that moral yardstick, the only drawback with Karen Matthews’ scam was that the kidnap of Shannon did not end up with the receipt of a cheque from News International. But you’ve got to hand it to the gal, she’s some entrepreneur for a single mum from Dewsbury.

‘Broken Britain’ is likely to feature as one of the main rightwing riffs between now and the next general election. Fortunately, the isolated incidents that tend to feature in the narrative are not necessarily proof of the contention.

But if Britain is indeed broken, the left needs to make sure that Cameron is not allowed to forget who broke it in the first place, and to ask why New Labour thraldom to the free market preventing it from fixing matters. We should have plenty of time for that after 2010.

‘PREACHER of hate’, ‘truly dangerous individual’, ‘Osama Bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe’; if rhetoric alone were sufficient to secure a criminal conviction, Abu Qatada would currently be in the early years of a very long stretch. Luckily for all of us that live in Britain, any amount of declamation or hearsay is not enough to put somebody behind bars.

Yes, of course this man’s openly expressed views are utterly odious and utterly repugnant. However, until the Thought Police do finally get to run the show in Airstrip One, to endlessly reiterate that undeniable point is to miss what is at stake, namely the quaint insistence that the same rules must apply to all.

Either there is evidence to show that Qatada has committed offences under British law, in which case he should be accorded due process, and punished if found guilty. Or there is insufficient evidence to show that Qatada has committed offences under British law, in which case he is entitled to compensation for the period he spent in detention without charge or trial.

The £2,500 he has today been awarded is extremely modest recompense for well over two years banged up in Belmarsh. The likelihood is that in setting payment at so ludicrously low a level – the Daily Mail was predicting this morning that Qatada could get ‘hundreds of thousands’ - the European Court of Human Rights intends purely to make a point.

But the point the ECHR is symbolically stressing - that New Labour’s Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 is the type of legislation profoundly unacceptable in a modern European democracy – is the correct one.

Similar logical consistency must also be applied to the mistaken decision to deport Qatada to Jordan. The notion of human rights is now routinely extended into territory into which it was clearly never designed to apply. City Boys are claiming with a semblance of a straight face that they have a ‘human right’ to a gargantuan bonus; if you want a definition of reductio ad absurdum, there you have it.

But if the concept is to have any meaning at all – as I am convinced it must – then the human right not to be tortured must be upheld, even for the irredeemably reprobate. That is the fate likely to befall Qatada were he to be returned to his native country. Accordingly, it follows that it would be morally wrong to send him there.

In the end, we come back to the old saw about whether or not society must tolerate the intolerant. Ultimately, it is better that it does so, rather than become intolerant itself. Yes, there are qualifications involved; it can be maintained that by being intolerant of others, Qatada himself forfeits his ability to complain about intolerant treatment.

Even so, it remains the right – perhaps even the duty – of civil libertarians to complain on his behalf. Unless the authorities can convincingly demonstrate that he has crossed some inviolable line, that is what we should be doing.

IT’S THE kind of prediction that I will only finally believe when I see the footage of barricades comprised of burning designer handbags hastily thrown up in Tunbridge Wells and Leamington Spa.

But given just how intimately the Guardian knows the mood of Hugo and Sophie Sixpack, let us suspend disbelief, and consider with due trepidation the newspaper’s warning this morning that Britain is in for a ‘summer of rage’, in which ‘middle class anger at economic crisis could erupt into violence on the streets’.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the best-mannered and most polite protests in British political history. Even as we speak, some opportunist author is presumably working on the Little Book of Riot Etiquette, a sure-fire number one in the non-fiction chart if this alarming scenario of petit bourgeois quasi-insurrection does come to fruition.

Molotov Cocktails, we will be told, must be passed to the left and not be thrown while wearing brown shoes or before 6 pm. It will also be deemed inexcusably bad form to run away from a pitched battle with a phalanx of tooled up police before one has had a chance to present flowers to the hostess.

Demographics alone dictates that the Dalston branch of Matalan will be immune from looting. But just picture the scene as the baby buggies get hurled through the plate glass windows of Fresh & Wild on Stoke Newington Church Street, and squads of pierced-nose yummy mummies clad in combat gear dive in to liberate overpriced organic lettuce.

What if things get really serious? At that point, some tax lawyers will get sufficiently angry to order the nanny to forget the school run and to engage in acts of sustained sedition on their behalf. Could legitimate order possibly survive?

On the other hand, it might just be that the front page splash on Britain’s highest circulation Berliner this morning is nothing more than hastily concocted tosh, based purely on the contention of a senior copper that nobody has ever heard of before, without any real evidence advanced in support. All this might happen, I suppose; then again, it might not. At this stage, it is anyone’s guess.

But do read on to the end of the story, in which Superintendent David Hartshorn - head of Metropolitan police’s public order branch, and seemingly the sole source for the entire piece - singles out the extreme right and the far left as the real target of his tirade.

What I suspect we are reading here is advance justification for heavy-handed policing if there is any unrest as a result of the return of mass unemployment. And if there is, it is not the middle class that will be the target.

JUST as once it was hip to be square, these days it is clever to be dumb. At least that is what Harry Mount argues in the Daily Mail this morning, in a piece that contrasts the public perceptions of Jade Goody and Gail Trimble.

Ms Goody – by far the better known of the two, of course - first achieved national eminence following her appearance on Big Brother in 2002, in which she famously referred to East Anglia as ‘East Angular’, apparently under the impression it was a foreign country.

That, and some degree of onscreen fumbling with housemate PJ, was enough to result in overnight fame. Ms Goody went on to become a staple of sleb-based glossies, and lent her name to a fragrance that apparently sells well in Superdrug, perfumier of choice to the fake Burberry-wearing classes. All this has proved enough to build a fortune of £8m.

Although her career seemed on the line in 2007, with an apparently racist outburst aimed at an Indian actress during her second stint in the Big Brother house, her recent diagnosis with terminal cervical cancer has naturally engendered extensive sympathy. Max Clifford was able to milk that factor – one might say ‘to the max’ – in order to secure £1m for the photo rights to Ms Goody’s wedding last weekend.

Ms Trimble, on the other hand, is the heavy hitter of the Corpus Christi team that emerged victorious in this year’s University Challenge. As a result, she has apparently been subjected to extensive criticism on a number of blogs, which have described her as ‘brain-rupturingly irritating’, a ‘vicious bitch’ and a ‘horse-toothed snob’.

As far as I can work out, nobody can find evidence of any objectionable personal habits or character traits on her part. Granted, she is of nerdy and bookish aspect, but that is her lookout. Who is anyone else to tell her how to dress?

Mr Mount does have a point, in that contemporary culture does value a certain type of faux chav populism more highly than intellectualism. That is why so many New Labour politicians feign an interest in the local football team and on no account confess their love for opera.

But what he does not stop to ask is why these two women –more or less coeval – have reached such differing states of academic attainment. After all, human beings are born with more or less equal potential. What proves decisive is their home environment in their early years, and the quality of schooling on offer to them.

Ms Goody is the daughter of a drug addict and habitual criminal, who served prison sentences including a four-year term for robbery, and who died of a drugs overdose at the age of just 42. I cannot immediately ascertain where she was educated, but it seems she left school at 16.

By contrast, Ms Trimble was born in Walton-on-Thames to a manager father and a mother who served as a JP, who were able to afford the fees to send her to Lady Eleanor Holles School. There she secured an astonishing array of GCSEs and A-levels, before going on to take a first in classics at Cambridge, leaving her now working towards her PhD.

To put it another way, basic family details alone would be sufficient for most of us to have no difficulty in predicting where the two early 1980s children were going to end up.

Britain is a self-perpetuating class society, and education is the key transmission mechanism for class. That is not the least of the many arguments in favour of the abolition of public and private schools.

It is easy to take the piss out of Jade for being a thick white racist lumpenproletarian, and as it goes, that description is obviously accurate enough. But the reality is, there was very little chance that she was ever going to end up any other way.

ASK MOST Labour supporters why they prefer a Labour government to a Tory government - at all times and in all circumstances - and the notion that only Labour government can bring about a more egalitarian Britain will almost certainly come in somewhere near the top of the list. What, otherwise, is the point of social democracy?

The architects of New Labour insisted that their project was not about abandoning that goal. Shortly after the 1997 victory, Peter Mandelson addressed those who had any doubt on that score. ‘Judge us after ten years of success in office,’ he insisted. ‘For one of the fruits of that success will be that Britain has become a more equal society.’

Almost 12 years later, it is time to offer a balance sheet, and that is what a book by Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics, published today, attempts to do.

Thanks to a particularly busy schedule today, I am not going to have a chance properly to offer my thoughts on the key findings, as reported in several newspapers this morning. Instead, I’m inviting readers to comment on the summary on offer in the Financial Times, and promise to return to the topic later this week:

Progress in tackling poverty is set to stall owing to entrenched inequalities in British society, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The outcome “will disappoint those who might have hoped that a Labour government in power for over a decade would decisively reverse the gaps in society that had widened over the previous two decades”, said Prof Hills, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion. But whichever government is in power, the gains that have been made may now be “as good as it gets for some time to come”, he said.

With the Tories seemingly certain to dominate the 2010s politically, everybody on the left – not least those of us who consistently campaigned against Thatcherism all through the ‘no such thing as society years’ – will be asking themselves ‘is that it, then?’

ONE OF the following gets paid far too much pension at far too young an age, and is therefore an unacceptable drain on the public purse; choose the correct answer from (a) Fred the Shred or (b) a nurse in the National Health Service.

It hardly takes a brain the size of Gail Trimble’s to work that one out, one would have thought. After all, Sir Fred Goodwin - who is just 50 years old - is picking up a pension of £650,000 a year from a bank that had to be bailed out with £45bn of public money.

Even the congenitally timorous Alistair Darling has politely asked for a refund, although one suspects he has a fat chance of ever seeing a single penny of the dosh ever again.

But thankfully, those frightfully clever chaps who write the editorials at the Daily Telegraph have uncovered the real pension scandal of the moment. Yes, the problem is all those overpaid teachers and hospital porters and squaddies and binmen that are living it large off the back of hedge fund managers.

People on the public payroll retire earlier and with far more generous index-linked pensions than their counterparts in the wealth-creating part of the economy.

Sadly I haven’t the space here for a refresher course on Marxian economics here, but I suspect that the Telegraph is operating on a different definition of ‘wealth-creating part of the economy’ than most of us would.

While few public sector employees directly generate surplus value these days, education and healthcare workers, and many others, are essential to its realisation. Those employed in financial services – and I think these are the folks the Telegraph has in mind – are superfluous. Fred and his mates are not going to be missed; arriverderci, non-doms. I think we’ll somehow manage to get along without you.

This favourable treatment has traditionally been justified on the grounds that public servants are worse paid. No longer. The Office of National Statistics says that median full-time earnings in the public sector last year were £523 a week compared to £460 a week in the private sector.

I’d like to see how the ONS calculated that one, given the stellar earnings of many in the City. It must take huge numbers of burger flips and cleaners to offset all those multi-million pound wedges. This sounds like a job for the brilliant leftie economics blogger Chris Dillow; read his empirically substantiated observations on my recent Jade Goody/Gail Trimble post here.

But in any case, the comparison is irrelevant, given the vastly differing make ups of the two main parts of the economy. At a guess, blue collar workers will often be better off in council employ. Many local government professionals, on the other hand, are getting far below the private sector going rate.

The Government itself recognises the position to be unsustainable: three years ago, it sought to increase the retirement age of state workers from 60 to 65, only to back down at the first whiff of grapeshot from the unions.

Hello? As I remember the agreement – which many on the left regarded as a craven sell out – the retirement age for new entrants to the public sector is now 65, just as the Telegraph counsels. Only those who joined on the basis that retirement was at 60 hold on to that privilege, which is fair enough.

With Labour lacking the stomach for the fight, it will be up to the Tories. In a speech two months ago, David Cameron said a Conservative government would, over time, replace the generous final salary schemes with the more affordable defined benefit schemes now almost universal in the private sector …

The public sector unions – now the most powerful in the country – will take to the streets to preserve the status quo. They will have to be faced down if Britain is not to be fettered with a crippling burden of pension debt in the decades ahead. Margaret Thatcher won her spurs by taking on overweening unions. History may be about to repeat itself.

I had to pinch myself when I read that bit. Unions? Overweening? In Britain of 2009? It’s almost as if the last 30 years didn’t happen. Your party has already smashed effective trade unionism in this country once, guys. Cameron will not have the slightest need to do it again. Unison and the PCS will simply stage a couple of 24-hour stoppages and then sign on the dotted line.

Throughout this rant, one point is altogether missed. Public sector workers – and private sector workers too – earn their pensions, through their labour and their contributions. They are deferred wages. It is up to employers, many of whom were only too keen to go on ‘pensions holidays’ in the 1980s, to stick with their side of the bargain.

And from the social point of view, a nurse who puts in decades of graft has got rather more moral right to a decent standard of living in old age than Fred the Shred has never to work again as a reward for thrashing the banking system.

BACK when I used to frequent strip joints, I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with being there. Given the ‘right on’ nature of the readership of this blog, I suppose I had better explain that point further.

The thing is, I was something of a late developer in terms of politics; it was not until becoming a mature student that I was even aware of the feminist critique of such activity.

As a teenage male factory worker in the East Midlands in the late 1970s, with the rest of my pay packet to burn after giving mum a tenner for my keep, I was fully a part of the pre-Loaded, Nuts and Zoo lad culture of the day.

Friday and Saturday nights started with swallowing a handful of dexies - four for a quid and you were high all night - and then meeting my mates in The Vic to plan the rest of the evening.

Rock gigs won out every time, provided only that there was a decent band on somewhere. If there wasn’t, we would tour the town centre pubs, and might sometimes end up in a dodgy boozer that put on what were still quaintly known as ‘go-go dancers’ once or twice a week.

All of the gang had probably lost their virginity by this point, although we were hardly the worldly sexual sophisticates we affected to be. So we didn’t see a problem with paying a bird to get her kit off. Just for a bit of a laugh, like.

Yet it was noticeable how controlled - innocent, even - the whole proceedings were. The women used to come round with a pint pot, under the protection of a burly bloke obviously there to make sure you kept your hands to yourself. Punters would throw in 50p or a quid, she would smile and say thanks, and then move on to the next group.

Then she would get up on stage, writhe in feigned ecstasy to a couple of heavy rock numbers, flash her tits for a minute or so towards the end of the act, and then disappear, probably to the next pub on the circuit. It all seemed good clean dirty postcard fun, a Carry On film come to life more than anything else.

Fast forward 30 years, and the informally organised once-a-week pub strip night has gone big business mainstream, in the form of the lapdancing industry. Over at Comment is Free, a former lapdancer explains the atmosphere in these establishments, which sound very different from their functional equivalents of the past. Like all areas of economic life, stripping has seemingly become somewhat nastier and more market driven then ever before:

Some dancers pushed the boundaries, prostituting themselves, and the club turned a blind eye …

I had to dodge the gropes, pinching and slaps even though, officially, there was no touching allowed. I felt the stress. I constantly had to say "no" to propositions of sex. Once, as a "joke", a customer pinched my nipple and twisted so hard I nearly passed out. It bled, but the management's reaction was: "Well, stay out of his way then."

For two decades or more now I have been aware of feminist arguments on this issue, and at the theoretical level, I agree with those who argue that the process necessarily does objectify women. Given the basic mechanism at work, how can it be otherwise?

And even leaving such analysis aside, I could never see myself spending the evening in a lapdancing joint, if only because the entertainment on offer sounds anything but erotically charged now that I am no longer a leery youth.

Nevertheless, I have to agree with the conclusions of the CiF writer - she signs herself Nadine Stavonina de Montagnac - that such establishments should be allowed to operate, under strict licenses.

Sure, lapdancing is one aspect of the commodification of heterosexuality under late capitalism, and something that would not arise in a genuinely liberated post-capitalist social formation. Ultimately, socialism will put paid to the Spearmint Rhinos of this world. In the meantime, the last thing the left should do is to line up with the moralistic right.

AL MUHAJIROUN’S Luton demonstration and the Real IRA/Continuity IRA killings of the last week - although vastly differentiated in terms of degree -are based on broadly similar tactical considerations. It is a law of politics that actions such as these are designed to provoke equal and opposite reactions.

The Republican splinter groups seek an Orange backlash, in the hope of reinitiating the kind of climate in which they can put themselves forward as the only force capable of defending Nationalists.

What the Bedfordshire Islamist militants are attempting to achieve, at least at this stage in their development, is of an entirely different order. Nevertheless, I suspect that they would positively have liked to get their faces filled in by irate punters or, better yet, to have seen their protest suppressed by representatives of the British state.

The thought process at work here is analogous to the thinking of a small far left faction that puts a formally correct but otherwise outrageously OTT world revolution-demanding resolution before a staid union branch, in full awareness that only the comrades that move and second are likely to vote in favour.

Why bother? Well, firstly, this is the politics of sect differentiation and branding, based on the need to underline that the groupuscule in question represents ‘the best militants’.

Secondly, the hope is that if they keep up this tactic, occasionally they will attract a vote or two from confused punters that can then be targeted to take out a subscription to their paper.

A possible further parallel with the whackier fringes of Fourth Internationalism is the pretentious cover name chosen by the organisers of yesterday’s picket. Ahle Sunnah al Jamah roughly translates as ‘the majority of the Muslims’. The self-delusion in the nomenclature is palpable.

Al Muhajiroun’s motivations, then, are all too transparent, and presumably they will be cock-a-hoop with the front page publicity they have secured in Britain’s mass circulation press this morning.

Pick your cliché of choice, they are all there to be found; ‘sick Muslim extremists’ from a group ‘linked to a banned preacher of hate’ deliberately ‘hurled abuse at our boys’. Impressionable teenage Muslims –shopgirls like the Lyrical Terrorist, who picked the internet pseudonym because it sounded ‘cool’ - will swoon with admiration.

Yet give or take some changes of formulation, placards expressing more or less identical sentiments could easily have been carried by Luton’s remaining leftists. Come to that, many could happily have been brandished by those nice white-haired little old lady peaceniks from the local Quaker meeting. Yes, the war in Iraq was illegal.

Elementary considerations of freedom of speech mean that even al Muhajiroun must be allowed to make their point, as forcefully as they may choose. They have the right to be provocative.

Other opponents of the Iraq war will just have to grit their teeth and watch them deliver further tens of thousands of votes to the British National Party in their efforts to pick up two or three recruits.

EVERY time I hear an Old Etonian pledge to fix broken Britain, my first response is always to ask who broke the country in the first place. My firm belief is that the roots of every single one of the UK’s pervasive social problems can be found in the vindictive policies enacted by post-1979 Tory governments.

At this point, the intelligent rightwingers that sporadically pop-up in my comments box – and as I a political writer, I welcome sensible critique from all directions, not least because it enables me to sharpen my thinking – usually start to protest.

Thatcherism can’t be to blame for everything, they insist. And indeed, New Labour have had the best part of 12 years to put things right, although its inability to break with Thatcherism has meant that it has not on the whole been successful.

The most popular counter-explanation on the right is the application to Britain of a thesis imported from the US, which maintains that the welfare state has created a benefit-dependent underclass.

It seems fatuous to deny that this social layer exists, but the real question is how it came into being. Call me an economic determinist if you like, but the answer is chiefly to be found in the Thatcherites’ calculated and callous twin decision to deindustrialise and to ditch social democracy.

Nowhere has this process crystallised to such an extent as in Britain’s former coalfields, which have become by-words for deprivation on an inner city scale, on almost any yardstick available.

Now research into erstwhile mining areas, carried out by the Financial Times, underlines the point. All of them ‘lag behind the rest of the UK in levels of wealth creation’, despite New Labour’s serious and costly attempts at urban regeneration, the newspaper has discovered.

At first the strategy even seemed to work; by 2007, unemployment rates in the former coalfields were close to the UK average. But that was largely a statistical illusion, generated by the large numbers of people on Incapacity Benefit claimants.

Moreover, these regions remain structurally weak in economic terms, and are unable to cope with the current recession. While the increase in the number of men claiming unemployment benefits has risen by an average of 56% since August 2007, in Durham, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire the figure has risen by about 80%, and in the Welsh valleys, by almost 90%. In Leicestershire and Warwickshire, it has more than doubled.

Further additions to the joblessness tally - in places already suffering from de facto longterm mass unemployment - will add to every social evil the moralistic right attribute to the wilfulness of the feckless underclass, from teenage pregnancy to heroin addiction.

If you want to see the real impact of a 30 years of uninterrupted pursuit of free market dogmatism, check out your nearest former coalfield, and ask yourself how it got to be in the state in which it currently finds itself.

I GET a regular full health screening at a Harley Street clinic – there’s a bit of a confession for a leftie – which annually sees me subjected to every type of health check known to medical science. Perk of the job.

Most of the results last year were fair enough for a man whose fortysomething infrastructure is sadly catching up with his twentysomething mindset. Not, unfortunately though, the outcome of the liver test.

Naturally the doctor pointed this out. Having already admitted on a questionnaire that I exceed government-mandated drink unit levels almost every damn week, I was bang to rights.

She smiled sweetly, and in an only-slightly-patronising tone of voice, reassured me that the liver is a self-regenerating organ. Cut down and things will sort themselves out; keep caning it, and you could be in trouble. It’s down to you, Mr Osler. Report back next year.

Since then – well, Christmas and New Year excluded – I have been doing my best. Honest I have, doc. But even though my heroic drinking days are long behind me, 21 units equates to just two and a bit bottles of wine a week. I admit to finding it a difficult standard to which to adhere.

Yet a substantial minority of Britons – presumably a higher proportion than admit it in surveys on the topic – are in the same boat. We are a nation of pissheads. But with the greatest respect to Sir Liam Donaldson, I don’t think setting a minimum price of 50p a unit will bring about mass sobriety in the UK.

Londoners routinely pay £3.50 or more for a pint of cooking lager. A bottle of decent wine already comes in at the best part of twice Sir Liam’s recommended £4.50. The cheapest option at the local supermarket – Tesco’s own label Aussie red – is already £3.84. It’s not as if 64p is going to deter most wage earners.

How about £14 for a bottle of whisky? Sorry, but I stopped drinking the crap blended stuff years ago. As a single malt man, I am already accustomed to shelling out rather more than that.

Naturally, Sir Liam tries to frame what is essentially a simplistic reworking of the price floor argument of free market economics in terms of sweet reason:

Let’s try and imagine a country where nobody is physically or sexually assaulted because of alcohol.

Let’s try and imagine a country where nobody dies in an accident cause by alcohol; where no child has to cower in the corner while its mother is beaten by a drunken party.

OK, let’s try and imagine that. The question is, would slightly pricier alcohol bring about utopia? Not if my memories of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s are anything to go by.

As Magnus Linklater points out in The Times this morning, drink was considerably more expensive when I was growing up than it is now. In real terms, he argues, the last three decades has seen the price of beer fall 36% in pubs and 139% in offies. In other words, booze cost far more then than Sir Liam wants to see it cost now. But that didn’t stop people getting ratted.

At the risk of getting all too personal on a blog, I was in the 1960s one of those children who cowered in the corner – well, under a table, usually – when my alcoholic father got home from the pub and knocked seven shades out of my long-suffering mum.

Sometimes our family went hungry because much of my dad’s wages ended up in the coffers of Watney Mann. This has been not an uncommon working class experience since the days of Hogarth, and one historical result was a definite temperance streak in traditional British Labourism. But my point here is that prevailing price levels did not act as barrier to my father’s drunken aggression.

I started going into pubs circa 1974, four years before I was legally old enough to buy a drink. Fights were commonplace. You’d be having a pint, suddenly hear raised voices at the bar, and next thing you know, two men were throwing punches at each before the barman broke them up.

But much of that was down to the all-male atmosphere in the spit and sawdust dumps, where food options were limited to crisps, pork scratchings and a slice of processed cheese in bread roll if you were lucky. It simply doesn’t happen in All Bar One. And if there is more trouble at kicking out time these days, much of it will be chemically fuelled.

The essential libertarian argument – that putting up the cost of a bevvy will primarily hit moderate drinkers, or the 21-unit exceeders among us that can knock it back without coming to blows. Besides that, the policy would be a sure-fire election loser on its own. Somehow I cannot see it ever making a mainstream party manifesto.

SO HOW would the government explain and justify quantitative easing to somebody certain that she had heard of Rio de Janeiro, but not quite sure exactly who the man was?

And how could a woman under the impression that East Angular is a foreign country possibly develop an informed opinion on the merits of British participation in regime change in Iraq?

Following the death of Jade Goody - the erstwhile reality television contestant who skilfully parlayed such lack of general knowledge to become the general public’s number one dumb but ballsy all-round chav sweetheart - politicians have been quick off the mark to express their utterly insincere sympathy.

Yet both prime minister Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron, neither of whom remotely likely to number anyone of her background among their circle of personal friends, are committed to the kind of social and educational policies that leave people such as her unable to operate at the level of full citizenship.

I suspect I may have been a little harsh on Ms Goody in earlier posts on this blog. The more I learn about her upbringing, the easier it is to understand and even sympathise with her public persona, low level racism and all.

With two drug-addicted parents, one of them severely disabled, her failure to attend school very often was hardly surprising. In short, this chick was never destined to grow up to captain a team on University Challenge.

Little wonder that Brown and Cameron prefer to concentrate on the way her death encourages women to go for cervical cancer checks than on the multiple deprivation her life would have exemplified had she not become famous and therefore wealthy.

At least it is a posthumous step up for a woman once denounced as ‘a slag’ by Edwina Currie, with the former Tory minister presumably having to draw deeply on her ample reserves of chutzpah prior to deprecating an imputed want of chastity in others.

But Ms Goody’s ability to make good was a never-to-be-repeated random occurrence. If the political class meant one word of the platitudes scripted for them by their speechwriters, think tanks would even now be devising means to ensure that the tens of thousands of people now growing up in disastrous family situations have some kind of chance of achieving at least a working knowledge of the geography of the UK. In the mean time, Brown and Cameron should spare us the homilies.

ANARCHISTS ate my hamster, nearly all newspapers report this morning. OK, I’m exaggerating here, but not dramatically.

‘Police lock down the City as anarchists prepare for G20 riot’, ‘Anarchists in plan to storm City offices’, ‘European anarchists ‘to invade London’ for G20 violence’, ‘Anarchists organize to Spread the word’: all these headlines and dozens more feature prominently across the mainstream media.

This is the most concerted red scare seen in this country for a long time, and much of the advance hyperbole clearly emanates from the police. This tactic is straight off a Kaiser Chiefs album; predict a riot often enough, and you are pretty certain to get one.

Right now, the giant plasma screen television in the news room is running pictures live from the Square Mile, which shows nothing worse than the standard argy-bargy between protestors and lines of cops, of the type that will be familiar to experienced demo-goers.

Scrub that; I’ve just seen pictures of a few missiles have been thrown, and it suddenly strikes me how ridiculous it is to use the word ‘missile’ in this context. I mean, say what you like about sticks of plywood, but they are qualitatively distinct from the oversized firework North Korea is gearing up to launch in the next few days.

Doubtless a section of the crowd is ready to kick things off, and the Old Bill have not come tooled up to reciprocate for nothing. Any significant ruckus will lead to page after page of anguished coverage this afternoon and tomorrow.

Whatever happens, it is now a week to the day since an outfit calling itself Bank Bosses are Criminals put bricks through some of the windows at the expensive Edinburgh home of disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin, also inflicting damage on his Merc while they were about it.

OK, it will be easy enough to write off both the disruption in the City and attack on Fred the Shred as the work of hotheads, the kind of people Boris Johnson derides as ‘nose-ringed twerps’. Bloody students, innit?

Yet it is harder to dismiss wave of wildcats centred on the Lindsey oil refinery walkout earlier this year in quite that fashion. This, remember, was the first serious co-ordinated defiance of anti-union laws since their introduction in the early 1980s.

The trade union bureaucracy combined compliance with their legal duty not to back such wicked deeds with fairly obvious tacit support, but were clearly not in control. These stoppages were organised by the rank and file, with neither sanction nor assistance from the official machine.

The Prisme packaging factory in Dundee is now entering the fifth week of an occupation against job losses. This company is not even unionised, remember. Elsewhere, some 200 workers at the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast and 80 of their colleagues in Enfield have also taken over their respective plants. Again, we have seen nothing comparable to this since God knows when.

For several decades now, it has been the stock in trade of sections of the far left to trumpet any minute uptick in working class activity as evidence of a ‘new mood’. Never mind the reality that statistics for industrial action are at the lowest level since 1893, that ‘brilliant’ 12-hour strike by binmen in some obscure council no-one has ever heard of points the way to a generalised upsurge in class struggle, we have repeatedly been assured.

But this time it looks different; the increasing radicalisation is palpable, as all the evidence presented above suggests. In so far as this widens the audience ready to give socialist ideas a hearing, the development will be welcome to everyone on the left.

At the same time, it is worth making a few precautionary points. Unlike the 1970s and 1980s, the process is not being refracted through the official structures of the labour movement. I am not aware of any evidence of increased turnout at union meetings, for instance, and certainly there has been no influx of new recruits to the Labour Party.

Great, many activists will maintain. Labour and the unions have in the past acted as a safety valve, redirecting anger into safe channels, and this time will be unable to play such a craven role.

Yet the radicalism that is emerging will inevitably find a political expression somewhere, and we cannot automatically assume that Britain’s disorganised and dishevelled far left is up to the job. While this blog broadly applauded the Lindsey strike, there is no point in denying that the nationalist undertones were clear enough. The dynamic was anti-foreigner as well as anti-capitalist.

Contradictory as it might sound, there is no reason why passive sympathy for those shoving bricks through bankers’ windows cannot be combined with electoral support for the British National Party if a vote for the far right is perceived as the angry, anti-establishment option. There will be a lot to play for in years ahead.

CARDBOARD City in Waterloo was probably the most visible corrective to the atmosphere of bourgeois triumphalism that prevailed across affluent London in the hey-day of Thatcherism.

The three million-long dole queues undeniably had more impact on the UK as a whole than the legions of rough sleepers on the capital’s streets. But that stuff was kind of happening somewhere up north, and so it didn’t really count.

London’s in-your-face mass homelessness, on the other hand, was just as apparent to the Home Counties wealthy as it was to the labour movement. Hell, even the tourists must have noticed.

As Old Etonian Conservative housing minister Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, famously remarked circa 1991, one couldn’t even exit the opera without stepping over a rough sleeper.

I know, I know. In that period, I had much the same experience drunkenly stumbling out of rock clubs at two o’clock in the morning. The difference was, I regarded it as a cause for anger, rather than an opportunity for a cheap joke.

Now, I’ve got no hard evidence for the following contention, and it might just be down to the fact that I am now walking many journeys I would previously have bussed, simply to get more exercise and to save a few quid. But it does seem to me that the number of visibly homeless people on the streets of London has increased sharply in recent months.

Moreover, I appear not to be the only one to have formed this impression. The website of Russia Today - the Russian English-language cable television station - earlier this week published an article titled ‘Middle class homelessness on the rise in UK’.

The headline alone tells you as much as you really need to know. Yes, we really have reached the point where the foreign media is now making such observations about this country. That can only be read as worrying.

With unemployment rising sharply again, and little by way of safety net for people with mortgages if they lose their job, the problem can only be expected to get worse in the months ahead.

For a Labour government, a return to the days of Cardboard City - and let us pray we do not get there - would surely provide the ultimate rebuke.

THE TROUBLE with purpose-built towns is that once you take away the ‘purpose’ that constitutes the first part of the compound adjective, they really do not have much point. Such has been the fate of Edlington, a village founded purely as a dormitory for workers at Yorkshire Main Colliery, once among the largest in Britain.

The Tories shut the pit down in 1986, as part of their nasty vendetta against mining communities. The results were entirely predictable. Jobs in the area are now few, and poverty levels are high.

At least the redundant council housing – when it is not simply boarded up – offers the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster a handy place to park tenants that cannot be found anywhere else to live.

Now Edlington is back in the headlines, for the first time in over two decades. Two local lads – brothers aged just 10 and 11 – have been remanded in secure care after being charged with the attempted murder of two other boys last Saturday.

The victims, aged nine and 11, sustained serious injuries after being battered with bricks, cut with knives and burned with cigarettes. One of them came close to death, spending two days on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. It looks like the gains from the crime came to about £5 in cash and a mobile phone.

Few details of the assailants’ lives have been made public as yet, other than the revelation that the local authority had recently placed the two of them in foster care. But what will almost certainly emerge when their story is told are details of privation and perhaps degradation in their family background. It’s a safe bet they won’t turn out to be middle class kids.

The Daily Telegraph today carries a thoughtful piece – not a commodity always in oversupply at that newspaper – from crime writer Nicci Gerrard, who warns against demonising children and points to some of the obvious parallels in recent history:

Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two 10-year-olds who led the two-year-old James Bulger down to the railway embankment by the hand, kicked him, then battered him to death with bricks and an iron bar, came from deprived families.

So, too, did Mary Bell who strangled Martin Brown the day before her eleventh birthday, in May 1968, and then two months later, strangled the three-year-old Martin Howe to death (her mother was a prostitute and often absent; Mary was forced to engage in anal and oral sex with men from the age of five).

For its part, the Daily Mail prefers to point a finger at the local council – sorry, I meant to say the Labour-run council, to use the tabloid’s very words – which it brands ‘the rotten borough they call the Haringey of the north’.

Doncaster ‘cannot be blamed directly for the chilling events’, writes the aptly-named Nick Craven, with the clear implication that it can be blamed for what happened, if only indirectly.

I’d like to use exactly the same formula. Thatcherism ‘cannot be blamed directly for the chilling events’ either. But it sure as hell helped generate the social conditions that brought them about.

The trial of seven young people from Croydon and Thornton Heath. charged with the murder of Shakilus Townsend, a 16 year old boy from the same area, opened at the Old Bailey today. In view of the wideranging interest the case attracted at the time, I'm reposting what I wrote on the killing in July last year.

That much must have been obvious to onlookers who saw him bleeding profusely from multiple kitchen knife wounds in a park in Thornton Heath in broad daylight on Thursday, crying for his mum and pleading that he didn’t want to die.

He did die, making him the 18th teenager to meet a violent end in London this year. And – let’s not dodge the reality in the name of misguided political correctness – the majority of both victims and perpetrators in these cases are black.

The tabloids will demand that the politicians ‘do something’, and so the politicians will oblige with ‘knife summits’ and ‘crackdowns’ that will garner some favourable coverage but achieve little on the ground.

But this problem goes deeper than anything that can be encapsulated in an easy headline. The processes involved are social, and ultimately the answers have to be social, too.

These killings are not happening in Hampstead or the leafier bits of RBKC, but rather in some of the most deprived parts of the capital. Social exclusion – to use the currently fashionable euphemism – and racism are a large part of the explanation, to be sure.

The left must continue to make its longstanding case for a determined assault on inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity, and against further erosion of civil liberties.

But when children as young as nine or 10 freely talk of ‘shanking’ each other over any kind of ‘beef’, is that the limit of what we should be saying?

Some – predominantly those on the right - speak of a crisis of masculine identity in the black community, with single motherhood so pervasive that few young men have any kind of stabilising relationship with their father.

That idea is obviously open to all sorts of moralistic interpretations, centred on glorification on the standard nuclear family as the only acceptable child-rearing arrangement. But it isn't necessary to buy in to the spurious corollary to accept the underlying point.

Use of drugs far more potent than those available in my teenage years, by children at an age when only the more advanced of my contemporaries experimented with alcohol and the odd sneaky fag, is also reportedly commonplace.

The most popular musical subcultures among young black kids promote ‘thug life’, in which the most important thing is to get rich or die tryin’, all the time bossing the hoes and the bitches around. Boom bye-bye in a batty boy's head, like the song says.

But the frightening thought occurs to me that it is becoming cool to kill, in much the way it is cool to top yourself in Bridgend. For a layer of inner city youth, it may no longer be enough to carry a blade; ‘respect’ will only accrue to those prepared to 'waste' somebody to demonstrate their adolescent macho bravado. And ‘waste’ is exactly the right word for deaths like the one met by young Shakilus Townsend.

Picture credit: News of the World

IF IT were possible to devise a scale to measure the seriousness of racist violence, the undeniably nasty but largely symbolic act of putting bricks through the windows of houses occupied by Romanian families in Belfast would only merit a fairly lowly ranking.

The consequence – that 120 people have been sufficiently scared to leave their homes and seek shelter in a church hall – takes the ugliness quotient up several notches. But to keep things in proportion here, the events of recent days cannot accurately be described as ‘a pogrom’, for instance. So how should they be characterised? And why are these incidents happening now?

Local sources tell the media that what we are witnessing is the work of a smallish group of sieg-heiling Proddie NEETs, and insist that there has been no involvement from the older heavies that constitute the Loyalist paramilitary outfits, who haven’t gone away, you know. Fair enough; I haven’t been to Belfast for several years, and am aware of no evidence otherwise.

But I do note that there has always been an elective affinity between Ulster Loyalism and the fascist right in mainland Britain. Supporters of the one cause are all too frequently supporters of the other. Not for nothing is ‘no surrender’ among the favoured chants of the bonehead brigade.

So the British National Party’s success in securing the election of two MEPs will doubtless have encouraged and emboldened the more thuggish elements within the Ulster Loyalist milieu.

Local protestant youth – who enjoy limited life-chances even during economic booms, let alone serious recessions - might just be finding the enthusiasm difficult to contain. With the Six Counties in a state of relative peace, there are few obvious pretexts for kicking the shit out of Taigs. And in any case, a change is as good as a rest, right?

For its part, the BNP will be happy enough with the division of labour involved. Griffin and his pals can get on with being chainstore-suited democratically elected politicians, pointing to the risk of sporadic egg bombardments as a truly shocking denial of their civil liberties.

The Six Counties has always been a case apart from the rest of the United Kingdom, if I can be permitted to use the two geographical expressions in the same sentence. Just because something happens in Belfast, that doesn't mean that it must necessarily happen in Burnley.

But sadly, it does not take too much of a leap of the imagination to see that if bricks can readily fly through immigrant windows in Belfast, the tactic may yet be duplicated in many English towns. If the bricks are one day followed by firebombs, then yes, we will be talking about pogroms.

MY ENTIRELY apolitical buddy Nick – we played in a band together in the early eighties – puts the fact that I am a socialist down to some inexplicable quirk I picked up while I was a wanky student and he was already doing a proper job of work in a bathroom supplies warehouse.

While I subsequently swanned around doing non-jobs and trying to foment world revolution, he knocked his bird up, secured a council flat which he was then able to buy ridiculously cheaply courtesy of Shirley Porter, climbed the property ladder and eventually established his own bathroom supply business, doing a roaring trade knocking out plush bog seats to the Bishop’s Avenue set at two grand a time.

The inevitable divorce cost him a few bob, but I assume he is still a millionaire, at least on paper. Not bad for a council estate boy, right? Such a story is of course indicative of what happened to a certain layer of the working class in the Thatcher, Major and Blair years.

Although Nick is where he is as much by luck and political design as the graft he undeniably did put in, he naturally believes that he is entitled to what he has got, and that the trouble with bloody lefties like me is that we want to take his dosh away and give it to other people.

The thing is, basically that is what we do want to do. It is an engrained aspect of socialist sensibility to be horrified by poverty, to be outraged at extreme wealth, and to see wealth redistribution as the obvious solution.

We do our best to come up with analytical justification for this stance, endlessly monitoring the ever-expanding ratio between the salary of the average chief executive and the average employee, and memorising the trend line for the UK Gini coefficient and Lorenz curve.

Our logic seems so compelling to us that we find it difficult to believe anybody can see things any other way. Yet the majority of the population still think like Nick, as the latest empirical research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Fabian Society seems to underline.

Regardless of where they actually do stand in the income rankings, most people consider themselves as somewhere close to the middle. Over two-thirds believe that everybody has at least the opportunity to get on in life.

Attitudes are more likely to be negative towards the poor than towards the rich; common sense dictates that the bosses deserve their huge remuneration, although that seems to be changing slowly in the wake of meltdown in financial markets last year.

Consequently, few are convinced by abstract arguments in favour of social equality. Indeed, inequality is considered fine, so long as it is ‘deserved inequality’.

While there is public support for progressive taxation and income redistribution, much of this is premised on fear of the negative consequences of poverty. Put crudely, those surveyed regarded income support as the price society pays to keep burglary and mugging down to acceptable levels.

All of this represents a major problem for any left that is actually interested in expanding it base. Capitalism - and the inequality it creates - continue to enjoy moral legitimacy in the eyes of an overwhelming majority.

While the unfolding recession has generated popular outrage aimed against those at the apex of the banking system, clearly general purpose ‘tax the rich’ fat cat-bashing will most of the time have little purchase.

I’m not suggesting any retreat whatsoever from the underlying principles involved. No socialism worthy of the name can be anything but redistributive in nature. But we need to come up with a more effective way of selling the message to the public, and sooner rather than later at that.

WE OBVIOUSLY do not know what yardstick Jack Straw uses when deciding whether or not prisoners should be released on medical grounds, but the contrast between his rulings in the cases of Augusto Pinochet and Ronnie Biggs is certainly instructive.

Both of them, after all, flew to Britain from South America in search of hospital treatment for serious ailments. Both were arrested soon after arrival. So how come the dictator gets sent back home to die in his bed, while the low-grade wide boy from Lambeth stays banged up?

Armed robbery is not in any way commendable behaviour, of course. Biggs was a villain, simple as that. He was one of a 15-member gang that brutally beat up train driver Jack Mills in the course of their crime, leaving him with injuries from which he never recovered. For that alone, he should have done custodial.

Yet somehow the public took the perpetrators to their hearts in a way that they never did with the Brinks Mat and Millennium Dome heists, neither of which are likely to end up as the subject of feature films starring Phil Collins.

Biggsy – one of the few crims widely known by a friendly soubriquet – secured folk hero status. Instead of doing the decently British thing and keeping a low profile on the run, he openly flaunted his notoriety.

We watched him cavorting on Copacabana beach with his tasty Brazilian girlfriend, hanging out with the Sex Pistols, and later any random tourist who would stand him a beer. The message – yes, kids, you can get away with crime – was clear, and for that alone the establishment will never forgive him. Hence the undeniable tone of moral indignation in Straw’s pronouncement:

"Mr Biggs chose to serve only one year of a 30-year sentence before he took the personal decision to commit another offence and escape from prison, avoiding capture by travelling abroad for 35 years whilst outrageously courting the media," he said.

"Had he complied with his sentence, he would have been a free man many years ago … Biggs chose not to obey the law and respect the punishments given to him - the legal system in this country deserves more respect than this."

But whatever Biggs did, his misdemeanours are as nothing compared to those of retired Chilean military dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who was plainly guilty of systematic and widespread human rights violations including mass-murder, torture, kidnapping and illegal detention.

Never mind coshing the driver; Pinochet ordered perhaps 3,000 deaths. He subsequently enriched himself and his family on a scale that shows up the Great Train Robbery gang as basically gifted amateurs in such matters.

While on a visit to London in 1998, he was placed under house arrest, on the application of a Spanish magistrate. Leading Tories frequently popped in for a cup of tea. In 2000, Straw allowed him to return to Chile, justifying the release on medical grounds.

Just how ill Pinochet really was is a matter of some dispute, even to those physicians who examined him. But he lived on a further six years, reportedly in some wealth and comfort.

The death of Ronnie Biggs is now not far away. A series of strokes has left him unable to walk or talk, and he is being fed by a tube. There are no good reasons to leave him behind bars. Why should the lenient side of British justice be reserved for superannuated caudillos alone?

SOMEWHERE – perhaps in a provincial town in Italy – there might conceivably exist the Platonic form of the ideal coffee bar, where locals really do sit around all day, chilling out and reading newspapers over a double expresso or two.

But while the myriad of identikit coffee bar chains that have sprung up around the world in recent decades purport to duplicate the experience, in reality they do nothing of the kind.

Corporate-led attempts to conjure up that elusive Italianate ambience inevitably fail, just as completely as that endlessly repeated Cannonball Adderley track invariably playing when you walk into such an establishment fails to inject an air of jazzy sophistication into what remains a routine retail outlet.

As you can probably guess, I am not going to miss Coffee Republic, which has today gone into administration. An Americano Grande is an Americano Grande is an Americano Grande, and you get one just about anywhere.

Some parts of central London have rival shops literally next door to each other, with branches of the same brand not two minutes’ walk apart. In my mind’s eye, they all melt into one, an indistinguishable CaffeCostaStarNeroBucks, knocking out exactly the same products for exactly the same prices.

I have no idea why Sahar and Bobby Hashemi have consistently been hailed as brilliant entrepreneurs – isn’t the phrase ‘dragons’ these days? – for founding the company in 1995.

I cannot see anything remotely original in their concept, which is patently a rip off of the Starbucks format, just like all the others. But rather than simply buy a Starbucks franchise, they hit on their own brand name instead.

Interestingly, Coffee Republic has reportedly never made a profit since day one, but managed to keep on going by losing other people’s money. That, I guess, is some trick. The only wonder is that it managed to survive for 14 years before finally going tits up.

YOU CAN have capitalism, or you can have equality. But the very nature of the former militates against thethe latter, and it is precisely this that renders New Labour efforts to introduce egalitarianism by legislative fiat ultimately self-defeating.

The political right just doesn’t understand this, of course. So the likes of Melanie Phillips can get extremely worked up about the plans of the evil Harriet Harperson to ban discrimination against northerners, as if the scheme could possibly have any real impact.

Let us assume this story has a positive truth value; Daily Mail articles of this stripe frequently collapse on closer investigation. The trouble is that Yorkshire is just as class-divided as everywhere else in this country, and where there is discrimination against Tykes, the active factor is almost always class and not accent. Posh northern kids are likely to suffer nothing more serious than occasional mild ribbing.

Quangocracy doesn't seem to do the trick, either. So New Labour placeman Trevor Phillips has been getting some stick for the way he runs the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. My local MP, Diane Abbott, has been paying more attention to this one than I have, and gives her opinion here.

But today, the spotlight turns on my erstwhile International Marxist Group comrade Alan Milburn, a man long ago reinvented as more Blairite than Blair himself, who has unveiled a report on widening access to high status jobs.

One interesting point he makes is that over half of top journos – as opposed to trade press and local rag hacks - are privately educated, making them almost as certain to be public schoolies as solicitors.

Yet Quentin Letts – another Daily Mail writer, as it goes - is wheeled on to the telly to sneer at Milburn’s findings as recidivist Clause Four class struggle Labourism. Glass ceiling? Don’t be ridiculous, he forthrightly opines in his best RP tones.

Now, I’ve not had the pleasure of making Mr Letts’s acquaintance. But let me hazard the wild and crazy guess that any boy mummy and daddy decide to christen ‘Quentin’ is certain to be the beneficiary of an expensive private education. Of course he belittles the very notion of a glass ceiling. For him it does not exist; ergo, it cannot exist.

I won’t pronounce definitively on Milburn’s document until I’ve read the small print. If the media coverage is anything to go buy, some of the recommendations are small beer good things. Nobody is going to object to giving working class kids better careers advice, or to the provision of higher education courses in further education establishments.

Other brainwaves – university representatives on school governing bodies, or promotion of cadet forces in state schools, for instance – are likely to make little difference to social mobility.

But as a one-time Fourth Internationalist, Milburn - a bright spark brought up by a single mum on a council estate, apparently - will of course have read Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, known in the trade as ‘the 1859 preface’.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society …

There is a sense in which all subsequent theoretical discussion of class is a footnote to this document. But to put the point in plain English, in capitalist societies, capitalist relations of production will dominate.

There will be bosses, and there will be a more or less substantial middle class. Lastly, there will be a working class that lives by selling its labour power to the employers.

These classes tend to reproduce themselves in a pervasive multitude of ways. We could start with the brute fact of inheritance of ownership and control of the means of production, for instance.

How can Britain even make a start towards meaningful social equality when a select few individuals inherit fortunes worth millions or even billions of pounds, others eventually get houses worth several hundred thousand, and many get zilch?

Look at the disparities between tax break-subsidised fee-paying schools for Britain’s little Quentins and Melanies, and the education on offer for everybody else. No amount of tinkering with existing provision will eliminate the differences between Old Etonians and the alumni of a bog standard comp. Don’t believe me? Look at the make up of the leadership of the political party Quentin and Melanie so clearly prefer.

One commentator has encapsulated the Milburn package as a call for the state to act as a surrogate pushy parent. If that’s a fair summary, my guess is that we are not looking at a social revolution in the making here.

I HAPPENED to be in Camden the other night, and couldn’t help noticing what had become of a small pub previously called The Halfway House, best known as the closest boozer to the tube station.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, this was where I would habitually meet up with the mates to get a few jars in before going on to punk gigs at Dingwalls, the Roundhouse or the Music Machine.

The place still stands out in my memory for the boxing memorabilia on the walls, the Motown 45s on the jukebox, and a clientele of amiable and readily talkative Irish pissheads, many of them ‘fresh off the boat’, as the phrase ran before the rise of budget airlines.

Now it has been rebranded as The Camden Eye. As the name suggests, it is a typical café-bar type set up, with free Wi-Fi, continental barstaff, and a comprehensive wine and food menu. Fine, if you like that sort of thing.

Businesses have to move with the times, and presumably the joint just wasn’t making any money as was. I'm told that the place went completely downhill in more recent years, and that most of the customers were either smackheads, streetwalkers or both, and thus not fit for inclusion in brave new bourgeoisified Camden.

But I can’t help feeling something a little bit special has made way for something sadly ersatz, pretty much like thousands of other such identikit establishments all over the capital. So the way is left open for O’Neills to market their chain as a ‘typical Irish pub experience’.

Still, at least you can still get a pint there. According to one report today, over 50 pubs a week are shutting down, in what is clearly a reflection of social change and the decline of the traditional manual working class. Many of them get made over into flats or offices.

It is true that old style English drinking dens were never the welcoming outposts of bonhomie for all comers they were sometimes cracked up to be. I accept that many women must have found them intimidatingly male, and fights were all too common towards the end of the evening.

Food availability rarely extended beyond pork scratchings, or perhaps a slice of curled up processed cheese in a bread roll if you were lucky.

So perhaps these reflections are driven by nostalgia. But I for one had a lot of damn good times in pubs like that, and part of me is that bit sorry to see them go. Farewell, Halfway House.

IT’S GOOD to hear the prime minister – discussing the case of soon-to-be-extradited computer hacker Gary McKinnon – proclaim that ‘anybody who looks at this must be sympathetic to someone who suffers from Asperger syndrome’.

The irony won’t be lost on anybody who has followed a discreet drip-drip campaign of repetitive sotto voce insinuation persistently mounted against Gordon Brown by his opponents for more than a decade now.

What, exactly, was Alastair Campbell – or on some accounts, Tony Blair himself - trying to say when he referred to the then chancellor as ‘psychologically flawed’? What did shadow chancellor George Osborn find so funny in 2006, when he famously made a public wisecrack suggesting that Brown is ‘faintly autistic’?

Sorry guys, not quite with you. Can anyone give me a hint as to just what is being said here? Thanks, Guido. Thanks, Simon Heffer.

Blairite author Robert Harris - writing in the Sunday Times a few years back – spelled things out explicitly for anyone slow on the uptake, with an article pithily headlined ‘‘Autistic’ Brown loses the plot’:

Brown suffers from a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome. Intellectually brilliant, he sometimes seems socially barely functional: a little bit . . . odd.'

Harris went on to speak of Brown's ’compulsive-obsessive behaviour’, his 'awkwardness' and even his 'autism when it comes to personal relations'. Autism when it comes to personal relations? What other kinds are there, exactly, Mr Harris?

Within days, the piece was followed up with an article from Anatole Kaletsky, who spoke of Brown's 'brooding, almost autistic personality'. Note how he says that like it's a bad thing.

OK, I think I am starting to twig the multitudinous nudge-nudge references by now. The insiders may well be trying to inculcate the premise that Mr Brown and Mr McKinnon kinda have something in common.

McKinnon admits that between 2001 and 2002, he hacked into almost one hundred US computers from his bedroom in north London, seeking evidence for the existence of antigravity technology and proof of a UFO cover-up. Sounds like the guy spent too long watching reruns of the X Files. In any event, terrorist motivation can absolutely be discounted.

The US authorities insist that this is tantamount to ‘the biggest military hack of all time’, forcing it to spend over $700,000 (£436,000) to patch up the damage. Accordingly, they want him to stand trial in their country, where he could be looking at decades behind bars.

There are real fears that in these circumstances, McKinnon would take his own life. Yet Britain is determined to play ball.

McKinnon's lawyers are challenging the decision by former home secretary Jacqui Smith not to take into account Mr McKinnon's condition when she ordered that he be handed over.

I feel uneasy that the question is being couched in these terms. Many people with Asperger’s Syndrome are of above average intelligence, and some are capable of holding down positions of power and influence. Or so it would seem.

For many offences, a diagnosis would rightly form part of a plea for mitigation. But it is not a ‘get out of jail free’ card that automatically lets aspies off the hook if they commit an offence. The same standards of justice apply as apply to neurotypicals.

The real issue is the Extradition Act 2003, which requires the US only to show ‘reasonable suspicion’ that a suspect committed a crime before he or she can be removed from Britain. This is a far lower threshold than the British authorities must show in order to bring an American to trial.

Yet English law provides that an offence can be tried in England and Wales, provided the conduct or its consequences took place in England and Wales. That is clearly the case here, and it would be in the interests of justice for the case to be handled in this way.

It is the Daily Mail, of all papers, that is doing most to campaign on McKinnon’s behalf, and David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Blunkett have all lined up behind the publication’s stance.

Part of the impact of Asperger’s Syndrome is lack of insight into the effects one’s behaviour has on others. I do hope someone can make that plain to Gordon Brown.

ANYBODY else rejoice to read the front page splash in the Mail on Sunday this morning? The headline - ‘Secret Labour tax on having a patio: Millions of homes assessed for charge which hammers middle classes’ - says it all.

At last! Those patio-owning bastards get what’s coming to them in the name of class war! New Labour is finally introducing the kind of fully-fledged irrational quasi-Leninist diktats that washed up ex-Trots like me have always secretly advocated. If the story is true, it is too good to be true, if you know what I mean:

Shocking new details of a stealth tax of up to £600 for householders with views of any kind, patios, conservatories and even a nearby bus stop are revealed for the first time today.

Not just new details, but shocking new details. Revealed for the first time today! Always get the clichés in the copy early, guys.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show millions of homes have already been secretly assessed by Labour in preparation for council tax hikes expected to target the middle class after the Election ...

Even those who have a mere glimpse of a river, hill or park - or any other pleasing outlook - stand to pay more under a special category for 'partial scenic views'.

Basically, I should be OK. Patios are not a common feature of two-bedroom flats in Hackney. And Osler Mansions overlooks a piece of waste ground that local youths use for stabbing each other, sometimes fatally, when the junkies and the streetwalkers leave them any space. Glimpse of a river, hill or park? No such luck. But there is a bus stop round the corner, handy for the 243, 76 and 109.

Nevertheless, this article has got me thinking. What other stealth taxes could or should New Labour devise, simply out of its obvious ingrained hatred for Daily Mail readers?

What about a middle class name tax, with first names banded by social origin, so that Jocastas and Quentins attract a lower income tax threshold than Bills or Sandras? An unnecessarily poncey food tax, so that brie on ciabatta yields VAT at double the rate of a standard toasted cheese sarnie? A £1,000-a-head duck island congestion surcharge? How about a yummy mummy levy, expressly designed to subsidise cigarette consumption for gymslip mums?

I invite readers to use their imagination and come up with outrageous but amusing means of penalising the petit bourgeoisie, just out of sheer spite.

TRACEY. She really did have to be called bleedin' Tracey, didn't she? Just to hammer home the stereotype. Damn, couldn't she at least have lived in a tower block as well?

The identity of Baby P's mother has been readily available to anyone capable of using Google for at least ten months now. Even so, Mr Justice Coleridge decision to allow the public prints to name Tracey Connolly and her lover Steven Barker will open the way to a circulation-boosting moral crusade against a couple set to become the twenty first century lowlife equivalent of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.

The killing of Baby P was an act of vicious depravity and what Connolly and Barker perpetrated rightly merits punishment. Liberal commentators will invoke the one long car crash life stories of these people – Connolly’s own history of childhood abuse and relationships with dangerous men, Barker’s IQ of just 60 – as part of the bigger picture. They are correct to do so, but such factors can at best be advanced by way of mitigation.

The political right, on the other hand, have instantly hijacked the tragedy to feed a distinct reactionary political narrative. You can already read an example of the genre in this Daily Mail editorial:

Peter's death also casts light on a section of society that gives the lie to Labour's claim that British society is not 'broken' - the country's ever-burgeoning underclass of welfare junkies, drug addicts and single mothers …

If he is not simply to become another sorry statistic, politicians must discard the Left-wing dogma that children do not need two committed parents, and that writing ever bigger welfare cheques for single mothers is somehow kind.

Before long, a politician will take up the theme, and be heralded as ‘brave’ for his or her willingness to ‘ask uncomfortable questions’, even if the speech is largely restricted to cheap shots at politically-correct Guardianista caring professionals wearing earrings the size of dustbin lids, and/or 4x4 welfare mamas with their endless succession of booze- and crack-addled short-term boyfs.

But do the statistics justify the rhetoric? On average, 47 pre-school children die at the hands of their parents or carers in Britain each year. Some of these deaths will be in very two-parent homes that ‘leftwing dogma’ is said to excoriate, of course.

Only the truly gruesome examples - the Maria Colwells, the Jasmin Beckfords, the Tyra Henrys, the Victoria Climbiés and the Baby Ps – actually have the capacity to make national headlines.

Yet well over 10% of households in Britain, including the one that contains my own two daughters, are headed by single mothers. The chances against any child in a single parent home becoming the next Baby P are literally millions to one against, and there is no evidence whatsoever that benefit cuts would lengthen these already colossal odds.

For every Tracey Connolly, there are hundreds of thousands of warm, loving and supportive lone parents who do their best by their kids. To generalise from two deeply damaged and inadequate individuals to a political offensive against single mums as part of some back-to-the-fifties family values drive smacks of grandstanding of the most contemptible kind.

LENIN Arroyo – ‘the volcano’ to his fans – is a professional boxer based in Miami, a part of the world where such a first name will not endear him to many. He’s the reigning WBC Latino light welterweight champ, and he’s on 18-5-1 with three knockouts in 25 bouts.

Less successful is Gilbert Lenin Castillo, a Dominican amateur who competed at the 2008 Olympics at welterweight but lost his first fight to Olexandr Stretskyy 6:9.

I am in possession of these fascinating factoids after frantically googling ‘Lenin’ and ‘boxing’ in an effort to find out the correct line on the International Olympic Committee’s decision to allow women boxers to compete in the London Olympics in 2012. Not being able to come up with any scriptural guidance, I have been reduced to having to think about the issue for myself.

As a socialist of generally libertarian bent, I have always found boxing a difficult subject to wrestle with, if you see what I mean. I imagine it raises moral quandaries for feminists, too.

This is the sort of practice I would ideally like to die out, simply because nobody should wish to participate. It is both violence as spectacle and violence as big business, with television rights to the big matches worth millions of dollars. It speaks to everything that is worst in the human condition.

It is also dangerous. The British Medical Association thinks it should be banned for men, let alone women. Most regular boxers will end up suffering from conditions ranging from detached retinas and brain damage to Alzheimer’s, as is the case with Muhammad Ali.

Society has outlawed all forms of cruelty to animals. Surely it is consonant to proscribe cruelty to people, too?

Yet nobody is forced to become a boxer, or compelled to watch boxing either live or on television. They do so because they wish to, and it is no part of my idea of socialism to argue that grown-ups should be prevented from doing things they wish to do, entirely at their own risk.

And if something is allowed to men, logically it must be allowed to women as well, as any good feminist would probably insist. This must be the case even though women are physically different from men and even more vulnerable to permanent damage from this barbarous sport.

In the end, libertarianism appears to me the trump card here. If adults want to box, let them box; it’s not the job of the rest of us to tell them that they cannot. But I’d really like to hear persuasive arguments to the contrary. Answers in the comments box, please.

CONSERVATIVE Euro-MP Daniel Hannan reckons that the National Health Service is a ‘Marxist system’. And notice how he says that like it’s a bad thing.

This outburst offers further proof of the infallible rule of thumb that when the Tories really, really do not like something, they reflexively reach for a USSR analogy. Yep kids, for the residents of Hayekville, visiting your GP is the first step on the road to serfdom. Don’t go there.

The Cameroons are trying desperately to backpedal from Hannan’s remarks. But inconveniently for them, the hardline rightwinger is only repeating the rhetoric of former Tory leader Michael Howard, who branded the NHS a ‘Stalinist creation’ in a speech to the Commons in 2001.

Where to start? I mean, yes, the architecture at Homerton General is perhaps a tad brutal. But it is nevertheless difficult to mistake the average A&E for a gulag camp. The nurses even try to cure you. Then again, I doubt that a posh boy like Hannan has all that much direct experience of public healthcare provision.

Stalinism had its plus points, of course. If we wake up tomorrow and find that NHS chief executive David Nicholson has unexpectedly been found dead on account of icepick wounds, at least we will know why.

The NHS is perhaps the definitive creation of democratic socialism in Britain, and in its hey-day, it truly was ‘the envy of the world’, as the cliché had it. What has damaged British healthcare provision more than anything else in recent decades is the artificial attempts – introduced under Thatcherism and continued under New Labour – to introduce a faux free market into a field in which the free market has no rightful place.

From the internal market to the Private Finance Initiative and the most recent proposals, known as ‘Transforming Community Services’, the changes have all been designed to facilitate a system under which the market increasingly determines who gets what healthcare, with treatment provided by multinationals of a for-profit basis.

There’s nothing whatsoever Marxist about straightforward handouts to a parasitic private sector, Dan. And that, sadly, is the reality of what the NHS is increasingly becoming.

UNTIL someone comes up with a scale that facilitates such measurement, it remains logically meaningless to weigh up the morality of Tracey Connolly, and then judge it against the morality of Sir Fred Goodwin. The actions that these two people have perpetrated, and the impact these actions have had on others, vary enormously in scale, extent and degree.

The specific details of the harm inflicted on Baby P – the broken back, the eight fractured ribs, the ripped ear, the injuries to lips and tongue, the missing fingertip – can of course more easily be distilled into tabloid hate prose than the intricacies of investment banking.

Reread the justification advanced by the group calling itself bankbossesarecriminals@mail.com when putting bricks through the window of Fred the Shred’s Edinburgh home earlier this year, and the charge sheet seems broader and more diffuse, yet somehow anonymous. His victims are the category ‘ordinary people’, not a named individual kid:

We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning.

Socially speaking, Connolly and Goodwin stand in reciprocal relationship to one another, at extremes that most of us will never experience.

The designation ‘underclass’ rightly comes with a health warning. But if it is restricted to a layer permanently detached from the mainstream working class - the people traditionally described in Marxist theory as lumpenproletarian - then it does merit limited specific application.

Similarly, there is now a superbourgeoisie, for want of a better word. These people are rich not in the everyday sense of earning six-figure salaries, but in the sense of being the beneficiaries of bonuses worth millions of pounds, year after year after year.

Strictly speaking, they are an element within the ruling class, but ‘overclass’ serves as useful shorthand notation for this element in our society.

Sir Fred, we read in The Times today, has returned to Edinburgh after taking five months’ time out on the French Riviera, in a £4m villa outside Cannes. An unnamed mate insists that he ‘accepts he made mistakes’. Good.

Meanwhile, Connolly has commenced her five-year prison sentence. Given the gravity of her offences, that punishment seems rather light. But every account makes clear that this woman is a pathetic, frightened and damaged individual who seems to have fallen into her way of life more by accident than design.

Goodwin, on the other hand, is a highly educated master of the universe who knew what he was doing, every step of the way. Precisely because of his responsibility for his own actions, he deserves rather more opprobrium than the amount to which he is currently subject.

IT’S NOT as if coining a daft new acronym makes a problem disappear; rebranding the young unemployed as NEETs – short for ‘not in education, employment or training’ - almost comes across as a calculated insult. Piss off, kids. We’re not taking you anywhere as seriously as we take out of work adults.

But this semi-mocking designation now seemingly applies to one in six men and women aged between 18 and 24, totalling 959,000. In round numbers, that’s nearly one million. There are now more unemployed youth, if you’ll excuse my failure to resort to euphemism, than when Labour came to power 12 years ago.

Things now look so bad that the young jobless are at risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ in labour market terms, chancellor Alistair Darling has warned. As a member of the lost generation last time round - I was unemployed for the best part of two years as a young man in the Thatcher period – I am absolutely bewildered at the prospect of a re-run of the movie.

Youth unemployment costs lives. One study conducted in the north of England found 15% of under-25s not in work or at college in 1999 were dead just ten years later. With time on your hands, the drift into drugs, crime, unhealthy lifestyles and depression becomes almost automatic.

Most NEETs will find that their careers never recover. Those without a job at an age when those destined for the glittering prizes have already come down from Oxbridge – that is the term, isn’t it? – are starting out in the City and the media will find the professions are all but effectively debarred to them.

Perhaps the main reason we find ourselves back in the late 1970s is the return of recession, an inevitable feature of the present economic system, however much politicians boast of abolishing boom and bust. That capitalism automatically entails periodic bouts of massive unemployment is one of the most important arguments against it.

Whatever happens to Britain next, it won’t be frenzied growth that makes up for lost ground and then takes us further forward. One prognosis is a decade of stagnation, which means that if you are NEETed now, the likelihood is that you will stay NEETed for good.

But a shortage of jobs is not the whole story. Any government committed to the well-being of young adults needs to tackle the outcomes of Britain’s state education system, which sees too many kids spending their secondary school years playing truant for long spells before leaving with little or no formal qualifications. Working class pupils are being systematically let down, even as the parents of middle class pupils increasingly buy their offspring a guaranteed head start.

It will also be vital to address the almost total unavailability of apprenticeships anywhere other than at McDonald’s. If we are to avoid future polarisation of the most extreme kind, we are going to have to provide occupations intermediate between burger flipper and barrister.

And if we don’t? Well, you can still meet people from my generation that lost contact with society under the Thatcher governments – which didn’t concede the existence of society in the first place, of course – and never managed to reinsert themselves. They belonged to the blank generation, as the song went at the time. The last thing we need is a cover version.

THERE is a natural tension between social conservatism and social liberalism, and not one that can be broken down on the usual left-right or Labour-Conservative axis.

Thus there are many socialists opposed to supercasinos, lap dancing clubs and 24 hour drinking, on the grounds that such activities are both detrimental to working class communities and carried on for private profit.

I happen think that attitude is wrong, and that the left should back the right of adults of all classes to engage in gambling, voyeurism and prodigious alcohol consumption if they elect so to do, irrespective of whether we approve personally.

At the same time, I acknowledge that the red puritan stance is a legitimate opinion with a traditional base in Britain’s ‘more Methodist than Marxist’ labour movement.

There is a similar cleavage on the political right. From the outside, it looks mostly an age thing. Thatcher’s children tend to be of the ‘let it rock’ school, extending the logic of the free market into the personal sphere. Yet at the same time, the Cameroons see no contradiction in harping on about ‘Broken Britain’.

Older commentators, and some rightwingers of religious motivation, still appeal to a morality that essentially disappeared in Britain decades ago. Some of them almost appear to be anti-fun on principle.

I have tried to explore such themes in a number of recent posts. I am well aware that my recent comparison between Tracey Connolly and Sir Fred Goodwin is not one of my better offerings, probably because the underlying thinking is slightly confused.

The thing is that we social liberals of both left and right demand social freedom, especially for ourselves, even though we can see the logical consequences of these freedoms when extended to society as a whole.

So we are agreed that it is bad when people are reduced to mugging or burglary to fund drug habits, especially when it is us they mug or burgle, but jolly agreeable when the middle classes break the charlie and the spliff out after a North London dinner party.

I have been in otherwise prosperous North American cities and seen block after block transformed into a wasteland as a result of the prevalance of crack cocaine. Yet still I am on balance in favour of the legalisation of Class A drugs.

Promiscuity among teenagers, especially those chav slags off the estates, sends the Daily Mail crazy. But student bedhopping at Oxbridge is only to be expected, and businessmen and politicians can get their leg over with the secretary and maybe a mistress or two, provided only they can afford the upkeep. Girls whose daddies buy them a loft apartment in Shoreditch are nice, girls who get knocked up to blag a council flat are nasty.

Tracey Connolly is slammed for watching porn,