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.

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.

The three million-long dole queues undeniably had more impact on the UK as a whole. But that stuff was kind of happening up north, and accordingly didn’t really count.

In-your-face mass homeless in the streets of the capital, on the other hand, was 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 is, I regarded it as a cause for anger, rather than an opportunity for a cheap joke.

But even though the Old Etonians are still in charge of the Tory Party – some things never change, do they? - these days ‘callous’ is out and ‘caring’ is in.

That’s presumably why Tory housing spokesman Grant Shapps - on the right of the picture above - spent the night of Christmas Eve out on the streets. It was, in his own words, a publicity stunt designed to highlight the homelessness issue. But even by its own lights, it was a remarkably stupid publicity stunt.

It’s instantly obvious to anyone walking down The Strand of an evening that rough sleeping has declined sharply under New Labour. I don’t know if that’s down to the success of various government initiatives, the general health of the economy, or some other factor. But here is something that not even the Blairites got wrong.

The statistics speak for themselves. According to the Department of Communities and Local Government, there were in 1998 some 1,850 rough sleepers in England on any given night; as of June this year, that figure had fallen to 498.

These figures understate the problem, of course. The charity Broadway points out the weakness of the ‘snapshot’ approach. It believes that 2,807 people slept rough at some point in 2005-06, and that’s in London alone. That marked a 9% year-on-year increase.

But whichever way you slice it, the situation is almost certainly better than at any point during the last four terms of office of Mr Shapps’s party.

The answer has to be an increase in social housing, which is a point Shapps is keen to press home. It’s just a shame that those of us now in our forties can remember that it was the Tories who effectively scrapped it in the first place.

Unless Shapps is prepared to apologise for the whole tenor of housing policy from the advent of the right to buy onwards, he should preserve as much of his dignity as remains to him by keeping his rightwing trap firmly shut.

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.