Throw in repeated over-the-top use of alleged analogies between liberals and German fascism, and deliver the outcome in a prose style reminiscent of Jeremy Clarkson minus his characteristic wit, intelligence and literary panache, and you end up with what evidently passes for serious comment on the political right these days.

Precisely because this offering is from a big name writer in Britain’s best-selling broadsheet newspaper, it is worth considering exactly what is being said here.

Randall starts by invoking Churchill’s famous speech to the US Congress in December 1941, in which the late prime minister famously asks: ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’ From there, through the insertion of the three words ‘seven decades later’, Randall describes the dystopia of Britain today, as he sees it:

‘What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which [Churchill] urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.’

The ludicrous contention here is that there is some form of parallel between what this country has become and what this country might have been had it lost world war two, with Monsoon-frocked social workers organised in mass right-on paramilitary formations to provide the necessary thought police. These are presumably the first death squads in history with an equal ops policy.

Actually, I suspect that Churchill would have knocked back another breakfast time double brandy and shrugged his shoulders about where we are now. Britain has participated in European integration because that was the only realistic option open to the post-war British capitalist class.

If Randall regrets the consequences, he should recall that it was Macmillan that first applied to join the Common Market, Heath who took Britain in, Thatcher who signed the Single European Act and Major who agreed the Maastricht Treaty. The storm troopers of political correctness cannot be blamed for everything.

Yet he is insistent that ‘human rights obsessives and jackboot egalitarians’ have led us to our present sorry state of affairs. And there was me thinking that liberals wore Birkenstocks.

He goes on to accuse the left of relentless assaults on popular consciousness, of demanding the unconditional surrender of adversaries and the criminalisation of those who resist us. To top the lot, he even speaks of something called ‘the Brown Terror’, presumably intending to evoke the Red Terror of the early years of the Russian revolution.

Look Jeff, I wasn’t too much of a fan of Gordon either. But if his supporters really had instituted a period of mass arrests and summary executions, I would have been among the first to put down a resolution condemning such actions at my local Labour Party ward.

Then there is all those bleedin’ foreigners, innit. Randall has got nothing against them, you understand. His only surprise is that ‘so few’ are already here. After all, who wouldn’t quit a ‘rat hole’ in Bucharest for £500 a week in handouts and a subsidised home?

Yes folks, that really is how Randall thinks that immigration works.  Millions of Britons with at least one immigrant parent – and full disclosure: that category includes me – will know that the overwhelming majority of immigrants come here to graft their socks off, leaving the national economy  better off as a result.

True, my mum did get disability benefits, a widow’s pension and a council flat. But she earned them by helping to build the NHS as one of its first nurses, and then scrubbing floors and working part-time in a care home while she raised two kids. Just like hundreds of thousands of immigrant women are doing today, I guess.

Sorry, but many of us actually like Britain pretty much the way it is now. Our inability to send Abu Qatada back to Jordan is not firm evidence that everything is going to hell in a handcart.

And huge numbers of City Boys aren’t that fussed about losing their jobs in investment banking because, let’s face it, most of them are better off on the sick.

As abuses such as these so conclusively underline, the case for reform Britain’s archaic benefit system is open and shut. How else can it be that not a single mainstream politician has managed to come out and state openly that Iain Duncan Smith’s call for a £26,000 benefit cap is entirely unjustified?

Well, for a start, the sheer intuitive populist appeal of the notion that nobody on benefits should get more than the average wedge for a full week’s graft makes the idea almost impossible to oppose outright. Framing the debate the way the Tories have chosen to do is sheer bloody genius.

The rejoinder of ‘Aha! So, you’d allow benefit scroungers unlimited cash …’ appears so utterly knockdown. As Oliver Wright points out in the Independent, only 9% of voters have expressed opposition to the IDS plan. Some 36% actually think that the cap should be set far lower, at just £20,000.

Thus even the heads of voluntary sector do-gooder outfits I heard on the radio this morning were reduced to calling for tinkering round the edges, which they hope will be duly delivered by a coalition of bishops and renegade Lib Dem peers in the Lords.

Meanwhile, Labour seems at sixes and sevens. It isn’t going to vote against the cap, although if we are lucky, it might just mumble some objections while it backs it.

But let’s just look at the facts here. The government’s own figures indicate that 100,000 children will be pushed below poverty line on account of these changes.

Even communities secretary Eric Pickles privately admits that 20,000 will be made homeless by the proposals. Far from saving any money, local government will actually end up out of pocket.

In other words, what we have here is a half-arsed, spiteful and misguided piece of legislation, designed to cut living standards of some of Britain’s poorest people (including many of the disabled) to score brownie points with the Daily Mail.

I’m sure those in the firing line will be grateful for any concessions that are secured tonight. But the truth is that the Welfare Reform Bill is just plain wrong. And no major political party dares to say it.

If Scotland goes its own way, a permanent Tory fiefdom would result in England and Wales. But Europe would gain another country with a social democratic centre of political gravity. Let the Scots decide their own future.

Nairn’s volume still sits on my shelves, and I guess I will have to dust it off in the weeks ahead, as the issues it raises attain new salience. What was 30 years ago an abstract proposition of the type I loved to debate with other lefties in the student union bar has emerged as a strong possibility, and not too far down the line at that.

The latest deliberations over a referendum on Scottish independence have been presented by several commentators as some sort of political poker contest between Cameron and Salmond. It looks increasingly likely that the Scottish National Party leader will take the pot after cleverly bluffing a mid-pocket pair.

The constitutional technicalities of all this count for little.  Ever since the SNP’s landslide election triumph last May – after a campaign that saw a lacklustre Labour Party blow a double-digit poll lead – it has had both morality and momentum behind it.

A referendum looks like it is coming in 2014, whether the Coalition likes it or not. A yes vote is not inevitable; support for a breakaway has always fluctuated, depending on just how ghastly London governments have made themselves to the Scots at any one time.

Yet if the perception is that going it alone will allow Scotland to opt out of austerity imposed by a Conservative government in Westminster, nobody should be surprised if the Nats pull this stroke off.

Until now, the unionist tradition has carried sufficient weight on the right to make it unimaginable that the Tories could even countenance conceding such a demand. Yet south of the border, attitudes may be starting to change.

Consider, for instance, the survey of the largely right of centre readership of City AM last May, which found that 51% support for Scottish independence, largely on the grounds that the Jocks are a bunch of scroungers leeching off the real wealth creators in financial services.

Now that the oil has just about run out anyway, surely some English Conservatives would find the prospect of guaranteed Tory rule for all time that little bit tempting. All they would have to do is to cry a few crocodile tears, and then gleefully grant Salmond his wish, while publicly protesting reluctance all along.

After that, this issue becomes just like any other divorce. The only real argument will be over which partner gets the record collection.

However, the place finds itself in the news this morning, after data released to parliament revealed that the age-adjusted death rate per nominal 100,000 people is 1,499. That compares with 1,452 in Botswana and 1,427 in Rwanda.

This could just be a statistical quirk. After all, Bryncethin doesn’t have 100,000 people. There are only some 1,300 residents. Maybe 2009 was just an unlucky year for a couple of the locals.

But as the full excel spreadsheet reveals, there are over 100 wards in England and Wales where the death rate is more than double the 492 per 100,000 seen in the UK as a whole, and they are heavily concentrated in former industrial areas.

The local authorities that figure in the table include the likes of Corby, Gateshead, Hull, St Helens, Stockton-on-Tees, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Bradford, Nottingham and others you can almost certainly guess. Interestingly, I didn’t spot anywhere in London.

According to the Office for National Statistics, something called ‘socio-economic status’ is one of the variables at work. In plain English, that translates to ‘class’.

One way or another, most of the other variables boil down to class as well. Deprivation is by definition concentrated on the poorest districts, and pollution usually is as well. Provision of health and other services tends to be far worse than in posh neighbourhoods.

When it comes down to what the ONS calls ‘health behaviour’, the reality is that the poorest are the more likely to smoke, to drink too much and to use the most dangerous drugs.

Nor are standardised mortality stats the only evidence that class can kill. As the Scottish National Party highlighted in the Glasgow East by-election campaign in 2008, life expectancy in parts of Glasgow is lower than on the Gaza Strip.

Depressingly, none of the regional and social discrepancies outlined above would shock a time traveller catapulted into the Britain of today from the 1930s.

Longevity has increased dramatically for all sections of society and across the entire country, of course. But now as then, it is the working class parts of Scotland, Wales, the north and the Midlands that come off the worst.

With the UK economy now seemingly set for a long period of at best stagnation, my guess would be that nothing is going to change any time soon.

Nor is Boris Johnson’s attitude any novelty within his party, as is demonstrated by today’s revelation that back in 1981, top Tories Geoffrey Howe and Sir Keith Joseph advised Margaret Thatcher to abandon that beastly city altogether.

Howe actually employed the expression ‘managed decline’, before duplicitously warning everyone else against using such a scandalous locution in the public’s earshot. Thanks to the 30 year rule, the gaffe is now public. Be sure your sin will find you out.

Despite the reputation Liverpool picked up for radicalism after Militant secured control of the local authority in the year that followed Howe’s overly frank memo, until the 1950s it was just about the only working class conurbation in this country to return mainly Conservative MPs to Westminster, thanks largely to religious sectarianism imported from the other side of the Irish Sea.

These days, only a handful of better-off local constituencies do so, and that is only when the Tories have a good year. What changed matters was decades of decline, and not particularly managed decline at that.

For most of the political, media and business classes of the South East, ‘the provinces’ represent today’s faraway countries of which we know little. I am not absolving myself from that stricture, either.

I have a job that regularly takes me to various European capitals, and sometimes to the Middle East and the Far East. So it is that I have been to St Petersburg, but never to St Helens; to Tokyo, but never to Toxteth; to Warsaw, but never to Wallasey.

What is the rest of the UK like? Why would anyone go there? I mean, there are posh bits as well, right? Search me, and search the average London-centric policymaker, come to that. The incomprehension is almost complete.

Majority thinking on other towns that ostensibly form part of the same country in which Londoners live can be summed up in the infamous Cities Unlimited report, published by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange in 2008.

Essentially, the document demanded mass migration from Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland to the bottom right-hand corner of the country.

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 did not seem to figure in these deliberations.

Authors Tim Leunig and James Swaffield identified real problems, of course. But if the free market economics they espoused was capable of delivering solutions, surely the Invisible Hand would have done the business already.

What I do know is that under Labour, Liverpool recorded annual economic growth of 5.5%, the best performance of anywhere outside London. Yet even that seems not to have eradicated some of the deep seated social problems on the Mersey.

And what I also know is that writing off entire swathes of the north to ‘managed decline’ is wrong in principle. What is needed is a regional policy that offers a strategy for managed revival, and sadly that isn’t going to happen under the ConDems. Then and now, the sheer indifference stays the same.

Such abject ideological capitulation to the ideas Labour was created to stand against demonstates a certain arrogant incomprehension on the political right, a category into which Mandelson clearly falls. Admiration for Margaret Thatcher is far from universal.

The former prime minister, whose life is celebrated in an impending biopic, is now in frail health, and plans are already underway to mark her passing.

The announcement of her death, whenever it comes, will no doubt provoke endless days of media coverage celebrating her ‘greatness’, a quality that ‘even her opponents came to recognise’, or so we shall be told. For those of us who were involved in the labour movement in 1980s, such a conclusion will not readily be conceded.

My generation witnessed first hand her destruction of Britain’s industrial base, her deliberately planned decimation of entire communities and her erection of greed as the very basis of the value system in a country for which there was no such thing as society.

I remain too much of a humanist to exult in Thatcher’s departure. But my disgust at what she did is entirely undimmed by the decades.

The very idea of according this woman a state funeral - originally advanced by Gordon Brown, of course – is surely entirely inappropriate for the most divisive figure in post-war British politics.

You mourn if you want to; this lad’s not for mourning.

As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort Bragg this week, the country the US military leaves behind almost nine years after the invasion is ‘not a perfect place’. If reports of continuing sectarian violence are anything to go by, that is a considerable understatement.

Obama’s principal argument was that intervention brought about a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government elected by its people. For those who supported the war, this will be seen as its ultimate justification.

The price tag has been immense, of course. Estimates of the civilian death toll vary, but seem to start at somewhere like 100,000 and rise comfortably above ten times that horrific figure, depending on the definition of a casualty. That fact does not seem to have merited a mention in Obama’s speech.

Even those of us who opposed the conflict at the time will agree that a democratic Iraq is the best outcome among the range of possibilities on offer from where we are now. We would not have started from here, of course.

But the obvious question is just how far Obama’s ‘stabilisation thesis’ is true. The power to destroy is not the same as the power to create, and to the outside observer, Iraq still seems to be beset with centrifugal forces that leave a question mark over its sustainability. The three-way split between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds alone is enough to guarantee volatility for years to come.

It’s not that there was ever any doubt about the brutality of Saddam Hussein, and no reason to think that he would have mended his ways had he remained in office.

That is why those shaping US foreign policy under George W Bush earnestly believed that Iraqis would strew flowers in the path of Chalabi or some other Washington-endorsed ersatz de Gaulle. That did not happen.

Yet as the events of the Arab Spring have since demonstrated, the people of the Middle East are perfectly capable of taking on their own dictators, perhaps sometimes requiring external support to achieve that end.

An interesting thought experiment is to compare the recent history of Iraq with what happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and what is happening in Syria, in 2011. We have yet to see what the long term consequences of those latter revolutions will prove to be, so any judgements cannot be definitive.

But there is no reason to think that the Iraqis would have been any less reticent to settle accounts with their dictator then the people of other countries in the region. Waiting for regime change from below might have proved rather less costly then imposing regime change from above.

For that reason alone, David Cameron’s decision to veto treaty changes designed to prop up the eurozone could prove a pivotal moment in Britain’s domestic politics. Nothing he could have done or said could be better calculated to restore his faltering standing among his activist base. This is Thatcher’s Bruges speech, all over again.

Bear in mind that the old distinction between eurosceptics and pro-European Tories has been ratcheted well to the right. The latter category no long exists, and the division is instead between pragmatists of broadly eurosceptic disposition and out-and-out Little Englanders.

That the prime minister’s move was motivated far more by deference to the City-led financial capitalism that dominates the UK economy then outright opposition to the EU project itself will be lost on the majority of the troops, for whom Cameron now constitutes a hero. Those who only yesterday were comparing him with Chamberlain will be left looking pretty foolish.

Cameron has also succeeded in dealing a damaging blow to the UK Independence Party, which already polls well in EU elections and had been nursing hopes of landing a clutch Westminster seats on the back of the votes of dissatisfied Tory supporters.

None of this comes cost free, of course. France and Germany have already expressed their fury; yet however unhelpful the diplomatic consequences, that will only make the gin and Jag belt love Cameron all the more. Given the weight Barack Obama attaches to a eurozone settlement, the White House will not be best pleased, either.

Nor will the exultant reception of this handbagging inside the Conservative Party cement relations with the Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, for instance, reportedly wanted Cameron to sign on the dotted line.

What we are now seeing is a rare outbreak of political passion at a time when Labour discussions of, say, education or employment rights sometimes seem to run the gamut of emotions from A to B, to quote Dorothy Parker’s immortal putdown of Katherine Hepburn.

I am not sure that Sunny – writing in the post below – gets it right when he argues that the eurosceptics are among the losers in all this.

Presumably the Conservative right can spot a tactical opening when they see one, and will be emboldened in the quest to secure their real desire, namely Britain’s outright withdrawal from the EU. The consequences of what happened this morning look set to be with us for some time.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have issued a statement, noting curtly that they ‘take note’ of the ratings agency’s decision to put France, Germany and 13 other countries on credit watch, implying a 50% chance of a downgrade in the next six month.

But the two leaders are almost certainly furious at this intervention, which just two days ahead of a summit meeting in Brussels later this week that is widely seen as the single currency’s last best hope.

The very real outcome of a downgrade would be to make it more expensive for the European Financial Stability Facility bailout fund to borrow on the back of bonds, leaving less cash to assist indebted countries.

What’s more, if the sovereign debt is downgraded, many corporates will be downgraded, too. What S&P have done this morning damages virtually every bank in Europe.

Eurozone leaders’ private anger will be on a par with that felt in the White House in August, after S&P downgraded the US to AA+, branding the Obama administration ‘less stable, less effective and less predictable’ at a time when the country was on the brink of technical default.

S&P may well excuse its actions with the ‘only doing our job’ defence. The company earns its crust by rating bonds, so rate bonds it must, the argument will run. If market participants choose to act on their counsel, then so be it.

But it is worth noting that there is no particularly objectivity to S&P’s output. Its judgements represent are based entirely on opinion, resting on a set of ideological assumptions, not least about austerity.

As David Wyss, chief economist at S&P until earlier this year, noted in a recent newspaper interview: ‘The credit agencies don’t know any more about government budgets than the guy in the street who is reading the newspaper.’

There are even questions about S&P basic competence at what it does. Like its rivals, it routinely ascribed AAA standing to highly risky collateralised debt obligations that proved impossible to value on any meaningful basis.

What we are now seeing is a further illustration that much power under capitalism rests not with elected politicians, but private sector interests promoting their own agenda. S&P is effectively pushing its own brand of neoliberalism.

I was just about to add ‘… without any regard to the consequences’ to that last sentence. But on second thoughts, that would be wrong. It knows damn well what the consequences will be, and is actively willing them.

As Freud explained over a hundred years ago, tendentious jokes are a mask for socially unacceptable feelings, not least violent hostility. There is probably a level at which Britain’s most famous petrolhead meant exactly what he said.

And if a joke is defined as amusing story with punchline, or even just a clever witticism, then Clarkson’s ugly little rant doesn’t deserve that designation. He is hardly in a position to plead exoneration on account of his exquisite wordplay.

Yet as a lefty who believes in freedom of speech, I reluctantly find myself agreeing that an apology probably suffices here. Nobody can seriously contend that Clarkson was actually calling for public sector employees to be rounded up at dawn and made to face banker-led firing squads.

Even so, some 21,000 people – and counting – have lodged complaints with the BBC, which broadcast the diatribe. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said that he is taking urgent legal advice as to whether the he should be referred to the police.

By way of context, let me offer one further observation. Remember the outrage directed at BBC Scotland radio comedian Brian Limond a few weeks back, after a couple of Tweets in which he expressed his impatience for the death of certain former Conservative prime minister?

The reaction of the right was apoplectic. Tory MP Louise Mensch pointedly asked – and in the pages of the Telegraph, come to that – ‘why is the BBC using licence fee money to pay a man who wishes Margaret Thatcher dead?’

I do hope that both Ms Mensch and the newspaper she writes for will be consistent in opposition to deathwish wisecracks, especially given the respective body counts involved. They might like to note Mr Clarkson reportedly pockets £400,000 a year from Auntie. I suspect that is rather more than Limmy.

Yet there are a couple of fundamental flaws with the education secretary’s assertion that those taking part in Wednesday’s  public sector stoppage are being manipulated by an unrepresentative clique of hard left union bosses.

For a start, every single one of the unions participating does so on the back of a mandate from its membership, with overwhelming ‘yes’ votes in every instance of which I am aware.

The Tories typically point to the low turnout figures, on the questionable assumption that failure to return a ballot paper is somehow equivalent to opposing a walkout.

Yet the evidence is that the strike is strongly backed, and not just by the strikers. An opinion poll published by the BBC today finds 61% believe N30 is justified, a total that includes almost four in five 18 to 24 year olds.

It is perfectly true that certain traditions on the left regard class struggle at the point of production as a good thing, in and of itself. These are largely individuals of Trotskyist or Communist political background, and yes, some of them do hold prominent union positions. And yes again, some of them are personal friends of mine.

But then there were plenty of leftie union officials in 1998, the year in which UK strike levels fell to the lowest since records began in 1881, demonstrating a reversion to pre-Edwardian levels of deference in the labour movement.

Even hardcore tankies from Hell cannot conjure up industrial action out of nowhere. How telling that Gove regards ordinary union members as incapable of striking because they want to go strike. That they have a genuine grievance about the government’s pensions rip off does not seem to have occurred to the bloke.

For a long time now, the reality is that British unions have more or less been on life support. Union density has fallen from over half the workforce in 1979 to well under a third, and this minority is largely concentrated in the public sector.

The current situation gives unions the best chance in decades to rebuild some of the strength they have lost since the defeat of the miners, and the country will be a better place if they seize it.

The finding that leaps out at me from that Beeb poll is that almost 80% of young people are in favour of the strike. Yet fewer than 20% of them are unionised. Somebody needs to get out there and dish out some union cards, pronto.

The 11 year old would sulk in a corner all day long, telling anyone who politely introduced themselves that she really, really hated them and never wanted to speak to them ever again. Knowing my luck, she would demonstrate her awareness of the F-word within earshot of the chief executive.

The younger one would charm all adults in the vicinity, lisping and giggling as she happily skips around the building, innocently saying things like ‘what happens if I press that button, daddy?’

At that point, she would lunge for the button in question and irreversibly delete the firm’s principal database, compiled through decades of round the clock labour on the part of generations of wage slaves.

But no. Despite being a private sector wealth creator myself, I have taken November 30 as annual leave, expressly to show solidarity with millions of striking public sector slackers, all seemingly determined to leech off the fruits of my toil.

The way that some newspapers tell it, the big problem with this country is that ‘we’ – as in journalists and lawyers and PR consultants and owners of twee nick-nack shops on Stoke Newington Church Street – do all the work around here.

Meanwhile, ‘they’ – meaning hospital porters and coastguards and dinner ladies – sit around scratching their arses from nine to five, just counting off the years until they can qualify for their gold plated pensions. As most readers will be aware, things are just not like that.

With the exception of a two day temp job as a student, I have never worked for the public sector in any capacity. Yet I can recognise an attempt to divide and rule when I see it. All workers have a common interest in ensuring that pension entitlement is levelled up, not levelled down.

I will be there on the demo to say thank you to those teachers subjected to more face time with my evil offspring then I suffer myself, and to all the NHS staff who looked after me when I had an operation earlier this year, and the people who make sure that my rubbish disappears and that the streets I walk down get cleaned and that the restaurants I eat in maintain minimum standards of hygiene and do all of the thousands of other vital tasks the public sector undertakes.

If anyone else in my position has similar plans, get in touch and maybe we can form a private sector wealth creators’ bloc as a counterweight to those bloody anarchists. Dress code: business casual.

Even though I also back a policy of open borders, I never once imagined that the Coalition would implement the idea quite so literally.

Much media coverage in recent days has focused on Theresa May’s hush-hush policy initiative of relaxing passport checks on arrivals from the EU, and whether or not UKBA boss Brodie Clark was over-zealous in their implementation.

Sadly, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper have sought to extract political capital from all this by playing to the xenophobic gallery. The subtext of some of their remarks are not exactly pretty. Is the 100% increase in firearms seizures over the period really entirely down to bloody foreigners, Ed?

I suspect those ghastly continentals are laughing their clogs off on this one. Have none of the politicians involved ever heard of the Schengen Area? Maybe they should google it up.

Almost every country in Europe outside of the Balkans now forms part of what is a vast single state for travel purposes, with 400m people needing no documentation whatsoever to move between them.

So it was that on one holiday a few years back, I drove over a bridge. One side was Portugal, the other Spain. Nobody stopped me half way across.

Frankly, Britain could quite easily have scrapped the majority of passport checks about three decades ago. Permanently. It really is high time that the UK signed up to Schengen.

They are conceived of as capable of adhering to ethical codes, from which they have of late drifted away. Ostensibly they can experience such human emotions as tension, and even desperation, fear, panic and the jitters.

In addition, they can demand obedience, on pain of the exaction of serious consequences. George Soros tells us that financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression. No wonder that governments have little choice but to do their bidding.

So it is a worthwhile corrective to point out that, in the ordinary sense of the word, financial markets do not exist. No one has ever seen one, or taken a photograph of one, for instance.

They are not an expression of the laws of physics, or of some divine will.  They are simply a conceptualisation of the social relationship that exists between the people that make them up, and the rest of the population.

Somehow a set of human properties is depicted as having broken free of its basis in the real world of men and women, and is projected instead as an independent power over them, capable of issuing diktats that impinge on just about everybody on the planet.

I’m not an unqualified admirer of the late György Lukács, but anyone looking for an instantiation of the great Hegelian Marxist thinker’s notion of reification could hardly come up with a more clear-cut example.

Next time you hear that ‘the markets’ are pushing for this, that or the other, substitute the words ‘the bankers’ into the sentence. It will take you rather closer to the reality of the situation.

As the magazine’s token Trotskyist, I was always somewhat at odds with the overall editorial line. But nevertheless various editors somehow found a place for my contributions, and I will always be proud to be associated with a title that – for much of its existence, anyway – instantiated the best aspects of the democratic socialist tradition in this country.

So I am sad to hear that barring miracles, this week’s edition will be the last. Apart from anything else, the closure will mean redundancy for some of my former workmates. But much as it pains me to say it, the decision is probably the right one.

The move results partly from economic pressures, of course. With everybody under 30 now surgically attached to their smartphone, small circulation periodicals – and even many newspapers with substantial readerships – simply are not viable anymore.

Tribune will apparently resurface as an unstaffed website aggregating leftwing content produced elsewhere, which may serve some useful function. But that is not why fellow traveller Labour MPs Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss set the damn thing up in 1937.

Tribune existed to articulate a political project, which was at first popular frontism. But in its postwar hey-day, it achieved a circulation of 40,000 a week as the voice of Bevanism, and broadly supported the leftist strand in Labourism right up until the Bennite period 30 or so years later. After that, it lost its way.

As Labour moved to the right, the newspaper, as it was then, failed to find a renewed sense of purpose. Even during my stint on the staff, it tried too hard to be too broad. After 1994, the Blairites largely closed down the public expression of dissident opinion within the party. It is difficult to be a forum for debate when there is no genuine debate to be had.

I don’t usually quote Hegel favourably. But somehow his observation that the real is the rational and the rational is the real just about seems to sum the plight of Tribune up. It couldn’t keep on defying rationality forever.

Personally I am at a loss to fathom why Nazarbayev should feel the need to retain an expensive western public relations outfit. But inexplicably enough, he has done just that. The Financial Times reports that a firm by the name of Tony Blair Associates has landed a contract worth $13m a year to help tidy up Kazakhstan’s image in the West.

If you don’t have an FT subscription, read the rewrite in the Daily Telegraph here.

In case you are wondering who is in charge of Tony Blair Associates, the clue is in the name. Helping the former Labour leader on this project are Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, two of his key sidekicks from his stint in Number Ten.

‘His advice is priceless,’ one unnamed Kazakh official commented. ‘Kazakhstan will get the best advice possible from him on issues connected with policy and the economy. . . We could not have a better adviser.’

There are some tiresome individuals who insist on pointing out that Kazakhstan is a one party petrostate where awkward journos and human rights campaigners routinely get banged up.

But let me stress right now that this stance is still streets ahead of Uzbekistan, just down the road, where dissidents are routinely subject to death by boiling.

Surely the team at TBA will use the wealth of experience acquired in the New Labour years to bring about a climate in which Kazakhs feel free to express political opinions that dissent from the leadership, and in which probing media coverage is positively encouraged. These guys are worth every penny, Mr Nazarbayev.

Hacks penning hatchet jobs on this one have two ways into the story. One option is to start by stressing widespread sympathy for the participants, many of whom are nice boys and girls from good families. It’s just that there is no getting round the fact that the financial sector pays the bills around here, and that the protestors have no coherent alternative to offer.

The more hardcore take is to insist that naïve college kids are being manipulated by evil Marxist revolutionaries, hell bent on erecting a new Gulag system across the West. The banks did not benefit from free market capitalism, according to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, but rather its obverse. And in any case, the protestors have no coherent alternative to offer.

The irony is that if past form is anything to go by, the more strident sections of the far left will soon denounce the lack of ideological clarity on display in St Paul’s churchyard. What is needed is not reformist confusion, but a clear cut revolutionary programme, we will be told. Unfortunately, the protestors have no coherent alternative to offer.

Now people behind #occupylsx have come up with their first official statement, and inevitably, there is  more than a touch of ‘overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nice’ about it. It is a document that has plainly been drafted by committee, as the saying used to go.

Old timers like me will surely be befuddled. What, no transitional demands designed to expose the inherent perfidiousness of the trade union bureaucracy? Not even a model resolution to be tabled at Labour Party ward meetings up and down the country? I mean, Hackney North general committee would probably still go for something like that.

Yet anyone who has watched the weakening of the labour movement and the traditional Marxist left will understand why class politics does not seem like the way ahead for younger activists.

I’m tempted to show my age here and quote a line from the Sex Pistols: ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.’ But that is taken from a song called Anarchy in the UK, and it’s coming sometime, maybe.

It would be curmudgeonly of me not to approve of those prepared to get off their arses and do take direct action, on whatever basis. Platitudes will do for now; the rest you can work out later.

As a special adviser to Dr Fox myself – well, that’s what it says on my business cards, anyway – I should stress here that no concrete charges of misconduct have at this point been made against him.

Nevertheless, his obvious closeness to defence consultant Adam Werritty does create what Fox called at the weekend ‘an impression of wrongdoing’. Moreover, hard evidence seems to contradict some of Fox’s earlier statements in this affair.

As senior politician at the Ministry of Defence, Fox has one of the most sensitive jobs in government. His brief takes in not only the armed services, but responsibility to act as a super salesman for the arms trade, the one remaining high tech manufacturing sector in which a substantially deindustrialised Britain still claims world leadership in export terms.

In many cases, this entails pimping weaponry to regimes that use what they buy both for internal repression and external aggression. Arms consultants – people like Werritty – make often not inconsiderable livings by ensuring they get a slice of the pie.

For obvious reasons, I am reluctant to use the expression ‘smoking gun’ in any story that involves the MoD. But if it is proven either that Werritty secured financial advantage from hanging around Whitehall with his former flatmate, or that Fox has been less than truthful in answering questions, then it is quite clear that Fox should go.

He may not quite be naked on the floor, and I apologise right now to readers who find that image disturbing. But to paraphrase Ms Imbruglia’s 1997 anthem to all those with conflicted personal lives, he’s wide awake and he should see the perfect sky is torn.

That he can even get away with such a surreal claim without attracting widespread derision underlines just how far the issue of poverty reduction no longer looms large on the political agenda.

I don’t underestimate the sincerity of a quiet man. Ever since he was forced out of the Tory leadership, IDS has devoted much of his political time to the question of welfare reform. He has been widely commended for taking the problem seriously, and for developing a new approach within a centre-right framework.

IDS was also indisputably correct when he observed that under New Labour, income inequality in this country rose to the highest level seen since 1961, the first year for which calculations of the so-called Gini Coefficient are available.

But that is not the full story, of course. Look at the time series shows and you will see that the decisive transition between the relatively egalitarian postwar social democratic arrangements and the shocking degree of inequality we see today took place in the 1980s.

In other words, the Thatcher years were the time when poverty exploded in Britain, and that was the entirely predictable outcome of measures enacted by a prime minister for whom IDS has repeatedly expressed his admiration. The Tories are the party that created mass poverty in its current manifestation.

New Labour did what it could, within the limitations of its timid political thinking, to change that state of affairs. The National Minimum Wage was a step in the right direction. I’m not sure which way Duncan Smith voted on that one. Perhaps he would care to remind us?

Tax credits and Sure Start should also be numbered among the achievements of the Blair and Brown administrations. Nevertheless, inequality continued to grow, as is unsurprising under a government that boasted of being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.

The Coalition can fairly be asked to be judged on its record, and we do not yet have any meaningful statistical indicators to prove the argument one way or another. But a platform that includes a three year freeze in child benefit, the abolition of baby bonds, hundreds of thousands of public sector redundancies and a housing benefit cap does not exactly establish Cameron and Clegg as the legitimate successors to Robin Hood.

If the phrase ‘the party of the poor’ is interpreted as meaning ‘the party with effective policies to bring about a reduction in poverty’ – and what else could it sensibly mean? – then the truth is that the poor currently do not have a party, and British politics is worse off for that fact.

I exaggerate, of course. But only slightly. At a time when the notion that capitalism is in crisis has gone from being a demented Trot cliché to an everyday topic of debate in the Financial Times, the sheer disconnect between reality and Labour’s willingness to think the potential consequences through is immediately striking. We are somewhere close to the territory that psychoanalysts refer to as being ‘in denial’.

The shadow chancellor’s suggestion that Britain could now a Japanese-style lost decade is actually one of the more optimistic scenarios on offer. A full scale slump on the scale of the 1930s is mercifully not the most likely prospect we face, but neither is it out of the question.

Yet the timidity of the left’s intellectual response is shocking. The terms of debate are more or less limited to the desirability of slightly tighter financial regulation and the ringfencing of investment banking activity. There is no recognition that cyclicality is built into the system itself.

Consider the contrast with the slump that followed the 1973 oil shock. People such as Sam Aaronovitch and Stuart Holland, who later became a Labour MP, produced diagnoses and recommendations that found a reflection in Labour’s official policies.

Of course their work –not beyond criticism at the time, I should add – cannot simply be dusted off. Nearly 40 years on, much of it will have to begin from scratch.  Nobody has even begun that task.

Measures such as VAT and National Insurance cuts, a bank bonus tax and bringing forward public works spending may all have value in themselves. But even collectively they hardly constitute strong medicine.

I was among those who expected the election of the Coalition last year to push Labour towards at least partial rediscovery of social democracy. Instead, the talk is of Blue Labourism, a creed that has little to say about the economy.

Tellingly, even President Obama – acting, it has to be said, out of opportunism rather than ideological conviction – is posturing as a hardline Keynesian, calling for job creation and taxing the rich, and daring the Republicans to knock him down.

So the first time in my political memory, a Democrat president in the US is discernibly to the left of a Labour Party in opposition in the UK. It is a failure of nerve that Balls may yet live to regret.

Where business secretary John Hutton proclaimed that huge salaries were something to celebrate, his successor Vince Cable attacks ‘pay outs for failure’ and calls for workers and shareholders to have an input into deciding executive pay.

 Where Gordon Brown shamefully scrapped the 10p tax band – a move that left up to five million of the poorest people in Britain worse off – Nick Clegg entirely correctly advocates taking the low paid out of the income tax system altogether.

Treasury secretary Danny Alexander is hiring 2,500 additional inspectors to snoop into the tax returns of the super-rich and warning them that ‘we will find your money’. There is even talk of a mansions tax in the offing.

As is the way with all major parties these days, all of this will have been choreographed long in advance. The Liberal Democrats have deliberately decided to present themselves as progressive redistributionists, moving on to turf that Labour even under Ed Miliband is too timid to occupy.

Yet they are doing so as part of a government whose programme is centred rather on regressive redistribution; a government that wants to take money away from disability and housing benefit claimants and public sector pension funds in order to propitiate financial markets; a government that exists essentially to ensure that the wealthiest in society stay that way, even if they do have to hand over fractionally more of their vast incomes to the Inland Revenue.

The hope appears to be that flagging up proposals unlikely ever to be enacted will deflect the flak the Lib Dems inevitably have to take for participation in this project. But if the example of their sister party across the North Sea is anything to go by, the gambit will not necessarily work.

Germany’s Freie Demokratische Partei is a junior partner in coalition with the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, roughly equivalent to the Tories. The administration is taking a buffeting because, in the interests of the banking classes, it is footing much of the bill for the eurozone bailout.  

FDP leader Philipp Rösler – like Clegg, officially speaking the deputy head of government – is aware that this is going down badly with the electorate, and has sought to milk mild euroscepticism in the same way that Clegg has suddenly rediscovered softcore social democracy.

The results have not been impressive. Two state elections this month have seen it crash out of state assemblies in both Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin, its vote collapsing to the 2-3% range in both cases. If that performance were replicated at the next general election, it would disappear altogether from the Bundestag after failing to make the 5% threshold.

The parallel is not exact, of course. In this country, the government’s deficit reduction plan still commands public significant support, a factor the left should not forget. But this, I suspect, will be reversed as soon as the huge cuts in public spending that it entails has yet to be introduced.

Once we get there, we will find out just how serious the Lib Dems are about wanting to take on the rich, and whether their electoral base will be any more forgiving than the FDP’s.

If the people are turbulent and riotous, nothing is to be done for them on account of their evil dispositions. If they are obedient and loyal, nothing is to be done for them, because their being quiet and contented is a proof that they feel no grievance  –  Edmund Burke, 1797

The trouble in Manchester all kicked off when bogus rumours spread that a mob was besieging parts of inner London. A section of the lower orders, clearly fuelled by drink, set out on a wrecking spree, expressing their solidarity by smashing windows.

I refer, of course, to the situation in 1816, in a Britain so different from the one in which we live today that it is impossible to imagine what things must have been like for the dispossessed.

The country was led by a reactionary Tory government which, faced with economic ruin brought on by the huge of expense of foreign wars, was determined to introduce policies that directly benefited the wealthy few.

Among the measures that it enacted were the Corn Laws, which enriched the landed interest from which they drew their support, at the expense of making food dearer for everybody else.

The urban working class – derided at the time as immoral, uneducated, brutalised, feckless, and completely bereft of all prevailing norms of morality and decency – lashed out with undisguised fury.

First riots rocked the capital. Then they spread to other parts of Britain. In Bridport, there were protests against higher bread prices, in Bideford they focused on the export of grain while families starved at home. Merthyr Tydfil erupted against the imposition of wage cuts. In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, hungry miners went on the rampage, while in Glasgow, deaths resulted from a ruckus over poor quality soup kitchens.

Nor was there any respect for the property of the employers. Only years before, the mindless thugs known to history as the Luddites had wrecked machinery in factories, oblivious to warnings of political economists at the shocking short sightedness of such behaviour.

With the benefit of hindsight, historians can see that the warning signs were obvious.  For much of the population ,life chances were limited to unemployment, the workhouse or begging. No question of education for them.

The disconnect between the political system and the broad public was complete. Many seats in Westminster were in the control of small cliques or even individuals, and even elsewhere, only the affluent were represented in parliament.

There were huge disparities in wealth. Factory workers earned just 25p a week, while government sinecurists such as Lord Arden took £39,000 a year from the public purse. The entire annual budget for the relief of the poor at the time was just £42,000.

Yet instead of tackling these questions, incompetent home secretary Lord Sidmouth decided instead on a regime of growing repression. Any criticism of the system was criminalised as ‘sedition’, laws were introduced against trade unionism, and the freedom of the press was severely curtailed.

Some even blamed the unrest on recent developments in communications. Postal services were intercepted and letters to and from radicals or suspected agitators were routinely copied to the Home Office.

It is to just this period that the origins of today’s labour movement can be traced, as awareness grew of the need for a movement that stood up for ordinary people against a corrupt plutocracy.

Of course, Conservatism has evolved massively over the last two centuries. It is surely unthinkable that Theresa May would even contemplate making the same mistakes as her predecessor of nearly 200 years ago. Isn’t it?

By contrast, current Westminster representative David Lammy has been quick to distance himself not only from last night’s disturbances, but from the events of 1985 as well. The comparison between the two stances illustrates just how far Labour has travelled over the last 26 years.

Over the next few days, condemnation will be heard from across the mainstream political spectrum. So it is worth asking such basic questions as ‘why did this happen?’

For the stupid right, it was an outbreak of thuggery, plain and simple. For Telegraph blogger Nile Gardiner – a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst, no less – the underlying problem is that the Coalition has ‘not gone far enough in reining in the deficit, and has not been forceful enough on issues like crime’.

Let me run that past you again. The proximate cause of the unrest was the action of the Metropolitan Police in shooting a man dead. Just how ‘forceful’ does Gardiner want the cops to be?

At the other extreme, past experience shows that sections of the far left regard riots as good things in and of themselves. ‘FANTASTIC TOTTENHAM – BRUTAL MURDERING MET COPS GET WHAT WAS COMING TO THEM’, proclaims obviously breathless Ian Bone.

‘Have not seen a riot like this with so much hatred, property damage and lasting into daylight since Toxteth 1981 … At last the working class have re-entered the arena. BIGTIME. THE REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN TORY BRITAIN HAS BEGUN!’

You just can’t beat a bit of good old fashioned property damage, can you? The insurance industry will of course reimburse the chain retailers for the looted plasma televisions. Let’s hope the burnt out small shopkeepers were similarly well covered. But the impact of the riot on an already depressed local economy is hardly going to be positive.

I am not a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst, or one of Britain’s best-known anarchists, come to that. My home in N16 is about two miles down the road from N17, in a broadly similar area, and I have lived in inner city north London for most of my life.

I can see the poverty and the dereliction from the window of the room in which I am typing this. I can see the racist policing, the homeless alkies, the untreated schizophrenics, the wheelchair-bound beggars, the street violence and the gang culture on an average trip to the shopping centre.

All of this goes on just a short bus ride away from the fabulous wealth of the City, which is where I work, and where million pound bonuses continue to be dished out with the same regularity as P45s are handed to low-paid shopworkers. I’m all in favour of beginning the redistribution of wealth in Tory Britain, but I’d rather start it with the hedge fund boys than the local Asian convenience store.

The argument will go that the way to change this state of affairs is through the democratic process rather than the petrol bomb. But such is the degree of disconnect between all the major parties and the street that the chances of positive engagement are next to zero. There is instead the recourse of riot.

The depressing thing is that nothing has changed since the violence in Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth and, of course, Tottenham, that scarred the Thatcher years. New Labour had 13 years in which to address the multiple problems of areas that consistently return Labour MPs. Despite some useful initiatives, its essential commitment  to neoliberalism meant that it was unable to do so effectively.

Now we are back with a Tory-led Coalition determined to enact policies that will make matters worse. As a result, the Met last night got yet another bloody good hiding. Isn’t that enough to bring about a serious rethink? Maybe we should phrase it more diplomatically than Bernie did, but the least Labour could do is to make the case.

I do not see anything in either the extent or the seriousness of Hackgate that leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Coalition is on the point of imminent collapse.

Blog posts and newspaper columns from both the more impressionable variety of younger leftist and diehard Tory rightwingers who never had much time for Cameron anyway should probably be disregarded.

The British electorate repeatedly demonstrates a surprising willingness to forgive and forget. Remember the MPs’ expenses scandal, when it was widely suggested that the next parliament would be chock-a-block with the likes of Esther Rantzen and Simon Heffer, elected on independent tickets? It never happened, of course.

Governments don’t just topple. Sometimes in the past they have been pushed, not least by organised labour, as Heath and Callaghan found out. But given the current weakness of British trade unions, there is neither a conscious strategy to achieve that, or even much prospect of blundering into such a scenario by accident.

Nor should it be forgotten that the combined Conservative and Lib Dem opinion poll showing still equals or outstrips Labour’s. This government clearly has a social base that is fully convinced about the need for austerity, from which it derives democratic legitimacy.

If the left is serious about expediting Cameron’s downfall, it needs to start winning the wider argument as to why it should go.

It is a useful heuristic that nothing in politics is ever more than 80% certain, so it is not inconceivable that some yet-to-be-revealed factor will leave all existing bets off. As Ms Brooks warned NotW staff as she was sacking them, there may be a lot more to come.

But my best guess would be that at a time of year when the political classes are packing their bags for Tuscany, the holiday season will defuse the situation. We’ll see if this one still dominates the front pages in September.

Let’s say you take a bet on a horse to lose the Grand National, something that those of us who do the gees gees know as a ‘lay bet’. But in this case, you get access to the paddock, and have every opportunity to bribe the jockey or dope the nag. You can even throw ball bearings, or perhaps the odd suffragette, under its hooves once it is on the track.

What’s more, the Jockey Club – a bunch of bleedin’ useless aristos who are never particularly assiduous in these matters, anyway – can’t see any harm in all this, and doesn’t even make a pretence of trying to stop it.

Easy money? Of course. And the City Boys get to do something very like this, through a combination of using Credit Default Swaps and a tactic called short selling.

CDSs are often likened to an insurance policy against debt default, and they can sometimes be just that. They are readily available on state debt. But unlike legit fire insurance, for instance, there is no requirement to own what is being insured. In the overwhelming majority of cases, taking out a CDS amounts to no more than taking a punt.

It is also common to borrow shares and bonds that you do not own, sell them in the expectation that they will fall in value, and then buy them back at the lower price. The process often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The bonus is that if the firm – or in the case of government debt, an entire country – goes pear-shaped, you get to collect on the CDS. As such cover is obtainable at just a few percentage points, the payouts on offer far exceed anything the ordinary punter ever gets to collect on.

Today the Italian authorities have taken decisive action to scupper the speculators. Yes, the market regulator is using “moral suasion” – his words, not mine – to ask people nicely not to do bad things. The request is not binding, of course.

Yet the consequences of this little scam could yet prove to be devastating for millions of people, especially if the hedgies succeed in pushing in pushing an economy over the cliff. The results would range from mass unemployment to reduced pensions and less spending on schools and hospitals. All this, for the enrichment of a handful of money men.

In short – geddit? – there is no reason why these practices should be tolerated, and if the reality was more widely appreciated, they wouldn’t be. The next leftie Labour backbencher who comes up in the private members’ bill ballot could do worse than table legislation to outlaw them.