It’s probably fair to assume that among those who see little choice but to subject themselves to usury will be people that have lost their jobs and do not have recourse to more reasonable sources of credit than wonga.com.

With mass employment so good for business, no wonder Beecroft would like to make it easier to sack people. Among the proposals contained in the review of employment law he has recently completed for the Coalition is so called ‘no fault dismissal’.

Don’t like that black bloke in the ad sales department? Worried that the girl in accounts just got married and may be planning to have kids? Health and safety rep keeps on demanding that you stick to health and safety rules?

Never mind decades-worth of laws designed to give women, trade unionists and ethnic minorities some sort of job security. If Beecroft gets his way, employers will be able to give them their P45s, no questions asked, provided only they stump up a minimal pay-off as well.

The scheme truly is bonkers, and to his credit, business secretary Vince Cable quickly said as much. Beecroft has responded furiously, throwing the worst insult of which he can conceive at Cable: the man must be ‘a socialist’, he concludes.

For the record, he isn’t. There is nothing in Cable’s political track record – including his stint as a Labour councillor – to indicate that he has ever advocated common ownership of the means of production. He is actually a generic social democratic, of the kind that could find a home in any British mainstream party.

As for the suggestion that he is anti-business, let us remember that prior to entering parliament, he held a relatively senior position at oil multinational Shell, not an outfit famed for extending positive discrimination towards Trots and treehuggers.

In short, Beecroft’s outburst tells us more about the thought processes of the rabid right than the ideological complexion of Cable.

Yet this is the sort of person the Coalition is looking to for policy inspiration these days, and what’s more, he seems to enjoy ample support on the Conservative backbenches. Nice.

First enunciated in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last year, written by or perhaps ghosted for legendary investor Warren Buffett, the simple idea here is that millionaires should pay a minimum tax rate of 30%.

This week the call has embraced by Barack Obama, as part of his attempt to wrong foot his Republican rival in this year’s presidential race by depicting him as a creature of Wall Street rather than Main Street. Given Mitt Romney’s ‘I like firing people’ private equity background, this should not prove unduly difficult.

Moreover, Obama will be well aware that he does not have to deliver on the deal, as it will almost certainly be rejected by Republicans when it is tabled in the Senate next week. It’s a cheap shot, and I’m not saying that in a pejorative way, either.

Don’t get me wrong, a Buffett rule would not be my personal first choice of tax reform. I am sufficiently old school on these matters never to have accepted the arguments against sharply progressive income tax.

While I am mindful of the received wisdom is that any perceived reversion to Denis Healey-style soak the rich stance would be suicidal for Labour, I am not convinced this is the case.

Osborne’s recent move to slice the 50p top rate was clearly unpopular beyond the ranks of its beneficiaries, and François Hollande maintains a healthy second round poll lead in the French presidential contest despite his call for a 75% tax band for the very wealthy.

In this country, a 30% tax minima for millionaires would have the advantage of seeming fair to much of Middle England, not least because nowadays even some top end blue collar jobs put those that do them in the 40% bracket.

No doubt the Tories would oppose such a measure, leaving themselves vulnerable to ‘cabinet of millionaires’ accusations.

But best of all, even the Daily Mail who be hard put to denounce a policy supported by the president of the United States as nasty Bolshevism.

I fail to see what’s not to like on this one.

Some commentators are suggesting that this operation was carefully planned, by way of a reprisal from the Rupert Murdoch camp for the Leveson Inquiry. The theory is entirely plausible, and if that is indeed the case, the irony that probity is here being upheld by News International should be apparent to all.

Because if there is one businessman who must certainly does not need to stump up a quarter of a million quid for a meal with senior politicians, it is Mr Murdoch. No doubt he is contemptuous of the small fry forced to reach for their chequebook.

The media proprietor has dined with several successive prime ministers and effectively dictated media policy to all of them.  Less than two weeks ago, it was revealed that he held a secret meeting with Margaret Thatcher in 1981, prior to his purchase of Times Newspapers. Both sides subsequently lied by denying that it happened.

At least Mr Murdoch’s regular visits to Number Ten during the New Labour administrations were well documented, as were Blair’s begging phone calls to Berlusconi, putting the case for News International to buy an Italian television company.

It is sobering to reflect that the stitch-up of Peter ‘Premier League’ Cruddas is likely to inflict more political damage on the government than the ineffectual one-day public sector strike seen on November 30 last year.

That the labour movement seemingly packs less political clout than a single newspaper is a pointer to the balance of class forces in Britain today. But that is a debate that can be deferred to another time. Meanwhile, my advice is to just look on and enjoy.

If only they would count their blessings instead of counting their money, they would realise that the current arrangements represents a brilliant public relations coup on their behalf. For a somewhat modest outlay, the artificial impression is created that they are pulling something approximating their weight.

Nevertheless, it looks as if the 50p band is on the way out. The Liberal Democrats, we read this morning, have dropped their opposition to seeing it scrapped, leaving the the rest of us wondering how strongly the principle was ever cleaved to anyway.

Such timidity will be warmly welcomed by the noisy lobby that has become increasingly obsessed with this issue in recent months. Yet the case they make against it is notable for its incoherence.

The first main argument advanced is that the 50p rate doesn’t actually raise any money, but rather simply leads to more efficient tax avoidance. In that case, what’s the problem?

In  point of fact, it does appear to raise money. The Treasury estimates that it will pull in £2.7bn in 2012-13, which works out at something like £50 a head for every man, woman and child in Britain.

That is not a fortune, of course. But it is better than nothing, and if the government doesn’t find that sum from the wealthy, it will have to find it from the not so wealthy.

The second typical ground for opposition is the idea that the £150,000 threshold somehow stifles enterprise and wealth creation. That also is nonsense.

Higher taxation on the top 1% of earners does not deter anybody from setting up a local restaurant or window cleaning business. Few such small scale entrepreneurs have any realistic hope of pulling down £150,000 a year, ever.

The handful that do can channel revenue through their companies, leaving it subject to capital gains tax at 20% rather than income tax at any level. Isn’t that right, Ken Livingstone?

Conversely, most people on salaries of £150,000 or more are neither entrepreneurs nor wealth creators. Usually they work in the City, where they speculate using wealth in the main created by the efforts of working people, or have risen up the management ladder in established multinationals.

And despite all the overblown claims that this ostensibly punitive taxation regime would spark a mass exodus of City Boys, this clearly has not happened. Only a small handful have upped sticks. The overwhelming majority have elected to stay in Britain, which remains a country in which a strongly Friedmanite government is dedicated to helping them rake it in hand over fist.

Many of them have accumulated fortunes so immense that 50p rather than 40p is so much small change. It represents just another overhead cost of living in London, much along the lines of the extortionate price of upmarket accommodation.

Clawing back some of the spectacular giveaways doled out to the wealthy under successive governments since 1979 is entirely justifiable.

An effective income tax policy would see them pay rather more than what they are getting away with right now.

Nor is this country in the grip of a generalised witch hunt against those that wish to draw attention to their Christianity this manner. Despite the immense publicity accorded to Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin, these are the only two known instances in which the issue has even arisen.

Yet this is not the impression given by some of the more excitable coverage of the European Court of Human Rights case launched by these two women against the government, in which they seek an affirmation that they enjoy the positive right to display religious symbolism.

Double standards on the question of visible signifiers of a belief system are pervasive. But despite being a secular leftist of the type excoriated by Baroness Warsi, I do not have a problem with the practice as such. Nor should anybody with a serious commitment to the freedom to follow any religion, or none.

After all, Muslim head coverings, Sikh turbans and yarmulkes are commonplace. Any employer that unreasonably discriminated against such garments could rightly expect to end up in front of a tribunal.

I know of a chief executive of a prominent company who displays a fish-shaped lapel badge, popular among evangelicals, and the head of a trade association who sports a ring that indicates Masonic affiliations. In as far as I have professional dealings with either of these men, all of this is by the by.

Yet what is and is not acceptable is largely governed by convention rather than law. No City firm would have allowed pierced noses 20 years ago; today, many younger employees mutilate their nostrils in this fashion.

The point of upholding the separation of church and state is that this is the best means of upholding the freedom to practice religion.

Given the accommodation extended in instances like those I cite above, Christians are absolutely entitled to a level playing field. I’m happy enough with a generalised social presumption in favour of discrete religious jewellery.

British Airways –  well-known as an anti-union employer, incidentally – seems to me to have been heavy-handed in its treatment of Eweida.

Yet what cannot be forgotten is that certain forms of attire are simply not suitable for particular jobs. Chaplain’s bosses say that front line nurses are banned from wearing necklaces of any description, lest patients try to grab at them.

Whether or not objections like that are defensible can only be established on a case by case basis. But being clad in a burqa is an obvious no-go if you want to be a firefighter.

In this case, the Coalition’s decision to contest the action bought by Eweida and Chaplin is the correct one. While tolerance should be maximal, there are ultimately practical limits.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien starts, of course, from the theological premises set down in the Vatican’s 1975 Declaration on Sexual Ethics. Same sex attraction may be unavoidable, but is nevertheless ‘a serious depravity’; to act on that attraction is ‘intrinsically disordered’.

O’Brien is as entitled as any other citizen to express an opinion on gay marriage. The question is exactly how much extra weight his stance should carry by virtue of his position within an unelected hierarchy.

The Catholic church is a voluntary organisation, and is entitled to make whatever stipulations for its adherents its teaching appears to dictate. Obviously it would be wrong for the state to compel it to conduct gay marriage services.

But the same logic runs the other way; its authority extends exclusively to those who chose to accept it, which works out at around 8% of the population. It cannot be accorded a veto over policies that impact on the remaining 92% of us.

Moreover, the very credibility of its pronouncements on matters sexual is surely tainted by decades in which its leadership in many countries was knowingly complicit in child abuse on a mass scale.

On reading the O’Brien’s piece, I was also amused to see Catholicism posing as the brave defender of heretics and those who dissent from imposed orthodoxy. Get a history book, Cardinal.

The article contains more arguments than can conveniently be examined in the space of a blog post. Some of them are quite obviously tenuous. For instance, the idea that civil partnership is harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved is asserted without even an attempt at substantiation.

But one principal claim appears to be that marriage has existed at all times and places, and has only ever meant the legal union of one man and one woman. The government is trying to change that definition to include same sex unions, and is therefore guilty of attempting to redefine reality.

While my knowledge of anthropology is sketchy, the Cardinal seems to be on shaky ground here. As far as I am aware, human societies have always displayed a vast diversity of sexual set ups. One to one straight marriage has been dominant, but scarcely universal.

Even in the Bible, we read in in 1 Kings 11:3 that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Polygamy was nothing out of the ordinary in the Old Testament (Deut. 21:15), and Abraham himself engaged in divinely-sanctioned bigamy.

But the truth is not that the government that is redefining reality, but that reality is redefining itself. Committed gay relationships have surely been around as long as committed straight relationships, but it is only thanks to the social changes seen in the last 50 years that they have become both commonplace and open.

If the Coalition recognises that and allows LGBT couples that wish to do so to walk down the aisle, then that ultimate increases rather than diminishes the standing of marriage as an institution. Those that favour marriage should have no complaints about that.

But even at this distance in time, her name lives on, Emily’s List – the New Labour women’s network that helped around a dozen shoulder padded Blairites make it to Westminster – chose the appellation at least in part in Ms Davison’s honour.

Back in 1970, a radical young Liberal activist called Peter Hain initiated the Stop the 70 Tour campaign, which threatened to disrupt a series of test matches between England and an all white South African team. The tour was duly cancelled. Hain became a hero to the left, and ended up a New Labour cabinet minister.

Yesterday, Unite leader Len McCluskey told the Guardian that the union was considering peaceful civil disobedience at this summer’s Olympics. The defence of the NHS strikes me as being an issue of the same order of importance as votes for women and opposition to apartheid.

Yet his words have been condemned across the spectrum, from Baroness Warsi to Ken Livingstone. Even Ed Miliband has tweeted his outrage, branding McCluskey’s call as ‘unacceptable and wrong’.

It’s a good job Twitter wasn’t around in 1913 or 1970, I guess.

These days, it seems, even an additional ten quid a week is a bit much to ask. Many of Britain’s  most profitable employers are securing staff for nothing, with the state picking up the tab for Jobseekers’ Allowance and a bus pass.

When I did my six month stint on ET, my employer provided me with what turned out to be useful training as a press officer for a voluntary organisation. I guess there is not quite so much to learn about the finer nuances of night time shelf stacking.

But the current controversy has sparked widespread outrage and a bit of argy-bargy at a Tesco store in Westminster, and this morning the rightwing press has gone onto the defensive, with numerous articles in defence of workfare.

It was Labour that introduced the practice in the first place, says Philip Johnson in the Telegraph. Nonsense; workfare was commonplace in the Tory 1980s, it’s just that it wasn’t called that at the time, and Labour still had sufficient courage to oppose it.

It shouldn’t even be called workfare, Iain Duncan Smith tells the Daily Mail, before setting out what looks awfully like a distinction without a difference, and then proving how it all turned out well in the end for a woman from Neath. Opponents of the work experience programme are betraying the young, he maintains.

Employment minister Chris Grayling has even coined the term ‘job snob’, mendaciously asserting that the objection here is to the nature of the work rather than the principle involved.

Nobody I know from a working class background looks down on anybody undertaking less than glamorous tasks to earn a living. We have all done that ourselves. In my experience, ‘she’s only a shopgirl, Henry’ sneers more typically emanate from those who consider themselves above all that.

At a time when youth unemployment tops 20%, of course the state should take measures to bolster the chances of those who have been out of work for an extended period.

But I’m not convinced that the current scheme is the way to go about it. Indeed, it is actually a disincentive to job creation. Why employ anybody on a contract when the local Jobcentre will send you an uninterrupted stream of expendable labour power at no cost whatsoever?

If the work needs doing then there is a vacancy. And if there is a vacancy, it should be filled at an appropriate rate of pay.

The definition of appropriate rate of pay will vary according to taste. For me, that means union rates. Given the current weakness of the labour movement, others will regard the local average for similar work as good enough.

But at the non-negotiable very least, it has to mean the minimum wage. The clue is in the name here; if thousands of people are working for less than that, it no longer does what it says on the tin.

Widespread workfare will then exert a downward pressure on what everybody else takes home. And don’t tell the Tories hadn’t thought of that one, either.

Given that the job of any the European Union constitution is to regulate these matters, the case for such a document including explicit reference to God – as demanded by Baroness Warsi in the Daily Telegraph today – is tenuous.  

Yet Britain’s first Muslim woman cabinet minister advocates just that as a means of resisting the ‘rising tide’ of ‘militant secularisation’. Many of the claims her contribution contains are questionable, as is its principal conclusion.

We live in a country in which a minority denomination within Christianity is privileged as an established religion, with the head of state acting as its supreme governor, and places reserved in the legislature for its representatives. So long as these arrangements stay in place, the contention that secularism dominates political life is laughable.

Moreover, acts of religious assertion have risen dramatically over the last decade. The numbers choosing to wear clothing that signifies particular religious affiliation has risen dramatically, for instance. Nor do I have a problem with that. I mention it merely to counter the broad brush assertion that secularism is the only game in town.

Even if we admit that it is on the increase, the use of the adjective ‘militant’ is pure hyperbole. Secularism is not, for instance, enforced at the point of a gun. Nor is the labour movement balloting workers on indefinite all-out strike action is support of the right to blaspheme.

Although Baroness Warsi does not mention it as such, much has been made of the well-publicised recent court case bought by the National Secular Society against Bideford Town Council, which debars it from holding prayers before meetings.

Contrast the resort to legal action with the violent mass pickets that forced the closure of a play deemed offensive to the Sikh faith in Birmingham a few years back. Some might deservedly call that ‘militant religiousity’. Care to comment, Baroness?

Most risible of all is the idea that the instincts of secularists are intolerant and essentially similar to those of totalitarianism. To come up with arrant nonsense like that on the day she pays a state visit to the Vatican is particularly outrageous.

Or perhaps Baroness Warsi is just unaware of such regimes as Franco’s Spain, Tiso’s Slovakia or Pavelic’s Croatia, which had no difficulty in combining elements of fascism and Catholicism, while sometimes murdering and repressing adherents of other faiths?

Secularism is the correct sense of the word is tolerant by its nature. The separation of church (or mosque, or synagogue) and state is the precondition for the maximum exercise of religious freedom and the minimisation of tension in a multicultural society.

That governments should neither encourage or discourage religious belief is a point that should appeal to the thinking believer and the atheist alike.

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.