Commentariat

Guardian Comment and Debate

Timothy Garton Ash:This hard-nosed power does not share the west’s enthusiasms. Deep engagement is the best way to fend off conflict

• He’s mean, he’s keen and now they say he’s green. “Green-basher Boris relaunches himself as an eco-warrior,” said the Indy on Sunday, and sure enough the plaudits came this week as he promised to tart up selected parks, plant trees, cut carbon and increase energy efficiency. Progress of a sort from a man who trashed the Kyoto treaty. But before we get carried away, here from his draft budget is a snapshot of a few other steps in the offing, the better to safeguard the environment: jobs to go from the environment team (saving £189,000); cuts to the environment programme (£139,000 - and no provision for inflation); an end to the London Schools Environment Award (another £87,000 clawed back). He has dropped the pending appeal against an energy-hungry and polluting desalination plant east of the capital. There was a £60m scheme to have police, fire and other municipal vehicles powered by hydrogen, the biggest such scheme in western Europe. That’s now gone. And where, you ask, is the plan to test the emissions of the capital’s black cabs twice a year? Up in smoke. The fine words are good. Some fine deeds to match would be nice.

• At the same time there appears to be bad news for Ken Livingstone - the artist formerly known as the mayor of London. An early act for Boris was to scupper Ken’s oil-for-brooms deal with his friend Hugo Chávez - which saw Venezuela supplying cheap oil in return for access to London’s municipal expertise, to bring order to Caracas. Undeterred, Chávez signed up Ken as a consultant. But who knows what will happen now that el presidente has lost control of the city in regional elections. During a visit to Caracas a few months ago, Ken was feted - but only by the Chavista candidates. The word is that members of the opposition barely know or care about the man who would fix their city. Still, lovely place for a holiday.

• OK. Hands up. Which clever scheduler at Portcullis House, Westminster, decided to stage the forthcoming Sinn Féin London briefing in the Thatcher Room? It’s not clever, it’s not grown up …

• For things are changing, not always for the better. Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone - the former health secretary Virginia Bottomley - has been casting her eye over today’s “young gels”. She doesn’t like what she sees. “In 1984 I went for three interviews to be taken on as an MP and to have any hope I had to have my hair just like Margaret Thatcher’s,” she told the annual conference of the Financial Services Skills Council. “When I got into parliament there were 22 women MPs but Mrs Thatcher overwhelmed everything, she was the only one that really counted and we were all supposed to look like her.” It was a better time. “Today young women in the City dress like streetwalkers, and then they even complain about harassment.” If only the Thatcher look would come back.

• And if only more people would speak like the Lady. Instead we have Charles Barwell, the vice-president of the National Convention of the Conservative party and a fellow of the British-American Project. He is a nice enough man but he is of his time: questioned at the project’s annual jamboree in LA as to how he viewed the American elections, Barwell would only reply: “I’ve been sitting on the fence for so long I’ve been picking splinters from my arse.” This may have been an endorsement of Obama - perhaps he liked the other guy - but in any event he should express himself a little better. That imagery isn’t good.

• Finally, 1983 introduced us to many things: seatbelts, the Hitler Diaries - and it was 25 years ago that MP Harry Cohen was first elected. Many have turned to the Labour man in that time. He tells a local magazine he has always tried to help them. “Mr Cohen,” said one constituent, “I have invented a cure-all. It cures everything, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, even the common cold. I want to put this into production so I need a grant from either the government or the council.” He went on: “I need the money, I’m off sick at the moment.” You learn to keep a straight face. That’s experience.

diary@guardian.co.uk

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This week it was shown that there were more children born in the United Kingdom last year with Down’s syndrome than there were before the introduction of universal testing, 20 years ago. One of the reasons is more obvious than the other - fertility among women in their 30s outstripped that of those in their 20s for the first time in the UK during 2005. Mothers are getting older and that trend is continuing; with it the incidence of Down’s syndrome increases. The more surprising aspect, I find, is that 40% of women who have a Down’s syndrome baby having been advised of that strong possibility during pregnancy didn’t believe the test results.

My worry is this: that the discursive space around the issue is taken up with pro-lifers rejoicing in this selfless social direction. Pro-choicers are silent on the matter. And yet 94% of people will abort when told that a foetus probably has the condition. This silence is turning these abortions into a dirty secret. This can’t be allowed to happen - they are either defensible or they aren’t.

The taboo is even more marked in the case of aborting for birth defects than it is with terminations generally. First off, you talk about “defects” and very soon the word “eugenics” is used, and images of Nazis spring up. Second, there is an unavoidable inference that if you are in favour of aborting Down’s syndrome foetuses, you must therefore think that people with Down’s syndrome are worthless. Why would you take such an unkind position?

Well, first of all, it’s nothing to do with eugenics. Nobody aborts a Down’s syndrome foetus because they want to create a society of perfect people. I also think that you would struggle to make the case that parents do it for their own convenience. They do it because they don’t believe that life is so precious that it is worth it at any price. If you are pro-choice, you do not see the right to life as a trump card that obviates all other considerations. You ask questions about quality of life, and you bring to those questions your assessment of your own life.

Which brings us to point two: the argument for termination always falls silent in the face of people saying how happy Down’s syndrome children are, how much joy they bring to their families and communities, how much greater are their opportunities these days - because people were prepared to have them and fight for them.

However, you don’t have to dispute any of that to support a parent’s decision in favour of termination. I am pro-abortion generally for women who get pregnant by accident and are not in a relationship - or at least not one that they want to stay in - and don’t want to have a child on their own. That doesn’t mean I think children of single mothers are worthless, that I wish they didn’t exist, that I don’t believe they bring anything to society. I deride the idea of adoption as a humane and viable alternative to abortion, but that doesn’t mean I wish adopted people dead. I wouldn’t in a million years judge a foetus on what it’s going to bring to society, nor what it will cost. I don’t believe doctors do either.

But nor would I judge a parent who decided against having a baby with Down’s syndrome. You might conceive children for your own pleasure, but once they are out, parents are just there to marshal children to their own life, hoping that it’s one of more pleasure than pain. If you think that you can do this under any conditions, that’s a point of view; but if you think you can’t, that is not a selfish attitude, and nor is it shaming, nor reckless, nor spineless. It’s a mature decision, based on an even-eyed view of the world and life in it, and one that any pro-choicer should be proud to defend.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

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Because some things cannot wait, it was good to be a part of the Environment Agency’s annual conference this week. It was all top stuff - about waste, pollution and renewable energy. Lord Smith, the chairman, talked about his call for the Green New Deal to assist the UK economy, while others pressed for further and better action to combat the scourge of climate change. One of the sponsors of the event was the oil company Shell, who hosted a session on “innovation and technology”, with vice-president Paul Snaith explaining “how business and government can share risk in the commercialisation of technology”. And as everyone was being nice, no one made too much of the fact that in recent months action by the regulator has seen Shell fined £18,000 (that was July) for polluting ground waters in Grimsby, despoilment that will cost £5m to clean up; and £10,000 (September) for diesel spills in Hampshire lakes. In terms of etiquette, it was just as well.

The fearlessness of information commissioner Richard Thomas is surely beyond question now. Robust, independent, oblivious to government pressure, he was at it again this week, challenging the cabinet secretary over secret minutes containing the legal advice that took us to war in Iraq. And so we think it highly unlikely that he will be influenced by the government’s decision, announced also this week, to hike his salary to £140,000 - a 40% pay rise. But no harm in trying.

Perhaps a better approach is that taken towards Jenny Watson, the new chair of the Electoral Commission, who might have hoped to inherit the £150,000 salary enjoyed by her predecessor Sam Younger, but has instead seen MPs whittle it down to £100,000. Ukip’s Bob Spink wants it reduced further, to £63,000. Jenny may note that MPs in general and parties facing investigation have little time for the Electoral Commission. If she didn’t know it before, she does now.

What can we say about Shami Chakrabarti. Earlier this year she fought to kill off the government’s 42-day detention plans. And now we see she is fighting for the reinstatement of Jon Gaunt, the shock-jock and Sun columnist sacked by TalkSport for calling a councillor a Nazi. Before his little difficulty, he derided our Shami as “the most dangerous woman in Britain”. But, ever helpful, she points out that he may now have some redress under the Human Rights Act. That particular piece of legislation is not to his taste, but strange things happen in a crisis. Allegiances shift; tastes change.

As the search for a new poet laureate hots up, the culture department reveals that it is “consulting widely in the poetry sector”; the bosses, the unions - everybody.

Disappointment for all who attended the Richmond upon Thames annual literature festival expecting to hear Professor AC Grayling discuss the nature of duty vs pleasure, the theme of his new book The Choice of Hercules. He didn’t show up, leaving many with the impression that pleasure had won out. In fact, the thinker’s thinker had the dates mixed up. Clever, stupid, it happens.

Finally, though many controversies plagued the Blair premiership, the claim that he sat and watched Jackie Milburn play from the Gallowgate End of Newcastle United’s stadium seemed curiously damaging. It revealed, one thought at the time, a longing to be viewed as clubbable and - as there were no seats in the Milburn era - a willingness to play fast and loose with the truth. But too late perhaps. The former prime minister emerges as a man who was wronged, for last week, when he returned to the north-east, he was staggered to receive an unsought confession from the regional newspaper, the Sunday Sun. You never said it, they admitted in a videotaped interview. It was us. “I used to get so much stick over that,” said a close to speechless Blair, whose only reaction to the news that the reporter responsible has now left the paper was a uncharacteristically terse: “Pleased to hear it.” Iraq, PFIs, “boom and bust” still stand, but on this one it wasn’t him guv. It was the Sunday Sun wot done it. Let history record.

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Mark Thomas: Jacqui Smith’s proposal to give the police Taser guns is stunning - in its lack of research, that is

It’s been astonishing how the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, has got away with it. For several years he has embarked on a radical redefinition of the role a museum plays in public life. Not so much a repository of beautiful objects that generates tourist dollars, but a place for some of the most fraught and contentious of contemporary political debates. If that seems a far-fetched claim, then the recently opened exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality will convince you. After wandering past cuneiform tablets and exquisite carvings, you end up in front of footage of armed American soldiers sauntering through Babylon’s ruins, and Iraqi archaeologists pointing out the damage inflicted by the US troops in the ancient site.

Part of the rationale for the exhibition is to show how myth is used to motivate and explain human behaviour - even to justify aggression. Nowhere illustrates this theme better than Babylon, a city that crumbled into the desert 2,000 years ago, but that has persisted in the western imagination as myth.

Every age has made of Babylon a mythology that suits its purpose, right up to the US invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy: Babylon the decadent city; Babylon a symbol of oppression and exile; Babylon the city of human ambition; the Tower of Babel, an engineering feat that God destroyed for its human hubris and imposed as a punishment the multiplicity of languages to cause confusion in the human race. These myths - still widely used in films, literature and art - represent all our anxieties about the city as a place of anonymity and diversity: a place that allows possibilities of sexual experimentation beyond the control of community, faith or state, and where diversity threatens our capacities to understand each other.

These are all myths with currency still, but we have lost any idea of where they came from, or indeed that they are myths with little historical reality. The British Museum curator Irving Finkel points out that if you ask those over 60 who Nebuchadnezzar was, there’s a good chance they can identify him as the King of Babylon who invaded Jerusalem. Ask those under 30 and you score a blank.

The myths of Babylon were created by two distinct traditions: the Old Testament writers and the Greek historians, both of which have now faded significantly in their influence on western culture. While the Greeks had huge admiration for the engineering feats of the Babylonians, it was the biblical sources that ensured Babylon became a trope for all western cultures’ most profound pessimism about possibilities of diversity and the freedoms of the city.

That is what makes this exhibition a timely intervention into an increasingly anxious debate about London as a modern-day Babylon, as a place of violence and social fragmentation; of the London bus lament that it’s a city of so many languages we can no longer find the everyday solidarities of sharing public space. Our politics of migration and integration is still beholden to the Babylonian myth that multiplicity of languages is a curse - a language test is now imposed on prospective British citizens. There’s a media campaign excoriating the cost of the translation services that ensure access to public services for ethnic minorities.

Yet the historical reality is that almost all political societies have been multilingual, and many are today. Across Africa and Asia, it is routine for people to speak more than one language. Britain’s monolingual culture of the past century has been entirely atypical, part of a standardisation and centralisation of culture dominated by the state that obliterated dialects and other languages.

Far from being a curse, argues Peter Austin, the professor of linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the multiplicity of language is a blessing, an expression of the huge range of human imaginative capability. The biblical myth has served us poorly: it was neither accurate at the time nor since. It could be characterised as the first tabloid panic over diversity, claims Austin.

Significantly, the Qur’an proposes the exact opposite of the Babel curse; a verse says that God has given many languages in order for human beings to understand each other fully. Lots of languages do not confuse, but rather enrich our understanding of human nature.

Historically, different languages are rarely, if ever, the primary cause of conflict. One only has to look at how many civil wars have been fought by those perfectly capable of understanding each other linguistically. In fact, what is more likely to cause conflict is the formal imposition of a single language, argues Robert Evans, a professor of modern history at Oxford. Indeed, Europe’s history over the past two centuries has amply demonstrated the destructiveness of an ideology of nationhood based on a single language - the idea of “one folk, one language”. Peaceful, neutral Switzerland with its four languages has always demonstrated that a country’s political stability and cohesion need not be compromised by a lack of linguistic unity.

This is exactly what a museum should be for: provoking us to reconsider the cultural underpinnings we can so easily take for granted. This is where the British Museum assumes such an unsettling responsibility: reminding us of the power of myth, and how - despite our vaunted claims to rationality - human behaviour can be as captive to myth as ever, challenging us always to be aware of how destructive some of those myths can be.

m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

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Thanks to Alistair Darling, prices in the shops are coming down. From next week the cost-conscious consumer will be able to snap up a £550 flatscreen television for £538.38 and save £6.38 on a £300 washing machine. That’s assuming, of course, that retailers pass on all the 2.5% reduction in VAT rather than plumping for round numbers: £10 off the TV and £5 off the washing machine.

Lower prices will encourage spending. A contraction in the British economy in 2009 that would have equalled 1.5% of national output will be limited to a 1% drop, with activity starting to recover from the summer of next year onwards. The Labour party will be able to go into the next election boasting that, unlike the Conservative governments in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, it did not leave communities to rot, and that its bold action paid off.

That, at least, is the theory. In reality, Gordon Brown’s chances of being re-elected depend on whether this is a so-called V-shaped recession - one that is comparatively brief in duration - or a much deeper and longer affair.

The chancellor’s argument for a rapid descent into recession followed by a relatively rapid recovery is optimistic but not unreasonable. The economy has received a fivefold stimulus since the turn of the year from lower interest rates, lower taxes, higher spending, cheaper oil prices and a fall in the value of sterling. The weaker pound helps exports because they become cheaper; lower oil prices push up real disposable income; the easing of monetary and fiscal policy encourages consumer spending and investment. With inflation falling sharply during the first half of next year, people will find that they can buy more with their monthly pay cheque and - assuming that the financial markets have returned to something like normal - it is reasonable to expect a pick-up in demand during 2009.

As things stand, however, there seems to be little prospect of the financial markets returning to anything like the conditions that existed before the onset of the credit crunch. Mortgage lending has collapsed over the past 15 months - partly because demand has weakened and partly because the inability of banks to access funds from the City’s wholesale money markets means they no longer have as much to lend.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, said yesterday when appearing before the Treasury select committee that the most pressing domestic issue for policymakers was to ensure that normal levels of bank lending were resumed. “Without that, the downturn in activity could become protracted and extremely damaging,” he added. King is absolutely right in his analysis: government action to implement the recommendations of Sir James Crosby’s report on the dearth of mortgage funding would be far more significant in boosting the economy than a 13-month VAT holiday.

Nick Parsons, the head of strategy at the Australian bank nabCapital, noted yesterday that while Easter eggs might be 10p cheaper next spring as a result of the VAT reduction, the fact that house prices were coming down by £3.97 every hour would knock £10,000 off the cost of the average property in the same period. That puts the fiscal boost into context. The housing market is not going to recover until first-time buyers clamber on to the property ladder - and by insisting on 25% deposits and withdrawing low-cost mortgage products the banks are making it clear that they are not exactly falling over themselves to attract new customers.

So what sort of recession is the UK likely to have? The big fear is of an L-shaped recession, which is where an economy falls off the edge off a cliff and remains unconscious for a number of years thereafter. The classic example of an L-shape is the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the Wall Street crash of 1929 precipitated a four-year slump in American output that reduced national output by 25%.

While the current financial market crisis is the most acute since the 1930s, the determination to avoid the policy mistakes of eight decades ago means a second Great Depression appears highly unlikely. That is partly because welfare states are much bigger than they were in the 1930s, and help cushion the impact of recession. But it is also because policy has been eased more quickly, banks have been rescued rather than being allowed to go to the wall, and countries have, so far at least, not fallen back on beggar-my-neighbour policies.

There are two other possibilities for the UK - neither attractive, but both plausible. The first is a W-shaped recession, where the economy contracts, starts to recover but then suffers a relapse. Often this sort of protracted downturn is caused by policy errors: taxes or interest rates are raised too quickly because finance ministers and central bankers believe wrongly that the economy is out of the woods. The risk of that happening in the UK over the next couple of years is high.

Darling in effect announced two budgets on Monday: a tax-cutting budget for today, and a tax-raising (and spending- cutting) budget for 2010 and 2011. Similarly, the deep cuts in interest rates from the Bank of England to historically low levels are not going to last for ever. King did nothing yesterday to hose down expectations that Threadneedle Street may push the bank rate down to 1% over the coming months; but the bank will be keen to avoid the mistake made by then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in the US earlier this decade, when he left borrowing costs too low for too long. The conduct of both fiscal and monetary policy involves fine judgments: acting too early could bring a nascent recovery to a halt.

That leaves a U-shaped recession, which is really just a longer and more painful version of a V-shaped downturn. The longevity and the severity of the credit crunch suggests, at present, that the former is more likely. For Darling to get his V-shaped recovery everything, but everything, has to come right. Consumers must start spending, world trade must pick up, banks start lending, firms stop firing, houses start shifting. It’s not impossible, but the chancellor will need all the luck going.

• Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk

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Barack Obama has already broken one promise. On the night he was elected, he issued a declaration that rebounded off the statues in Grant Park, Chicago and reverberated around the world: “Change has come to America,” he said.

Trouble is, it wasn’t true. We’re still waiting for change because Obama is not yet president. George Bush is still in the White House and will remain there for nearly 60 more days. The economy plunges ever deeper into crisis and yet Obama can do no more than stand and watch from afar, held back from the levers of power until January 20. Bush, meanwhile, gives lame ducks a bad name, still armed with the full authority of his office yet unable or unwilling to act while the economic crisis deepens. Obama defers to the notion that America has “one president at a time”. Yet right now it seems to have no president at all, drifting and functionally leaderless at a time of dire need. The US constitution brims over with mechanisms of elegance and reason - but this three-month period of institutionalised limbo is not one of them.

That’s partly why Obama gave his second press conference in two days yesterday, with another on the way today. It was a recognition that, in Bush’s absence, someone had to get a grip. His performance at the podium - calm and steady - will have done much to reassure Americans that the grownups will soon be in charge. Just so long as they can wait.

But press conferences are only the most overt way in which Obama has signalled his intentions. Just as revealing has been the slew of staff and cabinet appointments since November 4 - all of them shedding crucial light on the Obama presidency to be.

First, we know the new administration will break from the old by valuing expertise and experience - quite a contrast after eight years of cronyism. Remember, Bush named as his point man for national emergencies one Michael Brown, fresh from his post as the judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian Horses Association. Obama’s early nominees, by contrast, each boast resumés either packed with long years of relevant service or luminous with academic prizes - or both. After John McCain threatened the world with a putative vice-president who seemed to regard her own ignorance as a credential for high office, and after he granted Joe the Plumber the status of chief adviser on taxation policy, it’s a relief that the US will soon be run by people with qualifications to do the job.

Second, Obama is clearly determined to be no naive liberal, no wide-eyed neophyte who stumbles into town smiling at the locals even as they pick the wallet from his pocket and slip the watch off his wrist. He will not be Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who brought in pals from their home states as unschooled as they were in the wiles of Washington. So while Clinton’s first chief of staff was an Arkansas buddy from his kindergarten days - and hopelessly out of his depth in the nation’s capital - Obama has turned to a man who has no fear of the DC shark tank, not least because he has some of the sharpest teeth. The notoriously hardball Rahm Emanuel was Obama’s very first appointment, and with it the president-elect sent a clear message. That he does not want to be surrounded by people who are nice. He wants to be surrounded by people who are effective.

There is a deeper insight here too. Obama understands that servants need not be identical to their master, so long as they can implement his will. In Emanuel’s case, the contrast in personality is useful: he can be bad cop to Obama’s good cop. More widely, the incoming president is betting that he can still cast himself as the new broom come to sweep out the Augean stables, even when he’s surrounded by a team of Washington insiders. So he has turned to the former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, a Capitol Hill fixture, to reform healthcare. He wants someone who cannot be tripped up by the time-honoured, reform-thwarting tactics that are a way of life in Congress, someone who knows exactly how the machine works. The lesson of Carter, and especially Clinton - who tried to overhaul healthcare and failed dismally - is that the untainted outsider is a useful persona for an election campaign: it’s not a qualification for a role in government.

This approach has, predictably, disappointed many of the Obama true believers on the liberal left. They are enraged by the proliferation of ex-Clintonites in the incoming administration, whether former treasury secretary Larry Summers as economic adviser in the White House - perhaps a holding position until the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve becomes vacant - or, most visibly, Hillary Clinton herself as secretary of state, an appointment expected to come after tomorrow’s Thanksgiving holiday. Why, they ask, did we go to all that effort to elect Obama, if we end up with the same old Clinton crowd? That’s not change we can believe in.

But this concern probably rests on a misreading of the way Obama sees his cabinet and circle of advisers. His longtime strategist David Axelrod gave the clearest clue at the weekend, when he said: “He’s not looking for people to give him a vision. He’s going to put together an administration of people who can effectuate his vision.” In other words, he’s not hiring Daschle or Summers or Clinton for their ideological colour. He’s hiring them as political professionals who will take a brief - ultimately authored by him - and get the job done.

Perhaps that is a gamble on Obama’s part, to imagine he can construct a progressive administration staffed by those in the centre and even on the centre-right. (Note that his expected national security adviser, the former marine General James Jones, backed John McCain, while Hillary supported the Iraq war.) But that is the bet he is making.

The traditional reading of this would be as a sign of weakness, suggesting Obama feels compelled - New Labour style - to keep right-leaning opinion on board. But it could just as easily be read as evidence of tremendous confidence: that he is sure enough in his own convictions to be surrounded by those who are far from nodding yes men. Bush could not tolerate any such dissent, once telling a luckless economics adviser that any decision the president made was, by definition, good policy. Obama has always invited argument, encouraging his aides to present different views. This must partly explain why he is so drawn to the precedent of Abraham Lincoln and his “team of rivals”.

My own worries are, first, that at least one of Lincoln’s biographers has written that the team ended up “scheming and squabbling among themselves”. Second, more recent history suggests that secretaries of state, in particular, are only effective if world leaders believe there is no daylight between them and the president. Think Kissinger and Nixon, Baker and Bush Sr. Surely few will believe that of Obama and Hillary. Yet one senior Democrat tells me that this was a point explicitly discussed and agreed by the two former opponents last week, and that Hillary has won all that she asked for on that score - including “constant and immediate access” to Obama.

The Hillary nomination is the one that gives me pause. But the other signs are encouraging. The only real criticism of Obama’s presidency? That it hasn’t started yet.

freedland@guardian.co.uk

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The New Labour era is over - welcome to social democracy. Following in Obama’s footsteps, it is suddenly safe to tax the rich and spend to protect jobs. Keynes and Roosevelt are the world’s spirit guides through this crisis, because in a crisis social democracy is what works. Yesterday that faith allowed Labour to shed its disguise and follow its nature in a £20bn shower of spending. Yesterday saw the Conservatives strip off their sheep’s clothing too, as George Osborne tore into the “unexploded tax bombshell” with gusto, merrily defending the aspirations of the wealthy. Now we can see both parties naked as nature intended, and at last comfortable in their own skins.

Symbolism is everything in the volatile irrationality of these times. When markets zigzag between exuberance and despair, confidence is the only currency. The language, the mirage, the smoke and mirrors, it all matters as much as the substance. No one alive has ever lived through such a crisis or faced the danger of a slump so deep, so if enough people say that the right thing was done yesterday, then it was. The stock market rewarded Alistair Darling with the biggest ever one-day rise - so for now, it worked.

For years New Labour has forgotten about the power of symbolism. As wealth at the top soared, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had no word of reproof for gross greed and excess. Relaxed about the filthy rich, they “celebrated” vast salaries that spilled over to contaminate the public sector too. On Labour’s watch the top 10% consumed nearly a third of national earnings and 54% of personal wealth. This comes too late to check the bonus culture that wrecked the economy, but better late than never. The words are spoken: “Those who have done best in the last decade will pay more” - an average of £3,168 more for earners over £140,000 in 2011.

And the sky has not fallen in after all. On the contrary, some sense of the rightness of things begins to be restored. Of course the mega-rich should pay a fairer share of tax. Of course low earners deserve a fairer share of rewards - the cleaners, caterers and carers who earn too little to keep their families above the poverty line - though they didn’t get it this time.

In poll after poll, from British Social Attitudes to the Guardian ICM, three-quarters of voters say that the income gap is too wide. The Sun tries a feeble jab at Gordon Brown for “turning his back on wealth creators” - but it lacks conviction. Odd how it has taken near calamity to shake Labour from its craven fear of the hyper-rich. The Tories and their press, who inhabit a world where “everyone” earns over £100,000, forget at their peril what “ordinary” really is: only 2% of taxpayers earn more than £100,000 a year. Only 1.3% earn more than £150,000.

High earners are always in denial about how exceptional they are, while Labour over the years has colluded by failing to tell the true story about the distribution of wealth and earnings. Here is a reminder of the shape of national incomes now: only 10% of people earn more than £40,000, to reach the top tax bracket. Half the working population earns under £23,000. A couple need £11,000 to rise above the poverty threshold - and over a fifth of people fall below, with a third of children born poor.

So now let’s hear Labour remind itself and all other opinion formers how little most people have shared in the boom. Labour doesn’t need the votes of the top 2% so long as the other 98% see fairness done - but Labour does need to get the facts across, as most people are woefully ignorant of where they stand on the earnings scale. The richest 2% will protest because they think their earnings are ordinary, refusing to believe most people earn so little. Sadly, even the poor think they are nearer the middle than they are.

But don’t imagine Britain has become Sweden overnight, for this was less redistributive than the symbolism suggests. Alistair Darling had promised “help to every household” - and that’s what his VAT cut did. But was it wise and necessary - or even populist? This money would be better spent on the poorest children and pensioners, instead of scattered thin and wide. Out there in the high street - where economists rarely venture - shop windows offer discounts of 20% and 30%, so what chance of a mad rush for 2.5% off VAT? Will people notice? £12.5bn is a huge sum to squander without provable results when it is just not true that every household needs help. Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs. Most people will suffer not at all in this recession: on the contrary they will do well as prices fall and the real value of their earnings rises. Though the VAT cut may ease the climate of fear when fear itself is the risk.

Some of that great VAT cut should have paid instead the £3bn in child tax credits that would have seen Labour hit its child poverty target, raising half of all poor children over the line. Oddly, Darling promised to set that pledge in law instead of giving the money to fulfil it. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says there will now be no extra children lifted above the poverty line in 2010-11 and the target will be missed. What a missed political chance to challenge the Tories on their compassion. Sadly, the VAT cut will help the poorest least: apart from in their energy bills, they spend least on non-food items while the big spenders get most benefit. The IFS says the VAT cut will only spur the buying of the “most expensive, infrequent items” like white goods and furniture.

Good news is capital spending of £3bn dragged forward to create jobs. Good news too is extra spending on helping people find work. Help for small businesses that employ 60% of the workforce is just what was needed. Here is a plethora of good measures, but a huge gamble. Will this send the economy upwards by halfway through next year? Darling risked his reputation in that prediction. Will he be able to prove Labour’s action made the difference and all this spending saved the day?

But whatever the details and the fine print, history will judge yesterday was the turning point when Labour unfurled its old battle banner for social justice and the Conservatives chose to ride full tilt against it. There is danger for both in abandoning their centre-ground hug of death - but now there is real choice for voters.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk

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George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000.

His backers - among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America - are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.

If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror.

Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest there is nothing that can be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year’s Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun.

Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic’s “late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century … in some models.” But, as the new report by the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc) shows, climate scientists are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years. The trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs like a meteorite falling to earth.

Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1,000 miles inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere. It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes through the winter.

The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated in any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.

Barack Obama’s speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing development. It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are hopelessly out of date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As the Pirc report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy replacement.

A paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research shows that if we are to give ourselves a roughly even chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015 and decline by between 6% and 8% per year from 2020 to 2040, leading to a complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050. Even this programme would work only if some optimistic assumptions about the response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by more than 8% a year.

Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that annual emission cuts greater than 1% have “been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”. When the Soviet Union collapsed, emissions fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years.

There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these are risks we have to take. Astyk’s proposals travel far into the realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological new deal I favour inhabits the distant margins of possibility.

Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No, we can’t.

monbiot.com

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Jim Al-Khalili: While people still cling to beliefs from the dark ages, more scientists must publicly defend rational, secular society

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: If they are to be elected, Cameron’s cohorts must ditch the silly Bullingdon showboating and foolery

In these times of regional pride, are the English entitled to be as proud of their culture as any other group? Certainly. Would anyone object to a charity set up to do just that? Probably not. But, for all sorts of reasons, these things can be misinterpreted, and so it seems important to have clarity. Take, for instance, the Macclesfield-based outfit called the Steadfast Trust, which is registered with the Charities Commission, the better to address “concerns of those in the English community”. It has a very swish website and clearly sets great store by outreach work, and it was as part of such that an email was sent to one Ian Campbell, offering regular updates on what the charity is up to and asking for a handout. All fine and dandy, until one realises that Ian Campbell was the name and email address created by Guardian senior reporter Ian Cobain during his undercover investigation last year into the far right British National party. This Ian Campbell does not exist, and the email address is one that was only ever supplied to the BNP. So how, prior to last week’s leak of BNP records, did the trust get the details? Alas, the charity does not know, but there is no link to the BNP or any party, it says. Appearances can be deceptive.

• Never nice to kick a man when his face is crawling with insects, but we see proof that Robert Kilroy-Silk has spent too much time away from politics. Who is the chancellor of the exchequer, he was asked, during I’m A Celebrity this weekend. “Alistair Diamond,” he said.

• But then what is the future for those who thrive in the parallel world that is reality television? Is it the obscurity of lesser-known cable channels? Or the VIP lounge at Chinawhite, in the company of the wags? In the case of Carole Vincent, who appeared on Big Brother last year, it is Southwark crown court, where she faces trial for allegedly stealing a police baton during an anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar Square six months ago. Not the platform she would have wanted, perhaps. But a public stage, nonetheless. One can’t say how things will turn out - prosecutors will prosecute, defenders will defend - but what we know is that thousands will be spent on a three-day trial in February to establish whether the peace campaigner picked up a fallen police baton - now recovered - and passed it to someone else. On this basis, Regina v Vincent promises to be a thriller.

• We don’t do God, said Alastair Campbell, and in his case, that turned out to be so. But now that he has a novel to sell in Manchester and given the absence of space in the local Waterstone’s, we note that he is planning to promote his masterwork this evening at St Ann’s Church, in the city centre. We don’t do Campbell would seem a reasonable line for God to take in the circumstances, but that has never been His way. And not even God fancies a row with Alastair.

• Feisty talk at the National Union of Students Black Students’ Campaign conference at the TUC this weekend, where delegates were still smarting over the respective fates of the two regional NUS leaders who disgraced themselves earlier this year. One, who appeared to equate minorities on campus with gun and drug crime, has been sacked from his post. But another, who held a “Bring Back Slavery” placard, has survived. Activists say they will battle on. But they will be fighting on several fronts, for there is also trouble over plans that might exclude minority representatives from a new, all-powerful NUS committee. They’ll read a few books during lulls in the fighting. Such is the way of things.

• Finally, we consider this a record. It could also be a further sign of global warming. Geoff Hoon’s Christmas card arrived at Westminster on November 19 this year. Pretty, certainly; premature, probably. But there is method in the madness, because the cards support a deserving charity, and they depict a very old Labour kind of steam train, chugging along, making progress. “Scotsman in winter sunshine”, the caption says. They are saying the same at No 10.

diary@guardian.co.uk

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New 45% top rate for those earning more than £150,000 to be announced in pre-budget report

The readers’ editor, Siobhain Butterworth, on … rules of the road for users of the information superhighway

Max Hastings: History shows that it is far better to be led by a man who relishes a challenge than by one who slumps into despondency

Ariane Sherine: For spinach-in-the-teeth and embarrassing-smell moments, it is far better to be brutally honest

One night, in a bar in Zanzibar, I saw two sex workers chatting up a couple of Germans. The men were in their 50s, paunchy and balding - the women were young and pretty. It was a painful sight, the Germans plying the women with drinks and single entendre; the women laughing as though their lives depended on it, which in a way they did.

But after a while the true pathos became apparent: the men actually thought that these young women were interested in them because of who they were rather than what they had - money. That their dazzling personalities and dashing good looks had magically transformed them into irresistible specimens of manhood. Mistaking the possibility of a commercial transaction for the unlikelihood of sexual attraction, their eyes lingered on the mirror behind the bar as they started preening themselves, as though their looks mattered.

Power, whether you wield it or not, has a way of shading our sense of selves and others. In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama recalls a businessman seeing Al Gore shortly after the 2000 election. “During the campaign I would take his calls any time of day,” the executive said. “But suddenly, after the election, I couldn’t help feeling that the meeting was a chore. At some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former vice-president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realise what a big steep cliff you guys are on.”

The US may be perched on the edge of a similar precipice. The degree to which it commands its hegemony through wealth and might (hard power) as opposed to culture and democratic example (soft power) has long been an open question. The personal aspiration, individual liberty and social meritocracy that are central to its national brand has an almost universal appeal. But how much that ethos makes sense without wealth and power is another matter. People need a social ladder worth climbing and something to do with their freedoms when they get to the top.

Have Caribbean kids been ditching cricket for basketball because it is faster and slicker, or because it offers the possibility of university scholarships, riches and fame? Was Obama’s victory any more miraculous than Evo Morales’s - he was the first indigenous Bolivian to rule his country - or do we just know and care more about it because of America’s impact on our lives? What is Sex and the City without the shopping and the skyline? By almost any count Sweden has greater gender equality and liberated sexual mores than the US. Yet would the escapades of four single women in Stockholm stand a chance of becoming an international blockbuster, even if it were in English? Unlikely.

The truth is that American economic and cultural power are so inextricably woven that to separate them would be to see the whole thing unravel before your eyes. Both are fundamental to how the rest of the world views the US and how Americans view themselves.

And yet, with the simultaneous transition of Obama’s ascent to the White House and the national economy’s descent into long-term decline, countervailing pressures are pushing those two factors in contradictory directions. Abroad, American political leadership has never been so popular or so impotent. At home, Americans have never felt so excited about what their country might become or so apprehensive about where it might be heading. The next few months are shaping up to be truly Dickensian: the best of times, and the worst of times.

On the one hand, almost three weeks after the election, Obama still peers out from posters and badges. The warm glow of his victory still radiates and few seem keen to snuff out the flame. On the subway in New York last weekend an African-American woman in her 50s asked me what I thought of “our new president”. We talked politics until my stop, exchanged a handshake and a hug. I dare say I’ll never see her again.

The disappointing composition of his transition team (if he was going to appoint half the Clinton cabinet, why not just let Hillary have the nomination?) has done nothing to blunt the enthusiasm. Two months before he takes office Obama enjoys a 61% approval rating. If the rest of the world were polled, it would be even higher. As his triumph was announced, public celebrations erupted in almost every time zone. It is difficult to think of a moment when there has been more global goodwill towards an American leader, let alone such a dramatic reversal of attitude towards US leadership.

On the other hand, it is difficult to think of a moment when Americans felt more depressed about the state of their country or were less able to enforce their will on the world. Just one in six believe that the country is heading in the right direction, and consumer confidence is at a historic low. A country wedded to the notion that every year will be better than the last, and every generation more prosperous, has seen social mobility stall and the past look more promising than the future. Meanwhile, thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation’s military is hopelessly overstretched and its reputation for invincibility lies shattered. Diplomatically, it is out of moral capital. Economically, it is out of plain old capital.

While these two trends coincide, they are not moving in lockstep. The presidential transition is hostage to a definite time period - Obama will not take the oath for another 57 days. Meanwhile, the scale and pace of the economic decline is indefinite. Less than two months ago, Citigroup was one vulture swooping in to feed from the carcass of the failed Wachovia bank. With its shares now in freefall and its chief executive in peril, Citigroup now looks set to become carrion itself. Obama wants to try and save the big three car manufacturers; it remains to be seen how many will be left by his inauguration.

So Obama’s win may have been a lesson for the rest of the world, as claimed by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. “Electing a black president says around the world that you can overcome old wounds,” she told the New York Times last weekend. “I’ve said in our case, we have a birth defect, but it can be overcome.”

The trouble is the rest of the world no longer needs to attend the lectures. “Owing to the relative decline of its economic and, to a lesser extent, military power, the US will no longer have the same flexibility in choosing among as many policy options,” concluded the National Intelligence Council (which coordinates analysis from all US intelligence agencies) last week. The report acknowledged that, while the US would remain the single most powerful force in the world, its relative strength and potential leverage are in decline.

It doesn’t take a genius to work this out. Which is just as well, since there are clearly few geniuses in the NIC. Its last forecast, in December 2004, predicted “continued US dominance”, and oil and gas supplies “sufficient to meet global demand”.

It can take time for perception to catch up with reality. By the time those Germans figured out their true aesthetic value, they may well have been broke.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

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These are strange times in politics. But already new patterns are emerging through the mist. Gordon Brown has a simple but compelling story to tell, about the depth of the crisis and the bigness of his response. The country is listening. David Cameron has no such clear analysis. But he is betting on a year of further economic catastrophe, and he may yet end up the winner.

The unprecedented nature of this crisis needs to be underlined. Let’s start with the apologies issue. Both Brown and Cameron have reversed direction dramatically. Brown has apologised for promising an end to boom and bust. Given that he’d promised “no more boom’n'bust” almost every day of the week for 10 years, that is a gargantuan helping of humble pie. Any normal politician would have choked to death on it. Yet Brown wolfed it down and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Meanwhile, Cameron has torn up almost everything he’s been saying about tax and spending too - his plans are being reviewed and he won’t match Labour’s fiscal boost, or its future spending plans. A political strategy based on prancing optimism and green taxes has vaporised and nothing positive has appeared to take its place. His polling figures have tumbled. He’s being battered by criticism from senior Tories, rightwing newspapers and almost every business group there is. Yet he seems more sure of himself. How come?

I think the key thing in both cases is that the recession now seems so terrifying, and potentially so deep, that voters no longer care whether politicians are consistent. There is, instead, an almost primitive need to feel that the people in charge know what they’re doing - that somewhere, somebody has a plan.

What is important is that Brown seems to know what he is saying and has some apparent confidence that we will get through it all - this matters much more than the fact that he’s had to eat his words from the good times. He’s an experienced man who’s getting on with the job. He may be taking a huge gamble with our money, but just now impressions count.

Below the surface, you can find plenty of evidence that the government is more divided and uncertain than Brown’s demeanour suggests. There is talk of Treasury resistance to the scale of today’s expansion package; even that Alistair Darling was originally against a big tax cut. Treasury sources deny this, saying the main debate was about how to pay for the fiscal stimulus, rather than its scale. Peter Mandelson, as business secretary, has been in and out of Downing Street for the twice-weekly economic council meetings, plus cabinet meetings, and is said by some to have been acting as a kind of Brown enforcer. Certainly, business has embraced Mandelson rather as voters seem to have clutched at Brown - he’s been around a bit, he sounds like a grown-up, so all the past embarrassments are forgotten.

Relations between Brown and Darling have involved vigorous debates, and Darling has felt in the past that the prime minister was a little too keen to take the credit for thinking and initiatives that came from him and his Treasury team. It was interesting that, the day before Darling’s big day, Brown hit the airwaves himself. “In the end, he’s the prime minister and he gets his way,” as one Treasury source tactfully puts it.

The primal yearning for experience is hardly unique to Labour. When Lord Kalms, the Tory fundraiser, said his party needed more grey hair on its frontbench, he was reflecting a plea that is echoing through the business world. Surprise, surprise, who was the first person to call for, support and predict a 15% VAT rate? Ken Clarke, one of those touted as a possible replacement for George Osborne (and the nearest thing the Tories have to a John Sergeant figure). That gives Cameron and Osborne an extra headache for today’s exchanges. If Ken is for the fiscal boost, they look even more isolated.

In the short term, Brown must be rubbing his hands with glee. For Cameron’s narrative is a mix of hindsight and despair, and this is hardly a recipe for popularity. Cameron and Osborne are lucid on the mistakes of the past. They are darkly apocalyptic about the future: those vast tax rises being piled up; the dire state of public borrowing; and the hard choices that now need to be made about spending. Yesterday Cameron confirmed that all those earlier Tory promises were up for review: that will allow Labour to talk again of Tory cuts. Christmas has come early for Labour, not just for taxpayers.

Just wait. If this fiscal stimulus does not work - and many wonder whether over-borrowed families will pick up on lower VAT and lower prices to spend some more - then the Conservative message will start to resonate. Cameron will pick those parts of the Labour plan that seem to be working, for instance the pressure on the banks to lend more freely, while roundly condemning a tax cut that will soon be forgotten.

I remain highly critical of his, and Osborne’s, judgment about the pound and the central question: to boost or not to boost. They were very slow to understand the nature of the crisis, slow to find words to describe it, slow (and timid) when it came to policy too. They are gambling on failure through the course of next year. That will not make them an attractive pair; but if the country despairs of Labour, they will be able to chant: “I told you so.”

But what if that fragile thing, confidence, does begin to return next year? What if the coordinated international action, and a return to liquidity in the financial system, and some kind of recovery in consumer spending, make the fiscal boost seem a success? Then Cameron is in a terrible position. He has turned himself from Sunny Dave to Mr Glum and still got it wrong. It will be too late to save himself by reshuffles. He is tied to his chum Osborne and the two of them will look too inexperienced.

We must not run away with speculation about a political future that is still impossible to read, based on a political present that is so unfamiliar. But it is right to point out that Cameron, as well as Brown, has gone for broke this winter. He needs a crash just as much as the prime minister needs some signs of recovery. If he doesn’t get one, then the Conservatives will be back doing what they do so well - toppling their leader.

I keep reading that the only reason William Hague wouldn’t come back as shadow chancellor is that he is too busy making money, and enjoying himself. I bet he is. But I’m beginning to wonder whether there isn’t a little more to the story than that.

jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk

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Isabel Hilton: Faced with Chinese intransigence, young Tibetans are planning for life after the Dalai Lama

You don’t always get what you pay for - in education, at least. Ofsted’s latest report on the independent schools it is allowed to inspect (two other lots of monitors also swim in the same, highly contentious pond) shows an “outstanding” quality rating in only 5% of the 433 reviewed. Some 6% were “inadequate”, and the rest merely pottered around between “satisfactory” and “good”. That is marginally worse than state school results (where 15% were outstanding) - and you can add in some inspectorate worries about standards of care and child safety for bad luck. So look hard before you reach for a chequebook. Think hard, too.

For the really fascinating point about independent school results isn’t anything to do with the difference between paid and unpaid sectors, a line of privilege or exclusion perennially drawn in society’s sand. It is how, on the inside looking deeper, the old verities about quality education still apply - however high fee demands soar.

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic always mouth the same mantra: no child left behind. The assumption is that with willpower, resource and effort you can create a much fairer, more equal system. And, of course, cash and conviction do matter. They make a clear - though not automatic - impact in thousands of individual cases.

Yet somehow, as Christine Gilbert, the head of Ofsted, laments in her annual report, the faster you try to sprint, the less progress you seem to make. “While the attainment of disadvantaged children has risen, so have standards across the board.” We’re running on the spot. The national gap essentially remains. It doesn’t close. It yawns as wide as usual. Somebody always gets left behind, because that is the nature of this race.

But somebody gets left behind at the supposedly top end of the spectrum, too. Look at the independent school league tables of A-level excellence for 2007 (various famous names pulled out of the premiership reckoning this year, crying “foul”) and you are struck immediately by the gap that exists even between establishments that are all keen to charge £12,000 or so a year and will double it for boarders.

Here’s Wycombe Abbey at the top, with a 98.0% success score - and Westminster at 96.5%, just pipping Magdalen College School, in Oxford, on 97.5%. Plenty of famous names (most of them girls-only, as a matter of fact) cluster in the upper echelons just behind. But leaf a few pages down and the picture (if not the fee structure) grows a deal more blurred. The names are still famous enough: Repton, Wellington, Malvern, Stonyhurst, Ardingly and Rugby, for starters. But there aren’t any 90%-plus A-level rates here. You are in to the lower 60s, the middling 50s, and even the back end of the 40s. If results matter, then 50% or more separated top from bottom last year. And the question that needs answering is simple: why?

It wasn’t ancient tradition or country house grounds. It wasn’t class sizes, because those are kept low ratio and pretty constant. It wasn’t the level of teachers’ pay on offer - or, of course, the amount that parents are supposed to shell out up front. No: if results matter, if results are relevant to this particular education game, then only two variables stand out. One is what Ofsted calls “leadership” - the calibre of a head-master and his or her most senior staff. Good teaching, purpose and morale matter. And the other variable is the intake. How hot is the selection competition?

You have always had to sweat and swot and strive to gain a place at Westminster. Elsewhere, especially as credit crunches bite parental legs, and £25,000 earned after tax turns out to be only enough to send one kid to a not very imposing public school, you can begin to hear the pips squeak. The independents have pushed their case too hard for decades on end, just as they’ve pushed up their fees. And now it is a time of reckoning: now we will see what the money really buys.

An old school tie in a social cocoon? A job in the City? A slot at some suitable varsity? Perhaps: but increasingly it is hard to put much of a price on that - and the message left behind grows starker by the day. Money does not make all schools equal. Equality depends on a mix of human talents and virtues impossible to replicate in any standardised way. Somebody will always be left behind - but many will also still come puffing in the rear, no matter how much their parents pay. The real chequebook question is: what is it worth? And the answer is just as real: it depends what it is.

Forget ideology. Just mind the gap.

p.preston@guardian.co.uk

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Anthony Douglas: I can state categorically that child protection work is the most difficult local public service to provide and get right

Andrew Martin: I stand independent and free, fighting for equity and battling limescale. Yes, I do the housework

Unless you are a Royal Bank of Scotland shareholder, you probably missed the great white apology for the financial crisis. On his last day in the job - after repeatedly refusing to apologise for having to be bailed out with £20bn of public money, and only when he was prompted by a shareholder - Sir Fred Goodwin, the RBS chief executive, this week said he was “sorry”.

Was that supposed to be the catharsis? I didn’t order the full Oresteia, but I’d have preferred to see Fred - and any other top bankers thinking of deigning to address their staggering incompetence - adopt the weaselly styling: “I apologise if anyone was offended.” It would be marginally less pathetic.

Those of us less willing to trust bankers than we were a year ago - ie all earthlings - might be cynical and say that RBS’s glorified “soz!” was little more than a pre-emptive strike, what with bonus season being almost upon us. You know bonus season - that time of year when financial folk remind you that whereas normal people are motivated by their salary and what we might summarise as “not losing their jobs”, bankers decline even to set the world’s money on fire without being paid an extra wedge for their trouble.

Obviously, RBS have said they’ll be paying bonuses, as will the rest of the nationalised banks. And obviously, caring about the economic crisis is starting to feel like a guilty pleasure, what with all the important Strictly Come Dancing news. But it seems as good a time as any to ask whether you feel you’ve had your pound of contrition off the masters of the universe? I can’t say I’ve had my eight-thousandth of an ounce yet. The ratio of stories about bankers “suffering” to stories about bankers saying sorry is currently about 837:1.

Back in September, New York magazine ran a great piece in which an anonymous Lehman Brothers trader gave his account of the days following the bank’s collapse. There was a lot of talk of “sudden onset poverty” - I think he was going to have to let the ski chalet go - but the most confounding vignette concerned the trader taking his eight-year-old son to his first baseball game. Anyway, the kid tries and fails to get the attention of Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ star shortstop, who’s jogging out to the field. “Daddy, why doesn’t he answer?” he asks. “And suddenly, the trader boiled with anger,” we learned. “He had done his part, put in the 16-hour days to buy his kid the best seats in the stadium. Lehman and the career he signed up for were disappearing in front of his eyes. Yet the Yankees were losing, and Derek Jeter was still going to take home his $21m, and he couldn’t even bother to show some gratitude. It was a fantasy world, out of touch.” Yes. Ring any bells? “‘Those guys have the easiest job,’ the trader thought, ‘when it’s clear they don’t care. Fuck, in my next life I want to be a baseball player.’”

Wait. He wants to get lucky twice? If this guy doesn’t come back as a one-winged gnat, I’m personally taking it up with the Dalai Lama.

Bankers are traditionally supposed to be throwing themselves out of the windows by now, and even though any fall would be broken by the vast cushion of public money we laid out for them, I guess we still need to ask: how are they coping? Well, as I sat in a Kensington pub the other night (this is a proper field report, from the heart of the story), unable to hear my companion for the chap shouting about being “locked on” for his bonus - which seemed to be counted in a multiple to which he referred to as “mil” - I hazarded they were pretty much scraping by.

Yet, in the manner of those male columnists who fret about having walked past a hoodie stealing something and having done nothing, I find myself wondering in print: should I have intervened with Mr Locked-on? After all, I regard myself as having in effect paid for his pint. At the very least I should have asked him if he wanted crisps and a footrub with it.

Either way it is clear that neither he nor any of these stubbornly tight-lipped banking chiefs have any idea how to disport themselves in the new climate they themselves created. Much as the police or BBC staff are occasionally forced to go on refresher courses, surely the upper echelons of financial services should be sent on training days to teach them how to behave in public now they’ve cocked everyone’s world up.

No one’s saying people should have the right to know if a senior banker lives in their community. (Although if any legislators fancy the idea, can I make a case for it being called Marina’s Law?) But plenty of US judges sentence the most forlorn souls to stand outside Wal-Mart wearing a sandwich board reading “I stole from Wal-Mart”. Perhaps senior bankers could be required to wander up and down high streets wearing boards reading something on the lines of: “My industry isn’t very good at its job and now you might lose your house. I. Am. Sorry.”

marina.hyde@guardian.co.uk

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At the first true test of his mettle, David Cameron buckled. He has scuppered his own brilliant repositioning of his party. Steam-cleaning the nastiness has been abandoned in a probably needless panic. Let the sunshine in? Forget it, along with his general wellbeing index that was to replace GDP as a measure of true values. “We are the progressives now,” he claimed, but not any longer. His green tree logo has shed its leaves; not a green policy survives. Vote blue, go blue.

It began at the party conference with George Osborne’s promise to cut council tax by cutting local government spending - slicing away services straight into the oncoming hurricane. Or maybe it really began the year before with the inheritance tax cut, gifting £1bn to the richest 6% of families: forget progressive. But modernisation finally died this week when Cameron said he would no longer stick to Labour’s spending plans. What political folly!

Until now that pledge stymied Labour’s every attempt to accuse the Conservatives of callousness or lack of compassion. Labour missiles, warning that schools, hospitals and the poor would suffer under the Tories, bounced off Cameron’s shield. No longer. Faced with recession, Cameron has U-turned his party back to 1981, a retreat to traditional cut, squeeze and freeze. If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working. Unemployment is a price worth paying. Let the market repair itself. This is high Thatcherism, reckless of the social fall-out.

That brand of conservatism has a long history. When Colbert, the 17th-century French finance minister, asked business what it wanted, the answer was: “Laissez-nous faire” - leave it to us, the market. Now that same reckless market that crashed the world economy is begging governments to bail it out. Intervene, is the cry: give us fiscal stimulus!

The IMF - hardly a socialist front - wants every country to borrow and spend, fast. So does the EU and even the Institute of Directors. The CBI wants money spent too, lots: it wants “cash in the hands of small business immediately … we have to keep people in jobs.” Even the CEO of Jaguar Land Rover writes an article extolling Keynes against the monetarists, calling for a fiscal stimulus to invest, create green jobs and “lead the world into the non-carbon economy of the future”. Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times, no leftist, calls for a big spend. Walloping the Tory “Bourbons” (who forgot and learned nothing), Brittan writes: “Too few people understand that a government’s budget is not like a family’s or a company’s. It is precisely when the private sector is cutting down and saving that the government needs to spend more.”

Slump stares us in the face. This week’s tally of horrendous job losses, tumbling stock markets and frightening news about withdrawal of insurance from retailers and suppliers, has brought into the open talk of a possible second wave of financial collapse. Woolworths’ 800 well-loved pick’n'mix stores struggling to find a buyer for £1 is emblematic of yawning black holes to come in high streets. Thriving small businesses are desperate for credit. I spoke to Excelsior, a Bournemouth coach company with rising turnover and profits - yet HBOS has in effect upped its lending rate to 20%. Myriad such stories show bailed-out banks refusing to lend.

But Cameron and Osborne don’t get it, as they return to Thatcher’s handbag economics. There is virtually no respectable support for their view anywhere. Rightwing governments, sober international institutions, all are for borrowing and spending. Alone in their clear blue water, Britain’s Conservatives perch on their melting ice floe.

Their strategists calculate that voters only understand handbag economics: the country has “maxed” out its credit card so can’t afford to spend its way out of recession. The Tories are good at the vernacular while clunking Labour language fails to hammer home the basic point: there is no cheap or risk-free option. Spend now to avert an economy-destroying slump that would cost far more. Repair the roof before it falls in and costs unfathomable sums to rebuild. Stop another fall-out generation whose social costs would cascade down to their children for decades.

Cameron thinks fear of a tax bombshell after the next election will be enough to make voters wary of tax giveaways in Monday’s pre-budget report. It all depends on how prudent Labour sounds. If Gordon Brown splurges on general tax cuts it would feel suspiciously like a cynical bribe: Cameron’s attacks would have traction. If, however, Darling finely targets every penny on obvious need - pensioners, unemployed, those in peril of repossession, those in need of social housing, businesses needing credit, and the young needing work and apprenticeships - then voters will see what the borrowing is for. Saving real people from real suffering is understandable. “Fiscal stimulus” that arrives in a brown envelope to the well-housed and securely employed will smell of vote-buying.

So Brown should scotch absurd ideas of a mid-slump election. The dead cat would not bounce - and Labour is still a semi-dead cat. The polls - only a three-point gap this week - can swing back if the public scent opportunism, not dignity and seriousness. But Labour is back in the game, and the Tories have made a crucial mistake: they can never again pretend to be progressive. When tested, Cameron reverted to type - a laissez-faire do-nothing, unconcerned about mass unemployment when it mattered.

Now Cameron will have to detail his cuts, as Labour MPs daily make scissor gestures across the floor of the House. Tory MPs are sending parliamentary questions scurrying round departments, asking after obscure projects: “cutting waste” is the last refuge of every opposition trying to make its sums tally.

They should have stood patriotically by the government until the crisis passed, waiting for the time to come - which it will - when a grumpily convalescent country blames the doctor for the pain caused by the operation. Now Labour can show that Cameron would be Dr Death. Because we will not hear its like again, I leave you with these nostalgic words: “We should be thinking not just what is good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in people’s hearts.” But David Cameron said that before he reverted to the dark side.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk

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