Commentariat

Guardian

Letters: The atrocious arrest of Damian Green by anti-terrorism police is reminiscent of the Stasi

John Kampfner: The Damian Green arrest confirms my fears about a vengeful government and a supine media

Letters: In quoting King Duncan’s ‘There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face … ‘ to support his belief that judging character from the face is ‘a dicey business’

Today’s corrections

Rosemary Roach: East Yorkshire

Letters: Your report (Shakespeare is shunned by schools, November 25) suggests the abolition of the key stage 3 Sats tests may tempt schools to marginalise the teaching of Shakespeare

The theatre of budgets depends on surprise, and Alistair Darling had crafted his effort this week to shock moribund markets into life. The drama of the day was wrecked, however, by the leaking - whoever did it - to the press of the report’s best elements.

Labour’s drop in today’s Guardian ICM poll is hardly unexpected. The 80% of the press that is essentially Tory has now aligned itself behind the project to get Cameron elected. With its cannonades now in sync, that firepower is daunting. However, press fury at the tax rise for the rich had to be muted: polls show how popular it is with Sun readers, if not with the Sun’s owner. The FT’s leader, “Feeble and fussy income tax rises”, was enjoyably mealy-mouthed. Funniest was its claim that the rich would avoid the tax by “giving more to charity”: the top tenth give less than 1% of their income compared with the poorest tenth who give 3% of theirs.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, until now the independent word of God, has allowed itself to be used as a hostile witness to Labour this week, especially over taxation of the rich. Its much-quoted view that this might bring in nothing was unaccompanied by simple suggestions for preventing that avoidance. The Mail and the rest presented the tax rise as an attack on middle Britain’s aspirations, with case histories of people earning over £150,000 struggling with school fees. A pity the IFS didn’t step in to point out “middle” is £23,000 a year. A pity too it didn’t step in over the non-story that Labour thought of raising VAT to 18.5%, since the IFS itself suggested a 20% VAT rise - a reasonable possibility in the unknowable years ahead. Labour should not have ruled it out, but could have shrugged and said of course it might: treat voters as grown-ups when everyone knows the future is so uncertain.

Most damaging of all was the use made by the Tories of an IFS presentation on whether ordinary earners would be taxed more. The government said, quite rightly, that no one earning under £40,000 would pay more income tax or national insurance - and that is the case. Basic rate taxpayers had their £120 one-off payment this year made permanent, money they weren’t due to get, to make sure they paid no extra in future. Only the 10% of earners in the top tax bracket earning over £40,000 will pay extra. The IFS said it all depended on whether taxpayers were expecting to have that one-off £120 repeated, which gave the Tories a free hit.

Stepping back from one week’s fevered news, this pre-budget report was always going to be bad news for Labour. No government gets plaudits for telling voters that the public debt has risen astronomically, taxes will rise, spending will be squeezed horribly and it will take seven years to get back in balance. Yet if Labour brings the country out of a bad recession, all is not quite lost.

If Peter Mandelson can seize the banks by the neck and throttle the money out of them, forcing them all to lend at set rates, then salvation is possible and recession could be short and shallow. Sir Martin Sorrel of WPP, no Labour friend, yesterday predicted: “By mid 2009 we shall see a very sharp comeback in financial markets.” He could be right.

But no one knows. Of all the fallers in this crisis, economists are deepest in the mud. With notable exceptions, they were useless guides in the boom, so there’s no reason to trust them in the bust. Look at the OECD opining this week that the UK is among the worst equipped to weather the storm. Can this be the same OECD that in September 2006 - at the height of the bubble - commended the UK as a not-too-hot-nor-too-cold perfect “Goldilocks economy … How stable the UK economy has been. It is doing very well.” A pity it didn’t spot any vulnerability back then.

All now depends on whether Darling is wildly optimistic to talk of an upturn next year: if not Labour is probably sunk anyway. To great criticism, he first warned of the worst depression for 60 years - and that pessimism was deliberate and useful. High drama and deep gloom is the fashion now, and that’s what Labour wants. Raise expectations of the worst and hope their own worst predictions could be wrong.

Look at house prices: so rapid was price inflation that Professor Steve Wilcox of the UK Housing Review reminds us that prices have still only fallen back to the level at the start of 2007. Anyone who bought before that is still ahead.

Other reasons not to despair: anyone on benefits and state pensions gets a 5.2% rise when inflation may hit zero. At worst, 90% of people are in secure jobs and pay rises may exceed inflation. The fall in interest rates puts more cash in most mortgage holders’ pockets, while shop prices fall. Even if many don’t notice an extra 2p from VAT, that £12.5bn is oiling the wheels of the economy with hidden effect. Strangle the banks into lending and this could be less of a horror than feared. Terrible for those who lose their jobs - but not so bad for most.

At least that is Labour’s great hope while the opposition prays, as oppositions do, for apocalypse now. See it on Osborne and Cameron’s avid faces. Our ICM poll today puts Labour 15 points behind: a third of the 2005 Labour voters say it’s “time for a change”. But Brown and Darling still lead strongly as the best team on the economy, as they do in the Times Populus poll.

With the economy the only story, the Conservatives will flounder without policies. Hoping for the worst and doing nothing is their only strategy. They have opposed every Labour move, from capitalising banks to spending on a fiscal stimulus. Standing alone against the world, each time they are forced to capitulate and U-turn. Accusing Labour of over-borrowing, they are at sea on whether they would raise taxes and/or cut spending even more than Labour admits it must. Blaming Labour for debt has traction, but with no route-map and no ideas, voters still find them unready to run the economy.

Can Labour breathe political life into the pre-budget report themes? Its frontbench so leaden-tongued, so weighed down by managerial mantras and caution fails to engage the public emotions. Ministers mumble apologetically on taxing the rich to voters who have always been out ahead on basic fairness in taxes. Labour has used Obama’s recipes, but oh, for Obama’s muse of fire to speak to the mood of the moment.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk

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Mohsin Hamid: India and Pakistan are in this together. Their fights against extremism will founder if fought alone

Of late Gordon Brown reminds one of a chap whose wife has informed him that there is a massive hole in the family budget. She will watch with a raised eyebrow as he finds a temporary VAT cut down the back of the sofa, and presents it to her with an imploring look. She will sigh in exasperated sympathy as he remembers £700m worth of supertax in an old post office account. And then she will point gently at the utterly undiminished hole in the balance sheet, and say: “I don’t mean to state the bleeding obvious, love, but there is a sports car sitting in the garage, and I can’t help feeling this might be the moment to let it go”.

His beloved Trident! Not a scratch on it, of course, and so adoringly maintained. Oh, he knows it’s irrational, and an indulgence, and a throwback to when his life was completely different. And it’s been murder to get the parts down the years. It’s stupidly self-regarding to be worrying what the neighbours would say, and it would solve so many of their problems in a single swoop. But must it really go?

It must, and in my ideal world Gordon Brown would get straight on the telly and announce an urgent review of the whole business. Talk about a magic bullet. Britain’s retention of a nuclear deterrent would be ridiculous if we were all lighting our cigars with tenners. As we enter an immeasurable recession it is full-blown insanity. Earnest ideas these tax rises and VAT cuts may be, but the glaring truth is that the economic crisis will have to mean huge cuts in public spending. A bare minimum of £37bn between 2011 and 2014, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies - so you may be on the point of spotting the luxury item in the trolley.

Even in the years when the fat cows were emerging from the Nile - 2007, for instance, when MPs narrowly voted to renew Trident at an estimated cost of £70bn - the arguments against were so luminous as to barely need repetition. Suffice to say we have been basking for some years now in the blissful peace secured by our arms race victory. However, from New York to London, Basra and Mumbai, there do seem to be those who remain unimpressed by our submarine collection, or India’s nuclear programme, and at any rate appear able to hold their own using boxcutters or standard machine-guns.

“It is impossible to predict the future,” was Tony Blair’s typically forensic explanation as to why we still needed Trident. “The one thing that is certain is the unpredictability of it.”

Yes, we are all set for the type of war we have never had; yet for those wars we can predict with depressing accuracy (considering we’ve started most of them) and involve AK-47s or simple explosive devices, we remain criminally unprepared - as so many coroners lambasting the MoD for basic equipment shortages have pointed out.

Up to 75% of Britons were opposed to Trident renewal or in favour of a delay, according to a Channel 4 News/Populus poll before last year’s Commons vote, but a 2005 poll for Greenpeace was arguably more revealing. When asked “Do you think the government should replace its nuclear weapons or not?” , 46% of respondents said it shouldn’t, 44% said it should, and 10% didn’t know. However, when told that the cost of replacement was the equivalent of building 1,000 schools, 54% opposed replacement, and only one in three supported it.

Clearly, a significant proportion of people had no clue how much these things cost. But then, we don’t talk about such fluff these days, which seems odd to those of us who grew up as relatively recently as the 80s, when people talked about nuclear weapons an awful lot. Today we scarcely discuss them rationally or irrationally, and if you are sitting there thinking that this is partly a failure of the media, then you are right.

To judge us on what is deemed to sell our newspapers and drive our web traffic, we are far more preoccupied with other comparatively infinitessimal aspects of public spending. Is it not a national embarrassment that we should be able to field so many people willing to make irate telephone calls about Mr Russell Brand - who cost the British public somewhere in the very low six figures before he decommissioned himself - while sitting mutely as tens of billions that could be spent providing better hospitals for our families are lavished on something so logically flawed as to be utterly pointless?

In these drastically straitened times, we need to stop being a nation of people who could tell you in pounds and pence the curtain allowance given to MPs, but can barely get in the ballpark on how much we spend on nuclear missiles. Those who used to chuck all sorts of luxuries into their supermarket trolleys without really paying attention to the price are suddenly all over their weekly budgets; and these same people should start thinking about major public spending the same way. It’s time to start talking about nuclear weapons again - and I for one shall be boosting the economy by getting a Scrap Trident badge made up without delay.

marina.hyde@guardian.co.uk

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The high street is a bit low at the moment. Woolies is offering a special Christmas “whole company for a pound offer”; MFI is coming apart at the back where its finances are loosely glued on to the rest of the company; and Currys doesn’t seem to have the right cord to connect its stores to profit.

Naturally there are serious people looking seriously at how to save these national institutions. As we speak Gordon Brown is probably devising a rescue package for Woolies that is vaultingly ambitious, chokingly expensive and totally unworkable. But extraordinarily extraordinary times require extraordinarily extraordinary solutions. That’s why extraordinarily serious thinkers like myself are looking ahead to the possibility that the entire high street might close down. What then?

A big opportunity would be to allow violent binge drinkers to take full control of the high street. They are after all its most loyal users (and decorators). At present violent binge drinkers like myself are only allowed to use the high street on a Saturday night shortly after closing time. We pay our taxes, especially on booze, so I think we should reclaim the streets. Let’s seal off each end of the high street with kebab vans and restrict access to violent binge drinkers, so we can come and go and drink and fight as we feel the need. The boards on shop fronts could be replaced by armoured glass, allowing the public to sit inside and watch us, much like cock fighting was enjoyed in the past.

A high street without shops would also save us from the creeping misery of pedestrianisation. Everybody who lives in town now shops out of town. However, some megamalls are on one side of town while others are on the far side, all the way round the ring road. Nowadays, the shortest flight of the crow between megamalls is through the old town centre. Let’s vehiculate those leafy, bollard-strewn pedestrianised precincts with some good old-fashioned four-lane tarmac to speed consumers from one side of town to the other. If we have to lose a cathedral or two in the process, so be it.

Alternatively, we could make a big effort to bring back traditional shops to replace the cloned chains that are struggling so badly. Frank Field could be appointed minister for Returning Us to the Fifties. Candlestick-makers would be specifically targeted for tax breaks and IT grants to make them viable once more. Sweet shops would be given VAT reduction on lemon sherbets sold loose by the ounce. Butchers would have all their offal guaranteed by government bonds. Haberdashers selling school uniforms would be obliged to offer only short trousers. And greengrocers would sell only misshapen vegetables in brown paper bags.

If this overtly interventionist package doesn’t appeal, perhaps we should use the power of the market to reinvigorate the high street. My plan is to draw up a list of life’s absolute essentials. On it would be newspapers, cigarettes, CDs, milk pans, postage stamps, chocolates and dog calendars for 2009. These would be available only in government stores on the high street, forcing people to travel into town. For a brand, the government could use Woolworths, which is on sale for approximately £15bn less than RBS.

But if the people won’t come to Woolworths, then we must take Woolworths to the people. We should set up these government-backed mini-Woolies on city street corners, in the suburbs and in villages up and down the country, to be a focus for the community. And then instead of calling them Woolworths, perhaps we could call them post offices.

• Guy Browning writes the How to column in Weekend magazine and is the author of Maps of My Life guy.browning@smokehouse.co.uk

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Editorial: An icon of French intellectualism celebrates his 100th birthday, a man whose books are more honoured than read

Letters: I find it a glaring omission that Mark Lawson (Comment, November 27) made no mention of Roger McGough as a possible candidate for poet laureate

Letter: Re deodorant balls. In 2000 a fellow beading enthusiast and I were introduced to a wonderful beading group

From the archives, November 28 1977: My friendly neighbourhood doctor died suddenly the other day

White House staff and children gather for pardoning of the National Thanksgiving Turkey

Response: There have been 13 sets of elections while he has led Venezuela. And the media is free, says Samuel Moncada

Editorial: Policing the capital has always been a hybrid job, a mix of the local, the national and the international, knife crime and national security

Letters: As convener of the group that coined the term Green New Deal, I would like to contest Adair Turner’s view that we should not overstate its job generating potential

Letters: It is unfortunate that Richard Dawkins, gave the impression he did not consider of value any information not derived from checking ideas by further observations or experiments

Letters: An examination of the background to and legality of Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq undoubtedly remains important

Letters: Send balls from roll-on deodorant bottles to the Ndebele village of Mapoch in South Africa

Letters: How disappointing that Lucy Mangan chose to ridicule the work of the Women’s Institute

Letters: I read with great interest your suggestion that President-elect Obama should “tear up” the 2004 letter from President Bush to Ariel Sharon regarding Israel’s major settlement blocs within the West Bank

What a fine time they must have had last night at Sir Ian Blair’s leaving shindig. Many old friends were there, but just as well that Brian Paddick, once part of his senior team at the Met, was otherwise engaged on I’m A Celebrity. Things have been sticky between them in recent weeks. The task for Jacqui Smith is to find a replacement for the only commissioner in 120 years to have had his term of office cut short, and it was to this end that Andy Hayman - a former Blair ally for whom the relationship turned sour - yesterday offered the Times this assessment of what will be required. It is someone who “will take a steady grip of the operational and internal challenges and rebuild media and political relationships”, wrote the former assistant commissioner. “There is no room for any more gimmicks, management-speak or leadership that lacks direction, probity and the human touch.” Roger. Over. Ouch!

• And what will happen once he has gone? Will he, like the three commissioners before him, be rewarded with a seat in the Lords? He benefits from the fact that Jacqui Smith still rates him, and that no one will want Boris Johnson and the Daily Mail to have the satisfaction of having cast him into the wilderness. On the other hand, political allies were disappointed by his “gaffes” and deplored the mess over contracts struck between the Met and one of his close friends. And then there is the expected damnation from the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes. Lord Blair of Stockwell? Perhaps. But it will be a close-run thing.

• The flood risk is real and dangerous, but some refuse to take the whole thing too seriously. At the Environment Agency conference this week, Sir Michael Pitt, author of the report on the 2007 floods, said: “A lot of people who live in flood risk areas are in denial - you have to wring it out of them.” It’s levity, you see. Raises morale. That’s the spirit.

• As will this. Coming soon to air. Sarah Palin radio, a weekly broadcast dealing with her favourite topics: geography, clothing costs, the right to bear arms, the right to life. Suddenly the case for Palin as Republican candidate in 2012 seems irresistible. To Democrats, anyway.

• Things for Robert Kilroy-Silk to think about as he flies back to Brussels, following the public’s decision to expel him from I’m A Celebrity. One is that his fellow MEPs in the East Midlands - Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat - have called on him to stand down, alleging that he has failed to contribute significantly to any debate since 2005. A second is that their disapproval is as nothing when set against that of his former allies in Ukip. “The Great British Public has realised what we did some years ago,” leader Nigel Farage said yesterday. “You just don’t want to be part of a club with Kilroy-Silk.” And it’s easy to knock, but everyone must sympathise with his predicament. What if you discovered that Timmy Mallet was your only friend?

• As the clock runs down, George Bush admits that he is eager to shed the seals of office. He is not the only one who cannot wait. Wafting around cyberspace is the tale of an old man who wanders up to the White House on a sunny day in January. “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush,” he says to a marine. “Sir, Mr Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here,” the officer tells him. “OK,” says the man. He walks away. The following day, the same man approaches the White House and says to the same marine: “I would like to go and meet with President Bush.” Again, the marine is patient. “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.” The man thanks him yet again and walks away. Day three, it happens again; the same man approaches the same marine. “I would like to meet with President Bush,” he says once more. This time the marine is agitated. “I’ve told you already that Mr Bush is longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?” “Oh I understand,” says the old man. “I just love hearing it.” “See you tomorrow,” says the marine.

diary@guardian.co.uk

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Today’s corrections