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Life is full of crises - family ones, health ones and, a little further from home, economic and political ones. Gordon Brown knows it. David Cameron knows it. It would be infantile to expect a crisis-free life. The question is whether we can survive our crises and learn from them. The political challenge is whether this dark and burgeoning recession could actually make us a better country.

This year, many hardworking people will lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Many businesses, built up with care, will be destroyed. Millions of savers, often older people, will find they don’t have the interest or dividends they’d depended on. High streets will have more boarded-up windows. People will look at the higher taxes to come, shiver, and shove their hands back in their pockets.

But after all that, bit by bit, confidence will come back. Markets go up as well as down. In a few favoured areas, house prices will stabilise. Good news, like bad, will ripple outwards. The unemployment figures will begin to fall. We will stagger out of this a little poorer but more cautious. We don’t know exactly when, but we know a recovery will come.

The great question for politicians, particularly those on the left, is whether we can do better than that - whether we can emerge from the hard times as a greener, fairer, more caring country, which positively rejects a return to the “life equals shopping” culture of the boom years. And one reason for staying interested in politics through 2009, election or no election, is that the political leaders are so visibly struggling about which direction to take.

Reading and watching Brown’s thoughts over the weekend suggests that he both does and doesn’t accept that something major needs to shift. On one hand, he’s been talking up the importance of state action and the death of simplistic free-market ideology - while he’s been spending and nationalising too. He wants public spending projects, offering jobs by modernising schools and railways, putting in more fibre-optic cables, investing in green technologies. He’s approved higher taxes for top earners and promised further help to pensioners and the poorest. In all this, we see the return of Labour values, which seemed at times over the last 10 years to have vanished into history. Nobody wants a state-run economy or 97% marginal taxes, but the notion of a slightly fairer, less materialistic and longer-term polity is not an ugly one, and is now sellable.

Yet on the other hand Brown also seems to blame the recession on a few unnamed bankers, or some toxic Americans. Challenged about the church leaders’ recent comments on the moral corruption of a high-debt consumer society he presided over as chancellor, he protests that he was brought up as a Presbyterian - which may be true, but is no kind of answer.

If we stand back from the confusing messages being sent out, his government has a decent story to tell about recent months. Business people I’ve talked to over the holiday say that, actually, the Labour rescue package may well have saved us from a succession of further collapses and was pretty well thought out. Has it worked? Too early to say, but if the government had sat on its hands, some banks and many more businesses would surely have gone to the wall.

I don’t buy the fashionable Tory-led hysteria about levels of government debt. They are high in comparative and historical terms, but not ludicrously so, given the challenge of the economy. Debt will have to be repaid in due course, with higher taxes, but this is not the end of the world - we managed perfectly well after earlier recessions. Among many, more taxation will even be popular. In a Fabian-YouGov poll, published at the weekend, 70% agreed that “those at the top are failing to pay their fair share towards investment in public services”.

The same poll suggests there is now a fat-cat backlash, directed at City bosses and others who have forfeited their right to high salaries by their incompetence. Some 55% of those polled blamed reckless lending by the banks for the credit crunch, against less than a quarter thinking the government was mainly responsible. Put it all together and you have the possibility of a political sea change, away from some of the beliefs which had seemed unchallengeable from the late 80s onwards. We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes.

Yet to properly exploit that, Brown and his ministers have to change their tune about the past. To hear him claim he made no mistakes, and that everything about the Blair-Brown handling of the boom culture was well judged, jars horribly. If he believes we need to think again about what kind of society we want to be, he has to start by being a bit more reflective. It would give him more authority, more credibility - and make him more interesting to listen to.

It would also rob the Cameron Conservatives of their best gambit, which is simply to point, like the child at the naked emperor, and state the bleeding obvious about past mistakes. As a commentator, Cameron has been rather good lately. He says interesting things about moral failures, vacuums and values - rather like a clean-shaven pink-cheeked archbishop. It’s just when he gets round to his own prescription for the future that he begins to falter.

Harsh? Well, we still have the Tory plan, which begins by saying they would rather not start from here. They too forget inconvenient parts of history, notably their enthusiasm for less regulated financial markets, and their more guarded acceptance of many of Brown’s now “profligate” spending increases on health, law and order, and education. But their biggest problem is the littleness of their own solutions now: a bit less spending, but without specifying the cuts; and a few alternative mechanisms to help business. Further down the line they’d like more localism, please. The harder the recession has bitten, the less they’ve sounded their optimistic and greener notes. If we do get a hung parliament, they will have some hard bargaining with Lib Dems before being able to form a government - and I can’t see any clear vision of a better country emerging from that.

No, the best bet for the year ahead is a rather more honest, self-critical Labour government responding to a changed public mood. We don’t only want them to “see us through” the worst of the recession but for Britain to emerge as a fairer and more stable place. Call it the higher opportunism - that’s the chance of a lifetime this crisis has brought.

jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk

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There are moments in the Lake District when scenes among the fells evoke memories of famous views elsewhere. As the late Harry Griffin remarked in this column more than once, Bassenthwaite bears a fair resemblance to Lake Lucerne in certain light. And there are landmarks like the Matterhorn Boulder on Carrock Fell and Sphinx Rock on Great Gable.

Similarities when sight and sounds gel are rather rarer. I came across one recently when taking up the challenge Alfred Wainwright flings down as he refuses to describe the way in a guidebook. In essence, he says “if you cannot find the top of Cold Fell with a map alone then take some good advice, old man, and pack it in”. Having duly climbed a frost-white Cold Fell with the help of a keen westerly, it was on the descent by a more circuitous route that I spotted the little packhorse bridge. It flashed to mind a picture of a bridge near the centre of New York City. A more searching comparison might not make the grade. This tiny bridge - said to be the oldest in Cumbria, built by the monks of Calder Abbey and known as Matty Benn’s Bridge - has no parapet unlike the Manhattan one, and it spans a ghyll rather than a pond.

But two striking similarities remain: the distinct shape of its arch, which has supported so much traffic through the years and a certain sound, unmistakeable from a field away from the beck - rush-hour traffic. Workers were driving home after their shift at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant across Cold Fell’s lonely, high road to Cockermouth. The constant banging of tyres on a cattle grid apart, it sounded identical to the motorised hum carrying into the south-east corner of Central Park - and reaching city strollers on Gapstow Bridge, immortalised in so many photographs. A classic shot shows it backed by the Plaza Hotel and Sherry Netherland Building while white with snow, not unlike Cold Fell’s domain that wintry day.

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Letters: Why didn’t those same demonstrators take to the streets when Israeli civilians faced daily rocket attacks for those seven months?

Today’s corrections

Letter: Hazel Blears is to be applauded for drawing attention to the issue of white working-class attitudes to immigration

Letters: Despite the EU’s call for a ceasefire, the brutal Israeli bombing of Gaza continues

Letters: Dr John Stevens asks us not to forget, but his account forgets much

Letters: The proposal that patients should actually be able to criticise their GPs publicly has got some professional knickers in a right old patronising twist

Letters: Policies such as requiring all new homes to be zero carbon by 2016 will be significantly undermined by its own failure to get its house in order

Today’s corrections

Letters: We can’t abolish the pound with such a large majority against the idea

Spread out on the dining room table are the unappetising leftovers of evening meals from long ago. I poke at one of the blackish, meatball-like lumps - not with a knife and fork, but grasping a cocktail stick in each hand - and begin to prise it apart.

It is nine months since I entered Tempsford barn and crouched at one end to gather up these unsavoury nuggets from the stone floor. Visitors skirted around this midden, perhaps unaware that the “animal droppings” were something else, perhaps unaware that their creator sat silent in the rafters above their heads.

Every night, a barn owl coughed up the indigestible parts of its supper in fur-wrapped pills on to this ground below its roost. It is a cruel irony that the fur which gave warmth to the vole, mouse or shrew, coated their sharp little bones in the owl’s stomach, ensuring that the hunter’s gullet was protected from harm.

The two sticks tease the pellet open, revealing crescent-shaped ribs stacked in parallel, each no thicker than a spider’s web. Above the ribs, the fur is clotted around a solid lump. I tug a thick pad away to uncover part of a smooth, rounded bowl. Careful pulling reveals more of the domed skull and I begin teasing out what proves to be the long, narrow snout of a shrew. Running along the lower jaw, my magnifying glass focuses on an impressive line of pointy red-tipped teeth, each beetle-pulverising tooth barely half a millimetre long. But I have inadvertently dislocated the jaw from its skull and now, scattered over the table, a complete skeleton has been rendered into an untidy mess of bones and fur.

Outside, on this winter’s evening, the barn owl must have begun hunting. It may catch five or six mammals tonight, but looking at these pellets, I ponder one inescapable fact - in swallowing its prey whole, the owl never tastes a single meal.

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Editorial: Minnesota is still re-counting ballots from the November poll - better to be messily late than undemocratic

Editorial: Making use of the human desire to fit in could be a powerful strategy in the government’s campaign for healthy living

Gerald Butt: More than just a means of transport, flying can take us to new spiritual places too

Editorial: These excellent historians completed the uncertain journey from prime ministerial bookshelf to the honours list this week

As Russia flexes its muscles, cutting gas supplies to Ukraine in a dispute that is as much about unpaid bills as it is about settling political scores, a small, disused Warsaw Pact airfield in a remote corner of north-west Poland finds itself at the heart of a new conflict between the US and Russia.

Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and Poland a Soviet satellite state, but with the fall of communism both have moved into the western camp - and Redzikowo base was selected by the Bush administration to host the “missile defence shield”, a system designed to intercept incoming rockets from rogue states such as Iran. The US ambassador to Poland recently visited the nearby town of Slupsk to see the mayor. Russia sees this as yet another provocation and, in an echo of the Cuban missile crisis, says it is being targeted by the proposed shield and will respond accordingly.

Recently Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, rained on Barack Obama’s parade, promising like for like: Russia would move its own missiles to the Kaliningrad enclave, on the Polish border. Russia’s ambassador in Warsaw, Vladimir Grinin, struck an even tougher line. “Of course our relations with Poland are important,” said Grinin. “We hope that Obama will listen to our concerns, and not go ahead. But in the worse-case scenario, if the Americans do proceed, we will also target the new radar systems in the Czech Republic, and will place missiles on ships in the Baltic and around Kaliningrad.”

Bronislaw Nowak is a former Warsaw Pact fighter pilot who was stationed at Redzikowo. I met him just outside the base on a bitterly cold day, a rusting MiG fighter standing as sentinel at the entrance. Now a local councillor in Slupsk, Nowak isn’t enthusiastic. “It makes us a target. It starts a new arms race. Did you know that it would take all of two minutes for a Russian missile launched from Kaliningrad to land here?”

Nowak, like most Poles, does not hanker for the old days and yet wants to avoid antagonising Russia. Poland was one of the first to shake off the Soviet yoke, is an enthusiastic member of the EU and Nato, and has spent the last decade removing any visible traces of its Communist past. If the Americans move into the nearby base, there will be 100 or so service personnel with their families spending money locally. This would surely boost the region’s economy, I said to Ryszard Kwiatkowski, Slupsk’s deputy mayor. But he wasn’t having it either. “It will make us a target, and we have seen enough of conflict in the past to know that we do not want to become the centre of another. Of course we like the Americans, but them coming here will make little difference to our economy.” The attitude among local shoppers was equally negative.

Back in Warsaw, I met Poland’s anglophile foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski. He was upbeat about the missile shield, and anxious to dispel Russian fears. “What you have to understand is that this is purely defensive in nature. The system will only react if we, Nato, are threatened. Should we be fearful of Russia’s response? Well, we have always lived in the shadow of Russia.”

Fearful of Russia or not, what Sikorski, the Russian ambassador and Slupsk’s local leadership had in common was a belief that the decision on the stationing of the missile defence shield would be taken in Washington. Obama has bought some breathing space by saying that the US needs more time to see if the system can work properly. He might also find time to listen to ordinary Poles, who fear that they will become a target. “We wanted a referendum, but we couldn’t have one,” says Bronislaw Nowak. “So we organised our own - 69% of our townspeople said no.”

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“What, pray, is all the fuss about?” asked a sage columnist in these pages on the first anniversary of the credit crunch (”Crisis, what crisis?”, 12 August). In response to claims that this was a great crisis of capitalism he even deployed the word “phooey”. That sage columnist was of course yours truly; it is safe to say that article will not be pasted into my scrapbook titled “Most Prescient Pieces”.

My argument was, of course, correct in so far as it looked in the rear-view mirror rather than at the road ahead. The striking thing about the first year of the crunch, in Britain and globally, was how little impact it had on the wider economy beyond the banks, the City and Wall Street.

And any impact that has yet been seen does not make the situation worse than the recession of the early 90s, or especially the early 80s, when unemployment was nearly double today’s level. Still, it is no longer possible to be as sanguine as I was in August. We are still far from a “worst since the 30s” situation, but there is no doubt that in the last four months all developed economies, and many developing ones, have frozen up. How bad might it get? We don’t know, because we can’t know.

It is worth dwelling for a moment (as I have for many moments, especially since mid-September) on why I was proved so wrong. There are, I think, two reasons beyond idiocy or complacency.

First, I may have spent too much time thinking about Japan. It really did have the rich world’s worst financial crisis since 1929, when after 1990 its stockmarket fell by 75% and property prices by 70%. But it never had a severe recession: more a slow squeeze that ended, from 1997 onwards, in deflationary stagnation. A slump was prevented by a huge Keynesian public spending programme; meltdown was prevented by using public funds to rescue banks.

The collapse of our financial pyramid scheme could be absorbed, I thought, by learning from Japan’s example and improving on it. That is exactly what Gordon “saviour of the world” Brown did by recapitalising Britain’s banks 14 months into the crisis, rather than waiting eight years, as Japan had; and it is reflected in the fiscal expansion announced in Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report in November and the huge spending programme being prepared by the US president-elect.

However, our drama now feels worse than Japan’s because it is international. Japan’s economy was propped up by healthy global growth, whereas now we are all slowing or receding together. It is also worse because of the second factor that I misjudged in August: psychology.

The position I took was, in effect, an attempt to argue that we risked talking ourselves into recession, through media scaremongering, and remarks such as Darling’s warning, in his Guardian interview of 29 August, that Britain faced the worst economic times for 60 years, with more “profound and long-lasting” effects than people were expecting. No doubt he now thinks he has been proved correct, while I still hope that he won’t be, and feel he may have contributed to the panic - even though it would be implausible to argue that he caused it.

Now fear has taken over. Companies, households and banks have decided that cash must be king, to be in debt is to risk death, and new commitments are best avoided. Individually, this is rational. Collectively, it is disastrous. Or, to avoid being a scaremonger, it brings about the thing we are afraid of: a nasty recession.

We can’t predict how deep the recession will be, or how long it will last, because it depends on psychology. Economics is not about models and mathematics, it is about behaviour: our reactions to opportunities, risks and fears.

Brown and Darling are right to be trying to counter that deflationary psychology by throwing away the old fiscal rules, cutting VAT and expanding public borrowing. Like in Japan, this will help to mitigate the slump. But whether it can end the slump will depend on companies, households and banks that hold cash being convinced that it is time to start spending again - because they have become sufficiently less afraid of an apocalypse, and sufficiently convinced that opportunities to invest, buy and lend have become sufficiently attractive.

Meanwhile, note, this is not - yet - a true “crisis of capitalism”. That would arise if confidence never seems likely to return, if unemployment has soared and if hope seems truly to have been destroyed. It cannot be ruled out. But let us, as the future US president said in his book, have the audacity to hope that it won’t happen, and the sense not to announce it until and unless it does.

• Bill Emmott is a former editor of the Economist and author of Rivals - How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade

bill@billemmott.com

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All those involved, and most of those following the bloodshed in Gaza from afar, are sure who is in the right and who is in the wrong. They know who the innocent victims are and who are the wicked perpetrators. These certainties are held equally firmly by those who will be demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinians in London today and those who plan to stage similar shows of support for Israel later this month.

Both sides see the conflict in moral terms. For supporters of the Palestinians, it could not be clearer. Israel is committing a war crime, killing people in their hundreds, hammering a besieged population from the sky (and soon perhaps on the ground too), claiming to aim only at Hamas but inevitably striking those civilians who get in the way.

Israel’s cheerleaders are just as clear. Israel is the victim, hitting out now only belatedly and in self-defence. Its southern citizens have sat terrorised in bomb shelters, fearing the random rockets of Hamas, since 2005, longer than any society could tolerate without fighting back.

Both sides say they would have maintained the six-month ceasefire that had held - albeit imperfectly - until December 19 had the other side not broken it first. And who did break the deal first, Hamas with its rockets or Israel with its blockade? Both sides point at the other with equal vehemence, a Newtonian chain of claimed action and reaction that can stretch back to infinity.

So perhaps a more useful exercise - especially for those who long for an eventual peace with both sides living side by side - is not to ask whether the current action is legitimate, but whether it is wise.

Israel, say its spokesmen, seeks not to trigger an Iraq-style “regime change” in Gaza but simply to alter Hamas’ calculus, so it concludes that hurling rockets is against its own interests. Israel hopes thereby to reassert its long-cherished deterrence, so damaged in Lebanon in 2006. Hamas will be taught a lesson, abide by an enduring ceasefire and leave Israel’s southern border quiet. Israel can then get on with pursuing a pact with the Fatah-led Palestinians of the West Bank.

That sounds coherent, but does it make sense? After this first phase of the conflict, Israeli officials say yes. They boast that Hamas’ command and control systems have been shattered, and that its leaders are in hiding 4m under ground.

But there are immediate questions, eerily similar to the ones that surfaced in Lebanon two years ago. How exactly does this end? If Israeli tanks go into Gaza, won’t they get bogged down in the mud and narrow streets of the refugee camps, terrain known intimately by Hamas?

And these are only the most obvious, current concerns. The grounds for questioning the wisdom of Operation Cast Lead, even from Israel’s own point of view, go much deeper.

First, even if Israel gets the quiet it wants there is every reason to believe it could have got that without resorting to war. The longtime Palestinian analyst and negotiator Hussein Agha says it would have been “straightforward: if they had lifted the blockade, the rockets would have stopped”.

Some diplomatic sources dispute this, arguing that Hamas actually saw an advantage in the sanctions regime: “opening up would have loosened Hamas’ grip,” says one. Hence the cases of Hamas firing on border crossings as they were opened. But most Palestinians insist that a relaxation of the blockade would have granted Hamas its key objective - a chance to prove it can govern effectively - and it would not have jeopardised that with rocket fire. It would have had too much to lose.

Put that to Israelis, and they admit that prospect was unpalatable too: they can’t allow Hamas, a movement whose charter drips with antisemitism and calls for Israel’s eradication, to gain the appearance of legitimacy. But if, as Israel insists, its chief objective is quiet in the south, then there was at least another, non-military path it could have taken - one that those who know Hamas best insist would have stopped the Qassams. Besides, any ceasefire will involve easing the blockade, so Israel will end up making those concessions anyway.

Second, if Israel hoped to break Hamas’ hold on Gaza it has gone precisely the wrong way about it. Its leaders have done this many times before, repeatedly misreading the way Arab societies work. They believe that if they hit Gaza (or Lebanon) hard enough, the local population will blame Hamas (or Hezbollah) for bringing tragedy upon them. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, Gazans blame Israel - and close ranks with Hamas. “Anything which doesn’t kill Hamas makes them stronger,” says Agha, noting the way the organisation has been lionised in recent days across the Arab world, hailed as a defiant party of resistance, turning it into a “regional phenomenon”.

Third, Israel’s best hopes lie with the so-called moderate Arab leaders. But they have been badly undermined by this exercise, and none more so than the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose peace talks with Israel now look like consorting with a brutal enemy.

And this is without mentioning the fresh supply of hatred Israel has stored up against itself, creating a new generation of Gazans bent on revenge. Every child who witnessed this week’s bombing is another recruit for the violence of the future.

So, yes, there may be short-term advantage for Israel’s politicians, eyeing the election calendar, in hitting Hamas hard. But the senior European official who told me that this is “tactics, not strategy by the Israelis, who are expert in dealing with symptoms, not causes” is surely right. This is the act of a nation that has plenty of tactics for war - but no strategy for peace.

If it did, it would realise that Israel cannot pick the Palestinians’ leaders for them, that Hamas - however repulsive its charter - is part of the Palestinian reality and will eventually have to be accommodated. Such a peace strategy would see a decision to withdraw from almost all of the West Bank and end settlement expansion, thereby making Abbas - and the peace process - credible in the eyes of his own people.

But there is no such peace strategy, only an Israeli leadership so dazzled by its own military might that it has come to believe that force is almost always the answer - and the way to avoid the toughest questions.

freedland@guardian.co.uk

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‘Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!” Thus goes the rallying cry of the sadistic emcee in Sydney Pollack’s disturbing movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which exposes America’s Depression-era dance marathons for the cheap, dehumanising spectacle they were. Half-dead with exhaustion, participants were subjected to ever-harsher judgements and elimination events, watched by huge crowds of people who, for obvious reasons, had little money and endless hours to kill.

As we lurch towards our own depression era, then, thank heavens for health minister Ben Bradshaw, who this week announced plans for patients to rate GPs on an NHS website, posting comments on everything from perceived competence to bedside manner. “I would never think of going on holiday without cross-referencing at least two guide books and TripAdvisor,” was Mr Bradshaw’s impeccably logical justification. “We need to do something similar for the modern generation in healthcare.”

Did you ever hear the like? Even by the standards of this most slavish of government toadies, the statement has to be a nadir. In fact, if you had to distil New Labour into a single utterance, perhaps it might be this: a healthcare system that was once the envy of the world now has much to learn from the manner in which people select boutique hotels.

Because British society is infinitely just, Mr Bradshaw’s performance is effectively judged only once every five years, while it will now be possible to sit slack-jawed in front of the spectacle of GPs competing to stay in the contest every day. We can dispense with the dance hall, thanks to the information age, and simply gather virtually to watch surgeries take a beating from people - anonymous people, naturally - who don’t realise that not giving antibiotics to malingerers is actually excellent medical practice. Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!

Oddly, doctors don’t seem entranced by the idea, with the chairman of the British Medical Association GPs’ committee branding it a meaningless popularity contest. Come come, medics! How can popularity contests be meaningless? They are the only thing in British public life deemed to have any meaning at all. Why, our own prime minister is on record as expressing his desire for “an X Factor Britain”, completely failing to see that the spectacle of humiliation is what really drives that show.

What the ideologically bankrupt Mr Bradshaw cannot see is that a society demanding constant feedback does not trust itself or its ideas. The GP ratings scheme isn’t an idea. It’s not even a policy. It is a desperately penny-pinching sleight of hand, designed to give people the illusion of power in the NHS. And, as it’s always worth pointing out, people don’t want “power” in the NHS. They want a uniformly decent NHS. They don’t want choice, they want provision.

The GP ratings website is a concept so intrinsically flawed that a child of nine could pick it apart. And will probably be asked to - or rather, to pick apart their GP. After all, the rating of teachers by their pupils is already under way. Last year a north London comprehensive deployed a speed-dating technique when interviewing candidates for the positions of assistant and deputy head; 16 pupils had two-and-a-half minutes each to question applicants, moving on to the next one when a buzzer sounded.

Far from being New Labour’s Cones hotline, then, the GP ratings systems is not some isolated idiosyncrasy, destined to be a joke from day one. It is joined-up government, finding its image in virtually every department, a great daisy chain of stupidity, stringing together the cheapest and basest ideas to give people the illusion of empowerment.

Yesterday we learned that the public vote may also be used to determine punishments handed out to criminals. The Respect agenda is back, apparently, and this time one assumes it’s personal. Of course, you’d struggle to class the summary judging of overstretched doctors as respectful … but then this government has never been shy of a glaringly idiotic contradiction.

How’s my driving? How’s my doctoring? How’s my rating? Because, of course, those doing the rating must be rated, as we become a vast, swarming tribe of people constantly judging one another - a nation of narks too stupid to realise that we are being usefully distracted; a baying, bullying society of people laughing at the incompetent, sneaking on our neighbours, and undermining anyone with the temerity to work themselves into a position of expertise with a press of our red buttons.

Back in the 1930s, many American city councils deemed dance marathons so barbaric that they rushed through emergency legislation to ban them; yet here we are in Britain 2009, rushing to enshrine their sadistic principles in social policy. And don’t make the mistake of assuming that we’ll stop at simply hampering doctors’ careers on the basis that they don’t dole out antibiotics like sweets. This judgmental, decivilising impulse has gained such traction on the popular imagination that logic can only suggest, down the line, darker trials and torments for doctors and teachers and other such wretched drains on society. And why not? They shoot horses, don’t they?

marina.hyde@guardian.co.uk

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From the archive, 2 January 1988: Tomorrow, Mrs Thatcher becomes the longest-serving prime minister since Asquith, a moment worth noting. Such longevity in office is a very large fact. Eight years and eight months

Letters: Had Israeli towns been bombarded with hundreds dead, the attack would have been described as a massacre

Letters: Wholly predictably one finds the Guardian’s leaders and letters pages teeming with the usual unsophisticated condemnations of Israel

Letters: “A new Iraq inquiry need not review WMD again” (Jonathan Steele, 1 January). Oh, but it must.

Letters: Greenpeace is right to express reservations about the prospect of biofuels (of whatever nature) making a significant contribution to air transport