THE MEDIA have made much of Gordon Brown's admission in last week's pre-budget report that he had got his sums wrong. Most notably the government is going to have to borrow £20 billion this year and £24 billion next year - nearly twice the amounts Brown forecast only seven months ago.
YEARS AGO there was a cartoon that did the rounds. It showed a galley ship, with hundreds of galley slaves rowing away like crazy. Standing over them was an overseer with a whip in his hand urging on the slaves with, "We're all in the same boat." What a perfect picture of how politicians talk about society. Yes, we all live in the same country, in the same world, we are all born and we all die. But the vital thing is that in the time between birth and death we find that the way we live is structured.
ONE PERSON you won't see running into burning buildings to rescue people is Jean-Pierre Garnier. He's the boss of the British drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline who has achieved notoriety by announcing that he can't survive on his £7 million annual salary. It's not enough, he says, to "keep him motivated". He wants more to continue running the company from his penthouse in Philadelphia. That's global capitalism for you - a British drugs firm run by a French man from the US.
IN THE aftermath of the United Nations Security Council resolution authorising the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, many people have deluded themselves that this makes war less likely. Even Richard Perle, the ultra right wing adviser to the Pentagon, argued on BBC News 24 last Sunday that the aim of Bush's administration was no longer "regime change" in Iraq but the removal of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. This apparent shift in US objectives may only be a figleaf covering the administration's real intentions.
THE PETER and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg was once a prison but is now a museum. You can wander round its cells and see grainy photographs of its former occupants, political prisoners under the old Russian Tsars 100 years ago. A large number are women-revolutionaries usually from middle class backgrounds who braved torture and exile for their cause.
"I'm just an American boy, raised on MTV and I've seen all those kids in the soda pop ads but none of them look like me so I started lookin' around for a light out of the dim and the first thing I heard that made sense was the word of Mohammed, peace be upon him."
THE "social explosion" which the International Monetary Fund and the Turkish employers' organisation have long been worrying about has, in a sense, expressed itself in the general election in Turkey on Sunday. The centre ground of established politics in a key US ally and NATO member has collapsed. The three parties which formed the coalition government of the past three and a half years have been decimated.
I LISTENED a week ago to some radio programmes about people affected by the Falklands War in 1982. We heard from a woman whose husband was a computer technician in the navy. It was clear from the way she spoke that she admired and loved him.
WHATEVER THE ups and downs of media coverage, the planned war on Iraq remains top of the Bush administration's agenda. Once the United States went to the United Nations Security Council for authority to attack Iraq the immediate drama went out of the story. There have been weeks of negotiations over the text of a resolution.
I WENT away for a couple of days over half term, and when I came back I found that Estelle Morris had resigned. Or at least I thought it was Estelle Morris. Reading the papers and watching the news, it appeared that the carping, nasty, vicious education secretary, a figure prompting contempt and ridicule in my school - and thousands of others, no doubt - had become Saint Estelle the Humble. The media claim she was an honest victim of the bullying Mr Fixits of Downing Street.
TONY BLAIR last week gave a speech blaming the IRA for violence in Northern Ireland. Yet just the day before, a former soldier gave shocking evidence at the Bloody Sunday inquiry which graphically illustrated the responsibility of the British state.
I AM a bit of a fan of the TV programme The West Wing. In it a fictional president of the US often has emergency meetings in the war room, where military advisers turn up and talk tough. Radio 4 had a great, if alarming, programme on last week about what these meetings are like in real life. It went through just how close the world was to nuclear war 40 years ago in October 1962.
