His analysis of the role of education in the reproduction of social inequality challenges Nick Clegg's belief that he was 'lucky' in life

Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the role of education in the reproduction of social inequality challenges Nick Clegg's belief that he was "lucky" in life. Luck, says the French sociologist, has nothing to do with it. Just 10 years after his death, Mr Bourdieu's work is already a classic to rank alongside Foucault or Lacan. The recent publication of his courses at the Collège de France has put his name back into the headlines. In contrast to those who trumpet self-determination, Mr Bourdieu focuses on the forces which shape an individual. If Mr Clegg really wants to "factor social mobility into the education system", he must recognise that the difference between success and failure is not luck but the ways in which social inequalities repeat themselves. The role of government is to break this vicious circle not to reinforce it. The drastic shrinking of the state is hardly the way to remedy what Mr Clegg called an absolute scandal.

With a sandstorm swirling around them and closing the airport, the six-party talks with Iran in Baghdad had every incentive to get a peace process worth talking about back on track

With a sandstorm swirling around them and closing the airport, the six-party talks with Iran in Baghdad had every incentive to get a peace process worth talking about back on track. In an election year, Barack Obama has no conceivable political interest in sliding into another Gulf war, which is what a bombing campaign started by Israel would unleash. And Iran has every interest in avoiding the oil sanctions that are about to start in earnest in June and July. Both sides are more than aware that the clock is ticking. And yet two days after they began, the talks ended with an agreement to meet in Moscow in a month's time but precious little else.

The Iranian negotiators talked extensively about their rights to a full fuel cycle under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) but not about specifics. A full nuclear fuel cycle can be achieved with levels of enrichment well below the danger level of 20%, which is what their centrifuges buried under a mountain in Fordow are designed to achieve. The US and European members of the six-party talks refused for their part to offer Iran a real incentive for abandoning enrichment to 20%, a short technical hop to highly enriched uranium that can be weaponised. Dangling modest relief from technology restrictions, such as aircraft parts, fall well short of the bargaining price. And whatever Iran agrees to, foreign financial firms who continue to deal with Iran's central bank after 28 June will be blocked from US markets, and an EU embargo on Iranian crude starts shortly after on 1 July. So where is the incentive for Iran to trade?

This is the problem with the sanctions. They have to be liftable and or least delayable. Given all the problems surrounding oil tankers and their insurance, a six-month delay is not too difficult to achieve. Sanctions relief has to be part of the negotiations if they are to work as a lever, rather than as a spanner in the works.

The hope that something can be salvaged in Moscow was still there in the closing statement by Cathy Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, but she did not disguise the fact that significant problems remained. Although the two sides were at last talking about the substance of the issue – Iran's nuclear programme – the process was still bumping along the bottom.

Both sides have decisions to make. Iran has to address concerns by the IAEA over the extent to which it conducted research on weaponisation. If progress is achieved, the conditions could be laid for a breakthrough in Moscow. But the US and the EU have also got to be mindful of Iranian psychology. The regime needs a deal they can present as a victory, not a national humiliation. If the ending of medium-enriched uranium is the goal, it is one worth spending time on. It will not be achieved by Iran looking down the barrel of a gun.

• Comments will be opened on this editorial in the morning

If this module of the Leveson inquiry has a smoking gun, it is the memo Jeremy Hunt wrote to the prime minister on 19 November 2010

If this module of the Leveson inquiry has a smoking gun, it is the memo Jeremy Hunt wrote to the prime minister on 19 November 2010. Mr Hunt, as culture secretary, was not in charge of the News Corp BSkyB bid at the time – Vince Cable was – and Hunt's officials were emphatic that he should keep his nose out of it. He was forced to cancel a planned meeting with News Corp – instead arranging a mobile phone conversation with James Murdoch.

Having, quite inappropriately, spoken to Mr Murdoch on a private line, Mr Hunt could not, apparently, help himself. He promptly wrote a memo to Mr Cameron telling him that Mr Murdoch was "pretty furious" at Mr Cable's decision to refer the bid to Ofcom. He warned the prime minister the government "could end up in the wrong place" and demanded that they shouldn't cave in to the "Mark Thompson/Channel 4/Guardian line". He wanted the government to support Murdoch's vision – "to repeat what his father did … with Wapping and create the world's first multimedia operator available from paper to web to TV to iPhone". He requested a meeting with Cameron, Clegg and Cable. A month later, Mr Cable was removed from overseeing the bid on the grounds he was biased against it. Mr Hunt – whose bias in favour of the bid was evident from this memo – was asked by Mr Cameron to take over.

The memo was revealed at the end of a long day in which the inquiry's counsel, Robert Jay, had examined News Corp's lobbyist, Fred Michel, on the avalanche of material revealing the staggering degree of contact between the company and government while the bid was supposedly being dealt with in a quasi-judicial way. The inquiry will, in due course, be publishing more than 1,000 text messages and details of 350 calls and emails between Mr Michel and the DCMS. Mr Hunt's adviser, Adam Smith, admitted he had no contact at all with the coalition of newspapers – including the Guardian – which opposed the bid.

There are three obvious questions that flow from this new evidence. The first – for Mr Hunt – is why he so recklessly defied the advice of his officials to intervene with Downing Street over a matter in which he not only had no role, but had been positively warned to stay clear of. The paperwork turned over to Leveson clearly shows Hunt's bias towards the bid before he assumed responsibility for it. He showed virtually no interest in the counter-arguments once he was running the process and will have to explain the voluminous insider back-channel contacts between his office and News Corp.

News Corp must answer questions about the "son of Wapping" plan that has now been revealed by the memo. Throughout the bid its executives denied any plans to bundle together its newspapers, digital and TV offerings, companies, platforms and content. Sometimes it suited News Corp to claim that Sky was an entirely separate company. At others the argument was reversed (and duly adopted by Mr Hunt): Sky was controlled by News Corp, anyway, so there was no real proposed change of control. But it now seems apparent that there was, indeed, a well-advanced plan to bring the Murdoch platforms and content into one unity. Leveson should ask to see those plans.

Finally, there are ever-more delicate questions for Mr Cameron. Why, knowing that Mr Hunt was privately lobbying on behalf of the bid, did he think it was appropriate to appoint him to run it, given that Mr Cable – with different sympathies – had just been forced to step down over the appearance of partiality? And what is he going to do about Mr Hunt, who is due to give evidence to the inquiry next week? Mr Hunt has been shown to have defied his officials' advice and to have run the bid (under the ministerial code he has to take responsibility for Mr Smith) against a background of clandestine contacts having made his own position clear in advance. Had it not been for the Leveson inquiry we would have been kept in the dark about what went on. We are, daily, getting a fuller picture, and it is not an edifying one.

Minority-ethnic MPs | Hitler's Children picture caption | Reza Marashi

• A Diary item (24 May, page 33) said 40 black and Asian parliamentarians had gathered for "a photograph to celebrate the election of the 20th century's first minority MPs 25 years ago". Several readers have pointed out that there are two other post-1900 minority-ethnic members of parliament who were elected before the second world war: Mancherjee Bhownagree (Conservative, Bethnal Green, 1895-1906) and Shapurji Saklatvala (Communist/Labour, Battersea North, 1922-23 and 1924-29).

• A photograph accompanying a review of the BBC2 programme Hitler's Children – which referred to Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hermann Goering, Katrin Himmler, the great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, and Rainer Hoess, the grandson of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess – was wrongly captioned as "Hitler with Goering, Himmler and Hoess"; the picture actually showed the Nazi leader with Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess (Last night's TV, 24 May, page 21, G2).

• In the abridged version of an article that appeared in the print edition (Lobbying campaign wins banned Iranian terrorist group backing in Washington, 23 May, page 16), the first mention of Reza Marashi – a former official on the US state department's Iran desk and now research director for the National Iranian American Council – omitted his surname.

I'm glad to hear Passenger Focus is taking on the train companies ruthless enforcement of penalties for passengers who have ticket problems (Report, 22 May). I was charged a £75 penalty because I had lost my ticket in a crush at the new King's Cross barriers. Yes, I could prove that I had bought a ticket. No, there could be no discretion. When I appealed I was told that train staff cannot waive the National Conditions of Carriage, no matter what genuine mitigating circumstances may have occurred. Does this mean that the Conditions of Carriage form an unfair contract?
Fiona Longstaff
Linlithgow, West Lothian

• Dr Davies (Letters, 24 May) draws attention to the new religion of Olympic flame worship. However, I remain baffled by the absence of the usual voices highlighting the reduction in GDP this will cause. Traffic congestion, deliveries late, people absenting themselves from work, hours of education lost as children line the streets.
Maureen Panton
Malvern, Worcestershire

• I heard someone calling someone else a "muttering idiot" and then lots of guffawing (Sketch, 24 May). It was the prime minister in parliament, who, I recall, said he would end Punch and Judy politics.
Greg Parker
Thornhill, Dumfriesshire

• At the first night in 1988 of Arthur Miller's Danger: Memory! at Hampstead Theatre, two men in the row behind me began talking in the middle of the first act (Letters, 16 May). I turned round angrily to tell them to keep quiet. When the lights went up for the interval I was embarrassed that it was Arthur Miller himself, who graciously apologised.
Tony Benson
London

• Of course one has the same sandwich for lunch every day (Shortcuts, 23 May). It is indeed toasted cheese, the ham is optional, but it must have sliced tomatoes and, if available, torn basil.
Gwen Mathews
Bulwick, Northamptonshire

• Am I the only pupil of the fifties to have had date sandwiches in their lunchbox (an Oxo tin)?
David Percy
Kendal, Cumbria

We applaud the National Autistic Society report, which echoes what so many families we work with tell us here at Autistica, the UK's largest autism research charity (Special needs kids deserve better than a rush to reform, 21 May). We know that early support can ameliorate the negative aspects of autism, dramatically improving quality of life and reducing distress for individuals and their families. But despite this, a third of families wait over three years for a diagnosis – missing out on vital support at the most crucial time. It is no wonder one in ten families have to resort to paying for a private diagnosis. It is clearly urgent that we both improve diagnostic methods and ensure that these are readily available to clinicians. Recently published research funded by Autistica found neurological signs of autism in infants as young as six months, helping us to understand the development of the condition. Further investment in research is clearly needed so that we can continue to explore earlier signs and the biological basis of autism with a view to providing effective treatments and interventions at a much earlier stage. Over 600,000 people in the UK deserve to have their condition understood. It is only with robust peer reviewed scientific research that we will be able to offer earlier diagnosis, effective support and proper understanding.
Christine Swabey
Chief executive, Autistica

The fact that tuition fees have been tripled twice in recent years can be a recipe for confusion. Professor Steven Cummins (Letters, 22 May) argues that the NUS is wrong to criticise the lack of improvement in student contact time since the three-fold increase in fees, and that the coalition should be blamed for simultaneously withdrawing teaching funding from universities.

Although we agree about the withdrawal of teaching funding, my original comments about the use of tuition fees by universities in fact related to new research from the Higher Education Policy Institute (Report, 17 May) which showed time spent with tutors has not improved since the implementation of "top-up fees" under the previous government, and therefore prior to the coalition's funding policy taking effect. Top-up fees were, at the time, additional to increases in public funding for teaching, and the rationale given by ministers and universities was that they would be put to use in improving the student experience: the HEPI's report and other evidence now gives us cause to doubt those claims.

The impact of the coalition's three-fold increase in tuition fees on the student experience has not yet been felt – the first cohort will enter university this autumn and we will be closely monitoring the impact. The NUS vigorously opposed both the introduction of top-up fees by the last government, and the rushed and unfair three-fold increase in fees and teaching funding cuts forced through by the coalition. We will continue to oppose the rationale of marketisation; the same cannot be said for most vice-chancellors.
Liam Burns
President, National Union of Students

Giving only prisoners released on temporary licence the vote may placate MPs and avert a costly clash with Europe

The latest round of the row on votes for prisoners is much ado about nothing for the inmates of Britain's jails. The vast majority of prisoners do not even want to vote. But on Tuesday the European court of human rights upheld its original ruling that the blanket ban was illegal and gave the UK a six-month ultimatum to act. So this will soon become a great to-do for the inmates of HMP Westminster.

The parliamentary mood and arithmetic has been clear ever since the Commons debate in February 2011. By an all-party majority of 212 it was resolved that the issue of votes for prisoners should be decided by our domestic legislators and not by the European court of human rights. That sound and popular decision would, at an informed guess, be supported by at least 75% of Her Majesty's past and present guests, including this one. That's because life on the wing is realistic not idealistic. In con circles as well as Conservative circles, it is accepted that a jail sentence loses you all sorts of rights, starting with the right to freedom. If any of them could be restored, voting would be way down the list. The right to send emails would be one far higher priority.

At present, the government appears to be set on having a head-on collision with the European court – great fun for Eurosceptics and great fees for human rights lawyers and lobbyists. But let's look at one alternative solution which would still leave our parliament firmly in control. I call it the encouragement of rehabilitation option.

In our jail population of 89,000 there are about 1,800 prisoners who each day are released on temporary licence (ROTL) for employment in the community. They have earned their status by good behaviour and achieving such low-risk assessments that they are considered safe and responsible enough to be sent out to work in local jobs as preparation for their re-entry into society. It would be a small and quite sensible step in their journey of rehabilitation for these inmates to be allowed the vote during this final period, usually about two years, before release.

Although this will not please those who want to stick to the established UK practice that all prisoners lose their voting rights as long as they are behind bars, there is a case for differentiating ROTL inmates, as they are already being treated differently by the prison service for rehabilitation reasons. Adding the right to vote to the right to day release seems a small and temporary concession that would also be in tune with the government's general strategy of encouraging rehabilitation.

The signs from Strasbourg are that the European court will accept that parliament can decide how much or how little voting rights can be restored to prisoners provided there is some movement from the present impasse. If so, a parliamentary bill to allow ROTL prisoners the vote seems preferable to the disproportionate financial bill of a prolonged battle with the European court.

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You are absolutely right that the introduction of degree-level apprenticeships will raise the prestige of vocational education (A plan for apprenticeship success, 15 May). Which is why I will ensure that by 2015 at least 20,000 young people a year will embark upon degree-equivalent higher apprenticeships in sectors like aerospace and the creative industries (there were just 180 when I became the minister responsible). Not only will this create one of the best gateways to university-level study but it will change the perception of vocational education to being a highway, not a cul-de-sac.

In government I have made my belief clear that, as the cornerstone of our mission to reshape the character of learning and workforce skills, practical competence must be as valued as academic prowess. Already we are succeeding with record numbers of high-quality apprenticeships. Because quantity must be matched by quality, I've insisted all apprenticeships will be for a minimum of 12 months and that all 16-year-olds work towards English and maths at GCSE.

Lord Leitch's report on skills told us that to match our competitors we must radically reform the way we train young people. We are doing what the Labour government that commissioned his work failed to. This government understands that a skilled workforce is necessary to power economic growth and fuels social mobility.
John Hayes MP
Skills minister

• University education hasn't worked – one size doesn't fit all (Ed Miliband demands end to 'snobbery' over vocational courses, 21 May). High-value vocational learning and apprenticeships offer young people alternative pathways into professions. We have proof that rigorous and demanding vocational qualifications and apprenticeships contribute significantly to social mobility and widen the path for young people to get into the workplace.
Jane Scott Paul
Chief executive, Association of Accounting Technicians

I agree with Simon Jenkins that "British energy policy is a dark underworld of fanatics" (Comment, 23 May) and I can't understand why the government is pushing for more investment in nuclear power when Fukushima is so recent. I've also heard Ed Davey "squirming" on the BBC and saying we need investment to "keep the lights on". Keep the lights on? Maybe 50 years ago this was the primary use of electricity but now most goes on powering masses of superfluous appliances and gadgets. So we should ask ourselves how we might distinguish between essential (keeping the lights on) and luxury (frothing coffee) electricity? One way would be to install a supplementary DC circuit in every home. Here batteries would be charged at cheap night-time rates or from solar panels, with them supplying a limited amount of essential electricity. The cost for daytime AC power could then be increased significantly so we all start to feel a real level of "financial pain" when we run the tumble-drier, switch on air-conditioning or leave the TV running when we are not really watching it.
Alan Mitcham
Cologne, Germany

• It ill behoves those of us who have lived long lives of profligate energy consumption to wring our hands as if nothing can be done to rationalise UK energy policy. 0ur best efforts make little impression on the global problem and may not impress India or China, but to do nothing sends a message about the greed of arrogant developed nations which they and others will seize with both hands. And we don't need to wait for Jenkins's wise mathematician to deliver answers. We should begin now by taking aggressive measures to cut energy use; not a glamorous step but effective, and cost-effective too.
Phil Booth
Bristol

• Simon Jenkins is right that energy policy can be confusing. Technologies hailed as the sustainable solutions to all of our energy problems often prove nothing of the sort. But his view of biomass as either a new dawn for energy or a technology that threatens half the world's forests is no longer true. The biomass power plant we have developed at Aston University overcomes many hurdles that have held back this technology. By using residues and waste instead of energy crops, the plant does not require the destruction of rainforests or agricultural land for palm oil production.

In fact, its by-product – biochar – can be used to increase crop yields. And by using heat instead of incineration, it produces no emissions. In short, there are no downsides. The first industrial-scale plant is working. If the government wants a clear conclusion for its energy policy, it need look no further.
Tim Miller
Project manager, European Bioenergy Research Institute, Aston University

• No public subsidy for nuclear power, says the energy secretary. Subsidies to the nuclear industry are illegal, according to EU regulations. So the government seeks to create a market structure which ensures the lights stay on. Consumers will have to pay for the infrastructure for new nuclear power stations, meaning prices will rise (Energy market shakeup raises fears of higher bills, 23 May). The insurance industry has become more reluctant to insure nuclear power stations after Fukushima, meaning we, the consumers, would have to pick up any bill in case of an accident.

The issue of storing used nuclear material has also not been settled. Will the nuclear industry pay for a depository deep underground, and for safe transport of the material? The used fuel rods are likely to remain at Sellafield, and will need guarding from terrorists and rising sea levels for centuries to come. Again, the government, ie we, will have to foot the bill. That is not called a subsidy, but it amounts to one by any other name. Legal wrangling will also cause super delays. Why does nobody mention the building of the high-voltage, direct current European supergrid, which will allow import of electricity from the Sahara, hydro-power from Norway, and geothermal from Iceland at times when we cannot generate solar or wind power, and export electricity when we generate more than we need? Several undersea links are there: to France and Ireland. Last year a cable was laid to the Netherlands. The next link to Norway has already been planned. Why does the energy secretary not mention this project, which won't expose us to the risk of a nuclear future?
Aart and Wiebina Heesterman
Birmingham

• Is this a Simon Jenkins first? "Do not read on if you want a conclusion on this subject" says Simon to introduce his second paragraph. As he is never normally under-opinionated, perhaps he is starting to realise, as the government already has, that there is no easy answer to Britain's energy future. Governments for years have read all the reports about the deleterious effects of burning fossil fuels and the future cost of the almost certainly increasing reliance on importing them, and tried to nudge energy policy towards other options, but immediately bang up against voters who are against whatever else is offered – nuclear (safety and cost), and renewables (cost and impacts on what I would call amenity and ambience rather than environment). The only logical response to my mind is to charge the cost to the taxpayer and ignore the amenity, but recent governments, especially this one, won't increase taxes for that, and are also terrified of campaigns against large-scale and/or highly visible options, as they are mostly in or proposed for Conservative areas.

A further consideration that Jenkins does not mention is that renewables would immediately become more attractive if a way could be found to store  the intermittent power generated from solar and wind, to keep the grid going at night and between weather depressions. I've not heard of any work being done in this regard. Anyway, come on Simon, give us a clue, how would you navigate through the "dark underworld" as you put it?
David Mills
York

• Simon Jenkins is looking for mathematical formulae that will help him understand the complexities of climate change, renewables and nuclear. Let me oblige with three suggestions from a recent conference on climate change organised by Help Rescue the Planet.

First RC + MJ = GG where RC stands for Reduced Carbon, MJ for More Jobs and GG for Green Growth. Secondly, EC + R > NO where EC stands for Energy Conservation, R for Renewables and NO for Nuclear Option (In maths > indicates greater than). In other words if the government is planning to spend £100bn to meet our energy requirements, should it spend it on conservation and renewables or on getting Russia or China to build a new generation of nuclear reactors. In political as well as purely economic terms this is a "no brainer".

The third formula was devised by our conference organiser and is the Russell-Jones variant of Einstein's famous 1905 formula MC2 = E where M stands for multitude (as in world population), C = carbon per capita (ie emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases per head of population per year) and E stands for extinction of species or, for those politicians who calculate that plants and animals don't vote, it stands for the END of human civilisation as we know it.
Michael Clink
Chairman, Help Rescue the Planet, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

• If Simon Jenkins is unable to discriminate between James Lovelock and Nigel Lawson on the matter of global climate change, he should cease writing about this topic at all, with immediate effect.
Pam Lunn
Kenilworth, Warwickshire

Our political elites find the issue of social mobility to be both irresistible and intractable (Suzanne Moore, G2, 24 May). Irresistible because even rightwing politicians cannot ignore the fact that our unfair education system, through which parental wealth has a far more significant impact on life chances than ability, is neither fair nor meritocratic, and ensures that structures of power remain ossified throughout society. And intractable because in order to significantly increase social mobility, educational opportunities for less well-off children must be significantly boosted, which will necessarily lead to a diminution of the access presently enjoyed by privately educated children to the best universities and careers.

Michael Gove's speech on the "morally indefensible" dominance by privately educated people in British society, and Nick Clegg's 17 annual "trackers", are nothing more than fig leaves to cover the government's growing embarrassment at the huge chasm between the status quo of private school dominance and the equality of opportunity which any intelligent person must conclude is essential for a country like ours to be able to describe itself as "great".

I doubt this government of privately educated millionaires is up to the task.
John Slinger
Chair, Pragmatic Radicalism

• I applaud Nick Clegg's commitment to the cause of social mobility. I suspect, however, that a much braver and more radical approach will be required. For example, private schools should only be allowed to keep their charitable status if they agree to take into their schools a significant proportion of appropriately assessed children from the state sector who are entitled to free school meals. It would not be perfect but it would be consistent in that, to an extent, selection would still be based on parental income. If they refuse they should lose their charitable status and submit to the market forces so beloved of recent governments.
Gordon Morris
Sherborne, Dorset

• No major political parties are sincere about promoting social mobility because they will not tackle the privileges and powers of Oxbridge and private schools (Social mobility still leaves some living in the gutter, 24 May). But we can do something as individuals. Do not send our children to private schools or the elitist state ones. We can decline to be students at Oxbridge. We can refuse the high salaries and the connections which make us a part of the establishment and instead identify with and agitate with those who are victims of an unequal Britain.
Bob Holman
Glasgow

• Your thesis about "the slow return of rage" (Leader, 22 May) is surprising, as a lead of 5% is a disastrous showing for an opposition party in mid-term. In fact, the low turnout for the local elections shows that the public mood is one of indifference. Part of the reason may be found in a photo you recently ran in which the three leaders plus George Osborne stood side by side. They appeared virtual clones, all being about the same age and wearing the same uniform (dark suit, monochrome tie, middle-of-the road haircut) and the same sleek metropolitan look. It is not surprising that their policies are hard to distinguish, especially as Miliband refuses to tell us what his policy is.
Christopher Wrigley
Chorleywood, Hertfordshire

Heathland, West Sussex: Male insects raise and rub their forewings on warm, early summer evenings to produce a soothing love song

Finally, it is a still, warm evening. I follow the footpath across the soft, grey sand of the heathland. Scattered trees glisten and a square of rape on the South Downs glows bright yellow in the sun. This is just one of a number of patches of heath in the shadow of the downs and for one insect the most important. The air all around is thick – almost oppressive – with the high-pitched chirruping of the field cricket.

By 1988 it was believed that just 100 of these insects remained in Britain, and they were on this one small area of heathland. The decline had been caused by the fragmentation and disappearance of light chalky or sandy heaths with the short, grazed grass preferred by the field crickets. Today, through breeding and translocation programmes, this colony is providing crickets for reintroductions at suitable habitats elsewhere in Sussex and Surrey. Looking closely at the ground, among the uncurling ferns and low, cropped heather, I find the round entrances to the crickets' burrows in the sandy soil.

The pioneering nature writer Gilbert White described the field cricket in one of his letters of 1779, remarking on its shy and retiring nature. Sure enough, finding one proves difficult. As I home in carefully on the source of one chirrup, the cricket senses the vibrations of my approaching footsteps and scurries down into its burrow. Then I find one, a male, sitting still, sunbathing in the grass. It is about 20mm long and black, with a large, round head. The small forewings – the field cricket has only vestigial hind wings and cannot fly – have a golden-brown band at their base. The wings and abdomen are intricately patterned, resembling tiny beaten bronze panels. The male insect raises and rubs these wings on warm, early summer evenings, to produce its soothing love song. I leave the crickets to their trilling., thinking of Gilbert White's description: 'Thus the shrilling of the field-cricket, though sharp and stridulous, yet marvellously delights some hearers, filling their minds with a train of summer ideas of every thing that is rural, verdurous, and joyous."

John Harris says children with special educational needs will lose out in a rush to reform. Far from it – they'll get a better deal

John Harris writes of the fight he had to simply get the basic support for his autistic child (Special needs kids deserve better than a rush to reform, 21 May). His experience is a story I have heard over and over again. It is precisely this problem that the coalition government is trying to fix.

John says: "It quickly became clear that NHS speech therapy was effectively nonexistent, no one mentioned my son's obvious problems with motor skills, and too often we were effectively told to go away, depend on threadbare arrangements and wait till he was eligible for school." I have heard from thousands of parents like John, who have battled to get their children's needs recognised. Parents go through repeated assessments; and all too often, even when their child's need is accepted, there are more delays as different parts of the system squabble about who should be paying for what. And when a child gets to 16 it can feel like standing on the edge of a cliff, as all the legal rights and support disappear.

I also know the system doesn't work well enough for children with less severe needs either, such as those with unrecognised language difficulties whose frustration in trying to communicate shows up as angry, even criminal, behaviour. For each child with an issue not picked up, there is one mislabelled as "special educational needs" (SEN) who is actually falling behind for another reason, perhaps because they're caring for a relative or being bullied at school.

But John's claim that the purpose of our reforms was to deliver some arbitrary reduction in the numbers on the SEN register is just scaremongering. These reforms are about making sure every child, whatever their needs, gets the right type of help early.

Neither is it true that the government's approach is "frantic" or that we are rushing into reform. We set out our plans in a green paper in March last year. Since then we have consulted carefully with parents. John says he's spoken to charities and pressure groups who reported "mounting concerns", but the detailed consultation on our plans has shown broad backing from across the SEN sector. We are now testing our plans in 20 areas, before parliament debates the legislation next year. These are the biggest reforms to SEN for 30 years and we are taking the time to get them right and to listen carefully to parents.

At the heart of our reforms is the proposal to make the current statementing process simpler and stronger – so families like John's get a much better deal from the system. John says "there are clear signs that [the new plans] will not be as dependable as what they will replace". Far from it, the new education, health and care plans will keep all the existing legal protections, but will bring health and social care needs into a single assessment process. This will be backed by a new legal requirement for councils and health services to plan services together. And that cliff edge will disappear as we extend rights for young people in education or training up to 25.

As for personal budgets, there are many parents who do want to have greater choice and control over their child's specialist support package, but no parent will be forced down this route.

Finally, I share John's frustration about the lack of early intervention. That's why we'll be drawing up a clearer definition of SEN, so schools ask why children are falling behind, and put in place the right support. Children and young people with special educational needs or disabilities deserve a much better deal. We owe it to families to get it right.

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News of the biggest monthly drop in retail sales for more than two years indicates that the slowdown has spread along the high street

In case this week's IMF report wasn't starkly depressing enough, try this from the boss of Marks & Spencer: "The UK looks completely different than it did 18 months ago." By that, Marc Bolland is not referring to some halcyon boom, but the rather tepid economy recovery engineered by Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown – which has been replaced by stagnation at best and double-dip recession at worst. Nor was M&S alone in this week's signals of distress. Just a fortnight ago, the chief executive of Sainsbury's complained: "People are not confident that things are going to get better." And this week, Tesco slashed bonuses for 5,000 staff and for executives, following the most miserable Christmas in years.

Woes for a big-name business do not automatically equal misery for an entire industry or economy. Other retailers are faring better, as Burberry's announcement this week of a 31% rise in sales shows. But the fashion label relies on international trade as much as domestic business. And as Wednesday's news of the biggest monthly drop in retail sales for more than two years indicates, this slowdown has spread along the high street.

Rather than rehash economic arguments, let us instead draw two political points from the becalmed state of the high street – both of which should worry the coalition. The first is obviously that whatever Downing Street hopes will grab the public imagination – kicking back against votes for prisoners, say – it is now clear that voters are worried both about the wider economy and their own prospects. That is backed up by the monthly index of consumer confidence which, as the publisher GfK says, indicated that "consumer confidence is in the doldrums" – and has been for nearly a year. Whatever hopes the most optimistic minister might hold for the possibility of an upturn in the GDP figures, British voters are deeply pessimistic. Similarly, if any bright spark in the Treasury thinks that the last budget flopped because of poor presentation, they've got another think coming. These gauges of retail sales and consumer confidence make glum reading for the government.

Nor are consumers the only ones to have broken faith with the coalition. It was notable that Justin King blamed the poor outlook for Sainsbury's on the government's austerity programme. Mr Bolland stopped just short of doing the same. These are the first serious fissures in the relationship between business and this government – and they should worry David Cameron. The Queen's speech was not greeted by a single big business lobby with a wholesale commendation – surely the first time that's happened with any major coalition policy announcement. Out there on Britain's high streets and the business parks, the government is no longer getting the benefit of the doubt.

Most Apple users have at some time come face to face with the shaven-headed Chingford boy talking in wonderment about the revolutionary nature of his latest creation

Most Apple users have at some time come face to face with Jonathan Ive, the shaven-headed Chingford boy, talking in wonderment about the revolutionary nature of his latest creation. They have also learned to discount some of the more wacky hyperbole of Apple-speak. The new iPad may be the cutest pane of glass yet, but is it really going to change how we see and do "just about everything"? Judging by results alone – the iPhone, iPod and iPad – the former student from Newcastle Poly who became Apple's chief designer amply deserves the knighthood he was given yesterday. It is tempting to turn the success of a Brit abroad into a morality tale of missed opportunity at home – but it should be resisted. If Britain lost a huge design talent, so too, very nearly, did Apple. Ive was practically on the plane home before Steve Jobs breezed into the basement office where he was languishing, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Prime minister's question time, elder statesmen sometimes lament, has been terminally damaged by television cameras

Prime minister's question time, elder statesmen sometimes lament, has been terminally damaged by television cameras. Lord David Steel, who made the observation again after Wednesday's bout of red-faced name-calling, may really have meant that technology brings a dangerously full version of the exchanges into the public domain (Mr Cameron cannot be the first national leader to dismiss a shadow chancellor as an idiot, merely the first to have been seen on live television doing it). Whatever its superficial frustrations, however, the weekly exchange is still the place where politicians can show voters what they are about. When the global polyphony of real and potential catastrophes ripples wider and wider, now embracing Iran as well as Afghanistan, the Arab world as well as Athens, Berlin, Brussels and London, and yet the most memorable political event at Westminster is a personal insult, it's not surprising that voters are more fed up than fired up: in our poll this week, only 53% said they were certain to vote.

This is not how David Cameron meant it to be. In opposition he recognised that it wasn't just his party that was unpopular, it was politics as a whole. He understood that from the time of Margaret Thatcher, civil society – universities, town halls, trade unions and churches – had been hollowed out. The public space had been desiccated. Perhaps his mistake was to be too prescriptive about the answer. He is still struggling to explain that his "big society" is a reimagining of voluntarism rather than the fulfilment of an ideological ambition to shrink the state. An earlier Tory prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who also led his party at a time of social and economic turmoil, set out not to write a programme of reform that addressed the daily anxieties of voters or Tory fears of revolution. Instead he tried to create a sense of national community. Not many of his audience would have been familiar with the Baldwinian essentials of Englishness – the corncrake on a dewy morning, or the sound of the scythe against the whetstone – but enough wished that they had to shore up the Conservative vote without a policy shot being fired.

The Dagenham MP John Cruddas, now commissioned by Ed Miliband (in another apparent rapprochement with his brother) to lead Labour's policy review, also recognises the power of emotion in political identity. Speaking at the University of East Anglia earlier this month, he described a good society that is none the worse because it would have been familiar to his party's 19th-century grandfathers, William Morris and John Ruskin. He says he is interested in "the search for political sentiment, voice and language; of general definition within a national story". Plainly this is not a complete agenda, and definition always carries the risk of exclusion. But what is clearly missing from politics now is evidence that its practitioners are not, contrary to popular myth, a self-serving class apart but ordinary people who share the emotions and instincts of the rest of the country. Ed Miliband is already beginning to make speeches that suggest he has a feel for this kind of conversation. He also, potentially, has the support of the man who is currently the most effective communicator of ideas in English. Professor Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy, discussing the moral limits of markets, should be the bedside companion of every Miliband aide. Here, in the carefully accumulated evidence of the moral impact of markets that recognise no boundary, lies the intellectual underpinning for a rebalancing of Labour's traditional twin concerns with economics and ethics. At its heart is the mission to reinvigorate the kind of local institution that supports the ability of ordinary people to live well: the libraries and amateur orchestras, the clubs and networks – the "common life", free of transactional values, on which genuine democracy depends. No progressive would argue with the need for a new ordering of the relations between state, markets and the citizen. The difficulty is talking about it in a way that people want to hear.

I agree with Marina Hyde (Love London 2012, if only for the madness and the mirth, 19 May), but we don't need to wait until the opening of the Games to start laughing at ourselves. The farce that is the torch relay, with the worship of "The Flame" elevated to a new religion, the deity being adored at every stage from its arrival in the country on its own jet to the almost mass hysteria of the TV coverage of its journey around the country, could have been written by Sacha Baron Cohen or the Monty Python team. I particularly like the idea that there are actually several reserve flames in case the main one goes out. It would be hilarious were it not for the cost of the exercise to taxpayers.
Dr John Davies
Kirkby in Cleveland, North Yorkshire

• The container of the Olympic flame flown into the UK is actually a Davy lamp, invented by Sir Humphry Davy 200 years ago to prevent explosions in coalmines. Why was the use of this great British invention not more applauded?
Dr RG Richer
Bovey Tracey, Devon

I agree with George Monbiot (My fight may be hopeless, but it is as necessary as ever, 22 May) that we cannot deny genocide if we care about justice and humanity, otherwise we will find ourselves in a "very dark place".

As a junior UN official during the Bosnian war I was frustrated at the lack of action to prevent the Srebrenica massacre, given internal reports in the lead-up about the impaling of pregnant women, forced displacement and executions. While we supported airlifts and co-ordinated aid from 24 countries, I wondered whether these countries would act more decisively to halt further atrocities.

In the wake of Srebrenica and Rwanda, the same countries committed to the "responsibility to protect" populations against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity at the UN 2005 world summit. Yet in Syria recent blasts near UN observers add to the toll of more than 12,000 deaths since March 2011, and these states have certainly not exhausted all the means of prevention embraced at that summit.

As a human rights observer in the occupied Palestinian territories I witnessed the impact of a lack of rule of law in the face of violence carried out by extremist settlers confident of their impunity, and the ensuing sense of abandonment felt by Bedouin and herders in the South Hebron hills. They wonder too, and echo the Syrians' dismay: "We now know that help isn't coming" (Ourselves alone: Syrian rebels cling to bullets and hope, 22 May).

In Bosnia, Palestine and Syria, nations haven't been willing to take adequate measures to protect civilians, and international law, binding nations to support humanity, is being tossed aside. We can't let complacency creep in alongside dangerous academic interpretations of international law and legal rulings. That would make for a very dark place indeed.
Jane Backhurst
Human rights observer, Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme for Palestine and Israel, and Isis Europe

• I have long admired George Monbiot for his courageous willingness to break ranks from those with whom he might be expected to identify, and I heartily applaud his latest salvo against those on the liberal-left who indefensibly remain in denial over the genocidal nature of attacks on Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, as seen at Srebrenica in 1995. Monbiot perhaps underestimates how important it is that journalists like him speak out unflinchingly from a left perspective, just as the Observer's Nick Cohen did in a more polemical vein in his book, What's Left? How Liberals Lost their Way, in 2007.

Many on the left are ever ready to attack the statutorily impartial broadcasters for media bias of one kind or another, so it's worth reminding people of the often outstanding coverage of the 1990s Balkan wars by ITN, C4 News and the BBC, where Martin Bell spoke out eloquently in favour of a "journalism of engagement" in his attempts to alert the world to what was really going on.

At that time the left was never entirely of one mind, and not everyone should be painted in the same damning colours of denial and cover-up, for it should be remembered that there were always some lonely, independent-minded voices on the left speaking out, such as Michael Foot, who plunged his pension savings into a campaigning film about the conflict, which he got shown on the BBC.
Giles Oakley
London

I thought your comments on Staines rather mean-spirited (In praise of... Staines, 22 May). It is very much a riverside town and owes its existence to a crossing of the Thames dating back to Roman times. Furthermore, while the M25 is not distant, if you are in the town looking for the M3 or M4 then you are lost, as they are miles away. As a resident I am ambivalent about the name change and will probably ignore the suffix, as do most similarly named nearby towns such as Sunbury, Walton, Kingston and Richmond. However, one thing that will never change is that Staines is very much in, and will always remain in, Middlesex.
Michael Crosby
Staines-upon-Thames, Middlesex

• Re the anniversary of the first sandwich (Letters, 16 May), readers may be interested to know that among the art works displayed at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry is Johan Zoffany's The Porter and the Hare – probably the first depiction of the sandwich in art (on loan to the Zoffany exhibition at the Royal Academy until 10 June).
Gillian Irving
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

• Hurrah for Jonathan Jones (A message to Damien Hirst: stop now, you have become a disgrace to your generation, 23 May) for having the guts to confirm what the proles have been thinking for quite a long time.
David Walker
Ipswich

• If, as you report (Head's 'communist' jibe at Clegg, 23 May), the head of an Oxford public school is arguing Nick Clegg is a communist in respect of some mild comments on social mobility, this must mean David Cameron is a fellow traveller. That may explain a few things.
Keith Flett
London

• Adrian Beecroft accuses my MP, Vince Cable, of being a socialist (Report, 23 May). I have met socialists: believe me, Vince Cable is no socialist!
Eva Tutchell
Former parliamentary candidate, Twickenham constituency Labour party

• When Hadley says (G2, 22 May) men employ "a much narrower palate" sartorially speaking, is she being tongue in chic?
EM Jones
York

The "muted" response of US academic experts to the global financial crisis has been noted, as has its partial nature. (Heist – Part 2, G2, 22 May). More remarkable, perhaps, has been the extraordinarily limited response to the crisis of the mainstream economics profession as a whole. The background to this lies in the extent to which so-called "neoclassical" economics has succeeded in purging the subject of the so-called "institutional" factors that embrace the political, economic and social organisations primarily responsible for the creation and management of the crisis in the first place.

And so long as prevailing economic theory is dominated by models abstracted from such "exogenous" factors, it is unsurprising that its practitioners have so little to say about the real world. I found this illuminated, if parochially, by the University of Glasgow finding, some decades ago, that the name of Adam Smith's "department of political economy" was unfortunate, being a possible deterrent to the recruitment of students from countries such as Saudi Arabia. The "political" element in the economics of its founding father was therefore removed, with the Adam Smith Building now housing the more respectable "department of economics".
Brian Pollitt
Honorary senior research fellow, department of economics, University of Glasgow

• Cometh the hour cometh the man … Thank the Lord for Alexis Tsipras challenging the crazy economic orthodoxy that has gripped our pedestrian and unimaginative coalition government here in the UK, and the leaders of much of mainland Europe, since 2010. Even the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, is warning George Osborne that he needs a Plan B (Report, 23 May). Along with Monsieur Hollande in France and, hopefully, a re-elected Barack Obama, there is some hope for the unemployed people of Europe, particularly those aged between 16 and 24. Just imagine if the likes of Cameron, Osborne et al had been in power in the years after 1945. There would have been no commitment to reconstruction, full employment, social welfare, and no preparedness to borrow American money to finance it. Capitalism needs managing and directing by progressive governments, otherwise it tramples people into the ground. Greece is fortunate to have a party leader who is not prepared to allow this to happen to his fellow countrymen and -women without a fight.
Sean McGrath
London

• As ever, Seumas Milne gets to the heart of it (In or out of the eurozone, we must ditch this failed model, 23 May), focusing on the crucial point that mainstream politicians seem so blithely to forget: "the eurozone's implosion [is] the product of the wider crisis of neoliberal capitalism that first erupted in the banking system five years ago and has since wreaked havoc on public finances, jobs, services and living standards throughout the western world". John McDonnell (our Alexis Tsipras?) is calling on his blog for signatories to a statement on the radical alternative to austerity. In defence of us, the people of Europe, sign up!
John Airs
Liverpool

• Many of us are looking round for reassurance and leadership during the continuing financial turbulence, but Christine Lagarde's visit hasn't helped. The suggestion that lowering interest rates could help our financial situation betrays ignorance of Japan's long-running economic difficulties, and the continued determination of British banks to play hardball with commercial and domestic customers while sitting on the reserves with which they have been provided.
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon

• Your image of the BAE workers at the rollout of a section of HMS Queen Elizabeth showed highly skilled people watching a billion-pound (of taxpayers' money) white elephant for which there is no useful future or export market (Carrier build on course, 15 May). Like most of the carrier sections, it is probably to be towed to Rosyth by Dutch tugs. For the foreseeable future at Portsmouth and other naval bases, thanks to the PFI, it will be handled by Dutch-designed tugs on Polish-built hulls for which there is a huge export market, costing the taxpayer multimillions. We are in a double-dip recession not least because successive governments have wilfully sent taxpayers' capital monies (and thousands of skilled jobs) abroad for spurious accounting reasons.
Robert Straughton
Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria

• Pat McFadden writes "Sending out signals that we don't want the highest-value workers to come here is a huge mistake" (Creating the future, 21 May). Yes, but is it not also a huge mistake to send out signals to business such as "No need to pay taxes to educate British youth – there are other countries fool enough to pay for decent education, you can pick your talent from them"?

Is the purpose of our government to work for the interests of the British people as a whole, or for the interests of global companies with a base in Britain? Sections of the right seem to have shifted to the latter, and the left, out of fear of accusations of racism, are not challenging it. Industry complains that British people have no sense of work discipline, but what has it done to create it? That discipline went hand in hand with job security and long-term loyalty. No wonder people have lost confidence.
Matthew Huntbach
London

• Can someone explain to me how "making it easier to dismiss workers" is "a way of boosting employment" (Too chillaxed? No, I'm driven like Thatcher, says Cameron, 21 May)? What perverse logic makes Cameron believe this? Surely if you sack someone you create unemployment? Does he conversely think that making it easier to take people on will create unemployment?
Michael Miller
Sheffield

European Union GDP | Revolvers and pistols | Orange prize sponsorship | Alyas Karmani

• A front-page story headlined $1,000,000,000,000 (17 May) said that the Centre for Economic and Business Research had estimated that a disorderly collapse of the euro would result in a 5% drop in eurozone GDP, amounting to $1tn loss. The figure of $1tn was a rough estimate of 5% of GDP for the whole of the EU, not just the eurozone.

• One of the photographs used to illustrate a feature about India's growing gun culture showed a woman pulling back the slide of a handgun. The caption incorrectly described the weapon as a revolver. It was a semi-automatic pistol, without a revolving chamber (Indian women take up arms against threat of violence, 22 May, page 22).

• Orange's backing of a literary award for women's fiction was described in an article as "the longest continuous arts sponsorship in the UK". The Orange prize website makes this claim, but the National Student Drama Festival points out that it can easily beat that 17-year record. The festival has been sponsored by the Sunday Times since it was launched in 1956 – one of the longest continuous arts sponsorships in the world (The future isn't Orange: literary prize sponsor pulls out, 23 May, page 4).

• George Galloway factor opens a door for Respect hopefuls in Bradford was amended because it said the Respect candidate in Little Horton, Alyas Karmani, was working on a policy paper about sexual violence for the children's commissioner. That conflated two things. He gave evidence to an inquiry by the children's commissioner's office into child sexual exploitation by gangs and has written papers about sexual violence, though not for the children's commissioner.

• Has Rebekah Brooks killed off the Peter Pan collar? was corrected because the original referred to men employing a much narrower colour palate in their clothing than women. That should have been colour palette.

Robert MacGibbon (Letters, 21 May) is quite right to point out the paucity of black faces at Lord's during the England v West Indies Test match. We were in the Edrich Stand last Thursday behind a small group of women supporting the West Indies. When Chanderpaul got his 50, a calypso singer came into the stands and occupied some vacant seats while he entertained the crowd. It took less than two minutes for the stewards to throw him out because his ticket wasn't for our stand. As one Caribbean woman said: "This is why the West Indies fans don't come to Lord's."
Keith Fenton Leeds, Tim Matthews Luton

• Yes, it's terrible that the West Indian supporters don't go to the Tests any more, but we shouldn't play dumb. As I recall there was a ban put in place on the tin cans, bottles, drums and trumpets that used to provide the relentless carnival soundtrack – picked up in the iconic BBC cricket theme – to the runups of Roberts, Holding, Marshall, Ambrose and co, and the disdainful cuts, hooks and drives of Lloyd, Greenidge and Richards. I can't remember the excuse for the ban but it had its, presumably, desired effect – the black support went silent and then they went home. It is a great shame that this has been allowed to pass without comment.
Stephen Dillane
Forest Row, East Sussex

• I was also at Lord's last Friday. I doubt if any of the West Indians I know could have afforded the £65 I paid for my ticket. But the social apartheid was worse. Few women, no families. I would guess from the conversations and vast champagne consumption that those around me were from the same social groups as the cabinet.
Mark Gooding
London

• Robert MacGibbon asks: "Where has the support of the London West Indies diaspora gone and why has its cricket side lost such support?" Obviously, they've all passed the Tebbit test!
David Geall
London

Apethorpe, Northamptonshire: Female hairy-footed flower bees look like black bumblebees wearing orange trousers. They are even busier bees than bumblebees

The sun has reappeared, lifting the recent rain from the ground. The prospering wheat is knee-high, deep green and dense. Along the field margin trundles a pill woodlouse; they desiccate easily so only emerge in direct sunshine on the most humid days. Among the wheat, variously sized brown and ginger solitary bees sit on the leaves and veer drunkenly on to the soil. I wonder if they have been poisoned by pesticides. A disused track sheltered between hedges provides a refuge from agricultural chemicals. Here there are patches of blue speedwell and ground ivy, and sprays of cow parsley. On a cow parsley flower head is a small but wonderful find, an umbellifer longhorn beetle. This scarce animal is dark ash-grey with a thin body, giant antennae, oversized head and orange forelegs.

In the cow pasture on the other side of the fence, a movement in the grass catches my attention. The sharp, neat features of a wheatear, black eye-patch and acute bill, peek out. He hops into the open to watch me, showing off his immaculately defined grey mantle, black wings and pastel-peach breast. Although common in north and west Britain, the wheatear is an unusual spectacle in Northamptonshire.

The yellow limestone garden walls in Apethorpe glow in the sunshine. They are alive with hairy-footed flower bees. The females look like black bumblebees wearing orange trousers. They are even busier bees than bumblebees, flitting speedily from flower to flower and then back to their burrows in the soft mortar. Each female provisions a series of cells with nectar, pollen and a precious egg. Predictably, a quick scan of the stonework also reveals a similar-sized but much less busy bee. Flatter, with a pointed abdomen fringed with tufts of white hair, this is the white-spotted cuckoo-bee (Melecta albifrons). She is a parasite of the flower bees, waiting for them to leave their homes unguarded then stealing in to lay her own egg. Her grub then supplants the flower bee's grub to exploit its foraging efforts.

His evisceration of the Obama government's alliance with the banks opens a new front in the war on Wall Street

He's clever, he's funny, he doesn't pull his punches, and he makes cliffhangers out of details like the $4bn in bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch after the failing bank was sold at the height of the 2008 crisis. But best of all he is furious, and reminds us why we should be too. The Inside Job director and former academic, who made a fortune from computer software, began his speech at last year's Oscars by saying it was wrong that no bankers had gone to jail for the frauds that led to the crash. They still haven't. So Charles Ferguson has written a book which both fills in the background to his film and tells us what happened next. His argument, that corporate America bought politics, is not new. But his evisceration of the Obama government's alliance with the banks opens a new front in the war on Wall Street. And his account of big finance's sway over academia is horrifying. If only righteous fury were always this enjoyable.

During the later Blair years, the prime minister's own aides would sometimes raise an eyebrow and mutter the word 'respect'

During the later Blair years, the prime minister's own aides would sometimes raise an eyebrow and mutter the word "respect". Their boss's swansong agenda pledged to put the respectable majority in charge. His henchmen revealed weary irony because, after a decade of hyperactive legislating, it was implausible to hope that central diktats could really do away with all the dumped fridges and drunkenness.

The coalition initially made a point of saying that draconian activism would not deliver. But as it slides in the polls, the old itch to do something about everything is flaring up anew. The home secretary's heavily trailed white paper on antisocial behaviour yesterday took us back to the time of Tony. There was spin about new fines which turned out to be on the statute book already, talk of "streamlining" and "joining up", plus a more substantive offering of a crackdown through the law.

Like her New Labour predecessors, Theresa May is right to say that bullying and unruliness that are tricky to tackle through the criminal law are nonetheless a major cause of misery on many streets. This is not always obvious from the vantage point of the leafier communities where judges and mandarins reside. The difficulty is not recognising a genuine problem, but posturing solutions that do more harm than good. New Labour's asbos were punitive all right, often a trapdoor to prison, but that did not make them effective. They fell out of fashion as the proportion of the orders being breached rose from about half to 70%-plus. Thus – as yesterday's document stated – their use has more than halved since 2005.

Rather than recognise this failure, Mrs May seeks to reinvent it in purer form. Specifically, her "crime prevention injunction" would move much of the arsenal of punishment out of the criminal and into civil courts, where penalties can be meted out on the basis of probabilities rather than proof. Asbos were always a legal hybrid, and New Labour had originally tried a similar trick. But it fell foul of the law lords, who ruled that the liberty-sapping potential of an asbo demanded the full protections of criminal justice. The new wheeze involves working round this judgment by legislating so that the whole process – not just the issuing of injunctions, but also determination of whether they have been breached – becomes a purely civil matter. Every sort of punishment including imprisonment could then be allowed without any conviction having to be secured.

It is frightening stuff, but it won't be happening soon. It was not in this month's crime and courts bill, and will now be examined as draft legislation before enactment is even considered. Lib Dems and Ken Clarke's justice department both fret about bulging prisons, and may have forced the delay. That is grounds for relief at least, if not for respect.

The "next steps" document on special needs education, following the Queen's speech, drives a coach and horses through the aspiration to inclusion (Special needs kids deserve better than a rush to reform, 21 May). Parents have the right to choose a mainstream school unless it is "unsuitable to the child's ability or SEN" – that is, they have a right just until some school or local authority tells them they don't. The right to mainstream is also said not to apply where it would be "incompatible" with the education of the other children.

The survival of this nasty and discriminatory proviso utterly contradicts the document's new and welcome aim – mentioned 71 times in as many pages – of tackling the dismal record on employment as disabled children grow up. Children who are "incompatible" with their peers will become adults who are "incompatible" with employment of any kind. The government also finds itself contravening article 24 of the new United Nations charter on the rights of disabled persons.
Richard Rieser and Chris Goodey
London

Current demands for slashing red tape to increase startups and ease employment are familiar remedies for recessions (No fault dismissal proposals set to be shelved, 22 May). But we know they are wrong. Birch's 1970s study showing relative increases in small firm employment was soon discredited when it became clear he was using data from firms seeking investment. Subsequent work has shown that small firms, in the UK at least, employ fewer (we have micro companies) and worse (the happy family firm is an ideal, not an empirical reality).

What these demands do show is a lack of direction and political leadership. Small firms with more regulated workforces (those at the prosperous core of the eurozone) benefit from workers who invest in their skills and stay around when the economy picks up. If we ever do get out of this recession, the number one problem for small firms will not be regulation but a lack of skills in the labour force. We'll need them to keep at the better-paying end of the value chain.

German (and Swedish and Dutch) industrial relations are not different because they have different cultures but because they collectively made different decisions. As they emerged from the crises that defined their 20th century, they chose consensus and collaboration, proportional representation and social equality. To achieve this they regulated their small firm sector and showed it was worth doing so. By not regulating small firms for basic employment standards, we are regulating for poor quality, low skills and a lack of competitiveness that will keep the rest of the economy dependent on the City. Is that familiar enough?
Dr Charles Dannreuther
University of Leeds

• Vince Cable is right to brush aside the ill-argued proposals of the Beecroft report along with those from Liam Fox MP, who has claimed, counterfactually, (Financial Times, 15 May) that Germany has "a more deregulated jobs market" than the UK. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has a dataset on "How Labour markets perform" (2011). From this, we compared the UK's "performance" with three similar economies – Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. Among our findings: the UK has a much lower level of employment protection, and is next to bottom of the OECD "league table" (ie the least protected); unemployment was higher than the others; UK taxes on labour are much less; UK employees worked far longer average hours; UK unemployment benefits, compared to previous earnings, are much lower than the others, and only half of the OECD average.

From the OECD data, we conclude that there is no evidence to support the thesis that excessive employment protection is damaging the UK's below-par economic performance. The problem with our economy is the lack of aggregate demand, not workers' rights.
Ann Pettifor and Jeremy Smith
Policy Research in Macroeconomics

• The Beecroft report ducks the main issue: workers' pay. If employers knew they could choose not to pay their employees when things got sticky, the jobs market would open up. Sometimes an entrepreneur will have to say "sorry chaps, bit tight this month" and not have to deal with a load of old fuss. Owners cannot always pay themselves what they like, so it puts them all in the same boat, really. If we can just change this something-for-nothing culture, we'd have this recession licked in minutes.
Howard Pilott
Lewes, East Sussex

• That anyone today should even conceive of the idea that an employer could dismiss a worker "at will" should be enough to provoke a revolution. The pioneer Scottish trade union leader Robert Smillie expressed it perfectly: "The bosses have invested their money in industry. The workers have invested their lives in it."
Frank Jackson
Political education officer, Harlow Labour party

• Can we expect the coalition to propose a "fire-at-will" policy for underperforming members of parliament whose lack of productivity fails to justify further expenditure from the public purse; perhaps piloting the idea in the Lords as a first step towards reform? Shouldn't want to scare the wits out of them, though.
Stephen Harries
Crowhurst, East Sussex

Prior to becoming secretary general of the Arts Council, Sir Roy Shaw led the Adult Education Department at the University of Keele (Simon Hoggart's week, 19 May). In 1969, Prof Shaw (as he was then) promulgated to a class of student health visitors (of which I was one) lessons from The Uses of Literacy – Richard Hoggart's great exposition of the betrayal of the intentions of the 1870 Education Act, and subsequent devaluation of the intellectual capacity of working-class readers of the popular press.

Shaw's teaching on Hoggart's analysis of the ease with which the media may influence people's attitudes left an indelible impression on someone who had left school after O-levels and simply pursued what was then nurse "training". It was probably this, with other experiences on that remarkable course, that convinced me of the need to educate nurses in higher education settings. I have often wondered during the recent phone-hacking debacle why Hoggart's seminal work has not been revisited.
Jane Robinson
Emeritus professor of nursing, University of Nottingham

• At the Arts Council in the 1970s I worked with both Roy Shaw and Richard Hoggart. Though authoritarian and often prickly, both men articulated and fought for crucially important cultural values in the face of creeping neoliberalism. Hoggart's Pilkington report, published 50 years ago, remains a vital testament to the importance of the public service ethic in broadcasting. From the perspective of 2012, both Hoggart and Shaw can be seen as proverbial moral giants when compared with current ministerial pygmies like J Hunt and E Vaizey.
Robert Hutchison
Winchester, Hampshire

I am obliged to be in receipt of a facsimile of the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible. I note from the gold letters on the spine that it is presented to us by the secretary of state for education (Tory donors fund Gove's mission to send Bible to schools, 16 May). In his charming accompanying letter Mr Gove writes that he believes it is important that all pupils "should appreciate this icon". Speaking as an RE teacher, I have to say that this particular religious artefact is not an icon but a Bible. Icons usually require even more gold leaf. Perhaps an icon of the donor is to follow: should I clear a space on the school hall wall?
Carolyn Roberts
Head, Durham Johnston school

• Graham Smith, of the pressure group Republic, describes the meeting at Windsor Castle of the world's "crowned heads" as a catastrophic error of judgment by the Queen because of the involvement of some of the most repressive regimes in the world (Report, 19 May). But what of the inclusion of the "kings" of two republics – Greece and Romania – and of the crown prince of the non-existent country of Yugoslavia. Is the Queen hoping these countries will restore their monarchs?
Peter Slade
Guildford

• I'm surprised that a newspaper which has led the way in the verbatim reporting of obscenities should now balk at the word "tit" (Tabloid tidbits, 12 May). The ever increasing influx of Americanisms threatens our language and exerts a subtle cultural censorship on us. I'm old enough to remember the magazine Titbits without a snigger (not a snicker).
Ian Goodall
Anarita, Cyprus

• "Is football as we knew it dead?" asks John Sinnott (Letters, May 21). Like many people he judges the health of the sport by the professional game. Should he wish to come to one of our training sessions and witness our under-sevens in action he might change his view.
Peter Thornton
Vice-chair, Rossendale United Juniors FC

• Re Monica Hemming's letter on lettuce and sugar sandwiches (21 May), we had them too – with the addition of a sprinkle of malt vinegar. I still eat them, but now the vinegar is balsamic.
Heather Walker
Papplewick, Nottinghamshire

I was surprised to see the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) quoted in a comment piece, (Minimum alcohol pricing? Blame those vomiting girls, 16 May), as noting "no discernible relationship between (alcohol) affordability and harm". This statement, taken in isolation from the report Trends in the affordability of alcohol in Europe, merely highlights that affordability is not the sole operating factor in cross-country comparisons of alcohol harm which in no way contradicts the finding that affordability is a strong factor within countries.

It is no coincidence that, as drink has become cheaper in the UK (alcohol was 44% more affordable in 2010 than it was in 1980), hospital admissions, liver mortality rates and alcohol-related crimes have rocketed. This all comes at a cost – to individuals, families and communities, that, as a nation, we can't afford to ignore.

There is a wealth of evidence to support alcohol price increases as an effective policy to reduce health and social problems: outcomes include reductions in liver deaths, suicides, hospital admissions, car accidents, youth fatalities, homicides, rapes, robberies, assaults, car theft, domestic violence and child abuse. The relationship between alcohol affordability and harmful consumption is indisputable. The coalition should be applauded for recognising this and taking action to tackle the problem of cheap drink through minimum unit pricing.
Katherine Brown
Director of policy, Institute of Alcohol Studies

• This talk of minimum unit price for alcohol will only put more money into the pockets of manufacturers. Might I suggest a sliding scale, seeing as pubs are losing out to supermarkets and are closing at an alarming rate. 

1 Reduce the tax on draught beer (limited to 4.5%), any higher strength, tax to remain the same. 2 Poured drinks: tax to be the same. 3 Sealed drinks, ie those sold in supermarkets or shops: increase the tax according to alcohol content. 4 Alcoholic drinks not to be sold as a loss leader. 5 Tins and plastic bottles (with soft drinks and high sugar): an added tax to pay for clearing litter.
Roy Gill
Ulverston, Cumbria

The retirement last week of the chief medical adviser for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) leaves its Employment Medical Advisory Service (EMAS) close to collapse. Twenty years ago EMAS was an internationally respected source of occupational health expertise employing 60 occupational health doctors and 62 nurses. It is now down to 2.2 doctors, only one of whom is full-time. Successive years of cuts and "reviews" (three in the past five years) have effectively destroyed by stealth an organisation committed to the wellbeing of the nation's workforce.

Well over a million people are currently suffering from ill health caused by or made worse by their work – all relying on medical help from an ever-stretched NHS, the vast majority suffering from preventable illness. If the government truly believes prevention is better than cure it must reverse the cuts to HSE and rebuild a service that can help protect the UK workforce.
Simon Hester
Branch chair, Prospect HSE branch

Wenlock Edge: Under cover of darkness and without reason the black pine unleashed a violence like a betrayal

It happened at night. Some people tucked up in bed at the time said it sounded like wheelie bins dragged across the ground, or thunder. Most heard nothing, but in the morning a pine bough lay on the church green. We went to investigate. Some edged from shops in a quiet moment, skirting like wrestlers reluctant to enter the ring; some wore an expression of official looking-into-this-ness; others walked their curiosity on a short leash. For all its ordinariness – a branch fallen off a tree – it was a shock. The break was livid and fleshy, a poking jagged stump 50 feet high. The bough, weighing several tons, had twisted in midair, scored deep lines down the trunk and crashed into the circular metal bench that surrounded it. "Suppose someone's still underneath?"

At one end was a dark mass of pine needles with old cones and new starfish-like creatures which would become new cones. These were still fixed to a 20-foot-long, torso-thick branch with serpentine cream-and-brown diamond-patterned bark. Beyond the amputated end was a rent that spilled its timber guts out on to the lawn and smelled of the warm resinous fragrance of summer forests. In the absence of any plausible reason, theories of rain-weight and years of stress were discussed. After a century or more of just being there, that tree had done something spectacularly dangerous. Some predicted its end because it had proved it couldn't be trusted. Others shrugged off the idea of trees as honorary monuments – casting the odd branch was just natural.

Nyctohylophobia is the fear of dark trees and woods at night. Something changed. The black pine had become a thing to be afraid of. Under cover of darkness and without reason, it had unleashed a violence like a betrayal. Suddenly, in this gardened precinct where even the dead had been tidied up, nature was dangerous again. Swifts raced over rooftops, pigeons clapped their wings, people came and went, but the great bough lay there: random, wrong, weird and scary. Its silence said something to the onlookers, but we couldn't repeat it.

Restricting the disability living allowance (or the personal independence payment) to "those who need it most" must seem to many right now to be entirely reasonable. But this policy accepts that the 500,000 scheduled to be denied help, although not the people who need it "most", will nevertheless be genuinely "in need". Another blow for the offensive claim that "we are all in this together".

Restricting bankers' bonuses to those "who need it most" might help redress the balance, and give Atos a useful damage-limitation opportunity (Paralympics sponsorship: Controversial Atos deal defended by organisers, 22 May). Bankers in line for bonuses could be subjected to the renowned Atos assessment process that disabled people are undergoing, and required to show that, if they were denied their bonus, the degree of hardship they would suffer would be equivalent to the level disabled people have to show to get financial help.

To ensure equity, those who showed such extreme personal hardship would retain the equivalent of the DLA/PIP but be required to donate the rest of their promised bonus to help fund DLA/PIP for the 500,000 scheduled to get nothing.
Dick Allwright
Lancaster

• Oh the irony! I read your article on Atos support for the Paralympics while sitting with my client waiting on an employment and support allowance tribunal and thought of comparable sponsorships: crack houses sponsoring drug rehab, Cosa Nostra running a prisoner resettlement scheme, and, of course, payday loan firms facilitating workshops on budget management. The tribunal? Yet another Atos rejection overturned. I won't tell you how many wins in a row that is, you wouldn't not believe me. This time, not unusual, the client was placed in schedule 3, the higher support group of ESA, acknowledging his high level of need. I won't say what this guy has suffered, you might be having your breakfast.
John Byrne
Oxhey, Hertfordshire

Danish troops in Afghanistan | University guide | Five Star Movement

• An article about an election pledge made by François Hollande to withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year said that other European countries had already begun drawdowns and "the Danes are mostly out of Helmand". In fact Denmark is reducing the number of troops by 100, leaving about 650 in Afghanistan, mostly in Helmand, this year although some have shifted from active combat to a training role. The error was introduced during the editing process (Hollande to offer compromises on Afghan mission, 18 May, page 25).

• Two pieces were wrongly bylined in a guide to applying to university (Best days of your life, 22 May). Open Days: what to remember, what to ask and what to look out for (page 5) and Degree Details (page 6) were written by Lucy Tobin, not Susan Young.

• The University of Bedfordshire was ranked 43rd for English in the newly published Guardian University Guide. It was wrongly promoted to 27th place in an article about departments which had made big improvements since last year's tables (Favourite subjects, 22 May, page 36).

• Parma elects anti-austerity 'comedy' candidate as mayor was amended because it named the party launched by the Italian comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo as the Five Start Movement. It is the Five Star Movement.

The IMF is warning about the long-term damage – to the economy and to the career prospects and life chances of Britons – of continuing with cuts

In September 2010, the IMF beheld the coalition's cuts programme, and saw that it was good. "The UK economy is on the mend," it pronounced in the very first line of its report. With the recovery apparently secure, "credible fiscal tightening is essential". Just a month before George Osborne's spending review, the IMF's economists backed the still-new chancellor to the hilt: "With steadfast fiscal adjustment, forward-looking monetary policy aimed at achieving the inflation target, and … strong financial sector reforms, economic fundamentals should … establish the basis for sustainable recovery." Far from harming growth, the cuts would ensure it. The phrase of that moment, indeed of the whole honeymoon period for the coalition, was "appropriately ambitious".

None of that breezy confidence was in evidence when the IMF presented its latest health check on the UK yesterday. "The economy has been flat," it admitted. "Risks are large and clearly tilted to the downside." And rather than proposing cuts, the economists recommended a battery of "policies to bolster demand". These weren't fail-safe, the Fund admitted, but "these risks need to be weighted against the risks of persistently slow growth and high unemployment". As discreetly as possible, the IMF is here warning about the long-term damage – to the economy and to the career prospects and life chances of Britons – of continuing with cuts.

For any large institution, this would be an extraordinary reversal of position – especially in less than two years. But coming from the IMF, which was one of the main cheerleaders for the wrong-headed austerity programmes followed by Britain and many others, it is just breathtaking – both an admission of colossal misjudgment and a commendable bit of implicit self-correction. It is in this context that yesterday's comments from Fund chief Christine Lagarde should be read. It is an inevitable and unlovely aspect of the Westminster debate that each side will cherry-pick official statements from multilateral organisations, hoping to find some crumbs of comfort for the government here, or a thumbs-up for Ed Balls there. But IMF executives do not routinely fly into the capital of a powerful member state and stand on a podium next to a government minister to pour undiplomatic invective all over their policies. That is even less likely to happen to Mr Osborne, who was one of the first government ministers in the world to support Ms Lagarde's bid for the IMF job – a move that stopped Gordon Brown's campaign for the post dead in its tracks. Nevertheless, the general message of the IMF report is clear: former austerity-supporter now admits austerity isn't working. Given the momentum of British politics (see our poll yesterday), this will be remembered as another black mark for the government, and for the chancellor in particular – justifiably so.

Even on his own key measure – the reduction of Britain's debt overhang – the chancellor's policies are not working. Figures yesterday highlighted the continued underlying weakness of the public finances, and the government has admitted it will have to borrow far more at the end of this term than originally planned. All this pain has come for no gain: the economy is not only in the middle of a double-dip recession, it may well shrink further over this quarter. Indeed, Britain's national income is still 4% below where it was before Lehman Brothers collapsed.

The problem for the government is that it has left itself little political scope to deviate from its budget plans. The IMF suggests a number of ideas to boost growth. The least convincing ones – such as cutting already ultra-low interest rates, for all the good that will do – are the only ones the chancellor might support. Yet, as Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has argued, a less dogmatic and more pragmatic government could borrow for a £30bn public works programme, creating infrastructure and jobs, for an annual cost of £150m a year. Labour should take this idea and run with it.

A pillar of postwar society has been shattered by the legal aid cuts: that's why a strike is now on the cards

Just imagine the home secretary had stood up in front of the Police Federation last week and announced not just 20% in budget cuts but 40%. That's the scale of cuts being wrought on legal aid. Never mind no standing ovation, you'd expect she would not have been left standing at all.

It's hardly surprising, then, that parts of the legal profession are contemplating industrial action. The mood across the bar is palpable anger at real injustice, and there is a desire to take action before there is nothing left to defend. The intention is to ensure all barristers are consulted as soon as possible about the nature and timing of any strike. The form it takes is important, because a total withdrawal of labour is exactly what the government wants – namely, no lawyers. The legal profession may not have engendered much public sympathy over the years, but the important message behind a strike would be about the predicament of the public they serve, not lawyers themselves.

This has been clearly articulated ever since the draconian measures were announced, even if it has been largely dismissed by monotonous mantras from a hidebound government. One of the postwar visionary pillars of a reconstructed and fairer state has been destroyed by the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act.

In February last year I helped the Haldane Society set up a tribunal hearing in the House of Commons. A respected independent panel heard the hard evidence of witnesses who explained how legal aid had saved their lives from devastation. The cases that were heard were not exotic or esoteric claims, but the stuff of everyday life pitted against stronger forces: landlords, employers, local authorities, government departments, violent partners, hospitals and education authorities. The issues are crucial: they relate to disability, benefits claims, discrimination, unfair dismissal, eviction, medical negligence, discrimination, matrimonial disputes, school and college placement, debt, immigration and extradition complexities. This review was not exhaustive: personal injury, criminal injury compensation, prisoner transfer abroad and inquests are yet more. At present some of these are barely covered, if at all, by public funding. From now on, there is an extensive and formidable list of exclusions from legal aid: , importantly for clinical negligence, personal injury, welfare/benefits claims and criminal injury compensation.the act empowers the lord chancellor to remove more categories and allows a newly appointed civil servant, the director of legal aid and casework, to apply a merit and means test to cases. This will have an especially devastating effect on those arrested or in custody, and marks the advent of the telephone gateway, replacing face-to-face consultation with call-centre advisers.

Criminal legal aid has already been severely hit by the threshold of contribution expected from a defendant. Amounts of £6,000-£8,000 are not uncommon, and there are instances of individuals considering pleading guilty simply because it's cheaper. This is particularly disturbing in the wake of the case of Sam Hallam, whose murder conviction was quashed last week after he had spent eight years in prison.

The bill received a drubbing in the Lords in November, with an unprecedented number of defeats. Senior clerics and members of the judiciary have voiced strong opposition. There have been two independent reports, commissioned by the Law Society and the Legal Action Group (LAG). The first demonstrated that the financial case for the bill was flawed and counterproductive, as 60% of the so-called savings will be wiped out by the knock-on social and economic burden. The second revealed overwhelming public support for a properly funded legal advice and representation service.

There has been a predictable toll on frontline legal workers and agencies. Citizens Advice bureaus and neighbourhood law centres have decreased in number, and the appetite for the stresses and strains of underfunded and under-recognised work has diminished. Yet it is these very agencies, euphemistically termed the "not-for-profit sector", that the government audaciously suggests should fill the gap.

I have the privilege to present the annual Legal Aid Awards on 12 June. The process has involved reviewing a large number of nominations. This is not some glossy, red carpet event accompanied by vacuous back-slapping. Each year the amazing work of thousands of dedicated public service lawyers is celebrated, given a small moment of recognition, and – most importantly – shown much-deserved solidarity. Their accounts of endless 14-hour days, in which they provide confidence and hope to thousands of citizens, makes truly inspirational reading.

Some of the nominees have a high profile, but most don't, and among them there is a younger generation stepping up to the bar with enthusiasm and determination. Whether it is the battered wife or the falsely accused parents of a dead child, such victims will not be deserted any more than the continuing campaign to reverse these detrimental proposals before implementation.

This coalition is on a short lease. Their much-vaunted agreement, with its broad themes of fairness, freedom, responsibility and the restoration of individual rights, seems to have evaporated. Like the emperor's new clothes, everyone save the wearers realises their invisibility. This cannot be admitted by the ruling elite, lest, like the emperor, they are thought to be stupid or incompetent. This explains why the objectives of access to justice were omitted from the first draft of the bill.This is a coalition wedded to wealth, a coalition that feigns surprise at the level of tax avoidance, FTSE 100 bosses' remuneration increases and bank staff bonuses, only to then ease the top tax band and continue rejecting a financial transaction tax that could raise £46bn.

The words of the lord chancellor Ken Clarke – that access to justice is a mark of a civilised society – are as threadbare as the emperor's clothes.

Bank of Cyprus UK | Prime minister Yoshihiko Noda | Great Ormond Street on BBC2 | Pork consumption in China | Jodi Gramigni | Unicef, not Unesco

• An article in Saturday's Money section was wrong to say "savers here with the Bank of Cyprus (UK) are covered by Britain's compensation scheme". Currently, UK savers with the Bank of Cyprus UK are protected – up to €100,000 – by the Cypriot Deposit Protection Scheme, not Britain's Financial Services Compensation Scheme. However, the bank is currently engaged in an incorporation process which will see its UK savers protected by the FSCS by late July (Is Cyprus next for the Grexit?, 19 May, page 4).

• A collection of brief summaries of what world leaders hoped to achieve in discussions on the eurozone crisis and other issues at the G8 meeting at Camp David last week mentioned, in the section on Japan, "President Yoshihiko Noda". Japan does not have a president; Noda is the country's prime minister (They all want to end the crisis, but can't agree how, 18 May, page 13).

• A preview of tonight's episode of Great Ormond Street on BBC2 suggested that it was the last in the series. In fact it is the third of six episodes (Pick of the day for Tuesday 22 May, page 67, The Guide, 19-25 May).

• Selling porkies: boost for UK exports as Chinese pig out was amended because it mistakenly gave an estimate for the amount of pork consumed by China last year as 50.7m kg; the correct figure is 50.7m tonnes.

• Kensal Rise library campaigners gain another day was amended to correct the spelling of Jodi Gramigni's forename.

• Finding the funds to bail out Greece, a letter from Bryn Jones, was corrected because it mistakenly referred to "agencies such as Unesco". Mr Jones had meant to refer to Unicef.

The least one can expect of a president who prolonged Afghan suffering by ordering a surge of troops to finish the job, is that he has something that could be dignified with the name of an exit strategy

It is disingenuous to claim, as Barack Obama did at the Nato conference in Chicago, that in two years, when US troops have ended their combat role in Afghanistan, the war "as we understand it" will be over. First, the US military has never understood what it was doing in Afghanistan, still less whom it was fighting, as one of its fallen stars, General Stanley McChrystal, admitted last year. He never resolved the contradictions inherent in conducting a counter-terrorist campaign and building a viable state, without which territorial gains were worthless. The state-building agenda has been quietly shelved since Gen McChrystal's days, but this does not lessen the failure. Second, with Nato bolting for the exit door, it is not within Washington's power to declare the war over. That can only be done by Afghans who see that peace has come.

The least one can expect of a president who prolonged Afghan suffering by ordering a surge of troops to finish the job, is that he has something that could be dignified with the name of an exit strategy. But, as Henry Kissinger acidly observed, the exit strategy has become all exit and no strategy. He is right in more than one sense. On the tactical level, the Nato conference finessed the French insistence on pulling its troops out this year, with private assurances that their combat mission has stopped anyway, that France may continue its training mission, and that it will take longer than the end of this year to withdraw most of the 3,200 troops and their kit. But these do not address the substance of the argument, which is as valid in Mr Obama's America as it is in François Hollande's France: that no one can see what the continued presence of foreign combat troops is doing.

The picture darkens further on the strategic level. Speed is now of the essence: war fatigue (a poll conducted in April showed that 69% of Americans wanted their troops out now), the imminence of the US presidential election, increasing Afghan hostility to the international military presence, the rise of "green on blue" shootings this year, the lack of mutual trust between Hamid Karzai and Mr Obama all point in the same direction. If the US military failed at the height of the surge in rebuilding infrastructure through its provincial reconstruction teams, the idea that the opposite force will produce the same result – that the prospect of a withdrawal of US troops will force a weak state to become stronger – is just as fanciful.

The more rapidly 2014 approaches, the sharper the contrast will become between airy aspiration and gritty realities on the ground. And yet the prospects of an "irreversible" transition from a foreign-led combat mission to an Afghan one depend more than ever on results, not statements or hopes. Mr Karzai may claim that soon 75% of the population will come under the protection of local forces, but the ability of Afghan forces to stand on their own remains unproven theory rather than established fact. Those are the words of Ronald Neumann, a former US ambassador in Kabul, not ours. Doing nothing to staunch the combat while troops are being withdrawn, the exit strategy amounts to little more than firing the same volley of bullets through a longer barrel. On this point alone, the statement issued by the Taliban is right: one step forward, two steps backward and no clear strategy for a political solution. It is only when the Taliban commanders held in Guantánamo Bay are handed over, that the next paragraph in their statement can be tested: that if the occupation of Afghanistan is ended "Afghans can … reach a resolution regarding their country".

Getting from a jihad run in the name of an Islamic emirate to a power-sharing agreement with an Afghan government that retains control of Kabul and most of the country will require negotiating resources that no Afghan leader has lived long enough to accomplish. The Taliban show no signs of being forced to the negotiating table. And the US shows no signs of abandoning the good fight, even though it has long since turned bad.

Name change is bizarre since the Thames is the least obvious feature of a settlement bounded by the M3, the M4, the M25 and reservoirs

Name changes are always revealing and, it's safe to say, never in a good way. They're done often enough. There are the Piddle villages of Dorset that became Puddles, the Butt Hole Road that becameArchers Way, and the unprintable Austrian town named after the sixth-century Bavarian Baron Focko. All succumbed to the limitless propensity to find names funny. It should have been enough to warn the people who decided that Staines should henceforth be known as Staines-on-Thames that changing names reveals a sensitivity that merely compounds the problem – in this case the association with Ali G. The name change is the more bizarre since the Thames is the least obvious feature of a settlement bounded by the M3, the M4, the M25 and the Staines reservoirs, all beneath the Heathrow flight path. Staines (meaning "the stones") has done without a fancy suffix for 1,000 years. Sometimes the old ways are best.

In successive polls since Christmas, the Tories economic lead of 21 points has fallen in sequence to 18, 17 and 13 before now shrinking to nine.

The most significant changes in public opinion take a long time to build. Labour's "shock" victory against Winston Churchill in 1945 was not so shocking to those few observers who had kept an eye on byelection swings since the early days of the war. Likewise Harold Wilson's "surprise" defeat, in defiance of the opinion polls of 1970, seemed less breathtaking to anyone who had monitored his administration's unremittingly awful performance in the local elections of the late 1960s.

Volatile polls and silly stories about Gordon Brown's blundering over the Arctic Monkeys, Mrs Duffy and everything else obscured it, but the outcome of the 2010 general election also grew slowly from deep roots. Labour lost not because its leader had a gift for putting his foot in it but because the party had – over its whole third term – steadily forfeited its economic reputation. A long squeeze on the living standards of middle Britain came before a violent slump. Mr Brown tackled the latter sufficiently competently to prevent the Conservatives winning outright, but light pay packets and long dole queues nonetheless sealed his fate. The country was ready for change, and minded to give the coalition the benefit of the doubt when it brought it. Today's Guardian/ICM poll suggests incremental change may once again be building under the surface.

That is not so much evident in the ups and downs of party support, where Labour's strong showing is matched by a partial Conservative recovery as George Osborne's divisive budget recedes from immediate memory. It is evident, rather, in the all-important question of economic trust. Labour may be dismayed that after so many weeks of bad budgetary headlines Eds Miliband and Balls are still behind David Cameron and George Osborne on this score. This, however, only underlines the depth of the tide that has to be turned. While the Tory team can take succour from remaining ahead in the slump, what ought to frighten them is the inexorability of the trend. In successive polls since Christmas, an economic lead of 21 points has fallen in sequence to 18, 17 and 13 before now shrinking to nine. Sinking job approval numbers for the coalition and each of its big beasts add to the sense that the benefit of the doubt is slowly evaporating.

Still behind in the blame game, and with a leader whose best boast is that he is no longer materially less popular than an unpopular PM, Labour would be unwise to take anything for granted. An unfolding catastrophe on the continent clouds responsibility for the slump, and could be one of those rare events that's big enough to turn the tide again. But the government ought not bank on that. The music is stopping while they are in charge, and that is not likely to persuade the country to revert to a more forgiving frame of mind.

Talks with the Taliban and a ceasefire are vital prerequisites to any dignified withdrawal

Nato's decade-long military intervention in Afghanistan will soon be over, but western governments will continue their generosity to that benighted country by maintaining their lavish aid programmes for many years to come. That is the reassuring message that was meant to go out from Nato's just-concluded Chicago summit.

With the new French president determined to get his combat troops out by the end of 2012 and two-thirds of the American public in favour of an early withdrawal of theirs, President Obama wanted to suggest that he is listening. So the summit trumpeted the "transition" to Afghan forces while seeking a commitment from Nato members to go on paying the Afghans long after the alliance's own troops have gone.

At the back of many Nato officials' minds is the Soviet Union's Afghan experience. Propaganda about a Soviet humiliation is giving way to awareness that the Russians pulled out in good order and the government of Najibullah, whom they left in charge, survived for three more years. When it collapsed 20 years ago, it was not because of the insurgents' prowess but because Moscow stopped delivering cash, fuel, and weaponry. Nato wants to avoid a similar outcome.

But there are key differences, summed up in two words not much heard in Chicago: talks and ceasefire. The Soviet Union sought to negotiate its exit by persuading Pakistan and the United States to stop arming the insurgents. Najibullah followed the same path by offering to include rebel leaders and monarchists in his government. At the local level his generals negotiated several ceasefires with mujahideen commanders. It was not enough, as Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence directorate (ISI) and the Reagan administration urged the rebels to resist Moscow's and Kabul's offers and keep on seeking victory.

Obama has not learned the lesson. Vague efforts at trying to talk to the Taliban were resisted by hawks within his administration and have not become real. Now Obama is afraid Mitt Romney will beat the macho drum about not "appeasing the enemy". Meanwhile, on the ground, instead of seeking ceasefires American generals are intensifying night raids and missile strikes on suspected Taliban hideouts in Helmand and Kandahar.

Nato's biggest mistake is to go on relying on a garrison strategy. Increasing numbers of Afghan troops will sit in bases and go out on patrols instead of US and British ones, but this is nothing more than "Nato with an Afghan face". Locals see these Afghan troops as occupiers just like the US and British. Less than 4% of the Afghan National Army are southern Pashtuns. Most are Tajiks and Uzbeks who speak a different language and don't know the area. But if you recruit more southerners in a hurry, you just feed the Taliban's latest tactic: join the Afghan army and police, get trained by the Americans and British, then shoot them in the camp or mess hall.

To strengthen the garrison strategy, the US recently signed a partnership agreement with Hamid Karzai. It did not specify how many US troops will remain after combat forces leave in 2014 since Karzai is unwilling to commit himself and Obama wants to blur the issue for electoral reasons. But the plan to keep US troops after 2014 remains on the table. This is a disaster. Whether dubbed trainers or advisers, they will still be armed and uniformed US soldiers.

The Taliban will never accept that. "A lasting occupation means lasting resistance," as they put it on the eve of the Chicago summit, in a statement which distanced themselves from al-Qaida and reaffirmed a willingness to negotiate. "American intelligence networks including the CIA state that members of al-Qaida have all left Afghanistan. So America's military presence is not for its own security but a long-term strategy for turning our country and the region into its colony," it said.

We need a change of course. The US must prepare for a total troop withdrawal, as the Russians did. Some say the Taliban can just sit and wait for 2014, but in the two years before then the ISI must be persuaded to threaten the Taliban leadership, whom they host in Pakistan, with loss of their sanctuaries if they do not negotiate. Another big difference from the 1990s is the emergence of a new player: the Pakistani Taliban. Compromise in Kabul is better for Pakistan than an outright Afghan Taliban victory which would embolden their counterparts south of the border to move against Islamabad.

Two conflicts are ravaging Afghanistan: a war between Afghans and a resistance struggle against a foreign invasion. Both need to be stopped, ideally through negotiations for a government of national unity and a devolution of power to the provinces. Without a strong push to end the Afghan civil war as the foreigners leave, this weekend's stuff about "transition" will change little for most Afghans. Fewer foreign troops will die and Afghanistan will revert to being an unreported war. This will not be ending Nato's intervention with dignity, but with cynicism.

The latest outpourings of the housing minister, Grant Shapps, are just one more ploy to distract us from the reality of the housing crisis for which he has no realistic answer (Cameron backs plan to abolish rent subsidy for higher-earning families in social housing, 19 May).

The minister's claim that council housing is subsidised is simply untrue.

The fact that council housing rents are not designed to make a profit does not amount to a subsidy unless you think profit is king.

There is no subsidy for council housing because it pays for itself and more, since governments for more than 30 years have creamed off over £70bn to subsidise their spending. This includes most of the money collected from sales through right to buy, and it continues.

Fairness would start to mean something if this money were to be used in building new council housing to relieve the millions on waiting lists. Such housing subsidies that do exist are all aimed at the private housing market.

If tenants are to be charged means-tested rents, this would fuel applications for the right to buy, reducing even further the number of council homes available for rent.

It's impossible to follow the logic of the government's stance on council housing. First, it goes out of its way to demonise council tenants as scroungers who are not interested in moving up the housing ladder, and then claims that council housing should be only for the poorest and those most in need.

Forcing more and more people into the private housing market, particularly at a time of high unemployment, fuels the need for housing benefit. Cutting benefit levels fuels the risk of more homeless people turning to the council for rehousing.

Consultation becomes meaningless when it is based on a false premise. This latest plan is simply a distraction, which will solve nothing and exacerbate the problem of lack of secure, affordable housing.
Shirley Frost
Defend Council Housing, Sheffield

Britain may well fall into a bad recession if Greece leaves the single currency, as Office for Budget Responsibility boss Robert Chote says (Interview, 19 May). But the costs of Greece staying in would be even higher. The prospect of a continuing cycle of crises, bailouts, defaults and more crises creates a huge uncertainty that leaves businesses unwilling to invest and expand – stifling the growth we need to get ourselves out of debt. To keep Greece in the single currency, European taxpayers would have to write off around €60bn of the bailout loans they have made so far, pump in around €200bn to cut Greece's €274bn debt to a sustainable size, and carry on subsidising its chronic overspending to the tune of €20bn a year in perpetuity. Better, surely, to get the pain over with so that people can at last invest confidently in the future.
Eamonn Butler
Director, Adam Smith Institute

• The copious analyses of costs and benefits of a Greek exit have barely touched on the human element, and completely neglected the moral one. The Greeks stand to lose all their savings, endure more cuts and see businesses go bust. It is predicted or, more precisely, imagined that the magic wand of devaluation will restore Greece to growth in just a few years. There is no question that the Greek government fiddled the figures, overspent due to cheap credit and mismanaged European funds. The threat of exit from the euro might be a necessary evil to extract structural and political reforms, but is the humiliation of a people required?

The missing factor in the Greek equation is what exit would do to European consciousness. Angela Merkel might believe in the superiority of German technology, economy and work ethic, and give little thought to the origins of these words. She might even believe such economic wealth results from wise investment and hard work, rather than the use of building a massive surplus to the detriment of other economies, the depression of salaries, the bank subsidies to businesses and the current refinancing through cheap interest rates. She has embraced an economic system reliant on uneven development and forgotten the help Europe received after the war.

If the rule of the mighty trumps Greece's livelihood, Europe will have chosen the markets over the cradle of its civilisation. It is our responsibility, as rich and "civilised" nations, to prevent human penury, restore dignity and show solidarity.
Francesca ES Montemaggi
Researcher in sociology of religion, school of city and regional planning,
Cardiff University

• You rightly headline Robert Chote's warning that the UK "may never recover" if Greece exits the euro. As this latest phase of the crisis unfolds, the UK is an observer. We wait for the storm to strike. How different things could have been. The 2010 coalition document promised that Britain would play a leading role in the EU. Yet every signal sent to the EU by the government since then, from the referendum bill to the two fingers shown by David Cameron at last December's summit, has been of contempt and proposed disengagement, thus reducing to nil our ability to influence the decisions that will help to decide whether our own economy sinks or rises.

Cameron knows what has to be done. Yet, friendless outside his own party, he is reduced to pleading weakly with Mrs Merkel to temper Germany's austerity determination (as if she will take any notice) and belatedly trying to cosy up to Mr Hollande (if only he will abandon his plans for a financial transaction tax). The EU is Britain's political homeland and our most important export market. The danger of the UK becoming marginalised has long been apparent. Now it's happened, and at a most inconvenient time for our own failing economy, it's not much consolation for us pro-Europeans to be able to say we saw it coming.
Christopher Denne
Chair, European Movement, Tamar branch, Tavistock, Devon

• The start of Ratko Mladic's trial for war crimes as the euro crisis threatens to spin into a "doom loop" should give pause for thought. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US effectively told the then European Community that Europe was its backyard and tried to withdraw from interfering. Yet the EC began a period of navel-gazing as the foreign ministers and heads of EC governments obsessed about drawing up the Maastricht treaties and introducing economic and monetary union and the euro. One side-effect was to ignore the Balkans and so help prolong the war, with the consequences Mladic's trial recalls. Now, with warnings of the danger of Greece collapsing into turmoil, even civil war, EU leaders have to look beyond their economics textbook arguments and confront the real-world consequences of their dithering. It would be a disgusting irony if the euro, the most ambitious project of an EU designed to make war in north-west Europe impossible, were to be book-ended by two civil wars in south-east Europe.
Rob Raeburn
Brighton, East Sussex

• As David Cameron has been chuntering at the G8 summit (Report, 21 May) that cutting and cutting again is the only path to economic salvation, let's recall previous summits. At G20 in London, chaired by Gordon Brown, countries agreed to both rescue their banks and stimulate their economies, a twin-pronged strategy that worked in Britain, with economic growth returning and unemployment falling up until the 2010 general election. Shortly after that election came the G20 in Toronto, where Cameron and George Osborne, with President Obama weakened by the Republican onslaught, pushed through instead a one-club solution of cutting national deficits, a strategy in Britain that has led to an economy at best flatlining, unemployment only contained because so many people are working part-time, and a double-dip recession. In Europe their strategy, with Angela Merkel its champion, threatens the ruin of Greece, Spain, Portugal and perhaps Italy, and the collapse of the euro. We need a plan B.
Pete Ruhemann
Reading, Berkshire

• There are usually said to be only two options for solving the present crisis in the eurozone and in the UK: austerity or growth. But greater equality of income and more generous provision of services might provide a better solution. That is, more widely, a rejection of neo-liberal nostrums, and an alternative to growth (We will not recover the euro without re-examining our deepest held beliefs, 19 May).

The situation is so difficult and painful for many because it happened so suddenly, with those below the top of the income scale – particularly those at the bottom – bearing most of the burden. In general, people in western Europe did not feel they were facing austerity in 2000 or in 1990, although GDP in each of those years was lower than now. What makes the present situation different, apart from its suddenness, is its disproportionate impact. Thus many experience a fall in living standards – in some cases catastrophic – while those at the top experience little, if any, decline in income and some continue to receive huge increases. The most important problem, however, is growth. There is a limit to possible global growth and in western Europe there is no need for further growth in GDP – if it is more equably distributed. The issue of austerity v fairer income distribution is political and social. The issue of growth is existential.
Margaret Bone
Langford, Somerset

• Your economics editor, Larry Elliott, (The flawed euro is ripe for creative destruction, 21 May) rightly notes that Ireland and Spain suffer from having accepted too much private debt. Then he blames this on low interest rates set by central banks. He must know the rates at which individuals, businesses and governments could borrow were low because free global capital markets were awash with savings seeking interest and safety. Low US and UK bank rates helped stimulated their economies. Private and government borrowing and expansionary monetary policy fix the failure of deregulation to sustain global demand.

I attribute this failure to the low wages set by competition in free global labour markets and to the large current account surpluses of some low-wage and oil-producing nations. The resulting surplus savings were attracted by the returns on and readily access to deposits in trusted global banks. Elliott's criticisms of the euro and EC do not explain why the US is in such trouble. Nor is its willingness to run huge deficits to sustain its beloved global freedoms more sensible than the EC's determination to curb the deficits as if large nations were similar to small households. Note: some nations tie their currency to the dollar without becoming uncompetitive but are not subsidised by the US treasury. When will Elliott and the Guardian deal honestly with our grave financial and economic problems?
George CA Talbot
Watford, Hertfordshire

• Surely the Greeks have enough to endure without David Cameron giving them advice?
John Porter
Oxford

Your account of how the US state of Texas may have carried out the execution of a totally innocent man is a truly disturbing reminder of the fatal fallibility of capital punishment (The execution of an innocent man, 16 May). This latest research on the execution of Carlos DeLuna in 1989, coming soon after the deeply dubious execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last year (Comment, 24 September 2011), further undermines the US's claims to run a capital justice system that respects human rights.

Meanwhile, in Missouri, a man called Reggie Clemons is on death row despite there being no physical evidence connecting him to his alleged crime, and prosecution conduct described as "abusive and boorish" by four federal judges.

Internationally, the US is increasingly isolated over its continued use of this cruel relic of the past. It should abandon the inhumanity of the death penalty and concentrate on better policing, crime avoidance and prisoner rehabilitation.
Kate Allen
Director, Amnesty International UK

Jonathan Freedland's article (In death – as in life – my mother was rescued by love, 19 May), drawing movingly on his experiences of the care given to his mother, rekindled my thoughts when my wife was having chemotherapy in the excellent oncology unit at St James's University Hospital in Leeds. That was on the day that Barclays shareholders were discussing executives' remuneration. I estimated that Bob Diamond's alone could pay for about 200 nurses.
Alan Pennington
Wetherby, West Yorkshire

• With the 13th biggest budget in French football, Montpellier (€36m/£29m) have just beaten Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain (€200m), Lyon (€150m) and Marseille (€140m) to the French title. Paying a top salary of €20,000 a week, Montpellier's management has transformed a group of former academy players and astute purchases into a title-winning team. Can this be a sign that football clubs do not have to sell their soul to achieve glory (Letters, 21 May)?
Nigel Pickard
Montpellier University

• With wall-to-wall coverage of the football in Monday's Sport section, did it not occur to anyone that Sam Woolaston's TV review (21 May) might be overegging the pudding somewhat by only reviewing the football coverage. Some of us watched both the football and the final two episodes of The Bridge.
Philip Foxe
London

• Were any of the world leaders in Washington brave enough to register an honest indifference and not watch the Champions League final (Cheers then hug watching shootout at Camp David, 21 May)?
Paul Gubbins
Congleton, Cheshire

• If the Beecroft report prompts changes to UK employment law it might come in very useful to get rid of any employee who watches football when s/he should be working.
John Kilburn
Easingwold, North Yorkshire

• Never forgetting the sheer bliss of a Marmite and lettuce sandwich (Letters, 21 May).
Liz Holmes
Skipton, North Yorkshire

The case made by Caroline Spelman (Britain is rising to the challenge of greening our economy, is woefully inadequate. We urgently need to redefine the way we measure economic growth. Green conservatism as mediated by George Osborne sees the natural environment as detached from the wider economy, when it underpins it. Natural capital must be conserved or transformed into other forms of capital – social, intellectual or physical – if we are to achieve economic growth that is genuinely sustainable.

Rio+20 next month is an opportunity to redefine the model of economic growth for a century where the global population reaches 10 billion. I would encourage Mrs Spelman to read her own department's natural environment white paper before she boards the plane to Rio. It includes a commitment to embed the value of natural capital into the government's accounting framework. She needs to encourage other governments to adopt this approach; but she can only do so if she understands it herself.
Barry Gardiner MP
Ed Miliband's special envoy on climate change and the environment

The deputy prime minister wishes to provide more funds to encourage students from free school meal backgrounds to enter university but fails to say whether any new money is involved (Clegg plots £2,500 premium to boost access, 21 May). Instead the government appears to be eyeing up the widening participation funds allocated to universities in England. These ensure that universities which recruit students from less advantaged backgrounds receive some additional funding to support their teaching and to encourage students to apply in the first place. This premium is like the pupil premium in that it goes direct to institutions. To suggest that universities which are doing the heavy lifting in promoting social mobility should lose this premium so that younger students receive more funds to access a fees system is worrying. Basing university access on free school meals also risks marginalising the one in three undergraduates who start studying for a degree when they are older.
Pam Tatlow
Chief executive, million+

• Your report (17 May) on research from the Higher Education Policy Institute says time spent with tutors is the same despite a three-fold increase in tuition fees. But fee increases are a response to withdrawal of virtually all public funding of undergraduate teaching in many disciplines, particularly the humanities, arts and social sciences. The increase in fees over the next year is to replace what has been lost. Universities will have less money, not more. If the NUS wants increases in contact time, it needs to blame the coalition not universities and take action to win an increase in the public funding of undergraduate teaching.
Professor Steven Cummins
Queen Mary, University of London

• Your report takes no account of three elements of learning – reading the literature, writing essays and, crucially, the quality of contact time with staff and students. Personal study is a key component, particularly in arts and humanities. Universities were set up to share the few existing books – I queued in university libraries in the 60s, so now the literature is so accessible, the whole model needs a rethink.
Peter West
London

Langstone, Hampshire: Suddenly, from deep within a dark thicket, comes an explosive burst of pure, penetrating notes – the cut-glass chinking, tumbling solo of a Cetti's warbler

The fading light picks out the silhouette of a robin singing from its perch on the wooden bridge that spans the Lymbourne stream. From a nearby bramble patch a willow warbler joins the robin in song, its melodic rippling phrases trickling down through the foliage like syrup. A quintet of collared doves and wood pigeons provide crooning backing vocals for two blackbirds, whose rich, throaty calls rise and fall in a mellow jazz duet. A song thrush cascades through its fluting, looping repertoire, while a chiffchaff chants its name and dunnocks tinkle tunelessly from the undergrowth.

The dusk chorus is a subtler affair than the dawn chorus, more chamber ensemble than symphony orchestra, though some birds actually prefer to sing at dusk. The fluttery chirps of house sparrows congregating in the elder bushes that border the stream are more prominent, and it is easier to pick out the wispy, silvered tremolo of a blue tit perched high in the canopy of an overhanging willow tree. A low ivy-clad stump provides a stage for a wren, whose finely barred wings tremble with effort as it executes a spirited bravado performance. Its final territorial proclamation before nightfall ends with a prolonged trill, like the machine-gun rattle of rain on a corrugated iron roof.

The birdsong lulls to a murmur, fading away as the wren's final notes dissipate in the still air. Colour seeps out of the landscape, and platinum-white Venus rises low in the western twilight. I inhale the pungent odour of wild garlic as it wafts up from beneath the hedgerow and watch as moths swirl in the hazy orange glow of a lone streetlamp, like charred embers caught in the updraft of a fire. The flitting shadow of a pipistrelle bat silently skims the inky black surface of the stream and a wood mouse scurries across the path in front of me. Suddenly, from deep within a dark thicket of holly and hawthorn, comes an explosive burst of pure, penetrating notes – the cut-glass chinking, tumbling solo of a Cetti's warbler breaking the silence of dusk.

Sam Hallam and Timothy Harrington | Olympic torch route | Felipe Calderón

• The print version of an article about Sam Hallam, whose murder conviction was quashed by the court of appeal last week, left some readers wondering about the identity of a person referred to only as "Harrington" in the story's penultimate paragraph. A previous reference to Timothy Harrington – the friend that Hallam said he was with on the night of the murder – had been accidentally cut from the story when it was edited for the newspaper (Hallam attacks police over 'eight lost years' as murder conviction quashed, 18 May, page 6).

• A caption underneath one of the pictures on a centre-spread graphic showing the route to be taken by the Olympic torch in the runup to the 2012 Games in London said: "After touring Northern Ireland, the torch makes its only non-UK excursion, to Dublin…" In fact the torch is also visiting the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, which are crown dependencies but not part of the United Kingdom (London 2012: Olympic torch route, 17 May, pages 22 & 23).

• The surname of Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón, was misspelt as Calderén in a report about murders carried out by rival drug cartels in the country (Mexican massacres are displays of gang war brutality, 15 May, page 20).

The return of Peter Moffat's legal drama is a welcome event - the profession deserves a little glamour spread on it

No one pretends that watching the closing statements of a trial, as viewers will soon be able to do, will be anything like witnessing a full case. Few of us have the chance to attend court for days, except in unwanted circumstances. So the return of Peter Moffat's legal drama, Silk, is a welcome event to anyone tired of gavels, attorneys and the felonies peculiar to the US criminal justice system. Last week's episode, featuring a menacing Phil Davis, tackled the difficult defence of duress and saw Frances Barber providing a hint of sexual intrigue. This week a military tribunal will, Moffat promises, offer another frisson. Even cuts to legal aid have been mentioned, though not in a way that would explain why the criminal bar is currently threatening to strike over late payment of fees. But with training costs rising and life at the junior end tough and precarious, this branch of the profession deserves a little glamour spread upon it.