Stop the Games! The security staff can't get through the Olympic traffic jams. But the beach volleyball show will go on

• Don't panic, but the Olympics may have to be cancelled. The Diary has been given a top-level briefing by the head of Olympic security for G4S, which is providing 10,000 guards for the Games, and the news is not good. At its Games security hub at Canary Wharf, which remotely manages logistics and staffing for the Olympic Park, there is a Truman Show-style bank of giant TV screens providing a stream of the latest info. Two of them permanently display the Transport for London web page, which gives tube and bus info. Forget missile strikes by al-Qaida, G4S's No 1 nightmare is the tube breaking down, as it has done repeatedly this week. If that happens, security staff can't get to the site, and, if staffing drops below specified levels, venues can't operate. Boris?

• More Olympics news. Transport for London today launched its planning tool on temporary road changes, which lets drivers check road closures during the Games. And it did it in the most shameless and chauvinistic way possible. TfL got the women's British beach volleyball team to set up their net in Parliament Square, guaranteeing gridlock as white van men overheated. Yes, we realise you were demonstrating Games-related traffic jams, but parading women in bikinis and sports bras is nothing but a cheap PR stunt. The Diary was trapped in the square for four hours and, frankly, it was a disgusting spectacle.

• Talking of Boris, which we vaguely were, two journalists with strong links to the London Evening Standard – former newsdesk hack Sam Lyon and current chief news correspondent Ross Lydall – are in the frame to replace the recently departed mayoral mouthpiece Guto Harri. Anyone would think there was an umbilical link between Boris and the Standard.

• Bob Geldof has given a fascinating interview to ShortList magazine. Q: Are you passionate about recycling? "No, I don't want to think about it at all. It's just a fucking pain in the arse, all these coloured bins and stuff. I don't have a choice, though. Down in London you get fucking hung, drawn and quartered in the fucking public square if you don't." Good points, thoughtfully made.

• Tony Blair may be set to re-enter frontline politics, but what about Gordon Brown? When, if ever, will he re-emerge? The ex-PM is said to be concentrating on being a good local MP in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. Yet the diligent Fife Free Press has recorded little about Brown since he attended Cowdenbeath FC's vital match against Forfar Athletic, which clinched its elevation to the first division. That was on 21 April. Fife MSP John Park, who is said to be close to Brown, believes he could be part of the "dream team" (along with Alex Ferguson) to beat the SNP in the independence referendum. "He's potentially more popular than Alex Salmond," says Park, who must be extremely close. As the Heathcliff of the heather broods, the silence becomes deafening.

• Was too much champagne taken at the Journalism Foundation gala evening, which we reported on yesterday? There is growing confusion over who got the replica of the ring jeweller Stephen Webster created for Elizabeth Taylor. The hammer went down on Hugh Grant's bid of £10,000, but it has now been claimed by the Hon Geraldine Harmsworth Maxwell, a friend of Independent owner Evgeny Lebedev. The Journalism Foundation is checking its sources, and the Diary hopes to keep this starry ring cycle going for at least a month.

• Back to Bob's aperçus. Q: How many foreign-language films are in your DVD collection? "I don't have a DVD collection. I snap it out of the thing, watch it and give it back to the rental store. But we have a lot of foreign language, because the missus is French. They're always about some 85-year-old shagging an 18-year-old." Holy Motors!

• Hugh Muir is back next week, thank God, and apparently he's planning a hibu-style rebranding of the Diary. There's sure to be controversy, but ignore the whingers, Hugh. Merci, large drink tonight!

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

It may be to a lesser extend than the Republican candidate, but the US president is a frontman for financial interests

Poor Mitt Romney. Despite defeating a weird and wacky line-up of candidates in a gruelling Republican primary race, and despite selling himself as "the CEO president", he can't seem to shake off his image as a slash-and-burn private equity boss, a modern-day incarnation of Gordon Gekko.

It hasn't escaped his opponents' attention. In 2008, Romney's then rival for the nomination, Mike Huckabee, mocked him for looking like "the guy who laid you off". Last year, during his own brief and bizarre bid for the presidency, the billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump ridiculed Romney as "a funds guy" who would "buy companies … close companies [and] get rid of the jobs". And, last week, Team Obama released a campaign ad attacking Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, and referring to the Republican candidate as a "vampire".

In a show of co-ordinated faux outrage, Republicans have since called on the president to disown such attack ads. But drawing attention to Romney's record as a corporate raider is fair game. As co-founder and chief executive of Bain Capital, Romney did make hundreds of millions of dollars from private equity deals, and did lay off hundreds of workers in the process.

Banks such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley have poured tens of thousands of dollars into Romney's campaign coffers. Key members of his fundraising team include the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer and three JP Morgan executives. Is it any wonder, then, that Romney responded to the recent news of JP Morgan Chase's $2bn trading blunder by blaming the "market" and saying he didn't "want to punish companies"?

The Republican nominee is a shill for big business and, in particular, big finance. But – and here's where it gets tricky for the Democrats and depressing for the rest of us – so is President Obama. Yes, I know, it's to a lesser extent than Romney, but the fact is that Obama has been a shameless apologist for Wall Street.

Take the case of JPMorgan Chase. Official records show that the bank's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, a major Obama donor, has made at least 18 visits to the White House since the start of 2009, meeting the president himself on at least three separate occasions. So should we have been surprised when Obama heaped praise upon the bank and its now-disgraced boss, in an interview with ABC last week? "JP Morgan is one of the best-managed banks there is," he said. "Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we've got, and they still lost $2bn and counting."

Like Romney, Obama ascribed the JP Morgan debacle to a failure of the free market, rather than to the recklessness and greed of its bosses, prompting the influential economist Robert Reich, who served as labour secretary under Bill Clinton, to respond: "Bain Capital and JP Morgan are parts of the same problem. The president should be leading the charge against both."

He won't – and it is worth noting that, despite the drop in financial support for him from the financial sector, the president and his party still managed to secure $152,000 from employees of – wait for it – Bain Capital. Such is his love affair with the guys who work on Wall Street – "very savvy businessmen", to borrow a stomach-churning line from Obama – that each of the three men who has filled the role of White House chief of staff during the president's first term has been an investment banker.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job is when director Charles Ferguson – extracts from his book of the same name have appeared in this week's Guardian – draws the viewer's attention to the revolving door between the White House and Wall Street, including Obama's appointment of Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, to be chief of staff to the treasury secretary, Tim Geithner; of Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; of Mary Schapiro, the former chief executive of Finra, the investment-banking industry's self-regulation body, to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is government of the bankers, by the bankers, for the bankers.

In his defence, Obama's supporters point to his overhaul of US financial regulation in 2010. But those reforms have since been denounced as weak and ineffective; they did little to regulate credit-rating agencies, restrict financial lobbyists or curb bank bonuses. The Obama administration has also refused to go after banks and bankers in the courts. As Yale University's Bruce Judson pointed out in October 2011, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests: "So the tally to date: 2,511 people arrested for disturbing the peace and related activities; no arrests for any of the financiers who broke the law and plunged millions into untold misery."

Upon taking office, Obama spoke grandly of the need "to change Wall Street's culture". It hasn't changed at all. Banks are still too big to fail (and, for that matter, jail) and bonuses continue to rise uncontrollably.

The choice in November may not be, in the immortal words of the Rev Jesse Jackson, a choice between "Republican" and "Republican lite". That would be to ignore the sheer extremism of the modern Republican party on a whole host of issues, from healthcare reform to the Israeli occupation. However, it will be a choice between a pair of frontmen for financial interests, two nominees of the 1%. The inconvenient truth is that, whichever candidate is elected in November, Wall Street wins.

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There is no Merkellande or Frangela, but François Hollande has shown good political acumen on the eurozone crisis

It may be an effect of belated spring sunshine, but there are reasons to feel optimistic about Europe again. Whatever the short-term reactions of the markets, there is a fact about the European Union that some experts seem to forget each time there is a crisis: the EU is a political process, not a financial transaction or a business takeover.

In the course of the past 50 years, how many fatal predictions have been proved wrong? How many frog-leaps – forwards, backwards and sideways – have avoided collective dead ends? Frogs are not only and necessarily French. The informal dinner in Brussels on Wednesday showed that many European leaders are now convinced a political compromise has to be found to stimulate growth and save Greece, the eurozone and, indeed, the whole single market, so crucial to our economies.

Of course, it comes terribly late and has proved immensely costly in social as well as in financial terms. A huge price has already been paid for the Maastricht treaty being incomplete, and for a monetary union having been forged without the necessary economic and political tools. Angela Merkel is right to insist, together with her Finnish and Dutch counterparts, on the need for austerity measures and more Protestant rigour. But they should remember that Germany has not always respected the criteria for its own deficits, that on the contrary Spain has, and that there is little sense in dying in perfectly starched sheets but in intense pain.

Credit should be paid at this stage to François Hollande's political acumen. Not only was he somehow fortunate in the timing of the French election and the evolution of the euro crisis – luck being crucial for politicians – but his decision to emphasise the need for growth has awarded him champion status, giving hope to the Irish as well as the Spaniards, and even the Greeks.

During his campaign, he stressed again and again his determination to renegotiate the fiscal compact. Typically, "Mr Normal" did not mention it once during his first press conference in Brussels. This sketches the kind of compromise that could be found with Berlin if Merkel, who has already agreed to project bonds and other marginal measures for economic stimulus, becomes more flexible on the major issue: eurobonds and the mutualisation of public debts. In this matter, the French president is playing hand in hand with Germany's opposition Social Democratic party, which supports the idea, and which could possibly become part of a new coalition after the general election Merkel has to face next year.

For once, the Brussels ballet was interesting to watch the other night. Hollande arrived at his first European meeting with the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti – not quite your typical leftist economist – after having cajoled Spain's conservative Mariano Rajoy at the Elysée earlier in the day. There was no Franco-German Merkozy-style pre-summit reunion, no suggestion of Frangela or Merkellande in the making – the words don't sound right, anyway. In spite of the stern German dismissal of the idea, Hollande kept pushing for eurobonds. He was supported by a majority of his colleagues, according to the Italian prime minister. For a premiere, it was good political showmanship.

Yet the Brussels meeting has not brought any tangible results. The eurozone crisis has not been solved. It keeps ravaging our globalised economies, threatening Obama's re-election prospects, and it helps populisme to develop in our democracies. In those countries that haven't been as determined as Schröder's Germany a decade ago, structural reforms are inescapable.

France has not yet experienced painful austerity, but the French are convinced they are doing so. Their new president and his government will face a legislative election on 17 June. On the same day, the Greeks will vote again to decide whether or not they agree to more European help and harsh conditions, assuming a possible government coalition emerges. Had the previous – and courageous – Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, been supported last November, when he proposed a referendum, the situation would be less catastrophic. It was another example of European leaders' short-sightedness in their handling of the crisis. It is high time the union got out of the quagmire, even if it moves like a frog.

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David Cameron's idea for lifting Britain harks back to 1930s Bank of England dogma. What we need is a cash injection

David Cameron is right. The government must tackle the deficit while securing growth. The G8 in Washington agrees with him, so do Europe's finance ministers, so does the IMF's Christine Lagarde, so intermittently does the Labour party. If so many people agree, what is the problem?

In reality Britain, and much of Europe, is chasing deficit reduction so hard that growth eludes it. Europe is in the grip of a demand famine that is the economic equivalent of the Black Death. A plague is feeding on itself. Today Britain was confirmed to be in persisting recession, precisely what the prime minister and his chancellor, George Osborne, said would not happen. Two years ago they derided those pleading for plan B as cynics and pessimists. I hear no apology.

In the Commons on Wednesday, Cameron described his attempt at a shotgun marriage of austerity and growth. He listed four components, combining "deficit reduction … an active monetary policy, structural reform to make us competitive, and innovative ways of using our hard-won credibility". He did not elaborate on modalities. Yet when rhetoric and reality appear in such glaring conflict as now, even a man as self-confident as the PM must sense he is up a stormy creek without a paddle.

Britain's deficit reduction has not been very austere, not like Greece or Spain. It is aimed at reverting public spending to its level of roughly five years ago, hardly straitened times. It has been effective in sustaining Britain's foreign credit. But it cannot be denied that it has stifled growth. Chided on Wednesday to reconcile his conflicting ambitions by the MP Dennis Skinner, Cameron said lamely that the purpose of his austerity was "to deliver low interest rates which are essential for growth".

As this seems to be the intellectual prop of the policy, it merits analysis. Low interest rates are not "essential" to growth, as Cameron says. They may help, but what is essential is higher demand, rising sales and profits. These are vital not just to growth but to government revenues and deficit reduction.

Cameron has pursued the lowest interest rates in modern British history, yet the economy has not grown but lurched into prolonged recession. How can he link the two? His cart is before his horse.

Throughout these troubles Britain has suffered from the worst economic bugbear: ingénue politicians in thrall to the Bank of England. The Bank's amiable governor, Sir Mervyn King, mesmerises Cameron and Osborne as he did Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. The Bank's conduct of monetary policy for the past three years has been as disastrous as was its conduct of financial regulation in the preceding two. But no heads have rolled.

Cameron's second growth prescription is of an "active" monetarism. This has consisted of King filling bank vaults with £325bn of credit notes. It has helped banks back to profitability but there is no sign that the policy has had any impact on credit to businesses, let alone on domestic money supply. It must be the costliest fiasco in regulatory history. Yet all King could say to a supine Commons committee in March was: "If there is one word I think we need to hang on to … it is patience. We've done the things that are necessary." Cameron's own banker admits that his monetary policy is not active but inert.

The message that Keynes drew from the inter-war depression was that there was no get-out-of-jail card. A choice had to be made between deflation and recession on the one hand, and recovery with possible inflation on the other. In essence governments should postpone deficit reduction in hard times, and build surpluses in good ones. Even if surpluses were not built, as in the last boom, deflating economies in a recession merely prolongs that recession.

Cameron's belief that austerity holds the key to growth through low interest rates and bank bailouts is Bank of England dogma of the 1930s. He may as well don a black jacket and striped trousers and declare unemployment the medicine for human sin. Economics students used to be reassured that such ideas would never again be heard because governments were no longer that stupid. Really?

Across Europe democracy is telling politicians this game is up. People want recovery stimulated, as much as governments want a return to buoyant revenue. The age of the bankers is ending. But what form should stimulus take? Cameron's two remaining prescriptions are opaque. Structural reform "to raise competitiveness" is noble in theory, but does nothing for growth in the short term. Deregulation has yet to reveal itself in practice and will hardly send consumers rushing out to buy.

As for "innovative ways of using our hard-won credibility", this was left unspecified, but does at least offer a glimmer of hope. Current Whitehall talk is of public spending "off balance sheet" – in theory hidden from the bond markets – which usually means privatised building projects such as Michael Gove's revived schools programme. They are seldom "shovel-ready" and yield little or nothing in the short term. N,or are they really off balance sheet, though they obsess prestige-hungry ministers. They are more likely to fuel the next boom and the next deficit crisis.

More intriguing is if Cameron is at last ready to draw on the coalition's much-vaunted credit balance and throw a little caution to the wind. Retailers, small businesses, large corporations, city councils and the exchequer are all skint. They desperately need goods moving from shelves, shops restocking, banks lending against renewed cash flow, employment growing and taxes being paid.

There is no shortage of ideas for this, long rehearsed in this column. They range from boosting social benefits for a year to temporary tax reliefs, scrappage schemes and time-limited spending vouchers. Given present unemployment and spare capacity it is inconceivable that such an injection would be inflationary. The Bank of England could print £500 per head in notes and dump them in every private bank account in the land for less than it has given its banking friends. It would be the quickest way of injecting cash into the veins of the economy "off balance sheet".

Such short-term boosts to demand would hardly endanger Cameron's "hard-won credibility". As a Tory he should know that the fastest growth in jobs comes from private spending; from money circulating in cash machines and purses through shops and services. The economy has been sated with state growth. To borrow a phrase from Cameron's favourite politician, Tony Blair, it needs people's growth.

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Many building projects were cancelled and the education secretary made to apologise after communication errors

Brazil has a proud record of protecting the environment, but a bill allowing deforestation would undermine the Rio+20 summit

Never before has the survival of so much rainforest depended on one person. But that is where President Rousseff of Brazil finds herself. The Brazilian congress just passed a forest code that puts the Amazon and other forests in jeopardy.

Dilma Rousseff's imminent decision on whether to pass or veto the bill will have huge ramifications. If approved, it would give loggers and farmers free rein to chop down 190m acres of forest. A territory the size of France and Britain combined will be at risk. It would open forests and rivers up for grabs, putting 70% of Brazil's river basins at risk. It would also give amnesty to anyone previously charged with illegal deforestation.

This bill would be a catastrophe not just for Brazil, but for the world and all our futures. Brazil is home to 40% of the world's last remaining rainforest – a lung that provides the earth with one fifth of our oxygen. So why is the congress passing such a destructive bill? And why would Rousseff not just veto it right away? Simple: industrial farmers and loggers have a stranglehold on congress and this powerful lobby claims current legislation is freezing development in Brazil. Others say forest must be converted into farmland to tackle rising food prices in Brazil.

None of these arguments hold water. The incredible development of Brazilian agriculture in the past decade is due to investment in more efficient farming and has been fuelled by the rising price of food commodities over 10 years. It has nothing to do with needing more access to forests. In Brazil, 200 million cattle roam over 500m acres. More efficient farming will free more land without any need for deforestation.

Every threat to the Amazon is a threat to indigenous life. The forest code would allow deforestation in previously protected areas. The interests of those that have lived in the forests for generations are being put second to those of commercial land speculators. Environmentalists who have spoken out to protect the forest have been harassed, threatened and even killed by thugs.

But this is not just a dispute between businessmen and environmentalists. More than 79% of Brazilians reject the new bill. All former environment ministers , whatever their political leaning, have joined forces to express their strong opposition to this issue and recently, even some of the top businessmen in Brazil came out against the forest code. More than 2 million people have signed a global Avaaz campaign calling on Rousseff to use her veto. Tens of thousands have signed the petition and thousands have called Rousseff's office and Brazilian embassies across the world. This bill is now as important to people living in the islands of São Tomé as it is for those in São Paulo.

The government has a proud record of protecting the environment: in the past few years Brazil vastly reduced deforestation rates, achieving a 78% decline between 2004 and 2011. Rousseff came to office promising to firmly oppose any amnesty to the destroyers of the forest. It is now up to her to stick to her promises and maintain the environmental records of her predecessor.

Brazil's track record made it the natural host of next month's critical Earth summit – the most important global environmental summit in 20 years. More than 50,000 people from all over the world will come to Rio and discuss the fate of the planet and how to accelerate the fight against environmental destruction, the collapse of biodiversity, and climate warming.

Rousseff will host the summit – a massive responsibility that requires legitimacy. But if she allows this bill to pass, Brazil will not be seen as a credible host of Rio+20.

A veto by Rousseff will be an act of global leadership, a gesture desperately needed to win the fight against climate change. An approval by her will cast a dark shadow over her presidency and Brazil's authority in these global forums. Worse still, a victory for big business profits over the planet's future will set a frightening precedent for the protection of the last remaining forests across our world. Brazil is seen by many countries as a model of 21st century development. This is a crucial moment to define what kind of model Brazil wants to be.

Millions of people will be watching Rousseff as she comes to a decision on this forest code. It is a decision that will have an impact on all our futures.

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Bidders certainly had a taste for lunch with Hugh Grant, but sadly a spa date with Nancy Dell'Olio proved less appetising

• The prime minister may call his opponents "muttering idiots", but within barely an hour of his comments at PMQs harmony had broken out along the corridor at Westminster, where 40 black and Asian parliamentarians from all the main parties gathered for a photograph to celebrate the election of postwar Britain's first minority MPs 25 years ago. "I get on with all of them," said the normally pugnacious Diane Abbott, one of those elected in 1987. Lib Dem peer Floella Benjamin was even more effusive about those in rival colours. Does she expect to see a black prime minister in her lifetime? "Definitely," she said, pointing to shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna. "I'm proud of what he's achieved." Yes, well done everyone, but that's enough cross-party goodwill. I'm feeling a little queasy.

• Good to see Lord Glasman popping up on Newsnight in an impenetrable discussion about the "John Lewis model". Glasman, Ed Miliband's former guru and founder of Blue Labour, has been lying low since January when he said the party had "no strategy, no narrative and very little energy" and that Ed had "flickered rather than shone". Now he's back, and on 23 June is staging a day-long conference at King's College London – a "speed-dating" event at which Blue Labourites can exchange info in a series of one-to-ones. But if you go along, avoid the word "progressive". "It's the last thing you want to hear when you go to the doctor, isn't it?" says Glasman. "'It's progressive'." He tells this joke at Labour party meetings, which may explain why relations with Miliband are still glacial.

• Commons culture, media and sport select committee chairman John Whittingdale has given his considered view of phone hacking. "We are under no illusion," he says sonorously. "These are serious matters. The conclusions we have reached bear profound consequences. I am not entirely clear what those consequences are, but there is no question that these are very serious matters." Thanks for sharing those insights, John.

• Congratulations to Alastair Campbell, who has joined Portland PR as a consultant, specialising in "strategic corporate communications and crisis management". "Despite all the negative definitions of spin," Campbell tells PR Week, "strategic comms is really important. It's something that Britain, as an industry, does well. So many organisations are tactical when what they need is strategy. I have an understanding of strategy that is pretty profound." Indeed. Just don't mention the war.

• Tuesday's glittering Journalism Foundation gala evening climaxed with an auction. Independent owner Evgeny Lebedev paid £14,000 for lunch at Gordon Ramsay's with Hugh Grant and Gillian Anderson; Grant bought a ring for £10,000; and dinner cooked in your own home by bon viveur Mark Hix went for £8,000 (imagine what it would have made if Blur's Alex James hadn't been doing the cheese course). The afternoon at a spa with Nancy Dell'Olio, however, went for an underwaxed £1,750. If only the Diary's invitation hadn't been lost in the post. We would certainly have stumped up more than that.

• I know I vowed not to mention Cannes, but film distribution company Alliance has had the ridiculous idea of charging journos £2,000 for brief interviews with stars of the Croisette. "Psychic journey … emotional closure … never wanted to be next James Bond ... this Canadian art film really appealed … would have taken the part for free … had to lose six stone and learn grade eight clarinet to do it … Dame Judi had a special aura … prefer not to talk about my recent separation or who gets custody of our adopted Yemeni children … Thank you, it's been special." That's saved us a few quid.

• "Perhaps it ought to be pointed out to potential tourists," writes Andrew Belsey in response to yesterday's item about the holiday company recreating the British retreat from Kabul in 1842, "that of the 16,000 British troops and civilians there was just one known survivor." Don't be so negative, Mr Belsey.

• Columnist Sam Leith tweets a timely warning on the dangers of "Diarese": "'Tome' unforgiveable. Like calling Julie Burchill 'la Burchill' or retailing lame joke attrib 'wag'." What else should we diarists avoid? I ask him. "Red faces all round, pistols at dawn, fisticuffs, ouch, miaow, alarums, klaxon, my Bakelite tinkles, wireless, gramophone, popular beat combo, and any story quoting Labour MP Stephen Pound." Ouch!

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

• The first item in the Diary above was amended on 24 May 2012 because it referred incorrectly to "the election of the 20th century's first minority MPs 25 years ago".

As the Balkan economies struggle, the temptation for nationalist solutions will grow. Europe must take note

Two weeks after the political earthquake in Greece, Serbia has now registered a powerful aftershock with the defeat of its incumbent president, Boris Tadic, at the hands of an erstwhile extreme nationalist on Sunday.

The election may look like a localised Serbian matter but it has the potential to develop into a regional and European problem. Apart from the dramas surrounding the Hague war crimes tribunal, the Balkans region has been away from the limelight for many years now. But several of its most significant political and constitutional problems remain unresolved. And now the corrosive impact of the recession and the eurozone crisis threatens to retoxify some of those unresolved issues.

The tremors of the election aftershock have been felt well beyond Belgrade because the new president, Tomislav Nikolic, was once the loyal servant and designated successor to Vojislav Seselj – self-proclaimed leader of the murderous Serbian Chetnik movement – who has been on trial in The Hague since 2007.

Nikolic's supporters point out that since his public break with Seselj in 2008, he has trodden a resolutely pro-European path and discarded the uncompromising nationalism of his earlier career. Nonetheless, though Bosnia-Herzegovina is a political mess it would look even worse if the winds of nationalism started blowing from its neighbour. Equally, Kosovo's independence remains contested, backed by the key western powers but opposed by both Serbia and Russia.

In recent months, the EU high representative, Cathy Ashton, and her diplomatic team have been making steady progress in closing the gap between Belgrade and Prishtina. But if President Nikolic were to pursue a hardline on Kosovo then this good work could unravel. The stakes are high.

Ironically, Tadic's unexpected loss at the polls does not reflect any resurgent nationalism among the Serbian electorate. Rather he is being punished because the government, led by his Democratic party (DS), has presided over an increasingly calamitous economic downturn. Unemployment now stands at around 25% while in January US Steel pulled out of Smederevo, the metallurgical complex that accounts for 14% of Serbia's exports and on whom some 200,000 Serbs are directly or indirectly dependent.

Serbia's urban middle class, disillusioned by the economic failure and by a series of major corruption scandals, stayed away from the polling booths. Most striking of all was Nikolic's victory over Tadic in Belgrade, the stronghold of liberal Serbs. Now politicians outside Serbia are quietly holding their breath. Will Nikolic allow his erstwhile prejudices to spill out and unsettle regional stability?

In the immediate future, this is unlikely. The west, the US, Britain and Germany in particular put considerable diplomatic effort into persuading Nikolic to break with Seselj in the first place, arguing that unless he embraced the European Union he would always remain a marginal figure. In his first comments to the press, Nikolic stated that Germany was "Serbia's most important political ally", a particular surprise given that Angela Merkel has warned Serbia very publicly that it must soften its position on Kosovo or never achieve its overriding political goal – EU membership.

Furthermore, Nikolic as president does not appoint the government – he merely invites the leader of the biggest party in parliament to try to form a government. His own SNS is the largest party following parliamentary elections two weeks before the presidential runoff, but it will find it hard to find suitable coalition partners. So there is now a strong possibility that Boris Tadic will become prime minister at the head of a coalition government. The buzz word in Belgrade is "cohabitation", which will reduce the possibility of any dramatic shift to the right.

However, Nikolic's victory, combined with the disturbing rise of populism in Hungary, Serbia's neighbour to the north, should act as a wake-up call to the EU. The eurozone crisis has witnessed a rise in nationalist and even fascist parties on most parts of the continent. With some of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty, Balkan countries are susceptible to this creeping sickness. Indeed, one could argue that it is a credit to Balkan electorates that so far they have resisted the lure of nationalism.

But as their economies sag further (as they are predicted to do), the temptation for nationalist solutions will increase. Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia are all still grappling with profound issues of political identity and stability which could yet turn nasty. It's another very good reason for European leaders to confront the crisis and stimulate economic growth.

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If the raising of the age limit for fertility treatment helps mend broken hearts, it should be a cause for celebration not concern

Evil scientists have just announced plans to bleed the NHS dry by forcing taxpayers to fund wizened old selfish harlots in their quest to swamp the country with bespoke, trophy babies. Actually, all that really happened was this: the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) announced it was recommending the extension of NHS IVF fertility treatment to women aged between 40 and 42, in recognition of new research suggesting they would benefit. But you wouldn't have been able to tell that, given the hostility of responses on radio phone-ins and internet comment sections.

What is it about fertility treatment that causes so much rage? The arguments of the furious protesters are well worn, namely that having a baby is a selfish lifestyle choice, not a right, and that non life-threatening ailments have no place being offered by a public health service that is trembling under the raised boot of a government demonstrably committed to wrecking it.

Given that the majority of NHS treatments are for non life-threatening ailments, including an increasing number of self-inflicted problems, this seems curious. The number of individuals seeking fertility treatment, either from the NHS or privately, is relatively small. NHS Devon for example treated 396 people between 2008 and 2010, offering them one cycle of IVF, at a total cost of £1m over three years. In comparison to the amount NHS trusts spend on emerging lifestyle ailments such as alcohol abuse, smoking or obesity, that figure is a drop in the ocean.

If there's something medically wrong with an individual, and modern science has a solution to assist them, why would we object? Regardless of which partner has the fertility problem, it's the woman who must undergo the physical and emotional stress of IVF, and one can't help sensing a background hum of misogyny in some of the voices raised in protest at their publicly funded treatment. Why did these women leave it so late, they cry; who are they to think they can swan about enjoying careers and then come running to the doctor when they find cobwebs jamming their biological clocks?

This is, of course, codswallop. There's little evidence that the small rise in age limit will see the wine bars of Hampstead suddenly empty of fortysomething, chain-smoking, female investment bankers, too busy and self obsessed to have had children, as they hurry to have that fertilised egg implanted at the taxpayers' expense. There are endless events and circumstances resulting in infertility, and age is only one of them. The new upper age limit recognises that many couples behave socially responsibly by waiting until they feel financially stable enough to start a family or until a relationship is secure, and thus discover their medical problems at a later stage. Same-sex couples may also have problems in delayed diagnosis given that their plans to have children can often be complicated.

Singling out IVF to be the front-runner of a deserving and undeserving health service is an unpalatable notion. To remain an effective, free at point of delivery service, the NHS must work hard to maintain the non-judgmental equality of its provision. To erode that leads us into ugly territory, where we question whether we should stitch Darren's ear back on again after his third drunken brawl of the month, or provide a mobility scooter for a 23-stone fast food devotee. That way lies a diminution of essential values that most of us cherish.

The reality is that non-fertile men and women across the country, of all races, classes and sexual orientation, have had broken hearts mended with the help of medical science, and this should be cause for celebration rather than concern.

And as for one radio phone-in guest who complained about IVF creating more feral, antisocial mouths to feed, one can only feel sympathy. Who can fail to be concerned about the growing numbers of 48-year-old unemployed lesbians next door and their violent IVF asbo twins? Oh, for pity's sake, grow up.

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Parmigiano has long been revered as a perfect ingredient, but it will be years before farmers can recover from this earthquake

As if there is not enough to worry about in Europe with the euro, the earthquake in northern Italy has made an enormous impact on the most famous Italian cheese Parmigiano Reggiano and its equally popular cousin, Grana Padano, with production losses of up to 10%.

This crushing disaster, with the loss of lives and land centring around San Giovanni near to Bologna, will no doubt bring hardship to the farmers and the cheesemakers.

How will the animals that have endured this quake be affected? Something like this brings not only destruction of the grazing pastures, which are the main source of fodder, but also the shock to the livestock affects the quality and quantity of the milk production. Around 550 litres of cows' milk make just one Parmigiano Reggiano, and with grasslands needing to be resown, herds depleted and their milk quality affected, it will be years before production can be restored to any decent level for selling.

All the younger cheeses aged up to six months would have been entirely ruined, as well as the brine baths where young cheeses are left to soak up the salty water. We can assume that prices for parmesan and Grana will increase, even though Grana is produced in a much wider area than parmesan's very specific locations.

And the government will probably have to help or indeed get help from other EU countries to fund the restoration process and maintain the livelihood of the farmers and cheesemakers in order that they can carry on.

Parmigiano Reggiano has been with us for over nine centuries. Rather like Italian olive oil, which has superstar status and is called Italian Gold, parmigiano is revered as a perfect ingredient and condiment since it enhances all sorts of dishes from vegetables to meat and fish.

This unique cheese has something of the umami flavour burst about it. Defining the depth of taste from sweetly caramel to salty gritty, it is a perfect accompaniment to food as it heightens your tastebuds and makes food appear to be even more tasty. The long, slow maturing process also means that the cheese has a concentration of proteins and a slow-burn effect making it easier to digest. In turn, it is one of the few super foods perfect for the very young to the very old. Athletes not only have pasta as part of their diet when training, but the addition of Parmigiano or Grana gives a huge energy boost, too.

Once it was only available in little shaker containers where the finely ground, foul-smelling cheese was poured over overcooked spaghetti and was either loved or hated. Over the years we have been educated not only by specialist cheese shops, but also food writers and more so by television travel and food programmes to the extent that some are now extremely snobbish about which zone our parmesan comes from. Do we get mountain or valley, river Po to the east or river Reno to the west, or even cheeses from the milk of the red cow breed? Do we have two-year, three-year or four-year? Just nibbling a piece of matured cheese with a glass of prosecco is one of life's real delights, and for all of us who really love food and want to taste "terroir" in its purest form, then a Parmigiano Reggiano is simply Emilia Romagna on a plate.

After this week, our much-loved sprinkling of parmesan on pasta, risotto and shavings over salad will hopefully not be a thing of the past, but just more carefully portion-controlled.

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Nick Clegg's desire to fast-stream clever kids out of deprivation leaving the rest facing shabby prospects is hardly communism

It's an interesting week that sees Vince Cable accused of being a socialist (by the Tory donor Adrian Beecroft) and Nick Clegg accused of "communist tactics" (by the headmaster of a private school, Tim Hands). What would Marx say? (Coincidentally, I have this written on my mug.) Leaving Cable's firebrand trottery aside for a second, Clegg's Stalinism stems from his speech on social mobility, to launch the Sutton Trust's report.

The figures in this report are stark but unsurprising – one child in five is on free school meals, but only one in 100 Oxbridge entrants is; that's probably the most arresting statistic in terms of how poverty suffocates one's prospects. Just as enraging is the fact that only 7% of children attend private schools, but these schools provide 70% of high court judges.

Nick "Commie" Clegg concludes that the government needs some targets; except because that word is so last century, they now talk of "annual trackers" – 17 measures, including the number of A to Cs in GCSE results among children on free school meals, and participation in higher education of those from poorer backgrounds.

Tim Hands' objection is that if factors such as background are taken into account by universities, it will be commensurately harder for kids from great privilege to get into Oxbridge. He calls this "capping the achievements of pupils in independent schools".

I think he's a really good example of my new theory; just as privatised medicine leads to the over-treatment of the rich and under-treatment of the poor, private schools over-educate the rich. This leads to many of them being educated beyond their intelligence.

It's a precarious, unenviable position, particularly for those with enough dog sense to be aware of it. When the suggestion is made that universities should broaden their criteria, and look at factors beyond a pupil's accent and how many times they've read the Iliad, you can hardly blame the insecure creatures of privilege for freaking out.

Social mobility sounds unarguable, but like so many other ideas that are apparently self-evident – the primacy of the "hard-working family", the ubiquity of "generations of worklessness" – its apparent simplicity is a cover. It's not Clegg's fault, incidentally: social mobility has been a policy-wonk buzzword for as long as child poverty targets have been in place – targets which, incidentally, will not be met.

This brings me to my first point: you can call it a target or a tracker, but this school of governance – imagine your ideal outcome, plot the signs that your outcome is being achieved, codify those signs into a "target", but never actually change anything – doesn't work. The child poverty targets weren't achieved because no serious attack was made on income inequality.

The social mobility "trackers" will most probably lead to the blaming of schools in poor areas, as they try to achieve those five A to Cs for disadvantaged kids; schools will learn to game the system, resulting in grade inflation; there will be an annual ding-dong with rectors from Oxford and Cambridge as it emerges that they've managed in yet another year not to find a single black person clever enough to study history. And that will be that. No serious change will occur because no serious policy lies behind the call for change.

Moreover, even if social mobility was achieved, what is so great about a society in which the outliers of each class can move relatively freely up and down the hierarchy? What's so great about being able to escape the gutter, when the bulk of people are still in it?

Part of the reason that class has become so ossified is that, in this time of great inequality, the consequences of dropping from any given class to the one below it are severe – you would move heaven and earth to prevent your children fetching up in blue-collar employment when wages at the bottom are no longer enough to live on. No wonder people try to lock in their privilege by paying for education. The only rational solution to that is to work towards a time when there is less difference between the classes.

This new-soft-left alternative, where you fix it to fast-stream the clever kids out of deprivation, leaving the rest to blame themselves for their shabby prospects because they turned out not to be clever enough … well, obviously it's not what any sensible person would call communism. It's not what you'd call socialism either. It's not liberal egalitarianism, or any of those more fine-tuned theories that make it possible to be a leftie and still own a house. It's not left wing and, fundamentally, it doesn't make anything any better.

Even if the waters of the social fountain were in perpetual motion (and you can bet that Clegg doesn't mean that by "social mobility" – he's talking about other people's kids having the freedom to rise, not his own having the potential to fall), you'd still have to accept, even embrace, the idea of some people living and dying in the sludge. Who could ever line up behind such a laughably shoddy vision of the future, a world in which everything looks roughly the same, but each class has had a very slight reshuffle in personnel?

This debate, as it's framed by the coalition – do you believe in social mobility, or do you believe in sink or swim? – is bankrupt (like so much else). I don't believe in either.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

Beyond Tahrir Square Egypt's uprising is one that intersects with grassroots struggles in Europe: that's what the elites fear most

The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt's political tumult in the past 18 months. A stone's throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades by both revolutionaries and pro-Mubarak militias, and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals' most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect. They gaze over the gardens of the Egyptian Museum – a regular home for one of the army's pop-up torture and detention centres where those still daring to rally for meaningful change have been brutally acquainted with the realities of a junta-curated "transition" to democratic rule.

This month my buildings' latest revolutionary iteration was unveiled – two giant billboards sporting beaming mugshots of Ahmed Shafiq: former Mubarak-era prime minister, current presidential candidate and feloul ("regime remnant") figurehead par excellence. The elections campaign's last batch of polls suggests Shafiq could emerge triumphant, sounding what many in the media would describe as the final death knell to the "liberal revolutionaries" of Tahrir who have been steadily battered – by guns at the hands of the state security forces, and by public delegitimisation at the hands of the state media – since those heady images of collective protest conquered global TV screens 18 months ago.

If Shafiq fails to win, the argument goes, then the similarly regime-tarnished former foreign minister Amr Moussa may squeak over the line, or the victor may emerge from one of the two Islamist camps consisting of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Mursi and a Brotherhood breakaway alternative, Abdel Munim Aboul Fotouh. Any of the above options are said to be a sad body-blow to the spirit of Tahrir, but the very existence of a democratic electoral process is itself trumpeted as a conclusive success for the revolution.

There are a million empirical holes that could be picked in this chronicle – the only results we have so far (from Egyptians voting abroad) put Moussa and Shafiq in fourth and fifth places respectively, while the lazy insistence of characterising Aboul Fotouh as an unreconstructed Islamist (and hence automatically anti-Tahrir) bears little relation to the substance of his support on the ground. But away from the specifics, is this general evaluation even the best way of conceptualising the revolution? Or is the battle for the presidency merely the institutional tip of a far deeper revolutionary iceberg, just one site of contest and dissent among many – some of which have just as big a part to play in determining the country's political and socioeconomic future?

Two misapprehensions underpin much of the discussion. The first is that the metric of revolutionary success lies solely in the formal arena of institutional politics, and the development of democratic mechanisms within it. The second is that Tahrir, along with the ludicrously titled "Facebook youth" who populated the square in January and February last year, is the only alternative space in which pressure on the formal arena is thrashed out.

That pair of skewed observational lenses produces a narrative that suits many elites – both domestic and international – because it contains the energy of the revolution within relatively safe limits. If the ultimate goal of the revolution is the establishment of "representative" institutions, and revolutionary progress can be measured along a linear scale with the authoritarianism of Arab autocracy at one end and the holy grail of western liberal democracy at the other, then the contours of political change thrown up by the Arab uprisings can be squeezed neatly into existing global power dynamics, reinforcing them in the process.

In reality, the purview of Egypt's revolution is far wider, posing a potentially more powerful and existential challenge to present systems of political and economic control.

And it's that energy which those who benefit from the status quo, from western governments to multinational corporations, really fear. Little wonder that there has been a rush by the world's most powerful entities – from Hillary Clinton and David Cameron to Morgan Chase and General Electric – to simultaneously venerate Tahrir (as long as the demands voiced within it don't overstep the mark), echo the generals' calls for "stability" (shutting down broader discourses of dissent in the process) and form links with the largely neoliberal Muslim Brotherhood (whose policies, despite anguished op-eds in Washington thinktank journals, pose little threat to American interests, and indeed offer up many opportunities).

The Islamist/secularist divide gets all the attention and is undoubtedly important – but it's also only one faultline among many, and a convenient one to concentrate on at that, as it smartly sidesteps the deeper rumblings of discontent that are continuing to sound below Egypt's skin. As long as the basic tenets of Egypt's Chicago-school economic orthodoxy remain stable, men with beards v women with no headscarves is a political divide that western policymakers and Egyptian elites are happy to contend with.

What they're less keen to acknowledge – because it carries the revolution out of its sheltered borders – are the other trenches that are increasingly being etched at the margins of Egyptian society, dividing those who have reaped pharaoh-esque riches as a result of 20-odd years of "structural adjustment" from those left behind in zones of neoliberal exclusion.

You don't have to move far from Tahrir to find these social cleavages. They aren't packaged for primetime but remain deep, growing and fuelled by grievances that none of the presidential candidates knows how to resolve within the existing political and economic apparatus. Islands of informal settlements dot the Nile whose residents battle security forces to avoid eviction – a government-orchestrated community clear-out to make way for financially speculative holiday resorts.

Travel north-east up the river to Damietta, and you'll find Egyptians who have been blocking ports and facing down tanks in protest at the pollution from nearby foreign-owned chemical factory. You can sail south to Qena, where locals have occupied railway lines and threatened to sever the electricity supply running from the Aswan dam to the north. From those employed directly by the state – like the central security force conscripts who mutinied a fortnight ago – to those locked stubbornly outside it, such as the Bedouins of Dabaa on the Mediterranean coastline who recently stormed a government nuclear plant and blew up an under-construction reactorto demonstrate against the illegal appropriation of their land, Egyptians are asserting control over their communities, their livelihoods and their future.

Forget Shafiq's advertising hoardings: the revolution is everywhere and it is potent. It encompasses the educated middle-classes as well as the urban and rural poor, and while subalterns may make contingent and strategic alliances with a wide variety of political forces – from political Islamists to former Mubarak acolytes – in the long term the inability of those forces to even articulate a language of genuine change, never mind actually deliver it, means that rapid mobilisation of protests on the street is always only a single volatile moment away.

Contrary to popular perception, Egypt has been a nucleus of radical dissent throughout its history, and certainly long before the anti-Mubarak uprising exploded. Just ask the residents of Kafr el-Dawwar, site of a barely reported insurgency in 1984; or the farmers of Sarandu, who in 2005 fought armed thugs and riot police attempting to seize their plots in accordance with a new Mubarak-promulgated "liberalising" land law. The difference now is that those agitating for transformation know that the winds of revolution are behind them, transforming what could otherwise be purely "local" or "parochial" concerns into a sustained and collective assault on the status quo.

As the sociologist Asef Bayat has argued, actions that appear to be individualistic strategies for survival and not explicitly political attempts to bring down elites can, in the right circumstances, become unstoppable and interlinked channels of mass rejection, a struggle for real agency in an era of globalised corporate cosmopolitanism that strives to deny it to so many. This is Egypt's revolution, one that intersects with grassroots struggles from Athens to Madrid, Sanaa to Santiago, and it is the revolution that existing elites are scared of the most.

The Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El Fattah was once asked whether he'd like to see the revolution establish a British (parliamentary) or American (presidential) system of liberal democracy. "Neither," he replied. "We want something better than both."

In that light, does the presidential election – and those looming billboards of Ahmed Shafiq that flicker late into the night – really matter? Absolutely, because its winner will assume a crucial role in either enlarging or restricting the space in which those far broader struggles play out.

But is this month's vote the all-encompassing final product to be spat out at the end of the creaking revolutionary factory line, now that the "Tahrir youth" have been supposedly muted? That's what the revolution's enemies are hoping. They are likely to be proved wrong.

International Monetary Fund says UK should cut tax and borrowing costs to kickstart economy

Are there tears at the demise of the Orange prize? Not from AS Byatt

• Last Saturday, Meg Hillier, Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, made a surprise visit to the home of one of her constituents – miscarriage-of-justice victim Sam Hallam. According to some sources, it did not go well. Hallam's supporters believe Hillier ignored his case while he was in prison, and they're not going to let her forget it. Veteran campaigner Paul May, who helped free the Birmingham Six and Bridgewater Four and chaired the Hallam campaign, recalls going to see Hillier about the case five years ago. He says she refused to get involved on the grounds that she did not deal with third parties. "There has been nothing but hostility from Meg Hillier," says May. "On one memorable occasion she said: 'Lots of mothers tell me their sons are innocent'." Hillier says she has no recollection of making that remark, that since May wasn't at Hallam's home at the weekend he couldn't know how the visit went, and that her rule has always been to deal with her constituents directly. Nor does she think it would be helpful to the family for her to engage in a slanging match with May, or to reveal confidential details of the case. "If you drag my name through the mud," she says, "so be it." "We don't want to drag her name through the mud," says May. "We just want her to leave the family alone."

• The Orange prize's final chapter has not made everyone tearful. "I shan't mourn it," says AS Byatt, who won the Booker for Possession in 1990. "I never allowed my books to go forward, because I didn't believe you should have a prize that favoured one's sex. You would never be allowed to have a men-only prize. Women should have everything that men have, but they shouldn't have their own little sheep pens."

• Leveson the Musical was a huge viral success on YouTube, and really ought to be staged properly. Most of the casting is straightforward – Gary Oldman as Leveson, Joseph Fiennes as Mr Jay, Sidse Babett Knudsen as Carine Patry Hoskins, Mr Burns from the Simpsons as Rupert Murdoch, Smithers as James Murdoch, Nicole Kidman as you know who. But who can play Jay's sidekick, David Barr? Best suggestion gets tickets to the opening night when we raise the £3m we need to put it on.

• To the Chelsea flower show, as we diarists like to say, where the publicity-crazed organisers helpfully hand out a list of visiting celebs. We rubbed shoulders with Anneka Rice, Christopher Biggins, Esther Rantzen, Floella Benjamin, Lionel Blair, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Louis Walsh. And they say there are no stars any more.

• "Richard Desmond – What I learned at Auschwitz", proclaims the masthead of this week's Jewish Chronicle. Just above another teaser (with pic) that salivates "It's time for cheesecake". A trifle unfortunate?

• Yorkshire-based tour operator Hinterland Travel is offering the holiday of a lifetime – a two-week break to Afghanistan in October, retracing the British army's famous retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad in the first Afghan war of 1839-42. "This is a very new trek for us and subject to various problems on the ground," admits Hinterland, "but none surpassing those that the British army had in January 1842 as they abandoned Kabul. The weather was ferocious – sleet, snow, ice and intense cold – and the attacks from the Afghan tribesmen constant and unrelentingly pitiless. We begin in Kabul, enjoy the city and acclimatise ourselves before we depart to the countryside to meet our pack ponies and guides." Just £2,100 for the fortnight. See you there.

• The Diary is gripped by the Olympic torch's epic journey around the UK. One is learning so much. Who, for instance, would have thought that Will.i.am from The Voice, who proudly carried the torch through Taunton on Monday, was a Somerset boy, or that rap had such a heritage there?

• The shadow cabinet held their weekly meeting yesterday in the Olympic Park aquatics centre. Sorry, that's just too easy. Please write your own item making amusing use of the words waving, drowning and sinking.

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

EU elites are trying to scare Greeks and Irish into swallowing austerity, but it's they who brought the economy to its knees

Democracy has never been the European Union's strongest suit. It's an institution where the unelected and the barely accountable have always called the shots – and electorates are routinely made to vote again if they get the answer wrong in a referendum. So perhaps it's no surprise that as soon as it became clear the Greeks would be given another say on the austerity programme that has already driven their country into 1930s-style depression, the threats and bullying began in earnest.

The entire European establishment has now lined up to scare Greeks off giving another majority to anti-austerity parties, as they did in explosive elections earlier this month. Europe's revolt against austerity has to be contained. Democratic niceties about not interfering in other countries' elections have been ditched. If Greeks vote for parties such as the radical left Syriza – now leading in most opinion polls – they will be voting to leave the euro, Europe's political elite has warned.

"To remain in the euro," the unelected EU commission president José Manuel Barroso declared, "Greece must respect its commitments". By commitments, he meant the package of pulverising privatisations, tax rises and cuts in jobs, pay and services demanded by the EU and IMF in exchange for loans which cannot be repaid and are reducing the country to beggary. Knowing most Greeks both reject death-spiral austerity and want to stay in the euro, Europe's political class is ratcheting up the fear of forced exit meltdown.

Most preposterous has been the British prime minister David Cameron lecturing Greeks on their responsibilities from outside the eurozone. "You can either vote to stay in the euro, with all the commitments you've made," he declared, "or you're effectively voting to leave". Fellow Tory minister Ken Clarke warned the Greeks of "serious consequences" if they voted for "cranky extremists". This from a government that demands growth from Europe while driving its own economy into a double-dip recession with homegrown austerity.

Meanwhile, the Irish are getting similar treatment, as the country's elites try to scare voters into backing the EU's permanent austerity treaty in a referendum later this month. Crucial to the campaign has been the threat that Ireland will be denied future emergency bailout funds for its own shrinking economy if the treaty is rejected. So far, that has kept the yes campaign ahead, even though Sinn Féin has mirrored the European trend by doubling its support to more than 20% on the back of opposition to the country's failed austerity programme.

But in both cases, the threats are phoney. The legal basis of the treaty clause the Irish government is claiming would cut off future bailout funds is strongly contested and the prospect unrealistic. And Greeks are not voting on whether to stay in or leave the euro next month. They are voting on whether to continue to reject a shock therapy programme that even those demanding its implementation know can only drive Greece deeper into debt and destitution.

There is now a strong likelihood that the country will end up leaving the euro, whichever way it turns – and that may well offer Greece the most realistic chance of eventual recovery. But it's not what parties such as Syriza are demanding. Instead, its leader Alexis Tsipras has been in Paris and Berlin this week calling for a halt to Greece's debt repayments, and negotiations with Europe's leaders on a new deal.

The stronger the vote for anti-austerity parties, the better the chance that those negotiations could produce more than cosmetic results. That's because the threat of a disorderly Greek default – which could still take place inside the euro – has the potential to trigger a cascade of bank runs and knock-on crises across the eurozone whose impact could dwarf the Lehmans crash of 2008.

Greece is, after all, only the state furthest down the road of collapse. The threat to crippled Spain could already be on a much larger scale. Across the eurozone, the banking system is once again tipping towards breakdown, as self-defeating austerity deepens the crisis.

As one EU commissioner told me yesterday, "this austerity union is simply not sustainable". Eurozone leaders' attempt to solve the crisis by "internal devaluation" – cutting wages and services across the southern periphery to restore competitiveness – was a "complete disaster", he said, that would deliver mass poverty and migration to the north.

But despite hopes that France's new president François Hollande, now backed by Barack Obama, could shift Europe towards jobs and growth, the concessions potentially on offer from Germany's Angela Merkel are not remotely on the scale necessary to overcome the growing crisis. That would need a commitment to fullblown eurobond lending to underpin state debts, a Marshall plan-style programme of fiscal transfers and investment in weaker eurozone states, along with recapitalisation and public takeover of European banks.

But Germany's leaders show no sign of being prepared to foot the bill for the costs of a currency union that has benefited German capital above all but now threatens, like the gold standard in the early 20th century, to bring Europe's economy to its knees.

But the eurozone's implosion isn't only the result of a cockeyed, one-size-fits-all currency structure that was always going to buckle and fracture under pressure. It's also 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.

Asked who they held responsible for the Greek crisis at the weekend, 50% of Britons polled rightly blamed the banks, 22% Brussels – and only 4% the Greek people. But the eurozone breakdown is also the product of a generation of EU treaty-enforced privatisation, market deregulation and corporate liberalisation that paved the way for the crisis across Europe, including in Britain.

It's that inbuilt neoliberal dimension of the EU, central to debates in mainland Europe, that has been missing from the growing political pressure for a referendum on EU membership in Britain – but has played a central role in this crisis. Across the continent, whether in or out of the eurozone, the need for a break with a failed economic model could not be more pressing.

Twitter@SeumasMilne

The government's decision to direct resources to nuclear and wind is typical of an institution befuddled and beset by lobbyists

Anyone who claims to understand energy policy is either mad or subsidised. Last week I wrote that politics is seldom rational. It is more often based on intuition and tribal prejudice. This week we have a thundering example: the government's new policy on nuclear energy.

Do not read on if you want a conclusion on this subject. For years I have read papers, books, surveys and news stories, and am little wiser. I trust to science and am ready to believe there is some great mathematician, some Fermat's last theorem, who can write an equation showing where energy policy should turn. I have never met him.

The equation would start with the current market price of coal, gas, oil, nuclear and so-called "renewables". That would give simple primacy to coal and gas. The equation would then factor in such variables as security of supply, which – being imponderable – can be argued from commercial interest and prejudice. Then it would have to take account of global warming and the virtue of lower carbon emissions. At this point the demons enter.

We must consider CO₂ reduction through substituting gas for coal, carbon capture, nuclear investment, biomass, wind, wave, solar and tidal generation. We must consider the application of fiscal policy to gas and petrol use, to energy efficiency and house insulation. Each has a quantity attached to it and each a fanatical lobby drooling for subsidies. As for achieving a remotely significant degree of global cooling, that requires world diplomacy – which has, as yet, proved wholly elusive.

Britain's contribution to cooling can only be so infinitesimal as to be little more than gesture politics, yet it is a gesture that is massively expensive. Meeting the current EU renewables directive, largely from wind, would cost some £15bn a year, or £670 a household, and involve the spoliation of swaths of upland, countryside and coast. It is calculated to save a mere 0.2% of global emissions, with negligible impact on the Earth's sea level.

Yet the government wants to commit a staggering £100bn to wind farm subsidies over the next decade, almost all to rich landowners. Northamptonshire, with England's most planned wind farms per acre (and least wind), will probably have turbines visible from horizon to horizon. Will this really so impress China and India as to persuade them to change their emissions policies? It is like a primitive tribe burning its wives and treasure to awe an enemy into submission.

So complex is the mathematics of these calculations that it rapidly dissolves into naked prejudice: irrational fear of nuclear, urban hatred of landscape, leftwing loathing for oil companies. Yesterday the government was forced to pretend that it is not subsidising nuclear power at all, a fuel I can support but which is ruinously expensive on present, probably exaggerated, estimates of risk. Investing in it would require massive government intervention – with consumers paying some £200 a year above the market price of electricity – almost as much as does "free" wind power.

The energy minister, Ed Davey, squirmed on the BBC yesterday morning, a politician who could not persuade people he was doing the right thing – and was therefore probably doing the wrong one.

Energy policy is a dark underworld populated by fanatics and necromancers. Read through the literature and you will learn that nuclear means tsunamis, terrorists and Frankenstein monsters, or is as harmless as a local radiology clinic. Biomass is the new dawn, or threatens half the world's forests. Wind turbines are free energy, or they tear up peat and exhaust Mongolian minerals.

We face a "peak oil" crisis, or we do not. We face a nuclear winter, or not. We can live for ever on shale gas, or it causes earthquakes. The world is doomed anyway (James Lovelock) or not doomed at all (Nigel Lawson). All Europe could be wired to the Saharan desert, or perhaps only in theory.

We feel our way through this miasma by relying on gut instinct or on those we blindly trust. The public sums allotted in grants and price enhancements to green energy – with 8 million people facing fuel poverty – are so enormous they have bred an army of lobbyists clamouring to protect every programme for every resource under, and including, the sun. They pounce hysterically on any opponent of their favoured watt or therm.

For my part, I must patiently await my mathematician. Until then I will never be persuaded that the beauty of the British landscape should be sacrificed for an insignificant reduction in global warming, one that is obliterated by a Chinese power station in minutes. My view is reinforced by the Welsh scientist, Sir Roger Williams, in his 2009 British Academy lecture. He remarked his "greatest hope among renewables is of tidal power … both predictable and potentially substantial". He supported the Severn barrage, a sacrifice of landscape preferable to putting the Cambrian mountains under wind turbines.

Another trusty is Dieter Helm, Oxford professor of energy policy, who makes the seemingly obvious point that since gas is cheap and prevalent and has lower emissions than coal, the biggest carbon gain is won by a straight switch from coal to gas. As for preferring direct resources to the two most expensive energy sources, nuclear and offshore wind, that could appeal only to an institution now as befuddled and beset by lobbyists as the British Treasury.

The asbo is dead – but a brace of souped-up new jargon is no shortcut to solving the problem of antisocial behaviour

'Antisocial behaviour" – was ever a phrase so pervasive? Umpteen home secretaries pledged to solve this terrible blight – to protect the "decent" and punish the "yobs". From begging, barking dogs and noisy neighbours to drug dealing, vandalism and violence, this euphemism posing as law covered everything from the irritating to the fatal. Section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 encompasses behaviour "likely to cause harassment, alarm and distress". In our everyday dealings, we have long been used to broad and evolving concepts of what is socially welcome, acceptable, inept and unpleasant. But does such vague breadth make just or strong law?

The guest who arrives late, hogs the conversation, becomes drunk and obnoxious, makes a pass at his hostess and punches his host, has obviously behaved "antisocially" according to cultural norms and the statutory definition. But exactly how much of this should be regulated by the law, let alone mediated by police, local authority and court intervention?

In an attempted shortcut to policing and justice, asbos dangerously blurred moral and legal distinctions between serious criminal activity and nuisance. They created "personalised penal codes" that set the young, vulnerable or mentally ill up to fail – fast-tracking offenders into, rather than away from, custody. Asbos were doled out preventing people begging, swearing, speaking sarcastically, wearing certain types of clothing or not enough of it.

In 2010 a man appeared in court for breaching an order prohibiting him from laughing, staring or slow-clapping. In 2005 a repeatedly suicidal woman was given an asbo banning her from going near railway lines, bridges and rivers.

The experiment failed. From 2003 to 2009, the breach rate rocketed from 40% to 56%. More than half of those proved to have breached their order receive an immediate custodial sentence, swelling already overloaded prisons. The Youth Justice Board reported that asbos were actively sought as a "badge of honour".

So now we learn that under replacement laws new tools will be given to the police, authorities and others that are faster, easier to use, less bureaucratic and less complex.

The asbo is dead. Long live new civil injunctive relief.

It's true that the system will be "streamlined" – 19 measures will be replaced by just six powers. The new criminal behaviour order will be used to ban individuals from particular activities or places and crime prevention injunctions (CPIs) will give agencies an immediate power to "stop bad behaviour before it escalates" – the lower standard of proof for civil orders, meaning CPIs, can be put in place in hours. This means that the authority would have to demonstrate only "on the balance of probabilities" and not "beyond reasonable doubt" that the individual was engaging, had engaged or was likely to engage in antisocial behaviour.

But the reality is little but a facelift for old thinking. Criminal behaviour orders, crime prevention injunctions, community triggers – a brace of souped-up new jargon won't protect the vulnerable. The problem was never about bad manners at the dinner table. It remains about threats, harassment, violence and inequality before the law.

The shocking case of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter doesn't demonstrate the need for special civil or administrative powers. It's about a vulnerable family, threatened and abused for a decade, and the authorities' failure to come to their aid.

Why should the police wait for criminal activity to be reported three times or by five different households before seeking to protect the poor?

They should respond – no matter where you live and without the need for public petition. On a country estate or council estate, victims are entitled to real protection from the criminal law.

The irony of successive governments is that the decimation of civil legal aid provision makes it less easy for the poor to resolve housing and neighbour issues and even harder to hold negligent authorities to account.

Shortcuts around the criminal law tackle neither crime nor its complex causes. They fail to protect both poor and vulnerable victims and those permanently vulnerable to prejudice, suspicion and injustice.

Prime minister suggests Greece would have to quit single currency if voters backed anti-austerity parties

Child-friendly cooking? Hardly Gladstonian, prime minister, but at this stage, every little helps

• Oh dear. Our chillaxed, Fruit Ninja-loving PM really doesn't need this. "Sam's brilliant at just playing with the children and having a great time," he tells Carol Vorderman in the latest issue of Tesco's in-store magazine. "Whereas I'm more of a typical dad – let's go and plant the vegetables, let's go on a cycle ride, let's do a structured activity. My biggest obsession with the kids is cooking. I do a lot of cooking, but I've got into more child-friendly cooking, such as pancakes, baking, rhubarb crumble – anything that involves getting messy and licking the bowl. As a kid, that was always the most exciting thing." Hardly Gladstonian.

• These are difficult days for Mr Cameron, and he's now as short as 3-1 to be evicted from No 10 before the next election. So who should the Diary back to be the next PM? Our mole in the lobby has the answer – dull but dependable Philip Hammond. Self-made millionaire, scourge of the civil service, respected by the right, a grey man for grey times. The odds on him becoming PM have tumbled from 33-1 to 14-1 in the past few days. Remember, you read it here first.

• Was it really appropriate that every radio station responded to the death of Robin Gibb by playing Stayin' Alive. Some decorum, please.

• You will no doubt be going to the anti-GM wheat protest being planned at the test site near Harpenden on Sunday. The action is being cooked up by pressure group Take the Flour Back, and they've just issued a what-to-bring list: OS map; banners, placards and props; messages and photos to tie to the fence around the trial site; bakers' outfits, aprons and hats; seeds to swap; bread and cakes to share (plus "tasty stuff to go with that"). Sounds like my kind of protest.

• Thierry Henry has been hogging the headlines with his plan to demolish a 1990s house in Hampstead designed by award-winning architect Richard MacCormac to make way for a tasteful new mansion (though sadly now minus the planned 40ft fish tank). But not to be outdone, Champions League hero John Terry is close to completing his multimillion-pound Dallas-style house in Oxshott, which will have nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms, eight dressing rooms, an indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, steam room, and obligatory cinema. This is at least his third attempt to build his dream house on the site. But can it really be true he intends to call his new home "Daffodils"? What will the Ukrainian forward line make of that?

• On the subject of daffodils, the hopelessly anglophile BBC New Elizabethans list has only two Welsh-born representatives – Roald Dahl, who was really Norwegian, and ersatz Englishman Roy Jenkins. Where the hell's Tom Jones?

• Bad news on Kusunda. My colleague Max, who has been masterminding our attempt to shore up the imperilled western Nepalese language, has fallen off his bike and broken his collarbone. So for the moment, we have to take a break. Here is Max's moving valedictory offering: Bum: semba. Female genitalia: ghyang. Penis/horn: ipi gidzang. Copulate: ghyadn. Urinate: eneyin. Shit/dung: yang. Thanks, Max. The people of western Nepal are thinking of you.

• Yang! I missed the do at the Commons hosted by the all-party parliamentary group on cannabis and children – "Sharing the Experience". Must have been a hoot.

• We are very taken with the forthcoming show at the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank – Invisible: Art About the Unseen. "You will see an empty plinth and a frame that looks like an empty frame," says gallery director Ralph Rugoff. "Lazy viewers" may reject these blank canvases, he says, but they make you ask "Where is the art in a work of art?" Good point. In the daily battle to fill this column, "art about the unseen" – otherwise known as white space – could prove a useful aesthetic ally.

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

A referendum on EU membership will tempt the Labour leader. But a yes campaign would be short of arguments

Well, who would have thought it? Riding high in the polls, touted as a prospective prime minister even in the rightwing papers, finally Ed Miliband is having a moment.

As the coalition teeters on the edge of an economic cliff, David Cameron finds his best qualities – easygoing confidence, close-knit family, not being Gordon Brown – suddenly twisted against him. A new hunger for intellectual seriousness, for more than the thin gruel of austerity politics, is now working in Miliband's favour. You can feel Westminster wondering whether the geek really shall inherit the earth.

But this new tipping point brings with it a dilemma. How far should Labour now go in consummating some of its racier new friendships?

The biggest reason for the Tory-inclined broadsheets' change of tone is that they're simply reflecting their readers' mood. But they are unlikely also to have missed Labour's new and frankly come-hither signals over the British right's great cause celebre: a referendum on EU membership.

It's still mostly teasing, of course: a flash of Jon Cruddas's ankle, a never-say-never quote from Ed Balls, a flirtation with the Tory mutineer David Davis. But what better way to trigger Conservative civil warfare than outflanking Cameron on his rebels' pet cause? It sounds bold, simple and popular. It reminds voters of the two Eds' early reservations about the euro. And the idea of a referendum – whether staged by Labour, or the coalition under Labour pressure – conveniently happens to delight large, still powerful swaths of the media. No wonder some in the shadow cabinet are tempted.

But it's worth examining where temptation leads, given that talk of a referendum some years hence - when the crisis is over - may not hold for long.

The attraction for the pro-European left is to settle the question once and for all, proving that Britain would still rather be in Europe (and moaning about it) than left out. It's a gamble on mainstream opinion being neither rabidly sceptical nor federalist, but somewhere in the middle.

But even a grudging yes requires having good reason to believe in Europe. And the trouble is that even many of us who feel instinctively pro-European increasingly struggle to articulate precisely why.

It used to be easy. If you were irresistibly drawn towards florid men sporting pound sign badges and complaining about "political correctness gone mad", then you might be pro-withdrawal. Otherwise, not so much. But these days, the "out" brigade is no longer confined to the lunatic fringe: a ComRes poll at the weekend found nearly half of us would vote to quit. Hearts are hardening; as Greece draws closer to an exit from monetary union, the chorus of "I told you so" grows louder, and lifelong pro-Europeans grow more chastened. What's new is that it's no longer unthinkable even for liberals to wonder if the European project as a whole is in peril.

Nor is the banking collapse solely to blame. It's many years since British politicians routinely and enthusiastically made the pro-European case, perhaps because once the prospect of a referendum on the EU constitution or the euro faded, there seemed no urgent need. Peter Mandelson aside, a generation who routinely banged the drum – Robin Cook, Stephen Byers, Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt, Charles Kennedy, Tony Blair himself – left frontline politics, some under a cloud. Like a married couple who stopped making the effort, Britain and Europe drifted apart – with Brussels doing little to help, failing to reform its decision-making or budget in good times, and visibly floundering in bad. Any future yes-to-Europe campaign is now seriously short of compelling arguments.

The old mantra that membership brings jobs and inward investment remains historically true, but a hard sell with youth unemployment running at 50% in Greece or Spain. Trade with EU partners remains critical to British businesses, but that's changing slowly as recession here drives companies towards China or Brazil. And arguing that EU membership helps us to access these new markets is perhaps too complex a point to get across amid all the shouting.

The crisis has arguably strengthened the original case for Europe – as a means of keeping the peace: while conventional warfare on EU soil still feels unlikely, the rise of neofascist parties does send a shiver down the spine. And as the coalition shreds job security with talk of making it easier to fire people, social Europe could come to be seen as vital protection for workers' rights in a recession.

But the core argument for a united Europe remains the feeling, often engendered by a crisis, that together we are more than the sum of our parts – with a new twist: that Britain is no longer just in the club, but inextricably of it. No referendum can remove us from an international banking system that has welded one country's fortunes to another's through a complex chain of lending and borrowing across borders, a distant echo of the moral obligations binding one human to another. Pace George Osborne, we really are all in this one together.

But until he can articulate that case with confidence, Ed Miliband should beware playing with fire. It's immoral to refuse a vote on Europe lest the people give the "wrong" answer: but it's certifiably mad to start this fight without knowing you could win.

Twitter: @gabyhinsliff

On trial beside Mladic in The Hague is a disturbing case of infectious idiocy and denial which the left can no longer ignore

The term genocide conjures up attempts to kill an entire people: the German slaughter of the Jews or the Herero; the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians; the near-extermination of the Native Americans. But the identity of the crime does not depend on its scale or success: genocide means "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

Though, in 1995, the women and children of Srebrenica were first removed from the killing grounds by Bosnian Serb troops, though the 8,000 men and boys they killed were a small proportion of the Bosnian Muslim population, it meets the definition. So the trial of Ratko Mladic, the troops' commander, which began last week, matters. Whatever one thinks of the even-handedness of international law, and though it remains true that men who commissioned or caused the killing of greater numbers of people (George Bush and Tony Blair, for instance) have not been brought to justice and are unlikely to be, every prosecution of this kind makes the world a better place.

So attempts to downplay or dismiss this crime matter too – especially when they emerge from the unlikely setting of the internationalist left. I'm using this column to pursue a battle which might be hopeless, and which many of you might regard as obscure. Perhaps I have become obsessed, but it seems to me to be necessary. Tacitly on trial beside Mladic in The Hague is a set of ideas: in my view the left's most disturbing case of denial and doublethink since the widespread refusal to accept that Stalin had engineered a famine in the Ukraine.

I first raised this issue a year ago, when I sharply criticised a book by two luminaries of the left, Edward Herman and David Peterson. The Politics of Genocide seeks to downplay or dismiss both the massacre of Bosniaks at Srebrenica in 1995 and the genocide of Tutsis committed by Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. Their claims are extraordinary: that the cause of death of the "vast majority" of the Bosniaks at Srebrenica remains "undetermined"; that rather than 800,000 or more Tutsis being killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda, "the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million", while members of the Hutus' Interahamwe militia were the "actual victims" of genocide.

What has changed since then is that the movement to which I thought I belonged has closed ranks: against attempts to challenge this revisionism, against the facts, in effect against the victims of these genocides. My attempts to pursue this question number among the most dispiriting experiences of my working life.

After I covered the issue last year, Herman and Peterson wrote a long denunciation on the Znet site. I believe in testing every proposition, so I set out to discover whether, as they insisted, I was wrong. I consulted four of the world's leading genocide scholars: Martin Shaw, Adam Jones, Linda Melvern and Marko Attila Hoare. I asked them each to write a brief response to the claims the two men made on Znet. Their statements, which I have also posted on my website, are devastating. They accuse Herman and Peterson of obfuscating, distorting and misrepresenting the evidence, and of engaging in genocide denial.

For Edward Herman and David Peterson to be right, the entire canon of serious scholarship, human rights investigations, exhumations and witness statements would have to be wrong. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But they offer little but the recycled claims of genocidaires and genocide deniers, mashed up with their own misrepresentations.

But this discovery did not disturb me as much as the responses of their supporters. I wrote to Michael Albert, the publisher of Znet, asking whether he might publish Martin Shaw's review of Herman and Peterson's book (originally published in the Journal of Genocide Research) as a counterweight to their article. He flatly refused, then went on to accuse me of a long list of heinous beliefs.

I wrote to Noam Chomsky, a hero of mine, who provided the foreword to Herman and Peterson's book, asking whether he had read it and whether he accepted the accounts it contains of the Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Srebrenica. Watching that brilliant mind engage in high-handed dismissal and distraction has been profoundly depressing. While failing to answer my questions, he accused me of following the Washington script (I have posted our correspondence on my website).

John Pilger, who wrote a glowing endorsement of the book, volunteered this response: "Chef Monbiot is a curiously sad figure. All those years of noble green crusading now dashed by his Damascene conversion to nuclear power's poisonous devastations and his demonstrable need for establishment recognition – a recognition which, ironically, he already enjoyed." The leftwing magazine Counterpunch cited my article as evidence that I am a member of the "thought police", and that the role of the Guardian is "to limit the imaginative horizons of readers".

Thus has this infectious idiocy spread through the political community to which I belong. The people I criticise here rightly contend that western governments and much of the western media ignore or excuse atrocities committed by the United States and its allies, while magnifying those committed by forces deemed hostile. But they then appear to create a mirror image of this one-sided narrative, minimising the horrors committed by forces considered hostile to the US and its allies.

Perhaps this looks to you like the kind of esoteric infighting to which the left too often succumbs, but this seems to me to be important: as important as any other human rights issue. If people who claim to care about justice and humanity cannot resist what looks to me like blatant genocide denial, we find ourselves in a very dark place.

Those of us who seek to judge a case on its merits, rather than according to the identity of the victims and perpetrators, have a duty to defend the memory of people being airbrushed by Herman, Peterson and their supporters. This does not make us apologists for western power, or establishment flunkies or thought police. It means only that we care about the facts.

Twitter:@georgemonbiot

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

• Comments on this article will be turned on in the morning

The Tory leader pledged to support single mothers. His party is now wielding the axe against them

After the rhetoric comes the bite. Today 124,000 single parents whose youngest child is five or six were moved from income support (IS) to jobseeker's allowance (JSA); they were told only eight weeks ago. The age of one's children when one moves from care to work has bounced down a slide since New Labour; now it lands at five, when In The Night Garden is still the news.

Britain's 1.9 million single parents and their three million children are, statistically speaking, the poorest in society: 46% sit below the poverty line, compared with 24% of families with two parents. They contain a disproportionate number of disabled children (34%) and a disproportionate number of disabled and ill parents (33%).

They are taunted as feckless and workshy, but this is a myth smelted in ignorance and prurience. Only 3% of single mothers are teenagers, a number to make misogynists gawp; 55% had their children within marriage; 57% of them work, an increase of 12% since 1997, and as soon as their children reach the age of 12 this figure rises to 71%, which is also the national average for mothers in relationships – good mothers, if you will. Fifty four percent of single parents of five- and six-year-olds work already, presumably because they want to; the Vicki Pollard manque is a bust. Even so, the Tories wield the axe.

One gets tired of typing out the prime minister's lies but, in case you want to hear it, after the riots David Cameron said this: "If we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we've got to start. I want a family test applied to all domestic policy. If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it ... stops families from being together, then we shouldn't do it." (He also said, in 2010: "To that single mother struggling and working her heart out for her children we can now say: 'We're on your side'.") Perhaps this angst printed the parenting vouchers whereby chemist chain Boots delivers £100 worth of parenting lessons to those with children under five. I do not hate this scheme, why should I? – free yoghurt for everyone! – but it is, as ever, a veil for cuts elsewhere.

What will happen? The old scheme, where single parents were gently segued into work with 12 months' notice – essential time to get qualifications while still receiving IS – is over. Educated parents get better jobs, obviously; 68% already enter the lowest paid professions and low-paid parents produce low-paid children. Before September 2011, single parents claiming IS received a fee remission on further education; now they have to fund this themselves. If they are on JSA, however, they will get funding – but they must continue to look for work, and if they are offered a job, they must leave education. A window has closed, a ladder has been kicked away – and this from a government that pondered tax relief for nannies and rejected a "mansion tax" as inhumane.

This policy is sheer spite, because these jobs don't exist. Even the government thinks that only 20% of those moved will find work; perhaps parental anxiety pleases them? There are six unemployed for every vacancy, and part-time jobs suitable for parents with young children are scarcer still. According to the charity Gingerbread's new report, It's Off To Work We Go, only 3% of part-time jobs would, were they full-time, pay £20,000 a year and, when part-time jobs are vacated, only 35% of them endure as part-time jobs. The Tories' response? Deregulate.

And if you do find work, what then? Childcare costs rise, while capacity and funding shrinks. The Tory MP Liz Truss wants to cut red tape but it comes too late for this year's single parents of five-year-olds. (More funding is promised, but not yet).

The cut in child benefit to higher rate taxpayers is due in 2013, and although the government is wobbling hither and thither, it is likely the single parent will suffer. And why should they not? Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice, an awkwardly named organisation if you consider its purpose, states the Tory mindset; it asked today where tax relief for married couples has gone.

This policy comes from the darkest place – women without men (and 92% of single parents are women) deserve no succour. Hence the disgraceful £20 upfront fee for accessing the Child Support Agency and a levy on child support collected at 7% to 12%. The single parent's existence is fraught with uncertainty – and fear.

Twitter: @tanyagold1

Removing employment protection with a 'no-fault dismissal' will give us a wild west economy that does little for business

You know a manager is losing his or her grip when the basic command "JFDI!" is uttered. (The J, D and I stand for Just Do It.) The Beecroft proposals on removing employment protection with the aim of boosting the economy are the Whitehall equivalent of a JFDI order. Really, all this nonsense about fair play, decency and dignity is just so 20th century, and deeply dull. Don't you read the papers? Haven't you seen what is happening in China, India and the rest of the emerging world? We must race to be as flexible and dynamic as them by cutting back our current rules and regulations. This needs to happen now. JFDI.

Some of the language – not sure it can be called analysis – in Adrian Beecroft's original paper is startling. "A proportion of employees, secure in the knowledge that their employer will be reluctant to dismiss them, work at a level well below their true capacity: they coast along," the paper states. In common with many of the assertions made in this document, no evidence is provided to back it up. (No wonder the government is now claiming the Beecroft paper was in fact a draft, and has issued a "call for evidence".) It would be interesting to know what proportion of the workforce genuinely feels secure that they will never be fired – a small number at the moment, I expect. But even if Beecroft's claim is true, it lets another significant person off the hook: the employer. What sort of manager allows people to coast, indefinitely? A bad one.

But then what sort of employer sits there thinking, "If only we had less employment protection in this country. I would then be able to hire more people and treat them badly"? It is a pretty grim view of humanity, and business, that argues that this is how employers calculate.

Beecroft, a Tory donor, seems to be ignoring the important example set by the prime minister himself in one of his best-known hiring decisions. When asked why he had taken on Andy Coulson as his press spokesman and subsequently director of communications at No 10, in spite of Coulson's earlier resignation from the News of the World, Cameron explained: "I believe in giving people a second chance." The Beecroft paper offers no such leniency. It wants to introduce a "no fault dismissal" procedure, whereby employers would not have to give any reason for getting rid of someone, merely an envelope filled with a modest amount of cash.

This would be the ultimate "hire and fire" charter, freedom to sack people almost instantaneously and for no valid reason. For a workforce that is already experiencing job insecurity and is struggling to raise its productivity, the "no fault dismissal" could only make matters worse. If your face didn't fit, if it was the wrong colour, if you belonged to the wrong gender – none of these things would prevent the tap on the shoulder and the walk to the door. Coming at a time of budget cuts to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, this move could really not be better designed to increase discrimination and inequality at work.

According to the government's own figures, excessive regulation is mentioned by only 6% of small and medium-sized businesses as a serious "barrier to growth". A real boost to job creation would be stronger demand in the economy and banks that lent more readily.

The low-road, low-protection route to a "wild west" economy will do little for business. It is amazing that Beecroft seems to believe that it would do the opposite. Only in one section of his paper, where he refers to the extension of an employee's probation period from one to two years, does he hit upon something interesting. "[This] deals with the case of a new employee who does not turn out to be up to the job: this often does not become clear during the first year of employment." You don't think he could possibly have the PM in mind, do you?

Luckily for the government, it has introduced a fixed-term parliament rule, so even if voters do want to dismiss it right now, they will probably have to wait another three years.

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The government's frantic approach to special education threatens vital provision for thousands of children like mine

The government bounces from crisis to imbroglio and back again – but at Michael Gove's Department for Education, the revolution rolls on. A green paper on special educational needs was published last year – and after the inclusion of the plans in the Queen's speech, last week saw an explosion of news coverage. As many as 450,000 children, said ministers, could soon be taken out of the category of special needs altogether. The resulting stories paid no mind to the idea that we are talking about a sliding scale, and the infinite complexities of child development – as far too many people saw it, you either have special needs or you don't, and too many people are playing the system. "Schools on a scam and an excuse for lazy teaching" was one of the more sensitive headlines on Mail Online.

None of which is to suggest that the way things are done isn't in need of change, or that some in government don't have a keen understanding of the mess special needs provision is in. Everybody seems to know someone who has been through the special needs grinder (if you have experience yourself, please get in touch at the email address below). It is a deeply malfunctioning system, in which the obligation in law to make decisions solely based on a child's needs eternally bumps up against limited council budgets, but no one is allowed to say so. As a result, good people serve messed-up imperatives – and, more importantly, thousands of families are denied most of the help they need. As so often happens, the machine often can only be satisfactorily played by the sharp-elbowed, so class is a constant subtext.

I speak from experience. One of my children is autistic. He was diagnosed just after his third birthday. In our innocence, my partner and I had some vague sense that the public sector would provide, not least because the most common theme in any introductory text about autism is the need for early intervention. But no: 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. Looking back, I'm not sure how we did it, but we read up on a research-proven technique called applied behaviour analysis (ABA), found an independent consultant, and set up a three-days-a-week home programme. My son's use of language hugely improved. He learned many of the other crucial skills that were either lacking, or absent: the ability to point, and imitate; the habit of commenting on his surroundings; how to divert his energy away from tantrums into productive activity.

The next step was to approach our local authority with a view to what's called a statutory assessment, so my son's needs could be officially analysed, and we could make the case for public funding of the programme, enshrined in a legally enforceable statement of special educational needs. We knew what was required: in cases like ours, to stand any chance of meaningful success, you need a truckload of informational wherewithal, the will to fight, and the money to hire a good lawyer – which, at a stroke, scythes out millions of parents, who are left with only piecemeal help, and hotchpotch provision.

To start with, despite my son's diagnosis, the local authority did what a lot of local authorities do, and refused to assess him, on the most specious of grounds. We then appealed via the official tribunal system, and endured grim months of compiling reports and writing a lengthy case statement. And then, one morning, mere weeks before our hearing, my mobile phone rang, and I spoke to someone from the local authority I had never dealt with before. Rather than obstinacy, we were suddenly met with a guarded kind of openness. We were granted assessment, and then a statement – and after long months of grinding negotiation, my son's programme was introduced into his brilliantly co-operative state primary school just as he started there in September 2011. The arrangements seem to be working well: last week, while getting changed for school, he turned round to me, beamed, and told me for the first time about all the classmates he would be seeing that day.

Inside two years, the government's new system will be in place, which will change arrangements that lie at the heart of lives like ours. Statements, which can hold councils to detailed commitments to particular children, are to be replaced by single plans covering education, health and social care between birth and the age of 25 – but there are clear signs that they will not be as dependable as what they will replace. There are plans to introduce personal budgets, but no real sense of what benefits they will bring to families who already juggle huge responsibilities, or whatgenuine innovations – if any – they will involve(therapies such as ABA appear to be off-limits). Late last week I spent two days on the phone, talking to people involved in special needs charities and pressure groups. It's fair to say that no one had any real clue about what might be coming.

The government has announced 20 "pathfinder" projects, to pilot some of their plans. Freedom of information requests made by one education activist in late March eventually highlighted the fact that,as against the official claim that the authorities involved "are testing" their plans, at least a third had not yet decided which families should be included; one council insider I spoke to last week said the government had issues of "credibility" in "moving so fast"; even such apparently up-to-speed authorities as Gateshead and East Sussex will not have their schemes in place until September. But a draft bill will be published in the summer, the government says its interim evaluation of the pilots is set to be published "in the autumn", and the plans proper are meant to be in place "for 2014". There are reportedly rumblings on Facebook from families who wonder why they're bothering taking part, and an increasingly familiar coalition odour hangs over the whole enterprise. Is all this a sign of ineptitude, or cynicism? Or both?

Meanwhile, massive fundamental issues remain, and it looks as if the government's plans will barely touch them. Autism is my specialism, and I well know that our health and education systems exist in a state of collective denial about the necessity of concerted early intervention. A survey this year by the National Autistic Society found that 34% of its respondents had had to wait three years or more for a diagnosis after first raising concerns: precious time, often completely wasted. Without powerful forces that will pro-actively hold public institutions to their obligations – something singularly lacking from what's now proposed – legal argy-bargy is set to remain the most reliable means of getting children what they need, and is often just as time-consuming. In any case, for thousands of people it's simply not an option. At a huge cost, we later pick up a bill for a mountain of missed opportunities, which is why even people mindful of the need to control public spending should favour early intervention, and a means of making sure it happens. The arguments are obvious: in the absence of essential life skills, too many autistic life-paths unnecessarily end with round-the-clock institutional care, mental health problems – even prison.

What, we should also wonder, of those 450,000 cases now said to be in the government's cross-hairs, and the fact that even if a "need" is nuanced and perhaps temporary, it may still be very real? Reforming zeal and raging stories in the press are no substitute for careful analysis and even more careful action. Looking at the current proposals, and mounting concerns about them, I'm rather reminded of cliched advice always thrown at parents with worries about a child: if you suspect something isn't right, then it is no good assuming that everything will somehow turn out OK – you must act, and fast.

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The paradox of such a city hosting this summit lays bare the brutal way in which inequality is globally maintained and locally replicated

On Friday morning in Brighton Park, a neighbourhood in southwest Chicago, around half a dozen Latina volunteers in luminous bibs patrolled the streets around Davis Elementary school. The school sits in the crossfire of three gangs; the Kings, the 2/6s and the SDs (Satan's Disciples). The trees and walls nearby are peppered with "tags" denoting territory and mourning fallen gang members. There is a shooting in the area every couple of weeks, explains Mariela Estrada of the Brighton Park Neighbourhood Council, which facilitates the volunteers.

That same evening, just a couple of blocks away, a 14-year-old, Alejandro Jaime, was shot dead while out riding his bike with his 11-year-old friend. According to witnesses, a car knocked them both off their bikes. They picked themselves up and ran. A man got out of the car and shot Alejandro in the back. "Although it's the city's job to provide public safety, we had to respond since our children are in danger and continue to face threats of gang violence," said Nancy Barraza, a Parent Patrol volunteer.

The next morning world leaders started arriving in Chicago for the Nato summit where, just 20 minutes from Brighton Park, they would discuss how to maintain international security. The dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through security; in much of Chicago neither exists.

When the city mayor Rahm Emanuel brought the summit to Chicago he boasted: "From a city perspective this will be an opportunity to showcase what is great about the greatest city in the greatest country." The alternative "99% tour" of the city, organised by the Grassroots Collaborative that came to Brighton Park, revealed how utterly those who claim to export peace and prosperity abroad have failed to provide it at home.

The murder rate in Chicago in the first three months of this year increased by more than 50% compared with the same period last year, giving it almost twice the murder rate of New York. And the manner in which the city is policed gives many as great a reason to fear those charged with protecting them as the criminals. By the end of July last year police were shooting people at the rate of six a month and killing one person a fortnight.

This violence, be it at the hands of the state or gangs, is both compounded and underpinned by racial and economic disadvantage. The poorer the neighbourhood the more violent, the wealthier the safer. This is no coincidence. Much like the Nato summit – and the G8 summit that preceded it – the system is set up not to spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos but to contain and punish it.

Nato is not an impartial arbiter in this state of affairs but the military wing of a political and economic project that makes it possible. Neoliberal globalisation, and the inequities that come with it, cannot exist without force or the threat of it. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," Thomas Friedman, an ardent advocate of free market globalisation, argued. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

The paradox inherent in a city like Chicago hosting a summit like this not only lays bare the brutal nature in which these inequalities are maintained at a global level, but it lends us an opportunity to understand how those inequalities are replicated locally.

Chicago illustrates how the developing world is everywhere, not least in the heart of the developed. The mortality rate for black infants in the city is on a par with the West Bank; black life expectancy in Illinois is just below Egypt and just above Uzbekistan. More than a quarter of Chicagoans have no health insurance, one in five black male Chicagoans are unemployed and one in three live in poverty. Latinos do not fare much better. Chicago may be extreme in this regard, but it is by no means unique. While the ethnic composition of poverty may change depending on the country, its dynamics will doubtless be familiar to pretty much all of the G8 participants and most of the Nato delegates too.

The gated communities – like the one in which Trayvon Martin was killed – have been erected on a global scale to protect those fleeing the mayhem wrought by our economic and military policies. This was exemplified last March when a boat with 72 African refugees fled the Nato-led war in Libya. When the boat found itself stranded it sent out a distress signal that was passed on to Nato which had "declared the region a military zone under its control", and then promptly ignored it, as did an Italian ship. The boat bobbed around in the Mediterranean for two weeks. All but nine on board were left to die from starvation, thirst or in storms, including two babies.

"We can talk as much as we want about human rights and the importance of complying with international obligations," said Tineke Strik, the special rapporteur charged with investigating the case. "But if at the same time we just leave people to die – perhaps because we don't know their identity or because they come from Africa – it exposes how meaningless those words are." When Alejandro Jaime's parents hear Emanuel talk about "showcasing the greatest city in the greatest country", they doubtless receive his words with similar disdain.

Twitter: @garyyounge

Just like a relationship, the crisis in Europe will only start being resolved if all parties begin accepting their share of the blame

Like a marriage in its last throes, the euro appears to be falling apart before our eyes. But does it really have to happen? It's worth remembering that the eurozone as a whole is in trade balance – it's comfortably solvent, so that settling of accounts could resolve the problem without any financing from the IMF or China. But any solution to the eurozone crisis will need to involve rejecting narratives of resentment and betrayal that can lead parties to inflict terrible damage on each other.

At the moment, the architects of the euro project still find it hard to forgive being hostage to Greece, whose economy is no larger than the state of Hesse. But the damage of a Greek exit will be out of all proportion to its size, as other dominoes totter, damaging confidence and trade even if they don't fall. It's the mark of a truly dysfunctional relationship when resentment at being threatened with break-up is the main reason no one will compromise to stop it happening.

Any therapist knows that saving a marriage has to start with abandoning stories of one-sided blame. In an economic union, nowhere is this more important than when creditors and debtors blame each other. Yes, the Greek government has been spectacularly spendthrift. From when it joined the euro at the beginning of 2001 until reality began to sink in at the end of 2009, Greece was the world's fourth largest arms importer, buying 70% more than Israel over that period.

But assigning blame becomes harder when you look at who sold Greece the arms. The US was the largest supplier, but France and Germany together delivered over a third of the total – with eager financing from French and German banks. Greek debt received a ratings downgrade as early as 2004 – can anyone remember a French or German politician urging arms suppliers to be more cautious about selling on credit? The euro didn't turn Greece into a greedy arms buyer – that had been true for many years, if not to the same extent. But having long-standing money problems is no reason to expect a marriage with your bank manager to be happy, and your bank manager has as much reason to know that as anyone.

Nor will it do to blame the public sector, as if the euro crisis were due to a secret conspiracy of the political classes against the rest of us. Spain (whose fragility is what makes a Greek exit so alarming) had healthier public finances than Germany till 2007. The Spanish debt build-up was a private-sector drama, with French and German banks lending money to Spanish real-estate speculators. There's nothing wrong with lending money, provided it's used to enhance the borrower's ability to repay. Yet remarkably, at a time when higher education has been expanding in many countries, Spain had more than 20% fewer students entering higher education in 2008 than it had 10 years previously – presumably the lure of easy money in real estate was too hard to resist.

Instead of asking why "they" let it happen, maybe we should ask why we let it happen. Greece's arms binge was no secret; the data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute is on the internet. Spain's higher education decline can be tracked on the OECD website. Inflating real estate prices animated countless dinner conversations: we steered into disaster wide-awake, like drivers failing to see a spectacular crash looming before them.

The official response to the crisis has been to turn it into a morality play, pitting southern profligacy against northern rectitude. This sends the dangerous message that the citizens of the debtor countries need to suffer badly to signal their contrition. Serious reforms in the indebted countries are inescapable, but the lender countries will have to make a massive contribution too. A solution that accepts a degree of shared foolishness will make that much easier. Otherwise, like crash dieters who think dramatic sacrifices will impress their families and friends, we risk valuing the gesture over the reality. Nutritionists know that crash dieting is inimical to healthy eating in the long run. Therapists know it won't save a marriage, either.

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The prime minister reportedly 'chillaxes' with wine, karaoke and his tennis machine, which he calls the Clegger

US student honour codes forswearing cheating have proved effective, but Britain is way behind

Across Britain the exam season is in full flow. Schools are in the middle of GCSE, AS and A-levels, while universities host finals. At many institutions, though, one issue dominates: how to tackle cheating.

Colleges spend thousands of pounds and professional teaching staff spend hours rooting out those who have plagiarised from the internet or, in some cases, bought entire essays. So imagine a college where students sit their exams unsupervised, take responsibility for timing them and for handing papers in afterwards and are trusted not to check the answers with a quick glance at the textbook. At Williams College in Massachusetts, all this is standard practice.

Williams, where I recently served as a visiting professor, is one of a group of liberal arts colleges in New England, including Amherst, Wesleyan, Bennington and Smith. Described as "potted ivy" they share a small student body (Williams has 2,000 students) along with high academic standards, and an honour code. When I first heard of the honour system, I assumed it to be something like a motto, a guideline without real application. What I discovered amazed me. Williams' honour code was adopted in 1971. It is short, and essentially asks that students do not cheat, lie or plagiarise material. Agreeing to sign it is a condition of entry. It is the duty of students to report violations, which are in turn heard and handled by a student honour committee, responsible for determining guilt or innocence and deciding the penalty.

My faculty colleagues all supported it, couldn't imagine teaching without it and were surprised to hear there was nothing similar in the UK. "Basically, it means I assume they don't cheat," a professor of biology told me. Overwhelmingly, cases of cheating are reported by other students, not by staff members.

Staff appreciated being freed of a responsibility that takes up time better spent teaching. Any professor suspecting plagiarism is duty bound to report it. But each case is handled from start to finish by students – who are, let's face it, better placed to deal with claims of internet plagiarism than, say, a middle-aged literature professor.

In the UK, most college lecturers I have talked to just laughed at the idea that an honour system could work here – though it was laughter born of despair. Some people have even called it a "cheaters' charter", but if the honour code works well in the US, why shouldn't it work in Britain?

Northumbria University has introduced a student pledge, but declined to call it an honour code or make it obligatory or legally binding – thus rendering the exercise redundant. The system must be binding, with breaches punishable; and the more educational establishments that buy into it, the better it works. A professor from Haverford College (where the honour system is treated with reverence) told me of a prospective student who had signed the code but attempted to take up a place at a preferred college. Haverford advised the second college that the student had signed the code and the offer was withdrawn. It was a matter of honour.

Far from being some kind of liberal opt-out, the honour code has its origins in the military – the code of the West Point cadets ("A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do") being the most famous. Perhaps British universities, far from being tougher, aren't tough enough. The main reason honour codes work is because they create a sense of community that students buy into. This is perhaps the reason they come down hard on each other. Because when you cheat, you're no longer seen as cheating the system: you're cheating your friends. Maybe that's a lesson British university students need to learn.

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From music making to motor manufacturing, UK plc badly needs an active industry policy

As G8 leaders stress the need for growth, it is timely to ask where the jobs of the future will come from and what Britain will do for a living. Part of the answer is right beneath our noses: making things. This is not nostalgia or wishful thinking, but a view of our economy firmly rooted in the future.

In a new Policy Network pamphlet I argue it is time to reject the "declinism" that often colours discussion about manufacturing and resolve to get behind making things. Yes, we make less than we used to, but we still make more than we think. Last week's news about new investment at GM's Ellesmere Port plant is the latest positive announcements on the UK car industry.

But more making things won't happen by itself. It requires government to support it and to pay as much attention to the supply chain – the ecosystem of manufacturing – as to eye-catching inward investment announcements. The effect would be good for jobs and exports but, crucially, the benefits would be social and political too.

The loss of making things in recent decades has eroded confidence and triggered political disaffection in some parts of the country. Politicians often make the mistake of thinking the answer to such alienation is to talk about politics differently, or to pursue political reform that will "reconnect". But political disaffection links to economic disaffection, to the sense that too many people have felt written out of our national story.

The task for politics is to shape an economic future in which every part of the country can participate. Making things should be a big part of that. A modern view of this should go well beyond physical products to include music and the creative industries, where Britain is a world leader. These are what Andy Heath, chairman of UK Music, calls "the weightless industries".

Why, in the digital age, should our definition of making things only be about what you can see and touch when Britain is so good at things you can't see or touch? Music, computer games, TV formats – these are making things too. Here are five ideas that could help Britain on that path.

First, equip people to do the jobs needed and boost the image of making things. Too many young people leave school without the skills and qualifications to succeed. Raising school standards to give young people opportunity should be a national passion, especially in areas that have felt left out of our national story. And why should an engineering degree be less valued than a law or accountancy degree? We need to wage a twin battle on standards and challenge the assumption that making things is old-fashioned or smokestack.

Second, remain an open society. Sending out signals that we don't want the brightest students in the world or the highest-value workers to come here is a huge mistake. Britain is a creative, innovative society because it is an open society. If we cut off the brightest students and high-value foreign workers from coming here we will only penalise our economy.

Third, government must play a role. An active industry policy requires the capacity to deliver it. That means a culture change in Whitehall. Departments ought to be thinking about the health of UK plc in everything they do. At the moment the system is not geared to this and changing it requires sustained leadership from the top. Instead of talking about abolishing the Department of Business, our ambition should be for it to become a powerful department of the micro-economy.

Fourth, we have to sort the finance for industry. The dialogue between government and the banks about business lending has become a dialogue of the deaf. If the banking structure won't make available the finance needed for Britain to invest, new entrants and players are needed. A government-backed British investment bank, geared to infrastructure and longterm industrial investment, could make a difference. Such banks exist and operate elsewhere.

Finally, we have to believe this can be done and take more pride in what we already make today. Making things is not only part of our past. It's part of our future too.

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The weight of the world is now on Zuckerberg's shoulders. As co-founder of Lastminute.com, I can, in a small way, empathise

I can't claim to have had anything like the success of Mark Zuckerberg, but as Facebook floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange today, I could empathise in a very small way with what its founder must be feeling. In March 2000, following a period if intense media interest, my own company, Lastminute.com, went public, and was priced the day Nasdaq peaked, at £571m. It increased its price during an accelerated road show by more than any other European initial public offering (IPO). The thinking then was technology IPOs were like Giffin goods – the more expensive, the more demand.

Facebook is at a different stage. Back then, the internet had very few profitable giants. We were loss-making and had the revenues, as one analyst wisely pointed out, of a small pub. Facebook is very profitable, making $1bn last year, and has jaw-dropping reach. Its execution has been almost flawless (excluding the occasional privacy lapse and mobile) and it is now valued at more than $100bn – 100 times greater than our business.

Yet there are superficial similarities. Both had young founder chief executives. I was 31 when Lastminute.com went public (old by today's standards: my co-founder Martha Lane Fox was 28). I had very little real idea of what to expect from investors and of managing large teams and crazy growth. Zuckerberg has had eight years to build a world-class, experienced team around him. Facebook has the benefit of the pioneers that have gone before it, they have lowered the costs of web technology dramatically and given a new generation digital management experience.

Zuckerberg is in the mould of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Google's Larry Page – an idealistic, passionate, driven, impatient, obstinate, obsessive CEO, who can drive a team to long-term rather than short-term goals. He will have 57% voting control – Martha and I had no control, and were never advised about the possibilities of such things as "dual-class voting stock".

But, like Facebook, our business was a hot stock that was chased up by retail investors. We saw how this creates real stress. People bought into our business at a high valuation and believed it could only go one way. Investors see this as free money, and if it isn't (in our case the bubble burst and the stock went down 95%, until we recovered) then sentiment changes fast. In such situations, motivation has to come from the team around you, from growth and the love of customers for your product – you cannot depend on support from critical investors and an increasingly cynical media.

Despite the massive boost to his personal wealth, which is now valued at $25bn, there are things Zuckerberg will hate about going public: the results, saying the same thing over and over again to investors when he would rather be driving the business; the market sentiment that will make his stock a hedge fund plaything. He will hate being asked about the share price, as if he controlled that too. He will hate people who want him to focus on short-term profits as opposed to his long-term mission. He will probably hate having to worry about how to invest his money, as that doesn't seem to drive him except as a way of keeping the score.

Investors, in turn, should look for Zuckerberg to keep his confidence – not arrogance. For the valuation to double over five years (the sort of return investors need to believe in) they will want him focused. He will need to demonstrate that with his fantastic war chest and user base he can take the business into mobile phones, payments, identity, big data analytics, social commerce … In a similar way the lastminute.com IPO valuation was based on a belief that the business was not about selling low-margin cheap flights but would continue its expansion into a greater share of customers' leisure spend across different devices and into different nations.

The night we went public and raised £120m, Martha and I were very subdued. It felt as if we had the weight of the world, and our employees, on our shoulders, and that the company was priced for perfection. That was massive pressure. However, now I look at Zuckerberg and see someone who really does have the weight of the world on his shoulders, is only 28, and doesn't have a proper business partner.

I had hoped Facebook would resist the temptation that we also felt, to raise the price too much. In our case I'm not sure the added pressure was worth it, and in theirs they really don't need the extra money. I suspect Zuckerberg will feel that pressure, that his world is surreal. But he will be happy that he has been given this chance to continue to change the world – and follow his passion. And that his creation's future is assured for some time to come.

Professional critics are no more reliable than Amazon ratings, a study shows. So do we really need them?

Is the professional book reviewer an anachronism? In a recent Harvard Business School study of nonfiction reviews, assessments in mainstream media outlets like this one and amateur ratings on Amazon largely converged. Assuming we can trust the questionable verdict of mere consensus, surely we could chuck the Review section and decide what to read purely by consulting peers online?

Full disclosure: I am a professional book reviewer. Moreover, who knows whether pros and amateurs would converge in evaluations of fiction, which are notoriously subjective, and more my bailiwick.

Nevertheless, traditional reviewers still serve a function. Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review. Supportive quotes are a virtual obligation of the form in print, since especially appraisals of style require substantiation, yet most Amazon reviewers applaud or deplore an author's prose without providing examples, and you just have to take their word for it. Granted, critics are often scorned as clubby in-fighters either championing their friends or settling old scores. On the Guardian website this week, a former reviewer for an unnamed London newspaper explained that he'd probably lost the job because he disparaged Joseph O'Neill's "odious" Netherland (certainly one of the most overrated publishing successes of all time), adding, "most book reviewers are pretentious tits".

Yet many Amazon reviewers are just as snotty, pompous and snide as the worst of the "tits" in the Times Literary Supplement. A few small-minded pros may indeed be brown-nosing or out for revenge, but most critics with a shred of integrity refuse to review authors they know. Besides, Amazon suffers from corruption as well: friends-and-family boosters can inflate a listing with flattery; rivals and personal adversaries can pump it with poison. Some review sections may be suspected of assigning books whose publishers advertise in the paper, but Amazon's emailed "recommendations" are paid for by publishers, no doubt.

As for accuracy of assessment, Amazon reviews tend to gather populist momentum, coalescing into a group-think that discourages dissenters. Able to check online for what's already out there before filing, insecure professional critics are likewise prone to go safely with the popular tide. But the best reviewers will stick their necks out, sometimes defending a misunderstood book against a deluge of denunciation, or objecting that a fashionably crowned "masterpiece" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Certainly critics are not all created equal. American papers now pay so appallingly that some reviewers no longer feel it behoves them to actually read the book, a little oversight that they expose by making gross errors in plot summary or by wildly mischaracterising a book's whole premise. Some critics are so at odds with your tastes that you go out of your way to read what they hate.

Still, when executed responsibly, reviewing requires many hours of reading that modest fees don't begin to compensate. We're not all grinding an axe or scratching a back. We try to put an author's work in context, to advance a more constructive argument than "I didn't like it", and to make a few halfway amusing observations along the way. We delight in bringing a fine book to your attention, while sparing you a trawl through dozens of conflicting comments by folks who can't spell. When we pan a work, hoping to save you time and money, we risk making an enemy of the author for life, while Amazon trolls can forever hide behind "woof25".

Anyway, why not read the Review section and go online? Then, if both the pros and the proles turn out to be wrong, these days you've got multiple forums in which to say so. I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing. According to that Harvard study, professional critics are swayed by awards and hype (witness the mysterious chorus of acclaim for Netherland), while regular readers are less prone to being bamboozled and more open to new writers. So between the two sources, we should all find the ultimate Holy Grail: a decent book.

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This budget-busting Olympics will at least offer comedy value. And laughing at ourselves is a sport the Brits always win

Who knows precisely how much scripting went into the gracious remarks Lord Coe made as the Olympic flame was passed from Greece to Britain. But I imagine it was all overridden by a single internal stage direction, which his lordship repeated frantically to himself as he was waiting to speak: Don't say "symbol". DON'T SAY "SYMBOL". Whatever you do, don't even allow that word to float into the consciousness of those who have just watched Greece – Greece! – symbolically pass us anything. It makes the Olympics look like the economic equivalent of syphilis, which isn't the "look" London 2012 is going for.

Greece, after all, is a country where the 2004 Olympics are widely held to have contributed significantly to the cataclysmic meltdown currently ensuring them top billing on the news. So Greeks palming us off with something in the rain is the sort of symbolism the London Games organisers could probably live without – second only, perhaps, to the gifting of a large wooden horse to snazz up the City of London.

Still, it's done now, and at the time of writing the flame was strapped into a special seat on a golden plane, before arriving on these shores and being used to light a torch carried – inevitably – by David Beckham. Of course, Beckham is not even an Olympian (yet), but he remains such a useful symbol of both Britain's vanities and its insecurities that it is entirely appropriate for him to be wheeled out on these occasions.

And so it begins. And so, I'm afraid, does my excitement. Forgive me. I know that in many circles, saying that you are excited about the Olympics is akin to voicing a belief that money is better spent on securing the archery venue against al-Qaida's crossbow division than on disability allowance, or suggesting that a budget-busting aquatic centre is a worthy substitute for child benefit.

It isn't. It never was, and the scandalous budgeting cock-ups will echo down the years. But having said all that – and I have said it about eleventy thousand times – you can't knock the chance to watch the country in a spasm of national madness. And the madness and the mirth is definitely coming.

Make no mistake: the only part of the Olympics for which any reverence should be reserved is the sport. Each time around, the athletic spectacle proves so entrancing that many of those who profess no interest in such things find themselves being drawn ineluctably in. The Times's Simon Barnes put it most elegantly. "There was a bus that went round and round Montjuïc during the Barcelona Games of 1992," he recalled. "It was while riding it that I realised that I could get off at any stop, walk in and witness the most important day of somebody's life – the day to which all other days had been leading."

Yet even for those resolutely assured that there will be nothing sporting to intrigue them, there is the après-sport. Approached correctly, then, much of this side of the Olympics will be … dare I even say it? … funny. The comedy value will range from the gentle to the viciously self-parodic. Consider the remnants of our navy stationed down the Thames, along with the bits of our missile arsenal we're allowed to use without asking America first. Consider the ghastly despots we'll fail to keep away from the corporate hospitality. Consider Boris Johnson.

Away from the sport, you see, an Olympics offers the host nation the chance to see themselves as other countries see them. To stage an Olympics is to pay billions of pounds for the world to laugh at you – the test is how you react. At the most recent Winter Games in Vancouver, the opening ceremony saw one of four giant ice penises failing to achieve erection, and I'm sorry to say I got lots of angry emails from Canadians wounded that I and countless others should have found this funny. Happily, I was able to reassure them that no one would be taking the piss out of the London Games more mercilessly than the British themselves.

This is a sport at which we would win gold every time. Is it too soon after the death of Princess Di to reveal that I almost wept with laughter when Mr Tony Blair quavered his Corinthians reading at her funeral? If you've somehow blocked out this camp classic, I implore you to watch it again on YouTube at your earliest convenience, and tell me if it is not the most hilariously hammy thing you've ever seen (bafflingly hailed as masterful at the time by many who later realised what pillocks they'd been for being taken in by him).

Of course, had I been seated in Westminster Abbey, my giggles would have been most unseemly. But in the comparative privacy of our own homes or those of friends or the pub, where most of us watch events like this and the Olympic circus, there is much mirth to be had from the spectacle of Britain taking itself preposterously seriously.

It's expensive mirth, certainly. But having paid for it, and with it heading unstoppably down the slipway towards you, it's time to take whatever pleasure out of it you can.

Twitter: @MarinaHyde

The heat is rising across Europe over Greece's future membership of the European single currency

Germany's changed social stuctures means there's a section of voters no longer served by the main parties

It's a fairytale success: two years ago, hardly anyone knew that the Pirate Party even existed; now, all of a sudden, it has won seats in state parliaments in four successive elections, and a new poll puts them at 11% of Germany's national vote. And that's despite still not having any clear stand on important issues such as Afghanistan or the euro crisis. The German press is bewildered and horrified by turns. The Pirates are a chaotic bunch, they say, a protest party without a real political agenda. A group of internet addicts, nerds who primarily want to download music and films for free.

Anyone who wants to understand the potential of the Pirate Party must first realise that the internet is more than a technical means to an end and more than a playground for file sharers. The internet is the birthplace and living space of a communication society and therefore the key to the transformation of an era; its far-reaching effects will one day be ranked alongside those of trains, planes and automobiles.

Overcoming barriers is about freedom. This is the point that is clearly so difficult to convey. The Pirates are not an internet party but a party interested in freedom. The internet can be seen as a metaphor for what that means today: freedom through equal rights, freedom through the expression of opinion, freedom through open access to education and knowledge. Freedom through the erosion of hierarchy and authority. And freedom through participation and pluralism.

No other party in the political spectrum right now is dedicated to serving freedom in that sense of the word. The Pirates fill a gap. They are the only German party that treats freedom not just as an idealistic utopia or an economic principle but as a very real tenet of organisation. They want to protect civil rights, to increase every individual's range to take action, and to give citizens more power to take part in political decisions through electronic means.

This means that they are at odds with the traditional categories of "left" and "right". In their mistrust of the state and calls for transparency, they are reminiscent of libertarian movements of Anglo-Saxon origin, be they Ayn Rand fanatics or anarchically-minded socialists. At the same time the Pirates call for an "unconditional basic income", a financial safety net that the state should provide for every citizen. Their preoccupation with the boundaries of intellectual property has even led to some observers calling them communists. The Pirates' success is due not least to their rejection of conventional political views. But they are not a reaction to the financial crisis – instead, they profit from the fact that an increasing proportion of the electorate feel that the traditional political parties do not speak to them any longer.

Germany now has about 2.5 million self-employed people who work on their own – freelancers and owners of small businesses without any employees. Artists, freelance programmers, tilers and hairdressers number among them. These people are not from the traditional Mittelstand of medium-sized enterprises; many of them have just enough to live on. They are neither entrepreneurs nor industrial workers, so they do not find their political home with either the conservatives or with the social democrats.

As the working world has changed, so too have family structures. There are now all shades of families, from the single working parent to more complex families with more than one father to gay couples with a child.

Different ways of working and different family groupings have given rise to a growing section of society to whom the established parties can offer no answers. The self-employed fall through the health insurance and pension nets, and battle their way every year through a taxation system that is set up either for employees with regular incomes or bigger companies with accounts departments. Lack of childcare is a problem that is as well known as it is unresolved, but flexible working – job-sharing, a four-day week or switching between working in the office and at home – continues to be a distant prospect shrouded in mist.

This is the point at which the generational conflict ignites, a conflict that many assume no longer exists just because parents and children wear the same trainers these days. While younger people are completely redefining the boundaries between work and leisure, job and family, older politicians can only see their desire to live their lives more freely as creating chaos for themselves or as an expression of need.

Traditional political parties' unwillingness to adjust to the new ways of living and communicating is winning the Pirate Party popularity. It has the potential to become nothing less than Germany's new liberal social-democratic party. Whether that will happen depends on how far the Pirates succeed in drawing up convincing political demands based on their core principle of freedom.

Sara's story is an extraordinary one of loss, survival and, at the end, the remarkable bonds between us all

Nearly 11 years have passed since I last broke my own rule and wrote in this place about something deeply personal. Then, in the summer of 2001, it was the birth of my first child and the article was a hymn of praise for the National Health Service that had ushered my son into the world.

Today I write about my mother, who died 10 days ago. Once again – though this is not my only aim – I want to record my praise, even awe, for the people who looked after her. It was not so straightforward this time. Yes, the NHS funded it all, but my mother was tended to – at home in Bournemouth – by a variety of agencies, some public, some voluntary and one private. I confess that before this experience, I would have been wary of such an arrangement. But my prejudices were confounded. The team worked together with perfect efficiency, a coalition of Macmillan and Marie Curie nurses, agency staff, NHS district nurses and care assistants and the local GP. Not once did any information slip through the cracks. It meant we could fulfil our promise to my mother that she would spend her last weeks not in hospital or in a hospice, but at home.

At no point, despite all the equipment and expertise that came through the front door, was money so much as mentioned. Never were we confronted with a choice of a cheaper option or a limit to our "cover". My mother got all the care she needed and no one presented her or us with a bill. That is the glory of our national health system, one we take for granted too easily. It is a treasure to be cherished.

And yet what will stay with me is a thought not about systems or organisations, but about people. Perhaps two dozen different women helped my mother in those last days. They were gentle and sensitive, speaking softly and with great care. Several of them, it turned out, were motivated by past experience of caring for their own, terminally ill relatives. On the last full day of my mother's life, I noticed that the eyes of one nurse, Sue, were welling with tears. She had been watching me talk to my mother and had, I think, been reminded of her own farewell to her father. When she said goodbye to me, she said something I shall never forget. "Thank you for letting me in."

I never asked what any of these remarkable people are paid, but I don't imagine it's very much. And yet they do work that is tough, exhausting and priceless. I know the explanation for that paradox but, in truth, it is inexplicable.

Still, what I've been thinking about most during these last 10 days is my mother. She won no prizes, she built no monuments – and yet her life was extraordinary. When I wrote a memoir of three generations of my family, including the lives of relatives involved in some of the epic political events of their era, it was nevertheless her story that touched people most.

She was born Sara Hocherman in 1936, in the small town of Petach Tikva in what was then Palestine. She was two months premature: the doctors warned that her life was "hanging by a thread". Her father was an ultra-orthodox Jew who showed his children what might politely be called distracted neglect. He did not provide for them or his wife and, after an older sister died through malnutrition, my mother's mother returned to her native London with her two surviving children.

By the time she was five, in 1942, Sara was an evacuee in the Bedfordshire countryside, taken in by a kindly unmarried lady who took a shine to the little girl. But Sara missed her mother terribly. In the spring of 1945, the war's end approaching, a reunion seemed only weeks away. Then one of the very last V2 rockets to fall on London hit Hughes Mansions in the East End, killing 134 people; 120 of them were Jews, my mother's 33-year-old mother among them. When everyone else was celebrating VE Day, eight-year-old Sara was in mourning.

What followed were hard years in the post-war East End, and in 1949 a return to what was now Israel, to witness the earliest years of the state. That period was hard too: my teenage mother had to contend with poverty, family estrangement and disease. In 1955, Sara returned to England where she eventually met and found happiness with my father. Illness would strike again when my mother was 43; once more the doctors would say her life was hanging by a thread. But somehow she survived.

There is so much to say about all of this, and one way or another I will spend the rest of my life saying it. But three points stand out.

The first is that my mother's experience made her much more hawkish than me on matters relating to Israel. To lose her mother (and an aunt) along with so many other Jews to one of Hitler's bombs meant she had felt the breath of the Shoah on her neck: it entrenched a yearning that she felt as a desperate need, the craving for a place the Jews could call their own. She was not the only one to feel it. Whatever view you ultimately take on the Israel-Palestine question, you cannot hope to understand that conflict unless you also understand this need.

Second, whenever one contemplates war or military intervention anywhere, one needs to contemplate this unbending fact: that every bomb or rocket that falls, no matter where in the world it lands, is destined to create another Sara Hocherman – a child who has lost a parent. And the pain of that act will live on through the decades and through the generations, as it did in my family.

Lastly, my mother's life was proof of the power of love. She was rescued first by her aunt, Yiddi, who took her in, and next by my father, who was with her for 52 years and with her at the very end. Their love ensured that, though my mother was unfathomably strong, she was never hard. She contained next to no bitterness, only oceans of empathy.

So this weekend, do yourself this favour, if you can. As my mother would have put it, deploying the idiosyncratic grammar that was part Yiddish, part passive-aggressive self-deprecation, "Phone your mother: she's also a person."

Jonathan Freedland has set up a Just Giving page in his mother's name, for Macmillan Cancer Support

Twitter: @j_freedland

Greek politicians divided about austerity programme linked to bailout funding

Azerbaijan may score nil points on human rights, but according to the wonderful world of PR, Eurovision's got the solution

• The Eurovision song contest is always the sequinned highlight of the cultural calendar, but will its lustre be dimmed this year because it's taking place in Azerbaijan, ranked 162nd in Reporters Without Borders' press freedom list? Quite a few opponents of President Aliyev will have to watch on 26 May on prison TV, and the anxious Azeris are employing a phalanx of PR companies across Europe to boost their profile. Berlin-based Consultum Communications, headed by the unfortunately named Hans-Erich Bilges, has been lobbying hard in Germany, but Azerbaijan's two agencies in the UK, Freud Communications and Ketchum, are also doing their bit. Freud works principally on cultural projects patronised by the president's daughter, Leyla Aliyeva, and denies reports it has been recruiting celebs to add glamour to next week's contest in Baku. Ketchum describes its role as "providing communications and media relations support" for the contest's organising committee. It, too, denies ferrying out celebs, but says it will be helping with "general logistics" for the 1,500 journalists expected to attend. Naturally, the Diary is available for an all-expenses-paid fact-finding mission. C'mon Engelbert!

• And now let us pray. Sunday has been declared a "day of prayer for the media", and God knows we need it after the revelations at Leveson. There will be special prayers at churches across the country. "God, who turned word into flesh, inspire those who turn flesh into word and image and story, that truth may be told and life celebrated." Book your pew early to avoid disappointment.

• Which brings us to former News of the World reporter Graham Johnson's new book Hack. "I moved at 800 miles per hour, the mean velocity of a tabloid terrorist, whether I was coming through your door to destroy your life, filing copy, or irritably phoning my mum once every six months. Like a German tank column, I only ever ate on the move, mostly out of 24-hour garages – Ginsters curry pasties, Lucozade to dissolve the exhaustion, and a couple of Zantac popped for dessert. My mind was so disturbed with passion and vice, I took beta-blockers in an attempt to make it still. I was in my twenties." Fear not, Graham, there is more rejoicing in heaven over one tabloid sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who work for the Economist.

• Carla Bruni says she was staggered by the treatment of her husband's campaign by the French press and that he was a victim of "fury", reports rightwing weekly Le Point. No media organ was spared as she declared "French television – it's leftie television!" Odd coming from a woman who called herself a leftist up until the day she married the prez. As one cruel radio pundit quipped: "She really should put on a brave face – if she can still manage the expression." What can he mean?

• Teach Yourself Kusunda (part 3). Today, weather. "Yago; tang giwen tsirmatn. Wi-yi badza qai ugi ipen sumle agendzi. Dza hoego borloq in dzi." "Cold; I believe it will rain. Outside the house, wind comes and the corn breaks. Stoke the fire and boil the water." Pure poetry. Today programme weather gabblers, take note. Next week: rude words.

• The unexpected benefits of minimum alcohol pricing. "As Tesco own-brand whisky will be £10.25 a bottle in Middlesbrough but £14 in Scotland," emails a sharp young fellow called David Carter, "I'll be stocking up the car to drive to Edinburgh at festival time. The profit will pay for accommodation. I assume there are no customs checks at the border." Trebles all round.

• Duncan Campbell, an esteemed former occupant of this pulpit, reckons he has solved the great insults question. "Surely any insult should have to pass the Groucho Marx test – does it make a bystander smile? My favourite Groucho (which I have used once, very satisfyingly) is: 'I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.'"

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

• This article was amended on 18 May 2012. The original contained a misattributed quote, which has been deleted.

Politically inspired civil service bashing is naive, and counterproductive to the process of reform

Ministers and civil servants have got to work together, or else they will fail separately. In the last few days there have been well-sourced reports of angry clashes at Downing Street meetings, and the unexpected departure of Ian Watmore as permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office has stirred a buzz of speculation. Politically inspired civil service bashing in the media – about officials being lazy for working from home during the Olympics and being generally obstructive – is not only naive and exaggerated but also counterproductive.

The complaints read oddly, given the scale of radical reforms – to schools, health, welfare, immigration, higher education - that have already been enacted and are now being put into operation. Head counts have already fallen by as much as they did during the Thatcher years.

Of course, there is plenty of scope for reform, as the Institute for Government has repeatedly argued. The record on managing big projects, notably on information technology, has often been poor. Departments lack the right kind of information to assess whether there is value for money, and policymaking too often does not take into account the problems of implementation. Civil servants can too easily fall into a cynical "here today, gone tomorrow" attitude towards ministers. Departmental permanent secretaries too often behave like barons resisting efforts to create collective leadership.

But the civil service has already changed considerably in the past 20 years, being more open and diverse and putting much greater emphasis on delivery and improving skills. And, as all accept, much more needs to be done. The public sector is still only a fifth to a quarter of the way through spending cuts lasting well after the next election with targets of cutting administrative budgets by between 33% and 50%.

The immediate focus is the government's long-awaited civil service reform plan, due next month. The discussions have been enlivened by the often brutal iconoclasm of Steve Hilton, the prime minister's strategy adviser, who has just started a year-long sabbatical in California. He advocates a much smaller civil service, all fitting into Somerset House, and he has clashed with civil service leaders who regard some of his views as naive. But many of his underlying frustrations are shared by ministers. However, the new civil service leadership, Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the civil service, fully accept that more big cuts and reforms have to happen – even though there has been vigorous debate over the extent and details.

Sir Bob and Sir Jeremy are indispensable to David Cameron. Sir Jeremy is the most powerful cabinet secretary in a generation, precisely the complaint of some Tory MPs and commentators. While Sir Bob's reflective style may be unusual in Whitehall, he has far more experience of running large organisations – from his nearly two decades as a local authority chief executive – than any other permanent secretary.

The pair represent the best hope for taking forward civil service reform. They now need to show a joint commitment to reform in detail if they are to mobilise their fellow permanent secretaries to show collective leadership.

It is no good ministers and their advisers treating the civil service as a populist punchbag. They cannot change government on their own. Cameron should publicly and strongly back the civil service leadership and the reform plan. The alternative is that reform will falter, as it so often has in the past, leading to a downward spiral of morale and performance.

Peter Riddell is director of the Institute for Government

Cameron's exhortation to 'get your house in order' is specious: the ECB needs to focus investment on rebalancing the economy

In the recent elections in Greece and France, voters voted loudly for politicians who argue that with record levels of unemployment, poverty and despair, only a growth plan will prevent Europe disintegrating politically, economically and socially.

The new emphasis on "growth" is due to the failure of austerity, in all countries, to kickstart a post-crisis recovery (or even reduce debt levels), and the failure of quantitative easing in achieving much but bailing out the banks that are now rich enough to start speculating again. Healthy banks in a sick economy: a bad mix. Yet this new emphasis on growth is hardly a consensus.

Economists, since the time of Adam Smith's 1776 work, Wealth of Nations, have debated what causes growth. Indeed, some economists have long insisted that growth occurs precisely through thrift – that is, austerity. And in recent weeks we have heard many economists argue that growth in the eurozone will come from "structural reforms" that will make it easier to collect taxes, reduce red tape, and easier to hire and fire workers.

But growth requires investment. Companies invest to make profits and grow. Evidence shows those which invest more in new technology, human capital and research and development, and are located in countries where public spending in these areas is high, are able to produce more competitive and better value products.

Italy has not grown for the last 10 years, mainly because its public and private sector did not make key investments in factors that increase productivity. Its debt-to-GDP ratio rose because its growth rate was so much lower than the interest it paid on its debt. And Greece grew in the 90s not because it was making smart investments but because badly directed European structural funds allowed it to get away with not making them. Once those funds expired, so did the false growth.

And structural reforms without investment don't produce growth. When Telecom Italia was privatised in 1997 (to spur growth) it cut its research and development spending, and is now much less innovative and competitive than France Télécom, which remained partly public and continued to invest. Scandinavia, with its large welfare state and stringent labour laws, has been one of the most crisis-resilient regions because it invests in innovation.

Yet through its moralistic and deflationary stance of "do what the Germans did", pressure from Germany is not allowing the weaker eurozone countries to do just that. German competitiveness is not due only to its lower unit labour costs (which are not low when welfare benefits are included), but to its strategic investments in research and development, vocational training, state investment banks that create "patient" finance, and its recent emphasis on greening the economy. Similarly, the engineering group Siemens did not win a UK contract for fast green trains because of low wages, but because of its innovation investments, which have made it one of the most competitive companies in the world.

The eurozone will grow only once weaker countries are allowed to make the strategic investments Germany has. There is much talk about the need for internal rebalancing, to increase the competitiveness of the deficit-burdened south relative to the surplus-blessed north, but this is a limited view. What is required is not that wages fall in Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, but that they make investments that increase their productivity – an impossibility with austerity-driven policies.

And the lack of these investments only makes Germany more competitive relative to its southern neighbours – but without a strong EU, Germany will not be able to compete with China and Brazil in emerging sectors and technologies.

A critical player, the European Investment Bank, could encourage productive investments across Europe, generating a real rebalancing. The EIB could become the financial arm of what should be, but is not, Europe's equivalent of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Applying the principle of the "Keynesian multiplier", the current proposal is to increase its capital by a modest €10bn, unleashing €60bn in co-financing projects which will then (hopefully) multiply to as much as €180bn of European Union output.

But to render this a systematic mechanism for European economic solidarity, more is needed. Under the present law, EIB investments need to be co-financed by member states; and the weaker ones have no cash for this. Only if European Central Bank bonds can co-finance EIB bonds – which Germany resists – will EIB investments allow Greece, for instance, to grow through investment in renewables, putting its sunshine to better use than just tourism. And, in the process, create the desperately needed dynamic "spillovers" in technology, research, education, and training.

So if growth is really on the agenda, the focus should be on the productive investments needed to rebalance Europe, and mechanisms that allow that to happen. It is far too easy for David Cameron to say "get your house in order" and then work against such mechanisms. The eurozone will rise when new economic thinking wins over static ideology.

I object to same-sex marriage because I believe in social pluralism, not fancy-free individualism

I will be the first to accept that homosexual people have suffered discrimination and sometimes worse through the decades and that the churches have, at times, been complicit in this. There is much penance to be done before we can look our homosexual brothers and sisters in the eye. But that baleful history does not diminish the need to speak the truth in love.

I firmly believe that redefining marriage to embrace same-sex relationships would mean diminishing the meaning of marriage for most people, with very little if anything gained for homosexual people. If I am right, in the long term we would all be losers.

Of course, if someone should ask, "how will my marriage be affected if couples of the same sex can marry?", the answer is: not at all. But let me put the question another way: what sort of a society would we have if we came to see all family relationships primarily in terms of equal rights? The family is designed to meet the different needs of its different members in different ways. It is the model of the just society that responds intelligently to differences rather than treating everyone the same.

While I am a strong supporter of justice and equality of opportunity for all people, I want to insist that with those rights go our responsibilities to one another. These are enshrined, I believe, in our legal definition of marriage. Would we be a better society if we made marriage simply a private contract between two individuals, with no wider implications of kinship and family? I do not believe that we would. The issue is not the implication for any existing marriage, but the implication for people in the future, when the social meaning of marriage has been changed and, in my view, diminished.

Drawing parallels between the proposed the proposed same-sex marriage and inter-racial marriage ignores the fact that there is more than one paradigm of equality. For me, racial equality rests on the doctrine that there is only one race – the human race – and any difference of treatment on ethnic grounds is therefore unjustifiable. But there is another view, based on the complementary nature of men and women. In short, should there be equality between the sexes because a woman can do anything a man can do or because a good society needs the different perspectives of women and men equally?

As far back as Mary Wollstonecraft we find that second view pressed very firmly. We see it today in the welcome insistence that all-male committees, clubs and so on are not fit for purpose. Unless one believes that every difference between the sexes is a mere social construct, the question of equality between the sexes cannot be completely addressed by the paradigm of racial equality. Defining marriage as between a man and a woman is not discriminatory against same-sex couples. What I am pressing for is a kind of social pluralism that does not degenerate into a fancy-free individualism.

Civil partnerships in the United Kingdom, granted under the Civil Partnership Act 2004, give same-sex couples rights and responsibilities identical to marriage. There is a formal process for dissolving civil partnerships akin to divorce. This similarity does not turn them into marriage. They are different from marriage. They are in every respect in ethical terms an honourable contract of a committed relationship. This difference does not imply that they lack protection in law, economics and social standing. To change the law and smooth out this difference on grounds of equality would force unjustified change on the rest of the nation.

It is important for the understanding both of marriage and of civil partnership that the categories are not confused. The retention of the current understanding of marriage should not prevent gay and lesbian couples from being able to affirm and honour their relationship without being obliged to fit into another category.

The question for me is one of justice, and not equality. Justice is the primary category. It does not mean not treating everyone the same way,but giving everyone what they need or deserve: education to the young, homecare to the old, opportunity to the enterprising, protection to the threatened. Equality follows justice, and secures its consistent administration: not just some young people, but all, not just some threatened people but all. A clear picture of the just order is what makes equality objective. Without it, equality claims are liable to be subjective and contradictory.

If it was a question of justice, what injustice would result from not turning civil partners into married couples? I suggest: no injustice.

It is a great mistake to use the statute to give comfort and assurance. The rule of law exists to address injustices. The current difference between marriage and civil partnerships does not involve injustice, but the proposed changes arguably would, by creating two new varieties of marriage.

The virtue of the civil partnerships scheme lay in the attempt to treat the needs of gay and lesbian couples as what they are, not to bundle them into some other category. Marriage is built around complementarity of the sexes, and therefore the institution of marriage is a support for stable families and societies.

Those civil partners who consider that their partnership is still inadequately recognised should give the civil partnership legislation time to establish itself and gain increasing public understanding.

This is an edited extract of a paper that can be read in full at http://j.mp/JjgEpv

• Comments for this article will be switched on in the morning

I thought I could see tribal bigotry at 100 paces and fell it with a Socratic blow, but I was deluding myself – and so are you

Are you for growth or austerity? Do you sympathise with the Greeks, or regard them as getting what they deserve? If you disagree with something you read, do you ever change your mind, or do you shout rubbish and chuck it in the bin? Since the days of Socrates, civilisation has honed the art of reason to resolve conflict and deliver harmony. Yet people of like background and education can disagree about everything. Why?

I sometimes wonder that I write for the Guardian when what I say seems to anger so many readers. Most people buy a newspaper not to be prised from their settled opinion but to find it confirmed and comforted. They would not be dragged from it by wild horses, let alone the old nag of reason. A newspaper is their tribal notice board, their badge, their identity.

Nor is that all. Tribes of left and right tend to buy the shop. They take their politics table d'hôte, not à la carte. Those on the left are for more public spending, higher taxes, no war and a tolerance of scroungers, those on the right the exact reverse. Once they have opted for Labour or Conservative (or the obscure freemasonry of liberal democracy), they surrender their political virginity to the party line, lie back and enjoy it – usually for life.

I have a problem with this. I opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars, would abolish Trident, end prison for nonviolent offenders and legalise drugs. But I support the government on NHS reform, students fees and targeting social benefits. I am a UN-enthusiast, but an aid sceptic. Gays should enjoy full civil rights but I find ethnic minorities over-cosseted. All this I regard as a coherent political outlook.

Not many others do. Friends and acquaintances find my portfolio of views either mischievous or mad, and mutter darkly about my probable need of treatment. Dear Abby, are they right?

At last we have some help. It is from the American political scientist, Jonathan Haidt, and his fascinating voyage of discovery through the social psychology of politics, The Righteous Mind. Haidt, a lifelong liberal, was baffled at why so many poor and working-class voters kept supporting conservative politicians when it was clearly against their interest.

Haidt's answer is not just that politics is seldom purely about money. Conservatives are also more in touch with what he calls the "taste buds" of politics. They understand human intuition. They score on such emotions as loyalty to the nation or group, desire for security and authority and a concern for religious and moral purity. Liberals cover just two bases, a sense of fairness and compassion for strangers, thus missing out on a large chunk of human intuition and concern. Above all, they rely too much on an appeal to reason.

To Haidt, reason is not how people wrestle with a problem to find a path to the right answer. That was for the Greeks (the ancient ones). Reason is rather a weapon we deploy to persuade others that we are right, and they use to prove us wrong. It is not a coming together but a driving apart. As David Hume observed, reason is subordinate to the passions. It rides into battle on the elephant of intuition. Hence the advice of modern political tacticians, that politicians should always "talk to the elephant first". Conservatives are good at talking to elephants.

So what determines these dominant intuitions, that they are so resistant to reason? Psychologists now believe that we owe our political views not to any argued programme, but to some gene pool or acquired tribal loyalty, parental, territorial, educational or occupational. It is part nature, part nurture. Loyalty to a profession can be as fanatical as to a family: most lawyers, doctors, soldiers and scientists in my experience believe their profession can do no wrong (unlike, of course, journalists).

This may seem a mere updating of WS Gilbert's cry that "every boy and every gal" is delivered into the world "either a little liberal or a little conservative". But what to Gilbert may have seemed a random attractor of Victorian politics is, in modern America, leading to an increasingly furious polarisation. To many foreigners, America seems a land divided between hysterias, driven apart by round-the-clock news and opinion, in which information inflames rather than calms preconceived opinion.

Studies suggest these political divergences may lie far deeper than we think, in our neurological pathways. Even in mild-mannered Britain, such cross-border adventures as red Tories and blue Labour gain little traction. Opinions reflect insecurity and fear of the unknown: as when America lurched to the patriotic and illiberal right after 9/11. In some American cities, the sociologist Bill Bishop has noted (in The Big Sort) that polarisation is producing a "political ethnic cleansing" as people find they cannot live near others of different views. If political attitudes are becoming that neurotic, it is doubly tragic that people live apart. A cartoon shows a divorcing father explaining to his child, "It is because I want what is best for the country and your mother doesn't."

Yet Haidt offers me only limited help. Whatever intuition he thinks holds me in thrall remains a mystery to me. I believe – as do most people – that I approach any political issue with an open mind, driving towards it in the chariot of reason. I think I can see tribal bigotry at a hundred paces and can fell it with a Socratic blow. I can only assume that Haidt is roaring with laughter, that somewhere in his political anthropology he will unearth a tribe that laced my mother's milk with scepticism and programmed me to a contrarian view of life.

These debates always turn into pleas for liberal tolerance, for a respect for other people's opinions, drawing strength from Stephen Pinker's thesis that, whatever else is amiss, the world is becoming a less violent place. But tolerance is itself a privilege of security. Intellectually it is appeasement. I do not want to tolerate those who disagree with me, I want to persuade them they are wrong. Haidt may cry, "Why can't we all just get along?" The answer is we can't. The best we can do is not murder each other in the process.

The governor of the Bank of England says there is no obvious solution to the crisis gripping the single currency

The elevation of Jon Cruddas can only mean one thing for the shadow cabinet – get philosophical

• Jon Cruddas's appointment as head of Labour's policy review in place of Liam Byrne promises to put some serious thinking at the heart of the Miliband project. But will it be a bit too serious? In a speech at the University of East Anglia last week, he managed to reference no fewer than 34 writers, philosophers, religious leaders and politicians, including Althusser, Balibar, Poulantzas, Laclau and Foucault. Their ideas may be common currency in the Dog and Duck in Dagenham, but what will the simple souls in the shadow cabinet make of them? Thinking caps on.

• With insults banned in the UK, the Diary is worried about its future. Aspersions, unsubstantiated allegations, mockery, contumely and generalised obloquy are our stock-in-trade. But a solution is at hand. We are relocating to Holland, where the high court has ruled that it's acceptable to call a policeman a mierenneuker, literally "ant-fucker", which the Dutch use to describe people who stick obsessively to the rules. We will not bow before the forces of state oppression, and in any case quite fancy a canal-side office in Delft.

• By the way, the Diary has not been invited to the Cannes film festival, so this has been formally declared a CANNES-FREE ZONE. Cineaste mierenneukers!

On the subject of insults, it's good to see that the much-maligned footballer and epistemologist Joseph Barton has received high-level support at Westminster. "It's nauseating," wrote a senior Labour MP on his blog. "Not Barton's skirmish – professional football is a rough old game – but the elevation of a bit of minor violence, during what most fans accept is a contact sport and where nobody got hurt, to crime of the century." Forcefully put. And who is the punchy blogger? Step forward Eric Joyce, MP for Falkirk and boisterous denizen of the Commons bar. Yes, indeed, step forw• ard, but please don't get too close.

• Tony Parsons, writing in the sociological journal Grazia, argues that it is a "law of nature" that men should earn more than women. "Many ordinary couples have two earners, especially in these hard times. But does it rock the family boat if the woman earns more? No – it drives the boat into an iceberg. Because the man will feel as if his penis is dropping off." Not surprisingly the sisterhood on Twitter have decided he's a bit of a cock.

• Teach yourself Kusunda (part 2). You will recall that we are doing our bit to save the moribund western Nepalese language of Kusunda. Having mastered numbers yesterday, we now move on to basic vocab. Hello: Sodzaq. Man: Duidze. Woman: Ngan di getse. Food: Xaidzi. Water: Tang. Tea: Tsya. Bread: Mame. Beer: Sizzang. Milk (also breast and udder): Ambu. Winnowing tray: Supo. Horse's kidneys: Paeyaksem geki. Goat's intestine: Aidzi gemet. Tomorrow, we turn our attention to the weather, which is jolly jolly important in western Nepal.

• It's been a good week for the BBC. First, Boris Johnson savaged the corporation as "statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, europhile and overwhelmingly biased to the left", and demanded that the next DG be a Tory. And now the anti-monarchy group Republic is threatening to take it to judicial review for having the temerity to cover the paraphernalia surrounding the jubilee. To alienate both Bonkers Boris and the monomaniacs at Republic suggests the BBC is doing a pretty good job.

• Following our Diary world exclusive yesterday about Manchester City not having a trophy room, a distressed Geordie writes: "Newcastle United haven't shut down their trophy room, but they have renamed it. It's now called The Room."

• The British Curry Club is running an initiative to help save the tiger in Bangladesh – 25% of the cost of meals in participating restaurants will this week be going to the Sundarbans Tiger Project – and they offer to buy me a curry if I mention it. Well, I'm sorry, but this diarist cannot be bought.

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

Nato's murderous occupation will feel the strength of American and Afghan solidarity in Chicago this weekend

Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Chicago this weekend for Nato's annual summit where Afghanistan will be top of the agenda. It promises to be one of the most important anti-war demonstrations of our generation. I will be unable to travel to attend, but from here in Kabul I can tell you that the whole country will be watching Chicago this weekend.

The protesters remind us that the US government is not representative of the US people. It's encouraging to see so many willing to take action and stand up against this unjust, disastrous war.

Recently Barack Obama travelled to Kabul to meet Afghanistan's so-called president, Hamid Karzai. Both leaders used this meeting to pretend that they are ending this war when they are really trying to prolong it. Obama knows that the American people are turning against the war, and both men also know that the Afghan people are against not only the war, but the continued occupation of their country. Both claim that the war will end in 2014, while saying simultaneously that American troops will remain in some capacity until 2024. As 2024 nears they will probably say they mean to remain in Afghanistan until 2034.

The reality is that the US and its Nato allies plan to dominate Afghanistan and the larger region militarily for the next generation. Their reasoning is geostrategic: to control our energy and mineral resources, and maintain military superiority over China and other competitors.

No one can believe leaders like Obama who say they are working for peace even as they continue the bombings, night raids and drone attacks that kill civilians every week – sometimes every day – in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

This weekend's protests will likely face repression. Police in Chicago have reportedly spent $1m on riot-control equipment ahead of the summit. But it's vital that people take to the streets to raise their voices. Here in Afghanistan, peace and women's rights activists risk their lives to hold protests against both the occupation and the fundamentalist warlords.

President Obama lived in Chicago for many years; it is practically his hometown. Mine is in Afghanistan's remote Farah province, where I was elected as an MP in 2005, at the age of 26. Because I spoke out and denounced the occupation, the warlords and the Taliban, I faced threats and assassination attempts – and was kicked out of parliament in 2007.

Because I was banished, I was unable to stand in parliament and condemn a Nato bombing in May 2009 that killed about 150 people in Farah. Most of the victims of this massacre were women and children. I would like to ask Obama and his wife, Michelle, how they would feel if their own daughters were killed in this senseless and brutal manner?

Because this is the reality of the war in Afghanistan. This is the reality of what Nato does all around the world, and if Nato is allowed to stay and continue the war in Afghanistan, it will be emboldened to wage more wars against more people – in the Middle East, in Africa and beyond.

We have many problems in Afghanistan – fundamentalism, warlords, the Taliban – but we will have a better chance to solve them if we have our self-determination, our freedom, our independence. Nato's bombs will never deliver democracy and justice to Afghanistan or any other country.

The voices of protest in the streets of Chicago will be seen and heard in Kabul, and in Farah, and eventually in every corner of Afghanistan. As we say here, the truth is like the sun: when it comes out, nothing can block it.

I'm sorry I cannot be in Chicago this weekend physically. But I, along with millions of other Afghans, will be there in heart and in spirit, standing in solidarity with the demand that Nato withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

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The Olympic flame that reaches Britain on Friday was initially a way of glorifying Hitler's regime

Seventy-eight years ago this month, two elderly Germans found themselves on a train to Athens. As they watched the scenery chuff past, they discussed arrangements for what would be the biggest sporting festival the world had seen – the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The older man, Theodor Lewald, was president of the organising committee for the Games; his companion was Carl Diem, the committee's secretary-general, who had captained the German Olympic team at Stockholm in 1912.

While the two men headed south, Diem had a brainwave. Wouldn't it be a great idea, he suggested, if the Olympic flame were carried by a torch relay from Olympia all the way to Berlin? There could be no more vivid a way of linking the capital of the new German Reich with the original games of classical Greece, whose culture Hitler so admired. Lewald agreed, as did the International Olympic Committee members they were to meet in Athens.

What the men could not appreciate was that the torch would become emblematic of the uneasy links between politics and sport. It took the Nazis to realise the full propaganda potential of the Olympics, and thanks to them the torch quickly became a symbol more of political willpower than harmless sporting pageantry.

However, the road from Greece to Germany was paved with good intentions. Before the first torch relay took place, the event was "blessed" by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics. He declared that through the event "there will be established the vigorous and well-considered peace appropriate to a sporting epoch of high ambition and strong will".

Ironically, the partly Jewish Lewald described the relay in terms of the cod Nazi history of which Himmler would have been proud. The torch created, he claimed, "a real and spiritual bond between our German fatherland and the sacred places of Greece founded nearly 4,000 years ago by Nordic immigrants".

The relay was a triumph of organisation, 3,331 runners carrying the flame all 3,187 kilometres to Berlin. But it did attract controversy. As the torch – forged from the same Krupp steel that would be used to build Hitler's panzers – made its way north, it became a magnet for Nazis and their sympathisers.

In Vienna, 10,000 Austrian Nazis greeted it with shouts of "Heil Hitler!" and, predictably, the Horst Wessel song. When Jewish members of the Austrian Olympic team gathered to see the torch, they were abused by Nazis, and 500 arrests were made. So much for De Coubertin's fine words.

Despite these disturbances, the Germans were so proud of the relay that Lewald upbraided De Coubertin for not giving the host nation more credit. "I cannot hide from you my extreme surprise," wrote Lewald, "that you have not given a single mention of the fact that the idea for the torch relay is a purely German idea."

To add further irony, it was Carl Diem who addressed thousands of Hitler Youth in the Olympic stadium in March 1945, calling on them to show "Olympic spirit" by refusing to surrender to the Russians. As an extra incentive, execution stakes had been erected around the stadium to inspire any boys who did not feel "Olympic" enough. Two thousand of those he addressed that day were killed before the end of the war.

Nevertheless, the Germans eventually honoured Diem by putting his face on a postage stamp in 1968. That's the great thing about Olympism – it's not just about being faster, higher, stronger, but also about forgetting.

We ourselves might do well to remember the somewhat sordid past of the torch relay when the flame reaches British shores on Friday Just as with 1936, the torch can be seen more as a political symbol than a sporting one, just as we witnessed four years ago when it made its controversial way around the globe for the Games in Beijing. Then the flame was surrounded by a mob of police heavies, which perfectly represented the controlling nature of the Chinese regime.

In truth, the torch has become more a symbol of the desires of the host country than of the Olympic movement. As the flame passes through our towns and villages, will we see it as a flaming beacon of a Cameroonian "big society", or something a little less confident – a flickering tealight caught in a mighty global wind?

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It's an egregious Tory narrative that blames the crisis on our individual 'debt-bingeing' while ignoring the true culprits

If you think William Hague telling you to work harder is the most vexatious political message imaginable, consider how much worse it would be coming from Cameron or Osborne. Hague, like Tebbit before him, has a "striver's" authenticity: "I slogged my way out of poverty, you can too." Both in fact and in progression, that argument is bogus, but we don't have time to get into that. There is an avalanche of preposterousness coming our way.

Hague's message follows the marvellously patrician thoughts of Philip Hammond, who wondered why households wouldn't take responsibility for their indebtedness, and told the Telegraph: "People say to me, 'it was the banks'. I say, 'Hang on, the banks have to lend to someone'."

We're looking at the beginning of a new narrative: it's mainly the fault of the last government. But if it's not their fault, it's your fault. Those hard-working families we love to talk about? You weren't one of them. I clearly saw your kid watching Pokémon. Nobody was even trying to make anything they could sell in Brazil.

Now, a lot of it is plainly silly. You can't work harder in a non-existent job. You can't set up a business on your own when conditions are so stringent for borrowers and the domestic market is so flat. Pressed on whether his was an updated "on-your-bike" idea, Hague replied: "It's more than that. It's 'get on the plane, go and sell things overseas, go and study overseas'. It's much more than getting on the bike, the bike didn't go that far." That's the government's new way of dealing with unemployment: persuade people to leave the country. It's original, you have to give it that.

The household debt argument is as absurd, in a more involved way. It's true that household debt rose before the crash, it's true that it was starkest in households with the lowest income, and it's true that that creates perfect conditions for economic instability (a report by the Resolution Foundation, published on Tuesday, shows the extent of the debt surge). It is untrue to surmise, as the Telegraph did, that poor people just had a rush of blood to the head and wilfully engaged in an "unsustainable debt binge".

Actually, there was a growing gap between pay and economic output, which is to say, wages at the bottom weren't high enough. This will, over time, suck demand out of the economy and lead to recession. The Tories can tub thump all they like about how we can't stimulate the economy "buying things we can't afford", but the truth is, if those low earners hadn't taken on some debt, we would have simply had the recession sooner. What caused the wage depression? A surge – you might call it an unsustainable salary binge – in riches at the top. This is an easily discernible pattern, pointed out by the economist Stewart Lansley: in the US, there have been only two periods in a century when the richest 1% held more than a fifth of the country's income pool. One was in the eight years running up to the Great Depression. The other was in the 18 years running up to this Even Better Depression (in 1990, they held 14.3%; by 2006 it was 22.8%).

Furthermore, if household indebtedness was that bad, why was no UK bank buried under its weight? All these debts are held by high street banks. As we've seen, in the face of instability from the international derivatives market, they had no resilience at all. And yet their lending to UK households has been strangely unproblematic, which suggests not that the banks have found some unexpected capital reserves under their mattresses, but rather that households soldier on with their debts.

It may put the brakes on their spending, but they're not defaulting and making it someone else's problem; they haven't bitten off more they can chew, in other words. This gives ordinary households the double-edged merit of being the most responsible element of the entire system of credit – it's double-edged because they end up paying for other people's mistakes anyway, and then have to swallow some totally egregious blame from the sneering Philip Hammond.

Finally, there's an ongoing attempt to make "household debt" sound like money that was thrown away on frivolities. Actually, it's mainly mortgages: pre-crash, there were 12,000 mortgage products available to the UK homebuyer, 8,000 of which were available to people with compromised credit histories. That's a case for the banks to answer; they didn't make these loans because we asked them nicely.

Regardless of where you are on the income scale, nobody could ever call your decision to buy a house irresponsible – whatever happens, you need somewhere to live, and swingeing rents usually represent far worse value. For low-earning households to have avoided mortgage debts, they would have had to actively decide to stick with renting; that is, to pay the same, for a worse property that they'd never have any equity in, just on the off-chance that, as a result of a possible downturn, they might be dragged down by the debt. What a bizarre thing to expect of people, when you're preaching a can-do, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, aspirational Tory attitude.

I think Hague and Hammond are hoping that the spectre of individual responsibility will be enough to scare us all back to blaming the last government. But misattributed blame is a dangerous thing; I don't know about you, but it doesn't make me afraid, it makes me very angry.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams

It's just another election in the birthplace of democracy, but the future of Europe may turn on this one

When Germany's chancellor Hannelore Kraft met France's president François Hollande in a sunny Berlin earlier this week, they agreed on a compelling strategy to save the eurozone. With no elections in any eurozone country for the next two years, they were able to stretch the austerity timeline for Greece, Spain and Italy, add some elements of growth stimulus, including increased demand in Germany itself, but also keep up the essential pressure for fiscal discipline and structural reform. As a result, even devastated Greece began to glimpse light at the end of the tunnel.

In our dreams, fellow Europeans, in our dreams. The reality is different. While François Hollande and Angela Merkel – not Kraft, the Social Democratic victor in last Sunday's North Rhine-Westphalia elections and possible candidate for chancellor in 2013 – meet under thunder and lightning-torn skies, there is capital flight from Greece (more than €5bn since the 6 May election), fear and trembling in the markets, self-reinforcing talk of Greek exit from the euro and another month of uncertainty until another election in Athens. Meanwhile, back in Berlin, Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble still preaches the gospel of Ordoliberalism as if it were revealed truth. And everywhere, all the time, there is that tiresome old Greek invention called democracy.

I recently heard a line attributed to Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister and head of the euro group, to the effect that "we know exactly what we should do; we just don't know how to get re-elected if we do it". It's not entirely clear that Merkel and Schäuble do know what is needed, since their economic doctrine is flawed. But even if they did, or if it were already federal chancellor Kraft, there would still be the problem of an election imminent somewhere in Europe, and the chronic difficulty politicians find in telling home truths to people whose votes they are courting.

Each country has its own home truth that its politicians are failing to tell. Britain's untold home truth is that it cannot have its cake and eat it, being a semi-detached member of the EU while continuing to enjoy all the economic benefits of membership. France's untold home truth is that it is no longer an equal partner of Germany.

Germany's untold home truth is that it is going to pay for this mess anyway, one way or another. Many of Greece's bad debts have already been socialised via the European Financial Stability Facility, the IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB). Germany has a major share of each of them, but particularly of the last. "Target 2" may not yet be a household phrase in Germany, but it should be.

Through the ECB's so-called target 2 liquidity system, Germany had – at the end of last month – some €644bn of claims on other eurozone central banks, a sum equivalent to roughly a quarter of German GDP. If Greece exited the euro, what would happen to its central bank's target 2 liability to the ECB, and through the ECB to Germany? Nobody knows, but in all probability, the ECB would just write it off. That wouldn't break the bank, but Germany would end up footing part of the bill. If Greek default had a knock-on effect on other weaker eurozone countries, Germany would have to reach into its pocket to shore them up – directly or indirectly – or face wholly unpredictable consequences.

Greece's untold, or only half-told, home truth is that its only alternatives now are bad, worse or worst. Worst is clearly an unplanned, chaotic exit from the euro. That may still happen. If it doesn't, then Greek voters have a month to work out which they think is bad and which worse: a planned, careful departure from the euro or remaining in on the best terms Hollande can help them squeeze out of Germany.

I am not ready to join the chorus of commentators confidently urging Greece to jump one way or the other. I simply don't know which would be better for Greece. I'm not an economist – and, by the way, the economists don't know either. I'm also not ready because I'm not Greek. Democracy means people working out what government and policies are best for them. There is no European demos, therefore no proper EU-wide democracy, so the Greeks have to work out what is good for the Greeks.

Their 6 May election was a howl of anguish at the suffering the country has been put through. It involved a majority rejection of the two main parties that have dominated the country's politics for decades and of those parties' support for the so-called "memorandum" – the agreement on austerity in return for European bailout.

The next election will be a moment of truth: in or out. Should the country gamble that after the initial shock and losses of "Grexit", its economy could grow again with the help of devaluation? Or should the new government negotiate the best deal it can get inside the eurozone, taking hope from the impact of Hollande and others? Merkel trailed her coat a little , telling CNBC: "If Greece believes that we can find more stimulus in Europe in addition to the memorandum then we have to talk about that." Yet even the best possible deal would mean a long, painful slog out of the valley of despair.

These alternatives need to be placed as honestly as possible before Greek voters. Then they have to decide. Actually, that was the extraordinary idea people came up with in Athens about 2,500 years ago. Free citizens gathered in the place of assembly. "Tis agoreuein bouletai?" cried the herald – "Who wishes to address the assembly?" Then any free man (yes, it was only men) could make the best case for his favoured policy choice, with democracy and free speech being seen as two sides of the same coin.

The future of the eurozone now depends on the choice to be made in Greece, the future of Europe on that of the eurozone, and that of the west to a significant degree on that of Europe – so, with slight hyperbole, we can say that the future of the west now depends on the birthplace of the west. Is it too much to hope that, in such a moment, Greek politics will rediscover some of the grandeur and simplicity that was present in Athens at the creation of democracy? Probably it is.

Twitter: @fromtga

• This article was amended on 17 May 2012. It originally referred to Jean-Claude Juncker as the former prime minister of Luxembourg. He remains the PM and this has now been corrected

'Remoding' for the Olympics: is this a policy beyond parody?

• "Remoding" is the word on everyone's lips, thanks to transport secretary Justine Greening's appearance in a film made by her department praising the virtues of Operation StepChange. "Across the whole department we're trying to reroute, remode, retime and generally reduce our travel," she says as she strides briskly to a cabinet meeting. "I'm remoding at the moment." Operation StepChange seems to involve abandoning the tube, which will be overwhelmed by the Olympics, and walking, cycling or kayaking around London instead. But it isn't playing well, even with government supporters. Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservative Home, likens the video to The Thick of It, and the Spectator blog declares it beyond parody. A YouTube rap version of La Greening's statement of intent seems inevitable.

• The UK Border Agency has yet to remode, according to Dr Hugh Macmillan of Dorchester. "I arrived at Heathrow yesterday on a Turkish Airlines flight from Cape Town via Istanbul," he writes, "Although, as a British citizen, I don't need one, I was handed a landing card. In bold print along the bottom of the card was the legend in English and Turkish: 'If you break UK laws you could face imprisonment and removal.' Is this the way that we welcome visitors to our country in the year of the Olympics, or any other year?" Over to you, Ms Greening.

• Recent gifts to the PM, as revealed on the Cabinet Office website: a rug from the president of Afghanistan; a vase from the president of Nigeria; stone carvings from the state council of China; pewter and aluminium items from Supersport Group; and, wait for it, a BlackBerry from Nigerian company Monitise Mobile Money. With any luck, next year someone will buy Mr Cameron lessons in how to use it. LOL.

• The Diary was moved by this week's news that the ancient western Nepalese language of Kusunda is down to its last native speaker, a 75-year-old tribeswoman called Gyani Maiya Sen. Any language that dies is a tragedy, so over the next couple of weeks we will be running a "Teach yourself Kusunda" course, put together by my linguistically inclined colleague Max. Today, counting in Kusunda. One: Qasadan. Two: Jinga. Three: Dahat, Four: Pinjang. Five: Pangang. Happily, anything beyond five is covered by Menni, meaning many. Good work. I really think we can keep this thing alive. Tomorrow, basic vocab.

• Where are Manchester City going to put the Premier League trophy? They have no trophy room, and closed their museum three years ago. When the club won the FA Cup last year, they put it in the souvenir shop, but that would surely be a little unseemly for the Big One. "There's an announcement in the pipeline," says a spokeswoman. "We should have something ready by July." Let's hope they don't lose it in the meantime. A Norwegian film crew spent most of last week looking for the replica of the trophy City won in 1968 for topping the old first division, but failed to find it. If anyone knows its whereabouts, please send details to Sheikh Mansour, Etihad Stadium, Manchester.

• And so to footballer's philosopher king Joseph Barton, tweeting from his hideaway in Portugal. "Think I'll sit by the pool and reflect on not only on [sic] how lucky I am but how hard I work and how far that hard work has taken me ..." Good to see you've calmed down after the weekend's excesses, Joey. Now how about apologising to that nice Mr Lineker?

• A Telegraph reader writes: "Sir, I use a quill; always have done, always will. Those from a peacock's wing feather are both sturdy and well balanced, and in plentiful supply about my garden." Priceless.

• OK, I accept that re-running Telegraph letters is the last resort of the exhausted diarist. You try producing half a dozen witty, sardonic, vaguely newsy items every day. I was intrigued by digital visionary Emily Bell's column about "robot journalism" in Media Guardian this week, and am hoping that tomorrow's column can be produced using algorithms which "take data and turn it into words". Space this watch.

Twitter: @StephenMossGdn

Former News International CEO expressed her anger that those close to her have been 'dragged into the affair'

Liberia's Charles Taylor has been convicted of war crimes, so why not the western leaders who escalated Libya's killing?

Libya was supposed to be different. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan had been learned, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy insisted last year. This would be a real humanitarian intervention. Unlike Iraq, there would be no boots on the ground. Unlike in Afghanistan, Nato air power would be used to support a fight for freedom and prevent a massacre. Unlike the Kosovo campaign, there would be no indiscriminate cluster bombs: only precision weapons would be used. This would be a war to save civilian lives.

Seven months on from Muammar Gaddafi's butchering in the ruins of Sirte, the fruits of liberal intervention in Libya are now cruelly clear, and documented by the UN and human rights groups: 8,000 prisoners held without trial, rampant torture and routine deaths in detention, the ethnic cleansing of Tawerga, a town of 30,000 mainly black Libyans (already in the frame as a crime against humanity) and continuing violent persecution of sub-Saharan Africans across the country.

A year after the western powers tried to make up for lost ground in the Arab uprisings by tipping the balance of the Benghazi-led revolt, Libya is in the lawless grip of rival warlords and armed conflict between militias, as the western-installed National Transitional Council (NTC) passes Gaddafi-style laws clamping down on freedom of speech, gives legal immunity to former rebels and disqualifies election candidates critical of the new order. These are the political forces Nato played the decisive role in bringing to power.

Now the evidence is starting to build up of what Nato's laser-guided bombing campaign actually meant on the ground. The New York-based Human Rights Watch this week released a report into the deaths of at least 72 Libyan civilians, a third of them children, killed in eight separate bombing raids (seven on non-military targets) – and denounced Nato for still refusing to investigate or even acknowledge civilian deaths that were always denied at the time.

Given the tens of thousands of civilians killed by US, British and other Nato forces both from the air and on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen over the last decade, perhaps Nato commanders prefer not to detain themselves with such comparative trifles. And Human Rights Watch believes that, whatever the real number of civilians directly killed by Nato bombing, it was relatively low given the 10,000-odd sorties flown.

But while Nato's UN mandate was to protect civilians, the alliance in practice turned that mission on its head. Throwing its weight behind one side in a civil war to oust Gaddafi's regime, it became the air force for the rebel militias on the ground. So while the death toll was perhaps between 1,000 and 2,000 when Nato intervened in March, by October it was estimated by the NTC to be 30,000 – including thousands of civilians.

We can't of course know what would have happened without Nato's bombing campaign, even if there is no evidence that Gaddafi had either the intention or capability to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. But we do know that Nato provided decisive air cover for the rebels as they matched Gaddafi's forces war crime for war crime, carried out massacres of their own and indiscriminately shelled civilian areas with devastating results – such as reduced much of Sirte to rubble last October.

There were also Nato and Qatari boots on the ground, including British special forces, co-ordinating rebel operations. So Nato certainly shared responsibility for the deaths of many more civilian than its missiles directly incinerated.

That is the kind of indirect culpability that led to the conviction last month of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, in the UN-backed special court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Taylor, now awaiting sentence and expected to be jailed in Britain, was found guilty of "aiding and abetting" war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s. But he was cleared of directly ordering atrocities carried out by Sierra Leonean rebels.

Which pretty well describes the role played by Nato in Libya last year. International lawyers say legal culpability would depend on the degree of assistance and knowledge of war crimes for which Nato provided cover, even if the political and moral responsibility could not be clearer.

But there is of course simply no question of Nato leaders being held to legal account for the Libyan carnage, any more than they have been for far more direct crimes carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only Briton convicted of a war crime over the bloodbath of Iraq has been Corporal Donald Payne, for abuse of prisoners in Basra in 2003. While George Bush has boasted of authorising the international crime of torture and faced not so much as a caution.

Which only underlines that what is called international law simply doesn't apply to the big powers or their political leaders. In the 10 years of its existence, the International criminal court has indicted 28 people from seven countries for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Every single one of them is African – even though ICC signatories include war-wracked states such as Colombia and Afghanistan.

That's rather as if the criminal law in Britain only applied to people earning the minimum wage and living in Cornwall. But so long as international law is only used against small or weak states in the developing world, it won't be a system of international justice, but an instrument of power politics and imperial enforcement.

Just as the urgent lesson of Libya – for the rest of the Arab world and beyond – is that however it is dressed up, foreign military intervention isn't a short cut to freedom. And far from saving lives, again and again it has escalated slaughter.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne