Any other business

The council estates of King's Lynn, Harriet Sergeant recently revealed, are groaning with Chinese migrant workers, 50 to a house. The Daily Mail, naturally enough, is outraged by this threat to society and house prices, playing on rumours that workers are controlled by Triad gangs. Equally upset is the Guardian, which complains that many workers are illegal, they are being paid less than the national minimum wage and their gang masters won't even let them join the Transport and General Workers' Union. Why is it that migrant workers have to be received so negatively? The Daily Mail has made an art of attacking 'welfare scroungers' over the years; now it seems the paper is no fonder of people who work hard for little reward – at least not if they are foreign.

Is Richard Desmond the new Murdoch? Many lips were curled when he acquired Express Newspapers in November 2000. People said that he had borrowed too much money. It was suggested that as a man whose fortune was built on pornography he knew next to nothing about running national newspapers. In some quarters he was dismissed as a foul-mouthed vulgarian who would be unable to halt the long decline of the Daily and Sunday Express. Nearly three years later Mr Desmond is taken more seriously. Largely as a result of ferocious cost-cutting, he has increased the profits of Express Newspapers, last year pocketing nearly £21 million for himself. The Daily Express has been stabilised, and is even selling a few more copies.

Anyone who believes that the anti-competitive ethos in state schools originates with a handful of ideologues in our local authorities should take time to study the United Nations output on education. The UN Commission on Human Rights's 'special rapporteur on education' recently attacked British schools for being too competitive. Katarina Tomasevski, a Swede, complained that the Department for Education's regime of tests for seven-, 11-, 14- and 16-year-olds breaches Article 29 of the Human Rights convention. Forcing children to sit down and take exams, she says, perverts the aims of education, which should be 'directed to the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential'.

When Robert Thomson was made editor of the Times some 18 months ago he let it be known that he intended to take his paper up-market. There was also good reason to believe that he would not let it be so slavish towards New Labour as it had sometimes been during the long tenure of his predecessor, my old friend Peter Stothard. How has he fared? The paper's news pages did briefly become more elevated. A couple of new foreign correspondents were hired. No one could have pretended that the transformation was a great one, but something seemed to be going on. Yet in recent months Mr Thomson has gone into reverse gear. Last week the Times thought fit to publish on its front page, above the fold, large pictures of Lady Archer before and after her face-lift.

The opportunity to applaud French farmers comes along once a century at most, so an overpriced, oversubsidised champagne must be in order. As I write, France is on the point of scuppering talks on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), thanks to lobbying from its dairy and cereal farmers. This is entirely predictable and might not be seen as much of a cause for celebration – until one examines the proposed reforms. It isn't easy to conceive of a more absurd system than CAP, which consumes half the EU's annual budget subsidising the production of food which European consumers do not want and which ends up being sold cheaply to the Third World, thus undermining their own agriculture. But the European agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler has managed it nonetheless.

Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to 'give it a rest' and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there. It is entirely logical that Sir Edmund should be happier at the idea of Everest being put out of bounds. Was his ascent of Everest really such a big deal, he perhaps fears people will ask, when pot-bellied American tourists and beer-swilling students are doing it every day? But why Nepal should be expected to decline to make use of its principal asset and deprive sherpas of valuable income is another matter.

Last week was the week when plenty of Britons, though not their government, seemed to place themselves on guard against M. Giscard's constitution. It was appropriate, then, that it was also the 60th anniversary of one of the greatest among the many crises in the career of the first Eurosceptic.