More from The Week

If there is such a thing as e-panic, New Labour is in its grip. Alarmed and caught off guard by the 1.7 million people who have signed an online petition against national road-pricing, the Prime Minister has written a response to them, hastily explaining that the government’s blameless intention is to reduce congestion, rather than to raise a new ‘stealth tax’ or bolster the state’s surveillance powers. ‘Let me be clear straight away,’ says Mr Blair, before doing just the opposite. ‘We have not made any decision about national road-pricing. Indeed we are simply not yet in a position to do so.

First, let us not submit to the self-indulgence of moral panic: there has never been a time when British children have been less afflicted by poverty, disease and malnutrition. The new Unicef league table for ‘child well-being’ across 21 industrialised countries, for all its disturbing statistics, gives little sense of historical perspective. Much of the information it collates is seven or eight years out of date. The report also idealises the notion of childhood and, in its litany of figures, glosses over the reality of human experience through the ages.

The tragic death in Iraq of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull under US ‘friendly fire’ in March 2003 has become a bleak parable of the flaws at the heart of the US-UK ‘special relationship’. Only now, and only thanks to a leak to the Sun of a classified recording of the conversation between two American pilots, has the precise nature of the accident become clear. As terrible as that error was, however, it is much more comprehensible than the disgraceful saga of bureaucracy and disdain which it triggered. All servicemen accept that there is a risk that they will be hit by friendly fire, or that they will fire on their own side by mistake.

In a free society, people are at liberty to gamble, much as they are at liberty to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and engage in other practices which, if indulged to excess, can have terrible consequences. Gambling has wrecked lives and enlivened others. The morality of a casino is in the eye of the beholder: one man’s den of iniquity is another’s harmless pleasure-dome. A government’s responsibility is to provide a framework of regulation that meets Parliament’s approval, and then to stand well back. On this reckoning, the proposed super-casino in Manchester is hardly a threat to western civilisation. The planned complex sounds truly ghastly: a site of 5,000 square metres packed with up to 1,250 fruit machines, a shrine to low-rent leisure pursuits.

The 300th anniversary this week of the Act of Union between England and Scotland has been a depressingly defensive event rather than a festival of celebration. In the Daily Telegraph, Gordon Brown — that indefatigable champion of ‘Britishness’ — warned against the ‘Balkanisation of Britain’. The Scottish National Party is poised to form the largest party in the Scottish Parliament after the May elections, and is promising a referendum on the future of the Union. The psychological reflex of the English — 61 per cent of them, according to a BBC Newsnight poll — is to demand an English Parliament. In some ways this is a strange time for Scottish nationalists to be flexing their muscles.

One thing is certain about the political year ahead: No. 10 will have a new occupant well before the end of 2007. Not since Eden’s long struggle to replace Churchill has an heir-apparent had to wait as long as Gordon Brown, and the sheer duration of his battle to dislodge Tony Blair has taken a terrible toll on both of them. Assuming there is no late upset — no last-minute dash for the tape by John Reid — the Chancellor will get his wish at last in the next few months. Much is made of Mr Brown’s alleged plans for his ‘first 100 days’. In truth, his most pressing task will be to persuade the electorate that it is their concerns, rather than the leadership succession alone, that has driven him all these years.

The juxtaposition of the sacred and the unholy is always shocking. This week, as we attend carol services, decorate our trees and prepare for Christmas with a levity of spirit, the news from Ipswich provides an unbearably horrible counterpoint. In the first ten days of this murder investigation, the bodies of five women were discovered relatively close to one another in Suffolk. The psychosis that underpins these murders remains a matter of pure speculation, but the killer is evidently animated by a savage desire to slaughter as many prostitutes as he can, as quickly as he can. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, spread out his 13 murders over six years. The Ipswich killings have more in common with Jack the Ripper’s murder of six women in three months.