More from The Week

This week, the nation beholds Parliament with a collective contempt unrivalled in living memory. We need a modern-day Trollope to do justice to this wave of revulsion, triggered by the remarkable revelations in the Telegraph. Gilbert Burnet, the great ecclesiastical and political historian of his time, wrote of the corrupt MPs elected in 1710 that ‘this is the worst Parliament I ever saw’. And so it seems in 2009: the Palace of Westminster is home not to an ancient institution but to a disgraced rabble of second-rate spivs who have dishonoured the public trust as flagrantly as they have raided the public purse.

We did not need to be told to keep calm and carry on — that seems to be our instinctive, collective British reaction to crises. In the case of swine flu, as with bird flu, (or even Spanish flu) the public has reacted with commendable common sense. There has been no mass absenteeism from work, no fad for face-masks; not even the closure of schools has provoked a panic. The national mood was summed up by the infected schoolgirl who announced that it was actually no worse than having a cold. Even the 24-hour news channels, though desperate for any story that can fill their air time, have given up trying to whip people up into a swine-flu fever.

‘In 1918, half a million Americans died. The projections are that this time, the virus will kill one million Americans.’ These were the words of the President’s chief health adviser, as he warned about the dangers of swine flu. But he wasn’t speaking this week. The year was 1976, the President was Ford, and the adviser had, it transpired, overestimated the death toll by 999,999. Swine flu has already proved more lethal this time round. There are 152 probable deaths in Mexico (though only 20 cases are confirmed) and 1,614 sufferers under observation there. At the time of writing two British cases have been confirmed, with another 14 being investigated. But the lessons of 1976 are just as relevant today. In the words of the late Douglas Adams: don’t panic.

On Budget Day, Alistair Darling achieved something rare among chancellors of the exchequer and unique among members of this Labour government. He actually made us feel sorry for him. By common consensus, he faced — with a stoical calm that has come to be admired even by his opponents — an almost impossible job. Markets and taxpayers wanted him to unveil a strategy to set the public finances on a long-term path back towards fiscal balance without crushing fragile indications of a distant recovery. The Prime Minister clearly wanted him to regain some political ground by being seen to address the sharply rising rate of job losses, while dishing out some fiscal punishment to the rich in a way that would trip up the Tories.

The naming and shaming of MPs who are abusing the expenses system is becoming a Sunday ritual. Each week the papers carry a fresh set of revelations; each week public cynicism about our elected representatives becomes more deeply entrenched. This would be bad enough if the MPs involved in these scandals were merely time-serving backbenchers. But the culprits include the holders of some of the great offices of state. Worst of all, the guilty seem incapable of seeing what is wrong with their presumption that the public should pay for everything from their bath plugs to their holiday homes.

A series of selective leaks had suggested that the second edition of the country’s counter-terrorism strategy, released on Tuesday, would see a shift from trying to tackle violent extremism to tackling extremism per se. This would have been a welcome development. Counter-terrorism in Britain has been crippled by a strategic failure to match policy to the reality that terrorism is merely the symptom of a wider problem: namely the hold of extremist Islamism on a small but significant slice of the British population. However, as so often, the spin was misleading. The document is actually deeply cautious — a reflection of the splits in government over this issue.

For Sinn Fein, the terrorist atrocity on Saturday night that left two British soldiers dead came at the worst possible time and involved the worst possible category of victim. Up until 2007, it seemed possible that the party would soon be in government on both sides of the border. This would have allowed it to claim that its goal of a united Ireland was within reach. But Sinn Fein failed in the 2007 Irish election; voters south of the border were repelled by the gangsterism of the Northern Bank robbery in 2004, in which £26.5 million was seized. In the North, the Democratic Unionist Party has out-manoeuvred Sinn Fein on issues from the Irish language act, to policing, to education reform.

‘Nobody rings a bell at the bottom of the market,’ says an old adage in the investment world — and anyone who thought they had already heard a distant peal signalling the low point of the current financial crisis has been proved woefully mistaken this week. Some stock-market investors, for example, had begun to feel that blue-chip equities looked attractively cheap in relation to historic dividend yields. But now, one after another, and on both sides of the Atlantic, major companies are slashing dividends or abandoning them altogether: in some cases as a matter of urgent necessity, in others as a matter of opportunism at a time when yields on alternatives such as cash deposits and government bonds are at rock bottom.