Fraser Nelson

Which flu jab would you like this season – the one with mercury, or without? It’s a question you’re unlikely to be asked when the NHS vaccination programme gets underway in October but there actually is a choice. One swine flu vaccine ordered by the government, Panderix, contains thimerosal, a preservative which is 49.6% mercury by weight. The other swine flu jab, Celvapan, is mercury-free. I found this out by calling the Department of Health on a hunch. When governments order vaccines, and have no intention of telling patients what’s in the mix, they tend to go for the bulk cheap ones. These often contain thimerosal. But the use of mercury in vaccines is far from uncontroversial.

What we've seen in the last few days cannot be described as a debate about healthcare. It was a session of transatlantic insult slinging – and damned lies. This raises two questions: is the future of the NHS a subject that can be discussed rationally? And is the internet taking to British politics to the inane extremes that we see in certain sections of the American media? Let’s take this #welovethenhs Twitter campaign. Contrary to several British press reports, Sarah Palin did not describe the NHS as Orwellian or evil (she didn’t even mention Britain in her Facebook entry, here).

Anyone listening to Lord Mandelson’s claim this morning that the Brown stimulus saved “at least” half a million jobs would have smelt a large, whiskered rat. The Treasury has tonight told The Telegraph that the 500,000 figure was a maximum estimate, not a minimum as Mandy claimed. Your baristas here at Coffee House have asked the Treasury to show us their study – not available, it seems. So we have submitted a Freedom of Information request for it. While we all hold our breath, it’s worth looking at this claim in more detail because it is a Brownie we are highly likely to hear again.

I don’t for a minute believe that Mandelson believes this class war nonsense, brilliantly rubbished by Melanie Phillips today. His decision to reprise the “posh unis don’t let in poor kids” theme is a more a sign that even someone as horribly powerful as Mandy feels the need to kowtow to a certain element of the Labour Party. The Sutton Trust is absolutely correct to point to social segregation as being one of the biggest problems in Britain today – but the problem lies with the schools, not the universities. The suggestion that snobbish admissions tutors are somehow to blame does the working class no favours by deflecting attention from the real problem.

With about 5,000 people being laid off every day, it sounds strange to talk of an economic recovery - as Stephen Timms did at the World at One. But he's right. I reckon that, even now, the recession is over and that the economy will be shown to have grown in Q3 - ie, July, Aug and Sep. This is, of course, just the end of the beginning. We will have started the long crawl to recovery - and it will be about five years before the British economy gets back to where it was before the downturn. So it is a rash politician who will say "all clear, recession over" - unemployment will keep rising until about the middle of next year and then may take a very long time to recover. We are used to relatively quick economic recoveries - as per the early 1980s and 1990s.

When justifying his decision to keep Gordon Brown’s 50p tax for the super rich, Cameron has recently taken to saying that the well-off must “pay their fair share”. This is worth closer examination. The richest 1% in Britain contribute 24 percent of all income tax collected – it is unclear whether Cameron regards this as “fair” or not. But if he wants it to rise, then it is clear what he should do. Data released last week from America, and picked up by the smarter economics bloggers, gives us a striking example. If he wants to soak the rich, cut their taxes. This US data shows that the richest 1 percent contribute 40 percent of all tax collected. And zoom in on the richest 0.

So, it took me two weeks to get out of the blogging mindset - when you read something outrageous, and start mentally composing a blog. I found out that James and Pete had a bet to see how long I'd last for while on holidays - they reckoned four days. Ha! I was back yesterday, and didn't blog just to show that I could hold out. But there's been plenty of temptation during these past two weeks. Not least when my friend Ed Balls tried one of his porkies again. "I actually think it's an astonishing achievement that we've arrested that rise in inequality," he said two weeks ago. I was going to let that one slip, until I spoke to a senior Tory yesterday who said that inequality was rising in the 1990s. That's Balls, I told him - but of course, who's to know?

This little phone, pictured, is my present to myself for this summer. It’s a Nokia 2630, costing £35 and distinguished by what it can’t do. No 3G. No email. No internet. No PoliticsHome, no ConservativeHome – just my wife’s family home in the outskirts of Stockholm, where I will be spending the next fortnight. I have all manner of missions lined up. There is a Swedish cookbook whose secrets I want to master. And there is a charming, rather charismatic 19-month-old boy I want to spend some time getting to know a little better. Last time I tried to take time off completely – sans internet - was my honeymoon. But the Blair coup happened and I ended up filing a cover story from my hotel  – which my wife still teases me for.

Since I hailed James Purnell as a possible Labour leader just over a year ago , CoffeeHousers have been, to put it politely, unconvinced. But pick up The Guardian today, and I tell you: my boy's on track. He has given an interview to Allegra Stratton which puts him squarely in the frame to be Labour's leader-after-next. She came away thinking that he'll "probably never stand to be leader," but my impression is different. I mean, he tells her that he decided to quit the government while sitting "on a park bench on a former council estate in his constituency". Note, not at Eat (where he'd always nip out for drinkable coffee while at the DWP), not at one of his favourite Soho restaurants. His Newtonian apple drops while he's sitting on a park bench in a touched-up Manchester scheme. Classic.

Gordon Brown calls the recession the "world economic downturn," but the IMF has just released a devastating report into Britain which puts things in a different perspective. It's really worth downloading (here) and saving somewhere: all sorts of ammo is in there. Page 22 is devoted to the  "Potential Spillovers from the UK Financial System to the Rest of the World". It's not just Britain that has been screwed by the collapse of the British banks. The Brown/Balls banking regulatory system meant there was no proper oversight and these banks were lending like crazy to all parts of the world (including US subprime). Now withdrawal of such credit is really affecting those countries - and the IMF gives the below colour coded map to say which parts of the world are hit.

Cameron has been fairly bold in entering the debate on marriage, because we don't like do that debate in Britain. Not really - it's private, and we Brits don't like debating private things. Anything which helps marriage can easily be paraphrased as "deploying fiscal incentives to force something which should largely be a private decision". And not by the left, but by our very own Pete Hoskin in the below post. Now, we are a heterodox bunch of baristas here at CoffeeHouse and we do disagree - so here is why I think Pete is wrong. I'd like to have a go offering some of the "convincing answers" he's looking for. Right now, millions of couples are better off apart under the perverted incentives of the welfare state. The Tories would remove this anomaly.

I am instinctively sceptical about health scare stories, so have been watching the Swine Flu story with much suspicion. We are seldom reminded that it's less serious than normal flu. Hysterically, Andy Burnham claims there could be up to 100,000 infections a day in Britain next month - the latest worldwide tally is 121,000. We are told how many die from swine flu, but not how many have also died from normal flu so we can put it in context (the DoH, remarkably, can't tell me).   Proper diagnosis is not being done by our doctors. Virtually anyone with a summer cold is being told to stay at home for seven days - result! - and prescribed Tamiflu just in case.  I went hunting for the normal flu figures, but found something else instead: that this is a London flu.