Matthew Dancona

Gordon Brown tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is so preoccupied with national identity. In the modern world, he says, we must be explicit about what being a Briton means ‘The problems will arise if you cannot say to a young person that there’s going to be a job after the training. We’ve got to make sure that we never return to the 1980s, when young people lost hope of ever getting jobs, and you had three-generation unemployment that created a situation where many people did become unemployable.

The Daily Mail has today picked up a scare story initially given (rather more nuanced) prominence by the Guardian’s ever-more influential Jackie Ashley. Speaking in a debate about social networking sites, Baroness Greenfield, Oxford neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, argued that the new digital technologies may actually be changing the brains of a generation as well as the means of communication that they have at their disposal. Web 2.0., in other words, may have neuroscientific consequences of immense importance.

My first journalistic job was at the free speech and human rights magazine, Index on Censorship (which, many years later, I still warmly recommend to Coffee Housers who care about fundamental liberties). My months at its offices on Highbury Fields had a profound effect on me, and stirred in me a sense that something unexpected and of deep cultural significance was happening in the towns and cities of this country. Index had been founded as a bastion of free speech during the Cold War, a vehicle to unite liberals and conservatives in the common fight against totalitarianism. But, by 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was clear that the threat to free expression was mutating and growing ever more complex.

I am struck by the absence of philosophical route-maps out of the current financial crisis: a subject I addressed in my Sunday Telegraph column this weekend. Compare and contrast the Seventies, when the Tories had the inspiration of Hayek and Friedman and the texts that poured out of the CPS and IEA. I recently asked George Osborne what he was reading on this subject and he recommended The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It, the most recent book by the Yale economist Robert Shiller. Fair enough. But what books and other inspirations would CoffeeHousers recommend as navigation guides for 2009?

When I was in Mumbai in February I stayed at the Taj and ate the best fish curry I have ever tasted at Leopold's: both targets in tonight's shocking attacks. Even as the angry flames light up the sky of this extraordinary world city, it is clear that this was, at least in part, a strike aimed at Westerners staying in Mumbai and, with an eye to the future, an attempt to spray psychological shrapnel in the direction of those planning to go there. The city has a long and bloody history of religious cantonisation and gang warfare. There have been worse outbursts of violence in the recent past.

So what's left? Bits have been falling off New Labour like body-parts off a leper. Prudence is long gone. Today, as I blogged earlier, we lost the all-important principle that wealth creation is the basis of enhanced social justice. Which leaves the famous statement of ideological eclecticism that defined Tony Blair's premiership if not his record: What Counts is What Works. And I cannot see how today's package will work. This was an overwhelmingly political PBR, as one would expect of Gordon Brown: its ideological centrepiece was the fiscal stigmatisation of the well-off and the overt declaration by Alistair Darling that, since these voters had supposedly "done best out of the growth of the last decade", they deserved to be walloped.

No man on Earth has more new best friends that a President-elect – especially the first black Commander-in-Chief, a walking charisma machine, swept to victory by a nation longing for change and hope. Nick Robinson’s fisk of some of the remarks made by British politicians in the past twelve hours is unimprovable. Brown sees Obama as a  prospective centre-Left ally in his Plan to Save the World; Cameron salutes the new Novice-in-Chief on his way to the White House as a comrade in the battle for change. Which British party leader will do a better job of claiming to be Barack’s spiritual brother? I have no idea. But it is going to be richly entertaining watching them try.

At the CNN party in Marylebone, Andrew Marr, James Purnell, Dame Sue Tinson, sundry BBC chieftains, Whitehall officials and Labour apparatchiks galore down cocktails, watch the huge screen, and dig in for a long night. The sense among centre-Left guests is one of superstitious apprehension. 'It all looked safe in 2000,' says one Blairite. 'And then it all went wrong the next morning and we ended up with eight years of Bush.' For the McCainites - a small band of brothers huddling in a corner - Palin looks like being the Fall Gal. But that won't quite do. Conservatism in America has conspicuously failed to rise to the challenge of the new economic disorder. How will British Conservatives respond? They will, of course, claim Obama's mantle of 'change' as their own.