The problem is that we need to understand their culture and identity, before we can explain to them our own. With 3,000 honour crime complaints to the police last year, maybe this is the issue that we’re failing to comprehend.

It would help to understand what happened in Tower Hamlets last year, when the Labour Party collapsed in on itself over the selection of Lutfur Rahman as candidate for Mayor.

It started out as a conversation about secularism, but we didn’t know it was about secularism, because in school we learn everything there is to know about Martin Luther King, but nothing about Martin Luther. We know about the rights of minorities, but not about the separation of church and state.

This was in the days when Muslims were considered to be either moderates or extremists, with nothing in between. This perception was encouraged by the fact that the extremists got more airtime, but also due to the taboos about race and religion that suppressed debate about community, but allowed debate about terror.

The row was mostly, but not exclusively, between Cllr. Helal Abbas and Cllr. Lutfur Rahman. Abbas was not devoutly religious, but Lutfur apparently was, and this is where Lutfur’s increasing clout in the community came from. Including all places of prayer, there are about 40 mosques in Tower Hamlets and most of them see Lutfur as their man.

When Lutfur was first elected as a councillor, he was the apprentice of Abbas. Abbas didn’t complain that Lutfur brought the mosques’ vote with him, but when Lutfur struck out on his own, Abbas was furious. He denounced Lutfur’s religious connections, speaking of the global reaching tentacles of the Islamic Forum for Europe, an organisation based at the East London Mosque, and supportive of Lutfur.

In east London, all politicians of all parties, seek to tap into faith organisations. When the doors of one are shut, they go knocking on another. Those who condemn these organisations tend to be the ones who have run out of doors to knock on.

The scrutiny of Lutfur’s connections to the East London Mosque began when a journalist called Ted Jeory arrived at the local paper. For years councillors had complained that they could never get anyone from the East London Advertiser to cover Town Hall meetings. Now they were complaining about this guy who kept turning up.

Rather like the way that Arab dictators began by condemning Al-Jazeera, Tower Hamlets councillors quickly switched from condemning, to briefing, Ted Jeory. According to Ted, the briefings came from anyone who was ambitious, and included every candidate who would later stand in the mayoral selection. Others, such as the MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, were fearful that Lutfur could muster enough Labour votes to replace an incumbent.

The fact is that Lutfur was on good terms with religious people across a spectrum of opinion, but he wasn’t a conduit for evil. He just didn’t realise that Labour people consider Islam to be authoritive, and not sharing the same values as us. In the fine line that a Muslim politician must walk, in a British political career, Lutfur was too far on the Bangladeshi side. However, this needs to be put into perspective. It’s not as if he was hanging out with suicide bombers.

The rumours about extremist connections continued and reached a high point when Ted’s reports were picked up by Andrew Gilligan and broadcast in a C4 Dispatches film, where Jim Fitzpatrick took the controversy to a new height by alleging a plot to infiltrate the Labour Party with Muslim extremists, “Rather like Militant infiltrated Labour in the 70s and 80s”.

It sounds like a ridiculous now, but at the time the country was paranoid following the 7/7 bombings and ready to believe anything. Meanwhile, Labour head office was becoming increasingly nervous about what was happening in Tower Hamlets. The persistency of the rumours began to turn even rational minds.

In May 2010, Tower Hamlets had a referendum for a Directly Elected Mayor, resulting in a mandatory six month time-frame for an election. Seeing an opportunity to bypass his isolation within the party, Lutfur ran in the open Labour Party selection for mayoral candidate, and easily won, but a report attacking Lutfur, from Abbas, and also one from Cllr. Bill Turner, was presented to the NEC and, without committee members having time to read them, a vote was taken to rule Lutfur out as candidate.

Although John Biggs came second in the selection vote, the NEC gave the slot to 3rd place Abbas. They may have feared that they would have been labelled as racist, if they gave the candidacy to a white man.

In response, Lutfur tore up his Labour membership card and announced his intention to run as an independent against Abbas. The two old friends were now sworn enemies and it would be for the electorate to decide who would win. Lutfur did.

In Bangladeshi village society there is little in the way of transparent rule of law. The community is governed by honour and shame. As a system, it seems to work in Bangladesh, but when transferred to the UK, we see both the good and the bad.

We see a low crime rate, juxtaposed against a high perversion of the course of justice, as victims are pressured to drop charges. We see strong family life, juxtaposed with school girls disappearing from the roster, without notice or explanation. We see a moralistic society, where alcohol is shunned. Yet when youths gather in groups on street corners to drink alcohol, as an act of rebellion, they will eventually face severe and violent retribution, from the “community”.

The lack of transparency undermines the justice done by creating other injustices. This is brutally demonstrated when false rumours are spread against individuals who have displeased someone in the community. I first saw this phenomenon when Oona King backed the Iraq War and the community turned on her with the most astonishing slander. She was alleged to be a Mossad spy, who wanted to criminalise the veil and remove Helal from school menus.

The fact that such rumours are unbelievable is beside the point. This kind of attack is a referendum against an individual. If the rumours catch on, then the community consensus has turned against that person. If the rumours fail, then the individual has the respect of the community. However, the attack on Oona was less to do with Iraq and more to do with a consensus in the community that it was time for a Bangladeshi to be MP and that the MP should be a man.

The allegations against Lutfur are different to the rumours about Oona, in that the target audience was the white community. The Labour Party had unwittingly become a part of the system of Honour and Shame, and had no understanding of the issue to help them cope. The result was division and misery.

Today, Tower Hamlets politics is deeply divided. Every time the two sides of the council meet to agree on working together, the agreement is then sabotaged by the Labour people who want to see Lutfur kept permanently out of the party. The bitterness amongst Lutfur’s people is plain and highly visible. They now attack the Labour councillors in return.

So deep are these divisions that Lutfur refuses to sit on the committee that will hire the new Chief Executive for the Local Authority. The Labour group has a majority on this committee, but no chief exec is going to take the job without the cooperation of the mayor. Catch 22.

Meanwhile, in the party, with Lutfur gone, there is a lack of good Bangladeshi activists who can make future councillors. It is unrealistic that any of the current Labour councillors would win against Lutfur at a future mayor election. The Bangladeshis see him as a victim, while the white people continue to see him as the Labour bloke.

The situation is bogged down and tragic. If Lutfur was to reapply to join the Labour Party it’s likely that he would be readmitted, but he point blank refused to. As far as he’s concerned, he is a victim in all of this. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband has washed his hands of the situation with no explanation as to why.

Shakespeare described the battle scene in Macbeth: “As two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.”

The image of both sides drowning is apt.

Mr Cameron complained: “How out of touch the EU has become, when its institutions are demanding budget increases, while Europe’s citizens tighten their belts.” Mr Cameron was complaining about the cost of the capital transfers that pay for roads and bridges in Eastern Europe, building their productivity and sustaining their economies during these difficult times. If he thinks that the political trend in the EU is to have less government and less intervention, then he should listen to the Germans and think again.

On the same day, Ms Merkel told her party, “The task of our generation now, is to complete the economic and currency union in Europe and, step by step, create a political union. It’s time for a breakthrough to a new Europe”.

Meanwhile in the UK, Mr Cameron seemed to be applying the complaints he has about the British economy, to the EU: a so far failed belief that an attack on red tape will act as a stimulus for economic growth. “It’s the pointless interference, rules and regulations that stifle growth not unleash it.”

Ms Merkel told her conference: “Through the crisis, Europe is growing closer together, and Europeans are discovering that decisions taken in one country can have enormous impact on the rest of Europe”. It didn’t look like they were “growing closer together” in friendship, when she was shouting at them. I think “growing closer together” must mean the rest of the Euro area knowing their place.

Mr Cameron seemed more interested in flowery rhetoric than substantial policy. As the leader of a country that has seen its economy take a dive since his party’s election, and regardless of the UK having substantially lower growth than the Eurozone states, regardless of our devaluation, and regardless of not being a Euro member, he still managed to lecture that, “Unless we all get a grip on growth, the European Union will remain an organisation in peril, representing a continent in trouble.” In the circumstances, that quote must be regarded as meaningless.

It now seems that the Germans were always ready to bail out other Euro members, but only on the condition that they would put in place policies that fix the structural weaknesses of their economies. Having forced out the leaders of Italy and Greece, they now seem ready to talk about their plans for a fully-fledged European monetary fund, along the lines of the IMF. Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said: “We now need to build the political union we never managed to build in the ’90s.”

Mr Cameron almost seems to be speaking about himself when he speaks of “an abstract end in itself”. He told the Lord Mayors dinner, “The EU is somehow an abstract end in itself, immune from developments in the real world, rather than a means of helping to deliver better living standards for the people of its nations”.

Has Cameron followed what was going on during the recent crisis meetings and at the G20?

It is now apparent that Germany’s refusal to bail out the offending countries is a far more carefully laid plan to get reform out of them. We should have a much better insight into this business, but our man, Cameron, who was there in the room, doesn’t seem to be aware of the thoughts of the main actor.

In the same meeting when Sarkozy shouted at Cameron to “Shut up”, Merkel looked to our Prime Minister and said that she believed that the EU did need reform, as if she was throwing him a bone. The problem is that she never included him in her strategy. In their private meetings, one has to wonder if she didn’t just nod politely as he spoke his woolly words of wisdom. Did he even ask her of her intentions, or did his arrogance get the better of him, preferring to give her a lecture, without any idea that she was already streets ahead?

It’s not just that he wasn’t important enough to be confided in; it’s that he doesn’t seem to have the intellectual capacity to read between the lines, even when he is in the room where the world is being reformed and reorganised around him.

Throughout these events, there has been a lesser sense of crisis in Germany. They have been accused of not taking the matter seriously. The British complain of short-termism, while fearing the day to day markets, but the Germans prefer to ignore the markets and stick to the fundamentals, rightly understanding that the long term is what matters. Reports that the Germans simply don’t understand the situation are now looking absurd. All along, they’ve been planning a carve-up that puts them firmly in control of a political and economic union. All along, our Prime Minister has been oblivious to what’s happening around him.

Unfortunately, they want someone else to pay. According to The Times, “government hopes private investors… will be tempted to pour cash into the infrastructure schemes. In return they will get the proceeds from tolls, rents and energy bills.” I’m not sure if this sounds like The Big Society or PFI, but the gushing copy of The Times would suggest that the Tory-led government has remarkable foresight in economics.

It’s been over 18 months since this government came to office promising to stimulate the economy by slashing the state. As a policy for growth, this was risky, untested, and has proved to be wishful thinking. To finally come around to the orthodox policy of creating demand through stimulating the economy is a welcome development, especially since the Times report speaks of social housing being a part of the package. House building ground to a halt partly due to the confusion over the Localism Bill, but also due the abandonment of regional targets as a Labour gimmick. It will be helpful to have something positive for this sector from government.

We won’t know the full details of their intentions until the autumn statement on November 29th. Normally a government would want to make a splash about a £50 billion spending spree, but in this case, I think it’s fair to say that they are not expecting an easy ride on their lack of consistency, so perhaps that’s why they’re publishing early, preferring to spread out the story, rather than encourage a splash, where they would be made to bask in their own infamy.

Mark Ferguson argues that we should avoid gloating over the failure of the government’s economic policy. He has a point. Politicians tend to react on different levels to events. When the economy flat-lines we’re pleased to see the Tories failing, but concerned that people are losing their jobs. There isn’t a contradiction in this. The Tories didn’t enjoy seeing the Iraq war go wrong, but they enjoyed the fact that it damaged Tony Blair. We tend to compartmentalise the differing aspects of the issue. However, the public don’t understand that, so we do need caution.

I think our approach should be to criticise the slowness of the stimulus policy to catch up with the slowing economy. There is no lack of “shovel ready” projects, as the shelved Building Schools for the Future project could be restarted with immediate effect, but they won’t go there. Expect the government to bundle lots of existing projects into their numbers. They will announce CrossRail as part of their stimulus.

For last year we’ve seen almost weekly examples of Tory incompetence. In my life there’s never been anything like it. John Major had scandals rather than incompetence, and Labour were never like this lot, even when we were a dying a slow death. But regardless of the constant hopelessness of this government, the polls have simply not shifted in ages.

The last time Cameron defended good polls (comparatively), was Nov 2009, when he was on course to gain a parliamentary majority of perhaps 70-100 seats. Suddenly his lead collapsed when we ridiculed his poster campaign on the internet. It was similar to what the military call the “tip effect” where no progress seems to be happening in the battle, then suddenly the enemy collapses.

Perhaps what we’ve been seeing is a strong desire by the electorate to be against Labour, rather than for the Tories. According to Luke Akehurst, in many parts of the south, people consider the previous Labour government as having conducted a major spending spree in London, while leaving everyone else to pay the bill. If Luke is right, then this view will take time to shift, and may explain the stubbornness of the polls.

However, if the Tories continue to be so incompetent, then perhaps it just has to reach the point where the goodwill of the south is simply worn out, and they give up on Cameron et al. If that’s the case, then that’s the moment we need to work towards.

As leader, Ed Miliband had a slow and bad start. He tried to define himself by what he’s not, rather than what he is. Even a simple bit of fun, such as the press creating the “Red Ed” nick name, was met with prickly rejection. While he tried to buy time, with navel gazing initiatives such as “Refounding Labour”, the public began to conclude that he is irrelevant. But then he had a good Riot Debate and a good Hacking Scandal. It seemed as if he could be defined by events in spite of himself. But the negative perception of the public will need to be undone, and this will take time.

For me, the turning point was his thoughts on “Predatory Companies”, which is something that I, and the rest of the country, have been frustrated about for a long time. However, there needs to be more clarity in Ed’s argument. It’s not correct to describe one company as a predator, and another as a Producer. It’s more to do with a lack of ethics due to the way that law is applied in this country. For example, a local authority is a good thing, but if they sent bailiffs after people for a measly £10 owed, then they are predatory. At the same time, the bailiff is not a predator if he conducts himself with integrity, but if he accepts the job of pursuing the £10 debt, with fines of many hundreds of pounds, then that is the moment that he becomes a predator.

I’ll speak more about Predatory business another time, when I’m ready, but my point right now is that we have to throw ourselves behind Ed Miliband, because he’s the only one who can make the Tip Effect happen. I’m not saying he is the perfect leader; there is lot of work to be done. But just imagine the day when that Tip Effect happens in the polls, and the Tories begin their slow dive to oblivion. On that day, for us, it will be party, party, party.

And Ed Miliband will be our hero!

When you look closely at the proposal, it sounds awfully familiar. The UK government will sell loans to small businesses, then package them together, and sell them onto the bond market in tranches.

In other words, his proposal to get us out of this mess is to use the same financial instrument as that was used to package the securitized mortgages, which then became toxic, and got us into this mess in the first place.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t work, but I am saying it’s ridiculous to blame the bankers for their complex financial instruments, when the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer is proposing exactly the same instrument as a cure.
The other proposal is to use Quantitative Easing to buy the bonds of British banks. He hopes this will boost their capital which will cause them to lend to small businesses.

He hopes. How he must hope. There is no guarantee that the banks won’t hoard the money. And besides, why would they lend to small businesses in this country, when they could do safer lending to bigger businesses abroad? I mean, they’re not exactly civic minded.

The new QE idea is that if we pay over the odds for bank bonds, this will raise their market price, causing the yields on those bonds to fall. With a lower interest rate to pay, this makes it attractive for the banks to issue more bonds. In other words, a second bank bail-out, but done on the sly. Further to that, with no equity in return, it’s a free gift from us to them.

The Bank of England governor, who has been very quiet of late, has refused to issue the QE to private businesses, saying that he doesn’t want the BofE to be politicised. Can someone explain what he means by that? However, he has today agreed to print £75billion and pass it onto the Treasury, for them to purchase of the banking bonds.

So the proposal is to supply the banks with debt, in the hope that they supply more debt to small businesses. At the same time as this, the government will directly supply loans to small businesses, through the “credit easing” policy. These proposals are in direct contrast to the Prime Minister’s insistence that it was debt that got us into this mess, and that the only way get us out of this mess is to pay off the debt.

According to the Bank of England’s own analysis, the last bout of QE boosted the consumer prices index (CPI) by between 0.75 and 1.5 percentage points. In other words, it caused 1.25% inflation. The difference between then and now is that then it was necessary to create liquidity in the economy. Everyone agrees that the problem now is one of demand, not liquidity. This bout of QE will certainly be much more inflationary than the mere 1.25% last time. And as people get used to inflation, they get used to demanding higher wages, which causes inflation. This is how governments lose control.

It’s the elderly and the poor who pay for inflation. Women are especially sensitive to prices. So by bailing out the banks with free money, it will be these groups that pay for the bail-out, not the wealthy supporters of the Conservative Party.

However, this is the biggest hypocrisy of Osborne’s policy: Inflation would affect holders of government debt. By stoking inflation, Osborne would be inflating government debt away. The international markets know this and, in normal times, would flee to preserve their capital. But the market doesn’t have anywhere else to go and Osborne knows this. The Euro is in a mess, and so are the Dollar and the Yen. Emerging markets are hardly risk-free, even if they were accessible. The safe haven of gold has far further to fall than it has to rise. There is no obvious place of refuge. So Osborne can stoke inflation without much fear of the markets turning against us.

This blows a hole in his entire raison-d’etre. His continued opposition to Labour’s economic strategy has been, and still is, that the markets will turn against us if we spend to create growth. So why does he not fear the markets now?

If a soldier returns from Afghanistan to spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair, he will rely on state support. But he is not “the poor”, he is the “the hero”.

Is someone in social housing poor? How about if the flat is in Covent Garden? Would you call them “the poor”? Because we’d call them “the damn lucky”.

The engineers made redundant by British Aerospace have mortgages, cars and foreign holidays. But in the hard times to come they may well look to the state for support. Does that make them “the deserving poor”? These are some of the most highly qualified well-educated people, who, through no fault of their own, are in an industry suffering a severe downturn. If they are struggling, in the months to come, if they need a helping hand, then we will offer that helping hand. But we will not regard them as “the poor” and certainly not “the deserving poor”.

It’s a term that grates with Labour people. It rubs us up the wrong way. It’s a Victorian idea that has no place in the modern day. Yet journalists constantly ask Labour politicians whether our belief in rights and responsibilities are examples or the deserving and undeserving poor.

They are not incorrect in their analysis. We do believe that some people have a greater entitlement due to their good citizenship, while others should have less entitlement due to their deliberate unwillingness to be a good citizen, but the term will always create a hostile response from a Labour politician because the language is simply unacceptable.

The media are just doing their job. They don’t intend to be offensive by using this angle. But they do need to recognise that to us, it is an offensive term and will not elicit an worthwhile response from any Labour politician or supporter.

If a soldier returns from Afghanistan to spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair, he will rely on state support. But he is not “the poor”, he is the “the hero”.

Is someone in social housing poor? How about if the flat is in Covent Garden? Would you call them “the poor”? Because we’d call them “the damn lucky”.

The engineers made redundant by British Aerospace have mortgages, cars and foreign holidays. But in the hard times to come they may well look to the state for support. Does that make them “the deserving poor”? These are some of the most highly qualified well-educated people, who, through no fault of their own, are in an industry suffering a severe downturn. If they are struggling, in the months to come, if they need a helping hand, then we will offer that helping hand. But we will not regard them as “the poor” and certainly not “the deserving poor”.

It’s a term that grates with Labour people. It rubs us up the wrong way. It’s a Victorian idea that has no place in the modern day. Yet journalists constantly ask Labour politicians whether our belief in rights and responsibilities are examples or the deserving and undeserving poor.

They are not incorrect in their analysis. We do believe that some people have a greater entitlement due to their good citizenship, while others should have less entitlement due to their deliberate unwillingness to be a good citizen, but the term will always create a hostile response from a Labour politician because the language is simply unacceptable.

The media are just doing their job. They don’t intend to be offensive by using this angle. But they do need to recognise that to us, it is an offensive term and will not elicit an worthwhile response from any Labour politician or supporter.

Today the crime is publicised by the media, but then we, the community, are excluded. The police pursue their case in secret. The trial is held in relative secrecy, and, the jail sentence is conducted outside of the glare of public humiliation.

It’s a frustrating phenomenon of the modern world that however hard we try to explain that crime is falling the people are convinced that it’s rising. The distinction between actual crime and perceived crime makes a completely different curve on the graph.

When we ask the professionals why this is, they blame the media for the massive publicity they give to a major crime. In fact, the opposite is true. The exclusion of the media from the subsequent process is to blame. The media are allowed to report the crime, but then restricted in every subsequent step of the process.

Policy Makers have objected to cameras into court, dwelling on the O J Simpson trial, where witnesses appeared on chat shows to discuss the case, while the trial continued. But this is dwelling on the extreme to justify the objection.

Under the Labour government, media organisations made considerable investment on the assumption that the Blair administration would open the courts to transparency, but when Blair stepped down and Brown took over, the policy was dropped. Today, a hesitant Tory government is returning to the question. The Supreme Court has been televising judges sentences on the internet.

Advocates against transparency provide numerous reasons to sustain the status quo. Witnesses will be intimidated. Judges will play up to the cameras. Convicts will be bullied in prison if the sad details of their pre-sentence mitigations are revealed to the world. The list goes on. The very lawyers, who create the theatre of the contested trial, fear that if the theatre had an audience, the system would collapse.

Each of these submissions have merit to a degree. Some restrictions will be needed to stop the media from taking over, but only some, and only to stop the media taking over. The assumption must be transparency. The blanket exclusion, or over-restriction of the cameras from the courts, causes more harm than good. We need to know that a system is in place to make us safe.

When we are victims, we lose confidence in ourselves and in the society we have created. The teenager, who broke into our home and did so much violent damage to our property, is a huge and powerful figure in our mind. All our locks and our security measures were swept aside by his anger, strength and cunning. We were defeated by him. We are the lesser, and he is the greater. In this same way, the robber, who held a knife to our throat, is a powerful monster in our memory, since we were so powerless.

However, when we see him in court, giving evidence from the stand, we see a pathetic sad creature. We don’t see power, we see weakness. The monster that haunts our memory is exorcised.

As the experiment with cameras in court is expanded, the debate will continue and the reasons for restrictions will flow. The policy was dropped by Mr Brown not because the policy was faulty, but because the reasons for policy were not advanced.

We need to know that there is a system on our side. We need to see it in action. We need to witness the monsters at their most vulnerable. We need to know we are protected. We need to see the trials.

I’m sure he believes that every local authority has a Frenchman hidden in a cupboard, who comes out at night to add new regulations, when no one is looking.

It’s taken a lot of persuasion to get local authorities to recognise how damaging these armoured sheet shutters are to the environment of the high street. Not only do they make good canvasses for gang graffiti to mark out territories, but they never get cleaned up by the shop keepers, who take the view that they don’t care about the look of the their shop fronts at night, as the shop is closed.

If you walk into Dodge City and see that everyone has a gun, you’ll get a gun yourself. When I used to go to Brixton regularly, I was always reassured by the bank of CCTV cameras as I exited the tube station. I was reassured because I was aware of the high crime rate in the area, but I was only aware of the high crime rate because of the presence of the cameras. When those cameras were removed, I was relieved that Brixton has finally got dealt with their high crime rate. In fact, the cameras are still there, but no longer visible.

Recently, a local new development had a couple of shop fronts. A hairdresser occupied one of the units but wouldn’t move in or even put a sign above the door until she’d had an armoured steel shutter installed at a cost of £800. She would think so, because all the shops in the area have them. She needed to protect her shop from the shampoo looters.

It’s a real battle to revive our high streets in the face of tough competition from the supermarkets, and one of the ways we are doing this is to try to make the high street an attractive place to pass through in the evenings. If the street is dark and looks dangerous, then affluent residents will walk around the block to avoid it. They are unlikely to venture along on a Saturday morning in this situation.

Armoured steel shutters don’t protect properties, they attract looters. Young people presume, not unreasonably, that if a property needs this shutter, then there must be something behind that’s worth stealing. Banks don’t get looted, because banks don’t have armoured steel shutters. Hairdressers do get looted because they have armoured steel shutters.

It’s time Mr Cameron rolled up his sleeves and got educated about the role of civic leaders. It’s not petty officialdom, it is town planning. It’s not regulation, it is expertise. It’s not getting in the way; it is improving the high street, which is what everyone wants us to do.

Newsnight Click to view

His opening line is “When I was a cabinet minister we spent more money on welfare because we wanted to reduce poverty. It was one of the things that everybody in the Labour govt agreed about. But when it came to the last election, one of the reasons that we lost is that traditional Labour supporters no longer backed the welfare state.”

In the film, Purnell demonstrates that the welfare state created by Beveridge has changed so much that it no longer has the love of the white working class. By contrasting this with the love of the NHS, he demonstrates that this is not a dislike of taxation, but a particular dislike of this one institution.

He draws our attention to the change in the Welfare State since 1945. In its inception, we would contribute in return for insurance against hard times, but now our money is given away to those who don’t work and often haven’t contributed, and we see little or no return for our own contributions; the stingy state pension being a good example. Purnell wants to get back to the Beveridge idea of benefit in return for contribution.

He suggests a job guarantee for those on benefits for more than a year, with an end to Job Seekers Allowance, if they don’t take it. Apparently it works perfectly well in other countries.

He accepts that change would be expensive and suggests we could pay for this by ending Higher Rate Tax Relief on pension contributions. This would save a whopping £7b a year. The reason this Tax Relief was introduced was to encourage people to save, however it is commonly agreed that people who earn £100k a year would chose to save regardless of the tax advantage. So it is a break for the rich, with no advantage for the country. In my view it makes perfect sense to restrict this relief to the Standard Rate of tax.

Purnell also suggests an end to the Free Travel Card for pensioners, the free TV License, and possibly changes to Child Benefit. This is what fired up the indignation of Labour bloggers and I tend to agree. I worked on Oona King’s mayoral campaign when she made a similar suggestion and gave Ken’s side a stick to beat her with. We found ourselves issuing all kinds of clarifications and denials when we should have been campaigning.

The fact is that the free bus pass is more than just a travel arrangement. A few times I’ve had elderly friends tell me, “I got my free bus pass in the post today”. Everyone knows what this mean. There is no need to say, “I am now 65. I am a pensioner”. There’s something about the rights of passage into the autumn years that is marked by this arrangement. No one likes to hit 65 years of age, but the receipt of a gift from the state seems not only to act as a milestone in a person’s life, but provides an opportunity for positive philosophy. For this reason, I’d advise against removing this benefit.

In his film, Purnell opens up the analysis to the wider view of the white working class of the Labour Party and I found myself once again agreeing with something. For years, I’ve been getting doorstep hostility from the white working class, who would say, “What do you ever do for us?” or “You only represent them!” meaning the Bangladeshis. I’ve never disputed this; I always thought they had a good point, and have written about this on Labour List. http://www.labourlist.org/labour-list-dan-mccurry-confronting-racism In his talk with Peter Kellner, Purnell discovers that it’s much wider than immigrants. Kellner tells him that natural Labour voters came to think that Labour reflected “special groups. Immigrants, the poorest, single mothers, public sector workers. It was not seen as a party for the generality of the white working class Britain”.

And this is why his film was so important. The naffness of Blue Labour has given way to a substantial and tangible debate. The bloggers who dwell on the detail to condemn the whole are mistaken. According to Kellner, it’s not the electorate who got it wrong, it was the Labour Party.

There are a huge number of different squads at Scotland Yard and elsewhere. Why didn’t this case go to the police who specialise in computer misuse and fraud?

Cmdr Clarke isolated the one case, rather than tackling the 11,000 documents of potential evidence they had in the so-called black bin-bags. He did this for strategic reasons, and he is plausible. The CPS are tactical in this manner all the time. By isolating the one case, the investigation avoids getting out of control.

Once they got a conviction, Clarke tells us he drew up a set of procedures for the other victims to be contacted. It naturally would follow that some of them would also want to make complaints, but it seems that they simply weren’t contacted. He didn’t explain why, and this point seems to have been missed by the MPs.

Clarke was dealing with about seventy live operations including a plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic, the Litvinenko case that began later that same year, as well as the 7/7 bombers. He says that, “For two years I’d been stripping out other departments for extra officers” just to keep up with the work.

So why did he get this middling little case? He’s got far more important issues of life and death to concern himself with. Why give him a case of tabloid journalists eaves-dropping the Princes’ voice mail for tittle tattle? But maybe that’s the point.

If somebody wanted to ensure that the wider matter wasn’t fully investigated, or at least that the investigation was limited to this one case and not be expanded, the Counter Terrorism department was perfect for ensuring that this happened. They never wanted the burden in the first place, so they were hardly likely to investigate beyond the narrow remit of achieving the one result.

Each day Clarke would discuss the business of his department, including the hacking case, with his immediate superior Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman. As he said, “There wasn’t much of a tree to push up above me. This was something I discussed with Andy Hayman.” In fact the only person above Hayman was Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson.

So we can only presume it was Andy Hayman that gave him the original hacking case. Could it be possible that Hayman would engineer a situation, whereby the wider investigation would be shelved?

Clarke told the committee of his regret that, “The Victim Strategy which we set in place in Aug 2006 has not been as effective as it should have been.” He didn’t name names, and although he comes across as having integrity, he did give me the impression he was withholding evidence at times, perhaps due to discomfort at ratting on former colleagues.

So when this Victim Strategy had been created, who was responsible for delegating it for action? I would have thought his immediate superior, Andy Hayman. So why did it fail to be successful? Did Hayman file it under trash, perhaps?

Hayman, who has since retired from the Met, was made a laughing stock when he appeared before the Committee. On retiring, he had been given a column on The Sunday Times, but said he didn’t consider that this publication was part of the same company that produced The News of the World. He refused to disown the column, only saying that he’d have a conversation with the editor about whether to continue.

He claimed it fulfilled a life-long ambition to be a writer. However, the extract read out to the committee hardly screamed of talent. Chair Keith Vaz mocked, “Your evidence is more Clouseau than Colombo.”

The appearance of Andy Hayman didn’t deliver much in the way of tangible evidence, since he was so evasive. What it did deliver was the ironic sight of one of the most powerful police officers in the country, spluttering, prevaricating, stuttering and sweating, like any one of the thousands of culpable and desperate criminals that he must have interrogated over the course of his career.

It looks like a sad end to an eminent career, but it may get sadder yet. He has further questions to answer.