The issue is a critical one for ­residents in the West London suburbs for whom Heathrow and the environment will be high on the agenda at the GLA elections in May 2012.

Across the spectrum, Labour now recognises the extent of the local environmental impact, finally kicking the idea of Heathrow expansion into the long grass. It has long been an albatross around the party’s neck, particularly at the 2010 general election, and one that we can gladly get rid of.

Maria Eagle’s statement came at about the same time as we heard of some worrying potential developments at a meeting of the London Assembly’s Environment Committee.

While there is an annual cap of 480,000 aircraft movements allowed at Heathrow, the number of passengers using the airport could rise from the current 66 million to 95 million, once redevelopment and construction of the terminals are completed. This equates to one-third more passengers passing through Heathrow and potentially London.

So, despite ongoing opposition to ­expansion at Heathrow, passenger ­numbers are still rising. This flies in the face of the usual argument peddled by the airport expansionists about limits on flight numbers stifling economic growth.

How, then, are de facto rising passenger numbers being squared with the ­maintenance of the annual cap? ­Essentially, the airlines are bringing in bigger planes. You only have to see the Emirates airbuses at Heathrow to appreciate that, while the airlines may have the same number of slots, they can fly more passengers with larger aircraft.

Naturally, there is considerable ­concern about the environmental impact of bigger planes for local residents.

BAA would have us believe that it is ­encouraging airlines to use more modern planes into Heathrow, because they are quieter.

However, recent changes to flight paths and operational methods could mean that more people than ever are affected by ­aircraft noise, the scale and impact of which is very difficult to evaluate at ­present as the Department for Transport begins a mixed mode trial.

Another aspect of this debate is whether we have enough surface ­transport to cope with the additional air passengers travelling into London by taxi, car and public transport. We were told that, of the additional 29 million passengers passing through Heathrow, up to one third of them would be ­transfer passengers – people going from one plane to another without leaving the airport. But that still leaves some 20 million additional passengers coming into London.

So while BAA,  IAG (formerly BA) and the other ­expansionists continue to point to the flight cap as the gatekeeper which prevents Heathrow from getting ever bigger, this mechanism does little to curb the ­expansion of actual passenger numbers. We should not detract from the usual ­objections for wholesale expansion at Heathrow, but nor should we lose sight of the impact that larger planes will have on noise and air pollution, particularly for local residents

Now Heathrow has taken a back seat, with London’s Tory Mayor Boris Johnson pushing even harder for a four-runway ­airport on the Thames Estuary to become the new airport hub for the capital. This idea has grown, as those in favour of wholesale expansion view Heathrow as an ill-placed aviation cul de sac.

Aside from the very real environmental concerns surrounding the idea of “Boris’ island”, it is hard to imagine West Londoners going to work in an airport in the Thames Estuary. So l won’t be surprised if a “Save Heathrow Airport” campaign is on the cards.

However, the other turkeys are every bit as bad, as they pander their way to see who can get most primary votes from Christian Zionists and cheques from Likud reactionaries. British leaders still bask in the illusion of the “special relationship”, but on Capitol Hill, the term is almost ­exclusively used for Israel and the United States. For better or worse, two world wars, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the half century of Britain being a prime nuclear target on America’s behalf, is not exactly at the front of legislative thoughts.

Between them, the candidates seem to have made it axiomatic that Israel should attack Iran, with US support. However, polls suggest, not surprisingly after the ­debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, that one of the few points of unity for an otherwise bitterly divided American electorate is ­opposition to a new war. Even in Israel only 41 per cent support an attack, which is ­surprisingly high, considering who would suffer most in any exchange of weapons with Tehran. But Republican candidates happily cheer terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists.

The one exception among the candidates, Ron Paul, has become the standard bearer of some on America’s alleged left, who are prepared to overlook his profoundly reactionary domestic policies because his America-firster views lead him to oppose Israeli influence in Washington.

This is no time to get sentimental about ayatollahs, and the appropriate response to Israeli threats is certainly not adulation for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime in Iran is almost as attached to fundamentalist religion and the death penalty as a southern Republican governor. It does appear to have stolen the last election, but some informed observers think that it might have won anyway.

However, if there is one thing that seems to unite Iranians, it is the nuclear programme, with many Iranians probably going beyond the government, which still disclaims a military nuclear option. As an aside, I am often invited as a pundit on Iran’s Press TV, and have told them, live, that they should disclaim civilian, let alone military nuclear programmes, abide by even unjust United Nations resolutions, and invest in their refining capacity instead. Last week I reached the limits of their ­tolerance. They called me about the ­Falklands, and when I told them I would say that even English speakers had the right to self-determination, my slot was immediately dropped.

I also said that Argentina used the issue to divert domestic discontent about the economy – which is a role that Iran plays for Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israel lobby in the US, where Iran can whip the majority of liberal-minded Jews into support for the occupying state.

So, begin with principles. It is useful to treat it like a mathematical equation and substitute the terms. Take out Iran and put it in Israel, Pakistan or India, the real rogue states. The difference is that Iran has signed the non-proliferation treaty and they have not. However, it could withdraw from the treaty, like North Korea, and it has not. If Israel attacks Iranian facilities and murders its citizens, it should not complain if its Dimona nuclear facility is targeted.

Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite some worries, has not concluded that Iran has moved decisively towards military nuclear capability. The UN Security Council only became involved when a kangaroo court on the IAEA’s ­ruling body referred the case – with nuclear India one of those supporting the referral, strongly instigated by Israel, the one ­definite nuclear state in the Middle East, with its several hundred war heads.

So is this a crusade, or jihad (since the Saudis seem to be onside) for civil rights? The Wahhabi theocracy in Saudi Arabia makes the most conservative ayatollahs appear positively Anglican in their ­tolerance. We are being invited to support or condone an illegal and unethical war that would unite Iranians and much of the Middle East against Israel and the West, and risk the destruction of Israel with collateral damage to its neighbours not to mention a high chance of casualties among the “oppressed” Iranians.

One does not expect our lords and ­masters to be too concerned about mere human body counts, but they should worry that one sure consequence would be a drastic spike in oil prices that could push the world economy, already teetering on the brink, over the edge, with a calculable chance of escalation. It seems a high price to pay so Netanyahu can keep on building settlements.

Any responsible government should be telling Israel that – far from backing, tacit or otherwise – there would be immediate consequences in terms of military and financial support. But the Republican and Likud circus is, at least in part, designed to weaken Barack Obama’s ability to do that in this election year – which is why we should be worried. What’s David Cameron’s excuse?

Britain ­revoked by the ­regulator, Ofcom, after repeatedly breaching the Ofcom code. The final straw was its refusal to guarantee that it was editorially controlled from London and not from Tehran. Last Friday it was removed from the BSkyB satellite.

An outrageous assault on freedom of expression? George Galloway, the former MP who has presented a regular show on Press TV, certainly thinks so. “Champions of liberty the British govt have now taken Press TV off Sky”, the gorgeous former ­admirer of Saddam Hussein tweeted in ­response to the decision.

But then he continued: “Follow us at www.presstv.ir and other platforms”.  That rather undermines his point. Press TV ­hasn’t actually been suppressed and it isn’t really farewell. Anyone who wants to can watch it online.

Not that I’m going to, I might add, or at least not very often. Press TV is an organ of Iranian government propaganda, a purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and anti-democratic bile, no more trustworthy than the Soviet Novosti Press Agency and its lackeys were in the bad old days. You only watch it to see what the ­Iranian government and its useful idiots in the West are saying.

Nevertheless, the case of Press TV is an important one because of what it says about the difficulties of regulating ­broadcasting in the digital age.

From the 1920s until very recently, Britain had a very tough regulatory regime for broadcasting. For more than 30 years, the BBC – a state-owned corporation from 1927 – had a monopoly of broadcasting, with strict rules prohibiting political ­partisanship and bias, and the same rules were applied to commercial broadcasters after the BBC monopoly was broken in 1955 with the creation of ITV.

In the years after the end of the BBC monopoly, commercial broadcasting grew massively in scope – commercial radio from the early 1970s, Channel 4 from 1982, Sky and other channels on satellite from the late 1980s – but the tough rules on partisanship and bias remained in place.

They weren’t perfect: a self-satisfied ­establishment consensus ruled, views ­outside the mainstream were largely ­excluded from the airwaves, and governments of every political persuasion did their best, with varying degrees of success, to suppress awkward programmes and keep out awkward programme-makers.

But the regulatory regime spared and still spares British broadcasting the ­propagandist partisanship that has ­poisoned the political culture of other countries. Italy has Berlusconi TV in all its forms, the United States has Fox and dozens of radio stations that pour out ­populist right-wing ­propaganda for their corporate masters. We don’t.

The very fact that Press TV was given a licence in the first place shows, however, that the long-standing British regulatory regime is coming under pressure – and the fact that its licence being revoked makes ­little difference to its accessibility is a ­harbinger of things to come.

In the multi-channel, multi-platform digital age, content regulation is more difficult to justify –  “We’re just an honest-to-goodness news channel with lots of ethnic-minority people (and George ­Galloway?)” – and ­almost impossible to enforce effectively.

Some would say that this is a good thing, but I don’t agree. A free-for-all of the airwaves is probably coming. But it would advantage no one but the very rich – individuals, corporations and states – ­towards whom the rules are already heavily stacked. The British regulatory regime for broadcasting needs to be defended.

Which is where Nick Cohen’s fiery new polemic about freedom of expression, You Can’t Read This Book, comes in. He recognises this. The book’s big theme is that laws about freedom of expression are not enough to sustain its practice. Fear – fear of being fired for stepping out of line by a ­corporation or government organisation that employs you, fear of the libel action that might come from a super-rich crook with a holiday home in London, fear of being ­assassinated for offending the religious ­sensibilities of some imam in Iran (who might well broadcast on Press TV) – is as potent a constraint on free expression as the censor of a totalitarian state, and a much larger and more present danger in Western democracies than necessary ­tolerant democratic media regulation.

Cohen’s book is brilliant – add that to the cover blurb – but it doesn’t go far enough in exploring the informal system of controlling what is sayable and what is not in the contemporary media. He’s quite blasé about political and cultural exclusion by newspaper and broadcast editors (his line is that you can always find another ­outlet for your opinions, which might be true for him but isn’t for most of the rest of us) and he has nothing to say about the ­collusion between journalists and their sources that keeps so much that should be public private.

Ah, what the hell. I’m writing what I think for a democratic socialist newspaper. It will be published (I hope) more or less unchanged. We might be marginal as it’s possible to be, but we’re still here, out and proud. That’s good and long may it continue. The survival of Tribune is much more important .

Of course, racism in football is nothing new. The sight and sounds of Oldham defender Tom Adeyemi being consoled by his team mates (and Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard) after a section of the Kop called him a “fucking black bastard” recalls the darkest days when British football had a reputation for this kind of thing.

To add insult to injury, home fans then began to chant the name of Liverpool striker Luis Suarez, currently serving an eight-match ban for racially insulting ­fellow professional Patrice Evra. Perhaps we should not be surprised that a player suspended for racism should be held up as an example of sporting excellence when Liverpool manager, Kenny Daglish allowed his squad to train in “Suarez”

T-shirts following the ban handed down by the Football Association.

Displaying this kind of solidarity for someone who is at best a thick idiot and quite possibly something much worse is laughable. Or it would be, had it not

directly contributed to the awful scenes we saw at Anfield a few weeks ago. There is no doubt in my mind that the sense of ­paranoia whipped up by “King Kenny” following the FA’s thorough investigation into the first incident of racism at

Liverpool FC directly contributed to the second. At the very least, Dalglish should be charged with bringing the game into disrepute.

I am also sure that had London not ­already been awarded this summer’s Olympic Games, events of the past few months would have scuppered our chances for a generation. If we cannot treat our own home-grown athletes with the respect they deserve, then what chance have we of welcoming competitors from around the world to compete in Britain’s capital city? Meanwhile the reputation of Liverpool, a city synonymous with humour, independence and a free-thinking anti-Thatcherite tolerance has been damaged beyond belief. This is a great shame, but I have every faith that Liverpudlians can and will restore their global brand in the eyes of the world.

The convictions of David Norris and Gary Dobson for the murder of Stephen Lawrence were met by most people with a collective sigh of relief, as though we could somehow draw a line under racism, and concentrate instead on what unites us, ­despite Diane Abbott’s somewhat ­unhelpful intervention. This is wishful thinking.

Statistics show that 13 years after McPherson concluded his report, black men remain 26 times more likely than their white counterparts to be stopped and searched by police, while black men and women in their early 20s are twice as likely to be NEETS (not in employment, education or training) as their white ­counterparts.

Black and Asian defendants are still more likely to go to jail than their white counterparts when convicted of similar crimes – and they serve longer sentences. The Ministry of Justice’s own analysis of thousands of cases from 2010 concluded that 23 per cent of white defendants were sent to prison for indictable offences, compared with 27 per cent of black counterparts and 29 per cent of Asian defendants.

I myself have been stopped and searched on more than one occasion. The first time it happened, I had just left a party attended by the great and the good, held in the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. Moments after chatting away to the then Home Secretary, erstwhile colleagues “off the telly” and a smattering of left-leaning celebrities, I was apprehended by two white police officers who actually took the trouble to reverse down Notting Hill Gate to stop me.

“Where was I going?” they demanded. Realising I had no particular destination in mind I quickly made something up. “Where had I been?” That was easy: “The New Statesman’s summer reception.” “Was I drunk?” I referred them to the answer I had just given. “Could anyone vouch for me?” I stopped short of giving them Joan Bakewell’s home telephone number, while wondering how many other guests from the same party were likely to suffer a similar humiliation. Probably none. Whether because of my accent, the cut of my suit or the fact that no one wearing flip-flops could be considered a high risk, I was allowed to proceed to my imaginary rendezvous without further enquiry, but with the awful feeling that an injustice, however minor, had been committed against me.

I resented it then, I resent it now.

I suspect a similar resentment led Diane Abbott to tweet what she did. The fact is that whether you are a politician, a bishop, or even a police officer, if you are of an ethnic appearance in the United Kingdom, you can expect, from time to time, to be treated less well than you deserve.

Abused footballer Tom Adeyemi turned down a place to study science at that other great bastion of diversity, Cambridge University, perhaps feeling that he would fit in better on the football pitch than in the Junior Common Room. He must now be considering whether he made the right decision. That’s a shame, not just for him, but for all of us.

Ed Miliband. But if, at any time between his election as Labour leader in 1935 and 1940, you’d asked around about Attlee, you would have been told he was unelectable. “And a ­little mouse shall lead them”, confided a ­bitterly disappointed Hugh Dalton to his diary on the night of the election.

Attlee was elected leader partly because the front runner, Herbert Morrison, was thought to be too close to Ramsay ­Macdonald, the good-looking, charismatic Labour leader with a beautiful voice, beloved of duchesses, who was widely ­perceived to have dumped all Labour’s principles even before he dumped the Labour Party itself – just as David Miliband lost out to his brother because he was perceived as being too close to Tony Blair. Attlee was the opposite of Macdonald, as Ed Miliband is the opposite of Blair.

Morrison always believed Attlee had to be dumped because he did not look or sound prime ministerial. But Attlee’s great strength was his certainty, his ruthless self-belief. He had a mind like a steel trap. When Britain had a war-ravaged economy and needed a vast loan from the United States just to stay afloat, Attlee introduced a full-blooded welfare state while Morrison was urging caution. His Cabinet meetings were short and to the point, and they reached decisions. He was ruthless with ministers. One minister asked why he was being fired. “Not up to it”, said the Prime Minister.

In the short time he has had, Ed Miliband has shown that quality twice. First, he decided to run against his older brother, who was the front runner, knowing that if he succeeded, he would destroy, almost ­certainly for good, the lifetime ambition of a brother he loved – and would probably ­destroy their relationship (as he has, according to the excellent biography by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre).

Second, his attack on Rupert Murdoch’s empire and his call for its breakup, to the horror of many of his front bench and while David Cameron and Nick Clegg were still saying the minimum they could get away with, was clear, brave and decisive. Ever since Tony Blair went to pay homage at the court of King Rupert, it has been accepted wisdom that no one can become Prime Minister if Murdoch is determined that they shouldn’t. Look what happened to Neil ­Kinnock, they say. I’m told that Murdoch sent the boys round to tell young Ed to watch his step.

Miliband gambled that the Murdoch empire will never be able to do that again. By gambling on that, Miliband has made it more likely that it will be true.

But – I hear you cry – this is not 1945. You need an image and you need to be good on telly. You think Attlee didn’t have an image? A wise man, he made his image fairly close to the real man – terse, calm, phlegmatic, pipe-smoking and reassuring. As for broadcasting – well, television didn’t matter then, but radio did, and Attlee in 1945 was up against Winston Churchill, the greatest broadcaster of his age.

The Labour Party should hold its nerve. Its leader is clearly holding his, and my ­advice to him is: go on being yourself, Ed. You’re not a Tony Blair or a Ramsay ­Macdonald, you don’t have the easy charm, the good looks, the superficiality. Ignore the siren voices that tell you that you have to turn yourself into something different. Labour’s spin doctors have a bad record in this respect – they told Neil Kinnock he had to start sounding “prime ministerial” and if only he hadn’t listened, he might have been Prime Minister. If you go on being who you are, the country will learn to trust you.

Francis Beckett is the author of Clem Attlee, published by Politicos

Eric Pickles, the former teenage Marxist who travelled right across the political spectrum and right down to Essex to find a safe Tory seat, is to welcome representatives from the shires to Leeds for their annual daffodil-time spirit-raiser. They hate being called delegates, by the way. “No one delegates us”, they snort if you even suggest it.

By all accounts, it will be a low-key affair, lasting only one Saturday – February 25 – in the plush Queen’s Hotel, in City Square, where until a couple of weeks ago a rather bedraggled Occupy Leeds camp was to be found. The weather, not the law, beat the protesters.  This winter may have been milder than the last two, but you could have believed we were having a dress rehearsal for the biblical flood.

The Occupiers in Sheffield are made

of rather sterner stuff, and the Cathedral ­authorities there are taking legal action to clear them off the pavement. They’ve taken refuge in a nearby Salvation Army Citadel that has been empty for more than a decade. There’s something quite poignant about that.

Not that such considerations will figure in the day of mutual Tory back-slapping. They may not have much to slap about in Yorkshire, but they’ll put on a propaganda show for the BBC, the broadcasting wing of the coalition.  The county’s Conservative MPs, while larger in number since 2010, are not shining at Westminster. Apart from ­escapee Pickles and the grand old man of Tykeistan, William Hague, they don’t figure much in the ministerial hierarchy.

The new intake is particularly disappointing, with only a parliamentary private secretary here or there and veteran Anne Mackintosh chairing the Defra Select Committee. And it’s hard to see the likes of former television sports presenter Jason McCartney ever making waves by the Thames. Most of them have simply disappeared into the House of Commons ­woodwork.

How different to the fortunes of the county’s Labour grandees. Leader Ed occupies Doncaster North, his Shadow Chancellor Big Ed has Morley and Outwood and his wife Yvette Cooper the Shadow Home Secretary (tipped to succeed Ed Miliband as the first woman leader if he’s pushed under the proverbial Number 11 bus in Whitehall) is well camped in Castleford and Pontefract. An arc of authority, you might say, or an axis of command. There are so many of the blighters round ’ere that Labour could ­afford to lose a few – John Healey and Gerry Sutcliffe – without the county ­becoming any less top-heavy on the ­Opposition front bench.

But I notice that Miliband and Balls, the notorious firm of political accountants, didn’t come north to lay down the new policy of adherence to Tory spending cuts and public sector pay freezes. The message trips off the tongue rather easier in London than in Leeds and the other big cities of the north, where thousands of local government, public agency, civil service and ­National Health Service jobs have gone and continue to go.

Council workers in Ed Miliband’s own Doncaster North constituency were told two weeks ago that they would have to accept pay cuts of 4 per cent to “keep” up to 250 jobs. That comes on top of pay freezes and 1,000 town hall jobs already lost in the borough. This, I suppose, is Ed’s policy to “prioritise jobs over pay” in action. The idea came from council officials, but was ­supported by Labour councillors and the authority’s directly-elected mayor, “English Democrat” Peter Davies.

But, faced with threats of legal actions over unilateral changes in terms and conditions, which could cost the borough more than the planned £30 million salary savings, Davies backed down and slashed the cuts to a maximum of 2.5 per cent, with those earning less than £14,733 a year losing nothing. As Tribune went to press, the unions were considering their response.

All this should be seen against the backdrop of the worst jobs crisis in years. Yorkshire and Humberside is the second hardest-hit region in the country, with dole queues growing by 10 per cent to 270,000. Figures for those in work actually fell, against the national trend. One in five ­children are reckoned to be living in poverty in West Yorkshire. And one local NHS hospital trust – Mid Yorkshire, the authority begging help from the British Army to staff an accident and emergency unit in Pontefract – is in debt to the tune of £20 million.

Wherever you look, the news is grim.

And that’s why I expect voters in ­Doncaster to end their 10-year failed experiment of directly-elected mayors in May. A Labour-supported public consultation found 90 per cent in favour of holding a referendum to scrap the post, and the poll will take place on the same day that councils are up for election. This is a free hit against the Government, and I imagine the vote could go the same way in Government-imposed referendums to establish directly-elected mayors in Sheffield, Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford.

The Tories may be coming up ’ere for a day out, but they won’t be taking home any presents from the electorate.

But a menace is precisely what she is, in spite of her boring style. Consider what she has been doing over the past year or so. As the crisis in the eurozone has developed, she has repeatedly declared her belief that the single European currency must survive if the EU itself is to survive. Yet she has persistently refused to use Germany’s enormous ­financial and economic resources to bail out those southern European economies whose gigantic debt crises threaten to shatter the unity of the single currency.

Not only that, she has flatly refused to allow the European Central Bank to do what other central banks like the Federal Reserve in the United States and the Bank of ­England would do in similar circumstance – namely, print money with which to buy up the debt of these stricken countries so as to drive down the interest rates which they have to pay on the borrowing that keeps them afloat. She has treated the Frankfurt-based ECB as little more than a branch of the German central bank, requiring it to ­follow the same sternly straight-laced ­monetary policy as Germany has pursued domestically since the war.

Instead, she has insisted that the citizens of these countries must endure crippling austerity regimes to qualify for help from the rest of Europe, in spite of the manifest fact that this austerity ensures that there will be no economic growth from which it might eventually be possible to repay the outstanding debt. Greece in particular has been condemned to a perpetual downward spiral which – given that country’s recent history – could well end in revolution, either from the left or, more likely, from the right.

Thus the ultimate outcome of Angela Merkel’s tight-fisted, tight-lipped­ ­authoritarianism is likely to be the exact ­opposite of what she apparently wants. Far from ensuring the survival of the euro, she may well prove to be the force which ensures its breakup. Why she can’t see this is ­incomprehensible. True, her sternly orthodox ­economic outlook used to be fairly widely shared. But not any more. One by one, her intellectual allies have been peeling off. The International Monetary Fund, under its new boss Christine Lagarde, was among the first to change its mind. Then the credit agency Standard & Poor’s jumped ship at the ­moment when it downgraded the credit-worthiness of no fewer than nine ­eurozone countries, including France, ­arguing that more austerity would be counter-productive.

The conversion that has astonished me most is that of The Economist. I have been a regular reader – often with gritted teeth – since the 1940s and, throughout that long period, it has been a consistent advocate of free-market, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism. But last weekend it came out, all guns blazing, against Merkel’s determination to ram austerity down the throats of the Greek, Italian and Spanish peoples. It concluded one of two highly critical articles by arguing that resentment of Germany as the ringleader of European intolerance is already rising, and that a populist revolt in debtor countries would be the biggest threat of all to the survival of the euro.

“Mrs Merkel should remember that”, it added, menacingly.

However, we need have no doubt that Angela Merkel does indeed want the euro to survive, because Germany has done very well out of it – and promises to continue to do well out of it in the future. Indeed, to a considerable extent it has been the ­foundation of the economic success that gives such muscle to Merkel’s moralising. This is because being tied to so many smaller and weaker economies has provided Germany with a euro exchange rate far lower than it would have experienced with the deutschmark.

As a result, Germany’s manufactured goods have been much cheaper on export markets than they would have been without the euro, and thereby have sold that much better. But the exact opposite has been true for Greece, Italy, Spain and the other, weaker countries. They have faced an exchange rate far higher than would have prevailed under their original currencies, not least because they have been unable to devalue their way out of trouble.

So Germany’s much-vaunted success as an exporting nation has been at least partly achieved at the expense of the very same euro countries which Merkel is now lecturing and bossingabout so insufferably. It is little wonder that Mario Monti, the unelected technocrat who is now Italy’s Prime Minister who is trying hard to do Merkel’s bidding, is growing increasingly ­exasperated with her refusal to play ­Germany’s full part in the operation to save the euro.

Two final points. The first is that all this simply serves to underline the huge service done by Gordon Brown in keeping us out of the euro – a service which Tony Blair was ­secretly trying to undermine, according to Peter Hain’s new book. The second is that one of the last people still loyal to Chancellor Merkel’s austerity doctrine is our own Tory Chancellor, George Osborne.

The issue, of course, was Iain Duncan Smith’s proposed £26,000 cap on welfare benefits, an ill-thought-out scheme ­scribbled on the back of an envelope by Daily Mail leader writers.

A House of Lords revolt exempted child benefit from the cap after Lord ­Ashdown asked: “How is it right morally to deny it to someone on £26,000 when you are giving it to someone on £80,000?”

It’s a simple point, well put and backed by bishops who branded the overall strategy as somehow unChristian.

So why couldn’t it have been made in the House of Commons by Eds Miliband and Balls or Liam Byrne? Because the ­Opposition is shackled by its fear of alienating “hard-working” families – also known as Daily Mail leader writers.

The welfare state was designed to give to those most in need, not as an exercise in social engineering and not as an easy target for reducing a deficit created by City and banking greed on both sides of the Atlantic.

The concept of a cap is alien to its founding principles, yet the official ­Opposition line is to back a cap while quibbling about the small print.

Of course, the long-term aim must be to reward those who contribute something to our community, weed out the cheats and halt the cycle of dole despair passed from generation to generation.

Work should pay more than ­fecklessness. But not at the expense of hundreds of thousands of children. And not at a time of rocketing unemployment, savage cuts in services and the ongoing debt burden ­suffered by families both in and out of employment.

Duncan Smith and the coalition ­Cabinet seem determined to reverse their defeat when the bill returns to the Commons.

But maybe, for once, the example set this week will stiffen the backbones of MPs on both sides of the chamber. The Children’s Society said: “The Lords have now stood up to the Government and sent a clear message.”

IDS, who previously painted himself as a Thatcherite-turned-carer, has been found out. And not just on child benefit.

The National Audit Office reported that the work and pensions secretary

has got his sums wrong on his flagship back-to-work scheme.

The watchdogs found that the

£5 billion scheme set up last year may squander taxpayers’ money because IDS severely over-estimated the effect.

Any benefits in reducing ­unemployment will be offset by public sector job cuts due to come into effect this year.

Canny bosses are already milking the scheme to their own advantage. The Government, the report said, has spent £63 million cancelling contracts only to sign up the same firms for the scheme.

The Government’s welfare strategy is a shambles which will penalise the needy and help the greedy. But what do you expect from a Tory-led coalition? Unfortunately, the Opposition’s strategy is all over the place

Now there is a new clarity and a new Labour message. It says: “Let us be clear: We are for and against the cuts”. The result of the pronouncements from Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and Labour leader Ed Miliband that, in opposition, Labour would not oppose the public sector pay freeze and in government  – an oxymoron in terms – would keep “all these cuts” is causing ­confusion among the public and furious anger among the unions.

It concedes the economic argument and the political high ground to the Tories. It cuts the legs from under unions trying to protect the very same vulnerable members it alienates and sows the seeds of civil war between the party and its paymasters. Above all and over-archingly more dangerously, it lends legitimacy to the coalition’s argument that there is no alternative to the depth of austerity that is being unnecessarily wrought on the British people.

It effectively means endorsing, or at least accepting, a pay cut for public sector workers from nurses and teachers to ­dinner ladies and refuse collectors. It embraces the false dichotomy between pay and jobs. It removes any credible platform from which Labour could claim it would do something different in government.

Yet leadership aides and one or two Shadow Cabinet members try to deny that there has been a policy shift at all. This is plausible – through rose-tinted thick lenses. All it simply means is that there’s not much Labour can do practically before a election because it’s not in government and it can’t make pledges on which cuts it will reverse until it is in government and is able to see how truly horrendous is the mess left by the coalition. It’s not bold but it has an undeniable, if uninspiring and almost fatalistic logic. If only that’s all it really meant.

Another interpretation – one which is shared among grass roots Labour and trade union members – is that in the democracy vacuum that exists in the party’s policy-making process the Blairite zombies have risen again, in the spirit of the bloody fratricidal wars of the early 1980s, for a fight to the death.

David Cameron and George Osborne are grinning all the way to the polling station.

But he was broadly right about the British working class, who put up with the First World War (and also the gigantic industrial crisis that preceded it) in a way that their Russian counterparts did not. Instead, they developed a mass trade union movement, and also a political party based on the unions which generally saw its role as ameliorative rather than revolutionary.

I suppose the closest Britain ever came to revolution was the General Strike of 1926 – on which the union leaders pulled the plug as soon as they came face to face with the reality that this was indeed a revolution they thought they were leading.

These rather simplistic turn-of-the-year thoughts have been stimulated by reflecting on the extraordinary docility of the British public in the face of the financial crisis and the recession it has provoked.

What, one wonders, do the capitalists have to do to attract the active hostility of the workers? The bankers whose naked greed caused the crisis are still pocketing their monster bonuses, the Tory-led Government is still protecting these same bankers in exchange for their cash support, and Chancellor George Osborne is ­blatantly making the poor pay for the crimes of the rich. Yet the opinion polls still show the Tories level-pegging with Labour.

Perhaps the most offensive feature of this deplorable situation was David Cameron’s New Year message, which contained a disgraceful example of the Roman “bread and circuses” approach to controlling the plebs. Yes, admitted Cameron, 2012 was certainly going to be tough. But cheer up, he said, the royal jubilee and the Olympic Games will make you feel better. In other words, we may be cutting back on the bread, but we’re going to make up for it with bigger and better circuses.

So what is the Labour Party doing about it? Well, Ed Balls has continued to batter away at the all-too-successful Tory lie that the whole crisis is down to the last Labour Government. The other Ed – Ed Miliband – gets mocked in the papers for his undeniable lack of “charisma”. But at the same time he has come up with a few quite good policy ideas, the best of which is his distinction between “productive” capitalists and “predatory” capitalists; the former he thinks should be encouraged, the latter penalised.

True, this isn’t exactly a ringing challenge to the entire capitalist system, but it will do for a start. Yet even this modest proposal has attracted the criticism of some of the disgruntled Blairites who would have preferred to have Ed’s brother David as leader. They claim to be worried that Ed’s rather elementary distinction could be portrayed as dangerously like socialism, and therefore likely to frighten the Daily Mail as well as the horses; indeed, some of them may even fear that it actually is socialism – a wholly unacceptable state of affairs in their eyes.

But in recent days some other Blairites – most of whom I didn’t know existed, ­although they were billed in the media as “top advisedrs” – have bobbed up to ­declare variously that Labour must rid itself of the “tax and spend” ethos, and

that Miliband must abandon his alleged “anti-business rhetoric”.

Now, I hadn’t noticed that Miliband was using much anti-business rhetoric in the first place. But if he has been, it’s pretty muted. And as for “tax and spend”, what on earth do these people think the process of government is about if it isn’t an argument over how much to tax, and what to spend it on? I personally would like to see Trident cancelled and the money spent on building houses to rent. Others (rot their souls) disagree. That’s politics.

So what must Labour do in 2012? I don’t think it’s entirely up to Miliband. The real problem with Her Majesty’s Opposition isn’t its leader, it is its parliamentary rank and file. Labour MPs –  or far too many of them – don’t seem to be up to the job. They seem to have collectively lost the will to fight. Perhaps it is the aftermath of the ghastly expenses scandal which has ­filleted them of their backbones. But unless they can pull themselves together then the prospects for the remainder of this parliament are dismal.

What is urgently needed is a corps of ­effective, fearless backbenchers, not following the party line with slavish loyalty, but conducting a real guerrilla war in the chamber. People like Dennis Skinner in his splendid youth; like Barbara Castle and Dick Crossman when they exposed the John Profumo scandal; like the glorious, nagging contraryism of Tam Dalyell during 40 years of asking devastating questions from the back benches; like Dale Campbell Savours, tirelessly raking up mucky secrets and flinging them in the faces of ministers day after day.

These people worked hard at their job. They weren’t mere constituency representatives, they were Tribunes of the people.