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I was caned regularly from 1957 to 1961, the latter year containing both my fifteenth birthday and the retirement of an elderly, traditionalist headmaster (whose liberal successor we loathed). When I say "regularly" I should think the average was about twice a week. Cheek. Insolence. Chucking things at the staff. Disobedience. I often think that debates about punishment are fundamentally flawed in the same way as debates about hooliganism because they are conducted by nice people who consider bad behaviour as "deviant" rather than by people like me who consider it to be entirely natural.

So what was good about it? The place was orderly, for a start, and gave you plenty of space to work and play. I received a very good education, far better than is even possible in most contemporary comprehensive schools. And nobody tried to reform you or get under your skin: I don't think I could have tolerated being reasoned with. If you don't chastise children you have to shame them, which is bad if it doesn't work and worse if it does.

The underlying assumption was that, of course, a teenage boy faced with the phenomenon of chairs with rubber stoppers on the bottoms of their legs would naturally wish to remove them and hurl them at the nearest figure in authority. But the institution would collapse unless this practice was disincentivised and the cheapest, most effective way of achieving this was a sharp, burning sensation in the buttocks. No stigma attached to being beaten: it was deterrence at its purest.

The personal gain has been lifelong. It starts with pain management; most of us are going to be in pain at some stage and it is good to be able to recognise and deal with mere pain (as opposed to pain which signals something worse).

The trick is . . . not minding that it hurts

From pain management develops a certain boldness for which I have always been grateful when dealing with censorious vice-chancellors or cocky policemen. What can they do, after all? - though serious criminals are a different matter. And from pain management develops stress management, including the ability to enjoy yourself even though you know unpleasant things are going to happen to you.

Spare the rod and spoil the child

But Elias and his followers are keen to point out that civilisation is not good in itself, it is merely a different style, marked by sqeamishness rather than a real ethics. Men cease to beat their wives in the public context of the market square, but the possibilities of mental cruelty in private are far worse. And does anyone seriously claim that marriage now is a happier institution than it was in the past?

Twentieth century European civilisation meant that the Vikings no longer show up to rape and pillage, but instead educated men meet at the Wannsee and work out a programme of extermination. One consequence of this is that a rational discourse about right and wrong is replaced by a pseudo-aesthetic discourse couched in terms of the "disagreeable" and the "distasteful", the typical adjectives of "civilisation". It is part of what Sir Tom Stoppard calls

the descent from thinking to feeling.

Lincoln Allison is Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton. His two most recent books are The Global Politics of Sport and The Disrespect Agenda: How the Wrong Kind of Niceness is Making us Weak and Unhappy.

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Moreover, we still know too little of Mr Brown. It may be that he takes Washington by storm, but the media experience with Sarah Palin (very unfairly traduced in my view) should make us cautious about the chances of untested populist protest candidates.

And as for the "tea party", this very fissile combination of independents, Republican ultras, and down-right crackpots needs to be treated with great care. We know nothing of its foreign policy stances, for example, beyond a certain knee-jerk muscularity. I suspect it will soon show its true isolationist colours.

Today the tea party has badly burned the Democrats, but tomorrow it could blow up in Republican faces. We are beginning to see this in places like Florida, where moderate Republicans such as governor Charlie Crist face "tea party" challenges. If the result of Massachusetts is simply to accelerate the right-ward drift of the GOP, while encouraging Mr Obama to drag his wayward party back to the centre, then another Democrat win in 2012 is assured.

The Boston result should be the opportunity for something quite different, namely the chance to explore a new kind of Republican Party We still do not know enough about the causes of the victory, but the big picture suggests that it is now possible to conceive of a GOP which must be informed by its southern and western loyalists but should no longer be totally dependent on them. To do this, the party will have to build on existing strengths, to be sure, by finally acting on its strong rhetorical commitment to cut government waste and promote self-reliance. But more than anything else, the party needs to reclaim old strengths. It needs to take back the clothes it shed, and the Democrats stole, over the past forty years. Here are some of the traditions that need to be repatriated.

1. The GOP is the party of Abraham Lincoln
It needs to dispel the impression that it is hostile to African-American aspirations, in particular by showing that its commitment to families, communities, and the entrepreneurial spirit is a surer road to advancement than government handouts and politically correct programmes. There should be no room in the party for anybody who apologises for racism, present - or past. Unfortunately, the "macaca" and other recent incidents, make this injunction necessary.

2. The GOP is the party of Ronald Reagan
For Reagan the promotion of US values abroad was as important as their defence at home. This means that the party should eschew a return to the failed Kissingerian "realism" of yesteryear, by supporting the democratic transformation of the Middle East, the defence of Israel and the creation of a democratic Palestinian state within borders that guarantee the security of both.

3. Above All, the GOP is the party of Teddy Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt was the founder of US environmentalism and a supporter of strong government where it is needed, in the provision of education, transport and national security. The party therefore needs to be more vigorous in support of overdue large-scale infrastructural programmes which will stimulate the economy without leading to long-term bloated government payrolls.

It also needs to make some positive proposals on how health care - the spiralling costs of which are a major problem - is to be reformed, an issue which Teddy Roosevelt himself first put on the political agenda in 1912.

Finally, if TR justified the creation of the wilderness parks with reference to the heroic "frontier" myth, his successors must link the protection of the environment to the promotion of American values, for example by reducing dependence on dictatorships in the Middle East. If the connection between health care, the environment, government-spending on productive projects and US national greatness is convincingly made, the public will support it.

The same is true of government financial regulation, which was largely invented by TR's Republican administration in the early 1900s. He was the original "trust buster". He would never have accepted that there were banks that were too important to be subject to the laws of the market. The new GOP must embrace the principle that if a bank is "too big to fail", it is too big, period.

About forty years ago, Republicans and Democrats began to exchange certain geographic and political constituencies. For many years, this paid handsome electoral dividends for the GOP, even if these came at a cultural price. By November 2008, at the latest, it had become clear that the rate of exchange was no longer favourable, not least because Barack Obama showed that the south was no longer the "south". The Boston result shows that two can play at that game. Now is the time to show the Democrats that the north-east is no longer the "north-east" either. It is time to assemble the Coalition for a new Republican Majority.

The author thanks Mr Charles Laderman for very useful comments on an earlier draft.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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I have observed this haste in imposing fines twice before. Once I stopped outside a hotel at which I was going to stay, to take in my luggage (the nearest available parking place being several hundred yards off). I received a ticket within two minutes, while I was at the hotel reception, and when I protested - the officer was perfectly aware that I was parking only to unload, for the door of my car was open and I had stopped in a way, by no means obstructive to others, which made it perfectly clear I had no intention of staying long - I was told that I ought to have had my warning lights flashing. That was the proper procedure for unloading, according to regulations.

Were these regulations national or local, I asked? They were local, he replied. In other words, the visitor is expected to familiarise himself with local regulations (several pages long) wherever he goes. Common sense and discretion are of no avail. These are expected neither of the citizen nor, above all, of the official who applies the rules au pied de la lettre - when the rules provide an opportunity for raising funds, that is.

I had another very similar experience to the one above.

An excellent insight into the nature and purpose of parking enforcement is available on the following website. The writer shadowed an ill-paid parking attendant who in 4 hours of an 8 hour working day earned less than £30 and raised £550 in revenue to be divided between the council and the private contractor who employed him.

In not a single case of the 11 tickets issued (five to police vehicles, one to a Royal Mail vehicle and one to a British Telecom vehicle, which had a correctly-displayed emergency vehicle sign but which has its wheels very slightly on the pavement, and was therefor "done" for "obstruction", though the vehicle quite obviously obstructed no one) was the recipient inconveniencing anyone seriously: practically all the tickets were issued on technicalities. One was issued to a car with a Manchester disabled badge, that had overstayed the length of time allowed in the borough in which the owner parked, but which would have been perfectly all right in Manchester. He, too, was supposed to know the regulations, not merely from region to region, or county to county, but from borough to borough.

The parking attendants (now called civil enforcement officers and provided with baseball caps, as if to emphasise just how far the British are now but trailer-trash Americans) have minimum targets to achieve, with bonuses as the carrot to performance. It is openly acknowledged within the organisation that employs them that revenue-collection is the primary goal.

One would have no cause for complaint or grounds for suspicion if other and more important aspects of the rules were applied with similar rigour and efficiency, but of course this is not so. I know from experience, for example, how difficult it can be to get the police even to record a crime, let alone get them to do anything about it. This difficulty occurs not merely with trivial offences, but with serious ones, up to and including arson and attempted murder. My working-class patients used to tell me regularly that the police refused to entertain their complaints that their houses had been burgled. This, of course, was only natural: the police have the task not of reducing crime, but
of reducing the crime figures, and by far the easiest and most efficient way of doing that is to manipulate them.

Once, called to a police station to examine a person under arrest to determine whether he was fit to be detained and interviewed, my car was broken into while parked immediately outside the police station. When I informed the police of this (to me) surprising occurrence, they replied with perfect equanimity,

I expect that's the Smiths at number 22, they're always breaking into our cars.

The disparity between the bullying nature of officialdom and its manner of revenue extraction (or what in other contexts would be called extortion) from the population, on the one hand, and the very poor return the population gets for its money, on the other, creates a state of mind that oscillates between sullen resentment and pig-headed rebellion, not necessarily against well-chosen targets.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

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The Tigers were weakened by an internal split which reduced their fighting strength by a third. The breakaway faction of eastern Tamils became allies of the government, working closely with the army and contributing both manpower and intelligence. The regime was successful at building relations with friendly nations notably Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan and Burma from whom they gained crucial financial, political and military support. In a post 9/11 world the LTTE were finding it harder to channel funds and arms shipments to Sri Lanka while Rajapakse was expanding and modernizing the armed forces. Sri Lanka is now proportionately the most militarized society in the region with the army, navy, air force, police and civil defence numbering 350,000 in a population of around 20 million.

Once hostilities resumed in earnest there were no half-measures. White van squads began operating and suspected LTTE operatives and sympathisers disappeared in increasing numbers. Dissenting voices in the media were muted by a series of abductions, assaults and murders. Despite occasional setbacks on the battlefield and a wave of terrorist outrages the momentum was with the Sri Lankan forces. In May 2009, on a narrow strip of territory in the east between the coast and a lagoon the remnants of the LTTE were killed or captured and the entirety of the senior leadership perished. The precise civilian death toll in this final phase is disputed, but was inevitably high, the UN estimates 7,000 fatalities.

After the initial euphoria had subsided and the victory parades were over, tensions quickly developed between the Rajapakse family and the former army commander. With no conflict to engender cohesion, injured sensibilities and bitter rivalries soon surfaced. The Rajapakse’s were concerned that their political hegemony might be threatened by an increasingly powerful military. At the end of the conflict Sarath Fonseka was appointed Chief of the Defence Staff, an apparent elevation but in fact the move weakened his control over the army. As his relations deteriorated with the government, the General opted to retire. He was offered a public servants role in the sports ministry, which he turned down as a humiliating slight. His personal security was drastically reduced, further evidence of what he considered degrading treatment. Fonseka was ordered to promptly vacate his official residence and when he did not do so, a large contingent of troops was sent to his home on the pretext of looking for army deserters.

In December Fonseka announced his candidature for the Presidency. It is unclear whether Fonseka's motivation is ego or a principled opposition to the government. He is promising to eliminate corruption and promote ethnic harmony, media freedom, and human rights. Fonseka has also announced his intention to abolish the Executive Presidency, which concentrates power in the hands of the President at the expense of Parliament. Many are indeed concerned that the present constitutional arrangement has led to a dangerous accretion of power in one office and has the potential to pave the way for autocratic and ultimately even dynastic rule.

The government has levelled corruption allegations against the General, claiming that in military procurement he favoured a company owned by his son-in-law. Cabinet spokesman Minister Anura Priyadharshana Yapa alleges that Fonseka became angry with the President's brother, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the Defence Secretary, when in August he refused his request for the purchase $222,392,635 of military equipment from China, Fonseka strenuously denies the accusation.

As Army Commander, Fonseka had made menacing pronouncements against the media. On January 2 2009, in an interview in the state-controlled Sinhala daily, Dinamina, while army commander, he called unnamed journalists "traitors" and referred to the "treachery" of the media. He claimed that the biggest obstacle to defeating the LTTE was the unpatriotic media. For some time Sri Lanka has been one of the most hostile country's in which to be a journalist. Six days after Fonseka's published comments, on January 8 2009 the Editor of the Sunday Leader, Lasantha Wickrematunge, was shot dead. The paper is best known for its investigations into corruption in high places and while unsympathetic to the LTTE was critical of aspects of the war's conduct.

Two days prior to Wickrematunge's assassination, the Sirasa television station on the outskirts of Colombo had been stormed and set alight. State media had specifically criticised Sirasa for giving disproportionate coverage to a suicide bombing in Colombo, diverting attention from a speech made by the President lauding the capture of the Tiger capital, Killinochchi on the same day. No progress has been made in finding the perpetrator of either crime which has been the pattern for all other attacks on the media. Reporters Without Frontiers has claimed that 30 journalists have fled Sri Lanka in the last year.

Ethnic minorities, especially Tamils and Muslims, will need some convincing that the General is the man to deliver ethnic harmony. His choice of language in an interview with the Canadian National Post in September 2008 was at best grudging.

I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people. We being the majority of the country, 75%, we will never give in and we have the right to protect this country. We are also a strong nation ... They can live in this country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things.

The largest Muslim party, the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress (SLMC) supports Fonseka and has significant support amongst the 8% of the population who are Muslim. After much soul searching the Western Peoples Front (WPF), a small Tamil party has decided to campaign for Fonseka. The WPF is led by Mano Ganeshan, a human rights activist who has worked at great risk to himself on behalf of the families of the abducted.

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) a coalition of four Tamil groupings was close to the Tigers. It represents lowland Tamils who form 12% of the population. To win the TNA's support Fonseka has pledged to repeal the state of emergency in place since March 1983, that gives powers to arrest and detain terrorist suspects without trial. He has offered an amnesty to captured LTTE cadres and to dismantle the High Security Zones in the north occupied by the armed forces. The government alleges that Fonseka has struck a secret deal to re-merge the Eastern and Northern provinces, a key demand of the LTTE.

The Tamil vote may be crucial. In the 2005 election a margin of only 2% separated Rajapakse and his UNP opponent Ranil Wickremesinghe. The LTTE had instructed Tamils in the North and East to abstain and in Tiger strongholds few dared disobey. This deprived the opposition candidate of vital Tamil votes that the UNP could normally have counted on in a presidential election and almost certainly opened the door for a Rajapakse victory. It is hard to estimate how exactly the Tamil vote may influence the outcome this time. The President is himself supported by some smaller Tamil parties. Many Tamils may abstain, unenthusiastic about voting for the army commander that led the military campaign against the LTTE and still less for the President who directed it.

The intense fighting that took place in the final stages of the war created around 280,000 Internally Displaced People (IDP) .They were housed in temporary camps run by the military and it is estimated that 100,000 are yet to be re-settled. Given the considerable displacement of the local population concern has been expressed that many will not be registered or possess an Identity Card enabling them to vote.

The main election monitoring NGOs have complained that the authorities have done insufficient to ensure the affected population will be able to exercise their franchise. The Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CAFFE), estimates that out of approximately 271,000 IDPs eligible to vote, only around 13,700 are registered. The wisdom of calling an election two years early is questionable when a proportion of the people that the government fought to liberate will possibly be excluded from the democratic process.

As is customary during a Sri Lankan election, a number of individual politicians have switched allegiance. Two UNP politicians who recently joined the Rajapakse camp were immediately rewarded with ministerial posts. S.B.Dissanayake, a national organizer of the opposition UNP has switched sides just as he did at an earlier election in 2001 when making a different calculation about the swing of the political pendulum. The former Captain of Sri Lanka's 1996 cricket world cup winning team, Arjuna Ranatunga, a member of the President's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), is campaigning for the General.

A prominent Buddhist monk involved with the hardline and Sinhalese nationalist, Patriotic National Centre (PNC) has endorsed the General after previously supporting the President. At a media briefing the Dambara Amila Thera said:

There is no media freedom, there are no free and fair elections in the country and there are too many problems in the IDP camps. Over 50 people die every day in the IDP camps.

Three parliamentarians of the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) including a Deputy Minister have broken ranks with their leadership and are campaigning for Fonseka. The CWC represents Tamil workers of Indian descent who largely work on the plantations in the hill country and make up 5% of the population.

Hardly had Fonseka's candidacy been declared when the campaign became mired in a controversy that has yet to subside. In an interview published on December 13, in the Sunday Leader, the General reportedly said that in the final stages of the conflict Gotabayha Rajapakse had ordered that neither the LTTE leaders nor their families were to be taken prisoner, even though they were attempting to give themselves up. The government response concentrated less on rebuttal than on portraying the allegations as treacherous and sullying the nations image abroad. They represented a betrayal of Gotabayha, the President and the armed forces, that left them open to war crimes charges.

The failure to anticipate how his remarks would be exploited was indicative of the Generals lack of political experience. The resulting furore compelled Fonseka to hurriedly claim misrepresentation. The highly respected and senior journalist, Federica Janz, stands by her story. In his subsequent clarification Fonseka said that he had only heard from a journalist embedded with the army of attempts by the LTTE leadership to surrender and that while he was in charge of conducting the final operation no request to surrender had reached him and hence the army had never acted unlawfully.

The General Secretary of the ruling SLFP, Maithripala Sirisena, alleged that Fonseka has now become a pawn in the hands of some western nations "conspiring" to bring "regime change" in Sri Lanka. Fonseka has wryly observed that:

Before I handed over the nomination I was the best army commander in the world, but after that I was the country's number one traitor.

The Rajapakse regime is certainly taking the challenge posed by the Fonseka candidacy seriously. The electorate have been offered a range of economic inducements. Petrol and bottled gas prices have been reduced. On orders from the President, import duty on wheat sugar and onions has been lowered to reduce prices of those staples. Rajapakse has claimed that he has received information that business men associated with the UNP were engineering a shortage in the rice market. Correspondingly he has ordered the importation of extra stocks at preferential rates to keep the price down.

Wages for public servants have been raised including the police and military. Pensions for service personnel have been increased substantially and the elderly are to be entitled to a 20% bonus on the interest they receive from their savings. Farmers are also enjoying the election time spree having seen the price of fertilizer reduced and rates for agricultural credit clipped. Fonseka is responding by making some similarly expensive promises that a fragile economy with a high level of public borrowing can ill afford.

With access to vastly greater finance, media advertising and hoardings supporting the President far outnumber those for Fonseka. Electoral law stipulates that hoardings and posters can be displayed only in the vicinity of party offices and at political meetings but the law has been flagrantly ignored. The Head of the Police has said that the President instructed the police to remove all illegal publicity from the streets before nomination day on the 17th December, but the illegal publicity is still in place.

The People's Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) is deeply unsatisfied that the law is being flouted. A police officer in the eastern town of Ampara has been transferred to Kilinochchi after acting on the orders of the Election Commissioner to remove illegal hoardings. The Commissioner has responded by ordering that no public servants be victimized at election time with transfers. The Election Commissioner, Dayananda Dissanayake, gave a fresh deadline of January 7 for the hoardings to come down, which came and went.

The Elections Commissioner now appears to have given up. He has told Inspector General of Police, Mahinda Balasuriya, that he will not be making any further requests to him to uphold election laws as the police have repeatedly failed to act. He has informed political parties not to notify him of any more complaints, given his inability to take action. The electoral contest has become rather like a boxing match, with Queensbury rules, but no referee to enforce them.

The President has been lavishly entertaining large groups of lawyers, farmers, artists, three-wheeler drivers and police officers, amongst others, at his official residence, Temple Trees. His ready bonhomie and common touch are well suited to such gatherings. The participants are entertained and in some cases transported at state expense, a practice Transparency International criticized in its report of December 31. This report revealed how state finance and property are being used in contravention of electoral law, by the Rajapakse campaign.

Key to understanding the potential for abuse is that the President has made inoperative the 17th amendment to the constitution. This amendment established the principle of an independent public service whereby appointments would be screened impartially by a Constitutional Council. This Council was also to nominate members of independent Commissions on elections, police, corruption and human rights.

The President has not appointed a Constitutional Council despite a statutory obligation and the Commissions are not therefore functioning. Accordingly all public appointees, including judicial, are the result of unrestrained presidential and ministerial patronage. At election time partisan place men naturally do their masters bidding. When coupled with the fact the four Rajapakse brothers head ministries accounting for two-thirds of the national budget, the extent of the family’s control over the agencies of the state becomes apparent.

Transparency has documented a number of other areas of concern. The deployment of government sector vehicles and public buses as well as helicopters for election work has been widespread. Public institutions such as the Board of Investments, Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Urban Development and a state retail chain, Lanka Sathosa, have placed advertisements and hoardings supporting the Presidents campaign. Money has been channeled to the youth organization Tharunyata Hetak, (Youths Future) by public bodies such as the Bank of Ceylon and the National Lotteries Board. The youth organisation is headed by the Presidents two sons and has been spending considerable amounts on advertising in support of the campaign.

The state controls a number of TV and radio stations as well as newspapers. They often have office holders from the Presidents own party in key positions and all obediently communicate the Rajapakse message. A selection of headlines from the Daily News of January 5 demonstrates the point.

President sets example

Fonseka arms deal bared

Govt never kept people hungry

A chilling video showing the alleged execution of Tiger prisoners by the army and supposedly filmed in January was screened by Channel Four in August. The footage was dismissed by the government as a fabrication after the experts it had appointed examined it. However the UN Rapporteur, Phillip Alston has said that independent analysis by US experts confirms its authenticity. Abductions and disappearances, attacks on the media and high profile incidents such as the murder of 17 local aid workers of Action Contre La Faim, have created considerable international unease regarding Sri Lanka's human rights record. To assuage international opinion the government has set up enquiries but foot-dragging, obfuscation and studied incompetence ensure no culprits have been identified and apprehended.

The response of the Sri Lankan authorities to all accusations that its personnel have committed human rights abuses has been an automatic and blanket denial. The rejection of culpability and a refusal to bow to criticism from the international community, wins approval from large sections of the domestic audience. It should certainly not be forgotten that the LTTE perpetrated appalling crimes against their own people and against the civilian population of the island. However the government's failure to take seriously allegations of human rights transgressions perpetrated by elements within its own armed forces has allowed a culture of impunity to develop increasing the likelihood of further abuses.

The European Union appears to have lost patience with the government and is moving toward suspension of an important trade concession, the Generalised System of Preferences or GSP plus. This is granted on condition that human rights norms are fulfilled. Primarily it will impact on exports from the important garment sector, for which the EU is the biggest market. The President has responded with characteristic belligerence:

We will not be held back by threatened economic sanctions or withdrawn trade concessions by those who seek strategic interference in the national affairs of Sri Lanka.

In the absence of credible opinion polls it is difficult to predict the election outcome but the incumbent has been shaken by the intensity of the contest. The General has undoubtedly rallied the previously demoralized and fragmented opposition. There is concern that the election and its aftermath maybe violent. Already rallies have been broken up and political offices burned. In Tangalle, a stronghold of the President in the south, a bus carrying Fonseka supporters came under machine gun-fire, killing one and injuring ten. Should the declared result be close and of dubious credibility, what Mahinda Rajapakse has termed the "emerging wonder of Asia" may be thrown into turmoil.

The Jaffna based group University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) has observed that the real issues facing Sri Lanka are being eclipsed by the squabble between the regime and the General about who can be considered the greater patriot and who deserves the major credit for achieving military victory. The UTHR believes the election should be about re-building trust between communities, devolving power and reforming the state in order to defend human rights.

Historically the Sri Lankan people have been poorly led by a self-serving political class, conspicuously unable to provide statesmanship and vision. It is hard to be optimistic that either candidate in this election can break a well established mould and deliver the reform necessary to nurture reconciliation, human rights, clean governance and development. It is earnestly to be hoped that this pessimism is misplaced as the end of the war has created a unique opportunity for the winning candidate to unleash the islands enormous potential. What has taken many by surprise is that in the aftermath of its bloody conflict that there is a fiercely contested election at all.

To read Clifford Bastin's previous reports from Sri Lanka, see Sri Lanka after the Tsunami.

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What has made all this endurable for British academics is two things. First, the very high level of job satisfaction: dons enjoy the privilege of being paid to indulge their intellectual curiosity; and - at least at many universities - they have the opportunity to interact with highly intelligent students.

Secondly, even though remuneration may be low, the working conditions are generally good. Academics enjoy an exceptionally flexible timetable; subsidised childcare is often available; and by comparison with many jobs in the "real" world, the tone and atmosphere is usually collegial. Above all, for the past twenty-five years academics have had more or less unchallenged job security, something which many began to appreciate all the more with the onset of the recession last year.

Or at least, they did. In a statement which has sent shivers down the spines of lecturers across Britain, the University of Sussex announced before Christmas that it is planning to save £5 million in 2010-2011 out of an annual turnover of £160 million, by reducing 100 posts out of 2300.

What was shocking was not so much the figures, as the intention to cut whole subject areas and courses, including - apparently - Early Modern History, because of reduced student "demand". By contrast, more would be invested in "growth" areas such as the School of Business, Management and Economics, Global Studies, and Media, Film and Music. Sussex's Vice Chancellor Professor Michael Farthing said:

I am confident that the steps we are proposing will help safeguard our future as one of the UK’s top research universities.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what dropping "Early Modern History" actually means, even if it "just" means cutting European history. No Reformation, no Thirty Years War, no Louis XIV, and perhaps not even the French Revolution. In short, no sense why Englishmen were so worried by what was happening on the other side of the channel (a very pertinent issue in Sussex especially, one might add). If the axe is to fall on Early Modern History across the board, what about the Tudors and Stuarts?

Bear in mind also, that one of the research themes currently highlighted by the University is "heritage". So no Armada or Guy Fawkes then? No Puritans sailing to America? In a managerial culture which prides itself on "joined-up thinking", it is clear that somebody has not been paying attention.

Sussex may be an extreme case, for now, but it is hardly an isolated one. The list of cut or closing departments is a depressing one: politics and philosophy at Liverpool, chemistry at Kent, physics and theology at Newcastle, chemistry at Queen Mary, to name but a few. There might be something to be said for a healthy competition in which the decline of "weak" departments was matched by the rise of "strong" rivals. It doesn't seem to work that way, however.

The vast majority of the new courses being offered at universities are "soft" subjects such as "media studies"; over the past decade the number of media studies academics has more than doubled. This trend has been encouraged by the Labour government's - in principle laudable - ambition to have 50% of young people in higher education without - inexcusably - providing the funding to make this possible without lowering standards. Subjects being cut are the "hard" ones: chemistry, physics and especially languages. One does not have to be an inveterate cultural pessimist to fear where all this will lead.

To be sure, universities face a horrific deficit, and they have to do something. Rather than running down intellectual and professional capacity which will take years to rebuild, however, they should try to spread the burden more evenly, perhaps by enacting a pay cut across the board. In Ireland, for example, where the fiscal situation is even worse, the government has simply imposed pay cuts of up to fifteen percent for the public sector. Irish academics have accepted this with comparatively few grumbles, because they know that the alternative would be job losses for their colleagues. This strategy would be costly for Professor Farthing, whose salary has just risen to £277,000 a year, but it would be an opportunity for him to lead from the front.

Otherwise, we can only hope that other British universities follow the Irish rather than the Sussex example. To do anything else might be Farthing-wise, but pound-foolish.

The author thanks Miss Katie Jenner for research carried out in support of this piece.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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The most recent Fledermaus, now playing at the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden, received at best an ambivalent welcome from the audience at its premiere on 21 November. Musically the performance was excellent, thanks to Zubin Mehta's direction, but the production drew as many boos as it did cheers. Christian Pade's version sets the story in present-day Berlin. Orlofsky, for example, is turned from a Russian prince into a jaded young Oligarch, who has already tired of everything the city, and life in general, can offer him. The Viennese prison warder "Frosch" is changed into a typical GDR jobsworth with a sideline in memorabilia from the time of the communist leaders Erich and Margot Honecker. The performers eat takeaways, and there is even a Botox scene, where the injection is delivered to the strains of the most famous lines of the operetta "happy is he who forgets what he cannot change".

Pade's target is bourgeois society in general and the banking sector in particular. Paper money is burnt in a rubbish-bin marked Hypo (the name of a major local bank which recently got into difficulties). Figures in bankers' pinstripe wearing placards entitled "Jump" are held up to general ridicule, and in case we didn't get the message the accompanying notes tell us that in 2008 the crowd outside the failed Lehman Brothers waved banners saying "Jump you Fuckers", in reference to the mass suicides after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

All this is of a piece with Pade's well-known didactic yen: in November 2004, he defended his version of Beethoven's Fidelio (which included the use of gas, and the now-obligatory allusions to Guantanamo) with the observation that "ethical behaviour is a increasing a crucial parameter of aesthetics".

The reviews have been generally brutal, focussing on the chaotic modern dance (which replaced the traditional waltzes), the stilted additional dialogue and the bizarre costumes, in which Orlofsky looks like nothing so much as a Humungan from Mel Gibson's film Mad Max. Not even the "financial crisis" theme is new, since the "Boersenkrach" of 1873 is well-known to have been the background to the original staging, and it has featured strongly in productions since, most recently Thalheimer's in Berlin itself.

All these criticisms are fair, but they miss the real problem with the production. In the original the hapless Eisenstein is a "rentier", who lives from his investments; in some versions he is also a newspaper baron. There is something else about which Viennese audiences would have been aware of in the 1870s - his name, Eisenstein - marks him out as a Jew. Interestingly, the Fledermaus was made into an escapist film starring the Goebbels protege and mistress Lida Baarova in 1937, and Hitler himself was an enthusiast for Strauss's music, which he regarded as Germanic and nationalistic. There is no suggestion, however, that the composer himself was an anti-semite, and a careful study of the libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genee reveals no further evidence. Indeed, Strauss was a focus of Austrian patriots opposed to Hitler during the Second World, who regarded him as a negation of everything the Nazis stood for. All the same, the naming of Eisenstein cannot be coincidental, and audiences will have drawn their own conclusions.

Pade unwittingly feeds the stereotype by sending Eisenstein to jail for financial malfeasance rather than assaulting a civil servant, as was the case in the original. Eisenstein's Jewishness", thanks to the instinctive connection popularly made between Jewish and banking jiggery-pokery, is thereby enhanced. German artists have often sailed close to the wind in this respect: one thinks of Rainer Werner Fassbender's play Der Muell, die Stadt und der Tod, (The rubbish, the city and death), which targeted a notorious Jewish property developer in Frankfurt and unleashed a huge scandal when it was first performed in 1981. But they always did so knowingly, and often provocatively.

This Fledermaus is surely innocent of any such intent, and it is exactly for that reason that it should reflect on the dangers of scapegoating. The producers seek to put capitalism in the dock, but they should remember what the Social Democrat leader August Bebel called anti-semitism: "the socialism of fools".

The author thanks Miss Katie Jenner for research carried out in support of this piece.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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Insofar as Betjeman had any abstract aesthetic principle, it was the one he invoked in a programme about Diss when trying to put his finger on what he particularly liked about the town (p. 194):

All this time, there's been something I haven't pointed out to you. It's the kind of thing you come to take for granted, strolling about in a town like Diss: the happy inconsequence of everything.

And now let me ask you to look at the electric light fittings. Better than those awful things like pig troughs that make the tea look like custard, aren't they? Trouble has been taken over the switch boxes. This isn't pomposity: it's delight in craftsmanship.

I'm always excited by a church I haven't seen before. What's it going to be like? That tower with its small windows, I should think, is Norman. Under these table tombs lie the bones of Georgian yeoman farmers. My goodness! - splendid windows in the nave: about 1450, from the look of them: very grand for so small a church.

the joy of being Anglican is that definitions are left, in the English way, capable of various interpretations. Love only lives in liberty.

Motor traffic. It smells nasty; it looks nasty. It's out of place in a human-scale village street. It's like a poisonous snake - a killer too. Not even a bit of nonsense like a nodding dog in the back window makes a motor car agreeable and driving a car makes the mildest man competitive and turns him into a fiend. [p. 75]

Burn them [cars] up! I mean, they're a frightful nuisance in Oxford. They shouldn’t be there. They ruin the place. The absolutely make it simply hideous, as they make every old town in England hideous. [p. 215]

Modern motor traffic is no friend to an old town. [p. 263]

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. His previous reviews for the Social Affairs Unit can be read here.

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A Week in December is a thriller with a social conscience, which in my experience normally results in something insufficiently thrilling. It follows a group of characters over seven days leading up to Christmas 2007. John Veals runs the hedge fund High Level Capital, and is planning to make billions by shorting the share price of Allied Royal Bank; meanwhile, his neglected wife anaesthetizes herself with two bottles of wine a night, and his son smokes dope of increasing strength while watching It's Madness!, a reality TV show in which psychologically unwell members of the public are locked up in a house and made to perform demeaning tasks.

Farooq al-Rashid, a millionaire chutney manufacturer, is about to receive an OBE, while (as we have seen) his shallowly-radicalized son, Hassan, has been recruited into a terrorist cell. The website through which the cell communicates is a soft porn site, and the picture they use as a message board displays Olya, who is both the girl friend of a Polish footballer newly arrived in London, Tadeusz Borowski, and the obsession of John Veals, himself a frequent visitor to the site. Ralph Tranter is a vindictive jobbing reviewer whose biography of a minor Victorian novelist is on the shortlist for a literary prize, and who is giving Farooq some last-minute coaching on English literature in case the Queen should decide to make literary small-talk when he receives his decoration.

Gabriel Northwood is a struggling barrister who is defending an Underground driver, Jenni Fortune, in a case of negligence arising from a suicide who threw himself under her train. Jenni is addicted to an alternative reality program called "Parallax", where she has an encounter with a London schoolteacher, Radley Graves. (If it was tedious to read that last paragraph, take pity on your poor reviewer.)

So much by way of dramatis personae. The novel's claim to be, not just an honest thriller, but a piece of social criticism, rests on the way its various strands of plot cohere into an indictment of what the cover blurb calls "the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life". What does Faulks's accusation boil down to? It is that the modern world not only cannot bear very much reality, but is running as fast as possible in the other direction. A minor character, previously presented to us as a hopeless drunk, is suddenly galvanised at the dinner party at the end of the novel where most of the major characters are gathered together to denounce in precisely these terms the modern financial world which permits men like John Veals to thrive (p. 376):

. . . investment banks and hedge funds created ever more arcane instruments which they could flog to one another in a completely false market. Because it was over the counter [sic], in private, the regulator couldn’t see it. Then they could sell an inverted iceberg of bets on the likelihood of the original instruments defaulting. They were able to account a notional profit on the balance sheet on all this Alice-in-Wonderland crap and so pay themselves gargantual bonuses.

Which takes us back to that fragment of the Joni Mitchell lyric which pops up without warning in the midst of Faulks's serviceable prose, where its superior imaginative power makes it stand out like a raspberry in a bowl of porridge. For Faulks seems not to be aware of the pressures you put on yourself when you decide to run this kind of analysis of the modern world. When you do so, you implicitly claim that you are not prey to the failings you anatomize; that you, in contrast to your characters, are indeed in touch with reality, and that your mental world is not prey to the shallownesses and confusions which disfigure theirs.

Both these claims are unsustainable in a novel where all the characters come from central casting, and where snippets of songs can arise without explanation. On this showing, Faulks may not like the subtle prison of the modern world, but he has no standpoint from which to launch an authoritative critique of it. He may be rattling on the bars, but, like his characters, he has no key.

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. His previous reviews for the Social Affairs Unit can be read here.

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It would be difficult to imagine that beer or any spirit could have ministered to wisdom in that way. Nevertheless, in the minds of our health professionals, wine is simply another vehicle for conveying alcohol into the bloodstream, and they are either uninterested in or unable to appreciate its distinctiveness.

Scruton, however, is eloquent on why wine drinking is different from, say, drinking cider, and this book is studded with faintly romanticised, but also thought-provoking, evocations of its special intellectual benefits. For instance, it would be easy to respond to prose such as this with a vulgar scoff (p. 115):

Wine, properly drunk, transfigures the world at which you look, illuminating that which is precisely most mysterious in the contingent beings surrounding you, which is the fact that they are - and also that they might not have been. The contingency of each thing glows in its aspect, and for a moment you are aware that individuality and identity are the outward forms taken by a single inner fire, and that this fire is also you.

A good recommendation, too, is Scruton's advice to look for examples of a white Pernand-Vergelesses from the lieu-dit "Les Noirets", which lies at the foot of the hill of Corton and is thus the neighbour of the fabulous white burgundy grown there, Corton-Charlemagne. According to Scruton, Pernand-Vergelesses "Les Noirets" possesses (p. 37)

the fine clean aromas and deep nutty richness that are the hallmarks of a noble white Burgundy.

Lastly, if the economic crisis has driven Yquem, Climens and Rieussec from your cellar, you could do much worse than follow Scruton's advice and replace it with a good Monbazillac, Château Septy. It is nothing like as subtle a drink as good Sauternes or Barsac. But it is properly sweet (or, as Scruton has it, it possesses "all the E major sonority of a golden Sauternes"); and it has none of that harsh afterburn you sometimes get with Monbazillac.

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. His previous reviews for the Social Affairs Unit can be read here.

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The bedrooms are all the same, give or take a few square feet, down to the kind of pictures on the wall, which must soothe without stimulating in any way. They are there only because an absence of pictures would disturb the guest.

The windows overlook the car-parks that are half the raison d'etre of the hotel: not that anyone is expected to look out of them. They scarcely open, at most by an inch or two, these windows, both to prevent suicides and to keep the silence in and the temperature-controlled air undisturbed. Although giant aircraft take ff only a few hundred yards away at most, their sound is reduced to a dull hum, which, when it occurs often and regularly, is rather soothing, like the ticking of a clock.

The strange thing is that I loved my three nights in these utterly impersonal surroundings. What happy hours I spent stretched out on my bed reading detective novels (I had taken the wise precaution of bringing several old-fashioned green and white-covered Penguins with me). I had no computer with me and switched off my mobile phone. I was almost as incommunicado as it is possible to be in the modern world: and this in the middle of an airport through which scores of millions of people pass annually!

I began after a while to reflect on why I was enjoying myself so much. Clearly it had something to do with the anonymity of the place, and a release from the need to be somebody or play a part in front of others. There was no social pressure whatsoever; there was no need to pretend or to try to please. Airport hotels, then, are the realm of Pure Being. They are places of spiritual refreshment or even of retreat. They are, at least potentially, the monasteries of our time.

Are there not commercial possibilities here? Re-think the meaning of your existence with three days in a Heathrow hotel! Guaranteed nothing to do, no one to meet, perfect calm, food bland enough to reduce eating to a physiological function. No one can spend his time fruitlessly wondering what is for dinner tonight: since no one, in the normal way, is expected to stay more than one night, why should the menu ever vary? The food today will be the same as the food in ten years' time - though it is possible that it will be called something different.

Needless to say, only those with minds - or perhaps I should say souls - prepared will be able to benefit from spiritual retreats in airport hotels: by which I mean those strong enough of will not to turn on the television that, appropriately enough, is kept in the modern equivalent of the commode, the television cabinet. How easily the heavenly peace of the room can be turned into one of the circles of hell: at the flick of a switch, in fact. To put people out of the way of temptation, perhaps the television could be removed for the duration of their stay; though more advanced souls could have them in their rooms, much as the Mahatma slept with young girls to test his chastity

Except for very superior people, of whom I am not one, such stays in airport hotels would be short, a few days at most; but the most spiritually-inclined, no doubt, would eventually come to live in them. My Diogenes Travel Agency would offer discounts, or perhaps even time shares, for regular subscribers.

The desire to get away from the oppressive aspects of reality is natural enough. That is why I sympathise so much with people who work in National Health Service organisations such as Trust Headquarters. Their offices have much in common with airport hotels except, of course, that the receptionists - who are reached only through a decontaminating air-lock at the entrance of the building - tend to the opposite of airport hotel receptionists. They react with Pavlovian suspicion towards all strangers, and perhaps receive an electric shock through the floor if their fail to display it adequately.

As in airport hotels, the flow of air in the premises is perfectly controlled and the windows do not open (there is no need for them to be able to do so). The outside world enters only as a faint and soothing hum, as a vague rumour of its existence. Here in the Platonic realm of targets, reality is as welcome as salmonella in a cream tea.

This is the dialectic, then, of the modern world: between the frightening disorder of pullulation on the one hand, and the antiseptic order of the airport hotel on the other.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

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This is a very German outcome. The decisive voice in the appointment was that of the Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Her opposition to Mr Blair served to swing the French President, Mr Sarkozy, away from Tony Blair when his candidature was beginning to seem unstoppable. The appointment of Mr van Rompuy also epitomises a huge and underappreciated shift in German attitudes towards the European project and their conception of security. Since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, Bonn and then Berlin had sought to embed German security in an irreversible process of European political integration on the one side, and the maintenance and later expansion of NATO on the other.

All that changed with the inclusion of Poland in both organisations. With a substantial buffer to the east, Germany reckons itself much less in need of the American security umbrella and the support of allies. In short, far from demanding a world role since the fall of the wall as many had feared - the Federal Republic has retreated into a geopolitical cocoon. She is so swaddled by friendly neighbours that future conflicts appear to be matters of choice, not desperate struggles for survival.

None of this would matter, if the Germans were right. In fact, the challenges facing them and the European Union more generally are more grave than ever before. To the east, Russian assertiveness is creating an arc of instability from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In Afghanistan, the "war on terror" is in deep trouble; Iran continues to press ahead with its nuclear programme. It is a commonplace that Chinese power is rising.

Within many areas of the Union itself, the threat of Islamist terrorism has escalated over the past decade. And - let us make no mistake about it - the new wind blowing from Washington is far colder than we realise. Mr Obama has little interest in us and one need only look at his abandonment of the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to see how quickly our security will be sacrificed if it suits their purposes. We are now increasingly on our own.

There is very little that can be done about this in the short term. The full significance of the global American retreat will need to sink in first. Then we will have to stand by to repel the resurgence of anti-western forces throughout the world. Nobody can know for certain when that challenge will come, and exactly how it will manifest itself. One thing, however, is clear. The longer the leadership of the free world remains in the hands of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and - let us not us forget - Mr van Rompuy, the shorter we will have to wait.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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Here is the latest, offering courses on the following:
Building Multi Professional Teams
Communications Skills
Assertiveness Training
Emotional Intelligence
Negotiation and Influencing Skills
Implementing Change
Time Management
Dealing with Conflict

Each of these course comes with a testimonial even less trustworthy than those that used to accompany advertisements for Pink Pills for Pale People, in so far as not even initials or addresses to within the nearest hemisphere are offered.

Really enjoyed every minute of it! Flexible, memorable approach, encouraging direction. Good practical exercises. Thank you!

Excellent session - very interactive.

Very useful and helpful, it helped me reflect on my work style and identify important issues.

The fee for each course (no doubt repayable by the National Health Service to those who work for it) is £225 per person, with a discount of 10 per cent for those who - perish the thought! - sign up for four or more of them.

If instead of going to a course you arrange for a course to come to you - an advantage to the public purse, because it will entail "no extra travel and overnight accommodation costs" - it will cost only £3000, which means that (shall we say) eight people would have to attend for their to be an overall saving. And just think how wonderful everything will be when all are equally assertive!

Another discount is available for individuals, of 50 per cent this time - for those who are retired.

It used to be that the British had a sense of humour, an irony that was an admirable approach to life, and that was once supposed to have preserved them from the wilder shores of ideology, whether communist or fascist. The idea that professional people aged more than 60 should now attend a course on how to assert themselves or learn to communicate would have produced a guffaw of contemptuous laughter. No longer, it seems.

All this para-work, this ceaseless diversionary activity, is designed, or at least destined, to prevent people from carrying on their real work. By doing so, of course, it creates employment, or at least the necessity to pay people salaries: for, overall, many man-days are lost to it. And it creates pseudo-entrepreneurial opportunities for so-called consultants (often ex-employees of the organisations whose staff they now offer to train in such skills as assertiveness). It is, in effect, an exercise in Keynesian demand-management, but unlike the kind of public works that Keynes envisaged as a stimulus to a flagging economy, it leaves the country with nothing of enduring value, unless a bureaucrat with a flat-screened television and a new conservatory be called something of enduring value.

Needless to add, ceaseless "personal and professional development" is perfectly compatible with the most abysmal incompetence. Indeed, such incompetence is welcome, for it creates ever more demand for the personal and professional development that is supposedly the means to overcome it. This is what I believe is known as a positive feedback loop.

I will mention just one of the courses on offer, the "building" of multi-disciplinary teams, so called. I have some experience of multi-disciplinary teams once they have been "built", or should I say "assembled", "agglomerated" or "accumulated". More often than not, in my experience, they are not so much multi-disciplinary as undisciplined. Lacking a clear structure of overall authority, and therefore of responsibility, they lead to endless disputes as to who is to do what, as well as the grossest neglect of the ostensible aims of the "team".

The power struggles are interminable and insoluble, for no one is truly in charge and any instructions are regarded as an infringement of or attack upon the idea of equality of disciplines and equality within disciplines. The pretence that the most junior is equal to the most senior means that supervision scarcely happens, or only retrospectively, after a disaster, when the most junior person who can plausibly be blamed is singled out.

The inevitable squabbles that result lead to accusations of bullying, usually defined in purely subjective terms: you are bullied if you feel you are (in the absence of a requirement of objective correlates of feeling, thought is, of course, quite unnecessary and probably best avoided). Such accusations can result in a Kafka-esque procedure lasting months and occupying days, weeks and months of labour-time.

Meanwhile, neglect of the real work is ascribed to a shortage of "resources" and the object of the team's attentions, that is to say members of the public, are offered perfunctory services, for example never seeing the same member of the team twice. Between holidays, team meetings and courses on how to make the team function better, there is no time left for the elementary compassion of consistency.

Every public enquiry into every disaster that comes within the remit of the services set up to ameliorate the social pathology brought about by years of social engineering finds the same thing: lack of communication between the various parts of the multi-disciplinary teams. Time, surely, for a course on Communication Skills.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

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I simply do not believe that she found the letter difficult to read: or if she did, it says more about her reading ability than about Mr Brown's intentions. I read the letter without difficulty in facsimile form in a newspaper, which is unlikely to have improved its clarity, as I am sure did millions of others. Moreover, I could not find the twenty-five spelling mistakes that she claimed to find in it, unless one counts the slight ambivalence sometimes created by the Prime Minister's inelegant hand. I am afraid that Mrs Janes, worthy of sympathy as a grieving mother as she is, was not telling the truth.

Of course, Mr Brown could not say this because we live in a world of immaculate victimhood. He who exposes the mistakes or lies of a victim is now a barefaced villain. A spokesman for the Prime Minister is reported as having said of his subsequent telephone conversation with Mrs Janes that "He apologised for the letter and the way that she feels about the letter".

This is a weaselly way of putting things, but typical of our times, and now de rigueur. There is no reason why the Prime Minister should have apologised to Mrs Janes for the way she felt about the letter, unless the way she felt about the letter was reasonable - which it was not.

Then he might have apologised for having caused her distress, rather than for the distress that she felt (a subtle but important distinction).

In short, he had no reason, other than that of political expedience, to apologise to her. If anything, the apologies were due the other way round, from Mrs Janes to Mr Brown: first for having publicised a private letter, and second for having allowed or encouraged the dissemination of a private telephone conversation. We cannot complain of the intrusiveness of government and officialdom if we do not ourselves respect the very idea of privacy.

The weasel-words of the Prime Minister's spokesman are a symptom of the horrible elevation of emotion over thought in our culture. "I feel, therefore I'm justified," seems to be our neo-Cartesian credo. When, for example, someone complains unreasonably about something done in the National Health Service (and, God knows, there are enough grounds for reasonable complaint), one is supposed to be as apologetic as if there were something really to apologise for. Thus all apologies are created equal, and none is sincere.

I thought this disgusting, and the only time someone complained about me, to the effect that I had not been helpful in giving him a sick note, I replied, in writing, "Mr C…. is a drunk who beats his wife, and I'm not signing any sick certificate for him". I am glad to say that I heard no more from Mr C…., for what I said was true.

The points Mrs Janes made about the state of equipment of the British army are another matter. She was saying in forceful terms what many others have said, including American officers. But it seems to me that she could have brought these matters up in a different way, at a different time, and more forcefully because less obviously the consequence of immediate grief.

What she evidently did not consider was the overall effect or impression that she was creating. Let us leave aside the vexed question of whether British forces should be in Afghanistan at all, or that of what they are trying to do there: Mrs Janes herself believes that they should be there. And even those opposed to the whole business can hardly want the Taliban to win.

Did Mrs Janes not consider, therefore, that Taliban morale might be immeasurably improved by a row such as the one she has stirred up? What will the tribesmen think of an enemy that turns a single death into a public display of competing emotion? Will they not be encouraged to think that, if only they can bring about a few more such deaths, they will win? A military enemy that considers a few losses intolerable is, after all, not a very formidable one.

The mere fact, now known to the whole world in a way that it was not before, that the Prime Minister writes personally to the relatives of soldiers killed in action will encourage the Taliban greatly. An enemy so solicitous of the life each individual (a quality admirable in its own eyes) will surely be seen by Taliban as weak and vacillating, one that cannot stay the course.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

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The Europeans, far from queuing up to provide more troops, are eyeing the exits. And who can blame them, when Mr Obama himself has sounded such an uncertain trumpet. True, he authorised a substantial force increase at the beginning of the year, but he sat on the recommendations of his commander General McChrystal for more than two months. The interminable seminar on "options" for Afghanistan has demoralised the coalition effort on the ground, and created the impression of unsteady military leadership. It is widely decried by British and other European strategists as the reason why they are unable to commit more troops themselves.

The events of the past weeks, when promised paltry force increases were so hedged about with qualifications, and demand for matching deployments, as to make them meaningless, have confirmed this picture. Worse still is the political vacuum. Mr Holbrooke has become increasingly invisible. The Afghan President Hamid Karzai has successfully seen him off on more than one occasion, and most recently over the flagrantly rigged election.

All this, unfortunately, is of a piece with Mr Obama's foreign policy across the board. He bowed to Russians objections to the proposed missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic - thus deeply embarrassing two loyal European allies - but failed to secure Moscow's support over Iran in return. He has indulged the Chinese government, first by sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Beijing with the explicit promise to relax criticisms of the regime's human rights record, and then by refusing to see the Dalai Lama. He deeply disappointed Iranian Democrats by his weak criticism of the stolen election in their country, and yet the mullahs have thrown his offer of a fresh start back in his faces, not least by their increasing belligerence over the nuclear issue. Israel, which needs to be persuaded to stop building settlements for its own good, has more or less told him to get stuffed, and he has meekly accepted this. Finally, Obama has shown virtually no interest in Africa in general, and in Darfur in particular.

In part, this restraint can be excused by the fact that the United States is militarily over-stretched and in serious economic distress. That does not explain, however, why the President does not even do what he promised to do: to draw down in Iraq and to use the spare fiscal and troop capacity to step up operations in Afghanistan.

Hillary Clinton said that while American leadership had been "wanting" during the Bush years, it was still "wanted" by the world. The President seems to be much less sure of this, talking a low profile whenever anything of substance is on the agenda. Obama's hesitancy clearly stems much more from a fundamental unease with the concept of intervention and democracy export itself. One way or the other, the President obviously does not believe that those who refused to be persuaded may ultimately have to be compelled.

"Yes, we can", Obama famously promised last year. Reviewing the record, it seems clear that he can't - or, worse, - that he simply won't.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.