There’s a school of thought that the economy will just do its own thing, and the colour of the political party in charge – and the machinations of its Chancellor – have very little effect. This school of thought thinks that things like levels of public spending are irrelevant – and it’s true that countries enter recessions, and booms, with the ‘public purse’ in the black as much as they do with it in the red.

At the heart of this contention is my earlier point that all ‘public’ money is recycled, not stashed or gambled* like ‘private’ money. Thus this kind of spending is only a force for stasis, not a ‘loss’ on any national balance sheet as neo-cons would have us believe.

The ‘recession’ we were supposed to have gone through and now recovered from was defined by the Conservative party initially by looking only at funds available for public spending (that allegorical ‘there’s nothing left’ note) and no other measure. This was then sold to us via the tory press to justify ideologically motivated spending cuts – and furthermore the cuts had no effect on the ‘ending’ of this ‘recession’. The bit that they have kept quiet is public finances are actually no better than they were at the beginning. As employment is slightly up they point to that instead, though no-one can explain how that’s connected to their policies (and it’s stopped going up now).

Meanwhile the ‘economy’ goes its own sweet way, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

*and no, John, that’s not ‘wealth creation’. Gambling wouldn’t work if you could just invent more money as you went along. You can pretend to, but it does go wrong when debts are called in…

What’s alarming, Bruce, is the alacrity with which the press descend on an old leftie stating historical fact which shows the depth of his political knowledge (and the shallowness of his ‘modern’ political skill), while the current Mayor of London, a deeply skilled career politician and probable next Tory leader happily and openly called black people ‘pickaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ right up until he had a shot at the big prize.

Yes, it would be nice if JC would stand up and say that in parliament.

Not a massive fan of Frankie Boyle, as he went through that phase of being distasteful for the sake of it, but I did like his essay on Jeremy Hunt, an extract of which reads:

One of the worst things for doctors must be that, after seven years of study and then another decade of continuing professional exams, patients come in telling them they’re wrong after spending 20 minutes on Google. So imagine how doctors must feel about Jeremy Hunt, who hasn’t even had the decency to go on the internet.

Hunt doesn’t understand the need to pay doctors – he’s part of a ruling class that doesn’t understand that the desire to cut someone open and rearrange their internal organs can come from a desire to help others, and not just because of insanity caused by hereditary syphilis.

This is before we get to plans for bursaries to be withdrawn from student nurses, so that we’re now essentially asking them to pay to work. I sympathise a little with Hunt – he was born into military aristocracy, a cousin of the Queen, went to Charterhouse, then Oxford, then into PR: trying to get him to understand the life of an overworked student nurse is like trying to get an Amazonian tree frog to understand the plot of Blade Runner.

We have a fairly low proportion of people who are doctors, don’t plan to invest in training any more, and are too racist to import them. So we’re shuffling around the doctors we do have to the weekend, when not a lot of people are admitted, from the week, when it’s busy. This is part of a conscious strategy to run the service down to a point where privatisation can be sold to the public as a way of improving things.

Naturally, things won’t actually be improved; they’ll be sold to something like Virgin Health. Virgin can’t get the toilets to work on a train from Glasgow to London, so it’s time we encouraged it to branch out into something less challenging like transplant surgery.

Yeah, perhaps that was a little strong, saying ‘the whole nation’. Still, there were some – I remember it well.

Re Heysel, Liverpool did have a ‘travelling army’ of scallies that followed them around Europe in the 80’s, and which did give them a bad name. These idiots were provoked by expat Italians in the ‘Neutral ticket’ zone, and their reaction was indefensible. I don’t know what had happened to this gang, as there was little evidence of them at Anfield by 1988 when I arrived and they certainly weren’t the people caught up so tragically in the disaster a year later. I suspect the ban on European competition led them to move on to other areas of troublemaking.

My point was that the Police told the Sun what to print as a deliberate attempt to associate, in the public mind, the Liverpool fans in Sheffield that day with the thugs from 86, and it would have worked if the Families hadn’t fought back. They should never have had to.

One – they are not spotty erks. The title ‘Junior Doctors’ is often misleading. It just means doctors working in a hospital who are not consultants.

Two – they knew what they were getting into when they joined, but the government are now changing the contract from that to something else considerably worse – that is the whole point.

Three – you want them to be further stretched? It is lack of human resource that is killing the NHS, a very deliberate policy of discreditation and one which the less thinking of us fall for hook line and sinker.

Using the trucking analogy – if you wanted to prove that road transport was a bad thing because you are following some political imperative, you make all truckers work longer hours without breaks, so they have more accidents. Job done – the public now see trucking as dangerous, and want it stopped. This is the policy – and yes, it will mean more deaths.

This has been a remarkably balanced, informed and civilised debate. I was living in Liverpool at the time of these events and after, and I met several people who were there on the day. I only have anecdotal evidence to go on, and know nothing about stadium design, or crowd control.

What I do know is that the fans that were there were just ordinary footie fans – excitable and loud, there for the football and keen to see the game, some had had a pint, many hadn’t. I knew how Liverpool was on a match day, and to be honest they were the least aggressive or drunk football ‘tribe’ I have come across. Nothing like some of the London team followers (I hesitate to use the word fans) of the time, for example.

They found themselves in too dense a crowd, on concrete steps sloping down to an impassible high fence. As soon as some lost their footing, that was it.

Charlie, when you talk of media pre-determining legal outcomes, don’t forget that the whole nation believed that the Liverpool fans were rampaging animals to be hated – and by extension deserved to die – because of a series of made up ‘facts’ in the most popular ‘newspaper’ of the time. It is this that has taken 27 years to fully turn around so that public understanding represents the truth of what happened on that day.

I agree though that there has been some over-focus on the Police and their terrible decision making on the day – perhaps missing the culpability of the FA and possibly even Liverpool FC. I think the police did bring this on themselves by their denials of responsibility, something that the families were keen to counter legally, and which they have now successfully done.