In discussions of Britain’s economy the contribution of farming, now down to 0.5% of GDP, is treated with contempt. Left to the market, it is assumed that UK farming would disappear altogether.  But there is something deeply obscene and almost suicidal about this attitude. Statistics can lie but here’s one that doesn’t: precisely 100% of the British people eat. So in a world in which global food supplies are now seriously at risk from climate change and Britain’s parlous balance of payments  (-£15bn in foodstuffs alone), is about to get worse as the bloated financial service sector shrinks, shouldn’t the contribution of farming to the wellbeing of the country be evaluated  on a different scale to this tyrannous yardstick of GDP?

Louis MacNeice wrote as long ago as the '30s that the countryside was “a dwindling annexe to the town, squalid as an afterbirth”. Well, farming may be dirty but that’s life. How can these precious, fastidious  townees live except by food?

 

Understanding form is probably the biggest problem in biology. OK, many would argue that the brain is the one. But let’s not quibble. If we can just about understand how single-celled life evolved, working out how we acquire our limbs, eye, noses, mouths is a way beyond that in terms of complexity. But we know a lot. Why do pretty well all higher creatures have 5 digits? A gene called sonic hedgehog is largely responsible. But it used to be thought that the gene operates on the basis of a concentration gradient. It runs from thumb to little finger then runs out of steam (polydactyl though is sometimes seen).

But a report in Science back in December (only just arrived in the British Library after supply problems) shows that Alan Turing’s reaction–diffusion process may be involved. This was proposed in 1952, a year before DNA let alone genome biology and for a long time was regarded with suspicion by biologists. But it is very much back in the frame now. Turing’s mechanism was originally devised to explain stripes and spots but if you think about it, digits are stripes: digit, no digit, digit, no digit . . . It has long been known that the hand begins as a one-piece and between the digits  cells have to die to create the famous five. Now it seems that hox genes control the expression of sonic hedgehog.  In mice, knocking  them out causes a progressive increase in digits – 14 being the maximum attained so far. The researchers  interpret the extra digits in terms of Turing’s theory: the wavelength  of the reaction–diffusion patterns has been changed by the hox genes, resulting in more toes in the same space. There’s lets more to learn about this but new insights into form  such as this are coming thick and fast now.

Science, 2012, 338, pp. 1406 and 1476.

On BBC TV's Question Time last night again and again panellists of all stripes consigned British industry of the 70s to the scrapheap once again. It was inefficient and had to be swept away. Did it occur to none of them that with Britain’s technological and scientific strength, reshaping them and promoting new hi-tech industries might have been a better option? The result is that both the private industries that replaced the nationalised ones and the car, train, plane and power-station makers who came in to fill the gap were almost all foreign-owned. Is this what the woman who wouldn’t eat French mustard wanted?

Certain assumptions are being made about Mrs Thatcher’s legacy that don’t stack up. Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian quotes Mrs Thatcher’s remark: “How absurd it will seem in a few years ‘   time that the state ran PIckford’s removals and Gleneagles Hotel “ and points to “the plethora of competing companies, replacing the single British Rail”. On Newsnight Jeremy Paxman jeered at the old order in which a monopoly telephone company kept you waiting for months for service.

Yes, many restrictive practices were swept away by Thatcher.  But look again at the industries privatised by Thatcher or her successors. No major decision on the railways – whether it is building HS2 , electrifying existing routes or buying new trains – is made by anybody other than the government. The track, stations and signalling are all owned by Network Rail, a not-for-profit company (effectively, the government again) that replaced the failed private Railtrack. For the last two and a half years the key East Coast route has been run by the government again, following the collapse of the last private franchise.

In energy, the private companies seem unable to make good the looming energy shortage. Of course, they blame it on government but if the market is so good, it would surely sort itself out without any reference to government at all, wouldn’t it?

Just as Thatcher jeered at the dinosaur state running Pickfords and Gleneagles today we cast a baleful eye on  the ludicrous incompetence and dodgy practices  of many private enterprises and observe that once-private banks required part nationalisation to avoid collapse.  Just as the state has to run railways when the private contractors run away.

The last word on Thatcher, the Iron Lady of over-centralised government, should perhaps go to Shakespeare. In The Tempest, Gonzalo waxes eloquent on the freedoms he would introduce “Had I plantation of  this Isle”:  “Riches, poverty, use of service, none: contract, succession, borne, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none: no use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil: no occupation, all men idle, all: and women too, but innocent and pure: no sovereignty...”

“And yet he would be King on’t”, Sebastian retorts. The same apples to Reagan, spending billions on defence that he refused to pay for in taxation because it offended his free market principles.

It is shameful that opposition politicians and the media have let George Osborne set the agenda on the welfare changes. It is all about making the system fairer for those in work and thus encouraging people back into work. No, it isn’t. It is not the poor who create jobs and at the moment it is the rich who are destroying them. The government’s attack on the welfare system owes its origin to the failure of British industry and the consequent creation of a dependent underclass in place of the working class: the collapse and/or selling off of the country’s manufacturing base. The City and Tory Party actively encouraged this process and it is still going on.

Vodafone are the latest target in a process that turns former industrial bosses into rentiers, living off their cashed-in share options. As Alex Brummer, the sole voice to lament the destruction of ICI, put it:

“As firms fell like ninepins around them, canny chief executives demanded new clauses in their contracts that guaranteed the equivalent of lottery wins if their firms were taken over. They did this by insisting that their share options — usually paid out only after a number of years — could instantly be converted to cash.”

So arise serial sell-off merchants  like Sir Nigel Rudd, knighted for services to industry. And a supine press and political class seemingly cannot even see this process for what it is, let alone try to halt it.