When the election results were announced, Galloway exclaimed, “All praise to Allah!,” to which his supporters responded, “Allah! Allah!” But the biggest cheer went up, at least according to the Guardian’s report, when he exclaimed: “Long live Palestine!”

Four days later, in the same newspaper, the political commentator Seumas Milne wrote that “the central thrust of Galloway’s pitch in Bradford was in fact about cuts, tuition fees, unemployment, poverty and the decline of a city.” This is a little like saying that when some of the people of Bradford marched through the streets calling for Salman Rushdie’s death after the publication of his Satanic Verses, they were protesting against the magic realist school of fiction.

…a combination of consumerism and utter economic dependence on the state is, like the lot of the policeman, not a happy one. The dependence is (admittedly at some remove) a corollary of the theory of entitlement, and a belief in one’s own entitlement is a belief as destructive of the human personality as it is possible to envisage. It precludes gratitude for what one has, encourages resentment over what one does not have, and discourages personal effort except to obtain things at other people’s expense. At the same time consumerism, by offering the mirage of personal fulfilment through the possession of trifles, lends an urgency to possession that it might not otherwise have, thus adding to or catalysing to the resentments of entitlement. I might add that in a world in which income is in essence pocket money (everything else having been taken care of, albeit at a level less than that desired) consumer choice becomes the only choice that is ever exercised, and thus the model for the whole of human life.

The rioters, then, were (and still are, of course) victims, not of injustice or poverty, but of bad ideas and a rotten culture that, alas, have become truly their own.

The pictures of Diego Rivera present us with a tension between two categories, the aesthetic and the ideological. From the aesthetic point of view he was a powerful and original artist—original here in the good sense of creating something both new and worthwhile. His ideology, however, was crude and schematic, though he was not without real feeling for the suffering of the ordinary people of Mexico, suffering that he conveys with sufficient truth in his art that he makes us feel it. (It is important not to let anti-schematizing ideology become a schematizing ideology in itself.) It was his obvious artistic merits, after all, that made him the cynosure of rich collectors.

The history of the extension of the use of swearing in public entertainment is interesting and instructive. It did not come about through any popular demand from the general public, but rather by the action of pioneering intellectuals…

The use of bad language on the stage or screen gave permission for it to be used off it as well. We live in a democratic age and if toffs could swear in public… so could everyone. And use, if repeated, becomes habit.

In the first place, it makes it more difficult to say something to cause another person to sit up and take notice.

Paradoxically, the more we swear the smaller, not the larger, our verbal repertoire and our capacity to shock. We therefore have to resort more frequently to extreme actions to startle people.

Second, though they mean nothing much, the words retain their vulgar connotation so that the more they are used the coarser our culture becomes.

We live in an age of Peter Pan. It is not eternal childhood that we seek, however, but eternal adolescence; not perpetual innocence, but perpetual aggravation of the grown-ups. The problem is that there are fewer and fewer grown-ups left to aggravate.

The tenfold increase in the number of late-middle-aged people who smoke cannabis or take other drugs by comparison with the previous generation is but one manifestation of a widespread desire for eternal adolescence. Increasing numbers of people – especially men – on the verge of old age dress as in their youth, as if reluctant to acknowledge that their youth has passed.

The tendency is international. In the part of France in which I live for half the year, ageing soixante-huitards, their lizard skins wrinkled by having been too much in the sun, wear short denim jackets and try (but thanks to nature fail) to grow ponytails. They are not so much young, as immature at heart; they long for the days when it was forbidden to forbid. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.