It looks oddly like a pencil, though a pencil with fins where you might expect a rubber. Or perhaps a dart, with small flights and the point removed. To some eyes, no doubt, it looks sexy.
 
You wouldn’t want to stick this shiny object in a pencil-sharpener, though, even if you could find one big enough. And you wouldn’t want to chuck it at a dartboard either. Because this shiny toy is a B61-12, the latest upgrade to one of the nuclear bombs deployed by America in Europe.
 
The first B61 was designed in 1963 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the very first atom bomb was developed. They’ve been here, or hereabouts, since 1968. They also look, come to think of it, rather a lot like the V2 rockets the Nazis used to attack London in 1944. Which is no coincidence, when you consider the history and pedigree of these things. But this baby could do a lot more damage than a few V2s.
 
As far as knowledge of such things is public and up-to-date, there are currently 180 B61s (11th model) deployed among NATO countries in Europe – Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey. It is one of the primary “strategic and tactical” weapons in what’s called America’s Enduring Stockpile since the Cold War supposedly ended.
 
In what you might call the official version of history, these things kept the peace for around four decades after the Second World War. Ours pointed at Them, Theirs pointed at Us – no one fires, because if anyone does, everyone dies. Mutually Assured Destruction – or Mad, for short. Crazy logic, but logic of a sort, perhaps.
 
It’s not quite so clear why they’re still there. And even less clear why they should still be being upgraded.
 
The B61-12 comes with an $11.8billion price-tag. Which sounds like an awful lot of money to spend on something some experts say will be technologically, militarily, politically and historically obsolete long before its planned deployment in 2024.
 
It’s hard to see why anyone could want this thing at that price. Or any price, really. Except, of course, the people building and selling it, the people who will get all that dosh out of America’s allegedly stretched public purse. People with friends in Washington.
 
The official Pentagon line is that the new bomb is not new at all, but a “life-extension” of the existing B61. It has, it says, “no new military capabilities”. Which again makes you wonder why anyone should think it’s worth the money. But it’s not quite true.
 
The reason they’re not calling it new is that it’s easier to get the budget passed for something billed as merely updating what’s already there. Even though that budget makes it the most expensive single weapon yet built.
 
And it does have two things the current version doesn’t.
 
Its tail-fins aren’t fixed, but can be moved remotely, which means the thing can be aimed to hit targets much more precisely.
 
And it has something called “Dial-a-yield” technology, which means the explosive force can be adjusted right up to the moment it’s launched.
 
At the top end, it has a potential destructive power of 50 kilotons – enough to wipe out the whole of Norwich from UEA to Whitlingham Broad, Eaton Golf Club to the airport.
 
Dialled down to its minimum 300 tons TNT equivalent, it could merely destroy something as small as Carrow Road football ground. Positively surgical. Sort of.
 
Which might all sound good to the military-minded out there.  But, quite aside from the cost, it comes with huge dangers.
 
One is that its very existence could give new impetus to the global arms race. It’s been argued that it will delay, and possibly halt or even reverse, the reduction in nuclear arms in Europe.
 
Another is that some Pentagon insiders are already talking about it as a “useable” weapon. Which is not a word that should ever be applied to a bomb that could slaughter 200,000 people in one blast. Once it’s been dubbed “useable”, it becomes only too likely that some numbskull will go ahead and use it.
 
And just think how many schools, hospitals, museums and public loos you could fund for $11.8bn (£8.1bn). Yes, I know that comparison is a cliché, but it’s become a cliché for a very good reason.
 
And yes, I also know that enormous sum is less than a tenth of the estimated final total bill for replacing the Trident programme. A bill which is itself bigger than all the cuts and other austerity measures our government has yet implemented or thought of.
 
 
 

I took a nostalgia trip last week to a place I’d never been before.

I’d been warned by my host that Planet Thanet was stuck in a 1970s time-warp. But nothing could have prepared me for the full reality of stepping off the train at Ramsgate.

The 1970s is often mockingly portrayed as a grim decade. This seems unfair. It was the decade of my teens and student years, so of course it was wonderful. Or, if not wonderful, then the time at least when everything was as it inevitably should be.

It was the last decade from which I can still remember every FA Cup Final. The last decade in which I knew, or cared, what was in the pop charts. And if it was also the Jimmy Savile era, we didn’t know then what he was up to off-camera.

It was the age of Led Zeppelin, of Ziggy Stardust, of Genesis when they still had Peter Gabriel, surreal creativity and street cred. The decade when my taste in most things was formed and when I saw most of the bands I’ve ever seen in my life.

They included the awful 101ers, whose lead singer Joe Strummer would just a few months later join The Clash and make them great. And the even worse Brewers Droop, whose lead guitarist Mark Knopfler was shortly to become the driving force of the fabulous Dire Straits. For music, as for me, it was a formative age.

But if it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times. And what I found hanging on in Ramsgate was not the creative energy, merely the grim and the grime.

I managed to avoid stepping in any dog mess, but it was a near thing. I did not avoid tripping, more than once, on the cracked and broken paving.

In many ways, this sad place is typical of so many seaside towns. The road sweeping down the cliff side is lined with once grand homes and guesthouses. Most are now surely “homes of multiple occupancy”, divided into flats let by private owners at inflated rents paid to them direct from the benefits office. The scandal of a land of too few jobs and too little social housing.

The paintwork is stained and peeling, the windowframes rotten, the once-elegant balconies sagging. Most of the people on the High Street looked similarly forlorn, dressed from charity shops that themselves appear to have seen better days.

In one apparently specialist store were used laptops and tablets at suspiciously low prices. I was half tempted until I noticed that the shop’s other window was full of assault rifles and other assorted  firearms. These were not people I wanted to do business with.

The portable computers may not be very 1970s, but outside stood a couple of genuine throwbacks. Skinheads, complete with braces, bovver-boots and belts studded with bullet-shells.

Yes, this is Thanet, that out-of-time corner of Kent which is Nigel Farage’s natural constituency and where anti-European hearts beat strongest.

It won’t stay like this, of course. Gentrification is on its way. The poverty-trapped will be forced out by economic migrants.

Not the foreigners they have been taught to fear, but a flood of middle-class Londoners forced out of the capital to a place they can afford 70 minutes away by train.

And where the present tenants of those rundown seaside flats will go then, who knows?
 

*****
 

My dad’s family were from Kent and he spent a lot of his youth there, yet it’s one of the parts of England I know least. The Port of Dover, and the roads to and from it, were about all I’d seen before an event in Canterbury drew me there.

Canterbury is a pretty town preserved in the shiny aspic of tourism. Most of the people on its streets the day I went were French teenagers.

At the cathedral gate I felt compelled to quote the Bible. My favourite story about Christ – his overturning of the money-changers’ tables in the temple.

I’ve visited every ancient cathedral in the land and in every one I was invited to make a donation. Only in Canterbury did I face an obligatory fee - £10.50 just to enter the grounds. I suppose it helps keep out the riff-raff.

And though it’s England’s head church, and full of history, I wouldn’t rank Canterbury in my Top Ten of English cathedrals. Norwich is much more beautiful, more gracious in its setting, and far richer in medieval art. Canterbury has some delightful details in its crypt, but nothing as unusual or attractive as Norwich’s painted ceiling-bosses. It’s nowhere near as enjoyable as the cathedrals of Lincoln, York, Gloucester or Wells. And nothing matches Durham for grandeur.

As for those French school parties, they have an abundant choice of greater gothic glories at home. Though, admittedly, without the Greggs pasties and Union Jack t-shirts.

Oh, the perils of the social network. I have been accused, by someone I don’t know, of political correctness.
Odd, isn’t it, that being correct is something to be accused of? Guilty of being right.

In its modern sense – as a term of abuse – “political correctness” has had 25 years of use defending rudeness by attacking the respectful. It is always used as an accusation, often with an accompanying suggestion that the accused is a “loony leftie”, trying to deny liberty, freedom of speech. Which is ironic, since freedom of speech is just what the accuser is trying to shout down.

There are older terms for what is now castigated as “political correctness”. One is “politeness”. Another is “showing respect”.

What got me into this was a rather feeble joke repeated online by one of my virtual friends. I won’t repeat it here, but it was a faintly topical twist on an old stereotype of the kind Bernard Manning used to trade on. I told my friend I was disappointed that he was promoting sexism.

At which point, drearily predictable, my accuser stepped in and began ranting. In his view, it seems, the right of men to mock women trumps the right of women not to be demeaned. And perhaps you can see his point. Freedom of speech and all that.

Except that casual, trivial sexism ceases to be casual or trivial when it’s repeated so often that it becomes accepted as part of the world’s fabric. As if the sexist remark were true. Not just in an isolated instance, but as a comment on all women.

And however light-heartedly it was meant, my friend Marc’s little jest was an insult to half the population. He may have meant it ironically, but the irony was surely missed by at least some of those who read it and passed it on.

This may all seem relatively unimportant – a “first world problem”. But it goes deeper than that.

Many of the jokes Bernard Manning told could not be repeated on TV or radio. And he defended his use of words I can’t print here – and wouldn’t want to – not because they were vulgar, but because they were racist.

His act, like that of so many “comedians” of his generation, wasn’t clever or witty. It was merely abusive.
Perhaps the humour, if that’s what it was, lay in getting away with saying the unsayable. Except that the very fact he was saying it – over and over again – made it sayable.

He defended his racism, his sexism, his homophobia, his cruel abuse of the disabled, in exactly the same way Marc justified his quip. “It was just a joke.”

But nothing is only a joke. “Only joking” is exactly what the schoolyard bully says when confronted. Jokes reveal the attitude of the joker and spread it around.

Recent psychological research suggests that sexist or racist jokes don’t turn people into bigots. But they do confirm those who are bigots already in their prejudices. They give them licence to be more outspoken. Crucially, they tend to make them hold their anti-social views more strongly, and to act on them more aggressively.

Jokes of this kind dehumanise people. And dehumanising people – for their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, their politics, their status as refugees – makes them victims.

As David Eagleman made very clear in his recent excellent BBC series The Brain, this process can lead frighteningly quickly to horrors like the Holocaust. The “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia in the 1990s. Or so much of the Middle East today.

This may seem a long way to have come from a relatively mild joke about International Women’s Day. But the connections are all there. And so are the excuses.

As long as even generally broad-minded folk like Marc can excuse sexism as “only a joke”, there’s clearly a long way to go on the road to gender equality too.

The trouble with political jokes is that they get elected. That crack, long familiar from T-shirts and graffiti, was apparently coined by an American comedian in 1958. But it's as true now as ever - and threatens to get truer.

I never expected to feel sorry for the US Republican Party. And I never thought I'd agree with Mitt Romney about anything.

Romney, a sharp-suited Mormon, seemed an odd choice when the Republicans put him up for the presidency in 2012. It did his prospects no good when a story emerged that he'd set off for a holiday with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But if he looked an unlikely candidate, he was Business As Normal by comparison with the scary joke now odds-on to be the Republican selection this time. And Romney, like a lot of us, doesn't really see the funny side of the man he calls The Donald.

Here's just a sample of the things he's said about his likely successor as candidate.

"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. 

"He’s playing the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

“Donald Trump tells us that he is very, very smart. I’m afraid that when it comes to foreign policy he is very, very not smart." Which is putting it mildly.

He lists Trump's personal qualities: "The bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics."

And he lists the business failures, which include Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Casinos, Trump Mortgage, Trump The Game, Trump Entertainment Resorts. Three bankruptcies, and an awful lot of squandered millions. 

How does Trump make a small fortune? Start with a big one.

But unhappily his latest venture, Trump The Politician, is far from a joke. And in calling on his party to get behind anyone but Trump, Romney misses the point – and risks giving yet more impetus to the man he so despises. 

The whole point about the Trump bandwagon is that he isn't a traditional Republican suit. He isn't any kind of traditional politician. Just as, in the very farthest opposite corner, the kindly, thoughtful, intelligent non-businessman Bernie Sanders is no kind of traditional American politician. 

Both, in their utterly different ways, are riding the same sea-change mentality that has brought the left-wing Syriza to power in Greece, and seen the rise of the National Front in France and UKIP here. The urgent, global desire for change. For anything other than the dull, despised status quo. You could argue that it's made both Jeremy Corbyn on one side and Boris Johnson on the other plausible prime ministers.

It's the very fact that they are not the same old suits, the same politics as normal, the same vacuous smiles. They all stand up for the common folk - or, in the cases of Trump and Johnson, seem to some people to do so. 

The same could be said of Adolf Hitler, whose election in Germany in 1933 seemed as unlikely as Trump's does now – until it happened. He too was seen mostly as a joke by all except his followers, whose numbers grew at extraordinary and alarming speed. As has the barmy army of Trump supporters.

Which is not to say Trump is like Hitler. For one thing, his policy platform seems much more muddled and unformed. For another, he was rich and famous before he began, whereas Hitler was nobody.

But there's a similarity in the mad, ranting populism. And whenever a noisy leader starts dividing the population up into Us and Them – “real Americans” versus Muslims or Mexicans, “Aryans” versus Jews, Gypsies and Communists –  there is genuine reason to fear. 

Trump, as Romney says, is dangerous. But exactly who he presents most danger to is an open question – at least until after the election.

Should he win in November, he will surely do untold damage to America. And damage to America means damage to the world.

America’s financial crash in 1929 plunged the world into the depression that created the conditions for world war. Including the rise of Hitler. And that was when the globe was less globalised than it is today, and the US far less eager to keep sticking its trigger-finger in everyone else’s pies.

Should Trump get the nomination but lose the election – which is what the bookies currently expect – the greatest damage he inflicts will be to the Republican Party. Which won’t be anything to celebrate either, because a one-party state isn’t.

Something awful is happening to our countryside. It’s disappearing.

Drive down any main route through East Anglia – the A11, A12, A14, A140, A10 – and you’ll notice it. You’ll see the same insidious effect along any A road in England’s once green and pleasant South-east. Where there were fields there are now houses. What were once by-passes have become the boundary fences marking the edge of town.

Britain, we are constantly being told by the xenophobes who want to halt migration, is full. And looking at the ugly swelling of our lovely market towns, you’d easily believe it.

In 50 years, the UK population has risen by 19.2 per cent. World population, meanwhile, has gone up by 166.4pc. We’ve gone from being the world’s ninth biggest country, with 1.8pc of global population, to the 21st, with just 0.9pc. In relative terms we’re shrinking, not filling up.

Of course, our land isn’t relative, it’s absolute. And absolutely limited. Which is why we need to guard and preserve it carefully. Not by slamming the doors shut at every port, but by applying some long overdue intelligence to our planning and property habits.

It’s a simple truth of world economics that we could easily feed and clothe even a global population that has rocketed past seven billion if some people didn’t take a lot more than their share. And yes, I’m afraid that does mean us. Many of us, anyway. Those who own the land, and the houses, and the cars that clog up those arterial roads.

It’s also true – it’s the same simple truth, really – that there’d be plenty of room for all in Britain if some folk didn’t hog more than their share.

And we wouldn’t have to keep concreting and tarmacking over good farmland, either. A habit which contributes enormously to our flooding troubles.

Consider these two recent headlines, one from the front page of London’s evening newspaper, the other from a national paper’s website:

• “Property Prices Soar in Suburbs”
  
• and “Tens of thousands of London homes deemed long-term vacant”.

How are these stories related?

The Evening Standard splash claimed the capital was suffering a “desperate housing shortage”, forcing people away from the city centre.

It said: “The average home’s value shot up by £10,683 between November and December… to a fresh peak of £514,097.”

Blimey. Wish I could earn 10 grand in a month. On the other hand, half a million for an average home? How can anyone afford that?

It went on: “The biggest year-on-year increase was in Barking and Dagenham, where the average home rose 15.3pc in a year to £309,760 – leaving London without a single borough where house prices are below £300,000.”

I wonder how much the Dagenham house my dad grew up in – a basic two-bed terraced with a narrow garden – would fetch now. And how any ordinary East-Ender can afford to live in what has long been one of London’s most deprived areas.

Now let’s look at that story from The Guardian. It revealed: “Tens of thousands of London homes have been left uninhabited for so long they are considered ‘long-term vacant’, with more than 1,100 empty for over a decade.”

More than 22,000 homes in the capital had been left empty by their owners for more than six months. Which might not be enough, in a city of eight million, to make a huge difference to property prices. But it’s still shocking in a city where so many are struggling – and not a few of them failing – to put a roof over their heads.

Helen Williams, of the charity Empty Homes, says: “With so many people priced out of decent housing across London, it makes sense to make the most of existing properties, as well as build new homes, to address the capital’s housing needs.”

More to the point, she adds: “We’d like to see more long-term empty properties across England bought by councils and charities to create new homes that are affordable to people on low to moderate incomes.”

Council housing. Now there’s a good idea. Not one much in favour, sadly, with a government committed to selling off what homes still remain in council hands. And which also, incidentally, intends to do away with the Freedom of Information Act, under which we were able to learn these facts.

Legal & General boss Nigel Wilson believes much of the problem is because “we are obsessed with owning homes”. The Englishman’s home is his castle – while most of Europe is happy living in flats.

Wilson says: “House price inflation isn’t good for society. Rental will help social mobility right across the country.”

Especially if rents are, as he puts it, competitive. Or, as I’d say, reasonable.

Meanwhile those average-home folk who can’t afford London prices are being squeezed out into new market-town suburbs all along our main roads and railway lines. So the overheating of London becomes a problem for our once-rural communities and market towns too.