Last Friday I did what the front page of a certain daily “newspaper” told me to do and Googled “The Terrorists’ friend”.

What turned up was the website of that same alleged newspaper – page after page of links to it. Which seemed apt.

The previous day that same so-called newspaper said we must not give terrorism the publicity it wants – somewhere in its 19 pages of coverage.

At least I think it did. Someone who knows someone I know said it did. And, to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to read through all 19 pages to check. Which seems like a level of journalistic thoroughness and integrity appropriate to the publication in question.

On the day of that shock-horror “exclusive” about the things you can find on the internet, the same scandalsheet’s continued coverage of the London attack ran to another 19 pages. On day three of its not giving terrorism publicity the count was down to a mere eight pages, again including the front.

Terrorists’ friend indeed. If a solitary, deranged individual with a police record and a string of pseudonyms, armed with a hire car and a knife, can truly be called a terrorist. That would seem to be affording him more dignity and importance than he warrants.

The police have called him “a lone wolf”, which doesn’t fit any definition of “terrorist” that makes much sense.

Collins English Dictionary, for example, defines terrorism as “systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal”. What happened last week was certainly violent – shockingly so – but hardly systematic. And it’s hard to see what goal Ajao / Elms / Masood can possibly have had in mind beyond the expression of his own disturbed mental state.

On the day he committed his murders, more than 300 people died in London. Assuming, that is, it was an average day. That’s just counting those likely to have been claimed by that greatest of killers, old age.

This in no way lessens the tragedy of those who lives were ended, or badly damaged, by Masood’s acts of criminal madness. It is no disrespect to those whose loved ones were so cruelly and pointlessly snatched away so long before their time should have been up. But it is to put a horrifying event in perspective.

On that same day, at least 33 innocent civilians were killed in an airstrike by US forces on a school near the Syrian city of Raqqa. Four days earlier, at least 52 had been killed in an American strike on a Syrian mosque.
It’s not just the Russians, and the Syrians themselves, who are slaughtering civilians in that sorry land. 

The obscenity committed in London last week happened in a place I know well. I and millions of others. Even to those who never set foot in the capital it will be highly familiar from television. So I understand, to a degree, the obsession with what takes place there.

And it is true, as has been widely remarked on, that that one act of random violence sparked hundreds of acts of kindness. It’s been called the British way. Actually, it’s the human way.

But it wouldn’t hurt us, as humans, to look occasionally beyond our own little bubble. To contemplate, for example, what the Westminster government gets up to beyond these shores.

The UK has sold over £3billion of arms to Saudi Arabia during that anachronistic kingdom’s killing spree in Yemen, which has just entered its third year.

Another, fuller definition of terrorism comes from The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. It says terrorist groups “usually have the financial and moral backing of sympathetic governments”. In this particularly gruesome case – happening now and every day – it’s the British government that’s providing the backing. Aiding the unelected, fabulously wealthy rulers of an oil-rich state in raining death and destruction on their desperately poor neighbours.

Yemen’s children aren’t just starving to death – they are being deliberately starved. And our government is one of the biggest suppliers of arms to the perpetrators.

The Saudis are blocking aid into Yemen, which is now on the verge of a major famine, with four in five people in need of emergency assistance. Largely because of British-made bombs dropped by British-made planes.

This is terrorism on a far greater scale, with vastly greater resources of cash and technology, than anything that can be perpetrated with a car and a knife.

Yet the only reference made last week to Yemen in the aforementioned supposed newspaper was that “unsurprisingly” it was in the bottom ten in the world’s latest “happiness rankings”.

And its only reference to Raqqa was this: “A book written about the methods employed by Islamic State suggested that around ten Britons were working in the Syrian city of Raqqa to disseminate online propaganda around the world.”

Note again the obsession with the alleged evils of the internet.

It is, of course, true that the web has more than enough sites vilely promoting hatred. Prominent among them being the online presence of the paper that shall not be named.

After nearly 40 years in newspapers, I didn’t think anything in the business could surprise me. And then the Evening Standard named its new editor.

The paper’s sub-editors have just had their hours cut to save money. Then in comes an editor who already has five jobs. One of which, only recently announced, comes with a £650,000 salary. 

Four of those jobs, admittedly, are part-time – though between them they should net George Osborne a little over £1.5million a year. One wonders why he feels the need to edit the Standard as well.

Two possible motivations suggest themselves.

One is the realisation of a long-held ambition. In 1993, when he left Oxford University, he wanted to be a journalist. 

After failing to land a place on the apprenticeship scheme at The Times, he got an interview at The Economist, and was turned down there as well. He did do a bit of freelancing on the Daily Telegraph’s diary column, but that hardly makes him a qualified journalist.

Even Piers Morgan, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), who all looked startlingly under-qualified when Rupert Murdoch handed them the reins of the late, lamented News of the World, weren’t that under-qualified.

Now, suddenly, Osborne’s in the big chair of London’s most widely read paper. A paper which, though it’s given away free and has only ‘local’ circulation, has more readers than every daily paper except The Sun and the Daily Mail. It would have looked a fabulous toy to the boy he once was.

But maybe the greater motivation is the opportunity he now has for revenge on Theresa May.

The PM didn’t just sack him as Chancellor when she moved in next door but piled on maximum humiliation in the way she did so. The arch Remainer now has the perfect platform from which to trumpet “I Told You So” as May’s hell-bent pursuit of Brexit sinks a disunited kingdom further into the mire.

Not that Osborne himself ran the economy well. To put it mildly. It was the austerity he plunged the less well-off into that got us into this mess. And all for the sake of further enriching the rich (like himself) while further impoverishing the poor – and a lot of the less-poor too. But the future scarcely looks any brighter under his successors.

It’s hard to know whether his latest appointment says more about the dire state of politics or the dire state of the press. The Twitter storm erupted almost immediately from both quarters.

The Lib Dems’ press office tweeted: “This doesn’t bode well for our coverage in the Standard.” To which one wag rapidly responded: “I don’t know why you say that, you lot propped him up for five years.” Fair comments, both.

But the political repercussions go further than which parties can expect a rough ride from Osborne’s paper (all of them, I suspect).

Many people have questioned whether it’s right for an MP to have another job while also collecting a £74,000 salary for sitting in the House. The electors of Tatton, whom Osborne is supposed to represent, have a right to feel let down. The question is so pertinent it may even lead to a change in the rules.

And it’s not just about whether it’s possible to do two full-time jobs properly. You might also think there’s a conflict of interest between the roles of MP and editor. After all, it’s the job of the press to hold politicians to account, in theory at least.

So what of Osborne’s other jobs? The combined income certainly gives extra meaning to the slash-and-burn Chancellor’s cynical comment that “we’re all in this together”.

Of course there’s nothing new in former ministers cashing in massively. Tony Blair is only the most recently, most egregiously visible of those who have grown very rich indeed trading on their experience of the corridors of power.

This is perfectly legal – as is Osborne’s lucrative few-days-a-month post with investment company BlackRock. Even though Parliament’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments advised against it.

Whether it should be legal is another matter entirely.

In my view, it should be illegal to profit from politics, beyond the salary and expenses that come directly from it. And, as with crime, that should continue to apply for life.

But that’s the ethics of the ideal world, not the law of the real one. And we know who gets to make the laws. 

Contrary to appearances, it’s not actually newspaper editors. Though they sometimes seem to have a bigger say than they ought.

Death by 1,000 cuts. That’s this government’s prescription for the NHS.

And, in one variant form or another, for pretty much everything they have responsibility for that bears the word “service”. Education; libraries; social housing; prisons; the police; you name it.

That’s not to say they want to see the end of all these valuable things entirely. They just want to replace the spirit of service with the spirit of free enterprise. Which is not the same thing at all.

The drive to convert public institutions into private money-making schemes has been central to Tory policy since the rise of Margaret Thatcher. It was just as brutal in her day, but there’s an added sneakiness about it now. The honest word “privatisation” is hidden behind the weaselly euphemism “reform”.

Faith schools, so-called “free” schools (there’s a classic piece of Orwellian doublespeak for you), Theresa May’s beloved grammar schools, academies and that most disturbing of trends the multi-academy trust are all semi-disguised steps on the route to privatising the whole education system.

The “right to buy” masquerades as a help to ordinary people. In fact, it’s a way of transferring public housing stock into private hands. So wages – or housing benefits – go into the hands of private landlords rather than being reinvested in more and better social housing.

A few cash in at the expense of the many. Tory philosophy in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, in America, Trump’s puppetmaster Steve Bannon has all but admitted that the president’s cabinet nominees were deliberately chosen to dismantle the departments they head. Rather like Jeremy Hunt here.

Hunt’s policy is surreptitious but clearly defined – and though he hasn’t exactly admitted it, it’s working well.

Run a service into the ground, deprive it of resources, disrupt it through supposed “reforms”, mistreat and demean its professionals. Then say it’s “broken” and needs fixing.

Which is a pretext for handing it over to companies whose interest is not in providing a good service but in making a good profit.

Talk of the NHS seems so often to revolve around how much money goes into it. But what that simplistic formula overlooks is the crucial matter of where the money goes.

If the answer to that is “private firms”, then someone somewhere is taking money from your National Insurance payments and pocketing it as profit.

And they might not even be British pockets, if Trump’s limp handshake with May means what it appears to.

Is Britain a civilised country? 

In the sense that life here revolves around cities and towns, yes. 

In the sense that we – most of us – enjoy modern comforts and conveniences, made possible by science and technology, undoubtedly. 

In the sense of cultural refinement – well, maybe. 

In the sense of social enlightenment and “a high level of government” – the country’s not what it was. And it’s getting worse, fast.

I’ve had an email from Shiromini Satkunarajah. Me and 168,500 other people. In it she says: “My mother and I are very happy to have been released and… it is only because of everyone’s support… Thanks to everyone who raised awareness by signing and sharing the petition.”

I get a lot of requests to put my name to online petitions. Mostly I don’t, though it’s seldom because I don’t agree with them. Mostly it’s due to petition fatigue. Both my own and a fear that the deluge of petitions – which are so easy to start and to join – will bring diminishing returns. “Yeah, yeah, another petition for the bin, yawn, yawn.”

In Shiromini’s case I did join in, for two reasons. It was urgent. And I thought that in this case a direct and forceful appeal to home secretary Amber Rudd might just work. As apparently it did. For now, anyway. 

Until her 11th-hour reprieve, Shiromini was about to be deported to Sri Lanka, a country she had not seen since she arrived in Britain with her parents eight years ago as a 12-year-old refugee from civil war.

Originally allowed to stay on her father’s student visa, she was given leave to complete her secondary education in the UK when he died in 2011. She was three months short of completing her engineering studies at Bangor University when the Home Office informed her that her application for a full student visa had been denied. 

Now at least it seems she’ll be able to sit her final exams, in which she is predicted to get a first-class degree. Clearly the Home Office believes we have so many high-grade women engineers we can afford to boot some out.

There remains a real danger that once the attention has died down, Shiromini and her mum will still be expelled from this allegedly civilised nation. Her message of thanks ends: “Please note that I haven’t been granted leave to remain and solicitors are on board to try and sort it out.”

Take the case too of Irene Clennell, which has attracted international attention. 

Irene, who  has been married to a British man for 27 years, has British children and a British grandchild, lost her indefinite leave to remain when she returned to Singapore for a spell to care for her ailing parents. She was back in County Durham looking after her husband John, who has had to retire through ill health, when the authorities decided to split up a loving family.

As her sister-in-law Angela said: “Irene has never claimed benefits in the UK. John has worked his entire adult life. We need to fight to keep them together so he has someone to care for him, and so she can stay with her family, where her home is.

“Irene has nowhere to go in Singapore, both her parents have passed away – her whole life is here in Britain.”

Except that now she’s been kicked out, treated, as she described it, “like a terrorist”.

All the circumstances scream “inhumane” and “injustice”. And this is not just about two innocent people - it’s also about the UK’s standing in the world. Does little Britain really want to be seen as a vindictive, irrational, racist – uncivilised – country?

Here are two women eloquent and educated enough to tell the world their stories. Stories which shame us all. How many others like them go untold?

The conversation going on in front of me was such an outrageous cliché that I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or to interrupt it. Maybe I should have done both.

The well spoken couple were discussing the topic that has become our national obsession: immigration. In particular, they were dragging out that tired old rubbish about “them” coming over here and taking “our” jobs.
This dreary recital of imagined wrongs was taking place in the checkout queue at a well known high-street store. The self-service checkout queue.

Now, I’m sure operating a supermarket till must be one of the most tedious jobs going. But it is a job. Or at least it was. On that particular day in that particular store there was one till operated by a human being and five or six automated checkouts with a computerised voice thanking you for shopping at…

Had their brains not been similarly automated, the anti-immigrant ranters in front of me might have noticed the obvious. That the people who used to run those tills hadn’t had their jobs taken by immigrants – they’d been taken by technology.

Well, you can’t stop the march of progress, you know. And in some ways it’s good not to.

I’m not sorry that children aren’t still being sent down mines and up chimneys, or that cities like Liverpool and Bristol aren’t still thriving on the slave trade. (Although child labour and slavery are still rife in some parts of the world, but that’s another story.)

But there are better and worse ways of managing change, and I’m afraid we’re not managing it very well at all just now.

It’s over 30 years since I was out on strike in a dispute over what was then called new technology in the newspaper business. The kind of jobs we were trying to preserve then are now history.

It’s more than twice that long since my parents were involved in a Labour Party working group looking forward to an era of greater automation. The optimistic post-war idea was that with less work to do, everyone would have more leisure time to enjoy.

The danger was always that what work there was would be unequally shared out. That some people would be overworked, while others had no work at all. Which is, of course, exactly what came about.

And not, I think, by chance or mistake. It suits the entrepreneur capitalist class to have a large pool of unemployed labour available, to keep down the wages of those in work.

That is why the captains of industry tend to be in favour of immigration. Though I’m sure in some cases kind-heartedness, human decency and the honest enjoyment of cultural exchange come into it too.

But the question that inspired Mum and Dad in the 1940s, and vexed us in the ’80s, remains at least as vital today. How should society manage a world in which more and more jobs are taken over by machines?

Bill Gates, who became the world’s richest person by owning of one of the companies responsible – Microsoft – has an idea about this. On the face of it, it’s not a bad idea, either.

He suggests that the robots which take over people’s jobs (presumably including self-service checkouts) should be taxed like human workers.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates said in a recent interview. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

I assume he means the robot’s owners – unless he’s contemplating a higher level of artificial intelligence than is out there yet.

Elon Musk, the high-tech guru and forward-thinking boss of the car and alternative energy company Tesla, has a different solution to the problem. “With automation, there will come abundance,” Musk says. “Almost everything will get very cheap. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”

And that, he believes, means people will have to be given a univeral basic income. Not – as at present – given benefits as long as they are “looking for work”, but paid not to work. It’s a crucial difference.

As Musk points out, there is a psychological cost too. “If there’s no need for your labor, what’s your meaning?” he asks. “Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with.”

I wouldn’t put money on America being among the first to deal properly with either the psychological or the economic problem, even though Musk has been named as a special advisor to President Trump. And I can’t imagine Britain being in the vanguard either. Meanwhile I’ll go on using the staffed till while I can.