Labouring the Lottery

How typical of the prissy panjandrums who dominate New Labour are the newly announced reforms to the National Lottery. I don't imagine for one second that Tessa Jowell, or any of her fellow ministers, would dream of betting on the Lottery for a nanosecond - not for them the discrete shaving of plastic with fingernail, followed by the inevitable disappointment as the card of misfortune is crumpled and thrown into the gutter. I dare say the socalled Culture Secretary, like the vast number of middle-class liberals, secretly views the Lottery as a tax on stupidity, and worse than that, a tax on desperation.

But the people who bet on the Lottery desperately want to get rich, they want to be hoisted out of their current sad circumstances - like this week's winner, a 16-year-old foster girl - by a golden rope. People like Tessa Jowell - and me for that matter - are quite happy where we are, thank you very much, so we leave it to all the worse-offs to drop whatever spare quids they have in the fervent wishing well.

New Labour inherited the Lottery from the Tories. You might have thought they would do away with it, but as the Millennium Dome was to vaulting civic ambition, so the Lottery has proved to fiscal rectitude. Read our lips - Tony and Gordon said - "No New Taxes, but while you're at it, have a scratch card."

Now the takings are down at the Lottery and Tessa Jowell wants to blame it on something she calls a "democratic deficit". The solution is to introduce still more razzmatazz: a National Lottery Day, with Lottery-backed athletes giving free coaching, and special prize draws.

There will also be Big Brother-style phone voting on what causes the charity levy should be given to. A new £200 million fund for young people will also be set up, together with "micro-grants" of less than £500 to small charities; while measures will also be taken to speed up the distribution of the money.

And it doesn't end there. Ms Jowell speaks of involving the media and creating "citizens' panels" to further assist in ensuring that the people's money goes to the people's causes.

She has also announced the end of Camelot's monopoly; all in all it sounds like such a dramatic move to fill the "democratic deficit" that you rather feel the Lottery and the Government should swap places.

The motivation for all this change is that the takings are falling, and the reason is held to be such "out of touch" donations as the £340,000 grant given to a pressure group that works for the rights of asylum seekers. Once again New Labour have acted to assuage what they perceive as the incipient rage of Little England, ever ready to trounce them at the polls.

The truth of the matter is that no one buys a Lottery ticket because they want to give money to charity; people who want to give money to charity do so, simply and straightforwardly. The reason Lottery takings are down - and I know many people who have abandoned it in the past couple of years - is because it's widely perceived as a poor bet, it just doesn't pay out enough, frequently enough.

There has always been a widespread and ingrained gambling culture in Britain, from the geegees to the pools and back again. Now the hopeful and the desperate are returning to their traditional punting preferences.

Instead of tinkering with the Lottery, Tessa Jowell would be wise to do to it what New Labour should have done about the Dome by now: blown the bloody thing sky high.

I've made my peace with Germany's past

The German MEP Martin Schulz is right to demand an apology from the hateful Silvio Berlusconi after the Italian premier "ironically" suggested that he'd be perfect for a role as a concentration camp commandant.

Berlusconi is far closer to being a fascist than his fairweather friends (such as T Blair) might care to admit. But more than this, the idea that the Germans can forever go on being the whipping boys of Europe is ridiculous.

I am not denying for a second the Germans' collective responsibility for the Holocaust - and nor do they.

Unlike Italy and Austria, de-Nazification was taken seriously in Germany, and there are firm constitutional safeguards against a regime like the Third Reich arising again.

Like many Jews I've always felt profoundly uneasy when visiting Germany, there's something creepy (or unheimlich, as they themselves would say) about the absolutely ordinary feel of the tidy towns and neat fields, when you're profoundly aware of the evil that they once incubated.

On one trip to Germany I found myself wandering into a church in Guttingen. Inside there was an exhibition by local school children which documented what had happened to the Jews of Guttingen under the Nazis.

Then and there I resolved never again to indulge in knee-jerk anti-Germanism.

I realised that if they could make the painful effort to confront their past, then what was needed was encouragement, not derision.

Jennifer the bag lady

Time was when an upmarket design house like Louis Vuitton would rather have spontaneously combusted than have the likes of Jennifer Lopez touting its wares. But recession creates strange bedfellows, and now J-Lo has become the new "face" of the famous handbag company.

In truth, I have always thought of Vuitton bags as very sad sacks. Indeed, they look to me like nothing much besides a couple of brass handles tacked onto an old bit of sacking stencilled with fleurs-de-lys. I suppose they know what they're doing, though, because the only future for these inherently ugly accessories is to flog them to upwardly mobile parvenus.

As Marie Antoinette might have said: "Let them eat bag."

The new house of God

Local residents and small businesspeople are up in arms at plans to further redevelop Spitalfields Market and turn it into just another shopping plaza, full of tourist shops and the big chain stores.

Because it was extensively rebuilt after wartime bombing the market doesn't have listed status, but even if it did, I don't think the inevitable march of retailing could be halted. I remember everyone being up in arms back in the 1970s when Covent Garden Market was moved out to Nine Elms, and now - gasp! - the Nine Elms market itself is to close.

The fact is that all the old London markets were built in cloistered forms that emulated the monasteries, which were once the pre-eminent London buildings.

In their day markets were the grand temples of commerce. But now we have a new religion: shopping, and inevitably the old temples must be refitted to accommodate their new gods.

I wonder how many of thousands of keep-fit enthusiasts who regularly stretch their Lycra on London's treadmills realise that just such a machine was used as an instrument of torture by the harsh Victorian prison system?

Still, it makes sense, because the current obsession with getting and keeping a hard body is, in its way, every bit as punitive.