The chancellor's autumn statement saw him take yet another opportunity to articulate his disdain for the poor, as he outlined the government's intention to deepen its attacks on the unemployed and benefit claimants. It also confirmed the abiding economic illiteracy which underpins austerity.

The recent controversy that has erupted over the flying of the Union flag over Belfast City Hall would have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with politics in the North of Ireland, or who has spent any time there.

America's problem isn't its gun culture; America's problem is the mass psychosis which feeds its gun culture and fuels not just the normalisation of gun violence, but exalts it as the sine qua non of the strength and self assertion that informs the nation's identity.