LOOKING BACKWARDS?

ON Monday the cover of the Labour Party manifesto showed a family looking over verdant fields to the rising sun of “a future fair for all”; the artistic style was of a margarine advertisement in the 1930s. Yesterday the Conservatives launched a manifesto inviting everyone to “join the government” in an evocation of John F Kennedy's Big Society vision of the 1960s. Is there any chance that today the Liberal Democrats' manifesto will have anything to say that is relevant to the 21st century?

Meanwhile, as Britain loses interest in everything except the general election -- but will this be reflected in turn-out on May 6? -- President Obama has been hosting a summit in Washington to face what he called “the cruel irony of history” that, while the risk of nuclear war between states has been greatly reduced, the threat of nuclear terror by terrorist groups such as Al-qaeda has greatly increased because of the risk that access to nuclear materials to make a bomb is increasing all the time. The general lay assumption is that making a nuclear weapon requires thousands of scientists and huge technical resources. But a leading American physicist on BBC radio's Today programme yesterday morning said that making a destructive weapon is relatively easy once you have access to enriched uranium. Barack Obama's initiative is timely and once again his award of the Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of what he wanted to do has been justified.