The young man lying in a suburban cul-de-sac cried: "Mummy, mummy, mummy. I don't want to die."

But die he did, with a gaping hole in his stomach where one of his killers had twisted the blade of a knife.

So many aspects of this tale make one catch one's breath:

• the fact that young Shakilus had been led to his gang-land execution by his ex-girlfriend, a 15-year-old schoolgirl;

• the fact that the victim had posted a social networking site profile of himself wearing a stab-vest and holding a knife next to a message in which he warns that if you mess with him he will "slash your face up"

• the fact that two of his killers had "tried hard" to build up a criminal record - the pre-requisite of a true gangster;

• the fact that Samantha Joseph - the girl in the "love triangle" - was prepared to see Shakilus murdered in order to win back gangster Danny Mclean, a man who beat her regularly.

These are the features of a parallel morality, a distorted interpretation of the creed of capitalism where bling is king, where tolerance is weakness, where women are whores, where a criminal record is a badge of honour, where lack of "respect" justifies bullying, torture and even murder.

It is a form of imported fundamentalism as alien to democratic society as the views of the most hard-line Islamists.

When fighting al-Qaeda-inspired terror, the focus is not on the weapons but the ideology. When fighting murderous gang-culture, it seems to me, the focus is not on the ideology but the weapons.

Politicians obsess about knives and guns but do far less to counteract the values which inspire the behaviour.

British gang culture models itself on the criminal underworld of black ghettoes in America. There are, of course, white and Asian youths involved in gang violence and crime here in the UK. But look at its victims. Look at the mug-shots. Overwhelmingly they are black - tragic black youths corrupted by a culture which should have no place here.

So why do we tolerate the preachers of black gang culture? Who is effectively challenging this stuff? I don't mean banning it - that almost certainly wouldn't work.

A better approach might be to mock it - make it appear so unsophisticated and out-dated that no self-respecting young black kid would want to be associated with it.

That was President Obama's strategy, you may recall, when asked on MTV last year to comment about a municipal ban on "saggy-pants", the low-slung trousers designed to echo the beltless clothes of prisoners.

"Brothers should pull up their pants", he said. "There are some issues that we face, that you don't have to pass a law, but that doesn't mean folks can't have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear - I'm one of them."

Gordon Brown couldn't get away with saying something like that, of course. But black British writers, commentators, artists, musicians, designers might.

There are examples of brave individuals who are working hard to fight against the preachers of gangsterism. But too often they are shouting into the wind.

The billions spent on marketing gang culture, by businesses who deny responsibility, blow away the counter messages.

It is that poisonous wind which killed Shakilus Townsend and the hundreds of other young black victims of gang violence over the last few years. It is that toxic ideology that turns shiny-faced young children into murderers.

I wonder how Gordon Brown reacted when he read these opening words in the Sustainable Development Commission's report Prosperity Without Growth
published in March this year. (The Commission is a public body set up to advise the prime minister on sustainable development.)

And I wonder how he might respond to today's news that, when one compares levels of sustainability and well-being internationally, Britain comes a miserable 74th in the world. Number one is Costa Rica.

The analysis, by the think tank nef, is bound to be controversial because it requires us to reconsider what we mean by progress. If you are reading this and believe that the success of a country is calculated by its wealth, this may prove disconcerting.

What nef, Sustainable Development Commission, UK government, European Commission and even the OECD all appear to agree on is that we need a better evaluation of progress than simple GDP.

It is argued that the measure of a successful nation needs to reflect some measure of life satisfaction and the environmental sustainability of that society. Simply being rich is not the point any more.

So nef has come up with a formula for international comparison: the Happy Planet Index (HPI). First conducted in 2006, today sees the publication of the second round of data, including a map of the world based on the HPI. And here it is.

According to nef, "the results turn our idea of progress on its head". Well, I certainly would not have predicted that the most successful countries on the planet are in Central and Latin America. Indeed, the researchers seem slightly surprised by the results:

"Let's not beat about the bush. The region has had, and continues to have, its fair share of misery: decades of civil wars and coups, the destruction of the Amazon, sharp inequality, and the favelas and slums of metropolises from Mexico City to Sao Paulo. For some, the region represents a sad tale of lost opportunity."

Hmm. Doesn't sound like paradise to me, but despite all of this, nine of the top ten countries in the HPI are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Here's how nef works it out:

"The HPI is an efficiency measure: the degree to which long and happy lives (life satisfaction and life expectancy are multiplied together to calculate happy life years) are achieved per unit of environmental impact."

So first, one can look at life expectancy around the globe.

The highest life expectancies tend to be in rich developed countries. Western Europe, North America, Japan, Hong Kong and Australasia glow green while, at the other end of the table, Africa is largely red. The coincidence of longevity ratings and continental boundaries makes the world look, fittingly perhaps, like a Risk board.

The next component of the formula is life satisfaction. This is found by asking people what is now the standard question to assess what is called "subjective well-being": All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

At first glance, it appears that rich Western countries dominate again, but closer inspection reveals that almost a third of the top 35 countries have a GDP per capita of less than $20,000. According to the nef analysis, "the country with the highest reported life satisfaction - and by some margin - is Costa Rica (8.5 on a scale of 0-10, compared with 8.1 for Ireland, Norway and Denmark)".

The final element of the HPI score is the size of a country's ecological footprint. The report explains the thinking like this: "To achieve one-planet living, a country must keep its ecological footprint below the level that corresponds to its fair share given the world's current biocapacity and population - 2.1 global hectares (or gha) in 2005." So a country with a score of 2.1 achieves one planet living. Over 4.2 is two planet living, and so on. Inevitably, rich, consumer societies fare badly on this measure.

The countries with the smallest per capita footprints are among the poorest: Malawi, Haiti and Bangladesh. The clod-hopping countries with the biggest ecological footprints are Luxembourg (10.2 gha), the United Arab Emirates (9.5 gha) and the United States of America (9.4 gha) - all using four times their fair share of global resources. Interestingly, the Netherlands achieve the same level of happy life years as the USA, but with a footprint less than half the size (4.4 gha).

After all the maths has been done, it is Costa Rica and its neighbours which come out top. The researchers put it this way:

"Latin Americans report being much less concerned with material issues than, for example, they are with their friends and family. Civil society is very active, from religious groups to workers' groups to environmental groups.
Some have mocked the high levels of reported life satisfaction in Latin American countries as belying a lack of knowledge of anything better (i.e. Western lifestyles). On the contrary, Latin America is perhaps more exposed to North American culture than anywhere else in the developing world. Yet somehow it has been more resistant to idolising this lifestyle, or at least more able to be happy with its own way of life despite this influence.
Pura vida is a popular expression in Costa Rica which is used somewhat like the English term 'cool'. It translates literally as 'pure life' and represents in itself an attitude to what is important."

Looking at the UK's position below Bosnia and Romania, perhaps we could do with a bit of Pura Vida ourselves?

I have been sent previously unpublished polling data on what voters think. And the answer is... totally inconclusive. It is pretty much a three-way split with no hint of consensus.

If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this chart, it is that we cannot rely on public opinion to guide us through the financial mess. It is for exactly this kind of situation that we elect and pay our politicians: to take the difficult decisions on our behalf, to use their talents and vision so that Britain comes out on the other side as undamaged as is possible

To dismiss them all as power-hungry, money-grabbing crooks at this time really isn't helpful.

The Ipsos Mori poll does offer some clues as to what the public think the government's priorities should be.

Of those who think that some services should be protected, two candidates emerge as serious candidates for the axe - and both of them hit the poor.

Just as hundreds of thousands of people find themselves joining the dole queue, a substantial minority of the country thinks government should cut benefit payments. And just as the global recession risks consigning millions of the world's most vulnerable to total poverty, a slightly larger group think that it is the time to pull the plug on overseas aid.

It is obvious, perhaps. If cuts have to happen, voters want them to happen to others. Self-interest rules the day. Once again, it might be argued, we need smart, professional policy-makers to consider the short, medium and long-term implications of any spending changes.

The question of where to cut is a lot easier if you believe there is substantial inefficiency in the delivery of public services. On this analysis, it is possible to reduce budgets without hitting services.

The Ipsos Mori poll finds a substantial majority of people (79%) think there is so much waste in the system that, if we could only root it out, cuts to real services would be unnecessary. Hallelujah! We are saved.

This running-the-country business is much easier when you don't have to take the risks yourself, don't have to deal with the consequences and don't have to justify your mistakes. I wonder which current services voters regard as a waste of money. Where is the multi-trillion pounds' worth of profligacy and inefficiency hidden? Let me know, and I will post a memo to ministers with the top ideas. Right now, we need all the expertise we can muster.

The district in which she lives near Lisbon gained its name and reputation from illegal drugs. But as I sat on a rock and watched her daily ritual, I was aware that Maria is part of an extraordinary and controversial experiment. In almost every other place in the world, what she is doing is crime. Here, though, she can be confident her drug use will not end in prison.

Exactly eight years ago today, on July 1st 2001, Portugal decreed that the purchase, possession and use of any previously-illegal substance would no longer be considered a criminal offence. So, instead of police arresting users, at The End of the World, health and social workers now dispense the paraphernalia of heroin use.

Paula Vale de Andrade told me how her "street teams" have been able dramatically to cut HIV infections and drug deaths since the new law.

"When drug use was a crime, people were afraid to engage with the teams. But since decriminalisation, they know the police won't be involved and they come forward. It has been a great improvement."

Many had predicted disaster - that plane loads of "drug tourists" would descend on Portugal knowing that they couldn't end up in court. But what one politician called "the promise of sun, beaches and any drug you like" simply hasn't materialised.

In fact, overall drug consumption appears stable or down - government statistics suggest a 10% fall.

Among teenagers, the statistics suggest that the use of every illicit substance has fallen. The table below is from the Cato Institute's white paper Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies.

I know there is some doubt over the methodology used in compiling some of these data, but what strikes me is that there is absolutely no evidence that drug use has risen.

Drug trafficking remains a serious criminal offence: Portugal hasn't legalised drugs. But people caught with a quantity of drugs deemed for their personal use (roughly ten days' supply) are sent to a local dissuasion commission panel.

The one I attended consisted of a social worker and a legal expert and they were looking at the case of Joanna, a heroin addict. The commission has the power to issue fines - while no longer a criminal offence, possession is still prohibited in Portugal - but the user here is addicted to drugs, so a fine is ruled inapplicable. The commission encourages her to go into treatment by offering to suspend other sanctions.

Some remain unconvinced that the new philosophy is working. The police officers I met on patrol in one of Lisbon's more "notorious" districts question the statistics, particularly the suggestion that decriminalising drugs has caused drug use to fall. There is clearly frustration that people who were villains yesterday are victims today. But there's also annoyance that in roughly a third of cases, drug users fail to attend the commission hearings when police send them there.

In the eight years since Portugal shocked the world with its drug policy, the idea that users need care not punishment has swept across Europe. In 10 EU countries, possession of some, if not all illegal substances is not generally pursued as a crime. In Britain, while officially the use of banned drugs is a criminal offence, Ministry of Justice figures (cited in UK Focal Point report [908Kb PDF]) show that 80% of people dealt with for possession are given a warning or a caution. Less than 1% - around 1,000 people a year - go to jail.

Portugal's government is proud of its drugs policy. The prime minister stresses his personal role in its introduction, claiming the results are conclusive and the philosophy is popular.

Some question aspects of the system, but what Portugal's controversial experiment has demonstrated is that, if you take the crime out of drug use, the sky doesn't fall in.

PS: Interested readers might also look at some of the briefing papers issued by The Beckley Foundation, including The Effects of Decriminalization of Drug Use in Portugal [529Kb PDF].

Not the sentiment of some soft-hearted liberal, but a clarion call to the world's governments from the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Antonio Maria Costa has long argued for the toughest action to control drugs.

"Drugs are not harmful because they are controlled - they are controlled because they are harmful," he proclaims in his passionate preface to the latest annual UN report on drugs.

He attempts to counter what he describes as the "growing chorus" among politicians, press and public that drug control is failing and that legalisation is the answer:

"I urge governments to recalibrate the policy mix, without delay, in the direction of more controls on crime, without fewer controls on drugs."

His argument sets up what some might argue is a bogus choice between total legalisation or tough criminal sanctions. But he makes it with conviction:

"Why unleash a drug epidemic in the developing world for the sake of libertarian arguments made by a pro-drug lobby that has the luxury of access to drug treatment?"

So far, so familiar. But what do you make of this?

"I appeal to the heroic partisans of the human rights cause worldwide, to help UNODC promote the right to health of drug addicts: they must be assisted and reintegrated into society," Mr Costa demands:

"Addiction is a health condition and those affected by it should not be imprisoned... in order to reduce the security threat posed by international mafias."

Calling for a "shift of focus" in law enforcement from drug users to drug traffickers, Mr Costa says:

"...arresting individuals and seizing drugs for their personal use is like pulling weeds - it needs to be done again the next day. The problem can only be solved by addressing the problem of slums and dereliction in our cities."

This attitude is a surprise from a man who has previously demanded that no quarter be given in the global war on drugs.

The UNODC recently congratulated the British government for reclassifying cannabis as a Class B rather than a Class C drug. But the only change affected by reclassification was to increase the maximum sentence for possession - from two to five years.

How does that square with Mr Costa's argument that "drug courts and medical assistance are more likely to build healthier and safer societies than incarceration"?

The idea that Britain's criminal justice system should decriminalise possession while retaining tough sanctions against those who sell illegal drugs is not a new one.

Anabolic steroids are Class C drugs, but it is legal to possess or import them for personal use. On the other hand, if people possess or import them "with intent to supply" it could lead to 14 years in prison.

The decision not to create an offence of simple possession followed advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs back in 1993. The committee told ministers that penalising users would be "undesirable as it would criminalise a whole group of people".

The Chief Executive of the independent UK Drug Policy Commission, Roger Howard, tells me that Antonio Maria Costa's comments "open the door to non-criminal sanctions and decriminalisation for simple possession".

He adds that "they also raise the possibility of non-penal or non-criminal sanctions for offenders committing low-level crimes to fund an addiction" while pointing out that "growing international evidence supports alternatives that address the underlying problems of drugs and social exclusion."

Next week, I am going to Portugal - which decriminalised the possession and personal use of all drugs in 2001.

A recent Cato Institute report on the policy said:

"None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass. In many cases, precisely the opposite has happened, as usage has declined in many key categories and drug-related social ills have been far more contained in a decriminalized regime."

I shall, of course, report back - so watch this space.

The grass court exemplifies not just a horticultural phenomenon but a cultural one: within its striped symmetry is a display of power as emphatic as a column of North Korean tanks.

But is the lawn's appeal now in decline, its potency failing in straitened and troubled times?

The small, rectangular sward at the centre of the championships is as famous and influential as any of the sports stars who have graced it.

Here, embodied in London SW19, is the Englishman's claim to have authority over nature; not just the triumph of good (grass) over evil (weeds) but an exhibition of how order may defeat chaos.

The English lawn was invented in the early 17th Century as a way for the Jacobean gentry to assert their superiority. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest and most powerful could afford to maintain the immaculate turf.

The traditional use of sheep or other livestock to graze pasture lacked the precision to create the closely-cut finish that amazed the rival gardeners of France and beyond. The perfect lawn was hand-produced by scything and shearing the grass.

So began an obsessive relationship between man and plant. And it does tend to be a man - there is something decidedly male about the botanic and geometric totalitarianism involved.

With the invention of the mowing machine in 1830, the lawn escaped the bonds of England's great estates and became a key component of the Victorian enthusiasm for games, sports and pastimes.

Croquet, cricket, bowls and lawn tennis required immaculate grass playing surfaces and the art of lawn-making was developed and exported around the world along with imperial expansion.

However, domestic dominance was largely retained because a key component of a soft lawn is soft weather - drizzly English rain.

In the 20th Century the United States, in keeping with its acquired super-power status, mobilised the masses to defy this metrological handicap and strive for global lawn domination.

The American Garden Club convinced its members that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful lawn: "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged".

A battery of fungicides, insecticides and herbicides were deployed. Ten million sprinklers sprinkled.

In suburban Britain, no garden was complete without its square of striped green, tended to within an inch of its life. The lawn had become a ubiquitous part of the English landscape, as this map of Wimbledon from 1933 shows.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club had only moved to its Church Road site 11 years before, but the courts were encircled by other examples of professional lawn construction - the bowling green, the cricket square, the golf greens on the Wimbledon Park course.

Gardens of homes to the south of the club would almost certainly have boasted lawns front and back - framed by a few roses, perhaps. This part of SW19 was lawn central.

Is the English love-affair with the lawn fading, though?

At the Chelsea Flower Show this year, not one of the show gardens featured a lawn. "I would advise someone with a small garden to use artificial grass if they insist on a lawn" presenter Alan Titchmarsh tells me.

This strikes me as cheating, missing the point.

"We like our stripes", he concedes. "There is something therapeutic about the repetition involved in caring for a lawn. We mow it today knowing that in a week we will have to mow it again. People like that."

But his fellow presenter Joe Swift articulates the anti-lawn argument. "Lawns are basically mono-cultural - they really are not that great for biodiversity." He could have added that they consume huge amounts of water and for most gardens are almost impossible to maintain without chemicals.

Joe tells me how he feared a lynching a few years ago when he advised the Islington Gardening Club to dig up their lawns in favour of something more interesting. But I wonder if the reaction would be as negative today.

With US First Lady Michelle Obama ploughing the White House lawn to plant organic vegetables, with climate change making lawn maintenance more problematic in Britain, with the fashion for the natural and with a global economic downturn, it may be that what was once a status-symbol is now a little bit naff.

The pampered lawn looks increasingly like an unsustainable relic from an era of excess.

The most pampered of all, of course, is the golf green. In an academic paper published in 1993, Professor Wolf Grossmann explained how a survey of 52 golf courses on Long island in New York had revealed that "collectively they applied 21 different herbicides, 20 fungicides, and eight insecticides annually, totalling around 50,000 pounds of active chemical ingredients".

He quoted the Chief of New York's Department of Environmental Conservation Joseph Okoniewski: "If you scraped a golf green and tested it, you'd have to cart it away to a hazardous waste facility".

That said, I was out with my mower this weekend, decapitating the daisies and skidding on the moss that approximates for turf in my postage-stamp garden. It is a pretty sorry excuse for an English lawn, but I did feel a slight sense of pride as I inhaled the summer-sweet smell of fresh-cut grass and sized up my stripes.

The image of Centre Court in 2009 is courtesy of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. You can see the full map in 2D and 3D format at the Wimbledon website. The image of Wimbledon in 1933 was provided by the London Borough of Merton.

Amid highly charged and chaotic scenes inside the Yarl's Wood detention centre on Wednesday afternoon, two officers were injured - one claims to have been bitten, another stabbed in the neck with a pen. Children were vomiting and weeping as a number of men were marched away.

Ethol then took nine-year-old Olger and seven-year-old Renee into a side room and instructed them to pray.

It was the dramatic end to a week when the desperation of those facing deportation boiled over.

The Singo family is from Malawi. Their claims to stay in Britain have all but come to an end after living for the past five years in Leyland near Preston in Lancashire. They were active members of a local church and the children both attended the scout troop. Melchior worked at the local hospital; Ethol had a job in Tesco.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of their residency application, the family has been shown support by people in Leyland.

A church newsletter shows what can happen when people are asked to choose between friendship and the system:

"The PPC and the monks think that it is our Christian duty to support them in their hour of need, and we know how many of you are concerned for them. There will be fund-raising events happening. As usual this Sunday we will attempt to talk to them through the computer."

It seems clear that, this week, Melchior's resilience snapped. After staying with his family for over a month in Yarl's Wood, with the threat of imminent deportation hanging over them, he was among twenty detainees who took part in what is being described as a hunger strike.

Ethol, who I spoke to last night, says it was a period of "fasting and praying", but it was undoubtedly a challenge to the system. There were demands from a number of the families held in the centre for better healthcare, but their decision to boycott the centre's canteen and to move their mattresses into the corridors looks to many like a protest borne of desperation.

It was clearly a potentially dangerous situation for the staff at Yarl's Wood, too. Children and parents were sitting and lying around the centre and staff could not clean or go about their normal duties.

They had tried to calm the situation with the offer of one-to-one meetings with any detainee who had a grievance or a problem about their treatment. However, a small number of protesters had convinced the rest that they should all stick together. Their sit-in would continue until someone from the Home Office addressed them as a group.

According to Ethol, with the impasse continuing, the management from the private security firm Serco decided to take action just after lunch on Wednesday.

"At about 2.15, twenty to thirty officers came in, rushing to where were sitting," she told me. "They were wearing black and white Serco uniforms. Someone was filming it all."

Ethol was having her hair braided by another detainee and her two children were sitting playing cards when the operation began.

"They saw it all happen. People were being sick everywhere, throwing up, crying and screaming. My children were really traumatised."

The Home Office described the operation this way:

"Officers separated a small number of detainees from the general population who were disrupting the normal operation of Yarls Wood. The separation was conducted by staff trained in conflict resolution. It was undertaken with the utmost sensitivity and there have been no injuries to detainees."

Ethol and the children were escorted from Yarl's Wood that evening and taken by van to Kingsley House near Gatwick. They were apparently told that Melchior would join them shortly afterwards.

In fact, he had been taken to Colnbrook near Heathrow. Ethol's attempts to contact her husband were rebuffed, one officer telling her that her husband was not allowed to make or accept any calls. I am told that the UK Border Agency later apologised for what it accepted was a mistake.

What strikes me about all of this is how easy it is to demand deportations and tough sanctions against those who attempt to live in Britain without permissions, and also how hard it is for those professionals charged with making the system work in the face of the emotions and apparent desperation of those caught up in it. Particularly the children. (It is Ethol Singo's birthday today.)

PS: The Children's Commissioner for England, Sir Al Aynsley-Green is urging the UK Border Agency to rethink its treatment of children caught up in the deportation process following his hard-hitting report which I posted on recently.

That may be why recent government figures showing a big fall in homelessness received pretty much zero coverage.

We have been constantly told that it stands to reason: recession = more people homeless. So the alternative story was spiked.

It is, I admit, unexpected. I am at a housing conference in Harrogate today, and when I told delegates about the statistics, jaws dropped. They didn't know. It didn't compute.

• a 15% fall in people declaring themselves homeless to the local councils in England between January and March compared with the same period in 2008;
• a 26% fall in the number accepted as homeless;
• and the proportion of that dwindling number of cases which were down to people defaulting on their mortgage is also down - less than 3%, lower than at any time since 2007.

So where are the "middle-class homeless" we were warned about? Where are the thousands of rough sleepers the charities told us would be on the streets?

Leslie Morphy, Chief Executive of Crisis, stood at a soup kitchen last December and said "our fear is that as the recession bites in the new year, we are going to see more people in the same situation as those relying on our Christmas centres today".

Shelter offered a similarly gloomy prediction - soaring numbers in temporary accommodation.

Well, the number in temporary housing was actually 17% lower at the end of March than it was a year earlier - more than a third down on where it was in 2004.

The much-trumpeted policy that the government was relying on to stop the most vulnerable families losing their homes and going through the trauma of repossession was the £285m Mortgage Rescue Scheme.

But the number of households in England which have accepted an offer through the scheme in its first four months is precisely two.

Yes, just two families have a roof over their head thanks to MRS, so ministers can hardly argue that that explains the fall in homelessness. (A similar scheme in Wales has been a little more successful, but would not affect the English homelessness stats.)

So there is a mystery.

Last year, repossessions hit a 12-year high at about 40,000. Now the Council of Mortgage Lenders is suggesting that this year may see 75,000. Perhaps the January-to-March data reflect the lull before the storm.

Even so, it seems odd that England has apparently escaped the kind of scenes being witnessed in America: tented villages of homeless people; motels requisitioned to house the destitute.

I recently attended a Cabinet Office briefing on the likely impact of the recession at which Tony Blair's former adviser Geoff Mulgan reminded the audience that homelessness actually went down in the last recession too. The private rented sector came to the rescue, he suggested. But he also offered a more sociological explanation: that British people are more tolerant and generous when times are hard. (See also the Young Foundation's The Receding Tide: Understanding unmet needs in a harsher economic climate, for which Mr Mulgan wrote the preface.)

Look at the main reason people gave for finding themselves without a roof over their head: 38% said it was because parents, relatives or friends were unable or unwilling to accommodate them.
It is far from ideal, but perhaps families are putting up with surplus children and grandchildren because they know how frightening it is to be homeless in a recession.

So I offer you a Map of the Week which tells the story of a dog which has not yet barked.

Homelessness acceptance rates are down in every region of England, with the biggest falls in the north west and the east Midlands, down 38% and 34% respectively.

The north east had the smallest decrease, down 9%.

The area with the highest proportion of its households which are homeless is London (0.9/1000), while the south east and south west of England have the lowest (0.3/1000).

Sometimes it is the stories which don't get written that tell the tale.

After the debacle over the use of knife crime statistics last year, one would have thought that ministers might have learned their lesson.

But I am reliably informed that when the National Statistician Karen Dunnell went to the Government Equalities Office last November and told them that their way of calculating gender pay differences might be confusing and potentially damaging, the GEO ignored her and published anyway.

So instead of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) pay-gap figure of 12.8% (hardly something to crow about), the department put out a press release in April this year which stated that women are paid, on average, 23% less per hour than men.

Now a letter has been sent to Harriet Harman by Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the official watchdog on the use of government stats), saying that her use of the 23% figure "may undermine public trust in official statistics" and "risks giving a misleading quantification of the gender pay gap".

The GEO's version of events is rather different to that of my source. They claim that they "ran the 23% past the ONS and they approved the calculation".

They may have ticked the maths, I pressed, but did they approve the use of the figure? "As far as I am aware," said a spokesperson, "no-one from the ONS has ever suggested we should not use the figure." However, the official promised to check.

What the GEO and ONS agree is that the UK's official statisticians are currently reviewing how they can best present the gender pay gap - a review which is ongoing.

Both the ONS and the GEO number come from the same data source, but the equalities department and Britain's top statisticians interpreted them very differently.

The 2008 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) attempts to provide the detail needed to get a true picture of how men and women fare in the workplace. For me, this is a key table:

Comparing men and women who work full-time, the gender pay gap is 12.8%, the ONS preferred measure.

Looking at part-time workers, women actually do better than men: their hourly rate is 3.4% higher than their male counterparts.

But when you add the two together, because part-timers get paid less than full-timers and because there are nearly four times as many part-time female workers as there are male, the gap appears to jump to 22.6%, which the GEO rounds up to 23%.

The GEO justifies its approach to me in a short statement:

"The 23% gender pay gap figure used by the Government Equalities Office includes both full and part-time employees. With women representing over three-quarters of the UK's part-time workforce, we believe this figure gives the fullest picture of the country's gender pay gap."

Nowhere in the press release, though, is the point made that those part-time workers are actually outstripping men who work part-time.

There is clearly some quiet fury at the ONS that Harriet Harman should have apparently rebuffed the country's foremost statistician. My source tells me: "The most important point is that the GEO has no statisticians inside it." The question, then, is: who did approve the 23% figure? One of Ms Harman's officials promised to find out for me, but did say that the decision was made "across government".

If one accepts my ONS source's version of events, this was not a professional difference of opinion between two statistical experts. Harriet Harman's officials preferred their in-house interpretation of the data to the independent and professional one because, one might assume, it made the case for their controversial Equalities Bill look a little stronger.

Attached to the letter from Sir Michael Scholar are the notes from the Monitoring and Assessment team at the authority which investigated the case. This suggests that it is not just the GEO which may occasionally get political with the numbers.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission refers to a gender pay gap of 35.6% for women working part-time. It comes to this conclusion by comparing the mean hourly earnings of female part-time workers with those of male full-time workers.

As the Statistics Authority document so delicately puts it:

"While we see value in providing a range of measures to present the differences between the earnings of women compared with men, a gender pay gap that compares the hourly earnings of women part-time employees with men full-time employees needs particularly careful explanation and justification if it is not to mislead."

Today's poll for the BBC reveals a nation which has lost patience with its Parliament. A remarkable 85% of people want to strip MPs of their power to police themselves. They would prefer an independent judicial body to scrutinise the activities of members, an idea which turns democracy on its head.

Such is the crisis of confidence in the Westminster system that, instead of elected representatives controlling Parliament, the public apparently prefers unelected judges. Only 8% of people positively oppose the concept of external scrutiny - although one suspects that many, if not most, MPs would side with the 8%.

It is one thing to feel angry at politicians on the fiddle, quite another to blame the Parliamentary system and demand such revolutionary reform.

Six out of ten voters support the idea of an independent inquiry into the whole expenses scandal - however much it costs and however long it takes.

Again, this reflects a belief that only people from outside the Westminster bubble can be trusted to sort out this mess.

Three years ago, just 46% of people said that they thought that MPs used their power for personal gain. Today, it is 78%.

The poll reveals an electorate which believes in large measure that MPs are liars and cheats while our system of Parliamentary democracy is in desperate need of radical reform.

Not since the heady days of the Tory sleaze scandals in the mid-nineties have so many voters said that they think the system of governing Britain needs substantial improvement - 35% felt it did in 1995 and 37% think so now.

If there is any positive news from this poll, it is that 84% of people still think members need expenses in order to ensure that people from all walks of life can become MPs. Some hope too for those politicians who emerge unscathed from the scandal - asked whether they trusted their own MP to tell the truth, 40% agreed they did (compared with 20% who thought MPs generally were honest).

On a sunny day in SW1, visitors pose in front of the Palace of Westminster smiling for the cameras. Across the road on Parliament Square, visible protest is limited to a few anti-war protesters and a handful of Tamils.

But the picture painted by this poll suggests that there is nothing benign about the British people's relationship with its Parliament at the moment.

Surrounded by the paraphernalia of security - counter-terror barriers, concrete blocks, and armed police - the Palace of Westminster has not in living memory appeared so separated from the people it supposedly serves.

Deep distrust of our democratic system comes just at the time when the country needs to trust its representatives to steer them through an economic crisis. It would be unwise, perhaps, to underestimate the danger we may be in.

Watching the final of ITV's Britain's Got Talent this weekend, I saw a stage for everything that is tolerant and inclusive about contemporary British society and identity.
The winners proclaimed multi-racial roots in their name.

Diversity's success spoke of something we should never forget about our country. While the press and our politicians too often demonise "gangs" of young men in their baseball caps and hoodies, this group from East London and Essex danced for the nation with discipline, wit, intelligence and joy.

The hard work and humility on display were at odds with the common portrayal of youth.

When the voting public was asked to select an act to represent Britain in front of the Queen, a million people chose Diversity.

Look at some of the other finalists: the 12-year-old singing sensation Shaheen Jafargholi may have an Iranian name and father, but the lad from Swansea is being hailed as the next Tom Jones.

Comedy dancers Stavros Flatley featured a man with "Cyprus" tattooed on his chest.

But the performance of Demetrios Demetriou and his son Lagi surely emanated from a very British school of clowning, an act built upon gentle self-mockery and plain daftness.

No-one suggested they were too Greek to represent Britain.

However, if you are a professional footballer, it appears that you can be too Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish to represent Britain.

The news this weekend that only English players will be available to play for the GB football team at the 2012 Olympics means brilliant young footballers from other parts of the UK will not get the chance to go for gold.

The decision was made by football associations worried that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland might lose the chance to win the World Cup on their own.

Britain's Got Talent, but when it comes to playing for team GB, only English footballers are allowed on stage.

With warm, southerly winds over the bank holiday weekend, the extraordinary annual journey of these fragile looking insects suddenly hit Britain and experts think it may break all records.

"We have all been stunned at how quickly it has all happened. We were expecting them to arrive and suddenly with the good weather - Bang!", Dr Martin Warren from the charity Butterfly Conservation tells me.

"All the signs are that this will be the largest ever migration of Painted Ladies to the UK."

They have been spotted as far north as Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland and hundreds have been sighted in central London.

An estimated 18,000 were spotted flying past Scolt Head Island on the Norfolk coast on Monday, passing at 50-a-minute over a 400m front yesterday.

Source: Butterfly Conservation

A Spanish researcher had predicted that numbers could be unusually high.

Constanti Stefanescu reported seeing hundreds of thousands emerging in North Africa in mid February and beginning their long flight north.

They were seen in large numbers in Spain during April and a few weeks later in France.

It is thought that heavy winter rains in Morocco allowed good germination of the caterpillar food plants this year, but experts think that global warming explains increased sightings of the Painted Lady over the past few decades.

The butterflies, with a 3-inch wingspan, manage an average speed of around 30mph. They don't swarm like bees - butterflies tend to be solitary insects which may explain why there is no official collective noun for them.

Suggestions I have seen include flight, flutter, kaleidoscope, rabble and rainbow but perhaps, in honour of this year's invasion, readers might like to propose a suitable word.

The last really big migration to Northern Europe was in 1996 when Painted Ladies were spotted in the North of Scotland and even in Iceland and Greenland.

There is a mystery to be solved too. Apparently no-one has ever witnessed the return migration of the Painted Lady around September/October time.

We assume they do go back, British winters are too cold for them and their genes are said to be needed back in the Atlas mountains.

The returnees would be the children of the spring migrants - their parents, exhausted after their journey, will survive only a few months.

So the appeal goes out - Butterfly Conservation wants people to record their sightings now on the map AND remember to do the same in the autumn if they see these dogged migrants heading south.

The charity says that butterflies are important indicators of the health of an environment. "In profusion they show us that nature is in healthy balance".

Surprising, some might suggest, that so many were spotted in Westminster last weekend.

You can help them track the Painted Ladies here.

The accusatory finger is also pointed at the large-scale institutions they ran, the dread-inspiring Industrial Schools which warehoused vulnerable children in Ireland for a century and more. Institutional life in these huge, regimented establishments led to "institutional abuse," the report concludes.

Despite calls in the mid-1930s for boys and girls to be integrated into mainstream education and the wider community, little heed was taken. A "deferential attitude" to the church meant that children were sent to industrial schools in order to help the priests pay their bills.

The system was designed around the needs of the institution rather than the needs of the child.

Today's report points out that while in England vulnerable children were increasingly moved to smaller more family-like settings from the 1920s, in Ireland the Industrial Schools thrived.

However, as we know, British care homes were to prove far from immune to institutional maltreatment themselves. After a series of horrific abuse scandals, exposed from the 1970s onwards, children's homes fell out of favour in Britain - although, as you may have read, a recent Parliamentary report recommends more vulnerable youngsters be looked after in such settings (Time to bring back children's homes?).

It is not the institution that is to blame, the argument goes. It is the lack of scrutiny. In Ireland, today's report tells us that "the system of inspection by the Department of Education was fundamentally flawed and incapable of being effective."

As we have seen in the City of London and in Westminster, when any institution is allowed to operate without adequate oversight, moral decay can spread.

Priest or financier, politician or nun - the saddest conclusion from the stories of the past few days and months is that when people have power and are confident they are not being watched, no-one can be trusted.

Without effective scrutiny, institutions rot.

In the City of London and the city of Westminster, the two grand neighbours that retain power in our capital, the imperious pillars buttressing our systems of finance and politics have crumbled before our eyes.

As they toppled, the curtain was torn away and, as in the Wizard of Oz, we saw that the "great and the good" were really no better than the rest of us.

In some ways, worse. Shielded from the harsh disinfectant of publicity, disease and infection had spread like swine flu.

Amid the gloom, too many politicians and bankers had become blind to the greed and corruption. Now pallid bodies stumble into the light, mumbling apologies with heads bowed.

But where was the Grub Street gang when it mattered? Where was I? Journalists have some questions of their own to answer, I suspect.

With some honourable exceptions, the Parliament press lobby, of which I was briefly a card-carrying member a decade ago, was too close to see what was happening. The rest of the pack was too far away.

The scandals of sleazy spin doctors and dishonourable members which have so shocked the wider populace were woven so artfully into the fabric of the Palace that those who walked its corridors never noticed.

The gilded traditions which gave authority and mystery to our institutions were tinsel that distracted eyes from the decay. A dash of ermine, an ounce of history and a golden coach possess almost magical qualities.

The Speaker, in his black and gold robe with lace frills and jabot, is the "Presiding Officer" of the House of Commons, the man or woman with a hand on the tiller of our democracy. He or she chairs the body that appoints staff, determines their salaries, and supervises the administration of the House. The Speaker shapes the debates that decide the law of our land.

And yet, outside the Westminster village and before this week, how many would even have heard of Michael Martin? His power, his strengths and weaknesses are all but invisible to the public who are not given the chance to interrogate him - even at the ballot box. To this day, those who might conceivably ask the tricky questions - lobby journalists or MPs - either cannot or dare not.

It has been a similar story in the Square Mile. With again a few notable exceptions, no-one was publicly challenging the ways of the financial world - taking crazy risks with other people's money while trousering vast sums. To do so would be to risk ridicule - and who wants to look like a fool?

I remember being initiated into the press lobby at Westminster and being quite shocked by all the etiquette and procedures. To ask the question "why?" was to show yourself up as naive and unworldly.

The pomp and grandeur, protocol and tradition that frame our financial and political affairs were designed to inspire respect and trust in institutions. But now the respect and trust have been so trashed, the trappings of power appear gaudy and cheap.

The spell has been broken.

Can we re-lay the foundations of our financial and political institutions for the 21st Century? Can we rebuild the trust and respect, brick by brick? As we try, perhaps we should remember that windows are as important as doors.

Everyone? What about the local scout troop?

Flexible working sounds so sensible - a modern progressive employment structure which fits in with people's busy lives. But it can also translate as "unpredictable hours", making it much harder for people to commit to activities outside the workplace.

Once upon a time, 9 to 5 was the working day, not an occasional shift pattern. People knew where they would be at what time. Tea on the table at 5.30. Darts match at seven. Bed at a quarter past ten.

Fixed hours meant that you could plan ahead. You could make commitments. But now staggered hours, flexitime and job shares make it difficult to promise to be there every Wednesday night. Ask the Scouts.

Tens of thousands of young people, as many girls as boys, are desperate to join Baden-Powell's youth movement - but are stuck on the waiting list.

Why? Because not enough adults are available to lead the troops. There are currently 33,000 youngsters who want to join but cannot because the organisation is 7,000 volunteers short.

Why? Partly because the image of the scout leader has been tarnished. Too many abuse scandals. Too many woggle jokes. Too uncool.

But the Scout Association thinks that the biggest problem is not image. It is that being a scout leader involves too great a commitment.

Scouting is actually going through a small renaissance. Numbers enrolled have risen slightly in the last couple of years (the brown line and left-hand axis above) and the number of adults working with young people has also gone up a bit (the blue line and right-hand axis).

But, shockingly, supply cannot meet demand in a society which consistently complains that there's not enough for young people to do.

What the two lines reveal is that in 1985, there were roughly five scouts for every adult. Today, it is closer to one adult for every four scouts. And the reason, I am told, is that you need more volunteers to cover for those who are busy doing something else that night.

If today's troops had the same level of staffing as 24 years ago, there would be no waiting list. As I was waiting to go on Radio 2 this lunchtime to talk about community spirit, who should I bump into but the new Chief Scout himself, Bear Grylls.

"Hello Bear", I ventured. "Do you think flexible working is one of the reasons for the shortage of volunteers in the association?"

"I am not interested in problems," he replied. "We need to come up with solutions."

It is a philosophy that probably works very well when Bear, a professional adventurer, is confronted by a grizzly. Maybe some positive thinking will be effective with this problem too. "We need new ways of encouraging people to volunteer," he continues, "to realise that there's something in it for them."

The "something" is not a new flat-screen TV or a free celebrity make-over, of course. It is the fulfilment and meaning that comes from putting something back, from being part of the local community, from making a commitment. And keeping it.