As we all know one of the exceptions to free trade, all free trade, all the time free trade, is national security.

This could be viewed as a little reductionist, even concentrating too much on a tiny detail, but the entire point of this whole civilisation thing is to knit bobble hats for post boxes.

Do tariffs allow an outbreak of capitalist greed? The Lizzie Warren explanation? Well, actually, yes.

It is competition in a free marketplace - free in the sense that others may enter - that turns that greed driven capitalism to the consumer benefit.

No-one knows where Trump’s on-again-off again tariffs are going to end up. The only certain thing is that the rest of the world is in for an overdose of once-bitten-twice-shy, scrabbling for new supply-chains and trade relations amid a general atmosphere of increased distrust.

In our more dyspeptic moments we end up insisting that the Town and Country Planning Act, the entire idea of the Green Belt, is simply to make sure that none of these awful working class people, those proles, get to do anything in those rolling and admittedly lovely green acres of England.

It has been enthralling in a ghoulish way to watch Birmingham descend into a chaos of rat-riddled rubbish.

So, everything should be nationalised and run as an economic democracy. This is the rallying call at least.

An almost certainly mythical aptitude officer test set this problem.

So British governance is edging toward economic reality then.

Spending on people usually commands more attention from the political process than does spending on things.

As rather the originators of the privatisation idea - based upon the clear observation that the British State could not succeessfully squeeze a wet teabag - it is possible for people to question the idea.