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The EU’s roadmap for transport focuses on the EU’s vision for a competitive and sustainable transport system as part of the single market and how it is to achieve this through research, innovation and new regulation. The four key targets developed are: growing transport and supporting mobility while reaching the emission targets (a reduction of 60% on 1990 carbon emission levels by 2050); an efficient core multimodal network for intercity travel and transport; a global level-playing field for long-distance travel and intercontinental freight and clean urban transport and commuting.

Amalgamating the growing need for transport with strict climate change targets is one of the biggest challenges facing the Commission. The white paper suggests that by 2050 ‘conventionally-fuelled’ cars should be phased out from cities, 40% of fuels in aviation should be low-carbon sustainable fuels, and more than 50% of freight that currently travels by road should be transported by sea or rail.

With proposals for the construction of a high-speed rail network to facilitate the ‘majority of medium-distance passenger transport’ by 2050, the paper acknowledges that ‘[c]urbing mobility is not an option’. Nonetheless, balancing the boom of the aviation industry and the desire of European citizens to travel with the necessity of reducing emissions will inevitably be problematic. Indeed, air traffic has been predicted to double by 2020.

However, while the emphasis rests on both cutting the EU’s reliance on fossil fuels and simultaneously improving mobility and transport links by 2050, a number of green groups have pointed to the lack of time frame for implementing these goals. Greenpeace criticised the paper for leaving the responsibility of change to future generations, and automobile manufacturers have also been quick to slam the paper as short-sighted and ‘arbitrary’ regarding the future of their industry.

Whatever your view on the paper, it is hard to deny that European transport is at a crossroads. As the paper states, ‘[o]ld challenges remain but new have come’. There are strong arguments for reducing the current reliance on oil, with its environmental effects and fluctuating prices, and there are excellent reasons for improving intercity links and revamping rail networks. It’s also promising to see safety and security featuring; the paper envisages that road fatalities should be near zero by 2050.

While the paper has the potential to be an engine for real change in the future of transport, the Commission has, as of yet, presented a mere chassis of a strategy. The test will be whether these laudable intentions develop with real potential or break down at the first hurdle.

That Labour’s economic policies need to be rethought is accepted by Mr Miliband, he has stated that his party has ‘a job to do to win back economic credibility’. However, in the same interview he stated that annual state borrowing of 2% of national income was ‘manageable’. I think that this is debateable, but I think the more important question is: is it desirable? The financial crisis and in particular the continuing problems in the Eurozone have stoked interest in national debt and deficits. The UK currently has a national (public) debt of £971.0 billion at the end of November 2010, or 65.2% of GDP. It has been forecast that in 2010 the UK ran a budget deficit of over 11% of GDP or £19.9 billion. Coupled with this the UK is a net debtor country according to its international asset position, that is the UK’s debts to foreigners exceed the debts of foreigners it holds.

To recap then, the UK has a steadily growing level of debt, and last year it added to this debt by running a large deficit. The question is: can we expect the UK to continue to increase its level of debt? Well if previous performance is anything to go by then yes. Since the last recession in 1992 the UK economy has grown every year, yet every year except for 4 years between 1998 and 2002 the UK has run a current account deficit, that is it has added to its debt.

Now then, is a 2% annual deficit, financed by borrowing, in Mr Miliband’s words ‘manageable’? Perhaps one way to judge this is to look at countries whose debt and deficits are clearly not manageable, for instance, Ireland, Greece and (debatably, but increasingly likely) Portugal. These three cases are different, however, in all three cases it is possible to say that the country’s debts were judged to be unmanageable because they were too large in relation to the country’s expected growth prospects. Creditors, or possible creditors, look at a country and assess whether it is a good idea to lend it money. Reducing this to a simple but relevant illustration, if you decided to lend someone £20 then you would need to assess whether they could possibly pay this money back. If the person had an income of £20 a day and outgoings (on rent and food) of £10 a say then clearly they would have enough money to pay you back relatively quickly. However if they had an income of £0.01 a day and outgoings of £10 a day then you would expect them to have trouble paying off your debt and may decide that they were too risky to lend to.

This is what many creditors felt about Greece, and are starting to feel about Portugal. They felt that Greece’s income (its growth prospects) were too low in relation to its outgoings (its deficit and debt levels). The question is: will creditors start thinking this about the UK? The current Government clearly hopes not, and its austerity measures are supposed to indicate that the UK is committed to reducing its deficit.  Evidence, such as the cost of borrowing for the UK, suggests that international creditors are still not too wary about lending the UK money. In this sense if the Government lowers the deficit from 11% to 2% then one can assume that the UK will still be able to attract creditors to finance its deficit, it will have a ‘manageable’ deficit.

However, I contend that this situation would be far from desirable. The previous Labour administration ran deficits at a time of high economic growth, propelled by Britain’s comparative advantage in financial services, which occurred at a boom time for the industry. The country’s future growth outlook is not so rosy, financial services will struggle to achieve previous levels of growth, and there is a great deal of uncertainty about the growth rates of British manufacturing and services. The seemingly casual way in which Mr Miliband assumes that annual state borrowing of 2% is manageable suggests that, like his predecessors, he will endorse borrowing regardless of Britain’s growth prospects.

If Mr Miliband wants to ‘win back economic credibility’ he would be wise to reject the previous Labour Government’s default acceptance of deficits, and concentrate on producing credible economic policies to stimulate British growth as this will determine what is a ‘manageable’, and indeed desirable, level of UK borrowing.

might the victorious abolition of Primark’s padded bras for children inadvertently result in the airbrushing of basic sex education from primary classrooms?

In a little reported letter on the 2nd June, Michael Gove wrote to Ed Balls to set out the spending decisions he has made as Secretary of State for Education. In the Annex which follows it is detailed that £7 million of savings are to be made by not implementing the Rose review findings and scaling back departmental initiatives on PSHE, Citizenship and RE. Sir Rose’s primary curriculum review had initiated the introduction of statutory PSHE from age five – it had intended to introduce a framework which would ensure children learnt about the onset of puberty and the basics of where babies come from while at primary school.

Labour’s attempt to topple England from its top spot in the tables of teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe has cost over £300 million since 1999 by most estimates – it may transpire that £7 million makes few inroads into this. But one hopes initiatives such as Clued Up and Meet the Parents in Hackney, where the pregnancy rate among under 18s has fallen from 77.1 per 1,000 to 57.1 per 1,000 over the last decade, won’t be cut. Blair’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy set itself the ambitious target to halve the 1999 teenage pregnancy rate by 2012. It will likely fall far short: this year, the rate was around 40 per 1,000 conceptions among girls under 18 – in 1999, the figure was 46.

Yet Labour’s record looks laudable amid a long term focus on teenage pregnancy rates. These have always fallen under administrations which put the issue on the political agenda and allow access and advice regarding preventative options to proliferate. Birth rates among the under 20s tumbled from heights of around 50 per 1,000 in the late 1960s and early 1970s to 29.4 by 1978, a time when separate and informal provision of contraception was made available for young people, and it became free on the NHS. The most significant rise recently was under Thatcher – when the birth rate among the under 20s rose from 26.9 per 1,000 in 1983 to 33.3 in 1990. This was a time of cuts to family planning budgets, attempts to restrict abortion and generally lower efforts to encourage people to access and use contraception.

The move to make sex and relationship education a statutory subject from age five is one of the least desperate interventions to try and lower teenage pregnancy – an approach which seeks to ensure that all pregnancy is informed. Later interventions will always be necessary, but with adequate education, one can hope they will be less so. It is surprising therefore that the opponents to last month’s Marie Stopes commercial about access to abortion, and the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE)’s new guidelines to allow emergency contraception to be offered in advance (and perhaps in bulk) are often also those who object to more sustained and comprehensive sex and relationship advice within schools.

Advocacy of sex and relationship education in primary schools is about removing the shame and sniggering which surrounds the scattergun style of sex education in British schools; depressingly, we know that 80% of teachers don’t even feel comfortable teaching the subject. Introduction of the subject early aims to ground and naturalise the subject by emphasising the biological principles which underpin it.

I wonder how keen the OECD would have been to make such a  call had the methodology it employed to compute the quantities of leisure enjoyed by the two sexes not been quite so obviously flawed.

Included as work, and therefore not as leisure, were all shopping, child-care, and time given over to the maintenance or embellishment of personal appearance. All these forms of unpaid activity are ones in which women expend considerably more time than men. They are, also, notoriously forms of activity in which many women engage for their own sake. Whenever so undertaken, they should be counted as leisure, not work: but they were not in the OECD report.

But the OECD report was guilty of a far worse methodological defect. It took no account of relative life expectancies of the two sexes. Computations of amounts of leisure were made on the basis of self-reports of men and women, hence over periods in which they were both alive.

However, the amount of leisure people enjoy varies over their life-cycles. They tend to enjoy more of it in the later years of life and of which women tend to enjoy very many more.

The OECD report acknowledges this methodological defect, by conceding that: ‘To obtain a true picture of leisure over the life cycle, longitudinal data comparing the entire life cycle would be warranted. However, such data are not available.’

Women enjoy on average several more years of life than men, years that, by definition, occur at the end of the life-cycle, when the ratio of leisure to work is high.

If the extra quantity of leisure that women tend, on average, to enjoy as a result of living longer than men were factored into the equation, I wonder just which sex would be found to enjoy less of it.

I also wonder why such a computation was not made.

It does not seem impossible, or even very difficult in principle, to devise estimates of the average extra amount of leisure women enjoy on average as a result of living longer.

Might the reason such estimates not have been factored into the equation been because of the adverse effect they would have had in terms of proving women victims of a social injustice in this domain?

Whatever the reason for their non-inclusion, it constitutes such a gross omission as to vitiate the entire report.

Lest it be thought that men owe their shorter lives entirely to their own less prudent and temperate life-styles, it should be noted that a substantial part of the difference in the shorter average life-expectancy seems down to biological differences between the sexes and not to behaviour.

As much as almost a third of the difference has been estimated as due to genetic differences. Given that the present life-expectancy of girls in the UK is 81.6 years and that of boys 77.4 years, it would seem women may expect to enjoy more than a year of extra life at a time of life when work commitments are least.

Not only that. That extra year of leisure is enjoyed by women when they do not seemingly have to put up with the company of the other sex, unlike men who never seemingly can look forward to such a period of life.

All told, I suspect that feminists would do best to bury this report. Otherwise they might draw the need to equalise leisure between the sexes to the attention of the equalities brigade. Should that happen, and the computations be done correctly, they may find on their hands a New Equality Bill that demands that, for the sake of equalising leisure between the sexes over their life-cycles, until the age of retirement women should have to work 1.5 hours for every hour that men do.