When it comes to political quotes, cynics have the last word

After the bar-code fiasco, a number of designers came up with alternatives for the European flag. One design showed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's profile, on the ground that Rousseau was, in some sense, the father of Europe.

Rousseau's romantic-but-wrong opening to The Social Contract ("Man is born free but everywhere is in chains...") leads into murky waters as he develops the "general will" that was to run society. Liberté, egalité and fraternité were compulsory. An early version of the slogan ended in "...or death!", that is: "Be free, equal and brotherly or we'll cut off your head". Such an interpretation at the time would have been considered cynical and would have led to the cynic's execution.

It was but a philosophical hop from Rousseau's "general will", to Maximilien Robespierre's "single will" and then a skip to Adolf Hitler's "ein reich, ein volk, ein Führer". No, Rousseau's is the wrong sort of Europe, I feel.

You can tell from all these quotations that I've been reading Antony Jay's Oxford Book of Political Quotations. It's quite excellent.

When asked why they went into politics, current MPs only say one of two things, either "to make a difference," or "to make things better". Benjamin Disraeli cut through this cant by telling John Bright: "We came here for fame!"

I asked the journalist Matthew Parris what reasons, other than wanting to make things better, might drive politicians. He thought for a moment and said: "To hurt other people." That deserves inclusion in a later edition.

Lord Hugh Cecil in 1912 is quoted as saying: "The socialist believes that it is better to be rich than poor, the Christian that it is better to be poor than rich." That puts Tony "Asian Babes" Blair and his Christian socialism into a difficult position (with its ankles round its ears, perhaps). I suppose he could argue that the poor were richer than they'd been before, and to St Paul he'd spin the fact that British poverty had increased throughout his stewardship.

Mr Jay also gives us the words that were actually on the piece of paper that Neville Chamberlain had in his hand in 1938, announcing "peace with honour". The paper, signed by Chamberlain and Hitler, said this: "We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again."

Were Hitler reproached with misleading us he would have been indignant. "I never said we weren't going to war, nor even that we didn't want to. Read what I said. A symbol of our desire. Read the Naval Agreement. I don't believe anyone was misled. I never wanted to go to war with Britain: it wasn't me who declared war."

"Dying in the last dyke of prevarication," is a quote pertinent to Stephen Byers. My bet, incidentally, is 2-1 on Mr Byers still having his Transport job this time next year ("Ambition can creep as well as soar").

Time to wake up to this silent killer

Health scares are all too often treated with a cynical lack of concern by the press. The campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO), the invisible killer, must be taken more seriously.

This colourless, odourless, tasteless substance kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO but the dangers don't end there. Companies dump DHMO into rivers and oceans and nothing can be done to stop them because the practice is still legal.

This toxin is also known as hydoxl acid and is the single largest component of acid rain. It contributes to the greenhouse effect.

It causes immense environmental damage, principally erosion, it accelerates corrosion in metal and has been found in excised tumours of terminal cancer patients.

When oh when will the Government do something? If only to give this lethal substance a more recognisable name? H2O, would do, I suppose.

Silly joke. You've got better things to do. We're all guilty.

The colour of their money

* The crackdown on mobile phone thefts is an eye-catching initiative with which Tony "Spunk Sluts" Blair is associated. Street crime has been ruining Government targets for reducing overall crime. That is a greater crime than street crimes; as a result phone thieves can now be imprisoned for five years.

There is something hysterical about this. Mobile phones cost, what... £80? A day's wage for an average working man? To go to jail for five years for stealing £80 harks back to an earlier period in Britain's penal code.

A labourer in 1724 earned nine shillings for a day's work, so Daniel Defoe tells us in The Complete English Tradesman. I've been trying to track down the judicial penalty for a nine-shilling theft in 1724, and have the feeling that, with luck, you might have got away with a five-year sentence after transportation to the colonies.

Optimists can only assume these modern five-year sentences won't – like so many other things the Government says will happen – happen.

Forty thousand criminals, Iain Duncan Smith pointed out to Tony "Purple Passages" Blair last Wednesday, had failed to complete their sentences but only 39 have had their benefit docked – another eye-catching initiative that came to next to nothing.

* "A chancellor who dyes his hair will trim every statistic." That was the thinking behind Gerhard Schröder's court case (you think our media are obsessed with trivia?). The German Chancellor felt accusations of hair-dyeing undermined his credibility. Having won his case, journalists who refer to the chance of dyed hair face, I don't know, death.

We're all still wondering about Gordon Brown's hair. It is remarkably, lustrously, defiantly black. Is he to be accused of trimming every statistic? Can we assume anything else? The latest evidence emerges from the Budget. About half the eye-catching increases in doctors, nurses and beds were actually announced two years ago. How are they doing so far? Of 7,000 new beds promised in 2000, 714 have appeared.

It's why we need a rolling 10-year plan.

* Labour's Stephen Pound is one of the three wittiest members of the Commons, it's not clear whether that's a good thing. A sense of humour in politics can be fatal. Nonetheless, at the Old Testament Prophets' lunch the other week he interjected on Paul Routledge's Old Testament report describing Michael Mates taking his trousers off on the plane, coming back from some junket. When Pound heard the words "rent his raiments" he said, off the bat, "Raiment's Revue Bar". Very witty. Wasn't it, though? Not very funny but very witty.

At the same lunch, the leftie Lynne Jones denounced him for being a sycophant and he said promptly: "You're absolutely right, but you always are, and may I say how very well you put it?" That wasn't very witty but it was very funny. Even Lynne Jones laughed. No, honestly.

* On Monday evening, in the middle a bravura performance by John Bercow winding up for the Opposition on National Insurance contributions, Mr Pound intervened to praise Bercow saying: "I can understand why, on public service broadcasting in America, he is already considered something of a cult." There was a nicely timed pause while increasingly ribald laughter bubbled up. "Perhaps that lost something in translation," he concluded.

* Some parliamentary questions that will never be answered: "How much money will Network Rail (the successor body to Railtrack) get from the Government? And how much larger is that figure than what Railtrack was asking for?"

Why Lord Levy needn't worry

* The Labour fund-raiser Lord Levy has failed to declare a £100,000 consultancy fee from an American company that builds shopping centres. There are enough possibilities of confusion over dates and times and what-was-signed-when for it to cause no more than a ripple.

Remember when the former paymaster general Geoffrey Robinson was accused of taking 200,000 of Robert Maxwell's tainted pounds? He denied everything, and continued to do so even when the author Tom Bower published an invoice for £200,000 from Robinson's company to Maxwell. It was stamped "PAID". Mr Robinson said he couldn't find any record of it. The committee let him off. Mr Robinson had earlier found fame for having offshore tax-haven accounts even while getting legislation through against such accounts.