Essentially this means that manufacturing and services in Europe will be but a shadow of their former selves, and that those products/services that can be provided from the East either in manufacturing or the design and construction of software, and/or call centre/back office facilities will be sourced in the cheapest possible area.In the medium and long term – not to speak in certain cases of the short term – this bodes ill for Europe, including Britain and Ireland.The question is what can be done about it? There are a number of responses, not the least being therecognition both by Europe and the US that they are engaged in a war for economic prosperity and survival as assuredly as they were in the Second World War. Of course everyone will say it can’t happen, that we, the people, can’t get radical change on the scale needed, that the mythical “they” won’t allow it. But events in France and Holland this week have shown that there are times when the people can overthrow the political ?tes, that there are times when they can demand and get radical change.The writer was Director General of the BBC, 2000-2004. Unless Europe and the US act swiftly, they are in danger of losing not only their manufacturing but also large parts of their services industries to lower cost competitors in Asia. That needs to report not to the government of the day – turkeys don’t vote for Christmas – but to Parliament.And then it’s up to us. But if that is the case, we need the checks and balances that go with it. With pitifully low turnouts at two consecutive elections, widespread apathy about politics in general and a deep mistrust of, and sense of betrayal by, the Prime Minister, something has to be done.So what do we need to change? Well it could be that Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair were right in identifying that we need strong leaders who can take decisions in the world we now live in; maybe we do need a presidential system.

In politics there are no other jobs to go to, hence the power of patronage.When in a decade or so historians take a long hard look at the Labour government of 2001-05, and come to terms with what the Iraq adventure meant, it could well be that the past four years will be seen as a turning point in British democracy. It enabled him to stamp on his department a high standard of scholarship and to imbue it with an ethos of trust and respect. His close colleague Robert Carson, in his presentation speech when Kenneth received the Royal Numismatic Society’s Medal, characterised his keepership as one of “urbanity and affability”. Those of us who came to the department during his keepership have a similar memory of being welcomed into a family of scholars. However, Jenkins had a deep loathing of bureaucracy and felt its burden heavily. He encouraged and inspired his staff, but irritated the museum authorities immensely by refusing to play the bureaucratic games of an entrenched Civil Service administration.Perhaps Jenkins’s most widely consulted publication is his masterly survey of Greek coinage, Ancient Greek Coins (1972). Translated into German and French in the year of its publication and reissued in 1990, it stands as the most comprehensive introduction to the subject of its generation.

It will not outlast his more detailed studies, but stands as an exemplar of accessible scholarship in its breadth and depth of presentation.When Jenkins retired in 1978 his colleagues presented him with his own portrait in the form of a medal by Fred Kormis, whose work Kenneth had long admired. The burden of office had had its toll and Jenkins’s morale went into decline after his retirement, and received a further downward push when his wife Cynthia died in 1985.The party to celebrate the publication in 1992 of a Festschrift for him and his friend and successor Robert Carson, Essays in Honour of Robert Carson and Kenneth Jenkins (edited by Martin Price, Andrew Burnett and Roger Bland), was one of his last appearances in the numismatic and museum community. He found it hard to be among so many well-wishers and seemed genuinely amazed at the applause which greeted him and the honour in which he was held.His natural humility and gentleness and his kindness and generosity to his colleagues were being celebrated as much as his contribution to his subject.Joe Cribb. The House of Commons is full of Labour MPs anxious to get on, and under the British system they can only do so by appealing to their party leaders. Watching a series of Labour MPs churning out the Downing Street line on Iraq was pitiful, but of course the reason they were prepared to do it was that the Prime Minister and those around him controlled their futures.In most areas of life, if you don’t get on with the boss or don’t think you are making progress, you just change your job. Any interest group or lobbyist trying to change a bad Bill knows only too well that their best chances are in the unelected House of Lords, where the Government whips are less effective and debate is more intelligent, rather than in the Commons where, in the last parliament, some terrible legislation was passed on the nod, pushed through by the whips.What is perfectly clear is that many of the failures of our democratic system as shown up by the Iraq saga are directly related to the Prime Minister’s power of patronage.

What happens now is that the Government reaches conclusions in rather small groups of people, and there is insufficient opportunity for other people to debate, dissent and modify.”In the same interview, Lord Butler also pointed up the second major failing of democracy in the time of the Blair government – the failure of the legislature to hold the executive in check. As a result, we’ve had government without one of the essential checks and balances.Lord Butler, the former head of the Civil Service who chaired the committee which looked into the intelligence failures in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, summed up the failure of cabinet government in a recent interview with The Spectator: “The Cabinet now, and I don’t think there is any secret about this, doesn’t make decisions … Members of his Cabinet – with the notable exceptions of Robin Cook and, to a lesser extent, Clare Short – should look back on their failure to ask the right questions and to ask for the relevant documents with shame.In doing so, this Cabinet failed to fulfil one of its central roles in the British democratic system – to hold the Prime Minister in check. What Mrs Thatcher and later, and to much greater effect, Tony Blair have both demonstrated is that a powerful – some would say ruthless – leader with a big majority in the Commons is largely unaccountable in our political system.Looking back now, we can see that from the very beginning Tony Blair was determined to rule without proper cabinet discussion – in all areas, that is, except the economy where, it seems, Gordon Brown has been equally dominant. Nothing illustrated Blair’s ever-increasing control more clearly than the way the decision to go to war in Iraq was taken by a Prime Minister who was able to delude himself and the nation that third-rate intelligence on Saddam’s WMDs justified going to war.What is remarkable is not that the Prime Minister tried to suppress the information and subsequent debate in Cabinet, but that his colleagues allowed him to get away with it.