. . . on a Heathrow pandemic, the supportive state and Stockholm stress

Why is Britain - compared with the rest of Europe and even with Mexico, where the disease apparently originated - so badly affected by swine flu? I have not yet read of anybody pinning the responsibility on Gordon Brown, but it cannot be long before a Daily Telegraph columnist blames it on the welfare state, arguing that state benefits and soft living have caused our immune systems to degenerate. Alternatively, the Telegraph crowd may find a way of blaming it on trendy education and the amount of hugging that goes on during lessons on personal relationships. Guardian writers may wish to blame public transport, which, thanks to privatisation, now reproduces the conditions of First World War trenches where (according to some accounts) the 1918 flu pandemic was incubated.

The true explanation is more prosaic. Next to Atlanta (Georgia) and Chicago, London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport, with more than 60 million passengers a year. Gatwick is also in the top 30 for passenger traffic. If you take out domestic flights, Heathrow is easily the busiest airport in the world. As anybody who has waited for summer flights there will testify, you couldn't design a better site for transmitting viruses if you tried.

Nor, given the scale of the traffic and the numbers involved in flight transfers, could you design a better site for allowing thousands of unwanted migrants to slip in. Whether or not we think immigration is desirable, all attempts to restrict it are a waste of time and energy, particularly if we keep building more airport terminals and runways. For the same reason, the government never had a chance of "containing" the swine flu virus. Politicians must know these things. Why do they not sometimes admit they are powerless?

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"The private sector pays the public sector's wages," writes a Times columnist, adding her weight to the growing attempts to create a culture war between the two. The statement is nonsense. Roads, policing, street lighting, refuse collection, education, training and health are just a few of the services, provided through taxation, that allow the private sector to operate. It is often said that the United States has a much smaller public sector - proportionate to national income - than any European country, as though this were evidence of virtue. In fact, the difference is almost entirely explained by America's lack of a comprehensive public health service. This does not mean that the US spends less on health; companies and their employees pay privately, taking a higher fraction of American GDP than the NHS takes of ours.

It should be axiomatic that capitalism cannot work without a strong state that provides a framework of law and enforceable contracts. But the claim that the public sector is in some sense parasitic is particularly absurd just now. The banking industry would have collapsed over the past year without state support. As far as financial services are concerned, it would be more accurate to say that the public sector is paying the private sector's wages, to say nothing of its bonuses.

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Here is a tip for travellers. Keep away from countries when they take their turn in the rotating EU presidency. An otherwise pleasant break in Stockholm this month - a city I strongly recommend for its waterways, green spaces and long summer days - was punctuated by the racket of police sirens and helicopters, and by prolonged road closures, creating enormous jams in a country where traffic normally flows freely. My wife and I abandoned a taxi after it took us 20 minutes to travel 500 yards.

Sweden has just started its six months in the chair and our brief holiday coincided with a meeting of EU home affairs ministers.Wherever they met -often merely to sip cocktails, as far as I could establish - the nearby streets swarmed with police. I realise it would be embarrassing if ministers responsible for fighting crime and ensuring security were themselves victims of assassination or terrorist attack, but is it really necessary for governments to inconvenience everybody else to such an extent? At the very least, they could hold fewer cocktail parties and dinners.

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I know it sounds hard-hearted to say it, but why is everyone so shocked that the British army has lost 187 men in more than seven years of operations in Afghanistan? I have no statistics, but this suggests to me that fighting in Helmand Province isn't much more hazardous than careering around British roads on motorbikes, which is what the same young men would probably be doing if they were at home.

If you join the armed forces, you might have to go to war, and then the enemy will try to kill you. Surely that is explained to army recruits.

Afghan civilians, on the other hand, did not sign up to any kind of war. There are no reliable figures, but their deaths at the hands of US and British forces are unlikely to be fewer than 10,000. Yet we hear very little about them.

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Since his team won the Lord's Test, everybody assumes Andrew Strauss's decision to declare the England innings closed on Sunday morning was the correct one. I would contest this by reference to what I call Finkelstein's Law, after the Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein who, defending the decision to invade Iraq even after the dire consequences became evident, stated: "You cannot . . . judge the quality of a decision by its outcome.

Strauss was wrong because he gave Australia a chance of winning. The Sky TV commentators - mostly former England captains - always
say "enough time" should be left to bowl the other side out. In fact, England won with about five hours to spare. It would have taken Australia another three hours, at most, to win the match. If captains, past and present, don't understand such simple equations of time and runs, it may explain why England have lost so often in the past 20 years.

Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman from 1998 to 2005

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