This will not be a trial, announces John Chilcot, chair of the latest inquiry into the Iraq war, and there will be no apportionment of blame, still less of criminal responsibility. Yet a trial is what we - those of us who consistently opposed the war - desperately want. We want dramatic cross-examination, men and women breaking down in public, cries for mercy, guilty verdicts, ruined lives, perhaps even a lynching or two.

The broad outlines of the Iraq story are already known: mistaken interpretation, shading into false representation, of intelligence material; misleading statements, shading into outright lies, about the stage at which the government resolved to go to war; inadequate preparation for, shading into complete indifference to, the aftermath of a military victory; improper pressure, shading into bullying, that persuaded the attorney general to change his advice on the war's legality. All the inquiry can do is elaborate on the details. If nobody has yet been sacked or criminally indicted - or even moved to admit they were wrong - over Iraq, it's not going to happen now.

The best we can hope for is an official apology, rather like the one that Gordon Brown has generously granted the people who, as children, were once exiled to Australia. The earliest we can expect that is around 2040, when everyone in power can happily apologise for events for which they bore no responsibility whatever.

Beyond the Palin
If religious faith helps parents cope, for example, with raising a Down's syndrome child, we should respect it, not sneer. But I find my mind boggling at Sarah Palin's memoir and its references to her weirdly personal relationship with God. Palin's popularity in the world's most technologically advanced society, despite her inarticulate manner and lack of political, scientific, geographical and even, apparently, theological knowledge, is unnerving. When I think of Palin I am reminded of a satirical novel by Frederik Pohl and C M Kornbluth, published in 1954. Human colonists on Halsey's Planet, faced with social stagnation, set off to Mother Earth, which their ancestors left 1,400 years earlier and which they assume to be inhabited by advanced beings. When they land, they find the technology of an advanced society, but an entire population, including politicians, unable to frame coherent sentences and murderously hostile to anybody who talks like a "wise guy". They eventually discover that the planet's infrastructure is maintained by scientists living underground in Australia who venture out, disguised as cloakroom attendants, to ensure the infantilised majority don't blow themselves up. If Palin becomes US president, my advice is to contact the cloakroom attendants.

Unpaid bills
Can anyone explain the point of the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, requiring the national debt to be halved in four years, and the Child Poverty Bill, requiring the eradication of child poverty by 2020? What happens if a Conservative government fails on both, which it will unless it reveals an unexpected commitment to re­distribution? Even more to the point, what if a Labour government fails to achieve these goals? If you hope for the relief of national debt or child poverty, it would be more fruitful to pray to Sarah Palin's hyperactive God than to rely on these preposterous pieces of legis­lation. At least He won't be issuing any self-justifying exculpations.

Grow up, baby boomers
You might also question the point of another inclusion in the Queen's Speech, the Personal Care at Home Bill, which is so complex that it hasn't the slightest chance of becoming law in an unusually short parliamentary session. But I have sympathy for the government's position. The bill proposes that, instead of being means-tested, home care should be free to everybody. Ministers have presumably calculated that, at next year's election, voters will: a) not have noticed the bill failed to go through and b) think that it also applies to residential institutions.

The middle-class baby-boomer generation has never grown up. Pay for care? Won't. Sell your house, now you're not living in it? Won't. Agree that what's left after your death should be subject to tax? Nah, don't want to! These people think they are doing their children a favour by ensuring they inherit estates intact, but are merely leaving them huge bills that will have to be paid from greatly increased general taxes or drastically reduced services in education, health and so on. The only way to treat such deluded fools is to pull the wool over their eyes.

River island
In January 1975, a bulk ore carrier on the River Derwent collided with Hobart's Tasman Bridge, splitting the city in two. Journeys that had taken a few minutes suddenly required a couple of hours. Residents on the underdeveloped eastern shore found themselves cut off, not only from friends and relatives, but from jobs, hospitals, theatres, cinemas and many shops. Marriage breakdowns rose sharply, as did crime, alcohol consumption and, more positively, borrowing from public libraries. Perhaps the effects on Workington in Cumbria, where the bridges were wrecked by the recent storm, will be less drastic. But I wonder if planners, when they go about their "zoning" of towns and cities, approving giant supermarkets and depriving whole neighbourhoods (usually working class) of the most basic local facilities, ever take account of these things.