Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.
What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble wi