Imaginative counter-action needs to be driven by a core of SAS-style anti-fraud officers

Imaginative counter-action needs to be driven by a core of SAS-style anti-fraud officers. Benefit savings from successful anti- fraud campaigns should be ring-fenced and used for tax cuts and increases in child benefit.The growth of individualism is not going to be arrested by talk about rebuilding the community. Welfare has to be shaped so individual wishes can simultaneously promote new senses of community. The stakeholder welfare scheme proposed here does precisely that.

Real power is delegated to stakeholder boards - which should eventually be directly elected - running both the new insurance scheme and the universalisation of private pension provision. Stakeholder welfare provision ushers in a period of popular or social, as opposed to state collectivism.Only in this way can the country's burgeoning underclass be linked back into mainstream activities. But this programme will also appeal to mainstream Britain, where the old order of jobs for life has already passed. The uncertainty implicit in a flexible labour market needs to be countered by a certainty offered from a flexible welfare state.Extracted from "Making Welfare Work", Frank Field, published this week by the Institute of Community Studies, 18 Victoria Park Square, London E2 9PF, £10.. THERE was a time when compositors, coming to the word nuclear, could be relied on to tap out unclear instead, for the same reason that they tended to put casual for causal: they were unfamiliar with the word and thought subconsciously that it must be a mistype for the one they knew. Modern typesetters are more likely to make the opposite mistake, and turn unclear into nuclear, which has long been part of our everyday vocabulary, and is susceptible to punsters.

Before last week's White Paper on the nuclear power industry the Cabinet was reported to be split on the subject, naturally prompting the headline "Nuclear fallout". In fact the word has existed since the 1840s, well before the atomic age gave it its present meaning. Nucleus in Latin was the kernel of a nux, or nut, and had come into English in the early 18th century as a technical term for the heart of a comet, before meaning the core of anything. (For a time it could serve as the adjective as well, so that a skeleton crew would be a nucleus crew, not quite what we mean by a nuclear crew now.) Nuclear likewise began as a technical term, mostly to do with the innermost part of cells - it wasn't one of those general words later taken up by scientists and borrowed back later still by laymen as metaphors, like paradigm say, though specialists have often borrowed it from each other, with Freudians writing about the nuclear complex, phoneticians about nuclear syllables and sociologists about the nuclear family. Nuclear has spread itself since Hiroshima.

If anyone mentioned "nuclear war" to Rutherford he would probably have visualised a nucleus being bombarded by neutrons. We, on the other hand, forget the atom's miniature systems, and imagine the larger-scale horrors.Nicholas Bagnall. SO THAT'S it then, until VJ Day Bunting down, Dame Vera resting. But wasn't it wonderful, the way the nation recaptured the indomitable spirit that pulled us through? You will have your own outstanding image of the present paying homage to the past: a grandchild with a grandfather, the Royal ladies at Buckingham Palace, Cliff Richard giving his irrepressible all. The Captain's, though, came at the marvellous VE night party thrown by Emma Soames, sister of Nicholas, the dieting but not noticeably diminishing defence minister. Who there - Mick Jagger, Brig' Parker Bowles, King Michael of Romania, Big Nick himself - will ever forget the sight of Wafic Said, Middle East Middle Man, former Kensington kebab bar owner and comrade-in-arms (I use the phrase strictly in its colloquial sense) of Jonathan Aitken and Mark Thatcher, triumphantly waving two Union Jacks in the air? It made me feel proud.

Share the moment through my photograph. And while we're at it, I have some other vignettes that I think you will agree give a special flavour of contemporary Britain. 1)In the East End of London last week, drivers carefully steered round two Asian businessmen who had been shot in the legs by a gang of men wearing balaclavas. 2)In the West End, a man was threatening to jump from a third-storey ledge when a bulky figure resembling the character in the television series Cracker elbowed his way to the front saying "Let me through, I'm a police psychologist", and then shouted "Jump!". 3) Nelson's Column is to be floodlit, courtesy of a Hong Kong Chinese-language newspaper, which will have its name inscribed on posts around the column.n NOW, this new Sleazebuster Watchdog General, or, if you prefer, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, proposed by Lord Nolan to keep an independent eye on our legislators. You want to know who it will be; the Captain has been inquiring. Lord Nolan, I can tell you, has said that the post should not necessarily go to a retired judge. The second thing is that on Thursday night in the House, MPs, already blanching at the prospect of full disclosure of earnings, choked on their refreshments when a rumour swept round that Dennis Skinner was to take up the position Alas, just a rumour.