EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

Cameron's welfare speech: he cannot be serious

After an omnishambolic few months, Mr Cameron was desperate to demonstrate a sure touch on the home front. He displayed the opposite

Is David Cameron serious? That is the devastating question posed by his set-piece speech on welfare, and the weekend of prime ministerial posturing before it. After an omnishambolic few months, Mr Cameron was desperate to demonstrate a sure touch on the home front. He displayed the opposite. There was a want of any sustained argument, and so little grip on the detail that many wheezes on his wishlist are unlikely to come to pass.

In and among many dodgy assertions, Mr Cameron did communicate the odd important fact. One was that the single biggest slice of the so-called "welfare" budget – some £110bn – is in fact consumed by pension benefits. Any serious fiscal conservative would have linked this observation back to their narrative about containing costs, but after volunteering it the prime minister blithely went on to defend every last winter fuel cheque and free bus pass as jolly good things. He paid no heed to this month's official data which charted a tide of poverty ebbing away from the old and towards young adults, nor to the emerging gulf between the generations which one of his more thoughtful ministers has written a book about. He had nothing to say about the biggest single prospective pressure on social security bills – the move of the demographic bulge of boomers into retirement – and instead drew a ludicrously sharp line between virtuous expenditure on the over-65s and the vice of spending on anyone else. As a rising pension age sees punishing welfare rules imposed on men and women well into their 60s, this division will be revealed as arbitrary and cruel.

Having singled out younger adults for the big stick, Mr Cameron wielded it their way without any suggestion of strategy. In some passages he bemoaned the creep of means-testing for stifling ambition, while in others he demanded new means tests – for example in allocating council homes. If the big picture was confused, there was frightening disdain for the detail. The prime minister howled about the perversity of reducing housing benefit for families whose adult children land a job, apparently blissfully ignorant of how his own government had increased this particular charge by 27% in both 2011 and 2012, with another 27% rise pencilled in for next year.

Then there was the centrepiece of the weekend spinning – the abolition of housing benefit for the under-25s. With the cosy middle-class assumption that mum and dad can always welcome back jobless twentysomethings, this sounded like a suggestion from a gin-soaked colonel in his clubhouse. Does Mr Cameron even know that he recently legislated for cuts to force council tenants to downsize once adult children flee the nest? What about youngsters whose parents are mad, bad or dead? The PM talked about the special circumstances of foster care leavers, but what about those leaving prison? Would it be a good idea to have them roaming the streets? And what about the thousand who get the coach out of dead-end towns and find a job but don't earn enough to put a roof over their heads without some help from the state?

Assuming No 10 was not actively misleading the country about what the PM had wanted to say in advance, some level-headed official must have realised there were no answers to all the questions and replaced the explicit proposal with vague words in the final script. But the thought only got so far as it did because crucial policies are being dreamt up on the basis of focus groups. The political strategy is clear – opening a second front in the class war may just divert enough bile towards the bottom to protect those at the top smarting from Nadine Dorries's "posh boy" charge. Punishing scroungers may be popular in general terms, but support will shatter if the government lacks the competence to sort the "deserving" from the "undeserving". Glitches with the universal credit and a crazy new council tax rebate may soon destroy faith in its ability to run benefits in practice. The theory should be the easy bit, but Monday's speech revealed that Mr Cameron is shaky even on that.

Silvio Berlusconi: please, not again

Another political comeback for the disgraced media tycoon is not as improbable as one would like to imagine

Could it really be? A return for Silvio Berlusconi only a year after he was bundled out of office to the strains of "hallelujah" from the crowd outside the presidential palace? Another political comeback for the disgraced media tycoon is not as improbable as one would like to imagine. There are powerful forces against a Berlusconi comeback: the majority of his people are against it, and in this age of protest votes, the man who had governed Italy for eight of the previous 10 years would be hard put to reinvent himself as the face of change.

But as always, this is not the whole story. The billionaire has seemingly limitless amounts of cash to throw at a campaign. And in recent comments in which he talked up the advantages to Italy's export-led industry of trading again in lire, Berlusconi is on to a potential election winner. Italy is more Eurosceptic than it often appears. While it remains pro-European in the sense that Brussels is seen as a more consistent provider of good governance in Italy than Rome, the euro itself is associated with inflation. Today it has become the icon of stagnation. Mario Monti's popularity, as the technocrat whose sole task is to reduce the budget deficit, has fallen off a cliff. Italy has no cash in the coffers to stimulate growth, as was demonstrated by a long-awaited growth decree. It was approved by cabinet only after it had been bled dry of its more radical provisions by the treasury. And yet without growth, Italy will be unable to repay its ever rising mountain of debt. The euro has acquired something of a bad smell and Berlusconi is far from being the only politician to latch on to the thought that Italy could regain growth through a return to the lira, devaluation and an export-led boom. But he could yet position himself to be its chief beneficiary.

The other path would be to put an end to some of Italy's more baroque restrictive practices. One of them occurred on platform 15 at Rome Ostiense station, when passengers boarding a new high-speed train operated by the private NTV operator were confronted by a two-metre-high steel barrier erected by the Italian rail network. It claimed that NTV's service centre, the station's former air terminal, was still governed by a clause in the contract that required the former air terminal to be separated physically from the station.

Barriers like these are beyond the capacity of a technocratic premier eyeing a future career in Brussels to deal with. Beneath him is a rightwing party whose vote is crumbling and a leftwing party that should win the next election, but for the protest vote that is going to the Five Star Movement, led by comedian and blogger, Beppe Grillo. All political bets are off. Hence the worrying twinkle in Berlusconi's eye.

In praise of … Lonesome George

In his 100 years of life, George survived pirates, whalers and goats, which ate their way through his habitat

In his 100 years of life, George survived pirates, whalers and goats, which ate their way through his habitat. But he could not escape his destiny, which was to be the last of his subspecies, the Pinta Island tortoise. So when George was discovered stretched out in the direction of his watering hole on Sunday, Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni was no more. Attempts to get George to breed produced two bursts of optimism, and headlines like "Lonesome George's eggs are fertile!", except that none of them turned out to be viable and the sobriquet stuck. But George does leave a legacy, an active breeding programme for the Galapagos's giant tortoises. Thanks to the formation of the Galapagos national park and the Charles Darwin Foundation, Galapagos tortoises have a future. With Lonesome George, they never knew what the problem of mating was. One researcher said he seemed to just run out of steam. That can be said of many a male.