Another division has recently become apparent in this fragmenting nation of ours: the one between the retail sector and the public services.

In the former prices are plummeting, with clothing, electrical goods, furniture and even some foodstuffs and drink now considerably cheaper than they were only a few years ago.

If you shop around (which is what more and more people are doing), this is now a bargain-basement sort of country whereas a decade or more ago it was considered to be an expensive place compared even to the United States.

To set against that, though, there's the alarming rise in gas and electricity prices, the inflation-busting council-tax increases, the steady increase in every other sort of taxation, rising water charges, dearer vehicle and personal insurance, houses prices going up and up along with rents.

On top of that, as state education standards fail to rise and the NHS heads deeper into crisis, a growing number of people are turning to private education (or at least private additional tuition) and investing in some sort of health-insurance scheme.

There is a big, growing and unavoidable extra burden on just about every household. So where do we cut down elsewhere? On those other items over which we have some control, obviously - the things we buy in the shops, stores and supermarkets which are doing the only thing they can to tempt consumers who are trying to make the money they have left over go further. They're competing by cutting prices.

As this belt-tightening is affecting the whole social scale, even posh people are joining the common herd in the quest for value for money.

They might still be able to afford to pay high prices, but they're deciding (to use that old Yorkshire word) that they can't "thoil" to pay it - ie bring themselves to fork out for something that seems overpriced.

All of which suggests that in its redevelopment, Bradford would be well advised to avoid too many twee arcades of upmarket designer shops (assuming, of course, that any of those are on the plans) of the sort which, in other towns and cities, seem to have too few customers and too many units unoccupied.

We already have a reputation as a city where the shoppers' money goes a long way, where stuff is piled high and sold cheap. Now the rest of the country is going to have to go the same way, it would perhaps be unwise for Bradford to try to shift in the opposite direction.

Cut the bullying

Can there be a more annoying woman in politics than Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt?

Not since Virginia Bottomley occupied the same post under the Conservatives has anyone managed to raise my hackles to such a extent.

When Hewitt (pictured) is on television smugly and patronisingly proclaiming that things have never been more ticketyboo in the NHS, don't you just long for the big Monty Python foot to come down and splat her?

She insists that billions more money has been poured into the health service and tens of thousands more nurses have been taken on. And I've no doubt evidence is available to back that up.

But why, then, are wards being closed and operations cancelled up and down the country while a number of trusts are so deeply in debt that if they were private companies they'd be heading for administration or bankruptcy?

If the funding is there, and the staff are there, why are things so obviously getting worse rather than better? That's the question Patricia Hewitt, as ultimate head of the massive NHS management team, should be addressing rather than trying to bully us all into joining her in denial.

It was reassuring to see that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott wore a protective suit and gloves (as our picture above shows) when he nursed a baby giant panda in a Chinese zoo during a trip to promote better relations with Britain. Well we wouldn't want any contamination risk, would we? Giant pandas are, after all, a threatened species.

The last laugh

With what glee some sections of the popular press greeted David Beckham's admission, in a Sunday newspaper interview, that he has problems helping six-year-old son Brooklyn with his homework!

Leaving aside the fact that the footballer (pictured) should know better than to give lengthy interviews to newspapers that have him and his wife high on their list of people they love to lampoon, what's wrong with owning up to being a bit baffled by new teaching methods?

I well recall, back in the 1970s, struggling (and failing) to get to grips with the Initial Teaching Alphabet and the New Maths, educational experiments which were foisted on our children.

They were a mystery to someone who learned to read the old-fashioned phonetic way and remembered the times tables by chanting them repeatedly in class.

Beckham might not be the sharpest pencil in the box when it comes to lessons, but he does know how to earn around £5 million a year - which is rather more than his mockers make, even at the dizzy heights of national newspaper journalism.