It's a healthy development that MP John McDonnell has decided to stand against Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party (and consequently, for a while at least, the premiership) when Tony Blair finally skulks off, shamed, to become a dark episode in Britain's political history.

The assumption that Brown will simply take over with no election, at least among members of his party, is an alarming denial of democracy.

McDonnell, by all accounts, is a man who still has principles, believes there is much that is wrong inside his party and in the country and wants to be given a chance to try to put things right. One of the issues raised by him during a radio interview after he announced his intended candidature was of increased taxation on high earners. Apparently he thinks those earning more than £100,000 a year should pay 60 per cent against the current 40 per cent.

And why not? Let those who earn most pay more to fund decent public services for all rather than constantly trimming them back a policy which most seriously affects those who have least and are unable to make any sort of private alternative provision.

There's a huge and widening gulf between people on average income or less and the growing band of fat cats and gravy-train riders, particularly those who enjoy a high life on public money.

Among them are the top-ten management team at the BBC, who last year were given pay rises of between 11 and 31 per cent while most were also deemed to merit substantial bonuses as well. None of them earned less than a quarter of a million and the director-general copped for £609,000.

Not bad at a time when the corporation is in the process of shedding 4,000 jobs and limited the pay increases of the survivors to 2.6 per cent. But what else can you expect of an organisation which sees fit to pay Jonathan Ross £6 million a year? It's typical of the situation in an institutionally corrupt country in which grotesque inequalities in income are now accepted without murmur by an apathetic population kept docile on a diet of Big Brother and other mind-numbing TV trash.

It's time someone issued a wake-up call in an attempt to replace some of that apathy with anger. John McDonnell could be the man.

He might not win the leadership contest (the forces of darkness will already be starting to plot his downfall, dreaming up ways of discrediting him) but if he manages to make at least some members of the public think for a while about the shameful state of affairs that has been allowed to develop he'll have achieved something worthwhile.

The ties that bind The view of former Conservative minister Michael Portillo, apparently backed by a third of the British electorate, that England and Scotland should go entirely their separate ways is a dangerous one.

We live in a world which is becoming increasingly split into factions, many of which are at each other's throats. Countries should be striving to unite under a common banner rather than drifting apart (which is why the EU, despite its many faults, should be seen on balance as a good thing).

Those countries already bonded by ancient treaties should stay that way. The break-up so far of the United Kingdom was misguided. We should be doing what we can to reverse it rather than turning ourselves into Little Englanders with a potential, and historic, enemy just across our northern border.

Rose-tinted? Yorkshire Forward chief executive Tom Riordan must wear spectacles crafted out of a fortune-teller's ball if he can say, of Bradford, "with the re-energised city centre with the Broadway development you can really see the changes taking place..." as he did in a T&A interview this week.

Off I dashed to look but all I could see stretched out below me was the vast, cleared space and mounds of sifted rubble where Broadway, Petergate and Forster Square used to be, with nothing yet in the way of energy or redevelopment apart from a bit of low-key pipe-laying.

Pass the special specs please, Mr Riordan, so the rest of us can enjoy this preview of Bradford's brave new tomorrow, today.

Celebrating, with that Italian style... It was a privilege to be in Italy on the day their national team won the World Cup, above. There was none of the advance orgy of flag-flying that England had indulged in, but the second that final penalty went in the place went wild.

Cars with horns blaring and flags protruding from the windows drove up and down the promenade of the small lakeside resort where we were staying, with drivers and passengers waving at everyone they passed. Hundreds of pedestrians milled around, cheering and laughing in a good-natured outpouring of joy and pride that went on for about an hour and a half.

Then the police arrived and firmly but politely asked everyone to call it a night, which they did. The resort fell quiet again. The following morning any litter had been cleared away. The flower beds were untrampled. There was no broken glass, smashed windows or any other evidence of vandalism.

You couldn't help but wonder what fate an equivalent English resort might have suffered had things worked out differently and the cup come our way instead.