After all, he has been handed a hideous legacy by his boss and predecessor at the Treasury, Gordon Brown. Most of his previous blunders and u-turns have been attempts to sort out problems created by Brown.

But Mr Darling has this week displayed staggering incompetence in his approach to the housing market. The property sector is absolutely vital to economic confidence and yet in his bid to shore it up blundering Mr Darling has caused havoc with it, leaving it in a worse state than ever.

By floating the idea of a stamp duty holiday, but refusing to confirm it, Darling has injected massive uncertainty into an already stagnant market. Prospective buyers will now sit on their hands until the Chancellor makes clear what his stamp duty proposals are. Yet he does not propose to do so until the late autumn.

So, instead of reviving the volume of sales as was his intent, Darling has actually stifled it even further. Barely a house will be sold for the rest of the summer because stamp duty is such a massive component of the costs of moving and the prospect of

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Despite the Irish decisively rejecting the Treaty in a referendum, no major European figure has got the message.

Premiers and foreign ministers have refused to concede that their beloved European Constitutional Treaty must now fall and are instead engaged in a conspiracy to bully the Irish into holding a Zimbabwe-style second vote.

This week French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been in Dublin to apply the thumbscrews. Last week Gordon Brown did his bit to crank up the pressure on the Irish by ratifying the treaty in double-quick time.

Sarkozy, whose government currently holds the six-month presidency of the EU, has publicly denied calling for a second referendum, but in such a way as to make it clear that he considers one inevitable.

“I never said Ireland had to organise a new referendum,” he said. "I said that at some stage or another the Irish had to be given the opportunity to give their opinion, they had to give their opinion.

"I never said there had to be a referendum. I didn’t say on what question there would be a vote. I did no

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How many times have we heard that reaction in the last few months from grieving parents whose teenage sons have been stabbed to death?

The trouble is, it never is an end to it. It always does happen again. Nobody's death seems to change anything about the basic facts of life on Britain's streets.

In many places gangs of out-of-control teenagers are free to roam and pick off targets at will. Some people will get away with a savage group beating, others are murdered with blades.

Yet a Government elected to be "tough on crime" thinks the answer is eye-catching "knife amnesties" which result in reassuring pictures of bins full of blades that are no longer on the streets. The trouble is that the people who are likely to use knives do not hand them in.

Knife crime among youths can be beaten, but not without provoking squeals of outrage from the civil liberties lobby and the likes of ultra-soft Children's Commissioner Al Aynsley-Green.

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Gordon Brown and his little helper David Miliband keep saying that the Irish should not be bullied into holding a second referendum.

But they are still pushing the Bill ratifying Lisbon through our Parliament. And they will not publicly declare Lisbon dead despite EU rules being quite clear: a new treaty must be supported by all member states or it falls.

This stance, by a major European player like the UK, does pile extra pressure on little Ireland to change its mind and ministers know it. They are being deceitful.

A far more courageous stance would have been for Gordon Brown to simply and openly declare that the Lisbon process is dead, that Britain will have nothing more to do with any sovereign powers being transferred to Brussels and that people across the EU quite obviously do not believe in a United States of Europe.

Such a stance would have won Mr Brown plenty of plaudits and perhaps even a boost in the opinion polls.

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But what an admission for a Labour government to make. It is an acknowledgement that the welfare state has created dependency and destroyed self-reliance on an epic scale.

With food and fuel prices continuing to rise and little prospect of them falling again anytime soon, the living standards of most hardworking families are in decline.

It was never right to create a financial incentive for millions of able-bodied adults to become dependent on the state, but now it simply cannot be afforded.

There are only two significant ways in which the living standards of the many can be protected. 1) make the public sector much more cost-effective and responsive to the needs of consumers (including reforming public sector pensions) thereby freeing up cash for tax cuts 

2) reform the welfare state to reduce the dependency culture and get several million people back into economic activity and making a contribution to national income instead of being a drain upon it.

Labour cannot do either of these things as it is now effectively owned by the

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