My colleague’s 72 year old mum in response to yesterday’s budget said something along the lines of this. ‘I feel so sorry for kids these days. There are no jobs, they are loaded up with university debt because the government doesn’t give them anything any more. And what do I do? I sit here with all these free things being thrown at me – winter fuel allowance, free TV licence, free bus pass, subsidised computer courses.’

She’s never had it so good and George Osborne is quite right to give her a little squeeze. In an ideal world benefits for the elderly would be means tested but the cost of that would defeat the purpose. It is not the raison d’être of the state to be handing out bundles of twenties to couples in their 60s living in million pound houses in Orpington when they aren’t staying at their estancia in Granada.

The classically British image of the elderly is of a sad old dear sitting alone by her electric fire which she is too poor to switch on. It’s very durable and hard to revise. The BBC Newsroom’s Rolodex is filled with ten of thousands of them ready to look anguished and frail when the telly crew turns up.

This isn’t the way things often are. Just ask those guys and gals down at Saga who are coining in the grey pounds. I’ll admit that when age is combined with infirmity which requires care at home things are not so rosy. We don’t look after the sick old very well in the UK and the advent of widespread senile dementia is going to be little short of calamitous.

It’s the elderly who have mugged my generation and for the coming Y plus Gen Z things are going to be even more dire as the oldsters demand we replace their knees, hips and fit Stannah stair lifts into their mansions. By the time I get to 67 the retirement age goalpost will have been shifted yet again. I’ll still be here banging out this stuff when I’m eighty plus. We’ll be back to the old days when you got two to five years on retirement in before you snuffed it.

So the well off old should quit whinging and count their blessings. They wouldn’t wish to be entering the world of adulthood in 2012.

So the Mob has got its way and is currently parading Stephen Hester’s head around the City on the end of a pikestaff. Metaphorically speaking. (To a banker his bonus is as vital as his head.) What this whole disturbing episode shows, yet again, is the disaster that often comes to pass when business and politics meet.  Hester is the one banker who has been beheaded because he was the one individual that government – urged on by the mob – could most easily humiliate and cut down to size. He is, after all, a government employee of sorts.

Except, of course, a civil servant he isn’t. You simply cannot run a bank – especially one which has a substantial investment bank included – as a public sector enterprise. RBS isn’t the NHS or English Heritage and never can be. It’s a nonsense.  The worse things get at RBS and the more politicians become involved in its operation the more likely it is we will never get our money back.  One thing is for sure – we may not have much confidence in the ability of politicians to run the country but their ability to run a bank is even more questionable.

A couple of other thoughts: how motivated would you feel today as you arrived at your desk if you were Stephen Hester? Would you be 100% fired up to give your all on behalf of the organisation and therefore the UK tax payer? How he must now feel about his decision to ‘help out’ by joining a bankrupt bank. I can just imagine the conversation with Gordon Brown’s people: ‘Great sense of duty… blah blah blah…  definite seat in the House of Lords… blah blah. Do the right thing.’ Well Hester has paid the penalty for being seduced. Who could blame him if he walks out? And the quality of the list of individuals to replace him will be pretty poor.

What this has done is ram home – if it wasn’t already glaringly obvious – that the majority of the UK population now loathes bankers with a passion and will do whatever it can to make their lives hard and indeed even bring them down. Well, fine.  Let’s chase them all out of town and see where that gets us. This morning, RBS shares were down to 27p, almost half the price the taxpayer paid for them in 2009 – a loss of £300m.  Public anger about high pay may be understandable but zeroing in on Hester will ultimately solve nothing.

This morning at 4.28 I was, as is frequently the case, woken by the first lumbering large Boeing or Airbus coming in from the Far East to land at Heathrow. The siting of an airport to the West of the City it serves when the prevailing wind is from the South West was a very dim idea indeed. But, as Heathrow dates back to the pre-jet era, nobody thought about this and the resulting sleep-disturbance it causes to millions is no laughing matter. Equally unamusing are the appalling levels of air pollution that exist at Heathrow.

Even if it was in the correct place, Heathrow is full. It operates at 98% capacity which means, as occurred last Winter, when we get a bit of snow all hell breaks lose and we become the air transport laughing stock of Europe. Gatwick has only one runway and is not a proper business airport. Stansted is a Ryanair ghetto miles from London with the slowest and most useless train link outside Afghanistan . Luton… Well, don’t get me started.

So we require a new airport and the Thames estuary is clearly the place for it.  The announcement this morning that the government is willing to do some research to consider it as a possibility is a good start. But there is a long long way to go. Where to stick a new alternative to Heathrow is an argument that has been going on for decades and I’m old enough to recall the fight against it being placed on Maplin Sands, an earlier version of Boris Island. It was the twitchers who were in the vanguard of the protest movement against that idea, as they will be this time round.

The infrastructure necessary to bring hundreds of thousands of passengers into central London each day from the estuary will be very expensive indeed. But building it will be a great economic stimulus and create huge numbers of jobs. By contrast if  we don’t do something fast we are in grave danger of being left behind as rivals in Holland and Germany eagerly suck air passenger traffic away from us. A recent GLA report shows that airline passenger demand is forecast to increase from 140 million to 400 million by 2050. We cannot just sit there and watch as everything clogs up to the point of standstill.

We’re supposed to be an outward-facing trading nation. Stuff doesn’t arrive on ships any more. People arrive on planes and gliding down to touch a runway in the Thames, our most ancient commercial waterway, is very apt.

Love it as much as I do, Italy is enough to drive even the most ardent admirer to distraction. As Swiss Tony would say, that Italia is a cruel and fickle mistress. We’ll come to the current economic and political cliff-hanger being played out in Rome and Milan in a moment but first a tale of a typically exasperated Venetian family.

A short while back an elderly couple from la Serenissima went to court in an attempt to get their 41-year-old son finally to vacate the nest. The exasperated mama and papa stated that although their son actually had a job he steadfastly refuses to leave home and demands that his parents continue to wash his clothes and get his pasta on the table at lunchtime and in the evening.

A lawyer from the Italian consumer association Adico sent the man a letter to warn him to leave within six days or face legal action via the Venetian courts who would be asked to issue a protection order for the parents against their son.

“We cannot do it any more,” the poor old boy was quoted as saying. “My wife is suffering from stress and had to be hospitalised. He [the son] has a good job but still lives at home. He really has no intention of leaving.”

This episode on the lagoon is symbolic of the sclerosis that afflicts Italy. This is what the new PM Mario Monti, “the most German of Italian economists,” will have to try to address.  Trying to get anything done, to move forward, to create or grow an idea or a business is painfully difficult. In Italy things simply don’t change which, especially to those visiting as tourists, is one of its principle attractions. The country possesses a bureaucratic attitude that creates a deadening inertia while providing perpetual, jealously guarded employment and the chance to retire in your late 50s on a nice pension.  You’ve never seen “jobsworths” until you’ve met the Italian version.

As a result the Italian economy has been virtually at standstill for the last decade. It will take a superhuman act of political will to get it growing again. This concerns us because, despite being stalled in a lay-by, Italy remains a large economy, big enough to bring the whole Euro edifice down in a way that Ireland, Greece and Portugal couldn’t because they were tiddlers by comparison.

There continues to be a deep culture of conservatism in Italy both in business and politics. There are powerful vested interests in its banks and businesses who will not welcome change. If you get frustrated by retail banking in the UK don’t even think about trying to open an account with the Banca Nationale del Lavoro. This resistance to change together with a national obsession with avoiding tax is something the Italians have in common with their  neighbours over the Adriatic, the Greeks.

Trying to get a decent job – indeed any job – in Italy is painfully hard. If you think that employment red tape is a hindrance to doing business here don’t even think of setting up in Parma or Palermo. (Definitely forget Palermo, as you are likely to encounter a whole host of other issues as you receive an unwelcome visit from various gentleman anxious, in return for a fee, to make sure that nothing untoward happens to you or your premises.) In the world of work the culture of the ‘raccomandazione’ or recommendation  is still rife. What jobs there are dolled out according to who you know and are related to rather than on merit

Italians will not find a huge change of attitude and behaviour easy. Just look at the way they “queue” as an example. Italians are richly amused by the religious way in which Brits patiently stand in line believing naively that it is the fairest way to get your turn. Only the simple-minded obey such rules. In fact, being a bit “furbo” or sly as you edge in from the side is widely admired as a trait necessary to get on in life over there.  And yet. And yet. And yet.

There is hope. There are so many things at which they are unsurpassed. They live in a place of unmatchable natural and built beauty. They have the most glorious cuisine in the world. They lead in style and design because no nation understands better the rules of bella figura. Just look at  MT contributing editor Stephen Bayley’s latest book  “La Dolce Vita:  The Golden Age of Italian Style and celebrity” if you really want to feel envious of a certain highly seductive lifestyle.

No, Italy just needs to work out how to make itself an incey wincey bit more German. And that 41 year old needs to find himself a flat and give his mum and dad a break.