Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.

Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability.

The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions, and most others, are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies.

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.

Nothing keeps people together like the exalted conviction that they alone are to be spared that eternal anguish of hell fire to which everyone else will be condemned.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

Could a government dare to set out with happiness as its goal? Now that there are accepted scientific proofs, it would be easy to audit the progress of national happiness annually, just as we monitor money and GDP.