We had a salvo of iPod playlists, and a low-key tussle over the public benefit of public schools, but now the battle to become deputy leader of the Labour Party has got downright ferocious - in the bare knuckle brawl between Harriet Harman and Hazel Blears over the cost of their handbags.

Yes, Harman (who had previously struggled to say anything memorable in the contest beyond screeching ‘I’m a woman!’ at every opportunity) decided to go on the offensive against other women who flash their cash on expensive handbags. Britain was in danger of becoming a ‘divided society’ she said, where some struggle to make ends meet whilst others ‘spend £10,000 on a handbag’ (or, in Harman’s case, £10,000 a year on their child’s schooling).

Blears, remembering that a lot of people who are middle-class vote Labour too, countered with: ‘I don’t think it is the job of politicians to tell people what they should spend their money on. Labour represents the poor and less well-off but it cannot only be a party for them.’

It is often painful to find oneself agreeing with Blears, even when she does say something sensible: so columnists and Labour women everywhere scrabbled around to take up sniper positions. A photograph of Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, was dug up, showing her carrying a £750 Chloe handbag. When asked, Hazel Blears described her own handbag as an ‘Orla Kiely’ costing ‘around’ £250. Harman declared that she had never spent more than £50 on a handbag. Ann Clywd weighed-in to the debate to agree, declaring that she had ‘a bit of an aversion’ to expensive bags and also never spent more than £50. Yvette Cooper, the housing minister, revealed that her handbag cost £75 and was a gift from her husband, Ed Balls.

So finally, the deputy leadership candidates are arguing about something and we can be confident in predicting the sort of society Harriet now stands for: one where footballer’s wives are pariahs and Victoria Beckham is burned at the stake. But yet again, the deputy leadership contest has shown itself up as an exercise in nonsense.

Nowadays, Big Brother is not just about al fresco sex and teenage bickering: it’s about getting ‘the right result for Britain’. Some might argue that this is the ‘post-Poppadom’ development of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother. When Shilpa Shetty was subjected to ‘racist bullying’ by fellow contestants, politicians and commentators everywhere hailed Shilpa Shetty’s victory in the series as a victory over intolerance and racism nationwide. But if you admit to watching Big Brother down the years (and I do, OK?), you’ll have to admit that every single year the Big Brother winner is symbolic of something and very much the ‘right result for Britain.’

A Liverpudlian builder, competing to raise £70,000 for his Downs Syndrome friend’s life-saving operation, won Big Brother 1 (a victory by proxy for the disabled). In Big Brother 2, flamboyant Irishman Brian Dowling won (that’s one for the gay community). In Big Brother 3, a woman won, which was only capped by Big Brother 5 when a transsexual won. In between those two triumphs for the Great British sports of inclusivity and harmony, there was Big Brother 4, which was won by an Orkney fish trader (in Britain, we tolerate boring Christians, too). Big Brother 6 was won by a 70s dancer who fended off the attentions of his gay bunny-boiling fellow contestant. Big Brother 7, however, was an unremitting triumph, as for all of its many, many weeks, the favourite was lovable Pete from Brighton who had Tourette’s syndrome. Pete, legend has it, only applied to be on Big Brother because his dead friend - who had tragically died in front of him on a railway track while high on drugs - appeared to him in a dream and told him he would win. Pete’s victory was to reaffirm his faith in God - making him the Joan of Arc for people with nervous tics.

Did Channel 4 spend the last three months trawling round Britain pleading with anyone wearing a hijab to appear on the show? If they did, they failed - and to compensate, have spent a lot of time rearranging the Big Brother house in a maddening way (putting the fridge in the garden, the oven in the bedroom and the bath in the living room). On Wednesday, we then got an all-women rota of contestants.

Interestingly, the audience outside the Big Brother house seem to know instinctively, without the benefit of two months of story editing and faux-Geordie voiceovers, which contestants will prove the ‘right result for Britain’. Booing before contestants have even gone in the house started around Big Brother 6, but this year it was remarkable. Watching, as Davina put it, ‘an hour and a quarter of people getting out of cars and going into a house’, the crowd were booing, on cue, for anyone looking chav-like and attractive and cheering hysterically for anyone who looked representative of a minority or claimed to be middle-class.

So the Topshop-bedecked, blonde Manchester twins, who ‘like pink, and fit boys’, were widely jeered and the South London IT girl and footballer’s cousin was downright vilified. Meanwhile, a miserable adoptee from Mother Theresa’s orphanage, whose half brother stars in E4’s teen show Skins, and who claims to ‘hate men’ was cheered. As was a Welsh Nanny who hates smokers and looks like Matt Lucas with a lego man’s hairstyle, a champagne-sipping member of the WI and an excruciating middle class student, Emily, who loves drama and hates benefit-cheats. Especial cheers (and no jeers) were reserved for the final contestant to enter the house: fat bisexual divorcee Carol. Hailing from east London and, at 53, a veteran of Greenham Common, she is an unemployed peace activist who stood for the Respect party, wears t-shirts reading ‘Beats not Bombs’ and was cautioned by the police for protesting against home secretary John Reid.

This year, Carol is the right result for Britain. She is a renegade, she is ‘political’ in short: she is Banksy. 

Reading a newspaper these days is like experiencing déjà-vu on a daily basis. It would save a great deal of paper and ink if the newspapers were just reduced to a single sheet of bullet points: Obesity - fat is fatal! Children - don’t let them out of your sight! Cancer - you’ll die from it! Social networking - it’s a phenomenon! Carbon - you better cut it! Houses - they’re expensive! Perhaps our biggest problem is not binge drinking or binge eating but the daily barrage of binge headlines.

Today we have a reprise on: Alcohol - it’s poison!

Every week there’s new advice on alcohol, tailored to a different sector of the population. This week, it’s the turn of pregnant women who are now to ‘stop drinking altogether’, according to the government’s leading doctors.

‘The new advice’, explains The Times (London), ‘radically revises existing guidelines, which say that pregnant women can drink up to two units - or two small glasses of wine - once or twice a week. Fiona Adshead, the deputy chief medical officer, said the change was meant to send “a strong signal” to the thousands of women who drank more than the recommended limit, that they were putting their babies at risk. But she admitted that it was not in response to any new medical evidence.’

So, if evidence did not generate this shiny new front-page headline why was it generated at all? The explanation is that ‘women are often confused about what drinking in moderation really means’ - so the guidance on alcohol has to be simplified to something that a pregnant woman can understand.

Next week, perhaps, the government will take a break from generating such predictable, déjà-vu headlines, and issue advice that (despite any new medical evidence) during pregnancy a woman’s brain shrinks to such a size she can’t think for herself, for that seems to be what they’re implying. 

Madeleine McCann’s abduction whilst on holiday in Portugal is every parent’s worst nightmare. But the response to it is worrying - and not just in terms of what it says about the national ‘mourning sickness’ (see ‘Maddie’ and the media in Britain AD (After Diana), by Mick Hume). The extensive coverage of the McCann tragedy belies the fact that child abduction is actually very rare - otherwise, it wouldn’t be news.

Worried parents are increasingly turning to new technology that will offer them a greater opportunity to monitor their children, at all times. An article in The Times (London) Parent supplement asks: ‘Would an implanted chip help to keep my child safe?’ The implied answer is - yes, but at what cost to their free development? The article outlines a variety of new child-tracking devices, ranging from pay-as-you-go services that follow the SIM card on a child’s mobile phone to electronic wristbands, known as ‘Toddler Tags’ that can also take the form of a badge or may be sewn into a child’s clothing. They have in-built Radio Frequency Identification technology and work in conjunction with a reader. Costing between £500 and £1000, they can be used to create a ‘virtual ringfence’ that triggers an alarm if a toddler wanders beyond its boundaries or ‘towards potential hotspots, such as kitchens or stairways.’

But, of course, the problem with these technologies is the fact that they are not foolproof. The badge, wristband or clothing could easily be taken off by an abductor. In America, a company called Wherify has resolved this problem by creating a ‘locator watch’ which it claims is ‘lockable and tamper proof.’

As The Times points out, however, would they wear such a watch in the bath? And these days ‘children are abducted from bed and even from the bathtub (as a girl in the North East of England was recently)’. A non-removable chip, therefore, ‘is something that some parents would welcome.’ Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, developed such chip technology in 2002, after the abduction of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. The implanted chip would send a signal via a mobile phone network to a computer, which could identify a child’s location at any time on an electronic map. Once a year a child would ‘have to hold his arm up to a charger’ to recharge his chip. But a public outcry against the idea of inserting electronic chips into children led him to halt the development of this technology.

In the aftermath of the McCann abduction, Professor Warwick claims to have been ‘bombarded with emails from parents desperate to keep tabs on their children’ and ‘wanting to know more about chip technology’. How many more Madeleine McCann’s it will take before our concept of freedom for children collapses completely under the weight of fear and paranoia?

Year on year the Turner Prize shortlist is announced, and year on year the cry goes up, ‘Call this art!? It looks like postmodernist bilge to me!’

But this year the old routine has been interrupted: the Turner Prize nominees have been greeted with yelps of delight in the liberal media. ‘The Turner Prize needed to be rescued’, cried Times ‘visual art’ critic, Rachel Campbell Johnston. ‘The art world’s most prestigious contemporary award had grown too complacent, too pompous, too pleased with itself. It seemed to have forgotten about its public - and for Heaven’s sake, they didn’t ask for much: just something a bit shocking or even, God forbid, something that was actually about something.’ And this year we the public have finally been rewarded: ‘The mood is overtly political.’ According to Miranda Sawyer, a journalist who is on the judging panel, the issue-led shortlist reflected the fact that ‘we live in political times’.

Favourite to win the £25,000 prize is artist Mark Wallinger, for his reconstruction of Brian Haw’s dismantled anti-war protest, State Britain. It has the shortest odds ever offered on the Turner Prize.

Joint second in the bookie’s ranking are sculptors Nathan Coley and Mike Nelson. Sawyer praised Nelson’s nominated installation, ‘Mirror Infill’, as a powerful antidote to ‘slick commercialism’. Coley is best known for reconstructing the Lockerbie trial courtroom and was shortlisted for three installations ‘which use architecture to make political and religious commentary: Camouflage Mosque, Camouflage Church and Camouflage Synagogue, made from cardboard and covered in blue and white striped warship tape from the Second World War.’ The 5-1 outsider, Zarina Bhimji, was shortlisted for her photographs of Uganda, her native country, from which she was exiled under the regime of Idi Amin.

So what we have here is ‘Tony Blair is a B-liar’, ‘African dictatorships are bad’, ‘let’s all buy less’ and ‘the power of religion is waning’. All that’s missing is a self-detonating model of a suicide bomber and we have our ‘political times’ sewn up.

Time to adapt that old cry, then: ‘Call this politics?! It looks like bilge to us!’

Turner Prize 2007, Tate Liverpool