EVER since the Bishop of London appointed me to the church of St Michael, Cornhill, in the City of London, in 1998, I have found him to possess a most interesting mind.

And now he has said something interesting once again. He says the over-60s are a “fortunate generation” who have enjoyed dramatic improvements in living standards but are now “absorbing” more than their fair share of taxpayers’ money.

I suppose he means then that these fortunate oldies are absorbing more than their fair share of their own money. For what they are actually “absorbing” is their due under the contracted agreement they made with the Government through their paying all those tens of thousands of pounds in tax and national insurance over their working lives.

Well, I told you the Bishop of London is always interesting.

Actually, in the long run we are all, of whatever age group, going to have to tighten our belts for the day cannot be long postponed when there will have to be the long prevaricated sorting out of the nation’s finances.

If you read the papers, you will know that, since we plunged into the economic abyss in 2008, all the talk has been of the savage cuts that have been inflicted already.

And this is balderdash since even the Government’s own figures show that public borrowing will be higher when it leaves office than when it entered.

The state sector is taking 50 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product, yet people talk as if we’re living under capitalism red in tooth and claw! For goodness sake, in communist China the state takes only 17 per cent.

All the political parties are acknowledging the need for true stringency now, even Ed Miliband’s party. But with an election perhaps as little as 18 months away, nothing will be done until after it.

The economic crisis is not disconnected from the world of real politics. War is merely the continuation of economics by other means as nations attempt to cure their economic ills by going to fight.

The Obama regime has recently been looking for a pretext for a manageable war. Boomslump- war has been the traditional course of events this last hundred years. North Korea looked a likely prospect but aggressive diplomacy by the Chinese scuppered those plans, so President Barack Obama hopes he will find Syria more accommodating.

The Russians have obliged him rather by deploying SS-300 missiles (a serious weapon) to help their client, President Assad, and now Mr Obama’s “red line” over Assad’s use of chemical weapons has a ring of Bush-Blair and the hoax of Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” about it.

Why make a special case out of chemical weapons (nasty as they are – but then, do you know of a nice weapon?) which have killed only a few hundreds when 93,000 have been killed by conventional means?

David Cameron and William Hague will back Mr Obama in arming the Syrian rebels, thus lending enormous support and encouragement to the extreme fundamentalists and jihadi Sunnis, Salafists and al Qaida –sworn enemies of the West.

Or do Messrs Obama and Hague really take so much notice of The New York Times, The Guardian and the BBC, which would have us believe that the Syrian Revolution is all in the hands of those darling young secularists controlling events by tweet?

Beware, gentlemen: manageable small wars have a habit of going global.