Age itself is not curable, though many of the diseases that once shortened the lifespan now are. The result is an increasing population of elderly people, increasingly infirm, who need, to some degree, to be looked after. The traditional solution – care in the extended  family – is often inappropriate, and the older people are, the more likely it is that they will have dementia.

At the same time, there has been a public revolt against forcing old people to pay for all their expensive residential care until their resources almost dry up. The search has been going on for at least a decade for a more popular solution which passes more of the burden to the taxpayer. The Government’s latest proposals, which it admits are incomplete, would tidy up many of the existing anomalies and encourage people to make provision for their own old age, for instance by encouraging them to take out insurance. But the central idea of the Dilnot report, published last year, is being resisted by the Treasury.

This would limit to £35,000 the amount each individual would be required to contribute to their care costs, with anything above that being publicly funded. That, said Dilnot, could cost £1.7 billion a year, and rising. Alternative figures suggested for this spending cap vary from £50,000 to £75,000.

Many people who go into care homes sell the house they were living in, partly because they no longer need it and partly to raise money to pay for their care. The Government is keen that there should be loans available, repayable (with interest) only after death. But all these ideas evade the fundamental issue.

The house the old person was living in before entering the care system has come to be regarded as a family asset, part of their offspring’s eventual inheritance. If it is sold to raise funds, the asset ultimately disappears. Thus a key factor in the situation is the expectation that wealth will be passed down ...

The almost universal adoption of the concept of human rights has undoubtedly made the world a better place. But there are exceptions. Human-rights theory, with its strong stress on the autonomy of the individual, sometimes fails to give sufficient weight to religious beliefs and practices which are largely expressed in a family, social or collective context. Thus a German court has ruled that the circumcision of male infants, a practice required by both the Jewish and Muslim faiths, is contrary to the human rights of the child and therefore illegal.

Its principal reason was that circumcision involves bodily injury to which the child is too young to give informed consent. This gives little weight to the right of a child to be brought up in accordance with the religious beliefs of its parents, or the right of a parent to raise a child accordingly, fundamental though those family rights are to the collective survival of the faith in question.

The flaw in the European Convention on Human Rights to which this draws attention is a proviso in Article 9, which states that “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary … for the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.” The last phrase is a clear invitation to a court to rank rights relating to religion subordinate to whatever other right is being claimed. In this case, the right being claimed on behalf of the child is the right to bodily integrity.

Jewish and Muslim organisations have protested at this ruling and it will be taken to appeal. They have been joined by Catholic and Protestant leaders in Germany, no doubt conscious that such a blow to a key ritual requirement of the Jewish faith is an uncomfortable reminder of the Holocaust. Circumcision is not required for Catholics but it is not treated in Catholic moral theology as mutilation, ...

Everyone knows cheating at cards is wrong, even if the finer points of high-stakes poker are complex. Similarly the detailed functioning of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) is something of a mystery, but clearly some players have been cheating at it. Nor is the analogy with a card game a bad one. The activities of investment banks have been likened to a casino, in which a lot of people can make a lot of money ...

Pope Benedict has appointed a man very like himself to the key position in the Vatican he occupied from 1981 to 2005, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Bishop of Regensburg in Bavaria since 2002, is a prolific theologian and champion of conservative orthodoxy. Yet similarities with his close friend the Pope exist alongside significant differences ...

David Cameron knows from his Big Society project that solidarity, the sense that “we are all in this together”, is what binds society into a whole. It would be a pity if that were to be undone by growing resentment from one section of society against another, in particular the better-off against the poor. This is the danger of raising the issue of welfare reform, as he did in Kent this week. With his latest ...

The Fiftieth International Eucharistic Congress has given a boost to the beleaguered Irish Catholic Church, at least for those who attended it. The real success of the event will depend on whether this emerging sense of energy, recovery and renewal can be transmitted to the parishes and the wider population. There are grounds for optimism, but there is a long way to go.

If the opportunity is missed, this can ...

Elections at the weekend, one in Greece and one in Egypt, took a step forward but also a step back in the progress of the cause of democracy. In Greece, the formation of a coalition which can command a majority in the Greek parliament means that at last the programme of austerity measures demanded by the European Union is broadly supported by a democratic mandate. The imposition of those measures against what seemed to ...

Gordon Brown, Britain’s last Prime Minister, was unexpectedly realistic in his appraisal of the problems facing modern journalism this week. Giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, he remarked how the internet had emerged as a rival source of information to the more familiar kind. But this “new” journalism was not subject to the constraints that applied to the traditional media, which was therefore at ...

The responses of the two major Churches to the Government’s consultation document on gay marriage expose it as a tawdry and ill-considered exercise. The Government did not ask for submissions on whether to extend marriage to homosexual couples, only on how to do so. The two Churches, quite rightly, have ignored that proviso.

In a proper consultation exercise, the statements of the Church of England and ...