Who cares about the eccentricities of a member of a family which, in addition to being one of Britain's richest, manages to live at our expense? Instead of partying in mock Nazi uniform, Mr Harry has chosen to taste life on the Afghan frontline - although not without a Gurkha unit to protect his "precious" person! So what? Why should he get any credit for it?

After all, by joining the army in Afghanistan, Mr Harry was at least defending his own interests - those of the rich and powerful. Ordinary soldiers and officers in Afghanistan and Iraq do not have that "privilege". They get neither the right to defend their own interests by refusing to go, nor even decent fighting gear!

Nevertheless, for several days, the media treated us to every detail of Mr Harry's "heroic behaviour". If this bout of hype was designed to revamp the royal image, the chances are that it only succeeded in rendering it even more ridiculous. But maybe it was also designed to help Brown sweep embarrassing questions concerning his wars under the carpet.

Indeed, it is now more than 6 years since western troops invaded Afghanistan. Yet, despite the West's huge superiority in weaponry and monopoly of the skies, they have been unable to consolidate the regime they created in Kabul. Not only have western allies failed to reduce resistance against their puppet regime, but they have failed to stop this resistance from gathering more and more strength.

The disastrous balance-sheet of this criminal policy is clear. Over a decade ago, the Taleban regime emerged as a by-product of the covert military operation carried out by the West in Afghanistan during the previous decade. In the same way, the 2001 invasion of the country looks set to produce another kind of Taleban, but one which enjoys a much higher level of support, due to the western occupation!

Much the same can be said of Iraq. This month, it will be 5 years since the first British missiles fell there. Today, the country is plagued by a bloody low-level civil war. Not one day passes without a host of terrorist attacks, with dozens of victims. The West's invasion has only succeeded in bringing to the fore various armed militias vying for power and willing to use any weapon, religious or otherwise, to defeat their rivals. And any idea that the western-backed Iraqi government might deal with these militias is absurd, since this government is, itself, an unstable coalition formed by such militias.

So, in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the wars drag on, with no end in sight, to the point where the withdrawal of British troops, promised for April, is now cancelled. Meanwhile more and more high-ranking retired officers, in the US as well as in Britain, have come out with public admissions that these wars cannot be won.

Such are the realities that Brown would much rather keep out of the media. But any idea that Mr Harry's pantomime can conceal them is a non-starter!

Last week a Private Members' Bill to give equal rights to Agency temps got through for a second reading, supported by 147 mainly back-bench Labour MPs. It goes against Brown's policy. But it doesn't go against the so-called Warwick agreement under which the government was meant to grant new workers' rights in exchange for union support in the 2005 election.

Of course, Brown never intended to honour Warwick. He was and is the driving force behind preventing the EU directive on equal rights for temporary workers being adopted. So now he is playing for time. A commission on agency workers' rights will be convened under George Bain, who helped engineer today's low minimum wage. In other words, Brown intends to kill off the issue, once again.

There are officially 1.4m agency workers, many employed by major companies like BT, BMW, or BA, even if making these workers permanent would hardly dent their profits. And this is not counting the hundreds of thousands more casual workers on lower wages, employed directly, or by subcontractors, but deprived of pensions, sick pay and paid holidays.

But aren't we all casual workers in waiting? All it takes is yet another "restructuring", or factory closure for us to be faced with no other choice but a casual job. This is one more reason why the issue of casual workers' rights concerns all workers. The principle "same job, same rights and conditions", used to be central to the class struggle. But the union leaders, in their frenzy to rub shoulders with the bosses, have long since turned the class struggle on its head.

Yet during the big waves of strikes out of which today's unions and Labour party grew, more than a century ago, large masses of striking workers terrified Tory MPs into voting for pro-labour legislation, out of fear for the bosses' profits.

This is what needs to be done again - to stop the bosses playing even worse havoc with our jobs and conditions. But we also need to develop the political voice which we have been deprived of for so long - in the form of a working class party that does not seek to boost the profits of the capitalists, as the Labour party does, but aims at representing the political interests of working people.