In a panoramic sweep of the city a forest of tower blocks intersperse with the low level splash of orange roofed shanty towns (favelas) stretches in every direction.

It’s late evening and gradually the outline of the towers seeps away to leave their outlines in the lit windows of the homes of 19 million people who live here.

Greater Sao Paulo extends to 34 million people – already by far the largest city in Latin America, now challenging to be the largest city in the world.

We are in Brazil, looking north to the Copenhagen summit to try to understand how, what some have described as the most important meeting of nations since the end of the second world war, looks from one of the “tigers” of the developing world.

Listen to Jon Snow on Audioboo.

I’ve never been here before and it’s fascinating to be in a dense and vibrant society in the south in which English, Britain, the empire, have no resonance whatever.

Outside influences certainly include the United States economically and in terms of corporate investment and ownership, but it happens on Brazilian terms – Portuguese is the first language of negotiation.

My bad Spanish, dwindling memories of Italian go some way to help, but language is a severe barrier if you speak no Portuguese – there’s a lot of guesswork and hand signals involved if your translator isn’t to hand.

It’s hard in your first 48 hours to get a handle on a place that so dwarves what we once thought as large – London or New York – yes it extends over the kind of area Los Angeles is settled upon but is far, far more densely settled.

The gulf, no, ravine between rich and poor is deep and compressed.

You can be walking along an urban high way, past shops that would be interchangeable with an up market branch of Boots, or Waterstones, and suddenly your guide indicates a tiny slither of a passage between two buildings.

You walk down it; a rough covered track barely two meters high, hardly wide enough for your shoulders, and 20 meters later you gasp as you meet the semi fresh air again.

You are in the midst of a heaving swarm of shanty life. Children playing in mud puddles, old men leaning on grubby brick walls smoking. Women hanging washing on wire lines across the street. And the noise of voices, music, revved up engines. Whole families live in tiny rooms stacked crazily one upon another.

Beyond this particular favela I look up at a modern tower block perhaps 500 meters away beyond the main street I had left a few minutes earlier. Ivy cascades from the elegant balconies, there’s a swimming pool on each of the 23 floors.

I’m off to observe the rush hour. Off to try to comprehend what this dash for development, growth, urbanization, and consumption is doing to a country richer than any in available agricultural land, attempting to create still more out of the residual scrub and forest – a country at an environmental pivot.

I also have to talk to a carbon trader about offsetting our own carbon footprint.

Protective of the national sovereignty of member states, the interests of the citizens of those states have always been represented by their heads of government.

The problem with this way of doing business is that it has all the appearance of hole-in-the-corner anti-democratic activity.

The European Parliament has never been vested with the power to represent the interests of the people who elect it – the very same citizens of those member states.

Indeed the European Parliament, itself long suspected of being a hotbed of expenses abuse and largesse, gives all the appearance of being as unrepresentative as the heads of government when they meet as the Council of Ministers – this despite the fact that we elect it.

In some ways it is remarkable that the European Union is as effective as it is. But one senses that in trying to fix a president and a foreign minister for Europe, the European ideal has hit a new low.

The choice is a mess…at its extremes it’s a choice between a man who started a war that divided Europe itself, and someone with zero international profile from a divided neo-ungovernable member state.

That choice will be made during the foie gras tonight. When the dust settles, the rest of us probably won’t give a damn anyway.

Europe is a compromise, so its president will be, together with its foreign high representative. That’s because we cannot agree, as Europeans, whether we want a convenient trading bloc or a United States of Europe.

The trouble is that because Britain, perhaps understandably, wants to stand slightly to one side of Europe, the UK has almost no influence over the way the EU evolves and gets dragged along within it.

It isn’t a happy situation. One can’t help thinking that those who have opposed the development of Europe, have backed its rapid growth of members precisely to ensure that it never works. Tonight around that Brussels dinner table they will score another victory for their cause.

With the homecomings through Wootton Bassett and the now ever-present cameras and crowds, these are events rarely seen before outside world war.

I was at Brize Norton once for the homecoming of a British soldier killed in Basra. Only the family, someone from his regiment and the lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire were present. Not any more, these days.

One senses that these very public markings of each death in Afghanistan are exerting there own dynamic on the government – hence the prime minister’s remarks at the Guildhall in London on Monday night and David Miliband to Nato meeting in Scotland yesterday. This is not a “war without end” said Mr Miliband.

Yet today is the very day that the battle of the Somme ended in 1916, not even 100 years ago. It was the very middle of the first world war. The battle had raged for just four months and shed a staggering, utterly shocking number of lives, in excess of one million.

The government continued to send hundreds of thousands of young men to die on the poppy fields of Flanders and beyond for a further two years.

My grandfather was at the Somme. General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow lost 4,000 men from his regiment this day alone. One general losing 40 times the UK’s loss this year in Afghanistan, in one day.

In 93 years our tolerance of death on the battlefield has experienced a welcome revolution. Does it mean then that our tolerance of war itself has dwindled? Is a direct assault on our own land now the only cause for which most of us would agree to lay down our lives?

Perhaps for once we should thank the media. Had the slaughter on the western front received even one per cent of that accorded to deaths in Afghanistan, would the great war’s carnage ever have been stomached?

For how much longer then, with this degree of focus, will another war in a foreign field be stomached? Intriguingly I suspect, quite long.

The conflict in Northern Ireland tells us the media come to suffer battle coverage fatigue. Afghanistan may come to suffer from it too. On the other hand it may not, and if that is the case the political clock on the wall is ticking hard.

There’s been a church there since 606AD. The canon told an American who asked him why he’d built the place so close to the railway!

The music came from Jon Lord, formerly of Deep Purple – hauntingly lovely stuff for flute piano and strings, beautifully played by the Bernardi orchestra.

What a journey Mr Lord must have been on, from Deep Purple to classical beauty, maybe a shorter journey than one supposes.

And John Mortimer present in all but person – his words and those of others read by Edward Fox, Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodge, Joss Ackland, and Derek Jacobi.

I liked this by Mortimer on getting old:

“The ageing person is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn’t prepared to appear ridiculous.”

And given that Mortimer was both lawyer and writer beyond a lot more, I liked today’s theme – “the defence rests”.

I sat behind Paxo and ribbed him for his unmasking by Michael Crick on last night’s Newsnight, as a man who goes shooting with a Tory knight of the shires who objected to Liz Truss as his local Norfolk Tory candidate.

There but for the grace of God go we all. John Mortimer would surely have enjoyed it.

But after the outing of Belle de Jour – the PhD-wielding academic with an intriguing money-generating enterprise on the side – I felt we should put the other side of the coin. We should talk to some of those who have no choice in the matter and who work at the exploited, grubby end of prostitution.

The New Horizon youth centre, where I worked before becoming a hack, is a day centre for young homeless people in London.

For some years now we have run a twice weekly group for young woman sex workers. They are young women who live harrowing lives. One of them contributed to Alex Thomson’s report last night.

I popped into the centre today. I’m still the chair of the project. We got a significant lottery grant earlier this year and the entire place is being refurbed and expanded. It look sensational and will reopen at the beginning of next year.

We are presently decamped to another building in the same street, a road that runs between the British Library and Euston Station.

The reason I mention all this is that one of our sex workers contributed to our report last night. New Horizon’s blog has been active since, so here’s a link: www.nhyouthcentre.org.uk

No, forget Ms Palin, and we can probably afford to for now. Let’s concentrate instead on the strengthening pound – last night up against the dollar, up against the euro. This has on a little to do with the UK’s improving prospects and much more to do with the current tussle between America and her largest investor, China.

As the dollar dives, the Chinese currency stays low – too low. The stock markets continue their insupportable surge across the world, some of the banks grow stronger, the hedge funds put on weight. The second limb of the “W” is climbing.

How rare to see an American president in China for whom castigating the Chinese leadership for their appalling record on human rights is proving far safer territory than any wholesale discussion of the value of China’s currency.

The Yuan is being sustained at artificially low levels. The effect is to give Chinese exporters a crazy advantage, swelling China’s trade surplus whilst America’s trade deficit also surges.

The Chinese manage to keep the Yuan down by buying unprecedented quantities of cheap dollars. The cheap dollar sucks in ever greater amounts of product (much from China itself), fuelling ever more dangerous levels of US unemployment. I commend Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Klugman’s column in yesterday’s New York Times.

Nothing has changed. And that’s not the first time I have said it. I have offered the view here in Snowblog for months. The ingredients are gradually falling into place to bring about another global financial crisis – a crisis that will put unbearable pressures upon Britain’s tender currency.

Yet whilst the world economy crackles in the heat, British politicians argue about the distance the country needs to keep from the safer haven of the eurozone. Size matters in a global crisis, as Ireland and Iceland showed in their different ways the last time round.

Whilst the UK is more robust than either, this is not a moment to begin believing that UK plc can be anywhere other than in what the former Prime Minister John Major once called “the heart of Europe”.

Hence Nick Clegg’s call today to cancel the Queen’s speech this week may have a stronger resonance than at first might appear. Clegg wants to use the last few weeks of this parliament to reform the political system rather than waste time debating a legislative programme that will never be enacted.

History may view with some disdain the failure of the political classes to recognise that the expenses scandal is less about usury than about the implosion of an overall parliamentary system seen by many as “unfit for purpose”.

The continued election of parties who manage to garner perhaps a third of the entire potential national vote and then govern with “absolute power” will surely be regarded as past its sell-by date.

Adversarial politics fought out in a chamber that dictates a sword and a half’s length between speakers from government and opposition may be seen too by historians as beyond the ridiculous.

There are huge constitutional challenges facing Britain, let alone the economic issues that accompany them. The idea that MPs took three months of holiday, then luxuriated in the state opening of parliament with less than six months to go to a general election, beggars belief.

I am depressed by those comments in my Lords Snowblog of last week, that we are in danger of letting in “terrorists” and the rest if we go too far with reform. I believe quite the reverse.

To add to matters, I have learned that the Labour party is now going through its ranks of peers to determine where their “principal residence” is. This after years of wholesale abuse of the system in which lords and ladies of all persuasions have claimed distant holiday homes to enable them to get the accompanying unreceipted travel expenses.

I have also learned that “arrangements” have been made to allow serving ministers in the Lords to claim a residence out of town “for necessary respite”, retrospectively protecting ministers and law officers who may have claimed for such provision.

Maybe Mr Clegg has a point.

I have now talked to a committee secretary, who informs me that none of their expenses are receipted.

My contact talks of “knocking back” particularly extreme expense claims from one peer who has already been named in the matter of undue housing claims.

But the central issue is that of paperwork. There is a voluntary scheme in the Lords for peers to draw a business credit card, on which they can charge flights, meals, hotels, taxis and the rest.

I have to hand those for all the Northern Ireland peers. But they are a quite extraordinary bundle of paper, because just about every entry has been redacted.

There is absolutely no knowing what the individual commercial transaction was. At times it is obvious that it was a flight.

Peers claim that their travel arrangements are so uncertain, and their need to get to Westminster fast so urgent, that they invariably have to take the most expensive option going.

So while the rest of us are spending £35 on Easyjet or Ryanair, they go for British Midland or some such. And as for buying tickets in advance, they quite simply don’t seem to do it.

All this only goes to show that if a credit card issued to the peers, funded by the taxpayer, cannot be fully and publicly accounted for, the system isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. Added to which, all this redaction is using up a great deal of printing ink.

I go so far as to suggest that, if anything, the system of expenses in the House of Lords is potentially more dubious than in the House of Commons, specifically because of the lack of receipts.

It’s worth pointing out that there is to be no comprehensive inquiry into what’s been going on in the House of Lords, and the amounts of money involved are very much larger than in the lower house.

Following our own micro consultation with the UK public last night, one’s sense of confusion and mystification over the Afghan war only deepens.

Here in the UK the acid question must surely be whether the damage done to communal relations in Britain from deploying UK troops to engage in action which inevitably sheds Muslim blood, outweighs the risk of blood being shed here by Muslim extremists.

To be doing this to facilitate a regime the US ambassador deems corrupt seems pretty foolhardy. The general commanding the US war effort, General McChrystal, is said to be fuming over Mr Eikenberry’s thoughts. He very publicly wants another 40,000 troops right now.

Who would be Barack Obama in such an hour? I’m interviewing the Nato Secretary General this morning, Mr Rasmussen. And what is Nato in all this? A bit part player in a British-backed US adventure? A smokescreen of “international” respectability? A cypher? Who knows? We’ll ask!

This is indeed the Afghan hour of truth in a conflict that has outstripped Vietnam in length – and the second world war, for that matter.

Compared with this, the illegal war in Iraq was a doddle. It was either right or wrong, and most people knew which side they were on.

Afghanistan – what a shambles. Send for Tony Blair and George Bush! Perhaps they know what to do next. After all, they thought it up in the first place in response to a terrorist attack starring a group of Saudis, for the most part trained on the American and German mainland.

Today I am in Coventry, a city still scarred by the last world war. Somehow today renders Armistice Day more poignant. More poignant because of the daily toll of young life in the wastes of Helmand.

Britain now at war. To what end? And when will that end come?

Some of the questions that are bound to arise when we talk with a cross-section of the general public tonight on Channel 4 News.

We shall be in this city addressing the home front on the matter of the war in Afghanistan. In the meantime, and though I shall blog again later after the two-minute silence, I would commend this poem by the poet laureate, whom I had the great honour to meet on Sunday night.

LAST POST
by Carol Ann Duffy
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home –
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce – No – Decorum – No – Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too –
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert –
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.