Martha Kearney's week

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By Martha Kearney Presenter, BBC Radio 4's World at One Liverpool fans held up a banner showing four of their managers

I am writing this on the train on the way back from watching Liverpool play in the Europa League at Anfield.

The opposition was a team from Romania, from a small town of just 17,000, so there weren't too many travelling fans.

My husband accuses me of sometimes enjoying the fans' chants and songs more than the football itself.

I did enjoy the jibes a while ago at a Chelsea v Norwich match directed at Delia Smith, owner of the Canaries.

"You're going down like your souffles," is the only one suitable for print.

'Oversacking'

When Liverpool play southern clubs, there are plenty of cracks about the city's perceived underdog status.

To the tune of Liverpool's famous anthem, Chelsea fans will sing, "Sign on, sign on. You'll never work again."

Lots of the chants date back to the recessions of the 1980s and 90s.

A hit squad in Dubai used forged British passports

The high unemployment figures of today are, of course, reminiscent of past downturns, but there are some important differences too.

Then, many employers panicked and laid off too many employees in a phenomenon known as "oversacking".

That was expensive in redundancy costs and made it harder for businesses to find staff when the recovery began.

This time, as our reporter Andrew Bomford found in Swindon, many companies are putting people on lower pay or part-time working in order to avoid lay-offs.

That means the jobless figures are not as high as they might have been, but also that the effects of recession are felt much more widely than the official statistics suggest.

That was an issue I discussed with Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper on Wednesday.

Civilian deaths

The other main stories of the week were the continuing Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan and the fall-out from the killing in Dubai of a Hamas leader by a hit squad which used forged British passports.

Phil Goff, now leader of the New Zealand opposition, told me how as foreign minister he had forced an apology and reparations from Israel after a similar operation involving agents from Mossad.

To get the latest information from Helmand we interviewed Brigadier General Ben Hodges.

He had returned from the front line in the town of Marjah two hours previously - he had been "forward", as they call it.

He told me the operation could take several weeks, but that he had been reassured by the reaction of the local shura (gathering of tribal elders) to the death of 12 civilians in a Nato missile strike at the weekend.