The issue has a growing saliency because America's trustbusters are currently rewriting the guidelines for "horizontal" mergers (tie-ups between firms that offer the same sorts of products).
Labour's attempt to match the Conservatives on law and order has made it a new, vicious battleground, raising the stakes for home secretaries considerably.Criminalising BritainBut it is increasingly the content of Home Office policy, as well as its saliency in the public mind, that seems to be destabilising ministers.
Mainly, however, it is due to the financial crisis, which several years ago superseded Islamic militancy as the most urgent item on the government's agenda.That is natural: times change, new problems crop up, old ones lose their saliency.
It is unclear how control of this huge investment will be split between 3G and Berkshire, a question given saliency by the fact that Mr Buffett, aged 84, cannot go on leading his company forever.
Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.
"Once you get to a certain size and saliency, a lot more people start paying attention to you," Mr. Miller said.
It requires us to think creatively about balancing urgency with saliency, connecting global impacts to local actions and combining methods of artistic and scientific practice.
If ever the PM's much-derided dictum – "We are in this together" - has had any saliency, it is in the light of the Census figures which highlight that the white minority residents of London and its BME majority have indeed worked together to make the capital the powerhouse that it is today.
But he also raised a question that mainstream politicians have dodged for several decades since – and has come home to haunt them in fraught times when the financial crash, ensuing austerity and rise in the global flows of labour give tensions about immigration particular saliency.
Some will see the saliency of the issue in the president's second inaugural as mere words.
