You are free ... to do as we tell you!

Gah.

So, I've got until 2014 (my passport's expiry date) to emigrate. Maybe New Hampshire. In the meantime, cheer yourselves up with this interesting fact.

Doesn't that make you feel better about the National Identity Register? Most of the time they can't even code a fucking website.

That's Smith, with an S.

Two (more) reasons Geoff Hoon's an idiot.

An intrusive press is to blame for the public's lack of trust in politicians, eh, Geoff? I suppose technically that's inarguable, since if the media weren't intrusive we wouldn't have much of an idea of what you lot get up to when you're not snoozing away on the green benches - but guess what? If you weren't so venal and iniquitous, so self-serving, so self-righteous, so profligate and so treacherous away from the green benches, maybe the press would have no ammunition with which gleefully to destroy our trust in you in the first place. I think politicians' utter lack of trustworthiness is to blame for the public's lack of trust in politicians. It's especially astonishing to me that these beautifully aggrieved-sounding comments could come from a senior member of this Government, elected promising to be whiter than white and having left a filthy grey trail of slime, patronage and corruption everywhere it has slithered. If this doesn't show how sociopathic politicians are capable of being, I not sure what will.

That's one reason you're an idiot, although in fairness to you I doubt you were acting independently. No doubt someone in Number 10 decided they'd taken enough of a battering from the press this month and it was time to break out the wounded innocent act. Whatever. You all stink and you know it. That's so obvious as to have been a waste of keyboard wear and tear.

Here's why you're really an idiot though. In the words of Captain Dudley Smith (the excellent James Cromwell) in LA Confidential, reciprocity is the key to every successful relationship. You are part of a Government that has presided over the greatest encroachment over a person's right to self-determination in the history of this country. From ludicrous Health and Safety regulation to an insistence on dragging even successful, moderately wealthy middle-class families into the benefits trap (£50,000pa and you can still claim tax credits!); from your obsession with directing our lifestyle choices by banning perfectly legal activities like hunting and smoking to the greatest expansion of CCTV capability ever seen, such that London is now by far the most heavily-monitored city in the world; from laws attempting to regulate what we can say, joke about or laugh at to laws, agreed only yesterday, that force us to submit our identity to your control, and pay for the privilege of carrying a card we will still not own. The message overall is unmistakable: you do not trust us. Without your benign guidance and loving protection we should wallow in ignorance, poverty and criminality like the degenerate, recidivist pigs we inevitably are. Only the state can make us genuine citizens. Only through the state are we validated.

So why should we trust you?

Me and Henry Porter...

Via Samizdata, a link to a worthwhile read about ID cards.

The last refuge of the scoundrel (21st century)

Here comes that epoch-making fourth invocation of the Parliament Act.

The realisation that a lie remains a lie no matter how many times or with what wide-eyed conviction it is repeated is one that usually strikes children of seven or eight. Clearly it has yet to strike the Labour Party, which as an institution appears to have the mental age of a five-year-old and the scruples to match.

Home Office minister Andy Burnham earlier said it had been "absolutely clear" from before the election that the cards would be linked to passport applications.

From the Manifesto:

We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports. [manifesto p54; document p27]

Disregarding the lawyerly, bet-hedging "initially", this sentence is likely to be interpreted by most capable speakers of English, of whom I am certainly one, as meaning that when one renews one's passport, one has the option of "registering for" (ie purchasing) an ID card. "I'm here to renew my passport, please." "Certainly, Sir. Would you like an ID card with that?" "No, just the passport will be fine, thank you." - that sort of thing. But no! Turns out we're all dunces! That stuff you learned at school about subject/verb/adjective agrement is meaningless! Now there's the new Equivocal Wriggle-Room style!

Here's my thing, Andy: taking the subordinate clauses (still with me?) out of the sentence I quoted from the manifesto leaves us with:

We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.

The meaning of the sentence has not been altered, but it helps us to see the agreement more easily. Clearly, it is the ID cards that are "rolling out" and, equally clearly, the basis on which they are rolling out, initially or otherwise, is voluntary. Unquestionably, the adjective "voluntary" describes the basis on which ID cards will be rolled out. Passports are simply mentioned in passing, as though to suggest that this happy transaction will simply take place at the same time as passport renewal and will not be codependent. The "voluntary" has absolutely nothing to do with renewing passports, and anyone reading that sentence would be hard pushed to infer that ID cards and passports would be inseparable.

Still, revisionism's like a warm shroud when you're losing the argument, eh Andy? The idea that the manifesto means what you now claim it means is only slightly less laughable than the notion that everyone studiously went out and picked up a copy and voted on the strength of it. That is what you imply when you and that unshaven buffoon Charles Clarke talk about the Lords "frustrating the will of the people" in such sanctimonious, highfalutin tones. It is demonstrably not the will of the people that ID cards be compulsorily introduced on pain of never leaving the country again, and it wouldn't be so even if you had a popular vote majority or more than 21% of the electoral roll on your side.

Well, then forgive me

I'm all for Marxist-bashing, but this is ridiculous.

I mean, sure: few things have made me as angry recently as the inability of anyone writing about V for Vendetta to refrain from propogating Alan Moore's ignorance of the meaning of the word Fascism. Moore originally wrote the graphic novel in the mid-Eighties, he has said, as a "rebuke" to Thatcherism, stating,

We had supposed that it would take a nuclear war to make England veer towards fascism. In the end all it took was giving people the right to buy their own council house.

I find it distinctly odd that he should attempt to rebuke the least statist government Britain has had since, probably, Gladstone's by setting V in a dystopian statist Britain. This appears to have occurred to precious few of those whose job it has been over the last month or so to come up with copy about the new cinematic version for various publications, who have, to a man, perpetuated the fatuous meme that Thatcher's was a fascist government because a writer of graphic novels said so. They may be interested to read this list of fourteen defining characteristics of fascism (I know, I know: they'll have to get the link from a blog they actually read. Permit me the posture, at least), on which I suggest they will find two or three, certainly no more than four at the outside, evinced by the Thatcher Government. (At least as many, if not actually the same ones, are characteristic of the Blair Government.) A corresponding list of defining characteristics of free societies would certainly bear far greater resemblance to Thatcher's Britain.

Ideological muddles aside, however, V for Vendetta has one great thing going for it: it's about the struggle against oppressive government, something that usually gets American conservatives all tent-trousered. This one, unfortunately, is a religious conservative, which means a full sense of humour bypass, the attachment of an overactive sanctimony gland and the graft of a blind spot for allegory.

Let's go back to that list. There at number 8: Religion and Government are intertwined. In other words, in V's world, because religion is a tool easily used to manipulate public opinion, Christianity has become part of the fabric of the Fascist state. Is this a slur on Christianity, "Dr." Ted Baehr, or is it merely an honest depicition of the underhand tactics of a repressive regime? You fuckin' dolt.

Charlie and the Consent Factory

I apologise for the doubtless alarming and upsetting reference to Chomsky in the title of this post. As a confirmed anti-idiotarian I spotted it as soon as I thought of the title; I left it in, however, because in this case (ie for once) I think it's actually quite an appropriate notion, although I doubt the great "public intellectual" would agree with me.

Speaking on the Today programme yesterday morning, the Lord Chancellor, Charles, Lord Falconer, opined thus:

Everybody recognises that political parties should be state-funded if we want a healthy democracy.

This is, of course, the same Baron Falconer of Thoroton, PC, who recently rejected calls for an English Parliament to represent the people of England. He would, of course: an English Paliament elected by English voters would be Conservative-controlled and as such is inconceivable. Far better, as under the current system, to take advantage of the corruption of funding whereby Scottish and Welsh constituencies receive significantly more public funds per capita while privately earning rather less. Quite happy with this state of affairs as they are, they are quite prepared to elect and re-elect Lord Falconer's cronies in Scottish constituencies from where they can run English affairs as they like to: with Scottish votes.

Ah, cronies: that's where I came in. Lord Falconer is hardly an exemplar of a healthy democracy. He holds the increasingly questionable distinction of being the very first peer created by Tony Blair, an honour for which, as he cheerfully admits, he qualified by dint of his long and distinguished public service as Tony's flatmate in their Bar days. Following an unremarkable few years in the Lords, unsullied by excellence of any kind, he was made Lord Chancellor, which lest we forget is one of the most senior and important functionaries in the government of the UK, after the previous one objected to Blair's class-war attempt to destroy the office. Not bad for yer basic QC. Clearly Blair, unable for the present to destroy the office, thought he could do worse than with a pal in there.

And so to this pronouncement, this transparent attempt to influence opinion by pretending it's already been formed in his image. What is it about state-funded party politics that he feels would be so healthy for democracy, exactly? Perhaps by his evidently warped standards, as detailed above, it would be ideal, but to people with a more received definition of "democracy" and "health" it could only be disastrous. How long until guidelines were laid down detailing within exactly what ideological boundaries a political party would be eligible for state funding? If that sounds outlandish, try and imagine impeccable progressives like Gordon Brown consenting to state funding of the BNP, or again humourless crusaders like Gordon Brown consenting to state funding of the Monster Raving Loony Party. There are few who would rejoice as heartily as I (a sometime Anti-Nazi Leaguer in my teens) at the prospect of the BNP going broke, but the price in this case would be far too high. What Lord Falconer actually means is, "Pretty soon, what with all this dreadful exposure of our funding scandals, we won't have any cash to run the next election. Just as membership of and donations to the Conservatives are on the increase. Curses!" He wants to nationalise party politics before his party runs out of money. That's healthy democracy. Honest, Noam.

Rubicon

This is a partial list of Acts that the government refuses to rule out being subject to the pending Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Act of Settlement 1700; Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001; Bail Act 1976; Bill of Rights 1688; Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919; Church of Scotland Act 1921; Civil Contingencies Act 2004; Claim of Right 1689; Constitutional Reform Act 2005; Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994; European Communities Act 1972; Freedom of Information Act 2000; Government of Ireland Act 1920; Government of Wales Act 2006; Government of Wales Act 1998; Habeas Corpus Acts 1679 to 1862; House of Lords Act 1999; Human Rights Act 1998; Identity Cards Act 2006; Immigration Act 1971; Local Government Act 1972; Magna Carta 1215; Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975; Ministers of the Crown Act 1975; Northern Ireland Act 1947; Northern Ireland Act 1998; Official Secrets Acts 1911 to 1989; Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949; Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986; Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984; Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005; Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Act 1706; Public Order Acts 1936 to 1986; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000; Representation of the People Acts 1981 to 2002; Scotland Act1998; Security Service Act 1989; Statute of Westminster 1931; Succession to the Crown Act1707; Terrorism Act 2000; Terrorism Act 2006; Union with England Act 1707; Union with Scotland Act 1706; Welsh Church Disestablishment Act 1914.

So much for joined-up Government: 16 of these 44 Acts were Bills presented by this Government, but their schizophrenia isn't the issue. Neither, for that matter, is the fact that this Government, which has invoked the Parliament Acts like it's going out of fashion to force some fiercely-opposed laws through, includes both Parliament Acts on the list, although the likelihood of those laws being repealed if the law used to create them is changed is, of course, slim in the extreme. And let's just gloss over the fact that Magna Carta effectively created the English Parliament: so good luck tidying up that one.

What does it mean to introduce such a Bill? The Cabinet Office page linked says, reassuringly, that the Bill will make it "quicker and easier to tackle unnecessary or over-complicated regulation and help bring about a risk-based approach to regulation". Whatever that means. They used the word "tackle", so they must be doing something. Then "deliver" later on. And - ah! now I see it. It's to tackle unnecesary and over-complicated legislation. No wonder their own legislation featurs so prominently.

But, of course, it doesn't really go into any detail about how this alleged streamlining will take place. One could, of course, have a look at the Bill itself - but easier, surely, to let someone else do the hard work.

Ooof!

It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and, voilà, the law is changed.

Yikes!, as Boris might say. But the question, surely, must be: who asks for this kind of power? In a Parliamentary democracy that can, or could until recently at any rate, be more or less proud of the laws it has passed and the legacy of freedom it has engendered, what could possibly give someone the idea that such a thing would be necessary or desirable? Only, and I do mean only, if the laws that this Bill will be used to pass quickly, without scrutiny or debate, are completely unacceptable to the vast majority of people, and therefore to their representatives, will a facility such as the one provided by this Bill be needed. The only way of thinking or kind of attitude that engenders such a Bill is the "I know best" approach. The notion that certain people know what's best for us all, and too much scrutiny from other people will only get in the way even if they aren't too stupid to understand what's going on: this is how our masters now think. So accustomed have they become to having ever-greater control over ever more numerous aspects of our lives that we've reached the point where they're making their play, planning that final land-grab to end all land-grabs. They've come too far now, after all, to stop here. The Great Project must be completed, before those nasty Tories even look like they might be electable again. And so accustomed have we become to having our lives micromanaged by the state that we hardly notice when they try to take our brains out.

Scrupulously fair over at the BBC...

I'm trying not to let this turn into a one-note blog, but I feel I'm being thwarted in that aim by the BBC.

Question Time was no more than usually boring tonight. (Margaret Hodge was incredibly sanctimonious, patronising and self-righteous. I wonder if she practises her beatific smile in the mirror.) Interesting page on the panel on the BBC site, however. Note that we're reminded, although it was ten years ago and he was merely accused of "dissemblance" in the mire of Neil Hamilton's scandal, of David Willets' resignation over the cash for questions affair. How odd, then, that no mention is made of the far more recent and significantly more serious smear on Margaret Hodge's record, where children ultimately in her care were systematically abused while she was leader of Islington Council. So, we're quite prepared to dredge up the past in the shape of a moderate cash and falsehood scandal to remind people how awful the Tories were, but heaven forfend we mention the systematic child abuse scandal from three years ago for a Labour minister. That would hardly be cricket, what?

Pro-test, Pro-gress, Pro-not-having-a-balloon-for-a-head.

Can there seriously be any doubt, in the present climate of fear, intimidation and thuggish self-righteousness, that the condition of these men is in the most part due to the "activities" of the animal rights terrorists? This possibility was, of course, magnificently ignored by the BBC, in the article linked and in various follow-ups throughout the day, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that pharmaceutical companies have been unable or unwilling to keep up a full and thorough programme of tests on animals before switching to humans. In other words, these drugs were probably not entirely ready to be tried on humans, and six people are seriously ill.

Once again, then: www.pro-test.org.uk

Gordon Berlusconi

This is encouraging.

Seems like Gordon's really making his play. Not only does he want us to think of him as British so that we forget how his majority will be sustained by Scottish MPs when the House votes on English matters, but apparently he's been learning a thing or two about telescreens and Freizeitgestaltung, because what this country really needs right now is yet another organ peddling government orthodoxy. I know the BBC has its own orthodoxy, and that's tiresome enough (in this article, for instance, they draw a beautiful distinction between the two sides of the debate by carefully referring to people they like as campaigners - tireless, committed, ordinary people forced into activism - and those they don't like as lobbyists - shady professionals in the pay of big business hatching plots to subvert our freedom - just so that we're quite clear who the good guys are, despite mounting evidence of the thoroughgoing failure of any and all handgun legislation), but at least at the moment it's free to change its mind should it ever choose to employ people capable of critically rationalist thought. It is not the BBC's task to "sustain citizenship and civil society" any more than it's government's task to report the news. No doubt Brown's envious of the influence exerted over their countries' media by such beacons of transparency as Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi (both owners, if you please, of national media organs), but this narrowing of the gap between state and media is ominous in the extreme.

Publish and be damned...

This article was taken down "for legal reasons" from the Telegraph website on Tuesday.

The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state. By Alasdair Palmer (Filed: 19/02/2006)

© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries.

"They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.

"The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory.

"It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent."

Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law.

"It is already starting to happen - and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue."

For someone with such strong and uncompromising views, Dr Sookhdeo is a surprisingly gentle and easy-going man. He speaks with authority on Islam, as it was his first faith: he was brought up as a Muslim in Guyana, the only English colony in South America, and attended a madrassa there.

"But Islamic instruction was very different in the 1950s, when I was at school," he says. "There was no talk of suicide bombing or indeed of violence of any kind. Islam was very peaceful."

Dr Sookhdeo's family emigrated to England when he was 10. In his early twenties, when he was at university, he converted to Christianity. "I had simply seen it as the white man's religion, the religion of the colonialists and the oppressors - in a very similar way, in fact, to the way that many Muslims see Christianity today.

" Leaving Islam was not easy. According to the literal interpretation of the Koran, the punishment for apostasy is death - and it actually is punished by death in some Middle Eastern states. "It wasn't quite like that here," he says, "although it was traumatic in some ways."

Dr Sookhdeo continued to study Islam, doing a PhD at London University on the religion. He is currently director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. He also advises the Army on security issues related to Islam.

Several years ago, Dr Sookhdeo insisted that the next wave of radical Islam in Britain would involve suicide bombings in this country. His prediction was depressingly confirmed on 7/7 last year.

So his claim that, in the next decade, the Muslim community in Britain will not be integrated into mainstream British society, but will isolate itself to a much greater extent, carries weight behind it. Dr Sookhdeo has proved his prescience.

"The Government, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, are fundamentally deluded about the nature of Islam," he insists. "Tony Blair unintentionally revealed his ignorance when he said, in an effort to conciliate Muslims, that he had 'read through the Koran twice' and that he kept it by his bedside.

"He thought he was saying something which showed how seriously he took Islam. But most Muslims thought it was a joke, if not an insult. Because, of course, every Muslim knows that you cannot read the Koran through from cover to cover and understand it.

The chapters are not written to be read in that way. Indeed, after the first chapter, the chapters of the Koran are ordered according to their length, not according to their content or chronology: the longest chapters are first, the shorter ones are at the end.

"You need to know which passage was revealed at what period and in what time in order to be able to understand it - you cannot simply read it from beginning to end and expect to learn anything at all.

"That is one reason why it takes so long to be able to read and understand the Koran: the meaning of any part of it depends on a knowledge of its context - a context that is not in the Koran itself."

The Prime Minister's ignorance of Islam, Dr Sookhdeo contends, is of a piece with his unsuccessful attempts to conciliate it. And it does indeed seem as if the Government's policy towards radical Islam is based on the hope that if it makes concessions to its leaders, they will reciprocate and relations between fundamentalist Muslims and Tony Blair's Government will then turn into something resembling an ecumenical prayer meeting.

Dr Sookhdeo nods in vigorous agreement with that. "Yes - and it is a very big mistake. Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done.

"The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work - yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops.

"It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book.

"Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both."

Perhaps the explanation is just that they do not take it seriously. "I fear that is exactly the problem," says Dr Sookhdeo. "The trouble is that Tony Blair and other ministers see Islam through the prism of their own secular outlook.

They simply do not realise how seriously Muslims take their religion. Islamic clerics regard themselves as locked in mortal combat with secularism.

"For example, one of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

'Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion - and it is their aim to achieve this.

"That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future - and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate.

"Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on."

That plan, says Dr Sookhdeo, is being followed in Britain. "That is why you are seeing areas which are now almost totally Muslim. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognise sharia law for Muslim communities - which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" or "violating the rights of Muslims" to deny them sharia law.

"There's already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. The Government has already started making concessions: it has changed the law so that there are sharia-compliant mortgages and sharia pensions.

"Some Muslims are now pressing to be allowed four wives: they say it is part of their religion. They claim that not being allowed four wives is a denial of their religious liberty. There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time - and stay married, in sharia law, to all four.

"The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government's record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that."

Dr Sookhdeo's vision of a relentless battle between secular and Islamic Britain seems hard to reconcile with the co-operation that seems to mark the vast majority of the interactions between the two communities.

"Well, it isn't me who says Islam is at war with secularisation," he says. "That's how Islamic clerics describe the situation."

But isn't it true that most Muslims who live in theocratic states want to get out of them as quickly as possible and live in a secular country such as Britain or America? And that most Muslims who come to Britain adopt the values of a liberal, democratic, tolerant society, rather than insisting on the inflexible rules of their religion?

"You have to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed leaders," explains Dr Sookhdeo. "I agree that the best hope for our collective future is that the majority of Muslims who have grown up here have accepted the secular nature of the British state and society, the division between religion and politics, and the importance of allowing people to choose freely how they will live.

"But that is not how most of the clerics talk. And, more significantly, it is not how the 'community leaders' whom the Government has decided represent the Muslim community think either.

"Take, for example, Tariq Ramadan, whom the Government has appointed as an adviser because ministers think he is a 'community leader'. Ramadan sounds, in public, very moderate. But in reality, he has some very extreme views. He attacks liberal Muslims as 'Muslims without Islam'. He is affiliated to the violent and uncompromising Muslim Brotherhood.

"He calls the education in the state schools of the West 'aggression against the Islamic personality of the child'. He has said that 'the Muslim respects the laws of the country only if they do not contradict any Islamic principle'. He has added that 'compromising on principles is a sign of fear and weakness'."

So what's the answer? What should the Government be doing? "First, it should try to engage with the real Muslim majority, not with the self-appointed 'community leaders' who don't actually represent anyone: they have not been elected, and the vast majority of ordinary Muslims have nothing to do with them.

"Second, the Government should say no to faith-based schools, because they are a block to integration. There should be no compromise over education, or over English as the language of education. The policy of political multiculturalism should be reversed.

"The hope was that it would to ensure separate communities would soften at the edges and integrate. But the opposite has in fact happened: Islamic communities have hardened. There is much less integration than there was for the generation that arrived when I did. There will be much less in the future if the present trend continues.

"Finally, the Government should make it absolutely clear: we welcome diversity, we welcome different religions - but all of them have to accept the secular basis of British law and society. That is a non-negotiable condition of being here.

"If the Government does not do all of those things then I fear for the future, because Islamic communities within Britain will form a state within a state. Religion will occupy an ever-larger place in our collective political life. And, speaking as a religious man myself, I fear that outcome."

© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

I don't know why it was taken down: I don't know whom it offends or, more pertinently, what law it breaks. I rather suspect it doesn't break any laws. It certainly wouldn't have got through the Telegraph's legal department had it been libellous or in any way "sensitive". It seems eminently rational and fair-minded. One could hardly accuse it of stirring hatred. I can't help the feeling that it was taken down following complaints from what one might term, in this particular context, the usual suspects.

You're entitled to your own opinion. Just make sure it's the right one.

Oh please.

As Hugh Laurie once wrote, Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. Laurie made this observation in the middle of a scene in his comic (and utterly marvellous) novel The Gun Seller, in which the narrator is trying to hit on a woman having just nearly killed an assailant in her front room. She tells him to "drop that shit right now. There's a man dying in here." Laurie's narrator observes to himself that implied in that statement is the notion that had there not been a man dying in there, he could have "kept holding onto that shit" and continued chatting up the woman.

Likewise, every time someone like Ang Lee or any of those people quoted in the article linked above complains that Brokeback Mountain only lost because it was a movie about gay cowboys and America wasn't ready to embrace the pink, their statements carry the implication that it should have won because it was a movie about gay cowboys, as though that were reason enough to award a film Best Picture.

It's the same asininity that beset Joss Whedon when he killed Tara in the Buffy episode Seeing Red. Mutant Enemy was inundated with complaints that by killing a lesbian character and sending her lover on a grief-stricken kill-crazy rampage Whedon had fulfilled the poisonous Dead/Evil Lesbian Cliché that has apparently permeated movies for decades. Whedon simply pointed out that Tara's death was merely a function of the story arc that started four years earlier with Willow's spell in Becoming, Part II: Willow's ever-growing power and her ability to control it. Viewed entirely dispassionately, Tara needed to die to bring Willow's ability to control her powers to a head. For Whedon to have held off killing her simply because she was a lesbian was just as offensive to him as killing her simply because she was a lesbian. In the end he had to ignore her sexuality and deal with her entirely independently of it. (Of course, this is what the gay community is supposed to have been after since forever.) Complaints that he had killed off half of the only lesbian couple on primetime TV were likewise refuted with the eminently sensible comment that that was hardly his fault: he couldn't write all the shows.

So everyone thought Brokeback was going to win and it didn't. It's not the first time that different films have won Best Director and Best Picture. Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love are but the most recent films to have shared the top two awards, if memory serves. I don't think anyone felt Ryan was cheated of Best Picture because it was just too anti-war (Hollywood being as full of anti-war types as it is of gay people). You can't predict how 7,000 people are going to vote and you can't second-guess their reasons for voting how they did when you find out.

It's actually really depressing to be right.

Charles Clarke's talking about the Lords again.

Oh, and guess what?

"I hope the Lords will recognise that this manifesto commitment, voted through by the elected chamber, should be respected," Mr Clarke told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Yawn. Deal with how Parliament works. Or just use the Parliament Act in a really effective fit of pique like you did for foxhunting and more laws than all the previous governments combined since the Parliament Act became statute in 1911. But stop dropping the dreadful sledgehammer propaganda into your press releases. You sound like an idiot.

Oooh, wilful misinterpretation. That's quality journalism!

Once again, the BBC demonstrates that they'll be damned if they can't impose their own agenda on a fairly unremarkable news story.

The opening sentence should, in any sensible world, render the rest of the article utterly fatuous. In essence it reads, "Anti-war campaigners have criticised Tony Blair after he suggested he believed in God." But how easy it must be to get confused when you know with such blazing certainty that you were right! How tempting it must be, subconsciously, to infer that what he really said was, "God told me to go to war, and hang the lot of you!"

So, for the record (inasmuch as a blog with no readers, or perhaps one or two very taciturn readers, can be said to be a record of anything except the amount of time I have spare), Blair only said that he believed his decision would "ultimately be judged by God". Not that God was whispering in his ear. He believes he will answer to God for his decision when he dies, not that he's been following God's instructions all along. This is, in fact, an utterly facile distinction that any theologically competent five-year-old could discern. Not the BBC, of course, with all its graduates and expensively trained personnel. Oh no. Reg Keys' comment that Blair was "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure" is way up near the top of the article, and aside from Stephen Pound's praise of Blair's "painful" honesty (a backhanded compliment, and in no way a defence of Blair's remarks or an attempt to inject any sense into the interpretations thereof), the various reactions reported further down the article are, without exception, guilty of the same deliberate misapprehension. This is gold for the BBC: not only do they get to air their anti-war credentials yet again, but they get to beat Blair with their anti-religion Bush-stick in the process.

Yes, I'm an atheist. Yes, I deplore the religious motivation of much Right-wing politics as much as I deplore the mindless collectivism of much Left-wing politics. But I don't hold it against a politician if he happens to have faith. All I ask is that I don't see his faith driving his politics, and much as I've been hating Tony Blair since long before it was hip I can find very little ground to fault him on this matter (the politicisation of religion, on the other hand...). If he believes he'll be judged by God, fine. I suspect God, if he weren't just a superstitious figment, would find very little problem with the liberation of a people from a violent dictator (a "totally unnecessary conflict" - Reg Keys), and if I were He (not much of a leap for the ego, I must confess), my only question would be, "What about Zimbabwe and North Korea and Sudan and Iran and ...?"

We decided to offend poor people?

In his book The Third Way Anthony, Baron Giddens, Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge, writes, "There will never be a common morality of the citizenship until a majority of the population benefits from the welfare state."

This, as Fraser Nelson points out in The Spectator, is the secret to eternal Left-wing government. Employ or otherwise fund, support, assist or bankroll as many citizens as possible, until eventually a critical mass is reached whereby no party talking about reform stands a chance of being elected, for the very simple reason that far too many people will be aware that to vote for them will amount to voting themselves out of a job, or voting themselves out of a claim to benefit. In other words, what Prof. Giddens terms "a common morality" is really a common voting habit.

The expansion of the state isn't like the expansion of a commercial venture. The latter can only expand at a rate dictated by the success it finds in business: this is not just good business sense but is a constraint of the concern's profitability. Expansion costs money: new employees, new premises, new products, new clients must be sought, bought, developed and courted. Lawyers will inevitably need to be paid. But the state has it slightly easier. With a near-inexhaustible (at least in the short term) supply of money from taxpayers and a near-impenetrable and conveniently opaque accounting system, the state can expand with alarming rapidity, in terms of both employees and clients, not to mention premises and products. (The idea that the state has "products" takes some getting used to, I always feel.) Since 1997 (or the Year Zero Anno Antonii, as much of this Government appears to consider it, at least subconsciously) the state has expanded its workforce by 784,000 to 6.8 million, or by 13% of the original 6m. This is one in four of the working population (as distinct from the working-age population), although it hardly seems like evidence of a grand client-statist project by itself. Consider, though, the unemployed. Officially they are 870,000 in number, although that's because 2.7m are on incapacity benefit, which is paid for life if a doctor says so. 790,000 are on lone parent benefit (did I miss the meeting where it was decided they weren't "single" parents any more?): the total figure, then, of those out of work or on benefits, is some 4.5m. So the total number of people working for the state or clients of it is somewhere north of 10.5m people. This is one third of the entire working-age population. Quite a powerful block vote with quite powerful reasons to continue to vote Labour.

So what's the problem? Aside from the obvious technical complications of an oversize public sector - the stagnant economy and ballooning public debt - there are surely ethical questions to be raised. At what point does a so-called "enabling" state (an offensively Orwellian misappropriation) become simply a bribing state? At what point do people begin to question the electoral propriety of maintaining such a vast proportion of the electorate in supplication to the state?

This is not just a psephological concern either. Labour's effective ownership of such a large percentage of voters has raised once again the sceptre of what Keith Joseph called the Pocket Money Society. The more the government of the day confiscates earnings, the more it seems that what the earners are left with is akin to a children's allowance, with the government making all the decisions and taking care of all the important issues like housing, education, healthcare and saving for retirement: what people are left with is for trivialities and indulgences. The responsibility for shaping their own lives is taken from them - and, of course, only when people are "trusted with responsibility" (as though that trust should ever be government's to bestow in the first place) will they begin to act responsibly.

Instead we have a situation where responsibility is given out grudgingly, if at all. That's why the small businessman must now spend on average an extra six hours a week keeping up with official paperwork, so that the state can be sure everything's being done just the way they want, why doctors have to cancel operations within 48 hours of their due time so that they don't show up on the list of cancelled operations in order to meet targets from Whitehall whch exist so that Whitehall can be quite sure everything's being done just the way they want, why a nursing home manager with 30 years' professional experience must suffer the indignity of attaining an NVQ - a fucking NVQ! - in order to keep the job, because the state knows so much better than the nursing home manager of 30 years' experience how to manage a nursing home and they need to make sure the knowledge benefits of their NVQ have been passed on so they're quite sure everything's being done just the way they want.

The expansion of the state is seen as a moral imperative, because only the state can be trusted to run things. A common, enforced morality is better than amorality. A future in which people are able to provide for themselves independently of government is a dystopia. The title of this post is a line from the West Wing, which as previously discussed I used to love dearly whether the politics were mine or not, in which Josh wants to use in the State of the Union address the line, "The era of big government is over."

"Oh, when did this happen?" demands Toby.

"This morning, we had a meeting," replies Josh.

"We decided to offend poor people?"

The view seems to be that it offends the poor to not give them jobs and money, and certainly that theory seems to be borne out by Labour's re-election off the back of their vast client state - but remember how people act responsibly only when "allowed" to? Conversely, take away their responsibility by offering to do everything for them and how do you expect them to vote? If the poor were allowed to exercise responsibility for themselves more, I suspect we'd soon find that what really offends them is having other people's money thrown at them in return for votes.

A fine display of ignorance

Charles Clarke's personal turf war with the Lords continues. This sort of stuff always raises a grim smile. As soon as you realise you're reading an article with the words "Charles Clarke" and "the Lords" in it, there's a sick inevitability to the occurence of a third phrase, "the elected House". Mr. Clarke is an intelligent, capable man, with a fine grasp of his pernicious, malevolent brief and an unflappable (figuratively, at least) manner, which makes him a formidable opponent in debate; but his insistent, cod-oblique references to the unelected nature of the Upper House (and by extension the democratic superiority of the Lower House) are wearisome in the extreme and furthermore betray an astonishing ignorance of the purpose of the Lords. One gets the impression that Mr. Clarke believes that the function of the Lords should be straightforwardly and unquizically to ratify whatever fatuous legislation is burped up from the Commons simply because the Lower House has the dubious distinction of a mandate from our famously discerning electorate. It has perhaps not crossed his mind that the undemocratic nature of the Upper House works in Parliament's favour insofar as it enables the Lords to examine legislation in an entirely dispassionate way, free of the ever-present, nagging fear of a fickle electorate which is the lot of a Commoner MP. In other words, they are able to act entirely in the interests of the country rather than in the interests of the party, as it were with one eye on their majority. Clearly Mr. Clarke considers this a personal insult to his authority as conferred by the estimable folk of Norwich South.

Of course, it is not the only absurdity inherent in these vignettes. The fact that among Tony Blair's first acts of cock-hardening destruction when elected was to remove 90% of the Lords' hereditary peers and stuff the place with like-minded cronies in the guise of life peers should mean that the Lords is just as supine as the Commons has only recently stopped being. But it seems that even Blair's most craven lapdogs have developed a sense of history and of purpose and of civic duty once within the House of Lords. I suppose that's the problem with "life" in this context. Give even your staunchest, most unquestioning ally a meal ticket for life and, having nothing better to do, he might just develop the ability to think for himself.