Mr Singh, 51, who was involved in a confrontation with police last month outside Lord's cricket ground, was fined £500 and ordered to pay £55 costs.

In an incident following a one-day international between India and England - which India won with three balls to spare - Mr Singh had waved his fists at police officers and told them: "I'll have your jobs. Do you know who I am?"

Interesting how the voice of the oppressed believes himself so powerful that he can get innocent police officers the sack at whim. But Singh was always a corrupt bureaucrat, as last year's election proved. He chose to have a petition signed by all the party leaders committing themselves not to use racism in the upcoming election. When Blair and Hague signed it on behalf of their parties, the CRE tried something different, getting every MP they could find to sign it individually, and publishing the names of those who refused, flashbacks of McCarthyism suddenly seeming very real for a moment. It was a clear attempt by a state body to smear the Tories in the upcoming election.

Britain did once need a Commission for Racial Equality, but I am not so sure one is needed now. Black and Asian men and women hold respected and vital positions all over our society; doctors, government ministers, teachers, journalists, policemen. The law rightly protects anyone from racial discrimination in job selection, and racism is diminishing rapidly across the country. Racial integration has far to go, but in general our immigrants are already far better integrated than most in the United States and much of Europe. What role does the CRE have in encouraging integration? It only concentrates the matter back on race, rather than ignoring it as the irrelevancy that it is. In nearly all of the ways that can be dealt with by government bodies, Britain is not a racist society. We have come far enough not to need a Commission for Racial Equality. To abolish the CRE would not be to vindicate racism, but to acknowledge its defeat.

A tycoon today insisted there was no connection between his £10,000 donation to the Labour party and a planned shake-up of gambling laws.

Duncan Bannatyne, whose plans to move into the casino business would have been impossible without the changes, insisted it was "absolutely pure coincidence".

Well, it always is a coincidence, isn't it? On top of this, Labour spin doctors already expect us all to believe:

• Bernie Ecclestone's donation to Labour made no difference to their policy on tobacco advertising in motor racing.
• The Hinduja brothers' donation to the Millennium Dome was unrelated to the help top ministers gave them in obtaining a British passport.
• Lakshmi Mittal's donation to Labour made no difference to Blair's decision to write to Romania requesting they help him.
• Paul Drayson's donation to Labour made no difference to their decision to buy the wrong smallpox vaccine from him.

It is no wonder Blair's cronies expect us to believe crime is falling and our schools are improving if they expect any thinking person to credit this bullshit.

"Donations to the Labour Party have plummeted by 83 per cent in only three months, deepening its cash crisis.

The collapse in contributions, disclosed yesterday, follows a series of rows over Labour's links with wealthy businessmen, including the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and the pharmaceuticals manufacturer Paul Drayson. With the party up to £8m in the red and Britain's biggest unions threatening to cut their contributions, the slump in donations will alarm Labour fund-raisers."

In a funny sort of way, this demand for state funding is basically just a call for a return to the 1970s and its legacy of taxpayers subsidising lame duck industries. It wasn't right then and it isn't right now. If a business doesn't want to go bankrupt, it should please its customers more, and if a political party faces huge debts it should govern the country better.

"[America's] preparedness to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN security council is a defiance of international law far graver than Saddam Hussein's non-compliance with UN weapons inspectors....

[I]f the US were not preparing to attack Iraq, it would be preparing to attack another nation. The US will go to war with that country because it needs a country with which to go to war....

[Tony Blair's] challenge is to recognise and act upon the conclusion of any objective analysis of global power: namely that the greatest threat to world peace is not Saddam Hussein, but George Bush. The nation that in the past has been our firmest friend is becoming instead our foremost enemy."

There we get a true whiff of what the Second Gulf War's opponents are about: mindless, morally blind, anti-Americanism. They hate America because it is one of the few countries left in the world that can still tell the difference between right and wrong, and is willing to fight for freedom. I am proud that Britain joins her in doing what she can to help in that quest. But America can do no right in these people's eyes. When President Bush acts in his own country's interests, it is a sign of "isolationism", a charge no other country's leader faces when putting his own people first. But when Bush acts on the world stage, he suddenly becomes "interventionist", "unilateralist" and "the greatest threat to world peace". Now Bush can either be interested in dominating the world, or in isolating America from it, but not both.The BBCdian liberal elite will really have to choose which it is soon.

The extent to which the left's warped world-view is based upon nothing more than numbers, calculations and sociological theories is evident in their response to the terrorist murders organised by Osama Bin Laden and Yasser Arafat. Instead of asking who the democratic, legally-bound leader is, they accuse America and Israel of bring the attacks on themselves, and absolve the terrorists of their crimes on grounds of poverty and hopelessness. The left's inability to distinguish between a democratically elected leader who fights to destroy those who bomb children to achieve their twisted political goals, and a half-baked tyrant who uses chemical weapons in testing on his own people, who marches into neighbouring countries, and who is building terribly destructive weapons to fight us, demonstrates why Britain will never again have a true socialist government. Bin Laden proved that good and evil really do exist, and the British people will no longer support those who deny it.

So what is Monbiot's alternative to co-operating with America? He openly states that he thinks President Bush is a worse man than Saddam Hussein, that terrorists and tyrants should be left alone and democratic statesmen opposed. So what should Britain do? In so many words, become France:

"We can resist the US neither by military nor economic means, but we can resist it diplomatically. The only safe and sensible response to American power is a policy of non-cooperation. Britain and the rest of Europe should impede, at the diplomatic level, all US attempts to act unilaterally."

Boris Johnson was right last April to describe us as the second most important country in the world. We earn that influence through having a huge economy, the fourth largest of them all, and through the most professionally trained armed forces in the world. But we also gain it from being the closest ally to the world's only super-power. It would be treason to throw that rattle out of the pram in a tantrum born not of logic or conviction, but born only of resentment that America continues to disprove every major socialist theory with her success. France has never changed minds in America, nor has she exercised any influence when she spouts her silly ideas. For all France's sniping, she has no army to back up her words, and no moral authority to support her protestations.

The left is ultimately about turning Britain into another backward, inward-looking, high-taxation, European state. What they want is a people too morally deficient to care enough about any cause to support a war in its favour, and a country too weak to wage war in the first place, even if they ever did decide it was right. This gloomy, pathetic vision stretches even as far as the likes of Kenneth Clarke, though it is much more weakened and vague by the time it reaches them. But it is not a vision shared by the British people, and so long as our political leaders continue to support America when she is right, they will win mass support for their foreign policy.

"As far as my parliamentary colleague is concerned, it should be borne in mind that he totally opposed the liberation of Kuwait and the action in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

"With the greatest respect to Mr Dalyell he is an appeaser of military and criminal dictatorships - which he has every right to be.

"It is not because he approves of those regimes but because he will not accept any military actions.

"Had we listened to those critics in the past just imagine what would have happened.

"The ethnic cleansing would have carried on and Afghanistan would have been under the same criminals who were responsible for September 11.

"Therefore I think we should not take what they say too seriously."

This exchange does show divisions within the Labour Party over this war. Wrong as it may be to be partisan over something so important, I must admit it is nice to see Labour's nasty old terrorist-supporting, economy destroying, bloodlust left returning to prominence, showing what the party is, at bottom, really like.

Schroder has always struck me as a shifty fellow. Resembling a vampire facially, he seems to have Clinton's political cunning, but also his lack of any moral principles. While the German public responded in revulsion when Britain became one of the only countries in the world to legalise human cloning for medical research, Schroder was privately envious of Blair's own standpoint; that he wouldn't allow ethical issues to get in the way of scientific research. But after four years in office, he has achieved very little for his economy or his country. With interest rates kept artifically high in Germany by the European Central Bank, the rate of unemployment has hardly changed, still being at the dreadful levels Britain last saw around Black Wednesday, nearly a decade ago. Populist Bavarian conservative leader Edmund Stoiber now offers Germany a different course of action. Just a while ago, it seemed inconceivable that a Bavarian like Stoiber could be elected to lead Germany, Bavaria being seen as the source of a far too vulgar, excitable sort of person. Now analysts are predicting that Schroder cannot close the gap of 10% in the opinion polls by which he is trailing Stoiber. I hope Germany votes Edmund Stoiber to power, so the last major European bastion of the left but one is removed. After that, it is down to Conservatives over here to complete the trend.

"The lead news story, for instance, is about the new 100-kilowatt infrared laser being developed by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter. The laser is designed for use in attacking non-human targets, such as other aircraft, ground vehicles or static targets such as fuel dumps, anti-aircraft batteries or power grids. Yet, because the laser's energy could be reflected from these targets and thereby cause accidental blinding, the focus of the story is not the science of the laser, but the magazine's barely disguised outrage that the laser is not banned by the Geneva Convention."

I think what Iain reports is a small part of a debate that has been going on a long time between scientists on how to encourage public interest in science.

They know that true science can be wondrous and fascinating, and that huge numbers would love it if only they gave it a chance. But they also know that science is currently very much a minority interest. So they work out different ways to bring it to the masses: first they try public shows with lots of fun explosives, then they present lots of TV programmes about the science of sex, of course giving lots of screen time to naked women. Now, they are apparently embracing left-wing politics in a way they hope will make science more "relevant". Well, we saw what happened when the Church tried that. Not a happy precedent, and particularly discouraging for a profession which cannot really justify itself without a commitment to objectivity.

"[Duncan Smith] will attempt to draw a line under the public infighting of the reshuffle, which ended phase one. The Conservative leader wants to launch policies in the key areas of the public services at his party conference in October to show that differences over personalities have been left behind.

Education, transport and health will be the themes of the first day of the Tory conference in Bournemouth in a conscious move to show that the party is thinking more broadly on the public sector than Labour’s 1997 pledge to reform education."

Once place where I do disagree with some like Tebbit and Widdecombe is in the need for detailed policies. Successful leaders of the opposition don't launch detailed policies: that only leaves hostage to fortune, helps split the party and gives the government much to attack. You get the miseries of defending a policy without the power even to implement it. Look at what happened to Neil Kinnock and William Hague. Successful leaders of the opposition, like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, set forth a general vision of a different sort of country with a new type of government. People voted for them when they first came to power not because of policy, but because of the sort of Britain they advocated.

Thatcher's case in particular is worth examination. She didn't explain by how much income tax would drop. She didn't say precisely how she would curb union power and Labour's hyperinflation. But she did make clear those were her aims, and people voted her in because they trusted her to carry them through. The 1979 Conservative Manifesto is a very sober document, the only radical policy being the promise to allow council tenants to buy their homes. We know the reality of how radical and correct her policies really were, but by defending a general vision that incorporated most of the British people, she ensured much support.

Tony Blair similarly didn't outline in much detail all his plans, the "early pledges" being an ignominious exception. Instead he managed to become the personification of the anti-Conservative feeling of a large majority of the British people at that time. That is what New Labour was, and is: an anti-Conservative coalition which makes zero ideological demands on its members. If he had detailed his policies, he would have been able to carry far fewer people with him. That is the lesson for an Opposition Leader.

As Winston Churchill put it, an opposition party should be a lighthouse, not a shop window. By all means explain the need for private medical insurance, explain why taxes are too high, but don't give a long, pointless list of policies that will win almost no support and will delight every Labour politician and interviewer as a great way to trip the party up between now and the next election.

I would make the case against it myself, but I cannot do it better than Janet Daley did last February.

“But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Edmund Burke, 1793

On British television recently, there was an advertisement for a beer. Set in the eighteenth century, it began by showing a pretty young woman sat in a carriage, looking on as the two men who seek her heart meet up in a field and bow before one another. Then, turning on their heels, they both walk towards their duelling positions. Except the duel doesn’t happen. After a few seconds, one of the duellers turns and shoots his opponent in the back. Along with a slogan like “Only the determined drink Andersons’ Beer”, the survivor is shown drinking the beer presented to him on a silver tray. And there it ends.

What interests me about that advertisement is that we are supposed to sympathise with the cheat. In a lovable rogue sort of way, we are expected to laugh at his shameful behaviour and to side with him. Duels and the honour that goes with them are so alien to us that we can see it only as a foreign custom, like a strange ritual of an African tribe. We appreciate that one of them has broken the rules, which is why the advert works, but we do not see it as a serious breach. The advert just wouldn’t work if it showed a football player pretending to be injured from a tackle, and I don’t think that is so much because football is not a matter of life and death. I think the reason it wouldn’t work is that however little someone may play football, we know the rules well enough to understand cheating, and we also have at least a degree of reverence for the game that would prevent us sympathising with a cheat who tried to wreck it. Yet so alien is the idea of an honourable duel that we can laugh and side with those who show no respect for its traditions and rules. Indeed, when the camera zooms in on the beer-drinking cheat, we see a very modern-looking, smug, twenty-first century face. It is us.

In a strange sort of way, then, this beer advert proves what Edmund Burke said was true two centuries ago. So lacking are we in that chivalry for which Burke pines that we cannot show any respect for its ways, and we side with those who use deceit and cheating to overcome those with honour.

Now, I might like to suggest that having murder laws drawn up in such a way as to criminalize duelling is a part of that. If we were to return to allowing men to make the choice freely to stake their lives on such a contest, that respect may matter more. Before turning to the practical implications of such a decision, I think it sensible to defend it in theory.

Liberal laws have for a long time been based upon the premise that a man should be free to do as he desires providing that what he does will not harm someone else directly. This is not to say that whatever he does is right, that all ways of life are equally valid, or anything else. It is simply asserting that the state should not decide these things for others; that its job is to protect the individual from the arbitrary will of others, not to choose the life he will lead. If one agrees with this - that freedom should be restricted only when it means violating the liberty of others – then one cannot believe in a ban on duelling. Yes, shooting a man most certainly does hurt him, but the loser made a voluntary decision to enter a duel: it was he who took the risk of injury, and that choice was his to make. Yes, it may hurt those close to a man to have their friend and relative die unnecessarily, but his decision to take that risk was again his own: any indirect hurt they feel is much greater than that we would all feel if forced to live in a society where no one could do anything if anyone else felt offended or hurt by it, however indirectly.

So in theory at least, duelling passes the central liberal test of being harmless to those who choose not to participate. Yes, those who do not take part in a duel may be upset at someone they love being shot, but that is not harm done directly to them any more than it is harmful to someone not to be the one chosen for a job, or not to be proposed to by someone they love.

But what of the practical implications? Here, I think, the case is strongest. Merely passing a philosophical test is insufficient to get me interested. If I saw no other argument for legalisation of duelling, I doubt I would support it. But because I believe it would work in practice in creating a better, more responsible, less violent society, I feel much more strongly about it. The violence we see in everyday society is a depressing and growing problem. It is clear that there have been a fair number of rather brutish young men in recent generations with no outlet for violent instincts. War provided this, but war is something imposed upon democracies by the enemies of liberty, not something anyone you or I would want to know desires in itself. This violence can be restricted by moral means, and by legal means. But churches and jails can only do so much. The problem generally is that violence against others seems to such people a fairly harmless bit of fun. Duelling, if made legal, would shift the scales for them dramatically.

Suddenly, every attack on someone, every cruel insult delivered, could be grounds for them being challenged to a duel. Yes, they can refuse and look cowardly fools in front of those with whom they associate – but could they afford to? Most thugs are not psychotic - they are simply violent, and being around others like them encourages this. Such violence is as a rule inflicted by groups. So for thugs to risk a challenge to a duel would mean either a fatal risk to themselves or looking foolish before the only ones they care to impress. Suddenly, decency and respect for others would be more natural. It is more trouble than it is worth to insult someone when he could be firing a bullet into your heart the next morning. It isn’t worth getting into a bar-room brawl any more if it means the man over whose head you shatter a beer glass could be the one who forces you to alienate what worthless friends you have by refusing a duel with him. There would still be much remaining violence of course, but overhanging it would always be the threat of honourable, deadly combat, which would reduce many a man’s violent instincts by activating his survival instinct.

And this would be among the most violent, worthless elements of society! The effect elsewhere would be just as great, because although the macho fear of turning down a duel would be less, the desire to inflict pain would be civilised more by morals and decency. Society would still be controlled to a degree by law and morality, but the underlying threat of death would also force people to think more about how their actions will affect others.

Now there are practical problems with this idea. First, how to distinguish a duel from a gangland shooting. Simply lifting the laws tomorrow would give an easy excuse to many a murderer. Contracts would have to be signed by both parties, and the usual legal bunkum agreed. Not only would this protect duellers from murder charges and ensure the jailing of gangland killers, but it would also ensure that both combatants had the chance to change their mind. Sufficient legal documents and photos would have to be signed to ensure that no one could reasonably doubt afterwards that a duel was agreed.

Now would this lead to much unnecessary death? I do not believe so. I believe it would make men automatically more decent, respectful and kind to one another. They wouldn’t even have to consciously think about how they were risking a duel – the politeness they felt that they and others were due would come naturally to them. But in those cases where men did feel insulted and a challenge was accepted, it would still often mean death. But not always. Unlike the brutes mentioned above, civilised, worthwhile men could prove their need to society and their family, giving some other reason to refuse than cowardice. I remember reading of a case of a man accepting a challenge a couple of centuries ago on the condition that his opponent breakfasted with him the morning of the duel. That morning came, and at the end of the breakfast he explained that he could not any longer accept the challenge, because he and his opponent were not on even terms. The host had a family of seven who relied completely on his support. The challenger agreed that he had nothing comparable which he was staking - merely his own life, with no family left behind struggling - and withdrew his own request for the duel. This remarkably civilised approach comes naturally to Englishmen separated from government and made responsible for their own fate.

Could duelling be acceptable in today’s society? There are some, I am sure, who would deem it too uncivilised. But it is they who have created a country of contempt for civility, respect and chivalry. It is their Britain where drunken louts brawl and rob every night, terrorising millions. By comparison, a civilised duel is nothing. I do not necessarily think I would vote favour of legalising duelling, but I do believe the libertarian argument against criminalizing it may be right.

But he returns again, again promoting social revolution. As it becomes clear that Labour plans to take a vote this year on Section 28, Norris speaks out. Listen to this rubbish:

"I would like to see Iain Duncan Smith send the clearest possible signal that the Tories would not oppose any move to repeal section 28. The reason it is there is homophobic nonsense," Mr Norris said.

As everyone knows, "homophobic" means nothing more than that the speaker has a different moral view on sodomy than the person he is talking about. But nonsense? The clause was introduced because books filled with homosexual propaganda were being used as texts in schools. Teachers promoting homosexuality is not necessary to prevent bullying of gay children, any more than promoting armed robbery is needed to stop kids teasing someone whose father is in jail. Last time an attempt was made to lift section 28, homosexual rights groups jumped on it, creating gruesome videos ready for school, including one of a 15 year old boy advising pupils to try out intercourse with both sexes to see which they preferred. If the Tories are no longer against that, we have no right to exist. Get out of our party, Steven Norris.

"Just for the record, the Tory party has always been popular with homosexuals. Mr Duncan talks about breaking the glass ceiling that stops homosexuals getting to the top: but Pitt the Younger, in all probability, broke it 220 years ago. Disraeli married late in life to an older woman, and would definitely have been put down today as batting for both sides. I cast no aspersions on their sexuality, but neither A J Balfour nor Sir Edward Heath found being a confirmed bachelor any bar to Downing Street. At least one member of Mrs Thatcher's first cabinet was homosexual. Her last parliamentary private secretary, Sir Peter Morrison, was a constant trial to the whips, who were afraid that his late-night cruises around and skirmishes in Sussex Gardens would come to the attention of the press.

Throughout the party's history, even when sodomy was a criminal offence, so long as no one frightened the horses, no one said anything and no one cared. To pretend to the contrary is historically inaccurate, and so wilfully so that one suspects those who continue to do it have some hidden agenda."

Essentially, I agree with all he says. We are doing what we can to prove ourselves bright and fresh and modern enough to govern Britain again. But after 63 months in opposition, it is now time to work primarily on the radical ideas which we can defend before the British people as they start to contemplate with dread a third term of Labour failure.

The Telegraph has learned that the Prime Minister is privately urging President Bush to call Arab-Israeli peace talks before any military action against Iraq, but the White House is resisting.

"The Washington argument is: You can deal with Iraq in a separate box. That is not the London position," said a senior Whitehall figure.

"It doesn't mean you cannot do anything until there is a settlement in the Middle East, but you have to make progress."

It isn't necessarily a bad idea to look at the Middle East in relation to Iraq, but this policy is really putting the cart before the horse. Iraq (like the Saudi government), gives cheque after cheque to the families of suicide bombers, fuelling the brutal terrorism to which Israel is responding, and which prevents negotiation. To aim at peace in the Middle East before removing Saddam is like trying to solve a bathroom flood without first turning off the taps. Then again, to mix metaphors a little, Saddam is only the cold tap. We certainly also need Arafat - the hot tap of this flood - out of the picture.

"Pressure mounts on Tony Blair as 91 per cent of voters slam plans to send our lads in to back Bush's armed "regime change" in the Gulf"

Turn to the full story, and you find - surprise - that it is not 91% of the voters who oppose war, or even 91% of people selected in an opinion poll - it is 91% of Mirror readers who could bother to phone up: less than eleven thousand people in a country with a population of 60 million. But, dishonestly, they go on to pretend this is a real blow to hope of Britain waging war:

"Blair knows a war in Iraq would go against the views of the electorate."

He knows no such thing about public opinion. But what he does know is that Saddam poses a grave threat to the British people. Popular or not, a war to be rid of him is necessary.

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
John Adams, 11 October 1798

• may not have the expected effects
• if it does work, will at best reduce global temperatures by 2100 to predicted 2094 levels - a mere six years' difference
• and is in any case being ignored by China and India, by far the world's greatest polluters?

Environmentalist scientists are now earning a fortune as prophets of doom. Unlike the men in Leicester Square with bells in their hands wearing sandwich boards proclaiming "THE END IS NIGH", we keep listening to them through false prediction after false prediction. Many of these people simply cannot make the financial sacrifices that telling the truth would mean. No one is going to pack theatres giving speeches stating that as long as we are all reasonable, there are no grounds for real fears over the environment. Those few who do give such an interpretation, like Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomberg, are treated as heretics leaving a religious cult, attacked in the most virulent and ridiculous terms. If they were cranks, no one would take them seriously enough to treat them with such cruelty. That every effort is made to destroy them should tell us all something.

*For example, global temperatures have risen massively in the past, to the extent that Britain has been a tropical climate. But when they rise even a tiny bit now, environmentalists claim it is nothing to do with cyclical changes in global temperatures: it is blamed on yuppies driving BMWs through London.

Mr Kinnock was one of 20 Commissioners brought down by a massive corruption scandal in 1999.

He was reappointed and ordered to clean up the EU’s giant bureaucracy. Top accountant Marta Andreasen was hired to pinpoint waste.

But she revealed EU accounts were even worse than those of collapsed US giants Enron and WorldCom...

Experts fear that up to £5billion of the £63billion annual EU budget is lost through fraud, waste and mismanagement.

Mrs Andreasen, 47, claimed she was asked to verify accounts she knew were untrue — and was threatened with the sack for refusing to sign.

And she accused Mr Kinnock, 60, of playing a key role in axing her after just four months in her post.

Mrs Andreasen said: “He decided I should go to another job.

“Commissioner Kinnock even tried, thankfully unsuccessfully, to prevent me from appearing before key parliamentary committees on the issues.”

Neil Kinnock would never have been leader of a sane Labour Party, nor for that matter anything more than a humble, dim backbencher. That he got so far is testament to the EU's blindness to talent: or even its deliberate selection of the talentless. He should go - now.

"Charles Clarke, the Labour chairman, has called on the unions to guarantee their funding for three years at a stretch to help to ensure that the relationship is “put on a proper footing”.

Assurances from the unions would help to solve Labour’s problems with its bankers, who are alarmed at the party’s £6 million overdraft and are demanding evidence of stable long-term income."

Labour has apparently never faced such a financial crisis, and just to rub salt into that wound, the Conservative Party recently paid off all debts.

“We know who his Daddy is and we don’t give a damn. He is accused of seven felonies and he is going down.”

“Irvine is in a two-man cell and is under no special protection. Just because he is English and has a privileged background does not give him any right to be separated from the other prisoners. I cannot reveal who he is sharing with, but it could be a rapist or a murderer.”

For an example of shocking bias, just take today's BBC Online report on what Norman Tebbit said in this week's Spectator about the Conservatives. With a banner at the top of the page reading 'It's tough to be a Tory' the piece quotes Tebbit in the most biased way possible. At one point in the Spectator article, Tebbit remarks that whether Alan Duncan is gay or straight is neither here not there - what matters it that the Tories have policies that appeal to the British people:

Despite the ramblings and spoutings of the overexcitable and scarcely rational children in Central Office, the nation is not possessed by an overwhelming urge to fill the shadow Cabinet with 25-year-old black lesbians and homosexual, asylum-seeking Muslims. Alan Duncan’s totally unsurprising announcement that he is ‘gay’ has on them the impact of a powder puff flung at an elephant. Britain is a very tolerant country. The great mass of us have no desire to emulate Mr Duncan’s activities under his duvet; we do not think it our business exactly what he does do there; we do not wish to join in; we just wish profoundly that he would not bore us with his sexual problems. [Emphasis mine]

So how do the BBC report it? By reporting the opposite of Tebbit's message as his beliefs. They deliberately miss out the main point of the article with a blatantly selective quotation designed to make him sound as though he is attacking homosexuals, rather than stating that the sexuality of Tory MPs is not an important issue:

"The great mass of us have no desire to emulate Mr Duncan's activities under his duvet... we do not wish to join in; we just wish profoundly that he would not bore us with his sexual problems."

When he backed Mr Duncan Smith's leadership bid, Lord Tebbit described him as a "normal family man" which was taken to be an attack on rival Michael Portillo who had admitted to youthful homosexual experiences.

This disgraceful bias has existed for years and years, but still Tories flinch from the most obvious solution to a publically funded institution that plays party politics: privatisation. Like the Guardian, the BBC can support Labour and the Euro as much as it likes as far as I am concerned, so long as they admit that is what they are doing and so long as I do not have to pay for it. There is no hope of the BBC ever returning to the ideals for which it was established: to bring culture and learning to the masses through a new medium. Its ranks are packed with politically correct Labour supporters, especially at the top, like Director General Greg Dyke, who donated a huge amount to the party, and socialist Chairman Gavyn Davies, whose wife is Gordon Brown's Secretary, and who was invited to the Chancellor's secret wedding even though Tony Blair and Charlie Whelan were not. Freeing the BBC would be best for everyone, especially the kids on council estates who have to go without their mothers for a fortnight when they are jailed for not paying their TV license. Please, let it happen soon.

"Ultimately, he was an articulate, but stupid man."

So concludes the Daily Telegraph on Arthur Scargill, who retired as NUM leader this week.

"If there were a contest for the most successful policy of the 20th century, the ‘right to buy’ introduced by the Conservatives after the 1979 general election must be a strong contender. While monetarism and privatisation failed to convince many people of the virtues of the free market, home-ownership did. The broad-based appeal which accounted for the Conservatives’ four general election victories between 1979 and 1992 can be summed up in the words of the fabled working-class voter when asked why he was not voting Labour: ‘It was Margaret Thatcher who got me my ’ouse, weren’t it?’ In 1979, 50 per cent of the population owned their own homes; in 2002, 70 per cent do...

In 1997, when his ears were still very much in tune with the likes and desires of the new middle classes, Tony Blair pledged to retain the right to buy. But this week it has become just one more manifesto promise to have fallen victim to the resurgence of socialist ideology within the government."

Joyce Lee Malcolm blames the rocketing rates of violent and armed crimes in England on "government policies that have gone badly wrong." Her careful research in "Guns and Violence: The English Experience," just released by Harvard University Press, leads to this conclusion: "Government created a hapless, passive citizenry, then took upon itself the impossible task of protecting it. Its failure could not be more flagrant."

In England, the penalty for possessing a handgun is 10 years in prison. The result is the one predicted by the National Rifle Association: "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns." During the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent. During seven months of 2001, armed robberies in London rose by 53 percent.

That we are less free and less secure, the report does not doubt:

An Englishman's home is no longer his castle. Thanks to gun-control zealots, England has become the land of choice for criminals.

There isn't a man worth his salt in the land who wouldn't do all he could to protect his family against burglars, killers and rapists. If someone breaks into your home, it isn't just your right to shoot them, but your responsibility to protect others from him. That government criminalises this most natural and selfless of instincts, and persecutes those who do what is right despite the law, is just another example of their quite fatal incompetence.

NB. Until a couple of years ago, I was myself uninterested in gun rights, viewing the right to bear arms as little more than an American idiosyncracy. It was this column by Mark Steyn that changed my mind completely. I urge you to read it.

"A survey by the Cost of Conscience pressure group seems to imply that many of the pulpits of the Church of England are filled with closet atheists. According to its recent survey of some 2,000 clergy, only three in ten women priests and six in ten male priests believe in the Virgin Birth; only half of women priests and seven in ten male priests believe in the physical Resurrection of Christ. Here they stand — the report suggests — not actually believing 75 per cent of what they preach each Sunday."

I have never understood why people who clearly do not believe in Christianity as anyone would normally define it would join the church, yet they do. We see priests arguing that homosexuality is not a sin, that Jesus was not born of a virgin, that abortion is morally justifiable as a means of birth control. How they can believe in such a shrivelled, empty version of the Christian doctrine at all baffles me. I can understand committed Christians, and I can understand atheists, but I cannot understand those who seem to take a 'middle' view; that believing in God in your soul is what makes him real, and that the Virgin Birth is a metaphor for a deeper truth and so on - you know the drivel I am talking about. Either God exists or He doesn't. I don't see room for compromise. But clergy find it all the time.

I am not religious, but I see the value of a strong church as a way to preserve Christian values in a decaying society. It seems obvious to me that the decline of the Church of England is as much to do with its own ambivalence towards the Bible (ambivalence is probably too kind a word: contempt may be better) as anything else. Is there any evidence at all that turning the C of E into a left-wing pressure group has actually attracted people from the Socialist Workers' Party and Greenpeace onto the pews? Because it is undeniable that it has turned away many thousands of ordinary Christians who look in vain for some sign that the Church will stand up for what Christians are supposed to believe.

As has been well said, 'inclusiveness' is not really about including people at all. By stretching the meaning of Christianity so far that in some senses everyone is a Christian, the Church also makes it meaningless to be one. If being a Christian means merely hoping for some afterlife and thinking Jesus of Nazareth was rather remarkable, it includes nearly all of us. But it also takes away any meaning for the true Christian, who believes that Jesus was born of a virgin, rose from the dead and awaits us in heaven. Those who define being a Christian as having particular views about the divinity of Christ or the value of Christian morality are excluded from the newly "inclusive" Church, which must once have appeared the only thing they could be sure would stick to Biblical teachings, but no longer stands for the beliefs they cherish.

"Saddam Hussein will have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005, a former Iraqi nuclear engineer told senators yesterday, as the US Congress held hearings on whether to go to war."

Elsewhere in The Guardian, William Shawcross makes a long and persuasive case for fighting in the Second Gulf War, the key line being:

"The real immorality and the greatest danger is to allow this evil man to remain indefinitely in power, scorning the UN and posing a growing threat to the world."

But time was made for a stupid argument from one of Saddam's useful idiots in the British press, Hugo Young, that as such a major action has not been taken in such a long time, it cannot possibly be necessary now. Making time to call the Falklands War an "absurdity", he suggests that for any democracy to launch a pre-emptive strike is inherently wrong, so presumably he would prefer to wait until Saddam has blown Washington DC, London or Tel Aviv apart before we do anything, just to ensure we are acting in self-defence. If he gets his way, we can only hope he is among those hit first.

He is just the next name in a very long list of new Union leaders: extreme, militant figures who threaten to destroy the authority of Tony Blair. Joining Serwotka and Derek Simpson, the new communist leader of Amicus, are the Marxist Bob Crow of the RMT (Rail), the hard-left Andy Gilcrift of the Fire Brigades Union, leftist Billy Hayes of the Communication Workers Union and Scargillite Mick Rix of the train driver's union. Even the TGWU's Bill Morris may soon be deposed himself in favour of a far-left figure (or someone even more far-left than him, depending on your perspective). We are already getting a whiff of the dangers that may come if the unions do fight the government, including mass strikes and cuts in public services or higher taxes to pay for their inflated wage demands. A Tory government would suddenly look a lot more attractive to the British people if this happens, so perhaps this should be grounds for optimism. People would again look to the right to fight the unions. Ballots worked very well twenty years ago, but if they now mean militancy, then encouraging more and more people through tax credits and vouchers to look elsewhere than the uniform, stale, unionised public sector for what they need will be not only a good position for the Conservatives to adopt, which it is already, but a forward-looking, attractive one to a great number of people.

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