CentreRight

Roy Hattersley has an article on CiF with which I don't completely disagree! The shock of this realisation made me read the whole thing through carefully. And thus I found, tucked away and disguised as a bittersweet nostalgic anecdote, a reference to Hattersley's single worst contribution to public life.

His article takes issue with Esther Rantzen's ideology-free approach to the duties of an MP. I'm no great fan of ideology (see constant references to the 'Bigger Picture', ad infinitum ad nauseam) but I do agree with Lord H that some form of vision for the society you would like to live in is essential for a member of parliament; seeking to represent everybody as though the MP is a reporter on a light-hearted consumer protection television programme, which was mercifully extinguished sometime in the late 20th century, is probably not a suitable model. Let's leave that though, because I don't bear Esther Rantzen any ill will. What interested me was Hattersley's recollection from his decades as Sparkbrook's member:

What Hattersley proposed, of course, wasn't a 'compromise'. He wanted to prevent publication of the paperback version of Salman Rushdie's novel. There are many things about this I find shocking, not the least of which was the Labour member for Sparkbrook's inability to state clearly: in this country we do not ban respectable works of fiction. Even at 18 I knew there was something wrong, something which felt craven about this, and that it worried me to inhabit a polity where some senior Labour politicians didn't think it worthwhile repeating this truth loudly.

I turn off from the main square, loaded with bubbling tourists, I'm like a branch cast into a stream, first rushing along with the current, now thrown down an offshoot, away from the crowd. No self-direction. I'm in a dark tunnel, where only a pinpoint of light, and what sounds like a murmuring at the far end, confirm that this is a tunnel, and not dark oblivion. Down the passage and I find another public square, smaller than Piazza Erbe, but, disconcertingly, packed with rows of silent people. They're watching a film of a Shakespeare play, projected onto the far building's wall, and they're watching it, not just with attention, they're watching it, with rapture. Since we're just two steps from Juliet's balcony, I'm glad that it's The Comedy of Errors and not you-know-what. I breathe in some communal peace before tiptoe-ing back to Erbe, and back to the hotel.

*

-- Which part of Britain is the most Victorian? I'm asked at lunch on Wednesday. Hmmm. I start to describe Glasgow, home to my alma mater, but Paolo interrupts me: -- No, not the architecture, the political culture. Well, that threw me. I was tempted to say -- Anytime that Melanchthon is posting an article to CentreRight, but I didn't. I'm now going to disagree as strongly as possible with a fellow CR contributor, without offending etiquette. I hope.

While we're whiling away the minutes until the Norwich result comes out, my attention's been grabbed by a Twitter update from Luke Pollard, a Labour PPC in the south-west. Luke has discovered that the Harry Potter actor is a Lib Dem. Someone acidly remarked (OK it was me) that it makes sense for Harry Potter to be a Lib Dem: barely literate fiction, written for children, more popular than reason demands.

But it makes you think, no? Which of our favourite childhood characters would support which party, and why?

*
"My goodness," sighed Anne, plumping up the cushions in the caravan. "It's so lovely to be back here in this rolling rural idyll, but I do worry that we might not have sufficient access to our parents and their colleagues, in order to furnish us with the informal networks which middle-class children such as ourselves will use to propel themselves forward in the professions in later life!"

There's something black-dog about today, something heavy in the air, something that will never be good. Today is the seventh day of July.

*

Four years ago today ...  Londoners will pause and remember where we were, what we thought, the panic, the fear, the claustrophobia of the phone shutdown, the numb horror - this cannot be - when the first images came on screen ... the otherworldly quality of the victims emerging from the Underground - but that's Aldgate - the scarred wreck of the bus in the square ... the shameful relief when we finally made contact with our lover, our families, our friends ... shameful, because fifty-two families would not experience that relief.

What do we remember now? The daytime seems lost in a red mist of anger. Mainly I remember the babbling of the evening crowd. When Keith eventually came home from work (...) we went back out at once and got on a bus just to be with other Londoners and to show that we could. We went to Columbia Road, it was a sunny evening, and we found friends, we found a street alive with noise and people and among the shock and the thawing numbness, numbness thawing into anger, into fury, into a mix of relief and anger and disbelief, we found our friends, we touched one another. Everyone's eyes were all over the place, as though the walls of the solid London all about us were no longer to be relied upon. As indeed they weren't; one week later the same Hackney Road bus half-detonated in the aborted second-wave attack.

And pause: we remember the fifty-two and we shudder to think of their families, for whom four years will not have passed so quickly, I think. We remember the people who survived but with wounds they will carry to their end. Is it too much to think, too, of the goodness which was seen that day, in the bravery of the victims who survived? I hope it's not presumptious to cling to that, to take some borrowed strength (as if they don't carry enough) from their resilience, some hope from remembering the actions of those around them.

Today we will see the memorial to the fifty-two in its home in Hyde Park. The correct setting. A beautiful memorial; fifty-two pillars of steel, clustered into the four compass points of the atrocity, each pillar commemorating the human being whose life was taken. Like all that is good in human endeavour, the pillars reach for the stars. Stars so far away, stars which know nothing of our existence, stars from which we are all made, stars we stretch our arms towards.

Words fly up? I never thought it was wrong for our thoughts to remain below. We will visit the memorial this Saturday and give our words to the missing Londoners.

To know, know, know him, is to love, love, love him ... I do love that song. And it often pops into my mind when I'm swimming; Zen-like rhythmic splashing is a mental magnet for songs with a hypnotic beat of repetition. What I think about most in the pool is how hard it is to know other people. I do believe this: all we can change is all we can love, and all we can love is all we can know. Which begs the question - how do you know someone?

In scientific experiment, I would answer the related epistemological question How can I know something based on this observation? through a(n unpopular) adherence to logical positivism. But I don't think that gets me very far in understanding how to know another human being.

There's a glimpse of an answer to the human problem in a swimming pool. I don't know the name of a single fellow swimmer in the London Fields Lido, though most mornings I see more of their bodies than their close friends ever will. The strange contradiction, once you're immersed, and moving up and down the lane, is that despite the near-naked bodies all around you - the flash of a torso you catch as you turn your head to suck in air, the sliver of water falling from an outstretched arm, the flippering feet five seconds in front of your face - despite all this naked humanity, there's very little of the individual to be discerned. It's quite hard even to tell the difference between the men and the women, until you stop for a breather at one end or the other. In the quasi-religious hush which blankets the splashing lanes we are not Graeme, the introspective statistician who posts on CentreRight, or Mary, the green-voting bookseller with worries about her mortgage, or Dave, the carpet-fitter with his daughter enrolled at QMU - we are just early morning swimmers. All other identities shed, along with our clothing, I know nothing of the others save that we share this early morning passion. And I love them for it. Seriously. I feel a warmth of fellow-feeling which goes quite beyond a desire to discuss how to enact a tumble-turn. And after, when we're dressed and outside, fumbling over bike locks or peering at mobile phones, a residual warmth carries over, we nod and smile in that gentle English way, before parting to get on with the rest of the day (and not much else will be as good as that first hour).

I'm a huge fan of Nick Cohen's writing and his latest piece, in Standpoint magazine, is well worth a read. He writes about the inchoate and yet civilised anger of the public to the recent sequence of revelations regarding the abuse of our money, in both the City and in Parliament. I think it's the first time I've read a coherent narrative describing my gut response to both events:

Worth reading the whole thing here [updated 11.40am with a fixed link!]

If we needed any more evidence about the failure of this particular House to 'get it', their apparent desire to elect Margaret Beckett as Speaker surely concludes debate on the matter. I have no animus against Mrs Beckett, who has been used by her party as its 'face', whenever matters have got electorally tough, for the last three decades. Whenever Labour get a drubbing in an election, it's Mrs Beckett who is wheeled onto the news programmes (insert favourite caravanning metaphor here) to spin whatever her party's current untenable line might be. This role appears to be transitioning to Chris Bryant, have you noticed? A figure of (unmalicious) ridicule. Which underlines the inappropriate nature of Mrs Beckett's candidacy. The speakership should not be a sinecure for a ministerial parliamentarian in the twilight of her career. 

Richard Shepherd should be made Speaker, from the pool of available candidates. He has spent his career campaigning for Freedom of Information, through the long, lonely decades before it became the leitmotif of this post-bureaucratic age. He's almost visibly sensitive to the importance of the words he chooses when he speaks in the chamber; something which you would imagine would be a sine qua non for an elected member, but which rarely appears to be the case. Mr Shepherd's vibration of care over the words he releases is often alluded to, usually (by implication) as a reason to reduce the esteem in which he is held.

I find this sick-making, to be honest. The words of parliamentarians are the tools with which they craft our laws, and set the parameters for our liberty. I would prefer everytime, when faced with the alternative, the verbal care of Mr Shepherd. There has been little sight more depressing this last decade than the clucking of the Labour MP for Android North, mouthing his or her whip-written speech, in the hope of being captured in the Prime Ministerial doughnut on the six o'clock news. Everything we need to know about the unfitness of this House to be tasked with selecting a new Speaker is there, in front of our faces, everytime those panting puppets are called to speak in debate.

Conditional on Mr Shepherd not being elected, the least worst option is Ann Widdecombe. Even if it were not likely that she would implement some much-needed reforms (and it surely is likely that she would) her candidacy is time-limited by the date of the next general election. What is so overwhelmingly obvious to everyone (apart from the Westminster hothouse, it appears) is that we require not just a new Speaker, but a totally new House. Reboot the House of Commons. That re-legitimised House must start by selecting a proper Speaker, free from the whip-soaked shenanigans with which we are currently cursed, shenanigans due to the dismal arithmetic of Labour's current, temporary, parliamentary majority.

Dear Headmaster,

Please find attached the Ofsted report on the latest addition to your teaching faculty, Mr Gordon Brown. As you know, we observed his performance over a range of subjects, and hope that our findings will help his very real, very personal journey, upwards, onwards, twirling, twirling, twirling, always towards the stars!

kind regards
Lettitia Prey

History
Mr Brown took an, er, unusual approach to this subject, telling his students that prior to 1997, the United Kingdom had suffered many decades of unremitting plague and doom ('The era of Boom-n-Bustism', as he called it), which had left the economy in tatters, the rainswept streets strewn with rubbish, and that the only sound to be heard in the never-ending twilight was a sort of low, keening wail of despondency. His demonstration of this wailing was perhaps the highlight of this lesson. After 1997, or 'Year Zero' as Mr Brown taught it, the country bounced into a period of never-ending expansionism, with record levels of sunshine. Mr Brown used the overhead projector to good effect in this session, displaying a sequence of pictures showing happy schoolchildren crying with joy whenever the 'Iron Architect of Growth', in Mr Brown's terminology, paid an impromptu visit to their villages. 

It's always ethical to reveal all the information you know about someone, isn't it? Is it? The ethics of choosing to disclose an author's identity are identical with the legality of such actions - aren't they? Are they? The Times seems to think so. Bear with me. 

From today's Times:

“I love Margaret dearly but the public would not stand for her as Speaker,” said one Cabinet minister who supports Mr Bercow.

Which cabinet minister? Shouldn't we be told? How can we know that this statement wasn't planted by someone on the Bercow team? Or just made up by a journalist, desperate for some copy and with a deadline approaching?

Or what about one of today's Times' leaders, which decries the censorship of foreign news in Iran. I agree with this, of course, but as usual the leader is unsigned, so we don't know who wrote it; we're not able to determine whether this writer, an employee of Rupert Murdoch, is as consistent in slamming totalitarian regimes when it comes to (for example) China.

Of course I don't believe that in either of these Times' examples is there anything scurrilous going on. I chose these two only because I want to accuse the newspaper of selective disclosure which is not always in the public interest.

Yesterday the Times succeeded in having an injunction lifted which allowed them to publish the name and home town of the NightJack police blogger. There was absolutely no public interest served by printing this information. The only outcome has been to create problems for NightJack, for his family and with his employers. So why did the newspaper take this action? 

I can imagine circumstances whereby a paper might wish to publish the information: if its investigations uncovered fraud on behalf of the blogger, for example - suppose NightJack turned out not to be a policeman, and his blog a work of fiction - but this wasn't the case. NightJack has been a serving officer for fourteen years.

Danny Finkelstein, who writes often and with authority about cognitive dissonance, attempted a justification of his paper's actions this morning on his blog, where he wrote: when someone publishes then they might reasonably expect that others might take an interest in their identity. This is especially so when they allow their work to go forward for a major prize.

ConservativeHome's irregular update memo for people who find themselves out of the country at times of high political drama.

1. Gordon Brown is still Prime Minister. We know this because he wrote an  article for The Times yesterday about The Digital Revolution, in which he claimed that the Internet is 'as vital' as water and gas. It's not clear from the article what form of gas the PM believes to be equal in importance to the internet: oxygen, presumably, although given the miasma of lies and smears which passed for the last PM press conference ('Did you want to replace Alistair Darling as Chancellor, Prime Minister?' - 'No, no, not at all') it is conceivable that a more malodourous gaseous form, connected perhaps with lentil consumption, may have been on his mind. In any event, readers should not be alarmed: so far, the government intends to make us pay for web access for All Britons, rather than forcing us to choose between having either water, or broadband, connected to our homes.

2. Peter Mandelson is in charge of Everything, with the exception of gas and water. He has approximately 2,400 ministers, including Baroness Esther Rantzen of Luton Parkway (the Five Genitally-Shaped Fruit 'N Veg Per Day Tsarina), Lord Amstrad of Spurs (the Buy-To-Let Property Tsar - this government knows how to ride a wave!) and Shahid Malik MP, unless it transpires, as seems plausible, that Mr Malik is 'renting' one of his several forgotten offices from an outpost of the Amstrad Empire, in which case Mr Malik will once again step aside while his expense claims are once more cleared by Sir Basil Wire-Brush, the Prime Minister's 'Transparency and Whitewashing' Tsar.

Want to know how it happened?

I thought about the 'how', during an increasingly unpleasant webroom chat with a Labour MP called Kerry Something, from Bristol, while the euro-results were coming in. She wrote that it was ‘revealing’ that Tories were staying quiet about the rise of the BNP. The innuendo was clear, along with the factual innacuracy (Tories in the chatroom were doing nothing but expressing angst about the BNP result), and I told her she should feel shame. She replied that it wasn't innuendo [that Tories aren't anti-racist] because the 'Left' has always been at the forefront of fighting racism.

So this is how you get the BNP elected.

First of all, decades back, you create a Race Industry, and you staff it with people whose entire life purpose is to see people through the prism of 'Race', although you deliberately rule out concerning yourself with anything to do with caucasians (the idea of 'Caucasian liberation' is innately laughable, and you feel it best not to draw anyone's attention to the logical consequence of this, that the concept of any 'race' requiring legally enforceable rights, in order to be treated with equality before the law, is inherently nonsense). There are some egregiously disgusting racist acts occurring in the country at this time, and some unspeakably hideous views being expressed; so no-one of good faith stops you at this first, crucial step.

Having put the population into its different boxes, you teach them to distrust one another, by introducing an ever-increasing sequence of laws in order to make free expression a criminal act. You have delivered thoughtcrime - not a lazy cliche, just the truth. I break the law if I utter a thought which is prohibited by the state. It doesn’t matter that decent people would not utter those thoughts anyway. Decent people have noticed that you’ve made thinking certain things a crime.

Did you see the Press conference yesterday? We were standing in front of the telly, unable to sit still as the county council results came through - Derbyshire! - watching the Prime Minister ramble and flap and snarl his way through a televised briefing that must go down as one of the most hideous spectacles in news history. I admit to feeling pity for Mr Brown. Something in the way the lobby were treating him reminded me of ancient Punch cartoons about bear-baiting.

But hold fast on that sympathy button! Sky interrupted the press conference to bring us the news that Caroline Flint Quits The Government. Oh please, please, I twittered (stylistically and technologically), please let someone in the press corp ask a question about Ms Flint, and please, please don't let the Prime Minister know already. The wonderful Paul Waugh obliged. We held our breath. Surely this would knock the PM from his memorised sequence of nonsense poetry about Renewal Councils, paternal Presbyterianism (this is a good thing?), I'm-the-one-man-who-can-lead-the-nation-from-this-catastrophe stuff?

Caroline Flint, objecting to the concept of being treated as female window dressing. The photograph is from the Guardian website, which helpfully includes the details Caroline Flint wears: red dress, £180, Karen Millen, 0870 160 1830; shoes, £70, Topshop. Photograph: Georgia Terry

So, the seductive whispering of Fair Votes (I want to write Fair Votessssss) is upon the heavy summer air once more. What is Fair Votes? It's the disingenuous phrase developed by those in favour of replacing First Past The Post (FPTP; another stupid name) elections with those conducted under one of the myriad forms of proportional representation (PR). When the proponents of an argument make up a name for it, such that the name carries a sense of goodness in its English meaning, you have to be worried. Cf Human Rights Act. What sort of monster could be against rights for human beings? Or, indeed, votes which are fair? Grrrr [that's me being a monster]. One of the least-remarked upon streaks of intellectual dishonesty, taking place just now, is that the Fair Vote Advocators are taking advantage of anger with MPs to push their historically unpopular little agenda. If we are not careful we will find ourselves in a cultural position whereby opposition to PR is 'felt' - without the requirement to be spelled out, in black and white - to be a subliminal support for the current unethical system of expenses. 

Of course there's the irony, which would be delicious were its likely outcome not so horrendous, that the key advocators of PR are among the set of people who are now living in fear that the BNP will gain representation in the Euro Parliament, an outcome which, should it happen, would occur almost entirely as a result of the system of PR being used in those elections, a system which was inflicted on us by those same key advocators of PR. This is an unpleasant irony, though in and of itself is obviously not a reason to be for or against PR.

You know that common-place assertion that one of the remarkable features of Jane Austen's novels is their failure to mention the Napoleonic wars? I read an essay by, I think, Margaret Atwood, which made the compelling point that Austen's failure to mention any political fallout of the tumultuous upset on the continent, other than by featuring a succession of military officers in romantic roles, is one of the keys to understanding her essentially Tory worldview. Well maybe.

I've been meaning to post onto CentreRight for days now, my head is full of stuff: about the Kirk in Scotland; about a book I've just re-read and what its author says about love; about a random act of beauty witnessed in the London Fields park on a sunny Friday afternoon, shortly before a random act of violence at the edge of the same park led to the death of another Hackney child in the early hours of Saturday morning. But any points to be made about any of these matters must, it strikes me, be of almost no general interest at the moment, as is the case for any political topic which isn't directly to do with the revolution sweeping the House of Commons.

If you were ever kind enough to be mildly curious about why I'm so grateful to be allowed to write here, it's because I think it may be important to try to shine a small light onto the politics of the everyday. I confess to no grand theory (other than love) and in fact distrust those who claim to have such a bigger picture, a phrase I detest. But the light from my shaky, amateur torch cannot begin to compete with the black hole of the Westminster carcrash, which is sucking every other story into its maw. Once light enters a black hole, of course, it never again escapes, and I wonder just how many topics, of perhaps national import, are being sucked in too, never to be seen again; topics, perhaps, which are being aired now precisely because their authors feel that they will escape proper public attention. 

Forgive the grammar of the title. I'm referencing the Obama slogan, and "Change in which I no longer believe" wouldn't resonate with it so much. Would that this were the only conundrum for the Tory supporter this morning.

Look, I'm no starry-eyed optimist, I probably have the lowest expectations possible of a Tory government. I'm not expecting white doves of peace to spontaneously circle Westminster on the arrival of DC at no.10, nor gazelles to leap from their wooded shade to nuzzle the laughing faces of happy children, nor, even, for much of the hideous legislation of the last 12 years to be unwound. I don't even expect the relationship with Europe to be sorted. When people get worked up about political issues, I don't. Not because I don't care. Just because I try to keep my expectations somewhere on the achievable part of the Want-Get axis.

Nick Cohen is my favourite writer of the Left, not least because he identifies and gnaws at the issues which the Left would rather he shut up about, most notably the tendency of some Leftist politicians (step forward Ken Livingstone) to fawn at the feet of clerical fascists whose views on women, social justice, homosexuality etc would cause the same politicians to organise a mass protest, were the clerics in question not seen as key to delivery of votes.

I'm feeling kinda mellow after the first al fresco lunch of the season, and I'm sat in the garden, flicking through websites, and I come across Standpoint, where I read Mr Cohen's most recent article, an article of such perspicacity and relentless hammering-home of revealed truth about the barren, pornographic heart of the Gordon Brown project that post-lunch sleepiness was banished.

Take this as an example:

Perfect, isn't it, and honest too (the 'characteristic' tendency of the Left to believe in their innate goodness). Like you, I'm sure, I've read many well-constructed articles which set out the reasons to be angry with Gordon Brown, but this one is in a league of its own, perhaps - and perhaps this is necessary - because Mr Cohen is a good man of the Left.

The whole article is here.

Most days of my professional life, I ponder the importance of coherence. That's because the concept has a very technical meaning - it has a life that escapes the bounds of its common English usage. Essentially, to be coherent means to make statements of induction ('What can I say about the Universe, based on these data in front of me?") which obey the calculus of probability. That probably sounds uncontroversial but in fact the dominant school of statistical inference resolutely refuses to obey what, for me, is one of only two laws of inference worth bothering about. Everything I subscribe to, in my working life, follows from obedience to a desire for coherent induction.

Well, and life would be dull indeed if it followed consistent patterns, no? Which is why Alice Miles' article in the Times this morning annoyed me a little. Ms Miles' view is that Tory policy is 'incoherent', a claim which she substantiates by saying that the Tories may increase spending on Health, but not on Education. Ms Miles' view, if I've understood her argument correctly, is that spending should increase on Education, but perhaps not on Health.

An original claim to coherent reasoning, but not one I wish to dwell on further. Instead I want to thank Ms Miles for helping me put my finger on what has been irritating me about lots of Tory coverage for some time. 'What are your precise plans?', Mr Cameron is asked, endlessly. 'Will you cut x% from budget y in department z? Or z% from budget x in department y? or both? or, like, neither?'. I don't find this a particularly productive line of questioning, not least because Mr Cameron isn't fool enough to provide any hostages to fortune. More, though, it's because these questions are just surrogates, taking the place of the question which perhaps the interviewer isn't even conscious of wishing to ask: What Sort Of Ideology Will Drive A Cameron Government? I solidly hope that the answer to this question is 'None'. More than that. I positively desire David Cameron's government to be incoherent.

To my left, a vast chemical-green sign announces: Asda 24 hours. To my right, the cathedrals of Matalan and TKMaxx, squatting in unholy alliance. Behind me a functional block of Town Hall, facing down onto this Water Garden. Concrete benches amongst clipped box hedges with a few steaming ponds of non chemical-green water, where bloated goldfish gasp for air. A fat man is throwing bread to the fish, while his wife looks on, impatient: --Poor f*ckers don't get 'nuff food. It is lunchtime, after all.

Even concrete melts in springtime sun. Lie on my back and close my eyes, let the space behind my eyes be dazzled, so that when they reopen the scene is bleached of colour. Voices buzz over the hot, heavy air, like flies adrift on the gentle warm wind. --[Don't you] 'ckin ignore me! --Awright I see ya! They're laughing, really.

I had stopped to pick up a coffee at the shop on the park's edge. --You don't look like your facebook photo, I mean, you look like I remember you at school, no it's a good thing. You can see I've shaved mine a bit since then, I'm a no-photo man I am, I'm the most unphotogenic man goin'. I sneak a look at them both - life tourist - while I'm waiting for my coffee. He's talking rubbish. They're both beautiful, both late 40s. Something good is starting here, the woman is smiling fondly while the man babbles faster, incapable of not releasing information he's been carrying about alone, for too long. --I lost my dad last year, thing is I told him I loved him just in time. A first date? Not their last.

Ian Tomlinson  Not a victim of the protestors, who didn't shower him with bottles in order to prevent medical attention getting through. That misinformation must have been given to the press through some unintentional error, at the same time that the police forgot to mention that they'd carried out a vicious and unprovoked assault on Mr Tomlinson themselves.

The other G20 protestor, given a good beating. No-one's allowed to film the police any more, are they? These protestors were a terrible nuisance to those wonderful banks, who've done nothing but good for the country. 

Jean Charles de Menezes. Not wearing a bulky jacket, didn't vault the ticket barrier, didn't resist arrest, wasn't alerted by the shout of 'Armed police' which wasn't ever issued, in fact. Some sort of unintentional error again led to all that misinformation being placed in the media.

Happy Easter first of all.

Not a hugely important point, this, perhaps, but it is one, in the maelstrom of smeargate this morning, which the mainstream media seem to be either missing, or willfully ignoring.

I heard Lance Price at the start of that dreadful Radio4 Sunday morning 'current affairs' programme, in between the bells and whistles and garbled poetry with which R4 treats Sunday news reportage, saying that the Right dominates the blogosphere because Labour are in government. Several other commentators have made much the same point. The implication is that once the purveyors of filth at No.10 are ejected from office, the British blogosphere will henceforth be dominated by the Left, by a process of some sort of critical osmosis.

They're partially correct, I would guess, of course, but there's something else, something quite important, which I think the Left are congenitally incapable of understanding. And if they do grasp the concept, they are incapable of implementing its practical consequence. It is that the British blogosphere - dominated by Guido Fawkes (I bow), Iain Dale (hurrah) and, of course, our own dear ConservativeHome - while certainly favouring a centre-right worldview to various degrees, are utterly independent of the entity called 'The Conservative Party'.

Guido was as much an attack dog to the Tories over Caroline Spelman's nanny as he has been over the much more serious McBride affair. Iain has written, I think, that his political career may have suffered by the candour with which he reveals his political thinking. And ConservativeHome, the gift to the centre-right, was started by Tim (I believe) as a reaction against the moves by Michael Howard to disenfranchise party members. All these Goliaths (in terms of readership and influence) are, in the Establishment sense, more akin to David, speaking for themselves come what may.

I've not been able to bring myself to read all the details of the torture of the children in Edlington; it's too distressing. And I'm not going to write, here, now, that by itself this horror tells us everything we need to know about the state of Britain today.

But.

Reading the Times this morning I came across this response from Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary (with my emphasis):

Did I read that right? He's using this distressing story to attack the Conservatives? He thinks there's a move afoot to demonise all 'groups' of children (why 'groups', I wonder?).

The estimable Mr Edward Leigh MP wrote a fascinating article for Platform today, in which he describes science or secularism as the Paradigm of Certainty, a paradigm whose approach, he claims is: if we cannot prove something scientifically, it is not truth.

This is, of course, nonsense, and Mr Leigh is far too intelligent to believe it, though it is one of the typical claims made by the antiscientific who seek to make religious belief a central tenet of public life. Science is fine, they say, for those test-tubey things, or for, like, making medicine or bombs or whatever, but when it comes to like the real stuff, the deep stuff, the what-it-is-to-be-human stuff, science is inadequate, and we have to give over to religion (typically 'my religion', but this isn't the place to list the contradictions between these competing theories, all of which claim universal application).

Scientific discourse is not a solid set of practice; there are different schools in the philosophy of science. But none of them - none of them - make the claim to provide certainty, about (almost) any theory (see below), and nor do they ascribe impossibility to something which cannot currently be tested (I'm writing this in Italy so I'm even more aware than normal that the root of the word 'to prove' means the same as to test or to try: provare, to try, in Italian). To an atheist, it feels much more as though religious people are the ones who lay claim to certainties ("I don't know you; of course, ultimately, I cannot know you, but I know you are sinful", or "When I die I will come back to life, somehow", or "God is love").

She would take his money and probably end up running his business. He should go, of course, Mr Wheeler. There's no place in the Tory party for someone who thinks he can buy its policy. I would think this regardless of the manner in which the putative policy purchaser made the money with which he seeks to buy his policies; but I admit that the more I've thought about Stuart Wheeler (whom I am sure is in real life a charming and good person), the more the plot of Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw's (in my opinion) masterpiece, has re-occurred to me.

We (by which I mean the people who run our party) were, prior to Mr Wheeler's political, ah, realignment, in the position of Major Barbara herself. Should we take this man's money, and do good with it? Or should we reject it, on the basis of its provenance? Some few aspects of my presbyterian upbringing have stayed fast within me; chief of which is that I abhor gambling. The haunted faces of men, outside the numerous bookmaker shops that my impoverished borough boasts, is one of the most depressing in urban life. Yes, yes, I know, free will, no, of course I would not ban it, but look at the face of the man who has lost his money, again, and tell me you do not think: someone is making money from this misery. I cannot think good of this. No doubt this is a personal failing. That you can now lose money on more gambled outcomes than mere horse-races, without as much as setting foot in a bookmaker's shop, is not my definition of progress.

A couple of observations coalesced into something approaching a feeling of foreboding this morning.

I came home from St Petersburg yesterday evening, very tired, passport-clutching, shuffling my way to the front of the weary immigration queue, not very here-and-now to be honest. So I forgot that on top of my bald head was a flat cap, worn both to protect myself from the freezing temperatures of the Russian weather I’d just left behind, as well as to signal Hey! I’m into indy jangly guitar type pop music to anyone interested. These semiotic signifiers, eh! I handed my passport over to New Labour’s frontline of border protection, a young woman resplendent in the toy-uniform designed by John Reid to give the impression that some sort of control is maintained over the country’s porous borders.

-- Could you take your hat off, please?

-- Oh, sorry, yes of course.

But here’s the thing. As I’m pulling the cap off, I look at her properly. Her entire head is wrapped up in a Muslim scarf, with only her eyes, nose and mouth visible: no forehead, no scalp, no chin on view. Fair enough. But my head is practically naked by comparison. I wonder, and I don't know, but if I had a headscarf on, would I have had to remove that? We look at each other a bit, then share a giggle. She can read my mind very easily.

I'm working my way through some revision today, trying out the exercises in Alan Agresti's excellent 'Categorical Data Analysis', because I've foolishly agreed to give a talk in May at a conference, and supplied an abstract claiming that I'll show X, Y and Z, when in fact I've yet to do A, B or C, and I'm realising that I've forgotten nearly everything I was taught about categorical data all those long, lonely decades ago. So back to square 1.

I'm finding it hard to concentrate though, and I'm loving the solidity of the word 'categorical' more than I'm into the statistical methods deployed to investigate such structures. My mind keeps wandering. I'm rolling 'categorical' around my tongue, and thinking of making a few such assertions. I feel an imperative to do so. Sorry.

It's as much Emily Thornberry's fault, this, as my inability to get to grips with multinomial likelihoods. She's the Labour member for South Islington, quoted in the Sunday Times this morning as saying: The richest have done best out of the good times. Now times are difficult, that needs to be shared. And who could argue with that? Ms Thornberry's idea is that 'the rich' should pay a higher proportion in tax now, to show they're feeling our pain. But who, exactly, is rich?

According to the Office for National Statistics, who released Labour Market statistics just last month, median public sector pay rose by 4% in 2008, while the private sector equivalent was 3.1%. This isn't a blip: it has been the trend since Labour came to power. Average pay in the private sector is now less well remunerated than in the public sector. These figures were the latest I could find on the ONS website, and so they don't take account of the news of those, such as the brave-minded men and women at companies like LDV, who are cutting their hours and their pay in an effort to stave off unemployment. To be  specific: the weekly median level of full-time earnings in the public sector was £523 per week in April 2008. In the private sector the figure was £460 per week. These figures are gross, i.e. before tax.