CentreRight

How did he do?  My view is that

• It was a significant error on the part of the BBC to devote so much of the programme to the BNP. Just because the BNP had to be on didn't mean there had to be a whole show devoted to questions about the BNP.  He was entitled to be on, and the rest of us were entitled to hear his views on bankers bonuses, on MP expenses, on Gordon Brown's biscuit problems, on whether the banks should be broken up, and so on.  He was either on there as part of the normal process or he wasn't.  If he was only there as part of the normal process, as the BBC insisted, then it should have been a normal show.

Question: Why has Nick Griffin been all over our screens for the past few days, and why is he tonight appearing on Question Time, when earlier incarnations if the BNP's mix of nationalism, socialism, and racism did not receive anything like the same publicity?

Answer: Proportional representation. 

Both predictable and predicted.

Unlike the Editors, I don't believe it is fundamentally unConservative to have all-women shortlists.  But there would be profound implications of doing so, flowing from something I do consider to be a fundamental Conservative principle: equality before the law.

Here are three implications of all-women shortlists, in the context of equality before the law.  (The first two flow straightforwardly and directly from the principle of equality before the law.  The third flows from equality before the law and the principle of liberalism.)

Every British Parliament has had its share of scandal.  Everyone remembers John Profumo, caught up in a world of call girls and spies, despite being Secretary of State for War.  Jeremy Thorpe was accused (though of course acquitted) of conspiracy to murder.  Keith Best was (initially) sentenced to four months in prison for making multiple applications (under assumed names) for British Telecom shares at privatisation.  But these scandals of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s did not lead to any sense of widespread corruption, either across Parliament as a whole or even within specific political parties.

All that changed because of a deliberate strategy of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.  For they attempted to paint the inevitable occasional scandals of the 1990s (much milder, in fact, than the cases above) as symptomatic of widespread corruption and decadence in the Conservative Party, as indicative that the Conservatives were no longer fit to rule.  Blair now says he regrets the strategy - likening it to a footballer's diving in the penalty area.  I know of no regret from Alastair Campbell.

I wish to disagree with the title of James' nice Platform piece this morning, though not, as it happens, what he says inside the article (that we should undermine the BNP mainly by addressing the legitimate concerns of the people that vote for them), with which I agree very much and which I argued myself here.

Where I disagree with James is his statement: "Nick Griffin must not have the opportunity to turn the BNP into a popular, nationalist party".  Griffin must have precisely that opportunity.  We might seek to deny him success in his opportunity by shooting his fox in the way James proposes (and I have myself proposed), but we should hope that the BNP can indeed convert itself into a legitimate element - albeit presumably always an extreme and (in my view) deeply misguided element - of British political debate.

Lots of you will have noticed this report about the Arctic being ice-free, in summer, within twenty years.  Now, let's set aside (I know you won't but I can suggest it anyway!) the question of whether it's really going to happen, whether the earth is really heating up or cooling down, whether the actions of Mankind have anything to do with it, and whether there's really anything we can do about it now, even so.  Instead, let's just take the report at face value and think a little about some of the implications.

All the country's bankers and all the backbench MPs were dragged into Parliament square by a screaming mob and burnt on a huge pyre.  Here is what the papers said...

I have explained before that Western liberalism (let's perpetuate a solecism and call it "English liberalism") is the product of humanist Catholic and Protestant ideas at the time of the Reformation - most specifically the doctrine of things indifferent in the form put forward by Philipp Schwartzerd, another who (like myself) adopted the pseudonym "Melanchthon", and particularly as Melanchthon's ideas were developed by Hooker and Locke.

Now here is a question: As an idea that has its genesis in Christian thought, could we expect a liberal society to be sustainable indefinitely that was post-Christian?  Let us set aside for now the interesting question of whether a liberal society could be constructed based on Muslim ideas.  As it happens, I believe that it could, but that the liberal concept in play in such a society would be unlikely to be quite the same as Melanchthon's - it would be a new form of liberalism.  Having teased you with that, let me now focus on post-Christian secularism.

The Guardian reports that Cameron will, quite rightly, rule out a post-ratification referendum on Lisbon.  He has been supported in this by Daniel Hannan who is reported as saying:

"I'm perfectly happy with [David Cameron's] policy. He's been very clear over the fact that he wants a referendum on the Libson treaty. If we are in time to stop it, wonderful. He's been working very hard to get that...if we are too late to stop it, there will need to be a wider renegotiation of our position. Frankly, I think it would be silly just to have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty at that stage."

Instead of a referendum on Lisbon, Cameron is reported as favouring a repatriation of powers, including employment laws and matters of justice and home affairs.

This is the way to go.  The renegotiation would have to go further than this, but the principle of Cameron's position is spot on.  If we can find a way to be clear enough about this in advance of an election, we might be able to avoid having a referendum of any sort at all.  No referendum; just renegotiate.

There seems to have been a lot of confusion surrounding my post advocating a Cameron government's investigating measures to reduce the cost of weddings.  Perhaps the following will help.

That's the headline of the lead front-page story in today's Telegraph.  And that's the key problem - the people that do want to kill themselves that we can no longer prevent because to frustrate a settled will to suicide is to violate a putative human right - not, as many prefer to argue, those that do not want to kill themselves being pressured into doing so.

It has become common for the cost of weddings, including wedding dresses, flowers, receptions, dances, etc., to be of the order of (or even exceed) £10,000.  Many people now cohabit for an extended period until they can afford a wedding (in some cases for five or even ten years).  The costs of weddings has thus become a material barrier to marriage and hence an issue of public policy interest.  I propose that if David Cameron is serious about his commitment to encourage marriage (as I believe he is) then one of the first actions he should take in government - perhaps even before tackling the "couple penalty" in the benefits system - is to tackle the excessive and socially damaging cost of weddings.

I note that what follows is intended completely seriously, and I consider it a matter of great policy significance.

Events of the past two years have shaken many of the political and economic assumptions commonly held by journalists, politicians and policy-makers up to then.  Probably the most famous change of mind has been that of Alan Greenspan, as discussed in the BBC2 show "The love of money", last week.  At the height of the crisis last year, Greenspan went before Congress and said that he'd been wrong to believe that self-interest would be sufficient to make financial markets broadly self-regulating.  In an interview for this BBC2 show, Greenspan expands upon his view.  You can see him here, at 56.35.  Here's what he said:

The Sunday Times reports today that new guidance will be issued this week decriminalising the assisting of suicides, with an attempt being made to distinguish between assisting and encouraging suicide.

I shan't repeat most of my arguments against this, which you can find here, here and here.  But I will re-iterate the following:

Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has criticised bankers for their lack of repentance.  Interesting word, "repent".  Sometimes we use it just to mean that, after some bad decision, we acknowledge to ourselves or others that we made a mistake - "Marry in haste; repent at leisure."  But usually, when we say someone should repent, we mean that he should be sorrowful or acknowledge guilt concerning a moral failing, perhaps even aspiring to change his behaviour in the future.

My guess is that bankers don't "repent" because they don't believe they did anything morally wrong.  They may believe that they made some decisions that, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to lose them money.  But people active in financial markets lose money quite often - it's just that they hope that their good days are more numerous and more lucrative than their bad days.  They won't remotely understand what could be meant by asking them to "repent" of losing money.  If they never lost any money, they wouldn't be taking any risks.  And if they never took any risks, they wouldn't make any money - indeed, their jobs wouldn't exist at all.  Since they were paid precisely to take risks, with the inevitable consequence that, sometimes, they would lose money, why would they think that losing money should be something to repent of?

My earlier post has provoked some excitement.  A few of points to bear in mind.

1) I asked questions.  I didn't supply answers.  Few of you commenting have addressed my questions.

2) The issue of obsolescence of weapons of war is very often not a matter of whether they can be defeated in a straight fight with another weapon.  The longbow did not become obsolete because other weapons had greater range, destructive power, or firing rate (indeed, it was probably centuries before the competitor weapons outstripped the longbow in these regards).  Similarly, the obsolescence of the battleship or tank is not primarily a matter of, say, in the case of the tank, lighter faster transport vehicles being more resistant to destruction by shells or able to deliver greater punch themselves.  Very often, obsolescence occurs because the nature of relevant combat changes.  If people stopped charging at you across muddy fields, the value of longbows will decline.  Sea battles and battles between land armies have changed in ways that render battleships and tanks obsolete.

Similarly, the point about drones is not that, any time soon, they could defeat manned fighters in straight combat.  Few defence authorities dispute that the next generation of manned fighters will be the last, because warfare will change in ways that will make traditional fighters irrelevant.  There is of course defence value in participating in that final generation, specifically in the (highly unlikely) scenario that we faced an opponent that did have final generation fighters.  But there is also a cost.  My question is whether there is an option of skipping a generation of weapons?  What would a final generation fighter plane really be for for the UK?

3) I did not propose abandonning nuclear weapons.  I questioned whether we wanted the Trident II system.  It is a typical move of fans of Trident II for them to suggest that the only options are Trident II or not having nuclear weapons at all.  That's not correct.  There are other options.

1) If not already obsolete, the manned fighter will certainly have gone the way of the tank and the battleship within a decade or so, to be superceded by unmanned drones.  Between now and then, the UK faces no plausible conventional opponent over which we would not have, in combination with our allies, unquestioned air supremacy, even with our current aircraft.  So what conceivable defence rationale is there for UK involvement in the Eurofighter Typhoon?  Or is the defence rationale supposed to lie in relationship-building with the other countries involved?

2) What is Trident II for?  What opponent, positioned with conventional strength sufficient to need deterring with nuclear weapons, or with sufficient first strike capability, interest in disabling UK nuclear forces, and confidence not to be adequately deterred by air-delivered cruise missiles, is Trident II deterring?  And if the answer is: "None today, but some opponent might arise during the period Trident II will be operational", is it really the case that such a threat would arise so suddenly and unexpectedly that we could not, if necessary, build or purchase (perhaps at greater expense than Trident II, but we would only be spending the money if it were needed, rather than just on spec) a nuclear delivery system offering as much deterrence as (or perhaps more than, since based on later technology) Trident II?

I wish to voice my support for Graeme, in particular his opposition to the principle that "If this law stops just one pedophile from gaining a position of trust with children it will be worth it".  Indeed, I want to take this further, and say that I oppose this law even though I think it perfectly plausible that the law might prevent some child, some day, from being murdered.

Because that's the thing with health and safety legislation.  If you ban kids from climbing trees in the park, you will prevent some kid, some day, from falling out and breaking his leg.  And if you forbid kids from playing on the beach, unsupervised, you will prevent some kid, some day, from drowning.  Those of us that oppose excessively cautious regulation in these areas should make our case with our eyes open.  Health and safety regulation does, at least in its own narrow terms, promote health and safety.

In just the same way, it almost certainly is the case that requiring every stranger who ever has any dealings with a child from undergoing a background check will deter or prevent some specific cases of child abuse or even murder.  But the question is: is it worth it?

I believe that the Save our Election Night campaign is more than simply a pleasing cross-party self-indulgence for political nerds.  I think it is one of the most important campaigns this website has set up, and indeed is important for the health of British democracy.  Here's why.

When UK politicians and commentators used to criticize the NHS, its supporters would proclaim that those critics lacked an international perspective for, they said, the NHS was the "envy of the world".  Now that the NHS faces international criticism we all pull together against Jonny Foreigner.

I've never heard a foreigner who wasn't a hard-left Socialist laud the NHS.  I have heard lots of foreign bureaucrats express amazement that we have what they regard as such an absurd way of organising our healthcare. Indeed, I doubt very much whether, outside of Somalia, Brazil, and the like, the NHS has been the "envy of the world" for decades, if it ever was.  Most foreigners know very little about UK healthcare and it certainly isn't held up as a model of how to to things.  Indeed, internationally the most famous thing about British health is how bad our teeth are.

What is politics about?  Max Weber famously defined politics as a "struggle for power".  Let's take that as our startpoint.  But a struggle between what?  Here are some options:

• representatives of classes or other self-interest-promoting groups
• representatives of cultures
• representatives of political philosophies
• alternative groups of managers
• specific individuals seeking power for its own sake
• representatives of concepts of how, specifically, to address the issues of the day
• specific individuals seeking power so that they could employ it in their own interest

In practice, of course, all of the above (and more) are likely to be found to some degree.  Even in a two party system, it's perfectly plausible that one party consists of representatives of a class interest whilst the other party consists of promoters of a political philosophy.

I don't think there is any one positive answer to this question.  So let us instead ask a normative question: what should politics be about for a Conservative?  I don't mean "what should a Conservative believe?" or any related question.  I mean, what should a Conservative think is the point of politics.

I don't hunt - indeed, I've never been.  It doesn't happen to be my preferred sport.  But, nonetheless, I believe we should repeal the Hunting Act 2004.  Here's why.

One last go at this for now.

Most of those that argue against assisted suicide do so on the grounds that it will be difficult or impossible to distinguish between cases of genuine assisting of suicide and cases in which the "assistance" actually involves some sort of pressure to commit suicide - that is to say, that there will be more deaths that are not actual suicides.

My objection is different.  I believe that the key problem with assisting suicide is that there will be more actual suicides.

As matters stand at present, if you saw a girl running towards a cliff edge whom you believed intended to throw herself over, you would feel both a moral and a civic duty to attempt to prevent her.  You might call out.  If you were large and strong enough you might rugby tackle and subdue her (provided that such physical intervention did not place you at material danger of being dragged over the cliff with her).  This civic duty is considered as justifying state intervention.  If you were a doctor you might sedate her.  If you were a mental health nurse you might place her in restraints.

We do not consider that such a girl has a human right to die, which we violate with rugby tackles, our drugs and our restraints.  On the contrary, we believe that we have a duty to prevent her death if we can.  Furthermore, her family and friends are unlikely to be so clinical as most of you in thinking about her proposed act.  They are likely to be upset by the idea that she might kill herself; angry with her (“angry”...what does that say?  Might they perhaps think she was considering doing something wrong?); pleased that you intervened.  You might be hailed as a hero, not condemned as a human rights violator.

[With apologies to Jeff Wayne.  Possibly the most disturbing part of this was how few words I actually needed to change...]

GORDON: Listen, do you hear them drawing near in their search for the Electorate?
Feeding on the power of our fear and the splits in the Cabinet
Incarnation of Thatcher's creation of all that we dread
When the Tories arrive those alive would be better off dead!

PETER: There must be something worth standing for
There must be something worth trying for
Even some things worth holding an Election for
And if one man can stand tall
There must be hope for us all
Somewhere, somewhere, in the mantras of New Labour

Yesterday, their Lordships made two key decisions:

- That there was a need to provide clarity concerning the conditions under which assisting a suicide might result in prosecution

- That the Human Rights Act provides us with a right to choose the manner and moment of our own deaths

My previous post on this provoked some fairly strong reactions.  I presume that with yesterday's decision and the likelihood now that Parliament will need to legislate to change the law, readers will at least recognise that my interest in the topic is not simply an extravagance.

I want in this post to respond to some of the arguments offered against my position, and to advance the discussion in a couple of ways with specific reference to assisted suicide.

First, I want to emphasize - as I did in my previous post - that I have the greatest sympathy and pity for many of those in the difficult circumstances that drive them to suicide.  But my pity for the dead is not going to save lives.  Convincing people that suicide is wrong might save many people's lives.  You should understand my case as a desperate argument, in full knowledge that I am in a small minority and that placing my head above the parapet attracts the greatest opprobrium (indeed, hatred), directed at trying to save a few people's lives.  I know you hate me for it.