Was this really what feminism was all about? According to Home Office statistics, to be published later this week, crimes committed by girls aged between ten and 17 have shot up by some 25 per cent over a three-year period.

Last week, a man died and a young woman was badly injured in an explosion in North London. It was thought to have been carried out by a girl gang which had previously been seen causing trouble in the street.

For several years, there has been a disturbing rise in the number of girls committing violent crimes at ever younger ages.

Last month, rival girl gangs used snooker balls in socks to batter each other in a mass brawl at a railway station at Shoreham, West Sussex. In March, a 15-year-old girl was jailed for using a mobile phone to film two drunken teenage male friends beating a man to death in Keighley, West Yorkshire.

Last October, a gang of teenage girls stoned a 72-year-old woman and forced her into a busy road, leaving her with a broken nose and two black eyes.

There has also been a string of murders committed by girls, often sickeningly sadistic. In 1999, for example, two 15-year-old girls murdered 71-year-old Lily Lilley, binding her mouth so tightly that her false teeth were pushed down her throat and giggling as they wheeled her body through the streets before throwing it into a canal.

In the same year, a girl gang was found guilty of murdering mentally-ill Angela Pearce after torturing her. And so on.

Of course, most girls live law-abiding lives. Nevertheless, it is highly disturbing that so many are now committing such acts of savagery.

What would once have been regarded as an aberration among a sex which was once (doubtless a touch misleadingly) a by-word for gentleness, order and self-discipline, has now become a shocking fact of life. So just what has gone wrong with girls?

Certainly, this has to be set in the context of rising crime in general. Only last weekend, a 16-year-old altar boy was killed when a fight broke out in a South London bakery shop, bringing the toll of teenagers killed in London so far this year to 13.

The Government’s claim that overall crime is falling, as this week’s statistics also reportedly show, bears scant relation to everyday life. Such figures — even in the supposedly authoritative British Crime Survey — are highly selective or manipulated.

The reality is that crime and disorder are rampant, along with a constant level of menace in many areas from people often fuelled by alcohol or drugs and whose aggression and hostility simmer just below the surface.

The reason for this parlous state of affairs lies in a combination of a collapse of family life and parenthood, depriving children of the love, security and discipline that are crucial in producing orderliness from within, and a parallel collapse in the willingness of the criminal justice system to impose orderliness from without.

On top of all this, however, modern feminism has added an extra and unforeseen twist. Little did those pioneers who fought for equal rights for women dream that one outcome would be equal wrongs by women. Yet that is precisely what has happened.

This is because, like the rest of the equality agenda, modern feminism recast equal rights as ‘identicality’. The notion that men and women behaved differently because they had different expectations and pressures was deemed to be sexist and discriminatory. Equality meant that men and women had to lead identical lives.

At the same time, however, feminism also held that masculinity was a problem. It was men, alone, who were held to be aggressive — crime was presented as intrinsically a male problem — as well as being emotionally illiterate and unfairly hogging the workplace, while women were chained to kitchen sink and family.

As a result of the feminist revolution, women have commandeered the freedoms and entitlements of the masculine world — while men themselves have now been largely reduced to sperm banks, walking wallets and occasional au pairs.

Women now claim to be equal breadwinners — but some of them will still go to court to fleece men for everything they have if their marriages break up.

Along with this has come an aggressive and self-centred approach to the world which apes the worst caricatures of male behaviour.

Whereas men were once associated with one-night stands, now women demand sex without strings and bring children into the world without a father as their ‘human right’. Told to be assertive, they have interpreted that as being aggressive. Female role models in movies, video games or rap music increasingly glorify violence too.

The outcome has been serious confusion among girls about their role in the world and how they should behave.

In the past, girls’ perception of where their interests lay meant curbing their own behaviour in order to attract men and safeguard the well-being of any children they might have.

But now they are told they can go it alone and have it all. So the brakes on their behaviour have been taken off. Assuming that to be equal means competing with boys on their own terms, girls try to prove themselves to be ‘one of the lads’ by drinking and drug-taking.

The number of women arrested for being drunk and disorderly has leapt tenfold over the past five years. And from alcohol and drugs, violent crime results as surely as night follows day. The original 19th-century feminist pioneers, who fought for women’s rights in a society where they really were second-class citizens, would surely have been appalled without measure had they been able to see into the future.

For their feminism was based on the belief that women were different from men — and worthier than them. Indeed, they wanted women to play an equal role in the public sphere precisely because they believed that women’s superior moral virtues — sobriety, chastity, self-discipline — would civilise public life.

Instead, just look at what we have done with their great legacy. Bob Geldof’s 19-year-old daughter Peaches has been reportedly filmed buying cocaine from a drug-dealer.

Photographs of Mick Jagger’s grandchildren published last weekend showed 12-year-old Amba clad in four-inch heels and a microdress posing with a sultry come-hither look at the camera; while her sister Assisi, at the ripe old age of 15, wore a skimpy little satin number and a knowing smile.

Even the likely future wife of Prince William, Kate Middleton, appears to spend half her life downing ‘Crack Daddy’ vodka and champagne cocktails at Boujis nightclub.

The solution to our crime problem must involve a ‘zero tolerance’ approach by the police. The instincts of London’s new Mayor, Boris Johnson, in outlawing alcohol from public transport and appointing apostles of this approach as his advisers, are admirable.

But we must have the same approach towards values. For too long we have made a fetish of tolerating the intolerable in the name of equality.

No one wants to turn the clock back to deprive women of equal rights. But we must recognise that equality is not ‘identicality’. Feminism never meant the degradation of women.

Somehow, we must restore the idea that women bring unique gifts and values to the national party. Reviving the traditional family would be a start. This would make men, women and children happier — and cut crime.

So what’s stopping us?

Ouch. It was almost too distressing to watch.

The Prime Minister clearly thought that by touring the TV studios yesterday he could steady nerves after last week’s shattering local election defeats. Instead, he proceeded to display yet again all the charm, humility and insightfulness of a satnav directing a driver into a cul-de-sac.

Apparently, the sole reason for Labour’s annihilation at the polls was the international economic storm — and since helmsman Brown would now steer the ship of state safely through the hurricane, everything would be fine.

Once again, Mr Brown has completely missed the point. Yes, the economic downturn is important, as was the disastrous abolition of the 10p tax band. But public disillusionment with the Government goes far, far deeper than that, and it is terminal.

Virtually everything the Government touches seems to descend into chaos. Northern Rock, losing millions of child benefit records and misplacing thousands of illegal immigrants, the tax credit foul-up, the collapse of standards in schools, lethal superbugs in the hospitals, and endemic incompetence, corruption and cynicism at all levels of public life.

Voters have concluded that the Government is simply incapable of running the proverbial whelk stall. When they get to that point there’s no coming back for a government, not even with a change of Prime Minister.

Indeed, this rot set in during Tony Blair’s last term of office, when his closest acolytes all slid away because they grasped even then that the New Labour ‘project’ had hit the buffers. For a short while this was masked by the changeover in No. 10; but it rapidly became clear that Gordon Brown was very much part of the problem.

Moreover, none of his likely successors will be able to put this right because they refuse to acknowledge that the problem is rooted in their own party’s fundamental shallowness and incoherence.

Not surprisingly, the Tories are ecstatic at the local election results. And they are to be congratulated on running a smooth, disciplined and shrewdly judged campaign, not least in London where their strategy of getting out the anti-Ken vote paid dividends in the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor.

But there is a distinct risk that the Conservatives will misinterpret their great victory. Already, there are claims that it has vindicated the Cameroons’ strategy of tacking to fashionable Left-wing thinking in order to head off any charge that they are just the ’same old Tories’.

This is to misunderstand what happened in London. For Boris’s appeal was not as a representative of the new look, politically correct Conservative party. On the contrary — his appeal was to be the gloriously politically incorrect, anti-politics candidate. As one voter told canvassers: ‘I’m not voting for you Tories; I’m voting for Boris instead.’

It is the very things that get Boris into such trouble — his shambolic manner, his inability to be diplomatic, his grandstanding instinct to do anything to get a laugh — that make people adore him. Even though party minders zipped up his mouth during the campaign, his appeal is that of someone who will never be corralled by any political machine.

And Boris was running against the quintessential machine politician.

Ironically, Ken’s original appeal eight years ago lay in his image as the Labour anti-Labour candidate. A vote for him was a kick in the teeth for the out-of-touch political elite. But then Ken himself turned into a key member of that elite — and what a distasteful, corrupt and arrogant spectacle it was.

A vote for anti-politician Boris therefore does not necessarily mean a vote for the Tories. Boris himself grasped this immediately when, in his acceptance speech, he said people shouldn’t think for a minute that London was now a Tory city.

On the contrary, on a turnout of fewer than half those eligible to vote the Tories won only 37 per cent of the vote in London; and as political analysts have pointed out, the Tories have never won a General Election unless they have won at least 40 per cent of the London vote.

Around the country, it was Labour’s simply catastrophic drop in support to a risible 24 per cent — lower even than the LibDems — that brought the Tories to power.

The triumphant Cameroons are in danger of missing the point that what happened last week was a mighty vote against Labour rather than an endorsement of the Conservatives. Indeed, such an endorsement would make little sense since, among the issues that most cheese off the electorate, there’s precious little to choose between the parties.

There’s no more delicious example of this than global warming. For the Cameroons, green policies are their totemic proof that the party has moved with the times. But Boris is actually a green sceptic who has called environmentalism a religious phenomenon and mocked green policies as ‘pagan yammering for sacrifice’.

And on this, he is far more in tune with the public who, sceptical of global warming hysteria, are deeply unimpressed by the prospect of green taxes. Indeed, Mr Brown is reported to be about to ditch the proposed rise in fuel duty in a panicky attempt to assuage public fury. So where does that leave the Cameroon carbon crusaders?

In any event, the Tories’ success can’t be due to their strategy of tacking to the Left since, until the wheels came off Mr Brown’s bus, the public’s doubts about what the Tories stood for meant they weren’t making the breakthrough they needed.

Indeed, their support jumped only when they started playing to traditional Tory concerns, such as cutting inheritance tax or supporting marriage and repairing the damage done by family breakdown.

Now, with Mayor Boris controlling billions of pounds of public money, the spotlight will turn to the Tories who will be under scrutiny as never before. They have said they intend to use Boris’s London as a laboratory to test Tory policies.

This presents as many risks as opportunities, not least from Boris himself. For although the party will try to control him, it may not be able to do so. However ambitious he may be, the new Mayor of London may not take kindly to having his every move policed by Tory HQ.

At a deeper level, such scrutiny may expose the weakness in the Cameroons’ ‘don’t frighten the horses’ strategy.

For example, for all their talk about decentralisation and cutting out bloated bureaucracy they remain committed to matching the Government’s eye-watering spending levels.

They have pledged to hold a referendum on the EU constitution; but if it goes through they will apparently wash their hands of it — and British self-government — as a lost cause.

They agree that the destructive human rights culture has to go — but flinch from the root-and-branch revision of treaty commitments without which meaningful reform is simply impossible. And so on.

It is the public’s deep disaffection with the process of politics itself that caused last week’s Labour meltdown. That disaffection is fed by the refusal to tackle problems at source, courting short-term popularity instead by taking the path of least resistance.

The political prize is waiting for the politician who by contrast displays real political courage and leadership. All eyes are now on the Tories to do so.

What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?

Next week, on 8 May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of that declaration. With every decade that it clocks up, people ask the same question: will Israel still be there for the next one?

It is indeed astonishing that it has not only survived but is flourishing. Its situation as a permanently embattled nation is unique.

On the day after Ben-Gurion declared its independence, six Arab armies invaded and tried to wipe it out. With the current exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab and Muslim world has been trying ever since.

Israel is the only country whose creation was approved by the UN; yet it is the only country whose legitimacy is called into question. It is the only country which the world requires to compromise with its Palestinian Arab attackers and accede to their demands, even while they are firing rockets at its schools and houses and blowing up its citizens.

It is the only country which continues to provide electricity and basic services to those attackers and routinely treats thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals, even those who have Israeli blood on their hands. And yet it is the only country which, in the court of public opinion, is condemned for behaving ‘disproportionately’ when it uses targeted military means to defend itself, and is accused of causing the very ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ atrocities of which it itself is the victim.

At present, the situation looks particularly ominous. Israel is menaced on several fronts by Iran which, racing to develop a nuclear weapon, is threatening a new genocide of the Jews while denying the last one. In Lebanon Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iranian-sponsored army Hezbollah, which is once again armed with thousands of rockets, says the next attack on Israel is not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Iranian-backed Hamas, which is pledged to wipe out Israel and every Jew, has built a well-trained standing army of at least 20,000 men and a huge arsenal of weapons smuggled in from Egypt, and relentlessly attacks Israel with rockets and bombs.

It is widely expected that, once Independence Day is over and President Bush has returned home from his celebratory visit, Israel will finally mount a major incursion into Gaza to deal with Hamas. If it does, Western opinion, which largely ignores Israeli victimisation, can be guaranteed to cry ‘atrocity’ once again. And just as before, Hamas will deliberately place women and children in the line of fire to maximise civilian casualties in order further to inflame that opinion.

For Israel finds itself trapped by a pincer movement of military and psychological attack from not only the Arab and Muslim world but also the West. And Britain, whose intelligentsia has swallowed wholesale Arab and Muslim lies, is the Western leader of those baying for Israel’s head.

Thanks to the poison spread by the British media, the universities, NGOs and the churches, Israel has been systematically demonised and delegitimised.

Few are aware, for example, how both Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately position both terrorists and weaponry in densely populated civilian areas, using women and children as human shields. While British headlines scream at Israel for causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, few are aware that Hamas has been stealing fuel supplies intended for Gaza’s population and blowing up the crossing points to provoke Israel into closing them, to escalate the conflict and inflame the world.

Even fewer are aware that many of the most inflammatory images from the region are fabricated, since both Hamas and Hezbollah routinely stage ‘atrocities’ or artificially exaggerate incidents using doctored footage — courtesy of British journalists who are threatened with murder or kidnap if they fail to toe the line.

More fundamentally, the obsessional demonisation of Israel is based on a false set of beliefs taken straight from Arab propaganda — that as a result of Holocaust guilt, Israel was created when a load of European Jews with no claim to the land were dumped on Palestine, driving out its rightful Arab Muslim inhabitants.

Ben-Gurion would today be surprised to find, for example, that Israel is regarded as illegally occupying the West Bank (and until 2005, Gaza). Along with modern Israel, this was part of the territory of Palestine within which in 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain the task of re-establishing the Jewish national home because of the unique claim by the Jews — the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arabs invaded it.

In other words, far from being ‘Palestinian land’, the Jews are entitled to claim it under international law, which also gives it the right to hold on to it in self-defence. Yet ‘progressive’ opinion not only denies both law and history but demands (as do the Palestinians) the ethnic cleansing of every last Jewish settler from a putative Palestinian state (just as half Israel’s population was created by Jews driven out of their ancient homes in Arab lands). So much for anti-racism.

The denial and inversion of such facts has singled out Israel for vilification applied to no other country. Scapegoated for crimes of which it is in fact the victim, Israel has become the Jew of the Western world.

This is a victory for the Arabs in the new type of war in which they are engaged. Asymmetric warfare, whose principal battlefield is the mind, uses ostensibly powerless people (the Palestinians) who are in fact backed by powerful state actors (Iran). Such an inversion of strong and weak and the systematic use of deception are vital to the principal strategic goal of asymmetric warfare: to confuse and demoralise its victims and suborn world opinion to its cause.

Even Israel itself has weakened under this. For it has an intelligentsia which is no longer confident of the nation’s right to its own Jewish identity. This has created a dangerous vacuum. In Israeli universities, revisionist historians have told corrosive lies about their country’s history, portraying it as having been born in sin. In the schools, children have not been taught Jewish history and parrot Arab disinformation instead.

The country’s sense of national purpose has been further weakened by the 2006 Lebanon war, which punctured public belief in Israel’s military invincibility, and by the ongoing crisis of political leadership caused by a political system which is endemically corrupt and excludes the brightest and the best from public office.

The result of all this is that at present, both the Israeli Left and Right are consumed by a morbid despair. The Left thinks Israel is doomed to war in perpetuity because there is no prospect of a Palestinian state — which it remains convinced is the prerequisite for peace, despite this being contrary to all history, evidence and logic. The Right, on the other hand, thinks that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is Israel’s Chamberlain, about to declare peace in our time by giving away half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and thus delivering Israel to the wolves of Arab annihilation.

But both are surely missing the bigger picture.

First, despite entering its seventh decade of living under existential siege, Israel is prospering. Its economy is booming, it leads the world in high-tech, and property prices in Tel Aviv rival those in London. Second, having stared over the edge of the cultural abyss it has started to realise the danger. It is beginning to turn education round, with a new awareness dawning among high school principals of the need to teach Jewish history, identity and values.

And although unprecedented numbers of mainly secular Israelis now choose to live abroad, there are rapidly growing numbers of the religiously orthodox who know exactly what they are fighting for and are prepared to die for it — as do the majority of middle-of-the-road Israeli citizens.

The same, however, can’t be said of the Palestinian Arabs, who are simply falling apart. The rise of Hamas, the progressive Islamisation and terrorisation of Palestinian society and the continued corruption and factional fighting within Fatah are all taking their toll.

Increasingly, Palestinians are packing up and leaving. It is they rather than the Israelis who are in despair. Their sense of national identity — always artificial — now lies finally shattered by the death cult that acts in their name. After all, with even supposedly secular Fatah being steadily Islamised, why on earth would any Palestinian in his right mind want to live in a repressive Islamic republic — which Palestine would without doubt become — where dissidents are thrown from the tops of tall buildings?

And here lies the paradox which offers the best hope for Israel’s future. For the very Islamism which so menaces it might finally unlock the door to peace. This is because both Islamism and Iran threaten not just Israel but the ‘moderate’ Arab world too.

Accordingly, the last thing those Arabs want is an Iranian-backed, Islamised state of Palestine. Egypt and Jordan simply cannot afford to have Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood on their doorsteps in a Hamas-dominated Gaza or West Bank. Currently, they rely on Israel to prevent it. But increasingly, talk of some kind of Jordan–Egypt–Palestinian confederation is in the air.

As the analyst Jonathan Spyer has noted, Jordan’s recent decision to connect Jericho to the Jordanian electricity grid is an example of its increasing involvement in the West Bank. And behind the scenes, the more realistic Palestinians have grasped that their best chance of having any future at all lies in just such a confederation.

Such an outcome would have history on its side. Some readers may feel the need to lie down after reading the rest of this sentence, but Jordan is historically the state of Arab Palestine. This was the original two-state ‘solution’ back in 1921, when Winston Churchill unilaterally gave away three quarters of the original territory of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty, creating what is now Jordan, with the remainder supposed to go to the Jews.

But this chance of an end to the dispute is currently being undermined by the self-serving meddling of America which, like Europe, falsely casts the Arab war against Israel as a boundary dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and is trying to force the agreed outline of a Palestinian state by the time President Bush leaves office.

It is even pressuring Israel to accept Hamas’s ‘truce’ — by which Hamas means a period when Israel doesn’t attack it so it can equip itself for war undisturbed — so that on his visit to Israel next week Bush can pretend that Middle East peace in our time is imminent. But this is a virtual reality peace process, since even the ‘moderate’ Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has said in terms that he will never recognise Israel as a Jewish state. So what’s to discuss?

Despite its sham nature, however, this appeasement process has had two baleful consequences. It has caused Olmert, under pressure from the Americans, the Israeli media and powerful Israeli oligarchs who want the economic advantages of peace at any price, to destroy checkpoints, release prisoners and float the possibility of territorial concessions — all of which promote and incite further Arab violence. And it has caused Jordan to put its own confederation idea on ice. Thus meddling America is destroying the best option for the Middle East to resolve its core dispute — that it is left to sort it out by itself.

Indeed, much of the responsibility for these six decades of conflict lie with a Western world which, from 1921 onwards, has chosen to appease Arab violence while shedding crocodile tears over its Jewish victims. But the future of Israel is the future of the West. If the front line in Israel were to go down, the West would be next.

Given its current internal appeasement of Islamism, however, the West may go down anyway. At least Israel knows it has to fight to survive. As a result, in 60 years’ time it will still be there.

Can the same be said for Britain or Europe?

As if Gordon Brown didn’t have enough to contend with at present, along comes Lord Levy to put the boot in.

When he wrote his autobiography, Tony Blair’s erstwhile fund-raiser and tennis partner must have imagined that his disclosures would inflict untold damage on Mr Brown’s reputation.

But however embarrassing some of these revelations may be, Lord Levy could not have foreseen that, come publication day, Mr Brown would have inflicted so much damage upon himself that the peer’s attacks could hardly make matters any worse.

His revelation that Mr Blair believes Mr Brown can never defeat David Cameron is hardly earth-shattering news since it now appears that there is scarcely one single Labour MP who believes that he can.

The 10p tax band fiasco, in which a revolt of Labour MPs led by Frank Field forced the Prime Minister into a humiliating climb-down, is but the latest and probably the most damaging mess he has got himself into.

Cushioning the blow for vulnerable groups from a tax change he had initially denied would create any losers at all has destroyed the last vestiges of his authority over his party.

All the attributes on which he based his reputation as Chancellor of the Exchequer — a deft hand with the economy, granite-like moral integrity, decisiveness, consistency — have been progressively destroyed since he became Prime Minister. And the only person to blame is Mr Brown himself.

It has got to the point where one wonders whether he can now win any of the fights he has opted to pick.

There continue to be strong suggestions that he will reclassify cannabis upwards to a category B prohibited drug, in defiance of his own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs which is understood to be saying the opposite in its report today.

If the drug liberalisers on the ACMD do carry the day, it will be a disgrace. But facing them down requires political strength. Does Mr Brown still have the authority to carry through his intention to overrule this body, almost certainly provoking its members to resign en masse?

More doubtful still, he has committed himself to extending pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects to 42 days, in defiance of most political opinion — with the exception of the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who warned ominously at the weekend that Britain would come to regret defeating this measure.

As with cannabis reclassification, 42 days has the support of the public. That’s what Mr Brown has been banking on all this time, insisting he will not back down over an issue of national security.

But if he ever had any chance of persuading Parliament to accept 42 days, he surely does not have it any more. And indeed, it has now emerged that the Government has prepared a climb-down in a proposal to give judges the power to impose tagging orders instead of detention — a compromise which is likely to please nobody.

By far the most serious damage of all, however, has surely been caused by the 10p tax band debacle. It’s not just Mr Brown’s original stubborn refusal to accept the hardship it would cause and then the U-turn he was forced to perform.

No, the really shocking thing about this affair — and undoubtedly the factor which has destroyed the Prime Minister within his own party — is that it has exposed the hollowness of his principles.

Here is a politician, after all, whose single most important stated goal, repeated to the point of obsession, is to eradicate poverty. Indeed, the big difference between him and Mr Blair — adduced by political friend and foe alike — was always that Mr Brown was the unreconstructed socialist who would fleece the middle classes to benefit the poor.

Yet the same Mr Brown cynically raided the pockets of the poor by abolishing the 10p tax band to fund a brazen piece of political opportunism in reducing the standard rate of tax to 20p.

That is what has so badly stuck in the craw of his party. With this move Mr Brown has simply destroyed the very basis of his political integrity — and dealt a scarcely less grievous blow to what remains of Labour’s ideals.

By showing that he is in fact indifferent to the struggle by poor people to make ends meet, to the extent that he is prepared to make them yet poorer if he can score a cheap political point, he has confirmed what has long been obvious to the rest of us about his whole approach to poverty.

It is not motivated by concern for the welfare of the poor at all. It is motivated instead by the belief that the state should control people’s lives.

This has always been apparent from his determination to trap people ever higher up the income scale into welfare dependency through the extension of means-tested benefits; to penalise and undermine marriage, the most effective institution for helping people live self-reliant lives; and effectively to nationalise childhood through ever more intrusive child care provision.

There was one anti-poverty campaigner who saw through all this from the start. He warned that Gordon Brown’s agenda was likely to deepen and widen poverty rather than alleviate it.

He warned that the extension of means-testing would spread the net of welfare dependency still further and suck more people into dishonesty as they succumbed to the temptation to fiddle the system. And he warned about the deserts of fatherlessness and uncontrollable children being created by welfare incentives for single parenthood.

The name of that far-sighted individual was Frank Field. It is indeed fitting that the revolt against the abolition of the 10p tax band has been led by Mr Field.

For not only have his prescient warnings fallen on deaf Treasury ears, but he has always held Chancellor Brown responsible for the abrupt termination of his ministerial career when, having been charged by Tony Blair to think the unthinkable about welfare, he was promptly sacked when he did.

Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.

The subject of welfare goes right to the heart of both our broken society and our broken politics. Poverty - not just the financial sort, but moral, spiritual and intellectual poverty too - will never be addressed by pulling the strings of our welfare state this way or that.

This is because the core assumption of the welfare state itself, that individuals are not responsible for themselves or their families and that the state should provide for them instead, is what perpetuates poverty in affluent Britain.

It also sets the stage for public disaffection with politics, since the state can never satisfy such unlimited demand and therefore is always seen to fail.

The poverty afflicting our society can properly be tackled only by restoring individual responsibility. This can be done, for example, by supporting marriage; by freeing up school choice and removing the dead hand of educationists from teacher training and the curriculum; and by replacing Treasury-controlled benefits and health and social care provision with personal and social insurance schemes.

The problem with British politics is not just one dysfunctional Prime Minister. It is that the whole relationship between individuals and the state needs to be radically rethought.

Mr Brown will never do this. Will the still-timid Tories rise to this challenge?

Everyone is waiting. In Israel, they are waiting for the 60th-anniversary celebrations to be over and for President Bush to have visited and returned home. Then, they say, the IDF will make its long-anticipated major incursion into Gaza. Then at last the problem of the ever-intensifying attacks by Hamas will be dealt with.

Across the world, everyone is waiting for the interminable US presidential election to be over. Then, many believe, the paralysis over Iran will end. Then, they think, the prospect of a military strike on Tehran will either swiftly be realised or permanently be laid to rest (depending on who actually wins).

And meanwhile the hallucinatory Middle East appeasement process meanders ever onwards, accompanied by dark rumblings about a secret backstairs sell-out Israel deal being cooked up between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas and enlivened by the Israel-phobic Jimmy Carter, fresh from paying homage at the tomb of Yasser Arafat, announcing the prospect of peace in our time with Hamas.

But waiting comes with a heavy price tag. It provides alibis for putting off what needs to be done quickly; it results in the slaughter of yet more innocents; and it gives the advantage to the player for whom time is crucial. That player is Iran.

The reason Israel hasn’t done what it needs to do in Gaza is not because of anniversaries or official visits. It is because of Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier who is now in his twenty-second month of captivity by Hamas.

Israel will not invade Gaza because of fears that Shalit will then be killed. Shalit is being used by Hamas as a hostage to prevent Israel from wiping it out. The result is that other Israelis are being relentlessly attacked and murdered. And the puppeteer pulling Hamas’s strings is Iran.

The West tends to put the various Middle East conflicts into boxes marked ‘Israel-Palestinian dispute’, ‘Iraq’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Hamas’, ‘al Qaida’ and ‘Iranian nuclear threat’. The fact is, however, that all roads lead to Iran.

Iran is simply the centre of strategic gravity in the region and in the war against the free world. It has encircled Israel through Hamas in Gaza and through Hizbollah in Lebanon, where it has also all but snuffed out the Lebanese democracy.

In Iraq, Iran is the central player. The Petraeus surge may have been successful. And the Iraqis recently surprised many by deciding to fight the Iranian-backed supporters of Moqtada al Sadr in Basra, causing Iran to beat a strategic retreat. But the fact is that, in Iraq, Iran has suborned government, insurgent and religious leaders.

As for al Qaida, the idea that Shi’ite Iran would never ally with Sunni terrorists is a lethal illusion. Iran has had working arrangements with al Qaida for years, as it has with other Sunni terror groups in their common cause against the West.

And although the West may not realise it, Iran has spread there too. In Britain and Europe, it has a sleeping army composed of Hizbollah cells and Iranian intelligence which uses western Iranian embassies as explosives stores. If Iran is attacked, Tehran will respond by unleashing Iranian terror in the West.

The prerequisite for stabilising all these hotspots — including ‘Israel/Palestine’ — and dealing with global Islamic terror is regime change in Tehran. The question is how.

Far, far more should already have been done. There should have been earlier and fiercer economic sanctions along with diplomatic estrangement. It is extraordinary that Britain still has diplomatic relations with Iran while (along with the US) it proscribes the PMOI, the principal opposition movement which is committed to human rights, as a terrorist organisation.

The fact is that Iran declared war on the West in 1979 as soon as Ayatollah Khomeini came to power — the last great contribution made by President Jimmy Carter to world peace. Ever since, Iranian militias have been attacking Western interests; ever since, the West has refused to acknowledge this.

People say war against Iran would turn a largely pro-western people against the West. But war need not mean carpet-bombing Tehran. It can and should mean targeted strikes on the regime and its principal interests.

War should always be a last resort. But, as in the 1930s, the West once again has failed to take the appropriate intermediate steps. Such a failure of nerve makes war more likely, not less.

As a result, the choice is not between war and peace. War with Iran is almost certainly inevitable. The choice is between war on our terms or on those laid down by Iran. The longer we wait, the more that choice is loaded against the defeat of this most lethal of all threats to the free world.

Few sights can surely be more unedifying than members of Parliament in a stampeding, knicker-wetting panic over the prospective loss of their seats.

Those of a sensitive disposition should avert their gaze now. For Britain no longer appears to have a functioning governing party; it has teetered instead into a collective nervous breakdown.

To the horror of his troops, the Prime Minister has been revealed to possess the opposite of the Midas touch. Whatever he does collapses in ignominy or worse.

Northern Rock, denying a free vote on the embryo Bill, breaking his manifesto promise over the EU referendum, facing both ways at once over the Beijing Olympics, punishing the poor through abolishing the 10p tax band — the political charge-sheet is lengthening by the day, and the opinion polls presage electoral disaster as a result.

At the helm of Labour’s Titanic, Gordon Brown is desperately rearranging the deckchairs.

He brought in a new right-hand man, the PR guru Stephen Carter, to provide a fresh sense of direction. That has merely resulted in turf wars of increasing ferocity.

Ministers are accused of coming close to thumping each other. The Prime Minister himself is reported to have kicked a table over and hurled a mobile phone at someone or something.

Tears, tantrums and screaming matches are being gleefully reported in briefing battles between rival factions.

Suddenly there’s feverish talk of stalking horses, leadership contests, lists of runners and riders. The key date is said to be the local elections on May 1.

If Labour loses hundreds of seats to the Tories, and if Mayor Ken Livingstone loses to Boris Johnson in London, then Mr Brown will be levered out and replaced by…

And there’s the rub. For there’s no towering figure waiting in the wings to snatch the party from the jaws of defeat. David Miliband? Too callow. James Purnell? Too shallow. Jack Straw? Yesterday’s man. Charles Clarke? Day before yesterday’s man. Harriet Harman? Ho ho, yes, very funny.

As for the most talked-up candidate Ed Balls, his onslaught against excellence, merit and the middle classes — culminating in his disgraceful attack on faith schools — has squandered support among many Labour MPs.

Here lies the real problem for Labour. It’s not simply the current occupant of No 10, regardless of his fabled psychological flaws. What’s happening is that the whole New Labour project has imploded.

This became apparent during the tenure of Tony Blair, who took the rap for a failed domestic agenda which was actually the creation of Gordon Brown. And behind Mr Brown was his very own Svengali, Ed Balls.

Messrs Brown and Blair were both the architects of New Labour; and it is the incoherence of that project that is the problem.

It failed because it tried to stitch together two completely contradictory positions.

It tried to hang on to core Labour principles while acknowledging that socialism was dead. Such a fundamental fault line should provide the Tories with an open goal.

But here’s a second problem. It’s not enough for people to decide that the Government is useless and should be voted out. The other lot have got to make the case for voting them in.

But the Tories haven’t yet convincingly done so. That’s because they have come up with contrasting positions in an attempt to appeal to wildly different interest groups.

The result is a very similar incoherence to Labour’s. Thus the Tories say they will decentralise power to the people (as in their promising school reforms) — and yet they are also pledged to throw yet more billions into the public sector black hole.

The welfare state has now been tested to destruction. But the Tories are too timid to take the bull by the horns and pledge to restructure from first principles the relationship between the individual and the state.

Nor are they setting out a convincing programme to defend this country’s identity from being destroyed through mass immigration, EU integration and human rights law.

And despite some welcome noises about shoring up marriage, they convey scant urgency about tackling the collapse of public order through the combined effects of pandemic family breakdown, educational collapse and drug abuse creating not just epidemic crime but horrifying levels of cruelty, sadism and gross neglect.

Instead, they have provided a stream of opportunistic gimmicks. So-called ‘quality of life’ issues such as green taxes.

Giving every parent the right to work part-time — which would bring much of the workplace to a grinding halt.

The absurd promise of a maternity nurse for every new mother. Pledging a referendum on the EU constitution –but only before it is ratified. Opportunistic ducking and diving over Iraq. And so on.

But the public aren’t daft. They twig that such pronouncements are being made merely to gain power. So when it comes to the key issue of public trust, the Tories just haven’t earned it.

As a result, the electorate is monumentally and dangerously disaffected from all politicians. And when such a dim view is taken across the board, voting becomes a fraught and highly volatile process.

It’s all very well to vote one lot out — but when the other lot get in, what then?

This is precisely the situation in London where the electorate is faced with a choice between a knave, a buffoon and a poseur (I’ll leave you to work out which is which).

The fight between the front runners, Ken and Boris, is too close to call. Ken seems fatally tarnished — mired in corruption scandals, damned by his support for foreign tyrants and accused of bleeding Londoners dry through the ever-widening congestion charge.

But although Boris is without doubt the only candidate who can beat Ken in a personality contest, there’s a perception that he is being kept on a tight leash by minders determined to prevent any of his famous gaffes.

Worse still, there’s a nagging concern that, such is his personal disorganisation, if he does win someone will have to be drafted in to run London for him.

In short, as people are chortling, this must be the first election in history where both Labour and the Tories are aghast at the prospect that their man might actually win.

When the public becomes so disaffected, extremists often move in to exploit the situation - which is why there is such a danger that in the May elections the British National Party, which has successfully camouflaged its true racist nature, may do well.

Such a crisis of political leadership exists elsewhere in the West but it is particularly acute in Britain.

In part, it has been caused by the declining quality of people going into politics. The deeper reason, however, is the loss of a sense of purpose. In the last century, the defeat of fascism and then the collapse of socialism left politicians across the spectrum unsure of their role.

In addition, the cultural onslaught upon morality and national identity left them unable to grasp just what they needed to defend, and against whom.

Achieving power is not enough. You need to know what to do with it.

Mr Brown so desperately wanted power - but then found it blew up in his face. Whoever succeeds him may similarly find himself left holding a most unwelcome parcel when the music finally stops.

How al Qaeda must be gloating. What would any sane country do if it discovered that living among it was Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man, who was wanted by his own country on terrorism charges? It’s a fair bet that it would deport him to that country as fast as it could.

What does Britain do in those circumstances? Declare that extradition would be a breach of his human rights and prepare to release him from jail under indefinite house arrest, courtesy of the British taxpayer, to the tune of some £1,000 per month in welfare benefits.

This is the surreal situation following the Appeal Court judgment this week on Abu Qatada, who is currently in jail fighting deportation to his native Jordan where he was convicted in his absence on terrorist charges in both 1999 and 2000.

The judgment, which overturned a ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that Abu Qatada should be deported, ruled instead that he could stay because, if Jordan prosecuted him, the evidence against him might have been obtained through torture and thus be in breach of human rights law.

In a separate but simultaneous judgment, the court cleared two Libyan terrorist suspects to remain in Britain for the rest of their lives because it did not believe assurances by Libya that it would not torture them if they returned.

One of these men had been found with a map marked with the flightpath to Birmingham Airport. The other was said to be involved with an Italian terror cell which was poised to launch a terrorist attack in Europe.

As a result of this second ruling, the Home Office has been forced to abandon deportation cases against a further ten Libyan suspects.

Between them, these judgments have left the Government’s anti-terrorism strategy in ruins. Despite Tony Blair’s declaration after the 2005 London bombings that ‘the rules of the game have changed’ and that terrorist suspects would henceforth be thrown out of the country, not one such suspect has been deported.

In the case of Abu Qatada, this notorious godfather of terrorism who turned Britain into the European hub of al Qaeda — causing foreign security services to dub it ‘Londonistan’ — has now made a monkey of us yet again.

How on earth have we got ourselves into such an insane position?

The reason is the way the judges have interpreted the European Convention on Human Rights. In cases in 1989 and 1996, the European Court of Human Rights extended the scope of the Convention’s prohibition against torture, making it impossible to deport suspected terrorists to any country thought to be abusing human rights.

And the English courts applied this ruling far more zealously than those in any other country.

This meant that, even if people turning up at immigration control presented a clear danger to this country, Britain let them all in if they claimed they would be ill-treated if they were sent back home. And by the same absurd reasoning, once they were in the courts wouldn’t allow them to be sent back.

This is precisely what happened with Abu Qatada. He turned up in 1993 and successfully claimed leave to remain on the basis he had been tortured by the Jordanians.

Maybe this was true. But Britain accordingly decided he should be allowed to live here even though — as it was repeatedly warned — he was a threat to the entire Western world.

Of course torture is a terrible thing, and it is right that Britain should not be involved in its practice. But this fine principle has been progressively stretched to ever more ludicrous lengths.

It is simply perverse in the extreme to require a country ever to put its own security at risk. Indeed, the Geneva Convention gives countries an explicit right to return any refugee who can reasonably be regarded as a danger to society.

Yet the English courts have laid down that Britain must accommodate people posing just such a risk — if there is a possibility that torture might be employed not in Britain but in another country altogether.

On that basis, this country must welcome its enemies with open arms. Indeed, the more dangerous they are, the more likely it is that the courts will insist they must remain here, since such people will be expected to argue that they will be ill-treated in their country of origin.

Bad as that is, this week’s judgment takes us even further down this lunatic road. For the court ruled that Abu Qatada should not be returned to Jordan — not because he might be tortured, but because any evidence used against him might have been obtained by torturing his co-defendants or witnesses in the trials in which he was convicted.

So, bizarrely, our judges are preventing us from deporting a man who is a risk to our security, not even because of fears about his own welfare but about the welfare of others — who have nothing to do with Britain.

What bewigged bone-headedness is this?

And just look at the threat this man poses. For Abu Qatada is said to be the spiritual head of al Qaeda in Europe.

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission said he was a grave threat to national security with a ‘formidable, even incalculable’ reach and influence. He led Spanish, German and Italian al Qaeda cells from his base in London. And for nine years, until the British police finally arrested him, he radicalised countless thousands of impressionable young British Muslims.

Yet now he is to be released under a control order — under which a number of terrorist suspects have managed to abscond — at enormous and unlimited cost to the public purse.

This is but the latest security debacle caused by a judiciary which has allowed its collective obsession with human rights law to destroy common sense.

Having made a bonfire of this country’s border controls, the courts have frustrated every attempt by the Government to exclude foreign undesirables from the country or lock them up.

The real problem, however, is the human rights law which has given the judges the power to cause this chaos.

Refusing to face the fact that we either have to change this law or get rid of it altogether, the Government has twisted and turned to get round it.

So it painfully extracted undertakings from countries such as Jordan and Libya that they would not ill-treat any terrorist suspects who were returned to them. And it pinned its hopes on the European Court of Human Rights overturning its own ban on sending people to countries where ill-treatment was practised.

But the Appeal Court has now said such agreements are unreliable, and the European Court has adhered to its ban. So the Government is well and truly stuck.

The implications of this shambles are truly alarming. It’s not just that Abu Qatada and others must remain in Britain at taxpayers’ expense.

These rulings are a positive invitation and incentive to foreign terrorists to flock to Britain — the one country in the world from where they know they won’t be sent back.

This is exactly why Britain became the European centre of al Qaeda in the first place, putting both Britain and the whole world at risk from Abu Qatada and his ilk.

In the years that have followed 9/11 and 7/7, what therefore do the Government and the judiciary appear to have learned? Precisely nothing.

Even by the standards of this government, the behaviour of the Children Secretary Ed Balls is simply astounding in its cynicism and ideological spite.

Consider the parlous state of education in Britain. Standards are dire and getting worse. Britain has tumbled down the international league tables in literacy, maths and science.

A quarter of all children leave school without having properly mastered the three Rs. Fewer than half of all 16 year-olds are getting five good GCSEs, with one in six failing to achieve a single grade C.

Truancy is rising every year in proportion to the increasing imbecility of what children are being taught. At the top of the system, degrees are becoming meaningless as universities lower their pass marks and spoon-feed weak students who would previously have failed.

From top to bottom, in short, the education system is simply disintegrating. So what does Mr Balls do in response to this national crisis?

He attacks faith schools — one of the last remaining bastions of relatively decent educational standards and discipline — on a trumped-up charge that they are breaking the national admissions code.

He has accused dozens of these schools of using banned practices such as interviewing pupils, researching their backgrounds and requesting cash contributions as a condition of entry.

It now turns out that most of these breaches were technicalities that he blew up out of all proportion. The most damning charge was of ‘cash for places’ — but when that was looked at more closely, it fell apart altogether.

It involved a mere seven schools in the London borough of Barnet, six of them Jewish primary schools and one Church of England. But there is not a shred of evidence that these schools have demanded cash as a condition of awarding a place, like some kind of classroom protection racket. It is a grotesque smear.

The fact is that faith schools often ask parents for money to fund religious studies and other services, since the state only funds the statutory education they provide.

But that doesn’t mean such contributions are a condition of entry. Indeed, Barnet council says emphatically that these parental contributions have had no bearing on admission to any of these schools.

The accusation is particularly grotesque because Jewish schools ask parents to help fund the security measures now dismayingly necessary because of the mounting threat of anti-Jewish attack.

When Mr Balls first hurled this charge, he was forced to admit that it was based on ‘unverified desk research’ — a fancy way of saying he had plucked it out of the air.

Having belatedly asked his staff to check whether his allegations were, in fact, true — after he had made them — he then had the gall to step up his assault, even though ‘verification’ revealed that his accusations were unsubstantiated and deeply unfair.

This has nothing to do with education and everything to do with politics and ideology. His new admissions code, which promised parents a better chance of getting their children into their first choice of secondary school, went belly-up when one in five parents was denied such a place.

The attack on faith schools was a crude attempt to deflect criticism of this policy onto schools which tick many boxes on the Labour class warriors’ hate-list.

Faith schools are a firm favourite of the middle classes; that makes them enemies of the people for starters. They achieve higher standards than other state schools - a sin against the sacred Labour doctrine of equality of misery.

They are particularly prized because they instil some moral principles into their pupils - anathema to Labour types who want to control what people believe. But their most grievous crime of all is that they show up the failings of the rest of the state sector. So they must be destroyed.

For Mr Balls, they are an obvious target because he is the chief of staff of the Labour party’s unreconstructed class-warfare wing, whose aim is to attack excellence as ‘elitist’, impose a uniformity of mediocrity and beat the living daylights out of the middle classes wherever possible.

Possessed of an ideological zealotry exceeded only by his arrogance, he is that curiously dated and contradictory throwback — a Stalinist ex-public schoolboy, who is determined to deny to others the educational advantages that brought him to where he is today.

He represents precisely the type of politician and set of attitudes which have brought Britain’s once world-class education system to its knees.

It is zealots such as him who have sacrificed excellence, fairness and merit on the altar of the comprehensive school, destroying in the much-maligned name of equality the grammar school system which provided the one certain route out of disadvantage for the talented poor.

In the education world itself, the same obsession with identical outcomes, which has been imposed to a quite lunatic degree, has destroyed the very concepts of teaching and knowledge.

It is the revolt against formal, structured education, on the idiotic grounds that it creates winners and losers and stunts children’s ‘creativity’, which has left so many children functionally illiterate and unable to master the basics of maths, science or foreign languages.

Indeed, it seems that the very primary school where Mr Balls sends his own children is the victim of precisely this mindset. Its award-winning, black headteacher, who turned the school round through her traditional and disciplinarian approach, has apparently been driven to resign by well-heeled white parents with trendy views after standards slipped in her absence.

The result is a failing school for which Ofsted says ’special measures’ are needed. And the real losers from the departure of such a gifted teacher will not be Mr Balls’s children but their classmates from poor homes, to whose progress Mr Balls pays such hypocritical lip-service.

The more parents desperately seek to rescue their children from this bonfire of education standards, the more Mr Balls is blocking all escape routes.

The relative independence of city academies is being destroyed. The life is being steadily choked out of A-levels through the introduction of yet another dumbed-down diploma, while the pledge to ensure that the more rigorous International Baccalaureate is provided as an alternative in every area has now been dropped.

Independent schools are under attack as charity rules are changed to force them to dilute their standards by spreading their expertise beyond their own pupils. Grammar schools are under renewed assault with fresh requirements to take in a broader mix of pupils.

This is now a real stranglehold. Such oppressive state control over education is unprecedented. It is simply Stalinist state socialism of a scale and virulence that we have never before seen in this country.

It is not concerned with education, a word which no longer even figures in the grandiose title of Mr Balls’s Department of Children, Schools and Families. It has nothing to do with equality of opportunity; indeed, the educational achievement gap between rich and poor is widening.

No, this is all about control. For the Labour tribe, education has always been their real Clause Four. Through power over education they think they can reprogramme individuals, change society and control the future.

With New Labour now lying among the ruins of its own incoherence, the Old Labour cobra has slithered once again out of its cage — and faith schools are but the latest target of its poisonous fangs.

At the National Theatre, a new play by the former radical playwright Howard Brenton, Never So Good, paints a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the Sixties Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who as a young man opposed Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.

Chamberlain’s claim that he could talk Germany out of war and produce ‘peace for our time’ is, of course, a byword for craven weakness and earns only contempt. But in the very week the play opened, a second Chamberlain was revealed in the form of our Defence Secretary, Des Browne.

In an interview on Saturday, Mr Browne said he thought Britain should be talking to ‘elements of the Taliban and Hezbollah’.

Since this country’s Armed Forces are locked in a desperate conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mr Browne makes Chamberlain’s monumental error positively pale by comparison.

At the very moment that our soldiers are giving their lives to defeat the Taliban, how can the Defence Secretary — of all people — say that Britain should be talking to them instead?

What sort of a government is this where the minister in charge of the Armed Forces demoralises and undermines them in time of war by implying that their sacrifice is pointless — and correspondingly heartens their enemies, thus inciting them to further attacks?

Afghanistan is the front line for the defence of the world against the global Islamic jihad. If the Taliban returned to power, it would again become a vast haven for al Qaeda.

Mr Browne says we should talk to them so they realise that their political ambitions can be delivered through politics rather than violence. What stupendous idiocy. The Taliban recognise only one ‘political’ authority: God.

Any ‘political’ process in which they take part will be subordinate to their interpretation of God’s word — which requires them to turn Afghanistan once again into a brutally repressive Islamic state in order to incubate the wider Islamist assault on the rest of the world.

As for Hezbollah — the other group Mr Browne wants us to sit down with — it is a bunch of murderous fanatics currently stamping the life out of Lebanon’s fragile democracy, pointing thousands of rockets at Israel and training gunmen in Gaza, in order to further Iran’s aims of the destruction of Israel, domination of the region and defeat of America, Britain and the West.

Precisely which of these ‘political ambitions’ does Mr Browne think can be achieved through the political process?

He is, however, far from alone. A very large head of steam has now built up for such dangerous ideas among the defence, intelligence and political establishment.

In recent days, similar views have been voiced by Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, and the Security Minister Lord West; while last year the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee recommended that the British Government should ‘engage’ with elements in Hezbollah and the implacable Palestinian extremists Hamas, along with Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood.

This thinking — based on the utterly flawed idea that within all these terror groups there are ‘moderates’ with whom the civilised world can do business — is the product of the fad for ‘conflict resolution’.

What drives it all is the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland whose apparent success, thinks the Establishment, can be repeated across the entire planet.

The fact that former wild men such as Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness have actually run an administration side by side is said to show that every extremist or terrorist can be turned into a statesman.

But the Northern Ireland analogy doesn’t work, for three main reasons. First, the agenda there was just not comparable to Islamic extremism. The IRA did not want to subject the whole of Britain to Irish rule, nor turn the UK into a Catholic state.

The second crucial difference is the IRA itself asked to join the political process — because the British Army had beaten it at least into a permanent stalemate, forcing it to realise it could never achieve its aims by violent means.

The third reason is that peace in Northern Ireland has been bought at a very high price indeed. True, the bombs have stopped; but parts of the province are now effectively a kind of mafia state, with the rule of law destroyed and the streets handed over to former paramilitaries who are now running protection rackets and inflicting mob ‘justice’ through knee-cappings and murder.

What’s more, the ‘peace process’ also destroyed moderate political parties in the province so that it is only the extremists who now rule. In every conflict where the men of violence are appeased, moderate politicians are undermined and destroyed.

Yes, history is littered with ex-terrorists who go on to become statesmen. But treating them as legitimate while they are still engaged in violence is to run up a white flag.

Indeed, the outcome of the secret channels that the British Government opened up with the IRA as far back as 1972 was a huge increase in violence.

As the historians John Bew and Martin Frampton write in their forthcoming book, Talking To Terrorists, such contacts intensified the attacks and increased the sense of constitutional instability that contributed to the crisis.

Appeasement produces such results over and over again. When the Sri Lankan government invited the separatist Tamil Tigers to a conference and offered them concessions, there was a huge increase in terrorist violence.

It has only been since the Sri Lankans decided to attack the Tamil terrorists militarily and started flushing them out that it has succeeded in isolating them in a small area.

Yet Paul Murphy, the former Northern Ireland Secretary of State, and Chris MacCabe, one of the first British civil servants openly to meet with Sinn Fein, have been advising Tamil separatists on ‘engagement’ with the Sir Lankan government.

In the Middle East, Tony Blair — with his messianic belief that he performed a miracle in Northern Ireland — is one of the greatest enthusiasts for bringing Hamas, which aims to eradicate Israel, into a renewed peace initiative.

But since 1991, Europe, America and Israel have made repeated contact through back channels with Hamas — only to discover that has merely made it even stronger.

Disastrously, the idea that such initiatives can succeed has achieved significant influence within an establishment which is reluctant to admit that we now face a hideously long war if freedom and justice are to be successfully defended.

The Islamists’ violence is fuelled by the belief that the West will not have the stomach for such a fight. The situation in Afghanistan is indeed desperate. But attitudes like Mr Browne’s will ensure that the war will indeed be lost.

Appeasement does not mean the difference between peace and war. It means the difference between fighting a war which vanquishes tyrants and defends life and liberty, and surrendering in a war in which the tyrants win and life and liberty are extinguished.

Peace is to be most ardently wished for — but not at any price.

With all the difficulties facing the Prime Minister, you’d think that he would be making every possible effort to avoid any further elephant traps. But no - having unaccountably constructed one for himself, he has not only fallen in but is refusing to haul himself out.

For reasons which so far have eluded everyone else, he is refusing to allow Labour MPs a free vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill and is instead imposing a three-line whip.

This has placed Roman Catholic Labour MPs in particular in serious difficulty, because the Bill contains a number of provisions - of which the most repugnant is the proposal to allow the creation of animal/human hybrid embryos — which diametrically conflict with their religious principles. As a result, three Cabinet ministers and nine other members of the Government are reportedly considering their position.

Now the row has dramatically escalated, with some exceptionally strong statements by church leaders expressing their horror at the Bill in their Easter sermons.

First, the Scottish Catholic leader Cardinal Keith O’Brien compared the hybrid proposal to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. Then other churchmen piled in, including Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who called for a free vote on the Bill, and the Anglican Bishop of Durham, who called upon all faiths to object to these ‘1984-style’ proposals from ‘a militantly atheist and secularist lobby’.

As the pressure on Gordon Brown has mounted, so too has the scope for political mischief. Yesterday, the arch-Blairite Stephen Byers gave another hefty turn of the ratchet when he warned that the public would ‘look on in disbelief’ if MPs were not given a free vote on such a sensitive measure.

With the row suddenly thus turning into a direct challenge to Mr Brown’s authority and judgement, it now stands to inflict upon him a level of damage going far beyond this immediate controversy.

This is truly a most baffling state of affairs. For the issues in this Bill have previously always been treated as matters of conscience on which MPs have accordingly been given a free vote.

So why on this occasion did Mr Brown decide instead to deny a free vote and force this crisis of conscience among Labour MPs? Why, when there are so many things — such as the gathering economic crisis or the meltdown in public services —which require urgent government attention, has Mr Brown allowed himself to become enmeshed in a wholly unnecessary fight over science and religion?

Moreover, even now he’s in a hole he’s still digging. Yesterday, the Government suggested that MPs could abstain on parts of the Bill - but only if its passage through Parliament wasn’t threatened. Such MPs would therefore be allowed to uphold their religious principles only if doing so was totally useless. What an insult.

The Health Secretary Alan Johnson says MPs won’t be forced to act against their conscience or their faith. Big deal! What about allowing them to vote with their conscience?

For parts of this Bill, such as the proposal to allow scientists to combine animal eggs with human nuclei and create hybrid embryos from which stem cells can be grown for research, are simply unconscionable.

Scientists claim that the protesters are irresponsibly scaremongering, since the proposed hybrids would not be grown into ‘monsters’but would be used only as primitive cells for research. In their arrogance, such scientists fail to understand the nature of the objection. It is the idea of creating such a hybrid embryo at all that is so abhorrent.

Experimenting on human embryos is bad enough; it destroys an individual life in order to serve the interests of others and thus degrades and brutalises us all.

But creating an animal/human embryo breaks an even deeper taboo. It negates the acknowledgement of what it is to be human and, by obliterating the difference between animals and humans, destroys the concept of human uniqueness.

In the House of Lords’ debates on this Bill, it became crystal clear that the Government is indeed doing nothing less than redefining a human being. In a remarkably revealing admission, the health minister Lord Darzi said that, after some thought, the Government had decided that the hybrids in question were ‘at the human end of the spectrum’.

Just think about that for a moment and you can see how grotesque this all is. It appears that an animal/human hybrid embryo can be said to be more human or less depending on the proportion of animal material in the mix, like a Delia Smith recipe.

But you can’t be a little bit human. This is the way humanity is dehumanised. Indeed, since this Bill would allow the creation of embryos that are half animal, half human, they would have no claim to be more human than animal.

Alan Johnson cynically suggests the Bill will bring about cures for such terrible afflictions as motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s. Yes, of course, everyone would like to bring such suffering to an end. But there isn’t a shred of evidence that this will be the case.

The destruction of hundreds of thousands of human British embryos for research has not led to any such major breakthroughs - for which there is more hope from taking stem cells from adult tissue.

What’s more, only last summer the former Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, told a committee on this Bill that there was ‘no clear scientific argument’ in favour of creating such hybrids and it would be ‘a step too far’ for the public.

So why did Gordon Brown decide to take that step too far?

Part of the answer must lie in the intense pressure from scientists who, in the Godlike belief that they can eradicate disease and misery from the world, constantly push to be in the forefront of medical research regardless of any adverse consequences for society.

They find all-too-willing allies among government officials who are mesmerised by the prospect of this country leading the world in anything, and also among politicians who will cheerfully tear up any moral or ethical code going in order to satisfy public demand.

Indeed, the Bill contains many other deeply troubling proposals. It removes fatherhood from the family script altogether for some children conceived through IVF.

It allows the creation of ‘saviour siblings’, whose sole purpose in being brought into the world will be to provide parts of their organs or tissues to help another member of their family. It permits fertility clinics to create ‘designer babies’ by selecting for destruction those embryos which are marred by serious disease.

In short, it should be renamed the Dehumanising, Brutalisation and Freakology Bill.

It was based on a report by the cross-party Science and Technology Committee, which was itself profoundly split. The dissidents on the committee said the majority report was ‘unbalanced, light on ethics, goes too far in the direction of deregulation and is too dismissive of public opinion and much of the evidence’.

That’s about the sum of it. This Bill should never have been brought to Parliament in its present form. Now that it has, there must be a free vote on it.

After all, if these proposals aren’t a matter of conscience for Mr Brown, what is? Or does he see absolutely everything in terms of crude political power? If this Bill is rammed through, where does that leave that famous moral compass of his?

In pieces.