Brilliant, devastating, heartbreaking and utterly, utterly true description by Harriet Sergeant in Saturday's Telegraph of the moral and professional implosion of nursing. She describes the effects of a catastrophic philosophy that has simply driven caring, kindness and common sense out of nurse training. Here's a sample passage that made me sick with recognition:

'...a second-year nurse was taking care of six patients, unsupervised by a senior nurse. An old man wearing an oxygen mask was sitting in bed, staring disconsolately at a wash bowl. Next to the wash bowl lay his breakfast, uneaten, and beside that, an overflowing sputum pot. A full bottle of urine dangled beneath the bed. The nurse had left him with the wash bowl "to do what he could". No one had taught the nurse that she should clear everything away first, remove the urine bottle and then present the bowl of water. No one had taught her the purpose of nursing: to do for the sick what they cannot do for themselves'.

As Sergeant relates, politically correct theory has driven out of nurse training the practicalities of nursing:

'At a London A&E department, a staff nurse who had recently qualified complained to me that her training had not prepared her at all. In 18 months of study, she had spent only one and a half hours learning how to take blood pressure and a patient's temperature. On the other hand, a whole afternoon had been devoted to poverty in Russia...The staff nurse had been astonished to discover how little anatomy or physiology her course contained. Anxious that her grasp of these essential subjects was "not as good as it could be", she approached her tutors. But they took a relaxed view. Soon, she discovered that her ignorance did not matter. Her first exam, tackled after 18 months, was multiple-choice; her final exam, at the end of two and a half years, allowed her to answer three out of six questions, and so avoid revealing her ignorance. For assignments, her tutors had set her work on social issues and ethics - including patient rights. That patients might have a right to a person qualified in how to look after them did not seem to have occurred to her teachers. She said: "Theoretically, you could go through the whole three years without anyone asking you about bed sores." '

The results are as predictable as they are distressing. 'A consultant anaesthetist at a London teaching hospital complained of patients arriving for operations with bed sores. On ward rounds, he frequently found himself helping patients to eat. "The catering staff slam the food down. No one bothers. Spooning food into a patient is just too demeaning for professional nurses, it seems. I always thought nurses were meant to care for patients. I might be wrong. I may have missed the plot somewhere.'' Another described the difficulty of trying to find a particular patient on a ward. Every patient is supposed to have his name above the bed. But, in some hospitals, they refuse to display the name "in case it infringes your autonomy". So the consultant found himself wandering around, trying to find his patient. "There never seems to be anyone in charge who knows anything," he said.He would try to find the patient's nurse. Then the patient's notes. "I don't often strike lucky with all three." Finally, he had to translate the nurses' diagnoses. "They refuse to use hierarchical, male-dominated medical terms, so they will not say the patient is unconscious. No, the patient has to have 'an altered state of awareness'.'' '

There are many other distressing examples in this piece, extracted from a pamphlet to be published next week by the Centre for Policy Studies. Of course, these experiences are not universal. If you are youngish and articulate, or if you are in an intensive care unit full of the highest-tech whizzbangerama, you may well have quite an agreeable nursing experience. But if you are old, inarticulate or worse, it's a different story.

The source of the rot is a feminist orthodoxy which says nurses must no longer be the 'handmaidens' of male chauvinist doctors but instead must be their equals. 'Caring', therefore, can have no place any more in nursing since it demeans the nurse. Making sure the very old and incompetent actually eat, or making them comfortable in bed, or helping them wash or dress in a way that maintains their dignity, are all beneath too many modern nurses. Wicked stuff; and nothing short of a collapse in the moral heart of nursing itself.

Fascinating developments at the Guardian. On Saturday, announcing her departure to the Times, Julie Burchill denounced the Guardian's institutional hatred of Israel and the Jews and asserted that the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is spurious. A sample of Julie's deathless:

'If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban. The fact that many Gentiles and Arabs are rabidly Judeophobic, while many others are as horrified by Judeophobia as by any other type of racism, makes me believe that anti-semitism/Zionism is not a political position (otherwise the right and the left, the PLO and the KKK, would not be able to unite so uniquely in their hatred), but about how an individual feels about himself'.

And much more in this vein. Glorious stuff. However, on the very same day the Guardian published a great piece by Emanuele Ottolenghi headlined: 'Anti-Zionism is antisemitism; behind much criticism of Israel is a thinly veiled hatred of Jews'.

Ottolenghi did not mince his words.

'If Israel's critics are truly opposed to anti-semitism, they should not repeat traditional anti-semitic themes under the anti-Israel banner. When such themes - the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, linking Jews with money and media, the hooked-nose stingy Jew, the blood libel, disparaging use of Jewish symbols, or traditional Christian anti-Jewish imagery - are used to describe Israel's actions, concern should be voiced...

'The fact that accusations of anti-semitism are dismissed as paranoia, even when anti-semitic imagery is at work, is a subterfuge. Israel deserves to be judged by the same standards adopted for others, not by the standards of utopia. Singling out Israel for an impossibly high standard not applied to any other country begs the question: why such different treatment?...

'Despite piqued disclaimers, some of Israel's critics use anti-semitic stereotypes. In fact, their disclaimers frequently offer a mask of respectability to otherwise socially unacceptable anti-semitism. By describing Israel as the root of all evil, they provide the linguistic mandate and the moral justification to destroy it. And by using anti-semitic instruments to achieve this goal, they give away their true anti-semitic face...'

He exposed anti-Zionism for denying to Jews alone the right of self-determination, and pointed towards the terrible truth that anti-Zionists support Jews only when they die: 'By negating Zionism, the anti-semite is arguing that the Jew must always be the victim, for victims do no wrong and deserve our sympathy and support'.

And he demolished the odious claim, now trotted out almost daily, that those of us who draw attention to the upsurge of antisemitism are distracting attention from Israel's 'crimes':

'The argument that it is Israel's behaviour, and Jewish support for it, that invite prejudice sounds hollow at best and sinister at worst. That argument means that sympathy for Jews is conditional on the political views they espouse. This is hardly an expression of tolerance. It singles Jews out. It is anti-semitism'.

It certainly is. But look where he was writing this -- in the paper which has become a byword for this phenomenon. So what's going on? Is the left finally waking up to the outpouring of anti-Jewish prejudice, hatred and violence in Britain and Europe that it has either ignored or helped whip up? Has the Guardian begun dimly to discern the role it has itself played in this? Or is it still telling itself that the devastating analysis which, to its credit, it hosted on its pages yesterday somehow referred only to others but not to itself?

My goodness, this man is brave. Mansour al Nogaidan, a reformist Muslim and Saudi journalist, writes in this piece in the New York Times that the alleged Saudi crackdown after the Riyadh bombing is merely cosmetic. The real harm is being done, he says, by the Wahhabi imams who continue to preach hatred against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews. Key passage:

'I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims. As the recent attacks show, now more than ever we are in need of support and help from other countries to help us stand up against our extremist religious culture, which discriminates against its own religious minorities, including Shiites and Sufis'.

Absolutely. And he should know, since he himself once subscribed to this doctrine of hate -- and he describes movingly how he discovered to his astonishment that there were other ways of interpreting his religion. But what leaps from the page is that he has already been sentenced to 75 lashes because of his articles criticising Wahhabism and calling for freedom of speech.

What courage. We must surely give people like this our loud and world-wide support -- and that means messrs Bush and Blair must speak up in support of them, too.

Sickening and all-too revealing award of the top prize in the British Cartoon Society's annual competition to the vile Independent image of a grotesque Ariel Sharon biting the head off a Palestinian baby. What a terrible message this sends, not just to Israel but to Britain's increasingly beleaguered Jewish community.

For it's not just that this image was grossly antisemitic, but people deny that this was so because it was about Sharon, the 'legitimate' target for opprobrium. As a result, those of us who say this cartoon was an astounding piece of antisemitism get the same reaction as when we talk about the revival in Britain and Europe of antisemitism, period -- we are marked down as the paranoid Jewish conspiracy, waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitise the crimes of the 'Nazi' Sharon.

Is it legitimate to criticise Israel and lampoon Sharon through caricature? Absolutely. Was this cartoon antisemitic? Absolutely -- on two main counts. First, the image plays on the medieval calumny that the Jews kill little children to drink their blood. This particular blood libel is currently enjoying a renaissance in the Arab world. The British left not only remains silent on this recrudescence of evil, but has now absorbed and reproduced the image in its own work. (Maybe this was unconscious, but then an awful lot of people fail to connect certain assumptions they make about the Jews to the disgusting prejudice that spawned them).

Second, the image articulates the view that Israel is deliberately murdering children. Not only is this grotesquely untrue, but it ignores the fact that Israel only launched the rocket attacks on Gaza -- which precipitated this cartoon -- because the Arabs in Gaza were attacking Israel. It ignored the fact that, while Israel tries to avoid hitting civilians (not always successfully), the Palestinian terrorists deliberately target civilians. It ignored the fact that it is the Palestinians who, through their cult of death, train their own children from a tender age to become human bombs. In short, the cartoonist totally ignored the fact that the Israelis are the victims here, and chose instead to portray them as child-killers. Such a gross libel is not just anti-Sharon. In totally airbrushing Jewish victimhood out of the picture and turning Jews into murderers instead, it is anti-Jew.

What does this tell us? That Britain has become a place where such obscenities, once limited to the far right, are not only published in reputable places; in addition, it puts up two fingers to Jewish protest by sealing such excrescences with the stamp of public approval. Along with the attacks on synagogues, on cemeteries and on Jews in the street (one rabbi in north London, who has been attacked on several occasions, now advises the men in his congregation to take off their yarmulkes in public) not to mention the 'world Jewish conspiracy' constantly discussed in the media, it is not surprising that more and more British Jews are feeling a rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred -- nothing like as bad as in France, but nevertheless deeply disturbing and disorienting.

Nevertheless, there are British Jews on the left -- like Mark Mazower in the Times -- who share the same warped view of their non-Jewish comrades that, far from being the victim of anti-Jewish hatred, the Jewish state is actually its cause. According to Mazower, the recent outbursts of anti-Jewish hatred in Germany tells us 'more about German frustrations over how the world deals with the Holocaust than about the dangers facing German Jews'. So that's okay then, is it? When Sharon talked about European antisemitism recently, opines Mazower, he was merely pursuing his own agenda of frightening Jews into emigrating to Israel. 'If Sharon is seriously concerned about anti-Semitism', he concludes, 'there is no one better placed than he to do something about it by changing his Government’s policies towards the Palestinians'.

Blaming the Jews for their own destruction was always an antisemitic canard. Now the collective Jew is blamed instead. Old venom, new bottle.

Many theories could be explored about those Jews who throughout history have taken the side of their persecutors. But as Mark Strauss observes in the Spectator, the current upsurge of anti-Jewish hatred is being fuelled by an alliance that has been forged between the anti-globalist left and the ultra-right. And he nails the lie that this is not merely anti-Israel but anti-Jew:

'Opposing the policies of the Israeli government does not make the new Left anti-Semitic. But a movement campaigning for global social justice makes a mockery of itself by singling out just the Jewish state for condemnation. Worldwide, protesters carry signs that compare Sharon to Hitler, while waving Israeli flags where the Star of David has been replaced with the swastika. Such displays portray Israel as the sole perpetrator of violence, ignoring the hundreds of Israelis who have died in suicide bombings and the role of the Palestinian Authority in fomenting the conflict. And equating Israel with the Third Reich is the basest form of Holocaust revisionism, sending the message that the only ‘solution’ to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is nothing less than the complete destruction of the Jewish state'.

Exactly.

The proposal to allow universities to charge differential 'top-up' fees, the centrepiece -- and maybe the nemesis -- of the government's new parliamentary programme, is quite simply a mess whichever way you look at it. No question that the universities are going bust and need more money. After that, all is confusion.

Old Labour oppose top-up fees because they think they are unfair and will penalise poor students. The government's insistence that it's got nothing to do with poor students because the fees will be repaid by a graduate tax which will only kick in if graduates earn £15,000 per year is completely undercut by the fact that it has nevertheless exempted poor students from paying these fees at all.

The Tories line up with Old Labour (the fact that this is simply a crass piece of opportunism, playing to the popular fury at the proposal, is of course, a thought too unworthy to be mentioned here). This position completely contradicts and renders incoherent the Tories' whole shiny new policy position, which rests on a radical premise of decentralisation and increasing consumer control over the financing of public services.

The universities oppose the Tories and Old Labour on the grounds that they need the money and it isn't ever going to come from taxation (true). The universities say if they don't get the money, they will cut student places. This whole crisis has arisen, however, because of the lunatic premise that at least half of all 18 year-olds should get a degree, a policy which has sent standards in the universities plunging ever downwards while they gently go bankrupt under the pressure. The universities remain publicly silent about this socially-engineered catastrophe, although plenty of university teachers provide graphic chapter and verse in private about the standards they are being forced to collapse.

They are also silent about one of the very worst aspects of all this, that the universities -- the very crucible of freedom of thought and action -- are under the cosh of an ideological government that is forcing them to discriminate against merit in order to shoehorn in students with the right social cachet (ie from poor areas and rotten schools), and that the extra cash will be used to tighten that control even further. If ever there was a trahison des clercs, this is surely it.

Meanwhile, as Martin Stephen, high master of Manchester Grammar School, points out in a Telegraph piece today (not yet online, for some reason), the pressure on universities is forcing them to consider pupils with low A-level predictions who clearly will never make the grade, but whose applications threaten to paralyse the entire process. This is because the government is gerrymandering the university admission process to conceal the real reason why not enough bright children from poor backgrounds are going to university -- because it has signally failed to improve primary and secondary schooling, and indeed has made it in many respects even worse than it was when it came into office, aghast at the low standards it found in the classroom.

So, having failed to provide poor pupils with the classic ladder up out of disadvantage, it is kicking that same ladder away from pupils who deserve their university place, an act that combines ideological spite with deep political mendacity. Simply despicable.

And anyway, even with the wretched top-up fees, the universities still won't have enough money to make ends meet.

Is this chutzpah on an epic scale, or is he really on a different planet from the rest of us? The BBC Director-General Greg Dyke has actually attacked news organisations that were prepared to 'bang the drum for one side or the other' in the war on Iraq. His target was outfits like Fox News. I don't watch Fox bulletins, and for all I know the criticism that it wore its war-supporting heart on its sleeve was true. But for Dyke, it seems that bias is a strictly one-way street. He only perceives it when it's on the side of America, not when it's against it. Thus he appears absolutely impervious to the fact that, day after day -- and even today -- the BBC has worn its anti-war heart on its sleeve, always viewing the entire conflict through a prism of prejudice which utterly betrayed the BBC's duty of objectivity which is at the very core of its role as a public service broadcaster. Yet Dyke had the sheer gall and effrontery to say:

'"For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility...They should be balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other." He cited research showing that of 840 experts interviewed on US news outlets during the war only four opposed the conflict."If that were true in Britain, the BBC would have failed in its duty," he said'.

But the BBC did fail -- conspicuously -- in its duty and is still doing so. Dyke wrapped himself in the heroic mantle of the independent crusader: 'It may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion, but it is what we are here to do'. This is precisely the self-regarding posturing that led directly to the debacle over Andrew Gilligan's 'sexed-up' allegations. Despite all the evidence of fundamental journalistic flaws presented to the Hutton inquiry, the BBC's topmost brass still appears to have leaned precisely nothing.

Surreal performance this morning by the Health Minister Rosie Winterton on the Today programme (7.09am) responding to the claim by intensive care specialists that there weren't enough critical care beds. The specialists say the number of beds has dropped by 1%. The minister said this was untrue and the number of beds had actually risen by 30%. The explanation for this startling discrepancy in claims? There were now intensive care beds that weren't actually in intensive care.

Uh huh. Well, maybe I'm just being very stupid but how can a bed that's not actually in an intensive care unit be an intensive care bed? To be an intensive care bed, its inmate surely has to be receiving, er, intensive care which is provided by units specifically equipped for that purpose.

The minister claimed this redistribution had taken place after consultation with all appropriate professionals. The fact that the main professionals involved, the intensive care specialists, were totally contradicting her left her unabashed. An intensive care bed is no longer a bed in intensive care. Of course.

Terrifically important speech by Singapore's former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew who has said the Europeans have completely failed to grasp that al Q'aeda is a totally new phenomenon and one that cannot be equated to terrorism as we have known it in the IRA, Red Brigades and so on. Events in Morocco, he says, are now capable of triggering terror in Indonesia. And he makes the classic argument against the appeasement culture that has gripped Britain and Europe:

'Many Europeans think they can finesse the problem, that if they don't upset Muslim countries and treat Muslims well, the terrorists won't target them.' But that is a fallacy, he says, demonstrated by the terror threat in south-east Asia : 'Muslims have prospered here. But still, Muslim terrorism and militancy have infected them.' And he spells out the manipulative tactics that have fooled so many in Europe: 'The terrorists' tactics for the time being are to hit only Americans, Jews and America's strong supporters, the British, the Italians, the Turks, warning the Japanese but leaving others alone. They intend to divide and conquer.'

But he also says that American-style force won't get to grips with the problem either because this merely removes the 'worker bees'. To combat the menace, the queen bees have to be destroyed -- the clerics who spread their twisted vision of Islam, brainwashing the young and inctiing them to mass murder.

To combat this, America must throw its weight behind moderate, reformist Muslims. 'Only Muslims can win this struggle,' he says. This is surely absolutely right. These brave Muslims who are trying to drag their culture towards reform, and who take their lives in their hands to do so, should be getting our unstinting support. But this cannot happen unless and until Britain and America stop talking about 'a few extremists' and start facing up to the true scale and nature of the threat we all face.

Robin Cook, our thankfully extremely ex-Foreign Secretary, is displaying once again his advanced moral sense and corresponding superior powers of intellectual reasoning. He has compared the invasion of Iraq to Germany's annexation of Czechoslovakia. In an interview to be broadcast tomorrow with the digital radio station Oneword, he says Hitler also claimed to be invading to protect the rights of the indigenous population.

But William Rees-Mogg correctly draws precisely the opposite conclusion from the same historical comparison in the Times:

'Of course, some people have argued that, if Britain had done nothing to provoke al-Qaeda, it might have been spared. I am old enough to remember the same arguments being used by the advocates of appeasement in the late 1930s. If Britain lets Hitler seize Czechoslovakia, they said, he will be satisfied with that. He will not turn on us: Hitler is a German patriot with limited aims'.

Exactly. Czechoslovakia should indeed be uppermost in people's minds at present, as an example of how Britain has an appeasement history which nearly did for us once before -- and if Cook and his chums had their way, would dish us now. The current appeasement mood is captured once again by David Frum, the American analyst who was clearly (and understandably) much disturbed by what he found last week on the streets of Britain:

' The argument over President Bush's visit to Britain is not an argument about him at all. It is an argument about Britain and its future. The anti-Bush mood is a spur that some hope to use to hasten Britain ever further into the European Union and that others hope to use to legitimise their ill-concealed sympathies for the enemy in the war on terrorism. The war in Iraq has become a war within the countries of Europe over their future identity - and that war is now being waged in Britain: the most stable, the most cohesive, the most unabashedly patriotic nation of the whole continent'.

Yes; and it's even deeper and wider than that, because the rot has now infested conservative middle Britain, who have little time for Europe but who are now so bamboozled by our dementedly decadent culture that their 'sympathies for the enemy' are concealed even from their own muddled selves.

Having just listened to yet more claims, reported on BBC radio's The World at One, that the British consulate in Istanbul wouldn't have been bombed had we not helped attack Iraq, I am struck even more by the truly demented discourse we are now being forced to have. The attack on Iraq may well have enraged more Muslims and helped recruit them to terror. But then so does any attempt at self-defenceagainst Islamic terror. As soon as one fights back, one is accused of aggression.

That is precisely what is happening in Israel. Israelis are murdered; Israel fights back to prevent more Israelis being murdered; Islamists then claim the Israelis have perpetrated aggression to which the Islamists are entitled to respond. But their claim is monstrously untrue. It is a reversal of the truth. The same argument is being used about Iraq. Saddam presented a terrible threat to the west, and was involved in numerous acts of terrorism against it. Eventually, the west decided to defend itself against this threat by attacking him. This was justified -- and indeed somewhat tardy -- self-defence. But the Islamists, for whom Islam is by definition perfection and is therefore incapable of doing wrong,and who therefore represent any act of aggression on their part as a legitimate defence against the west which by definition is aggressive towards them, not only invert victim and terrorist but in doing so incite other Muslims to rise up against this alleged attack upon Islam.

This is truly insane. The logic of this insane way of thinking is that the west must not ever seek to defend itself from attack by the jihad by waging a just war of self-defence, because to do so will merely invite yet more terror. This mad logic means that if we are murdered and fight back, the fact that this may provoke more Islamists to sign up to murder because of their truly crazy way of looking at the world means we shouldn't fight back at all. This is tantamount to a call to surrender to fascism.

The even more terrible thing is that there are so many in Britain who can't see how insane this is but themselves subscribe to its mad logic. It may well be true that the attack on Iraq has provoked more violence. But that should not support an argument for surrender to such monstrous intimidation. It's rather an argument for redoubling the fight against an insane and totalitarian ideological death cult. Someone in government has got to spell this out to the public, fast.

As was entirely predictable, the reaction from parts of our unintelligentsia to the carnage in Istanbul was the claim that Britain was only attacked because of its support for America. As was even more predictable, the most ludicrous version of this was promulgated this morning by John Humphrys on the ineffable Today programme. What was less predictable was that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, actually called a spade and spade and got the better of him.

Humphrys claimed al Qaeda attacked Britain because it had invaded Iraq, thus drawing more Islamist terrorists into the fight and targeting Britain. But as Straw said, Islamist terror had not only committed the atrocities of 9/11 but had been attacking American and other interests for the previous decade. It is perfectly plain, from what al Qaeda consistently says, that it is waging a religious war against the west, which has committed the crime of modernity and thus has to be destroyed. Christians, Jews, Hindus, secularists and reformist Muslims are directly in its sights.

In other words, as Straw said, the whole of the civilised world is under threat and has to fight this fascist terror. The idea that taking out Saddam created a threat to Britain where none previously existed is risible. And even if it did further enrage the jihadists, as Humphrys suggests, it is as spineless to say we should therefore have left Saddam alone as it was in the 1930s for Chamberlain to have looked the other way from Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia for fear of enraging Hitler. And as for Humphrys's complaint that despite the war on terror the world today is a lot less safe, well honestly! What would this man have said after Dunkirk?

Straw, to his credit, also grasped that what Humphrys was saying was not only idiotic but morally repugnant. For as Straw pointed out, Humphrys was effectively saying the Istanbul atrocity was America and Britain's fault -- thus shifting the blame from the perpetrator to the victim. That is indeed precisely the moral inversion that lies behind the appeasement tendency's whole position. It is disgusting and decadent.

And what, for the umpteenth time, is the BBC doing continuing to permit such outrageous bias to drive its premier radio current affairs show? When is it going to start putting its journalistic house in order?

While Britain has yet to join battle over the expected proposal for gay partnerships in next week's Queen's Speech, America is convulsed over the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court to permit gay 'marriage'. President Bush has said he will create a legislative bar to such a development, thus presaging a titanic new offensive in the culture wars.

My own view on gay 'marriage' (like gay partnership 'rights') is that this is a fundamental category error and a policy development that should be vigorously resisted. Does this mean I am prejudiced against gays? Not a bit of it, any more than I am prejudiced against women (don't laugh, I've been accused of this too) because I believe the feminist assault upon men and marriage has to be strenuously fought. I believe deeply in tolerance, and in the liberal separation of public and private which means that someone's sexual orientation should be their own private affair and never the cause of prejudice against that person. But the gay rights movement destroys this separation, yanking sexual orientation firmly into the public sphere. I believe that this movement, like the whole of the 'victim culture', is profoundly illiberal -- indeed, distinctly totalitarian in its reflex attempts to demonise its opponents and intimidate them into silence by smears and insults -- wrapping itself in victimhood to conceal its real agenda which is to destroy normative sexual values, with incalculable consequences for children, vulnerable adults and social order.

For those of you who have not already gone into orbit, but are prepared to consider a reasoned argument against gay ‘marriage’, here it is.

The fundamental argument in favour of it is equal rights. Married people have rights, goes the spiel, so it is invidious to deny these rights to gay people who are just as capable of forging permanent, loving relationships. The Massachusetts court ruling sets out this premise in terms:

'Barred access to the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage, a person who enters into an intimate, exclusive union with another of the same sex is arbitrarily deprived of membership in one of our community's most rewarding and cherished institutions. That exclusion is incompatible with the constitutional principles of respect for individual autonomy and equality under law... Without the right to marry - or more properly, the right to choose to marry - one is excluded from the full range of human experience and denied full protection of the laws for one's "avowed commitment to an intimate and lasting human relationship." '

Right? Wrong. This is not about equality. That is the category error. Married people don’t have ‘rights’. They enjoy certain benefits granted by the state in respect of the fact that marriage is a unique institution, sui generis. The Massachusetts court said that marriage was an ‘evolving paradigm’. It is not, any more than a court of law, an oath of loyalty or a constitutional monarchy is an ‘evolving paradigm’. Marriage is an immutable institution, and the only sexual arrangement in which the state has a direct and legitimate interest.

This is because marriage is not a love affair. It is an institution which hedges a sexual union between a man and a woman with a dense network of law, custom, social pressures, tradition and ritual, because that union is the crucible of human identity which needs special protection. That identity is created solely by the union of man and woman; only that union creates kinship, the blood relationship; marriage solemnises and sanctifies that union for that reason; the state has an interest in privileging marriage because if personal identity goes up the spout (as it does in fragmented or dismembered families) the social consequences are appalling.

That is why cohabitants don’t have these privileges, even though two sisters, say, may live with each other for decades in a devoted bond. If marriage were merely a matter of contractual rights, like buying a house, then of course any group denied those rights could justifiably claim discrimination. But the privileges of marriage are not rights, and the claim of discrimination is utterly bogus.

The demand by the gay 'marriage' lobby is not in fact for equality. It is for ‘identicality’. It is a demand that society acknowledge that gay relationships have the same weight as marriage. But they don’t. Saying as much isn’t prejudice or discrimination, any more than it would be to say the same about two devoted sisters living together. It is not to gainsay the devotion that a gay couple may display towards each other. It is merely to say that marriage is unique, and is the only sexual arrangement which has a public dimension because of the calamitous social and cultural consequences if it goes pear-shaped.

And marriage is going pear-shaped because of the fact that sex, marriage and procreation have become disconnected as the result of a complex combination of factors. Far from shoring marriage up in the face of such pressures by reaffirming the distinctiveness which gives it meaning, our society has proceeded to take an axe to all its supports – financial, legal, and cultural.

Many assume that gay ‘marriage’ is a marginal and harmless issue, as it would only apply to relatively few people. And surely it is only compassionate to provide similar protection for those gay people who crave the same kind of things in life – loving companionship, stability and security – as heterosexuals. Indeed, there are certainly grounds for compassion here (although many of these needs can already be met through private legal arrangements).

But one cannot legislate for compassion if this does great harm to an essential bulwark of our society. And it would do such harm. Because at the heart of gay ‘marriage’ is the belief that anyone who wants to marry should be allowed to do so ‘as long as they love each other’. It thus replaces objective morality by subjective desire. It redefines an institution from something that has a fixed identity and therefore possesses meaning to something that takes whatever shape anyone wants it to assume and therefore loses its meaning. For if gay marriage, then why not polygamy (many wives), polyandry (many husbands), polyamory (many same-sex or different-sex unions in the same household)? Why not incest?

Gay 'marriage', in short, is a means of destroying monogamous heterosexual marriage as a normative social and legal institution. That is, indeed, what its more honest advocates acknowledge, in order to remove – they think – the stigma that accompanies behaviour that is not considered the norm. Since homosexuality is not the norm, it follows that the heterosexual norm has to be destroyed. It is therefore a direct, outright attack on heterosexual, monogamous marriage. But if that goes down the pan, then eventually so too will personal autonomy, which is the product of monogamous marriage and the bedrock of our freedoms (such as the freedom of minorities, including gays) -- and what distinguishes us from societies where family structure takes very different forms, and where personal freedom is compromised or non-existent as a result, and minorities (including gays) suffer.

It is to many people simply astounding that so much of our political life is now taken up with the gay rights issue. From the Church of England to the British Parliament and now the American constitution, debate is being driven along by genital politics. But if one sees the gay rights movement for what it really is, a highly organised, pan-western movement to help destroy the normative rules of western society through the moral inversion of victim culture, so that personal liberty and independence of thought and action are replaced by the tyranny of the most powerful interest groups over the weak, then it becomes immediately clear why this issue lies at the very heart of the life-and-death struggle known as the culture wars, and why that struggle itself is the most crucial and defining political battleground bar none in our viciously self-centred, unthinking and lemming-like society.

More on that startling Weekly Standard scoop that detailed the apparent decade-long close connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, disclosed to the Senate intelligence committee by Defence Department official Douglas Feith. The author of the article, Stephen Hayes, deconstructs the Pentagon's elliptical response to the disclosure of the Feith memo. It's pretty dense reading, but the bottom line seems to be that the Pentagon is wriggling, saying that the material was merely 'raw data' and not fully evaluated. That's as may be; and clearly, not all raw intelligence is reliable. But as Hayes remarks:

'If the intelligence reporting in the memo was left out of earlier "finished intelligence products" because the reporting is inaccurate, it seems odd that it would form the basis of briefings given to the Secretary of Defense, the director of Central Intelligence, and the vice president. And it would be stranger still to include such intelligence in a memo to a Senate panel investigating the potential misuse of intelligence'.

The question is, why -- given the (literally) explosive nature of this evidence of such close links between Saddam and al Q'aeda -- this 'raw' intelligence was not fully evaluated; and why, if this information was good enough to give to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the US government has not made more of it in its attempts to convince the public that the war on Iraq was justified?

Just wait for the cry, in the wake of the appalling carnage in Istanbul, that Britain was targeted only because we have supported America in Iraq. To which one can only draw attention, for the umpeenth time, to the fact that -- as al Qaeda itself has repeatedly said, including here -- the war it has declared is against the west, secular liberalism, Christianity and the Jews. As further evidence of this, Reuters reports that Islamic militants burned to the ground thirteen churches and several houses in a remote northern Nigerian town after a Christian student was accused of blasphemy.

In addition, as this piece by Walid Phares notes, the compound in Riyadh was bombed at least in part because al Q'aeda had targeted Maronite Christians there. One of its commanders said: 'After consultation, we decided it was appropriate to attack this place and destroy it, including the people who lived there, because it housed Americans and a large majority of Christians holding Lebanese citizenship'.

Just when are we in Britain going to emerge from our trance?

Quite apart from the Blair government's little local difficulties in getting its flagship health and justice bills through Parliament, what has gone almost unnoticed is the fact that Gordon Brown's tax credit system has degenerated into unadulterated chaos. The Inland Revenue has managed to lose up to £2bn in overpaid tax credits over the last three years, and a computer problem which has stopped millions of people receiving the new child tax credits will not be solved until March 2005. In other words, a right blooming shambles, so much so that the National Audit Office has refused to sign off the Revenue's accounts.

It's not the twisted ideology that's going to do for this government -- its their sheer, staggering incompetence.

More evidence that America is waking up at last to the impact of Saudi terror theology. The chairman of the U.S. government commission on religious freedom has said that Saudi Arabia's continued funding and export of its Wahhabi brand of Islam makes it a "strategic threat" to the United States in the worldwide war on terror. '"We've struck a Faustian bargain, turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's domestic policies ... and we've turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabian efforts to export Wahhabism," said Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel'. Yup, that's about the size of it. But will President Bush now deliver on his implied resolution to deal with this?

The demented and poisonous logic of the rampant prejudice against Israel plumbs yet further depths in the Spectator, where Gerald Kaufman MP asks 'Why not invade Israel?' Kaufman, who is by no means stupid, is so consumed by his pathological hatred of Ariel Sharon that he has put his name to an argument which is as intellectually sloppy as it is morally repellent.

His first error, and the premise on which his entire argument is based, is the assumption that President Bush wanted regime change in Iraq because Saddam was a ghastly tyrant. On this basis, Kaufman asks, why not get rid of other nasty regimes across the world? But the assumption is wrong. Bush wanted Saddam out because he was developing weapons of mass destruction which, in conjunction with his personal instability, his involvement in terrorism and his megalomaniac desire to become the leader of the Arab world -- which would have put him at the head of the Islamic jihad which he could have equipped in due course with WMD -- meant he was a menace to all of us and had to be stopped in his tracks. The fact that removing him was obviously of inestimable benefit to the suffering Iraqis was merely a beneficent by-product of regime change (although one that has been talked up by both Bush and Blair in the face of the public's refusal to believe Saddam posed a threat, but that's another story).

On the basis of this false premise, Kaufman then constructs a number of factually wrong, logically flawed and morally inverted arguments why Israel should be invaded. He says Israel has violated UN resolutions -- and even though he acknowledges these are not binding resolutions of the kind that applied to Iraq and of which it was in breach, he nevertheless says this does not 'excuse' Israel. So having acknowledged the fatal flaw in his own argument, he promptly ignores it. It was because the Iraq resolutions were binding, representing instructions by the world's collective body, that the war was justified; no-one would declare war on the basis of mere expressions of opinion. Furthermore, Kaufman ignores the fact that the UN resolutions about Israel have repeatedly required the Arab states to desist from trying to annihilate it, failure to comply with which appears to have escaped his attention altogether.

'Since the present regime in Israel came to office, there has been unprecedented repression of the Palestinians who the Israelis govern', he says. He ignores the fact that the 'present regime' came to power because the Palestinians had launched their terrorist war against Israel as their response to the unprecedented offer at Taba of most of the territories and half of Jerusalem -- violence which simply destroyed the Israel Labour party and the peace camp. As for 'unprecedented repression', he is talking about measures taken by the Israelis to try to prevent their citizens being murdered in large number. If the Palestinians were not committing these atrocities, they would not be sufering from the demolished houses, the check-point hardships and the collapse of their livelihood. Even so, Israel is still paying approximately half the Palestinian Authority's income (as it is required to do under the Oslo agreement). Is there any other country in the world which would be expected to subsidise the murder of its own citizens?

Kaufman says most of the Palestinians killed by the Israelis have been 'innocent civilians, including babies and pregnant women'. This is a particularly outrageous and truly disgusting reversal of the truth. The majority of Palestinians killed have been armed men; the majority of Israelis killed have been unarmed men, women and children. That is because the Israelis target terrorists, and sometimes unfortunately kill cvilians whom their rules of military engagement instruct them to avoid; the Palestinians deliberately target innocent civilians (not to mention using their own children as human bombs).

'Now the Israelis are building an illegal security wall, reaching far into Palestinian territory, which is equally illegally annexing that territory...' I think the Israelis are wrong to build the wall over the green line since this is needlessly provocative. However, this is not illegal, just as their retention of the territories is not illegal. Under international law, they are entitled to retain territory seized in time of war from an enemy which has attacked them and which refuses to make peace with them; and while they hold that territory, they are legally entitled to do what they want with it. (Does that mean I approve of the settlements? No I do not; but they are not illegal).

'And would it not be poetic justice to invade the invaders? After all, the Israelis, who illegally invaded Lebanon until they found the going too tough and got out...' Yes, the invasion of Lebanon was a terrible blunder. But to brand it an 'invasion', implying that it was an aggressive act on a par with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, for example, is grotesque. Israel invaded Lebanon solely in an attempt to destroy the Palestinian terror factory that was using Lebanon as the base for its murderous attacks. In other words, it was a defensive (if misbegotten) exercise. But in Kaufman's looking-glass moral universe, Israeli self-defence is aggression; if Ariel Sharon is involved, it seems, Israel is not entitled to defend itself at all.

To come back to the beginning: the reason Israel should not be invaded is that, quite clearly, Israel poses no threat to anyone who does not try to attack it, and certainly not to the free world. It is simply trying to defend itself against a culture of death that has waged war upon it. To suggest that Israel should therefore be branded a rogue state that needs to be deprived of its sovereignty and democratically elected government is just sick, sick, sick.

That was one great speech by President Bush yesterday. He set out, in the clearest, most inspiring and most moving terms what has been obvious to anyone with an ounce of objectivity from the very start -- that what motivates him in Iraq and the Middle East is his realisation that the old assumptions shared by Britain and the US before 9/11 were responsible for producing the threat to the west with which we are now struggling, and that every single assumption on which that old realpolitik was based has now got to be turned on its head.

As he said, the free world failed once before to grasp the threat it was facing .'Free nations failed to recognise, much less confront, the aggressive evil in plain sight. And so dictators went about their business, feeding resentments and anti-Semitism, bringing death to innocent people in this city and across the world, and filling the last century with violence and genocide'. And indeed, the mood in Britain today bears an uncanny resemblance to the appeasement culture of the 1930s.

'The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists, and the dictators who aid them. The evil is in plain sight. The danger only increases with denial'. And that danger is being increased today by every one of those protesters on our streets, who are giving encouragement to the perpetrators of the fascist terror war against the west by sending the message that the west is divided and no longer able or willing to defend itself.

That's why Bush's speech is so very important. For he made it plain that the use of force, although a last rather than a first resort, would nevertheless in the final analysis be used: 'The people have given us the duty to defend them. And that duty sometimes requires the violent restraint of violent men. In some cases, the measured use of force is all that protects us from a chaotic world ruled by force'.

The Americans wanted to spread democracy to the Middle East, he made plain, because this was the only way to protect the west from terror. Personally, I remain sceptical about whether this is either possible or proper, if by democracy we mean the imposition of western values upon people to whom many of these values are an affront to their own culture. I believe that in Iraq, for example, we have a duty -- having laid waste the country's institutions -- to help repair them in order to bring order and security to the population. Beyond that, it is surely for the Iraqis to determine their own polity. Our position should be, we cannot and will not tell you how to run your country -- but if you harm or threaten us, we will come after you.

It is that last crucial understanding that has been absent from the west's postion these last several decades; and it is the rediscovery of that moral principle, that the west must be alert to and actively defend itself from any such threat, that lies at the core of Bush's argument. This is the key passage:

'We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold. As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found. Now we're pursuing a different course, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. We will consistently challenge the enemies of reform and confront the allies of terror. We will expect a higher standard from our friends in the region, and we will meet our responsibilities in Afghanistan and in Iraq by finishing the work of democracy we have begun'.

Many have come to suspect that, in the light of the difficulties in Iraq, the Americans will now back off from dealing with other terror states. Bush's words suggest, however, that this is not so and that the commitment has if anything increased. David Frum, the analyst and former Bush speechwriter who is writing about the tour for the Telegraph, believes this is a clear shot across the bows of Saudi Arabia:

'With those words, President George W Bush - George Bush of Harken Energy, son of George HW Bush of Zapata Oil and the Carlyle Group, the George Bush who selected Richard Cheney of Halliburton as his running mate, that George Bush - announced the demise of the American alliance with the House of Saud'.

I really hope he's right. For the US support of Saudi has been at the very core of the west's corrupt embrace of Middle Eastern oppression. Frum, meanwhile, has been finding out at first hand what it is like in Britain at the moment to discuss these matters with polite, pleasant, articulate Brits and quickly discover that one is having a kind of nightmare dialogue with the demented:

'I ran out of words after three or four minutes, and one of the protesters suspiciously asked: "Why doesn't President Bush ever say these things?" I sighed, and started one more time. He has said them, again and again and again - and now he has flown to your city, and in front of your cameras and your reporters so all of you can see and hear, in plain words and in full public view, that he endorsed everything you say you believe. You say democracy is the answer? You say we must stop putting oil ahead of human rights? You say we should stop coddling wealthy and oppressive regimes and press them to change? Everything you say, he has said. So the issue is not, why won't he speak? The issue is: why won't you hear him when he does speak?'

Why, indeed. Welcome, David, to the looking-glass land where morality, reason and logic have been stood on their heads, where thousands of people believe that America and Israel are more of a threat to the free world than any Middle Eastern tyranny, and where terror is rubbing its hands in satisfaction at the moral and intellectual collapse that is now its recruiting sergeant on the streets of Britain, America's closest friend.

It now appears that I was wrong to say the Tories were planning to junk their oppostion to the jury trial restrictions in the Criminal Justice Bill. They have now made plain they are still going to oppose them. Last weekend's reports to the contrary were therefore a spin too far from somewhere or other.

Confirmation that Michael Howard is Michael Portillo in drag. He is to allow his MPs a free vote on the same-sex partnership bill, which is expected to be announced in the Queen's Speech. This is supposed to demonstrate his new 'inclusive' approach.

What it actually demonstrates -- along with his expected junking of Tory opposition to the erosion of trial by jury in the Criminal Justice Bill -- is that the Tories have trashed principle and embraced opportunism. If the Conservatives are about anything at all, it is 'conserving'. Yet if they support the government's attack on trial by jury, they will be endorsing a populist measure which attacks a bulwark of our liberty in order to gerrymander more convictions in court and give the impression of being tough on crime-- regardless of the fact that this will actually have no impact on crime, which is out of control because of the failure to arrest people, let alone bring them to court.

As for same-sex partnerships, the proposal is intellectually incoherent, morally vacuous, will create injustice and inconsistency (why shouldn't two spinster sisters have the same advantages?) and make a mockery of the principle of contract (no penalty for breaking it). It will also further undermine marriage, creating an unstoppable momentum to give the same advantages to heterosexual cohabitants. Howard surely knows all this. It is unlikely to win him many plaudits down at the Dog and Duck. But this is the price he has agreed to pay in the Faustian pact he made with the Portillistas that brought him to power.

Same old opportunism; same old Tories.

Ken Livingstone is, we are told, about to be welcomed back into the Labour fold to prevent Labour from being humiliated into fourth place in next year's London mayoral election. Ministers assure us he's a reformed character. Here's a sample of the thinking of the newly mature, responsible, moderate, rational, feet-on-the-ground Ken:

'I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction'.

The Palestinians claim at every opportunity that the reason they can't crack down on terror is that the Israelis have destroyed the Palestinian Authority security apparatus. Well, here is evidence that this excuse is bogus. A textbook preaching the value of 'holy war' and 'martyrdom' for all Muslims has just been reintroduced into PA schools in the West Bank, despite explicit assurances that incitement and religious hatred would be removed from the curriculum. The PA is therefore continuing to incite mass murder. This is the wellspring of terror. The PA schoolbook also provides a definition of 'jihad':

'Jihad is an Islamic term that equates to the term war in other nations. The difference is that jihad has noble goals and lofty aims, and is carried out only for the sake of Allah and for His glory'.

So let's not hear any longer the spurious argument that 'jihad' merely means 'struggle', and that those who claim it means violence are somehow anti-Muslim. It means war. That's what the Palestinians are telling their children; and that's what their culture of hatred and death will use those children to provide.

The Guardian today writes a leading article lamenting the rise of antisemitism, entitled 'Our Dulled Nerve'. It was prompted by the bombing of the Turkish synagogues and the failure of the left to rise and protest about the wave of anti-Jewish hatred now sweeping much of the world.

The Guardian's leader writer would have done well to turn to yesterday's op-ed piece by Fiachra Gibbons about the Turkish atrocities. For as the Telegraph notes today in its own leader, Ms Gibbons dismissed the perpetrators as irrelevant: 'It matters little who did the deed'. Instead, she extolled the historic relationship between Turkish Muslims and Jews and implicitly blamed Israel for the fact that Muslims have now murdered Jews in Turkey: 'Of all the trials that have befallen them over the last 500 years, none has brought more threat than the existence of Israel'.

As the Telegraph comments: 'What has happened to the liberal media in Europe that the slaughter of innocent worshippers and the desecration of ancient synagogues in Istanbul should evoke implicit criticism, not of the perpetrators, but of Turkey's ally Israel? Since the last attack on an Istanbul synagogue in 1986 by Palestinian terrorists led by Saddam's late protégé Abu Nidal, a great deal has changed. Then, the condemnation of the killers was universal and unconditional. Now, each new atrocity against Jews is greeted by new attempts at justification or relativisation'.

Precisely; and the Guardian is in the forefront of this process. For like Ms Gibbons, it demonises Israel; indeed, through its relentless dehumanisation and delegitimisation of the Jewish state, it has done a great deal to foment not just anti-Israel but anti-Jewish hatred. It totally ignores the fact that the war being waged against Israel is against its Jewish character, fuelled by explicit Judeophobia pouring out of the Palestinian Authority and the Arab world. Instead, it vilifies the victim, blaming Israel -- not the Arabs, and not the axis between Islamism and the left which is now fomenting hatred of Israel and the Jews -- for the current rise in antisemitism. And then it has the gall to wrap itself in the mantle of concern for non-Israeli Jewish victims of race hatred. For even in today's leader, it carefully maintains this distinction.

Ms Gibbons ended her piece with this final vicious jibe at Israel: 'One pungent favourite of the tea houses seems particularly apt now: " Aharva kulo ke no pedo " - It's the backside that didn't make the stink that always gets hit'.

The real stink comes from the Guardian's hate-filled hypocrisy.

Eye-poppingly disgusting piece in the undeservedly prestigious London Review of Books, making the same argument as Tony Judt that Israel should be abolished and become instead a 'bi-national' state. This would, of course, have nothing 'bi' about it -- despite Ms Tilley's feeble protestations -- but would become by force of demography a Muslim Arab state, where the Jews would undoubtedly meet the same fate as that half of the population of Israel who were refugees from Arab countries which persecuted, massacred or expelled their Jewish populations and are now Judenrein, or ethnically cleansed of Jews.

Indeed, the author of this piece, Virginia Tilley, unconsciously betrays her own venomous prejudice and double standards when she writes the following:

'To consider the future of the settlements under a two-state solution is to understand that it is not a solution at all. In theory they and their 200,000 residents could be absorbed into the Palestinian state with settlers acquiring Palestinian citizenship or some kind of permanent-resident status. But given the extent of official Palestinian corruption, as well as the settlers' emotional, political and economic links to Israel, citizenship is not a serious option. Permanent residency would only compound the present situation: enclaves of non-citizens in a non-contiguous Palestinian territory'.

Let's deconstruct this for a moment. She's envisaging a Palestinian state, with citizens of that state. But she assumes that any Jews who might live in such a state wouldn't be its citizens. Why not? The reason the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza aren't citizens of Israel is because the West Bank and Gaza aren't part of Israel. So that comparison is bogus. She has simply assimilated the racist, Judeophobic Arab premise that no Jews can live on Muslim land.

Other highlights (or lowlights) of this vile piece are:

* the 'narrative of a beleaguered Jewish people trying to build a homeland in a tiny country huddled on the Mediterranean while fending off irrational Islamic/Arab hostility' is merely Israeli right-wing propaganda;
*Ariel Sharon wants terrorist attacks upon Israelis to increase to provide 'the opportunity both to intensify the military occupation and to preserve the settlements as inviolate sanctuaries for innocent civilians threatened by barbarity';
*Israel has 'apartheid-like privileges that presently assign second-class citizenship to non-Jews' (like the vote, perhaps, Ms Tilley? Or membership of the Knesset? Or positions in the Supreme Court or the army -- all available equally to Israel's Arab citizens?)

The London Review of Books, which never loses an opprtunity to demonise and delegitimise Israel, devotes many pages to this odious travesty. It is astounding and sickening that there can now be serious discussion about dismantling a legitimate, sovereign, democratic state like this. No other country in the world attracts this kind of argument. No-one talks about dismantling Pakistan, for example. No other country but Israel attacts this kind of malevolence, libels, distortions and smears in order to make the case for its destruction.

This argument, that a two-state solution won't work because of the settlements, is now beginning to be pushed by the Palestinians and their annihilatory fellow-travellers. In time, it will doubtless come to shape all debate about the Middle East crisis in the same way as the current mantra of the 'two-state solution' (here dismissed by Ms Tilley for promising 'only more trouble' and 'such dire consequences') shapes it now. People will thus become acclimatised to thinking and talking quite naturally about the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Israel, while denying in shocked tones that they are suggesting anything of the sort.

In a way, it isn't surprising since it merely makes explicit what has always been obvious to those with eyes to see but which has been ferociously denied by the Palestinians' supporters. This is that the real agenda has always been a one-state solution -- ie no Jewish state at all, the destruction of the Jewish refuge from world persecution, and the forcible removal from the Jews alone of their right to self-determination.

Our education system is simply disintegrating. The government's plan to drop foreign languages from the compulsory school curriculum at age 14 has already resulted in some 60% of comprehensive schools dropping compulsory language learning. Many bright children are dropping languages, but as ever the main casualties are the poor:

According to the Guardian, 'a total of 70% of schools surveyed with more than one in 10 pupils on free school meals had made languages optional, compared with 31% of schools with fewer children from low-income families'.

What this shows is that the compulsory curriculum, introduced by the Tories in the late eighties to combat the prevailing education ideology which was abandoning teaching and knowledge, has not only failed to revive the true meaning of education among the teaching profession but may even have masked a futher deterioration in attitudes.

There was a time when teachers didn't need the state to tell them what to teach; they knew that foreign languages were important, and made them compulsory as a result. But now they give children the choice to opt out. Surprise surprise, pupils are choosing less onerous options. And government ministers are complicit in this betrayal, saying that the change 'simply acknowledges that some teenagers would prefer to focus on vocational subjects and helps avoid turning them off schooling. Oh, please. This is tantamount to saying that poor children are too stupid to learn a foreign language.

The vocational mantra is a complete red herring. In European countries, where real, high quality vocational education is provided, virtually everyone -- including the humblest -- speaks English better than the English do.

It's not surprising that British children find foreign languages difficult because some years ago the teaching establishment decided to abolish formal grammar teaching. Instead, pupils were expected to 'immerse' themselves in the language and learn by a kind of osmosis. Not surprisingly, since they hadn't been given the means to decode the foreign language they were expected to learn (or even, for that matter, their own), they found this all but impossible. So now the wheel has come full circle, and they are dropping language learning altogether.

What a betrayal of children. What a condescending, philistine, vandalising government. And what a calamity for Britain, as our employers increasingly fail to find employees with foreign languages or other skills necessary to do the job.

Despite its continuing love-in with Saudi Arabia, the US has now quietly launched its first ever investigation into the extent to which Saudi funds world terror. The Americans have apparently begun trying to teach the Saudis the facts of life:

'U.S. officials believe it is likely that a significant amount of Saudi government money has ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda and other terrorist operatives who are still at large and could be planning attacks. Some of those officials said they have come to believe that the sheer volume and repetition of Saudi contributions, even if made unwittingly, could constitute some form of "willful ignorance" that borders on official policy.

"It is a problem we have discussed with the Saudis directly," said a second senior U.S. counter-terrorism official. "They have to realize that funding Wahhabi institutions has formed a base for Al Qaeda to operate. It allows them to recruit based on the ideology, to fund and to execute." '

The Americans have an uphill battle to judge from this response by a Saudi official:

'"It has become very simplistic to say that Saudi Arabia equals Wahhabism equals terrorism, but that is not the case," the official said. "Our religious doctrine is very conservative and orthodox. But is it violent? No.... We have crazy religious radicals who are nut cases, but they are not part of the religious establishment." '

Since Saudi-funded Wahhabism has subverted mosques throughout Europe and the world to a religious fanaticism which does indeed breed hatred and violence, this is what one might term in another world an economy with the truth.

The only thing more astonishing than this explosive Weekly Standard scoop is the fact that it has not been picked up by the mainstream media. It quotes extensively from a leaked report sent by the US defence official Douglas Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee. This report says that Osama bin Laden and Saddam had a relationship that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda.

It lists in considerable detail contacts between Al Q'aeda and Saddam Hussein going back to 1990 and continuing until shortly before the start of the Iraq war this spring. Drawing, it says, on numerous intelligence contacts, it provides the kind of detail -- names, dates, places -- which leads one to think this is reliable information. Who knows, when one is dealing with intelligence, whether it is true or not? But passages like this have a ring of authenticity, as well as being jaw-dropping:

'Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti'.

And then later, from the same source:

'The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required'.

It gets even more devastating. 'During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training'.

The implications of this report are vast. The anti-war mob has told us day in, day out that there were no links between Saddam and al Q'aeda. According to the Weekly Standard's account, they were entwined around each other for more than a decade. If this report is reliable, it shows that Bush told us the truth. It proves that the people who will take to London's streets tomorrow to proclaim fatuously that there never were any weapons of mass destruction are morons. It also tells us -- terrifyingly --that al Q'aeda has had at least some access to WMD training and material; and given that this material is now missing, raises the horrifying possibility that as a result of this relationship with Saddam, it may indeed have found its way into al Q'aeda's hands.

Of course, we don't know if the substance of Feith's report is reliable or not. But shouldn't our mainstream media be re-publishing this article and holding it up to the light of day? Because if this is true, it is immensely important, and horrifying proof of Bush's axis of terror.

A police whistleblower sounds a protest over the totalitarian victim-culture that has engulfed his calling. Superintendent Peter Schofield, of the Greater Manchester police, has made a formal complaint that he was put under pressure to deal more leniently with black and Asian officers accused of disciplinary complaints. 'The integrity of the force was at stake', he said.

Rather more than his force, I think, in the light of the recent Dizaei and Logan debacles. This is clearly a poison that has infected the police bloodstream ever since the truly catastrophic Macpherson report. The fallacy at its core is the belief that one can eradicate racial prejudice by abandoning the 'colour-blind' approach and viewing people instead as intrinsic victims simply on account of the colour of their skin. All that does is institutionalise gross unfairness and injustice, introduce a climate of manipulation and ferocious intimidation, and build into the system an inverted racism.

Once a society abandons the only fair way to conduct its affairs, which is to judge people solely by their conduct and not by their ethnic background, it has compromised its liberal values. The police are the means by which a society upholds the rules which determine its character. Their wholesale capitulation to this kind of threat is frighteningly symbolic.

Disturbing piece by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in America's Weekly Standard puts its finger on the question that's been troubling me. Is the Bush U-turn in Iraq a victory strategy -- or an exit strategy? The authors fear that Bush is preparing to cut and run; they point out that the Iraqis are not yet properly trained; and they add for good measure that there aren't enough troops on the ground, thanks to Donald Rumsfeld's parsimony.

I agree that this whole manoeuvre has the smell of panic about it; the suggestion that the Bushies are making, that overnight enough Iraqis have suddenly managed to train themselves adequately, is clearly absurd. Where I think the authors are mistaken is to assume the US could hang around in Iraq long enough to train people from scratch -- or, indeed, that they should do so. Under the right direction, even Ba'athists can be turned to serve another master. The British are adept at doing this. This is what should have been done at the beginning. Can it be done now? Are the Americans yet realising the mistake they made in ignoring British advice-- or are they still in their bubble?

No, it won't do. Margaret Hodge's apology to paedophile abuse victim Demetrious Panton, whom she labelled 'an extremely disturbed person', is not sufficient. The Prime Minister says he won't sack her because he judges people by the job they currently do, and he thinks she's doing an excellent job as Minister for Children.

What an extraordinary capacity he has to make the unacceptable okay in his own mind. It was as Minister for Children that Ms Hodge issued her appalling smear (and tried to bully the BBC into silence). How can she possibly be doing a good job as Minister for Children when, faced with evidence of paedophile abuse, this is how she treats the victim? How can she possibly be suitable to be a minister at all since, by such behaviour, she has shown once again that she refuses to take responsibility for her own appalling failure in the past to protect the children in her council's care, and is just as arrogant and dismissive as she was then? How can anyone have any respect for her at all?

How, indeed, can anyone have any respect for a Prime Minister who goes in for this kind of craven, problem-ducking sophistry?

The Metropolitan Police is clearly now allowing itself to be intimidated by a protection racket. Having abased itself before Superintent Ali Dizaei, it has now forked out 'tens of thousands of pounds' to pay off Chief Inspector Leroy Logan, who was subjected to a disciplinary investigation over an £80 hotel bill which he said he submitted as an expenses claim 'mistakenly' but in good faith.

Logan, who claimed 'racism and victimisation', just happens to be chairman of the Metropolitan branch of the Black Police Association, which claimed the Commissioner's scalp over Dizaei.

I have no idea what the truth was about this hotel bill. But I just wonder whether there was any evidence at all of 'racism and victimisation' -- other than Leroy's claim that he had been 'singled out' because of his role in the BPA and his support for Dizaei. And tens of thousands -- for this? The Met's credibility has disintegrated.

An astonishing and malevolent rewriting of history by Sidney Blumenthal, a former adviser to President Clinton. According to a piece by him in the Guardian, the Middle East road map went down the pan because of the 'neo-cons' around Bush -- to be more precise, Elliot Abrams, head of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, here stomach-churningly invested with quite diabolical power.

In Blumenthal's version, the Abrams-controlled Bush refused to put pressure on Israel to stop building West bank settlements, the one thing that could have saved Abu Mazen's Palestinian prime ministership.This is truly fantastic. Mazen went belly-up because from day one of his office, Arafat refused to cede control to him of what mattered -- particularly security and foreign affairs. Arafat remained firmly in control of the Palestinian Authority, in breach of the very premise on which the road map was founded and which made it therefore a dead duck from the very start. Mazen was slowly but surely strangled by this deadly grip, as is his successor.

Moreover, Mazen simply refused to do what the road map required as the very first step in the process -- that he should dismantle Palestinian terror -- because he said he had no intention of starting a Palestinian civil war. The idea that, if Sharon had stopped the settlement expansion (which I agree was and is unjustifiable, stupid and self-defeating) Mazen would have defeated Arafat and fulfilled the first requirement of the road map, is simply an insult to the intelligence.

The road map is now dead in the White House because Bush -- who as Blumenthal said was only pushed into it by Blair -- came to realise that the PA would not deliver and was still actively involved in terrorism itself. Mohamed Dahlan, Mazen's security chief, went to Washington and produced a detailed plan to show how he would sort out the militants and stop the terror. He didn't do any of it. Bush simply realised he had been duped.

It wasn't the neo-cons, Mr Blumenthal, who continued to pay the PA's Al Aqsa brigade to join with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in blowing up Israelis. It wasn't the neo-cons who blew up the two Americans who were in Gaza to award Fulbright scholarships. To blame the Israelis and the 'neo-cons' for the collapse of a corrupt process which revealed itself as such to everyone not willing to be manipulated by a vicious inversion of facts, morality and logic is truly disgusting.

Glorious destruction by David Pryce-Jones in the Spectator of that grand vizier of venomous distortion, the Independent journalist Robert Fisk. What Pryce-Jones brings out in particular, in addition to the hysteria and disinformation which are Fisk's calling cards, is that his sanctimonious posturing is beyond parody -- as when he praised his Taleban attackers for having the good taste to beat up a westerner who was by definition evil (ie, himself). Since events persistently prove him wrong in virtually everything he writes, the fact that he is so lionised by the left says it all.

America is clearly in very considerable trouble in Iraq. The terrorist war is not only intensifying but has now spread to the British-controlled south, with the killings of 27 people including 18 Italians. Now, President Bush has apparently performed a U-turn and is to move much faster to create an interim Iraqi administration.

Is it all too late? For this is what he should have done at the beginning. One of the key errors was to assume that the Ba'athists were all untouchable. As a result, there has been no properly functioning Iraqi security force, and sluggish or non-existent civil administration. In addition, the Americans clearly have no idea what it takes to administer a country in such difficult conditions and have alienated the population by crass insensitivity. The result is the progressive slide into anarchy that we are witnessing, as ordinary Iraqis turn against the Americans and are recruited to the cause of those Arab terror regimes for whom it is imperative to strangle Iraqi freedom at birth.

The British, who conducted a text-book operation in Basra, could have taught the Americans how to reconcile local diplomacy, intelligence-gathering and military force. Sure, the triangle around Baghdad was altogether tougher terrain, but the same principles should have been followed.

Unfortunately, the US administration has been conducting its own internal war from the start, which has paralysed proper decision-making. Now it has placed itself and the rest of us in great peril. For if it does lose the peace in Iraq, it will be a catastrophe not just for Bush's re-election prospects but the whole defence of the west. It is already pretty disastrous, since the axis of terror is undoubtedly noting with satisfaction the signs of American weakness, disarray and panic (as are their gloating fellow-travellers in Britain and Europe). Bush needs to listen to what the British are trying to tell him -- not just ministers and officials, but the commanders on the ground -- about the day-to-day nitty-gritty as well as strategy.

David Frum, the American analyst and former speechwriter for President Bush, gives expression to my own view that Bush's visit to Britain next week could turn into a major disaster. The Americans are only now waking up the the fact that London is going to greet Bush with what at best will be massive demonstrations against him, and at worst violence, rioting and maybe even terrorism.

Frum asks how Bush's advisers could have allowed him to drift into this. I think part of the answer is similar to the reason why Israel is so useless at putting its case across. For like Israel, America is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause that it simply cannot conceive that it can be hated as much as it is. It is incredulous at the suggestion that it needs actively to win hearts and minds. It has also never bothered properly to understand Britain. It knows Tony Blair has been a staunch ally over Iraq. Er, that's it.

The Americans have been going round in a kind of bubble. It's the same bubble, insulating them from the advice of candid friends which they simply override because to listen to it might admit to weakness, which has got them into such terrible trouble in Iraq. If they had bothered to look closely at what has been going on in Britain, they would have seen that the country has been engulfed by a rising hysteria about the US and Bush: an irrationality and complete breakdown in logic, common sense and moral reasoning from 9/11 onwards which has created the ugliest, most prejudiced and most dangerous national mood that I can ever remember. But the Americans, like the Israelis, have been so wrapped up in themselves that they have never opened their eyes to this. As a result, they have been almost entirely absent from the battle for hearts and minds, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the propaganda of noxious ideologues and their compliant fellow-travellers in the media.

The result is that if there are indeed massive, militant demonstrations against Bush next week -- and they are being organised by the same people who brought us the anti-globalisation mayhem, but who this time will have the backing of a large swathe of ordinary Brits, too -- this will not simply be a political disaster for Bush. It will be viewed as a major triumph by those waging war against the west, and will thus become a potent weapon to be used against us.

Excellent article on the malign influence of George Soros, and his close relationship with the US Democrats. Key passage:

'But what does it say about [Howard] Dean and the Democratic Party that they have sold their souls to this strange Euro-billionaire? George Soros advocates legalized marijuana, hates and boycotts Israel, is regarded by many as anti-Semitic, is a recently-convicted inside trader and global financial manipulator who seeks an end to American supremacy – that is, the global debasement and weakening of the United States?

'Is this who American voters want as the puppet-master and power behind the throne directing foreign and domestic policies of the United States of America? Indeed, will voters support a party that only months ago was screaming for campaign finance reform to prevent the rich from dominating our politics – but that now has rejected all such reform and instead sold itself to a single eccentric billionaire whose anti-American views resemble those of France?'

Yup, maybe. If Bush goes down the pan because of Iraq, that could be about the size of it.

Important speech tonight by Roger Mosey, the BBC's head of television news. Mosey makes a number of very interesting points. The vast expansion of choice through the explosion of TV channels has not expanded our society's horizons -- it has shrunk them into a tawdry and sordid theatre of humiliation, cruelty, degradation and trivia.

Samples of this dross: 'It was ITV1 and ITV2 which broadcast a show a year or so back called "Wudja? Cudja?" paying cash rewards for behaviour which was either unpleasant or anti-social. A man was paid £1000 to be stripped to his underwear and tied to a lamp-post before being pelted with fruit. Then worms were tipped over him. In another segment, a host who achieved nerve-tingling levels of awfulness ran round a market town trying to persuade shoppers to show her their bare bottoms...I quote from the Channel 4 website: Three mad mates from the Welsh valleys and one warped Londoner, all united by a total disregard for their own personal safety and a burning desire to destroy the boundaries of taste and decency. Not only will you see the team embarking upon foolhardy ventures such as rolling in stinging nettles, playing naked paintball, lying on beds of drawing pins, drinking their own urine, challenging professional wrestlers and downing four litres of water only to deny themselves lavatory relief - but, rather worryingly, you'll also be taken inside their deranged heads. And if you've ever wondered why someone thinks it's a good idea to nail their genitals to a piece of wood, Dirty Sanchez will reveal all!'

Naturally, these remarks have already produced sneers from the Beeb's competitors that it is returning to 'paternalism'. But so it should. The whole point of the BBC, and of public service broadcasting, is that it has a mission to educate and elevate as well as to entertain. And that is something the Beeb has departed from in recent years, both in its relatively dumbed-down programming -- because what Mosey does not acknowledge is the extent to which the BBC too has been dragged down this path -- and in the corruption of its journalistic standards of objectivity.

With the Hutton report looming in front of him, Mosey tackles this issue too. Refreshingly, he states the following: 'The bottom line is this. It is a legitimate aspiration of the BBC to make Britain a better place. But it cannot do this by reflecting through its journalism or factual programming a world which liberals or anyone else wishes would exist: rather, it has to be clear-sighted about the truth and about reality. News is not a function of social engineering'.

Absolutely. And he acepts the risk of following a 'consensus' view. But then, like every other BBC executive I have ever talked to about this, he refuses to accept what is patently the case -- that most BBC journalism views the world's events through a left-wing prism, a view of the world which is anti-America, anti-Israel, pro-Europe, anti-Tory and pro-social libertinism.

He then says something which illustrates perfectly how he is trapped between his desire to uphold journalistic objectivity and the fact that he too has swallowed the same assumptions:

'And so today we have to be fair and impartial about President George W Bush, despite his unpopularity in this country and in most of the world. The Neoconservative agenda may be right, it may be wrong: I honestly have no conclusions. But I stand by what I said in The Independent: the editorial assumption cannot be that President Bush is automatically wrong in everything he does'.

Absolutely, Roger --except what's all this about Bush's 'neo-conservative' agenda? That is code for 'the Jews now run US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel'. Bush's agenda is not 'neo-con'. It was forged out of the realisation that gripped old-style conservatives along with a load of others that geopolitical realpolitik as we knew it was incinerated in the ashes of the World Trade Centre. The assumption that the neo-cons now call the shots is the very kind of lazy, prejudiced, consensus journalism that Mosey so rightly criticises.

On the basis of Mosey's speech, it seems the BBC is now giving serious attention at long last to the perception of its institutional bias -- but it still has a hell of a way to go before it reasserts the proper standards of public service broadcasting.

As calls mount for Margaret Hodge to resign as Minister for Children, the Guardian predictably rides to the rescue of its sister-in arms. Ms Hodge, faced with a renewal of the charges over her past history as a council leader who had ignored evidence of paedophile abuse of children in her authority's care, tried to bully the BBC into silence and smear an abuse victim who had accused her of ducking her responsibility (see my article this week, 'The Minister for Child Abuse').

The Guardian, of course, has always lectured and hectored about the evils of child abuse. So might one expect it to take an exceedingly dim view of Ms Hodge's behaviour? Might one expect it to agree that to have made such a person Minister for Children in the first place was an astonishing piece of cynicism? Dream on. The Grauniad pins the blame instead on...you guessed it, 'parts of the media' for being 'out to get' poor beleaguered Margaret. She should merely have been 'particularly careful' in how she handled media inquiries; she had 'not handled this issue well'; and the BBC was right to report it all. But...she should not resign because 'she should be judged on her current performance'.

That, of course, is exactly why she should resign. Anyone not wearing the Guardian's hard-left solidarity blinkers can see this illuminated in neon lights above Tony Blair's head.

Depressing vindication for people like myself who have argued -- in the teeth of ridicule and outright denial from virtually the entire education establishment -- that education standards have dropped through the floor, that public examinations have been dumbed down and that the universities are having to spend much of their degree courses on remedial work. Lo and behold, now the former Chief Inspector of Schools has confirmed that this is indeed all too true.

So now, multiple-choice exam questions are to be replaced by essays, to try to repair the catastophic situation where university students cannot any more sustain an argument. The decline of the essay has indeed been one of the most devastating developments in recent years. Essays teach pupils how to make a structured argument around a set of facts. They teach one how to think. The eclipse of the essay has meant that hundreds of thousands of people can no longer think because they have not been taught how to do so. It has also meant the erosion of the idea of objectivity and the marginalisation of facts. If one is trying to explain why our society now apears so gullible in the face of systematic lies and propaganda, it is because being taught to think has long been out of fashion in what we laughably call our education system.

The new Tory health and education spokesman Tim Yeo gets gentle treatment in this Torygraph interview, which allows him to claim that he is now a 'stronger and possibly nicer man' after the personal and political difficulties which sent his career into eclipse until he was rescued this week by St Michael Howard. But a hint emerged from this interview which is not altogether encouraging to those who believe the duty of the Conservative party is to conserve and defend liberal values and social order from the assaults being waged upon them.

His son, who apparently found that cannabis had helped him over the effects of cancer treatment, has apparently been lobbying him over cannabis use. Now, of course one has sympathy with people desperate for some relief from the horrible side-effects of treatment. But cannabis itself causes cancer, along with brain damage -- not to mention the social destruction it leaves behind. And both Yeo and his son have form on this issue.

'...Yeo announced at a Tory conference several years ago that his son had smoked dope and that Yeo himself had enjoyed it as a student'. To which the newly non-arrogant, caring, inclusive Yeo now has this to say:'The party has grown up since then. It's foolish getting hung up on such minor issues'.

So there you have the new face of the Tories. Cannabis use, with all the personal and social devastation it wreaks, is to be dismissed as a 'minor issue'. Clearly, for the touchy-feely Tory tendency, there is still no such thing as society.

Typical line of questioning from the Ba'ath Broadcasting Corporation this morning when John Humphrys interviewed Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Radio 4's Today programme. Since Iran, Humphreys asserted, presented a WMD threat far greater than Iraq had done, why weren't we adopting the same approach we had taken towards Iraq by invading Iran? Straw properly dealt with the two twisted assumptions behind this question: 1) Saddam's WMD programme was well documented and beyond doubt and 2) we had only invaded Iraq after 12 years of fruitless negotiations. It is staggering that the BBC's highest profile interviewer can not only fail to acknowledge such facts but be allowed to broadcast such prejudiced distortions. He then went on to challenge the propriety of affording President Bush a state visit, as if Britain were honouring a war criminal -- which no doubt Humphreys thinks he is.

At the same time, he was right to put Straw on the spot over the division between Britain and the US over Iran. Britain has reverted to type in wanting to cosy up to Iran and play down the seriousness of its WMD threat. As this piece in the Telegraph makes clear, Iran has lied about its WMD programme for 18 years and has covered up the progress it is making towards developing nuclear weapons. One of the core lessons of the Iraq debacle is that the west cannot again tolerate being given the runaround from endless diplomatic manipulation. The Iran threat has to be defused.

George Soros, the financier who has the capacity single-handedly to drive national economies off course, has announced that he will devote more than $15 million to the goal of getting rid of President Bush, which he describes as the 'central focus' of his life and a matter of 'life and death'. He accuses Bush of a 'supremacist ideology' and creating a state of permanent warfare. It has obviously escaped Soros's notice that war has actually been declared upon the west. By working for Bush's defeat, he is therefore working for the defeat of the west's attempt to defend itself.

Such cultural treachery should surprise no-one who has observed Soros's position on prohibited drugs. Through his Open Society, Lindesmith Institute and other 'philanthropic' ventures, he has put his billions behind the cause of drug legalisation. Through this enormous influence, he has been a driving factor behind the subversion of most of the west's drug NGOs -- and increasingly, governments in decadent Europe -- to the legalisation agenda, thinly veiled as 'harm reduction'.

In his book 'Soros on Soros', he makes his position clear: 'I'll tell you what I would do if it were up to me. I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, except the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available. Initially I would keep prices low enough to destroy the drug trade. Once that objective was attained, I would keep on raising the prices...'

Soros wants to become the world's biggest supplier of narcotics. Far from destroying the drug trade, he wants to run it. He would thus be responsible for enslaving millions of people to narcotics, with untold damage to individuals and society which he would significantly control. Some might detect here more than a whiff of megalomania.

Other exciting Soros insights include his belief that euthanasia should be legalised, and that laisser-faire capitalism poses a future menace greater that either Communism or Nazism.

Not surprisingly for someone who represents such a threat to the values and survival of westen society, Soros is lionised by the left and now seems to be on the way to buying up the US Democratic party.

First, the good news. The BBC has appointed a former news executive, Malcolm Balen, to monitor its Middle East coverage for anti-Israel bias. Of course, this may be merely a PR stunt (I can't help wondering whether this is entirely unconnected to the forthcoming Hutton inquiry report, which might just throw the entire Manual for Trainee Journalists at them). If Mr Balen is an effective monitor, it would take a truly Herculean effort to clean out these particular Augean stables. And of course, the BBC denies that its coverage has been in any way wrong -- perish the thought. But this is the first time the Beeb has ever suggested that possibly there might just conceivably be the slightest suggestion of a small problem here, somewhere. So let's be cautiously optimistic.

Now the bad news. The extraordinary malice displayed towards Israel by both Reuters and Associated Press, the news agencies whose reports go straight into news items around the world, continues unchecked. On Saturday, AP drew up a chronology of terror attacks around the world. Guess what country was totally omitted? You got it. Reuters did the same thing, listing attacks in Pakistan, Tunisia, Yemen, Bali, Kenya, Chechen attacks in Moscow and attacks against Indians in Bombay -- but no terror attacks in Israel.

Israeli victims of terror have thus been rendered invisible. If the BBC were to draw attention to this... now then we really would be making progress.

Tony Blair has mounted an impassioned defence of next week's state visit by President Bush. The home truths he has told in these remarks (with the exception of his characteristically wrong-headed defence of 'old' Europe) will, however, only deepen the surrealist malevolence that now characterises everything to do with Iraq and America in Lewis Carroll's Britain.

As Blair rightly said, the tremendous battle going on in Iraq against the Ba'athist remnant backed up by a variety of noxious Arab terror sponsors simply has to be won because of the very reason it is happening. Those terrorists and their patrons know that if Iraq becomes a stable, settled, prosperous and above all free country, their whole game plan for overthrowing the west takes a dive and their own regimes become threatened. As Blair observed:

'It is the battle of seminal importance for the early 21st century and it will define relations between the Muslim world and the West'.

That is precisely why this war is still going on in Iraq. That is why it is unthinkable that it might be lost. That is why next week's demonstrations take on far more significance than a tiresome and inconvenient disruption. They are themselves a significant weapon against the west's war upon terror. They will be used as evidence that Bush and Blair are acting illegitimately and are on their own against the wishes of the majority of their people. They will be used, in short, to support tyranny, mass murder and fascism against those in the west who are fighting to defeat them.

These demonstrations are likely to be huge. They will draw upon the public hysteria that is now fermented on any issue where sufficient numbers of highly motivated groups use the internet to spread propaganda and incitement and also to organise large movements of people across the globe. And alas, they will also draw upon the anti-Americanism and anti-Bushism that is now rampant in Britain -- even among conservative or apolitical folk.

America has made very bad mistakes in Iraq. But the cause could not be more just, and the underlying objectives could not be more sound. It is critical that the west pulls together to win this thing. But Britain -- appeasement-minded, ignorant, prejudiced, gullible, decadent Britain -- has its head deep in the sand, while putting up a crude two-fingers to the two men who are trying vainly to convince them of the immeasurable stakes for the way of life the British public so cavalierly takes for granted.

Michael Howard's shadow Cabinet balancing act is too clever by half. Yes, there's obviously a point in slimming the thing down to focus on a few big hitters. But as Peter Riddell rightly says in the Times, once it gets down to practicalities it descends into confusion. Who exactly is going to speak for the Tories on education and health? Tim Collins, education spokesman, and Andrew Lansley, health spokesman? Or Tim Yeo, education and health spokesman, the only one of the three actually in the shadow Cabinet?

The government's claim that Howard has thus downgraded these vital areas is also hard to gainsay. Both health and education are enormous and exceptionally difficult subjects. The Tories have never grasped the depth and scale of the education disaster (thank goodness the useless Damien Green has been booted out). To understand what has gone wrong in each of them, and then to devise the remedy, requires two formidable brains. On his past record as a failed and discredited minister, Tim Yeo doesn't even have one formidable brain. Nor is he likely to be sympathetic to the underlying direction (albeit muddled and opportunistic) in which the Tories have been going towards patient and parent leverage. This now needs to be developed boldy and coherently. It is difficult to envisage Yeo rising to this task.

Howard has shown he has listened to the worries within the upper reaches of the party that he was falling into the clutches of the Portillistas. Most notably, Francis Maude -- who was expected to be rewarded with a plum post for swinging the libertine tendency behind him -- remains on the back benches. Moving Oliver Letwin -- the economic hardliner but social liberal -- to be shadow Chancellor, and David Davis -- the social conservative -- to be shadow Home Secretary, defends the real middle ground. So much is welcome.

But Yeo is the most significant weak link in the team, because health and education are the prime domestic battlegrounds. And as for Teresa May at transport, where no doubt she will repeat her previous performance in that post -- well, what can one do except cover one's ears and hope it all goes away?

The Palestinian Authority's security chief Jibril Rajoub has called on the Arabs to mount a co-oordinated resistance to the Americans in Iraq. At the same time, Yasser Arafat has gained control over PA security, making Ahmed Qureia even more of a puppet than he was already, and using the second PA prime minister to demonstrate that the prospect of the PA turning away from terror is a non-starter.

Question: Why is the US continuing to pay the PA some $100 million per year, only for it to promote and support war by terrorism against Israel and the US? Why, for that matter, is Israel itself paying the PA even more than that amount -- as was agreed under Oslo -- for the privilege of having its own citizens murdered?

It is now becoming a crime, it appears, to express politically incorrect views in public. The Bishop of Chester, Dr Peter Forster, who suggested that gays might seek psychiatric help to 'reorientate' themselves, is apparently to be interviewed by the police.

This is yet another appalling piece of evidence that Britain's victim culture is spinning out of control. I have no idea whether the Bishop is talking rubbish or not. I accept that his comments are offensive to many gay people. But so what? People give offence all the time, to all kinds of different people. Are they all to be criminalised? The idea that offensiveness inevitably creates hatred, and hatred inevitably creates violence or discrimination, is false. Down this road lies the burning of books.

Violence, and incitement to violence, are always wrong, and should be dealt with by the criminal law. Actual incitement to violence, though, is all too often ignored -- while now the police are getting heavy instead on offensiveness. This is to criminalise legitimate speech. Its effect is to outlaw 'prohibited' opinions. Its intention is to intimidate into silence all those who offend against the prevalent doctrines of the day (can one imagine the people who burned effigies of George Bush on Guy Fawkes night getting a dawn raid by the police?) It is a totalitarian measure, and should resisted by all true liberals with all the weapons at our disposal.

Victim culture has nothing whatsoever to do with producing a more tolerant, free and equal society. It is about the abuse of power by people who clothe themselves in the mantle of victims in order to force others to toe their line. The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement has supported this witch-hunt against the Bishop. They show by this that for them, tolerance and liberty are a one-way ticket, permissible only if it suits their utterly illiberal agenda.

Yesterday's dreadful carnage in Riyadh demonstrates that Al Qa'eda's long declared war against the kingdom has moved into a higher gear. It may also have been a tactical error. For this time, Muslims too were targeted in a compound where they mixed with foreign workers. As the Telegraph explains:

'The targeting of the Muslim compound in Riyadh, like the killing of anyone dealing with tourists, is legitimised for extremists because of association with "infidels". A way of life in which women drive into the compound and Muslims share western food at picnics around swimming pools is anathema to the fundamentalists. In attacking the Muhaya compound, al-Qa'eda was sending the message that Muslims of "lesser faith" will be punished and guest workers from other Muslim nations would be advised to avoid Saudi Arabia. The Saudi economy relies heavily on guest workers'.

There is no doubt that the Saudis are trying to fight this threat to their regime; but their relationship with terror is nevertheless a symbiotic one. For they have been happy to turn a blind eye to terror as long as it wasn't directed at them. Indeed, it is Saudi money which is behind the many mosques in Britain and elsewhere being used to spread a doctrine of extreme Wahhabiism, and recruit hearts and minds, if not actual bodies, to the cause of militancy. The question now is whether, having sown their murderous dragon's teeth, they will now abandon their strategy of world-wide theological fascism as they fight the many headed monster they have helped create.

I'm grateful to the informative website Dhimmiwatch for the following dismaying evidence of the march of the totalitarian victim culture across Europe. Norway's minister for local government Erna Solberg has been warned by no less a figure than the Bishop of Oslo for stigmatising Islam. Her crime? Well, she had the temerity to say last week that Muslims in Norway must accept they were a minority in a progressive, egalitarian society. For these and other similar views, she has received death threats. Another fine victory for the multiculturalists -- and how telling that a Bishop is on his knees before that particular shrine.

More evidence of the sound, logical, consistent and profound basis for EU President Romano Prodi's thinking. He agrees with Tony Blair that much of the EU constitution is merely a 'tidying up exercise'.

'Europe never changes in one shot, it’s a continuous change. It is clear that no one has had any idea of making nations disappear, not today, not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow'.

But then, a few paragraphs on: 'He admitted that the pooling of sovereignty enshrined in the constitution was a “change in centuries of history'.

Wake up, Dr Prodi, your contradictions are showing.

Isn't the Labour government's commitment to democracy a wonderful thing? It introduced the novelty of a mayor for London specifically to expand the democratic base and provide a counterpoint to central government power. Grateful Londoners promptly put that into practice by voting in Ken Livingstone, the ex-Labour bete noire who fought as an independent because Labour wouldn't touch him with a bargepole, in order to give Labour a bloody nose.

Now, Tony Blair is apparently intending to restore Ken to Labour's ranks. Is this perhaps because Blair has been converted to Ken's brand of post-Marxist, libertarian, victim culture politics? Alas, the reason is a touch less high-minded. Blair fears that Labour's official mayoral candidate could once again be trounced in next year's election, paving the way for further defeats in the London assembly and EU elections. "What we must do is avoid the smell of death," said a strategist.

So -- if Labour is heading for disaster at the hands of a rival candidate, the way to defeat him is simple. Make him Labour too! Semioticians must be thrilled.

The announced departure of Michael Portillo from the political stage, a mere 72 hours before Michael Howard announces the make-up of his shadow Cabinet, is most intriguing. The gossip in the last few days has been about mounting concern within the upper reaches of the party that Howard has allowed himself to be taken captive by the Portillistas. Indeed, there have been dark mutterings that a deal has been done with Francis Maude to put key Portillistas into the shadow Cabinet in return for a smooth accession. Now, though, the eponymous hero himself has fallen on his sword after Howard offered him a job. So what does this mean?

At least five explanations suggest themselves. 1) Howard offered Portillo something (arts, media and sport?) which was an insult to his dignity; 2) Portillo thinks Howard will be impossible to shift and he might as well cut his losses now; 3) Portillo thinks he personally has blown it for ever with the public and has therefore passed the libertine baton onto Maude; 4) Maude has done a Blairite Granita swindle on Portillo's Brown and got a plum post; 5) Portillo has simply said 'Stuff this for a game of soldiers, I'm off to star in a sitcom as a single mother'.

It's a moot point whether we will learn the real answer to this mystery sooner than we learn precisely what the Prince of Wales is supposed to have done with Michael Fawcett.

Stunning speech by President Bush who shows he now understands that the doctrine of appeasing the world's tyrants, fascists and terror-sponsors, which was the foundation-stone of western pre-9/11 realpolitik, was the main reason why the free world is now being threatened by systematic terror. Far from wanting to impose western-style settlements on the Islamic world, he accepts that giving Muslim peoples their voice may well mean Islamic states. But this doesn't mean, he says, that they are necessarily incapable of giving their people freedom.

Well, I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that if Muslims wish to reconcile personal freedom with governments based on their religious precepts, they are going to have to separate church and state -- in other words, have their own reformation, the absence of which more than anything else has held them back from prospering. There are signs that some of them are beginnig to face up to this, but at present these are sadly a most courageous but dangerously beleaguered minority.

But even if such a reformation doesn't happen, or at least not for a very long time, Bush is surely right to say that people are entitled to make political arrangements which reflect their own cultures. It is insupportable for a liberal to believe anything else. But equally, the west is entitled to say that if such states threaten its security, then it will defend itself by whatever means are applicable. The crucial point is that this has never been done. Instead, the west has backed tyranny, as long as it was opposed to the Soviet Union and ensured the supply of oil to western economies. It thereby promoted a stability of terror, and is now reaping that particular whirlwind. The key to ending terror is to give it no quarter.

And that is why Tony Blair, who (Iraq apart) stands for appeasement of terror (Ireland, Israel), is beating his head against a brick wall in fruitlessly urging Bush to restart the Middle East road map process. Bush appears finally to have grasped that this has imploded because the Palestinians will not keep their side of the bargain. They are simply not interested in peace, except on their own terms of the destruction of Israel. What Bush has not yet done, however, is to take this logic to the next stage. For if Israel is under existential threat, and is in the front line of the west's defence against Islamic fascism, Bush needs to translate his admirable words into deeds against those sponsors of terror whose appeasement he so rightly condemns.

The headline on Martin Woollacott's op-ed in today's Grauniad says it all:

'Now Europeans see Israel as a threat to their existence'.

Of course! Forget the fact that Israel is under daily bombardment by terorrists armed -- in part-- by money provided by the Europeans. Forget the fact that the Palestinian Authority pumps out the most vile libels about the Jews and incitment to kill them, in part courtesy of money provided by the Europeans. Forget that the instigator of this terror is Yasser Arafat, lauded and fawned over and encouraged at every stage by the Europeans. Forget that Israel's existence has been under threat consistently since it was formed since 1948, from which time it has been in a constant state of war.

None of this remotely affects the fact that 'viscerally, Europeans believe they would be much safer if there were such a settlement, and a majority probably believe that Israel is much more to blame for the lack of it than the Palestinians'. Yes, that is indeed what Europeans -- and 60% of the British -- now think. It is also what the Israeli left thinks.

The fact that a settlement based on territory was offered to the Arabs by the UN in 1948 and by Israel in 2000, that Israel offered to vacate the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war in return for peace, and that a Palestinian state could have been set up by the Arabs at any time between 1948 and 1967, but that all such overtures and opportunities have been turned down by the Arabs who have merely used them to redouble their war by terror -- all this is unaccountably absent from Woollacott's judicious prose.

Because as Britain and Europe know for sure, the jihad against the west whose avowed aim is to destroy Jewish and Christian civilisation is all Israel's fault.

No wonder the Prime Minister is so sanguine about the EU constitution. The Foreign Office somehow managed to overlook a clause in it handing over the UK's oil and gas reserves to Brussels.

'The Foreign Office was caught off guard, having wrongly supposed that the German government would block it. "They missed its significance and now they're becoming quite disturbed," said the source'.

Becoming quite disturbed, eh? Not as disturbed as the public, who might justifiably wonder what on earth we have a Foreign Office for if it signs away our gas and oil reserves to a foreign power in a fit of absent-mindedness. Maybe it's also missed the significance of handing over defence, foreign treaties, the economy, the justice system, social policy, control of our borders and sovereign law to Brussels under this constitution.

But don't worry, folks. 'A Foreign Office spokesman said the transfer of energy competence to Brussels was "basically OK", except for some "second order concerns".'

So that's all right, then.

The latest eruption of the Blair/Brown feud is, we are now told, all about a difference over general election strategy between Brown and Peter Mandelson. This is the difference:

'While Mr Mandelson argues that Labour should box the Tories into a Right-wing corner, by occupying the Centre ground, the Chancellor would prefer to emphasise the difference between Labour and the Conservatives'.

Eh? Am I missing something here?

That's the thing about appeasement: the blighters are so damned ungrateful to you for grovelling to them, they proceed to kick you in the face again. Two days after the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens fawningly welcomed back into the fold Superintendent Ali Dizaei, the officer who was cleared of corruption charges but admitted lying and threatening to kill his mistress, Dizaei has claimed: 'I was suspended and kicked out on to the street. Like a dog. I was dazed and sick and shaking. I was being treated like a dirty terrorist'.

Now the Met has protested that the deal which saw Dizaei restored -- with a promise of fast-track promotion -- 'included an acknowledgement by Superintendent Dizaei that his conduct had fallen far below the standards expected of a police officer and that the indictment for which he had stood trial had been properly brought'. Tsk tsk. You just can't trust rogues these days to keep their word.

It added, in hurt tones: 'Both the Metropolitan Police Service and the Metropolitan Police Authority therefore regard the (newspaper) article as both inappropriate and an unusual way to build trust and confidence between Superintendent Dizaei and his colleagues, a task which he acknowledged in the agreement rests largely with him'.

Inappropriate and unusual, indeed. But then so too was the decision to reward misconduct.

The reports that cannabis has been shown to relieve muscle pain in multiple sclerosis sufferers should be handled with some caution. First of all, it's not cannabis itself that's been used but a component, cannabinoids. Second, the effect is mysterious since objectively it seems to have made no difference in muscle stiffness, but the patients felt better nevertheless. Of course, if they experience relief from their symptoms this should be taken seriously, even if the precise mechanism is baffling. However, the distressing symptoms of MS go beyond muscle stiffness. And since cannabis itself can cause damage to the brain, leading to loss of memory, depression or paranoid psychosis, extreme caution is surely needed in proceeding down this particular path.

We hear a great deal from the Blairites and their cheerleaders in academe about the need to combat health inequalities. Well, here's one. Apparently, career women are now 50% more likely to develop breast cancer than women from the lowest social classes. Somehow, I doubt that we are going to hear much from the Health Department about the pressing need fo social justice in equalising breast cancer rates.

In other words, the health equality scam is just that. It is not at all concerned with equality -- which is of course an unattainable chimera -- but simply uses it as an excuse for class war in a white coat.

Now the police are unable to hold the line against the mob. In both Cheshire and Strathclyde, police were attacked by gangs, in one case after they had gone to the help of a fire crew which was being attacked by thugs. Is our society simply disintegrating?

The judges have gone to war against the government. They are absolutely right. The abolition of the Lord Chancellor, the latest act of constitutional subversion by this government of Jacobins, threatens to rob the judges of their independence and turn them into the catspaws of the Cabinet.

Because the Blairites have absolutely no understanding of or respect for history, they think the Lord Chancellor's post is by definition useless because it is ancient. And particularly since he wears funny clothes like tights and knee breeches. So they have abolished him, just like that. (Actually not just like that, since when Lord Falconer mutated into the Constitutional Secretary he found to his dismay that he was actually still the Lord Chancellor because the government had been too incompetent to grasp what needed to be done to abolish the post).

But the Lord Chancellor, as we have been hearing, is pivotal to the way this funny old country of ours guarantees our uniquely independent judiciary. And that is precisely because the post sins against the ark of the modernisers' covenant in that it represents both executive and judiciary. For even though the LC is a political appointment and member of the Cabinet, he is also a judge and has sworn a judicial oath. That means that he is bound to protect judicial ethics against the government of which he is a member.

In other words, the post represents a pragmatic British fudge, precisely the kind which characterises our once-wonderful but now pulverised constitution -- and which depends on something else which has now tragically vanished: the arm's length principle, the implicit understanding that there were lines which were never crossed even though they were not codifed. This was the principle on which our whole, informal, freedom-producing, life-enhancing, glorious constitution rested. And now it is being destroyed.

The Blairites claim that because the LC's post faces both ways simultaneously, it cannot guarantee independence unless its powers are separated. But of course, the precise opposite is true. This will bring the judges directly under the control of a government minister who has no other loyalty but to the executive.

The judges are right to fight this. But they are not wholly blameless for the fiasco. For they themselves have been muddying the waters for years by their judicial activism and wretched human rights obsession which have led them directly into the political arena. Having become increasingly politicised, they are therefore less able to make the case for judicial purity and freedom from political interference. But it has to be made nevertheless; and their very public opposition still packs a mighty punch.

Finally, the Royal Family has been dragged kicking and screaming to make a kind of pre-emptive strike. Sort of. The disclosure that the person who had obtained an injunction -- to prevent publication of a story about a senior Royal whose identity we were not allowed to know doing something we were not allowed to know with someone else whose name we weren't allowed to know -- was the Prince of Wales's former valet Michael Fawcett, meant the trail led to only one person.

So now Prince Charles has outed himself with the remarkable statement by his senior aide, Sir Michael Peat, that whatever he was supposed to have done he hadn't done it. But we still don't know what it was.

When will the Royal firm wake up to the 21st century? When will they get a strategic brain? It was obvious a long time ago thaat this secret would eventually come out. Too many people knew about it; and the website rumour mill was always going to circulate it. indeed, it is the secrecy of the thing that has fuelled the frenzy: the fact that this is supposed to be the allegation on the 'Crown Jewels' tape, whose disappearance from Diana's possessions sparked the police action against Paul Burrell.

If the Royals had come clean about this from the start, there would have been a brief uproar but they would have been in control of the situation by claiming -- as they are now doing too late -- that this was a preposterous suggestion by a sick man and was utterly untrue. But they didn't. They left it so that they allowed themselves to become the sustained target of blackmail, and to look as if they had something to hide so that it is having to be dragged out of them.

And they still haven't said what this allegation actually is.

Typical nonsense from Ted Wragg, the education professor, who has been sufficiently moved by the Diane Abbott furore to inflict upon us yet more of his crackpot theories about education. As usual, he says the reason so many inner city schools are so dire is because their children are poor. 'If the fundamental problems of poverty are not addressed, educational initiatives alone will not achieve much', he says.

Pinning the blame for educational underachievement on poverty is tantamount to blaming the poor for their own failure. Yet instead, he accuses those who say 'poverty is no excuse' for blaming the poor. This shows he doesn't even understand the argument. 'Poverty is no excuse' is not blaming the poor at all.

Wragg also makes another very peculiar claim. 'Middle-class parents who rejoice at their children attending school with a cross-section of humanity have to run the gauntlet of caste fellows who see them as traitors', he avers. Eh? Since 93% of the nation's children attend state schools, the overwhelming majority of middle-class parents do so. The idea therefore that the majority of the population is cowering under a hail of insults being hurled back and forth between each other is a little hard to envisage. Anyway, many of the 'caste fellows' whom I encounter totally sever all social contact with anyone from the tiny minority who send their children to independent schools. What a strange parallel universe the good professor lives in.

This story in the Times, of a disabled man who killed himself having been tormented for years by local yobs while the police remained largely indifferent, says it all about the depths of cruelty, sadism, lawlessness and indifference to which this society has now sunk.

Dame Brenda Hale, the first female member of the Law Lords, deployed lawyerly disingenuity at her press conference yesterday when my fellow hacks apparently confronted her with my less than flattering remarks in the Daily Mail (see 'Loaded Justice', in Articles) about her hard-line feminism, her hostility to marriage, and promotion of cohabitation rights and easier divorce.

What me, she said, opposed to marriage? Good Lord, no. Yes, she had indeed 'raised for debate the question of what purpose the legal institution of marriage served'. Yes, she did indeed think there was a 'strong case for improving some of the protection available to the more vulnerable and disadvantaged partner in unmarried relationships'. Yes, she did indeed think there was a 'strong case for introducing a form of legal commitment between people who are legally unable to marry - principally, of course, gay and lesbian partners'. But she didn't think marriage served no useful purpose; nor did she wish to equate in law arrangements between the married and the unmarried.

This is precisely the logic-chopping that has done such damage to marriage over the years. Its opponents never say they want to destroy it -- they'd never get anywhere if they were to be so open. They say instead that marriage is just one of many morally equal lifestyle choices. But it is not. It has a unique character because it alone creates and confers kinship. In recognition of this, it affords particular benefits, revolving around a solemn promise of lifetime monogamy and faithfulness. If those benefits are sprayed around, it busts that covenantal bargain wide open.

Despite Dame Brenda's denials, giving benefits to the unmarried makes marriage -- the institution whose purpose is to enshrine those benefits -- progressively meaningless. And over the years, she and her fellow family lawyers have added a particular judicial twist to this wrecking process. Having helped make marriage meaningless -- by driving personal responsibility out of divorce, increasing benefits to cohabitants, loading the court process against fathers, and so forth -- they then turn round and say that since times have changed, the law must also change to reflect this fact.

This is precisely what Dame Brenda was doing when she wrote, as long ago as 1980: 'Family law no longer makes any atempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union...Logically, we have already reached a point at which, rather than discussing which remedies should be extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes'.

But it was the courts, above all, who took battering ram to those buttresses in the first place. Dame Brenda insists she is not a hard-line feminist. Her elevation is nevertheless another notable scalp for the sisterhood.

A reader takes me to task for reading too much into Michael Howard's 'Dianafied' utterances, and predicts that he will do as little as he can on social liberal issues and won't decriminalise cannabis. That may be true; but a politician who stands still while the agenda is flowing forward cannot escape the fact that this itself is a political position. Drug law liberalisation needs to be actively fought by any politician who really cares about the disadvantaged, the pitch we are told Howard is going to make later today. Equally, if a party leader chooses to take a neutral position on the many moves by the government to destroy moral and social norms and cause the further disintegration of the family by kicking away what remains of its props, such professed 'neutrality' actually connives at that disintegration. Abstention powerfully reinforces the moral relativist position that all lifestyles are equal, and everyone should be free to go to hell on a handcart and take the vulnerable with them. In the culture wars, there is no neutral territory.

Just when one lot stops tearing each others' eyes out, the other lot starts. With Michael Howard set to be crowned later today as Tory leader, the protracted and increasingly venomous row between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has erupted with even greater ferocity. Brown, being painted as wholly consumed by rage that Blair has not stepped down in favour of himself, has blasted Blair's asinine defence of the EU constitution out of the water. Blair, for his part, has refused to give Brown a place on the party's National Executive Committee and thus excluded him from the general election planning.

Conventional wisdom has it that no government can survive such a falling out between a Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But on a personal level, this is a relationship like none other in politics. These are blood brothers, whose thinking and fortunes have been closely intertwined ever since they worked out together the modernising agenda that transformed the Labour party. In a characteristically insightful piece today, the Telegraph's Rachel Sylvester provides a telling indication of this most agonised of dysfunctional government relationships:

'I am told that Mr Blair has telephoned Mr Brown at least five times in the past week to ask for advice over how to deal with Mr Howard. The Chancellor was cagey in his replies."He's worried that if he gives too much help to Tony then Tony will think he's weak and kill him," one Brownite said. "But Tony doesn't want to get too close to Gordon either because he thinks if he's too beholden to him then Gordon will kill him. It's a stupid game they're in." '

So each of them is gripping the other's throat as their heads both submerge below the waves. But what leaps out at me is Blair's weakness. He doesn't know how to deal with Howard. He is nervous of him. And he still relies on Gordon, the stronger intellect, to help him. The Prime Minister is now exposed, lonely and supremely vulnerable.

The EU's epidemic of Jew-hatred is spreading. First, German Christian Democrat MP Martin Hohmann claimed that the Jews had acted like a 'race of perpetrators' during the 1917 Russian revolution, and that large numbers of them were involved in Communist secret police massacres. Now Brigadier General Reinhard Guenzel, the head of Germany's elite special forces and fresh from helping fight the war on terror in Afghanistan, has praised Hohmann in glowing terms. Nosepeg quote:

'It was an excellent speech, of a courage, truth and clarity, which one seldom hears or reads in our country...You can be sure that with your opinions, you are speaking from the soul for a majority of our people'.

Guenzel has been summarily sacked, but the Christian Democrats have merely slapped Hohmann's wrist. How reminiscent of our own dear Tam Dalyell.

Meanwhile, a London coroner has rejected the conclusion of the German police that British student Jeremiah Duggan committed suicide by running into the path of two speeding vehicles. Duggan, a Jew, had attended a meeting of the Schiller Institute, described by his family as a 'dangerous and political cult with strong anti-semitic tendencies, known to have a history of intimidation and terror tactics'.

Incompetence by the German authorities? Worse? Who knows. Altogether, not one of the Federal Republic's better days.

But why on earth did Duggan visit such a group in the first place? Because 'he shared the Institute's stance against the war with Iraq'. According to his mother, he claimed it had 'solutions to problems he was worried about'.

Ye gods. This madness is becoming surreal.

Gordon Brown has laid into the EU constitution. Writing in the Torygraph, he has said all the right things about the sclerotic EU, its slide towards a federal state, and the enduring importance of national cultures. He has called upon it to abandon its fiscal federalism and remove 'ambiguities' in the constitution that could undermine national governments' power to make economic decisions. Good stuff; and of course, much excitement over this direct challenge to Tony Blair. One of them is going to have to go.

But the Chancellor's case is astonishingly limited. For even if the EU were to meekly agree and remove these fiscal 'ambiguities', the constitution would still remain the mechanism for ending British self-government. That's because it takes away our Parliament's powers in just about every area of life, not the least of which are defence, foreign policy, justice and control of our borders. So why has Brown confined himself to economics?

Could it be that to admit the full scale of the EU federal project would be to undermine his position on the euro, that the issue is solely about economics and that therefore he alone has to be the gatekeeper of the decision on a referendum? Or that the logic of the proper opposition to the constitution and euro-federalism is to leave the EU altogether?

The web is unfortunately teeming with demented conspiracy theories about the Jews. One does not, however, expect to see such clearly psychotic material printed in all seriousness in a mainstream British newspaper. But the Sunday Herald has done just that with this piece by Neil Mackay, who has floated a truly crackpot and disgusting suggestion that Israel's secret service may have known in advance of the 9/11 plot but did nothing. Here's a sample of this garbage:

'And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause. After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].'

Sheer, undiluted, poisonous fantasy. People really do believe that this is the kind of thing Israel is capable of doing. Such is the venom now coursing through the British bloodstream.

Disturbing claims from Canon Andrew White, the Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy in the Middle East, who says he ran into three British Muslims in Iraq who had come to fight the coalition forces. Two points he made should cause special concern. The first was that these three were not the normal radical types but apparently solid, respectable people. The second was that there was systematic recruitment going on in Britain to these forces of terror.

He said that Muslim clerics in Britain were appalled at militant figures from 'Mujahidin-type organisations' who run what are advertised as prayer groups from private homes but which are in reality recruiting missions. 'The overwhelming majority of Muslim leaders here and in Iraq don’t want foreigners going to Baghdad to fight when they are working for peace,' he said.

So it's not just treachery towards Britain and the west. It's also a betrayal of decent, moderate Muslims who are watching powerlessly as this recruitment -- and the further hijacking of their religion -- takes place under their noses. Once again, what on earth is the government doing ignoring all this? It knows perfectly well that Britain has become a major recruiting ground for terror. It must know who these recruiters are -- and if it doesn't, it jolly well should. Yet it continues to let them carry on with their appalling incitement and mass murder production line. Is it through fear, or misguided strategy -- or just plain incompetence?

Yet more evidence that Michael Howard is trying on the touchy-feely wardrobe for size. It now appears that his leadership bid speech was written by Francis Maude and Nicholas Boles, two key Portillistas.

There are three possible explanations for this: 1) Howard has been possessed by a dybbuk*; 2) Howard is cynically making Dianafied noises to shut up his enemies in the libertine tendency, but once in power will ruthlessly steamroller them into the ground; 3) Howard is cynically adopting libertine 'inclusive' ideas permanently, because he thinks this is the surest way to make him appear cuddly and sympatico in a Dianafied world.

Assuming we can safely dispose of 1), it's possible that it's 2) and that Howard is playing a long and cunning game. If however it's 3), then it means that Howard thinks the only alternative to being Dracula is to become Ken Livingstone. I know the world has changed, but this is ridiculous. But if it's 2), then how long are we going to have to wait before he shouts 'Gotcha'?

* A dead soul that inhabits another living body.

The Blair government simply doesn't have a clue what to do next. Is it fizzing with ideas to revitalise our public services and repair our social fabric? Is it bursting to communicate its vision for a better society?Fuggeddit. It's going negative. Key quote:

'Labour has drawn up an extensive dossier of “dirt” setting out the ministerial record of the Conservative leader-in-waiting which included rising unemployment, the introduction of the poll tax and the bitter disputes that marked his period at the Home Office. John Prescott gave the first hint of the new strategy yesterday, telling the Today programme on Radio 4: “We will remind him of his record. It was very unpopular at the time. His record is a bad one, his personality is not so great.”

So all the government can come up with is to rehash the battles of the 1990s, and hope it can scare the public by demonising Michael Howard all over again. What does this tell us? That it hasn't got anything at all to say.

Further education for Europeans who think the jihadists are all Israel's fault. This bulletin from al Qa'eda doesn't leave much room for doubt:

'Our number one enemy is the Jews and the Christians, and we must free ourselves to invest all our efforts until we annihilate them – and we are able do this if Allah allows us to do it – because they are the main obstacle to establishing the Islamic state'.

If that's still not clear, then this should clear up any lingering uncertainty:

'Therefore, the crime of the tyrants in infidel [i.e. non-Muslim] countries, who do not rule according to Allah's law, is an enormous sin… and we are obliged to fight them and initiate until they convert to Islam, or until Muslims rule the country and he who does not convert to Islam pays Jizya. That is the religious ruling with regard to infidel countries and all the more so with regard to those who rule Muslim countries by way of the cursed law [i.e. a man-made law]…'

Got that? The entire world has to be turned into an Islamic state. All non-Islamic countries are infidels, and those who occupy 'Muslim' lands are merely a bit worse than the rest. The only term for this is Islamic fascism. That's what we are fighting, in Iraq, in Israel and elsewhere.

The Europeans have described Israel as the top threat to world peace, ahead of North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran. Yup, so completely have the Europeans swallowed the demonisation and dehumanisation of Israel, so wildly successful has been the propaganda offensive of lies, libels, smears, distortions and medieval Jew-hatred promulgated by the alliance of Islamism and the left, that the Europeans really do believe that states which practise terror or threaten the rest of the world through totalitarianism, autocracy or sheer instability are less of a threat than the planet's most beleaguered democracy.

The Europeans' fragile grip on reality, in assuming that Islamist terror would disappear if the Palestinians had their state, is exposed by this typically statesmanlike article in the Palestinian Authority-controlled daily, Al Hayat al Jadida. Key quotes:

'The resistance - that is meant to bring the expulsion of the American occupation in Iraq - should be supported by all means. The same applies to the struggle against the Zionist entity until the Zionist project is defeated, it's entity is eliminated, and a free and Arab Palestine is established as a first step towards uniting the Arab homeland and striving towards independent development and socialism. There are no other fundamental solutions to the Arab problem, but this one...

'The two state solution, a binational state, or even one democratic state outside the Arab dimension, will not be capable of getting rid of the contrast between the Arab masses and the Zionist-imperialist project in the Arab region ...

'...There is no option other than the elimination of the imperialist-Zionist project... The meaning of resisting Israel is resisting Globalization, and vice versa...'

Let's hear it again, Europeans, that Israel is the top threat to world peace. But of course, the Europeans want to see Israel eliminated, too. They now say so. That's why it's the top threat. Because it exists.

The hideous news from Iraq where 15 Americans have been killed in a helicopter attack will undoubtedly fuel fresh recriminations from the anti-war lobby and pile yet more pressure on the Bush administration. To repeat -- this is a war that's still being fought. The Americans' mistake was to assume they had won it and to turn their attention to creating the civilian administration. They have to put themselves firmly back onto a war footing. They have to find Saddam. And they have to stop being strung along by Iran and start getting heavy with them and the rest of the axis of terror.

An article in the Sunday Times tells us excitedly that it's now cool to be blue. Conservatism is, apparently, the hottest button on the fashionista circuit. Repelled by the stench of decaying Blairism, bright young things now think the Tory party rocks. New model young Tories aparently hold hands -- if they're men, hoho -- rail against the 'fascist state' for failing to legalise cannabis, and put the boot into the Socialist Workers on the demo against tuition fees.

Uh huh.

Those who think this is an unqualified advance for civilisation might care to digest the following from Melissa Bean, 20, who was converted to Conservatism by an email from a friend:

'"He said, 'Labour thinks the state is best for you, the Liberal Democrats think local government is best for you, and the Tories think you are best for you.' And I thought, 'That is spot on, the Tories want to hand power back to the individual.'

In other words, the appeal is to the extreme politics of the self. As David Ruffley, a 'cerebral Tory MP' observes:

'Since Thatcherism, Conservatives have been libertarian on the economy, but groups like Conservative Future are encouraging us to be libertarian on social issues, too. As Labour is now so authoritarian, there is an opportunity for Conservatives to appeal to young people here. I think that’s great'.

It was, of course, Blairism that took the self-interest of the Tories' economic market and reproduced it by a free-for-all in the sexual, moral and cultural spheres. Now young Tories are apparently closing the circle. Their homage to Blair is complete. So what if morality, duty and social order are consigned to the scrap-heap? They just aren't cool.

Unease over Michael Howard's interpretation of the middle ground deepens with today's interview with the editor of the Sunday Torygraph, Dominic Lawson. Key quote:

''To be fair, I think the Conservative Party was slow to realise the way in which the country was changing. I think that the way in which the country had changed was symbolised by its reaction to the death of Diana. We are in many ways a different country from what we were 20 or even 10 years ago. People have a different approach in the way they lead their lives and that's something the Conservative Party has to recognise and embrace.'

It's possible that all Howard means here -- as he goes on to say -- is that the public are most concerned about things like education, health and crime. But the reference to Diana worries me. The undoubted Dianafication of the country is a change for the disastrous -- a plunge into sentimentality, false emotion, manipulation, infantilism, self-centredness, irresponsibility and hysteria. If the Tories are going to embrace this, it will be a case of the unelectable grovelling before the unspeakable.

So what's Howard doing here? Making Portillistic noises simply to put the libertine wreckers off the scent, but intending in practice to hold the line for order and decency? Or has he decided that the only way to deal with the path to social suicide is for the Tories to join the procession along it, too?

Diane Abbott says her decision to send her son to a fee-paying school is 'indefensible'. Well no, it isn't at all. Many parents will sympathise with her dilemma and applaud her for doing the best for her child. What is indefensible hypocrisy is her continuing attack upon fee-paying schools, her prosecution of the infantile class war which has blighted the life chances of countless children, and her attachment to the state monopoly on education which deprives poor parents from exercising the choice available to herself.

What is also remarkable is that having got herself into this hole, she just hasn't stopped digging.

One of my emailers has got there first, but this week's Spectator contains a stonking piece by Leo McKinstry about the totalitarian 'multicultural' ideology which now has our culture by the short and curlies.

The New York Times reports that Saddam is probably behind the upsurge of violence in Iraq. Surely that's been obvious from the start? In other words, the war didn't end in victory with the fall of Baghdad. It's still going on, but in the form that Saddam himself envisaged -- as a campaign of terror, the new world order of war. The Americans have been far too slow to appreciate this. It is inordinately difficult to deal with, as the Israelis have found for years. The west as a whole cannot even grasp that this is the new form of warfare but either trivialises and dismisses it as a 'remnant', or romanticises and sanitises it as 'resistance'. But it's neither. It's war. It's fought in and out of densely populated civilian areas, by an invisible enemy that targets the innocent. It is warfare shaped by the devastating asymmetry between those for whom human life means nothing and those for whom it means everything. In that contest, unless we change the way we think about war, the fascist death-dealers will triumph. We have to develop a whole new terminology, legal principles and rules of engagement to deal with this. But can we marry this with our own cherished beliefs? Is this where liberalism gets mugged by reality?

A quite astonishing climbdown by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens in the Ali Dizaei case. Let's remind ourselves about Superintendent Dizaei. Despite being cleared of corruption charges when the Old Bailey case against him collapsed, he was due to face a series of disciplinary charges by the Met. The behaviour in question included taped threats made by Dizaei to one of his mistresses after she left him, in which he said ‘I will take such revenge from you that like a dog you will be sorry…from now on you are dead…’ In addition, although he was cleared of perverting the course of justice by falsely accusing his fellow officers of damaging his BMW car, he admitted in court that he had lied about the location of the car to make it appear that police officers had vandalised it.

Now, though, not only have these been dropped, but he is to return to Scotland Yard with an offer of fast-track promotion and £80,000 in compensation. Worse still was the grovelling behaviour of Stevens as he welcomed Dizaei back into the fold. The Grauniad recorded his eulogy:'"The other thing I have to tell you, Ali, which I admire you for, you've admitted that you've done wrong... How often do we get police officers who are prepared to do that... and I believe that has allowed us to move on."

Whaaat?? He admired an officer who lied in order to blacken his colleagues and accuse them of a racist attack? Who threatened to kill his mistress?

'To reach compromise, ' Stevens added, 'to move forward, to admit to mistakes from both sides is not a weakness, it is a strength'. No it's not. It's craven, shaming appeasement. How can Stevens possibly have any credibility within his force after this?

For both the Metropolitan Police and the Home Secretary have caved in to the moral blackmail and intimidation that is now corrupting our society. Dizaei claimed he had been the victim of a racist witch-hunt. Race activists in the police threatened to boycott the Met’s drive to recruit more ethnic minority officers, and planned a demonstration. The Home Secretary told the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to close the issue down. So the Commissioner has capitulated.

Sadly, this is not surprising. For the police have long been in the very front line of appeasing the vicious bullies of the victim culture, which ordains that minorities can do no wrong and the majority can do no right. Instead of standing up to the Macpherson doctrine that the police were institutionally racist, their senior officers agreed -- and proceeded to send themselves on courses to retrain their minds to think only correct thoughts, and encouraged recruits to spy on each other for prohibited opinions.

Now, those who should be disciplined end up accusing their superiors of prejudice and successfully forcing them to grovel in front of them. If this is happening to our police, what hope is there for the rest of us to escape this Orwellian nightmare?