With all political parties pussy-footing around the issue, the medical profession has at last injected some much-needed realism into the debate over the National Health Service. 500 doctors signed an ad in the Times in which they called for a replacement of a taxation-funded NHS by compulsory health insurance on the European model. As they say, if we really want universal and equitable health care, insurance is the way to do it because taxation delivers the opposite:

'Dr David Wrede, a gynaecologist and another of the group’s founders, said: “The NHS is like a huge lumbering supertanker, slow to change direction. And it isn’t equitable. There is really a four-tier service. Poor provision in poor areas, excellent care if you happen to be near a teaching hospital, health insurance for elective operations for those who can afford it, and cash. If you have cash, you can get treatment right away.”...Dr Maurice Slevin, an oncologist and a founder of the group, said: “I don’t think the NHS has a future when patients have no consumer power. At the moment, they are passive recipients at the mercy of the system and what it is kind enough to provide for them. We have to give patients power.” '

All too true. Instead, they want the high standards, equity and patient leverage found in Europe:

'The group believes that a system based on compulsory social insurance would work better. In such systems, everybody pays for a basic insurance plan defined by law, with insurance companies competing for customers. The policies must provide a mandatory and comprehensive package set at the national level. Employers may or may not contribute: in France and Germany they do, in Switzerland they do not. Poorer people have their insurance premiums subsidised, or paid virtually in full. Patients can go to a wide variety of providers for care and operations. An alternative is a voucher system, as in Denmark, which patients can use to get care from wherever they want. Such systems can provide flexibility, genuine choice, and excellent healthcare, Doctors for Reform says, giving doctors and patients freedom and getting away from the centrally planned and politically driven NHS.'

The Tories are tiptoing towards this, but far too slowly. Labour is paralysed, and the LibDems... well, say no more. This doctors' letter, however, crosses all these political lines to tell it how it is. Politicians, please note. The public are not stupid.

John O' Sullivan points out in an astute article in the Chicago Sun-Times that, by aligining himself with Presidents Schroeder and Chirac in an attempt to show that Britain is now one of the big three in Europe, Tony Blair has managed to inflict a strategic triple whammy against himself and Britain's interests. First, by posing as a member of a ruling EU triumvirate, he has upset the smaller nations and squandered the chance of leading them in an effective challenge to the hegemony of the Franco-German axis. Second, since he hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell of denting that axis, he has made Britain the cats-paw of France and Germany. And third, by siding with the countries behind the EU defence project which challenges NATO, he has totally brassed off the Americans. As O'Sullivan puts it:

'By going to Berlin, Blair lost any hope of ever leading the great majority of European nations inside the EU. Both Italy and Spain reacted with anger at their exclusion from the Berlin summit. And the smaller countries naturally oppose an EU structure in which they are expected to take orders from either a Big Two or a Big Three. None of these countries, thus betrayed, will trust Britain to protect their interests in the future -- or as long as Blair remains in Downing Street.

'What is Blair's reward for this loss? Little or nothing. Inside the Big Three, he will be outvoted 2-1 on almost every issue of importance from immigration control to employment rights. Little more will be heard of Fischer's conversion to a Europe of nation-states. And Blair will have to content himself with his seat at the top table and a few minor concessions for appearance's sake.

'If Europe is to carry through an economic reform program, it will be because national governments decide it is either necessary or unavoidable. In the case of Germany it is certainly necessary. Because we think of Germany as the economic powerhouse of Europe, it is a shock to learn that, as this week's Economist points out, per capita income in modern Germany has fallen below the European average. But so far the German government has avoided anything but the most modest reforms. And there's the rub. Blair has joined the Big Two at exactly the moment that their political power and economic clout are diminishing. It is a bad bargain for him and the Brits. But why should anyone else worry?

'Unfortunately for the United States, the main item on the Franco-German agenda is the creation of an independent European defense separate from NATO. Even before the Berlin summit, Blair had been going along with this scheme, all the time assuring Washington that nothing really serious would happen. Yet at each stage he has capitulated to whatever Paris and Berlin demanded. Now that he is one of the Big Three, Blair will be even more likely to brush aside Washington's concerns on defense.

'Blair is now doing what he said he would never do -- choose between Europe and America. And he is choosing Europe.'

And at the heart of this calamity for Britain lies the key belief which explains so much of this government's failure:

'...unlike most of his countrymen, Blair is a passionate "European" who believes that the nation-state is inevitably being superseded by new supranational organizations like the EU.'

So (see my article Return of the Old Hatreds) bye-bye UK independence and liberal democracy.

As if the BBC's place in our national life wasn't in enough jeopardy, it has now suffered another symbolic blow. It has managed to lose the Boat Race to ITV. Next year will be the last time the BBC screens the race. According to the Telegraph, the reason is a combination of rapacious commercial instincts and BBC ineptitude:

'The BBC said that there had been disagreements with the organisers over sponsorship, including the prominent use of sponsor logos, which were incompatible with its role as a public service broadcaster. Christopher Rodrigues, the chairman of the race organisers, said the broadcasters had bid similar amounts but ITV's package was "more comprehensive". ITV said it plans to give the race its own two-hour programme. The BBC has guidelines preventing it from showing overt commercial sponsorship and it recently ran into trouble over a deal that would have involved Coca-Cola's name appearing on Top of the Pops.'

However, the Telegraph adds:

'The BBC said that there had been disagreements with the organisers over sponsorship, including the prominent use of sponsor logos, which were incompatible with its role as a public service broadcaster.'

This is a calamity. As Brian Barwick, ITV's controller of sport, gloated: 'The Boat Race is an integral part of the British sporting year - it has a genuine history, nationwide appeal and has produced some superb competition in recent times.'

Quite, The Boat Race is a national institution. So is the BBC. That's why the BBC's role is to televise events that unite the nation. If it loses them, its purpose is diminished.

Shame on all parties.

Well, what a surprise. The implicit threat in the great top-up fees furore has now emerged into the daylight as an all-singing, all-dancing, no-holds-barred gun to the head. As the Telegraph reports:

'Elite universities will be fined up to £500,000 and prevented from charging higher tuition fees if they do not do more to "secure a broadly based intake of students", Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, said yesterday. He published details of the powers given to the Office for Fair Access (Offa) to force universities to attract more applications from prospective students who are at present "under-represented".They include those from the three lower social classes, from state schools and colleges, from poor performing schools, from "low participation neighbourhoods", from some ethnic minorities and those with children or "eldercare" responsibilities or who have a disability.'

In other words, the universities are to be blackmailed into discriminating against bright pupils on account of their social background, in order to shoehorn into their places pupils who happen to come from the right side of the tracks -- that is, poor schools in every sense of the word, along with others deemed worthy of such preferential treatment.

Thus the core principles of equal access and meritocracy which underpin both education and a fair society are destroyed. Thus, the fight to improve lousy schools so that poor, bright children stand a better chance of getting to good universities on merit is utterly undermined.

The universities were warned that this would be the price of the tainted government money for which they grovelled on their knees. They dismissed such concerns, saying that if there were any real threat to academic freedom then of course they would press the nuclear button and declare independence. Given the utter spinelessness they have shown so far, in conniving at the progressive dismemberment of academic standards and the increase in government control, I would say the chances of their taking a stand against being turned into fully-fledged state apparatchiks of social engineering are nil.

Like the Health Secretary Dr John Reid, the government's chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson lost no time dancing up and down on the reputation of Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the centre of the revived MMR furore (see my article today about the current row ). Among many misleadingly complacent comments, Donaldson claimed Wakefield's original Lancet study had never been replicated. But this is not true. As I reported in my series on the controversy in the Daily Mail, there have now been several studies repicating his findings - which were not about MMR, but about a link between bowel disease and autism which had not previously been recognised but is now widely acknowledged. Because of the furore around the one line in that Lancet paper about MMR -- and Wakefield's comments at the related press conference about the vaccine, what he actually discovered has been largely overlooked. So much so, in fact, that the Lancet editor Dr Richard Horton now says the entire Wakefield paper was 'fatally flawed' -- even though in the next breath he says his only quarrel is with the MMR point, while he backs the bowel findings up to the hilt. So how can the whole paper be 'fatally flawed'?

And meanwhile, the CMO is failing to note something else. As the Telegraph reports:

'The latest research comes in an addendum to a paper presented to the American National Institutes of Science earlier this month. It says that a study, submitted for publication, found evidence of measles virus in the spinal fluid of 19 out of 28 children with autism compared with one out of 37 children in a control group. All the children in the study had received the MMR vaccine and none had caught measles naturally.'

So where did this measles virus, which may be implicated in these vaccinated children's brain damage, come from? This does not prove MMR causes autism. Nor does it negate the fact that the vast majority of children have the MMR jab with no adverse consequences. But it does surely raise some extremely urgent questions, which the attempt to destroy Andrew Wakefield only serves to dismiss.

Neat little demonstration of the BBC 'distorting lens' effect at work this morning on the Today programme. The item (7.17 am) was about the suggestion floated by Tony Blair for random drug testing in schools. The programme had on a junior minister, Ivan Lewis, to defend the plan. Opposing him was Francis Wilkinson, who was described as the former Chief Constable of Gwent and patron of the drugs charity, Transform. All perfectly correct -- but no mention of the fact that Transform happens to be dedicated to the legalisation of drugs, as is Wilkinson. Such an acknowledgement would have transformed, as it were, the ensuing discussion as listeners would have been aware that Transform has an agenda to oppose and rubbish all existing drug laws and therefore the context in which the Prime Minister made his suggestion.

Instead, Wilkinson was allowed to pose as a neutral commentator. He was heard resepctfully, and asked only gentle probing questions by the presenter Jim Naughtie. Compare and contrast the treatment meted out to minister Lewis, who was constantly interrupted with incredulous comments and expostulations. Now, I'm certainly not saying he didn't deserve tough questioning, since the PM's proposal is certainly open to the charge that it is not properly thought through. But the underlying premise seemed to be that the government was barking mad in trying --for once! -- to confront drug-taking by schoolchildren, while the person who would legalise the lot and thus expose many more children to drug abuse was the acme of common sense.

After the Netherlands, now Denmark is getting tough. As the Times reports, the Danes are proposing to curb the activities of Islamic preachers of hate:

'The measures, to be presented to the Danish parliament tomorrow, are aimed at imams who preach against Western values, encourage Muslims to wear the hijab, the Islamic head scarf, and demand that women do not work. The initiative is part of a package of tough immigration reforms that reflects mounting concern in Denmark about the growth of Islamic communities who reject the country’s values. There is also alarm about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism — a Danish citizen who fought in Afghanistan is being held at Guantanamo Bay. The Danish Government is trying to ban the radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for sharia, or Islamic law...

'Other measures include a doubling of the fine to £500 for people who harbour failed asylum-seekers, with imprisonment for repeat offenders. Successful asylum-seekers could have residence permits revoked if they return home on holiday, presumed to be proof that they were not persecuted. Men convicted of domestic violence will be banned from bringing another wife into Denmark for ten years. As well as the requirement that they be educated and self-financing, imams must prove they are “worthy”. The legislation states that visas will not be given if there is “reason to believe the foreigner will be a threat to public safety, security, public order, health, decency or other people’s rights and duties”.

This last reference is meant to be a ban on imams who, for example, teach that women should not work, who promote female genital mutilation or urge the killing of Jews.'

Read that last sentence again, and then muse on the fact that Britain has not seen fit to take similar action. As with the Netherlands, it seems to me that the reason why Denmark is prepared to confront head on this evil that menaces its civilised society is because it actually believes that it is a civilised society that is worthy of defending. That is why, as one commentator said:

'“It is about imams who don’t speak Danish or know nothing of Danish society. They drag Muslims back 200 years and know nothing about modern European life. It is directly the opposite of integration.” Danish newspapers have been carrying reports about suburbs of Copenhagen with large, alienated Islamic populations, which local police and council leaders have described as a “time bomb”. Comparisons have been made to the conditions that led to the race riots two years ago in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley.'

The reason why Britain refuses to take this kind of defensive action is that it no longer believes it has national values that are worth defending. Instead, its intelligentsia has progressively taken an axe to those values and that identity, rubbishing them at every turn and professing moral equivalence with other cultures and values. The result is a toleration of evil in Britain, which is now being shamed and exposed by comparison with the Dutch and Danes.

Even in the decent Netherlands, the virus of 'anti-Zionist' Jew-hatred has spread -- and has now even infected the country's most famous monument to the Holocaust, the Anne Frank house. An article in the Chicago Sun-Times reports the disturbing development:

'Not far from where Anne wrote her remarkable diary, museum visitors now are confronted with a photo exhibit juxtaposing pictures of the Fuhrer and the Israeli prime minister as well as a video clip of protesters waving posters of Hitler and Sharon. The exhibit is part of the ''Out of Line'' Exhibition, which the museum's Web site describes as ''an interactive exhibition that deals with contemporary issues'' -- particularly, the clash of ''two fundamental rights: freedom of expression and the right to be protected against discrimination.''

'How exactly are museum visitors supposed to balance these two competing ''rights'' in specific regard to the exhibit marrying the pictures Hitler and Sharon? Is the clash between free speech right of extremists to express their anti-Israel, anti-Jewish bile and the right of Holland's Jewish minority to be protected against ''hate speech'' the pedagogical issue at hand? Maybe so, but the Anne Frank House provides no such guidance. In fact, its Web site, while showcasing contemporary controversies over neo-Nazis and rapper Eminem, discreetly fails even to mention that the ''Hitler-Sharon'' comparison is part of the ''Out of Line'' Exhibition...

'Just as Anne Frank's family learned that there was no permanent sanctuary from the closing grip of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, the Anne Frank House has to recognize that it also cannot escape from confronting the rising tide of anti-Semitism, often posing as ''anti-Zionism,'' in contemporary Europe including Holland. It isn't enough just to invoke, mechanically, pieties about balancing free speech and minority rights.

'What the Anne Frank House needs to do is to challenge the beliefs -- and the prejudices -- of today's Dutch at a time when pro-Palestinian demonstrators regularly jolt Amsterdam with violent demonstrations, not just reviling Sharon and Israel, but chanting: ''Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas.'' '

But of course, as Jews are constantly upbraided, there is no connection between anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred. Tell that to the Hamas demonstrators.

In the latest instalment of her enlightening Guardian vignettes of life in Israel, Linda Grant produces a sharp riposte to those who contend there is no connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. She relates a conversation with scientists who fled to Israel from the former Soviet Union, and who encountered antisemitism particularly in the universities which would not employ Jews. With astonishment, they note the same phenomenon happening in the west, but masquerading under a different name:

'Most devastating to the scientists has been the academic boycott of Israeli universities. Gregory, a mathematician who came to Israel in 1996, has been involved in the campaign against it: "It reminded us that there was no boycott against Russia because of the invasion of Afghanistan. At the moment, everything we read in the European media about Israel reminds us of what the Soviet Union said about it. Open Pravda in the 1970s and you'd read the same things, the same anti-Zionism, though at least with Pravda you knew it was lies.

"The European left has still not apologised for believing the propaganda about the Soviet Union instead of the facts, which were there for all to see. All the actions of anti-Zionism now have their prototype in the Soviet Union. Our daughter tried to apply for a PhD in the US and she was told, 'This university is good for Israelis, this one isn't.' It's just like the Soviet Union: 'This university is good for Jews, this one isn't.' Nothing has changed in that respect." '

Nothing has changed; except that the Jew-haters of the left (who include, complicatedly and tragically, Jews among their number just as in the Soviet Union) are not only to be found on American campuses but have come to dominate British and European universities, just as they dominate British and European politics and culture.

Human rights campaigners are outraged by the Dutch government decision to expel thousands of failed asylum-seekers, including families who have been settled in the Netherlands for years. This is indeed a shocking and draconian move. But it is one to which we should pay the closest possible attention. For it shows that if legitimate concerns about national identity are suppressed and ignored, the eventual result is distasteful policies, political extremism or worse.

The Dutch are a paradigm of tolerance and liberalism. Yet as was shown by the rise to power of the anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn before his murder, it was precisely because the Dutch valued their culture that they revolted against immigration numbers that would destroy the cohesion and identity of their society. They key realisation by the Dutch is that multiculturalism is anathema:

'New asylum applications have already fallen steeply from 43,560 in 2000 to an estimated 10,000 last year, but the scale of past immigration - mostly through family reunion - has stirred fears that Dutch society is spiralling out of control. A parliamentary report last month concluded that the country's 30-year experiment in tolerant multiculturalism had been a failure, ending in sink schools, violence, and ethnic ghettoes that shun inter-marriage with the Dutch. It found that 70-80 per cent of third-generation Dutch-born immigrants brought in their spouse from their "home" countries, mostly Turkey and Morocco. The consequences of this were brought home after September 11, 2001 when the intelligence service discovered that al-Qa'eda was "stealthily taking root in Dutch society".'

This is now a vital issue as our own debates about asylum, immigration, culture and national identity are threatened by knee-jerk vilification from illiberals designed to shut down debate. The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, recently used the Guardian to accuse David Goodhart, the liberal editor of the liberal magazine Prospect, of racism -- simply because Goodhart had raised these concerns in an excellent and thoughtful article in the current issue. Now the Guardian has published an article by Julian Baggini taking Phillips to task. His point is that issues like this are far too complex to pin simplistic labels upon points of view:

'By eliding "race and culture" and presenting them as though they were two sides of the same coin, Phillips tarred Goodhart with the Powellite brush. But this is nonsense. Race and culture are not inseparable. Culture concerns beliefs and practices and we are responsible for what we believe and do. We have no such responsibility for the colour of our skin or ethnicity. To be against the culture of white slave-owners was not to be racist against whites. To deny passports to anyone who refuses to accept some basic principles about their prospective new country's culture is not prejudiced; to deny it on the basis of skin pigmentation is.

'This is not to say that Phillips was wrong in everything he said, or that Goodhart was entirely right. My whole point is that this is a genuinely tangled issue which can't be sorted out if we seek to pigeonhole every opinion into simplistic, assumption-laden categories. Most people are "not extreme enough" for that to work. We need to rise above the school debating society mentality that dominates our culture, from the Today programme to parliament. And that is impossible if we force people into pre-set moulds labelled "for" and "against". '

The issues of immigration, culture and national identity are perhaps the most fundamental, difficult and emotionally charged of any that we face. The myth of a 'multicultural society', that oxymoron which drives government policy and faux-liberal thinking, has been used to intimidate and vilify anyone who wants to defend national identity and culture by labelling such views as beyond the pale. The Dutch have shown us that even the most decent people are driven in desperation to do distasteful things when the harm caused by the faux-liberal consensus leaves them no alternative if they are not to commit social suicide.

The shocking revelation of the string of teenage suicides in Belfast has focused attention at last on the dirty secret of the Northern Ireland peace process. This is that 'peace' in that troubled province is of the most bitterly pyrrhic kind. Instead of bombs on the streets, there is now intimidation and terror as the rule of law, in certain areas, has simply collapsed. The reason is that terrorism was not defeated but appeased and brought into government, in exchange for the emasculation of the police and the erosion of justice with the release of terrorists from their prison sentences. The rule of law has thus been extinguished in certain areas by a mafia state, in which paramilitaries have merely moved from political terror into drugs, organised crime and gun law on the streets to replace the police. The suicides follow punishment beatings and other paramilitary violence which is rampaging apparently unchecked. As the Telegraph reports, there have been eleven such deaths in north Belfast since the new year:

'The area, which has a myriad of streets, is near impossible to police. With Sinn Fein refusing to sign up to police reforms the INLA has stepped into the power vacuum. The INLA, the group responsible for 127 murders in the Troubles, appears more interested in drug dealing than republican ideals, security sources say. For the last two years its leader, who allegedly murdered an RUC officer, has claimed to act for the community.

'Last year the group's political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, said: "Young individuals in Ardoyne were punished for a range of anti-social actions that warranted and deserved a response." The group claimed it did not torture teenagers, but the evidence is to the contrary. A troublesome 14-year-old boy was tarred and feathered last summer and last month had his shin shattered in an INLA shooting.

Kieran, 19, was another victim. Two years ago he was abducted, tied to a chair, beaten and interrogated for two hours about a stolen car. "I felt worthless, less than nothing," he said. "If they had done it again I would have thought about suicide." He also spoke of a friend who was put in a bath and threatened with electrocution with a hairdryer. The teenagers have few means of support to turn to although a 24-hour helpline was set up on Monday. The paramilitary beatings coupled with adolescent anxiety, drink and cannabis induced paranoia are thought to be the main cause of the deaths. "It's a lawless society policed by the lawless," said one resident.'

Note, in passing that 'cannabis-induced paranoia', along with alcohol and adolescent angst, is also a factor in these awful deaths. Clearly, all suicides result from complex combinations of pressures. But in the Ardoyne, the external breakdown of codes of behaviour appears to be combining with an internal breakdown with catastrophic effect. And repsonsibility for that external breakdown lies squarely with the paramilitary thugs and their political appeasers, who have simply sold the pass.

A remarkable story in the anti-war Guardian reveals the existence of an Iraqi slush-fund, no less, that was financing the anti-war movement:

'Money illicitly siphoned from the UN oil-for-food programme by Saddam Hussein was used to finance anti-sanctions campaigns run by British politicians, according to documents that have surfaced in Baghdad. Undercover cash from oil deals went to three businessmen who in turn supported pressure groups involving the ex-Labour MP George Galloway, Labour MP Tam Dalyell, and the former Irish premier Albert Reynolds, it is alleged in documents compiled by the oil ministry, which is now under the control of the US occupation regime.'

While the story emphasises there is no suggestion that any money was siphoned off into individual trouser pockets, it nevertheless exposes the anti-war movement associated with these gentlemen as corrupt -- and responsible for deepening the misery of ordinary Iraqis. If true, it's pretty sensational stuff. Let's see whether other anti-war organs treat it with the same seriousness as the Guardian.

He won't thank me for saying this, but my respect for David Aaronovitch continues to rise. A man still very firmly of the left, his support for the Iraq war turned him overnight into a pariah among his comrades and exposed him to the kind of thought-crime treatment to which those apostles of open thinking are so prone. Ever since, his writing has been developing an increasing maturity. Now, in an article in today's Guardian, he reveals those same jovial colleagues have been urging him to recant his heresy, particularly in the light of the rash gauntlet he threw down after the war ended:

'"If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing I am told by our government or that of the US, ever again. And more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere." '

And yet Aaronovitch is still sticking to his guns and in the most robust fashion:

'The trouble is that I find - partly as a result of the Hutton inquiry (the evidence, not the report) - that I don't believe the government did lie. As the MoD intelligence dissident, Brian Jones, wrote to the Independent last week, "I cast no doubt on Mr Blair's integrity. He evidently believed that Iraq possessed a significant stockpile of chemical or biological weapons and expected them to be recovered during or soon after the invasion... such a discovery would have enhanced, rather than undermined, 'the global fight against weapons proliferation'."

'Perhaps I might allay disappointment by blaming Blair et al for being too credulous, or too willing to adopt the precautionary principle, in order perhaps to maintain solidarity with the Americans. But I invite open-minded readers to consider this. Had there been a dossier released detailing WMD proliferation in, say, Libya, and blaming rogue Islamicist scientists from, say, Pakistan, I would have been just as (or more) sceptical than I was over Iraq. Yet last week Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has admitted trading nuclear information and equipment with countries including Libya, was "the tip of an iceberg for us". What now seems extraordinary is that Iraq may not have been part of the submerged mass. Perhaps Butler will tell us why our government thought otherwise.'

The trouble is, Aaronovitch is still applying logic and rationality to the Iraq issue. For that, he really will not be forgiven.

Anyone who may doubt that both Labour and the Tories are now competing for occupancy of the same narrow patch of ground has only to look at the story today about the developing battleground of public spending. The shadow Chancellor, Oliver Letwin, has unveiled his plan to make some £30 billion of savings in public expenditure largely, he says, by cutting back on red tape and civil servants. But according to a judicious leak on the very same day, the government is also proposing to slash civil service numbers, making some £15 billion of savings. The government has therefore largely shot the Tory fox, leaving the way open for ministers to level the usual lethal charge at the Tories that they really intend to slash core services. The new and ironic twist, to which the Tories have now laid themselves wide open, is that in order to meet their pledge to match the government's astronomical rises in spending on education and health, they will have to make heavy cuts in traditional Tory commitments to defence and crime, along with the other political running sore of transport.

Not clever politics at all. And all because -- as I said in my article in yesterday's Daily Mail, the Tories are still trapped like rabbits in Tony Blair's headlights, too timid to construct a policy from first principles. Instead, they should do what is crying out to be done -- restructure the whole relationship between the individual and the state, radically depoliticise the public services and introduce professional independence, public accountability, choice and exit strategies and, through the social insurance principle, combine individual responsibility with social solidarity and care for the truly vulnerable.

Now that really would be a choice worth making.

Curiouser and curiouser. Alex Polier, the intern at the center of the allegations against Senator John Kerry, has now denied she had an affair with him -- and even denied she was ever his intern. The Telegraph reports:

'She said: "I have never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumours in the press are completely false. Whoever is spreading these rumours and allegations does not know me. I never interned or worked for John Kerry." '

Her parents added for good measure: '"We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation, and intend to vote for him for president of the United States."

So if she was never even Senator Kerry's intern, why wasn't this fact made known immediately? Moreover, this is what Ms Polier's parents were reported as saying two days ago:

' "I think he's a sleazeball. I did wonder if she didn't get that feeling herself," said Mr Polier. "He's not the sort of guy I'd choose to be with my daughter. John Kerry called my daughter and invited her to be on his re-election committee. She talked to him and decided against it." '

Clearly, there are dirty tricks aplenty here. But whose?

At first blush, the proposal by the IPPR think tank that atheism should be taught alongside other religions in schools seems unexceptional. As the Church of England and Muslim Council of Britain have remarked, children are already taught that some people don't believe in God. But this agenda is actually altogether different. This is more than a proposal to state the obvious -- after all, once you've told children that some people don't believe in God, what's there to teach about atheism? How do you teach a non-doctrine whose only claim to fame is as a negation?

No, the real agenda is not to expand children's horizons but to narrow them by attacking both the faith they already have and the family authority that has given it to them. It is specifically to undermine Christianity, revealed religions and the meaning of religion itself by giving equal weight to agnosticism, humanism, environmentalism and paganism. Anti-religion, in other words, is to be equated with religion. It also explicitly aims to subvert moral norms. Thus, instead of being taught the Ten Commandments, it says children should be taught to question the authenticity of the Bible:

'They should also be told from an early age of the alternatives to marriage and that there are non-religious ways of marking momentous experiences... Children with strong religious beliefs would be encouraged to question them and to ask what grounds there are for holding them. "Pupils would be actively encouraged to question the religious beliefs they bring with them into the classroom, not so they are better able to defend or rationalise them, but so they are genuinely free to adopt whatever position on religious matters they judge to be best supported by the evidence." '

As the Telegraph leader comments, this is nothing other than yet another attempt at ideological indoctrination:

'It reflects the belief that parents who pass on the Christian faith are guilty of indoctrinating their children, and that it is the role of the state to stop them. The IPPR and its allies in the Government are not so much interested in promoting diversity as in replacing one set of orthodoxies by another: the joyless ideology of cultural relativism.'

Still, no doubt Edinburgh university would approve. It is to ban Christian prayers at graduation ceremonies to avoid offending other religions and atheists:

'Officials agreed last week that, in future, a short "reflection" would make reference to general spiritual themes... A report by Michael Anderson, the university's senior vice-principal, suggested that continuing the tradition of prayers might also leave the university open to legal action under race or religious discrimination laws.'

Thus a national culture is redefined as intrinsically racist or discriminatory, the necessary prelude to its total deconstruction.

After considerable thought, I have now reluctantly disabled all readers' comments on this site. Despite my having recently restricted them to a seven-day period to make them more manageable, the popularity of this site -- for which I am legally responsible -- means that I simply do not have the time to ensure that nothing creeps onto it that is libellous or otherwise unlawful. I am sorry to deprive readers of this facility, from which I myself have learned much of interest, and I may therefore review this decision in the future. Meanwhile, I will of course carry on posting diary entries as before, and hope that these will continue to help promote national and international debate.

Does anyone now know what the Tories are for, apart from gaining power? They are now, we are told, committed both to a 'smaller state' (Michael Howard's 'I have a dream' speech this week) and higher public spending, with more to be spent in particular on the NHS (leak of Oliver Letwin's speech next week). They have thus become the pushmepullyou party. As Nick Herbert, director of the think-tank Reform said in the Telegraph today:

'On the one hand the party has voted against and criticised the tax rises that allowed higher spending on public services and has repeatedly claimed that resources are being wasted. On the other it is making new spending commitments. Public services have never had so much money. Simply promising to spend more is not a credible solution to public sector failure'.

Indeed not. The Tories know this perfectly well; hence their movement towards decentralisation and depoliticisation of the public services. But they haven't got the bottle to spell out to the public that this means the days of state contrrol and free lunches are over. They are frightened that the government will claim they are going to decimate health and education -- as they would indeed claim. So instead of fleshing out a credible alternative to the patently failed template of taxpayer-funded public service black holes which abandon the poor in particular, they are trying to find a way of pretending to square the circle.

Some people think that Howard's opportunism is clever politics. So they approve of the cosying up to the EU today, maintaining the link with the federalist Euro-conservative group, and the embrace of the Portillista social libertine agenda. After all, they say, there's no point being a principled opposition in perpetuity. So principle flies out of the window, and opportunism is the only show in Torytown.

But voters tend not to like opportunists. Such people aren't to be trusted; and the one thing people want more than anything else is a Prime Minister they can trust. All these Tory flip-flops -- for/against higher public spending, for/against the Iraq war, against/for the EU -- show a lack of constancy, courage and character. Who can respect a party leader who swings so brazenly with the prevailing wind? And if Howard is genuinely turning into a pale shadow of Tony Blair, why should anyone vote for him when they can have the real thing -- and a Chancellor who has somehow magicked up a roaring economy to boot?

One of the hallmarks of Jew-hatred is that the haters almost always vehemently deny not only that they dislike Jews but that there is any antisemitism about at all. Instead, the classic Judeophobe often ascribes the perception of Jew-hatred to some sinister characteristic of the Jew making the observation about his own victimisation.

The first part of this phenomenon, at least, was on striking display in a report by Harry Mount in the Daily Telegraph. Visiting Llanelli, birthplace of the Tory leader Michael Howard who sang its praises in his 'I have a dream' speech this week, Mount was startled by the following encounter:

'"There was no anti-Semitism," says an 85-year-old woman who lives near the draper's that belonged to Michael Howard's mother, Hilda, now 91 and living in north London. "But I must say, I didn't like her. Whenever you looked in the window of her dress shop, she'd come out and try to get you to come in and buy something. But then, of course, they're like that.'' '

It never goes away, does it -- as some of the readers' posts on this website make all too graphically and disgustingly plain. But it is still shocking, every time, and a wake-up call to all decent people.

An encouraging straw in the Islamic wind. Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, former dean of the Faculty of Islamic Law at the University of Qatar, has written an article in the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in which he says that America's actions have changed the world for the better. Indeed, his analysis is startlingly insightful and frank. Here's what he says:

'America's positive deeds surpass its negative deeds… America has done many positive things and changed the world for the better. It is enough that it freed the world of many dictatorial regimes… Some claim that it did not succeed in establishing democracy in place of the regimes that it toppled, but in some cases it did succeed, and the most outstanding examples are in Germany and Japan…

'Let us imagine the world if America had listened to the French and German logic saying: Give the murderers of the Serbs and the Arabs a chance for a diplomatic solution. Would Bosnia, Kuwait, and Iraq be liberated [today]…? Let us describe the situation of the Arabs, and especially of Iraq, had America listened to the European council that said: Democracy is not suited to the Arabs, their culture is contrary to it. Leave the backward ones alone to consume each other… See now how many countries are turning towards democracy. Even Afghanistan has a constitution. In Iraq, [they are drafting] a new constitution and handing over the regime, and Libya has changed…

'What are the lessons to be learned from this? First, the tyrants don't leave until bombs fall. The peoples alone are not capable of struggling with dictatorial regimes except with powerful external help… Second, America needs to further encourage the democratic trend and reward the countries that have succeeded in the area of political, social, and economic reform, with aid, support, investment, and free trade agreements… The other problem is terrorism. We have suffered from terror and we cannot get rid of it. If terror had not struck within America we would not be able to fight it. It is true that America transferred the war to the terrorists' own territories rather than waiting [until they struck]…

'But might alone is not enough. Terrorism has an ideological and cultural base that must be dismantled, and therefore America needs to encourage the countries to reexamine their educational systems in full – not only the curriculum – and must give financial and professional aid in developing the educational system… '

He somewhat spoils the effect by criticising America's 'bias' in favour of Israel. Nevertheless, his assessment of the benefits to the Arabs of America's actions post 9/11 offers a stunning rebuke to the appeaseniks of the west who are fighting to undermine those actions at every opportunity. And his identification of the cultural wellsprings of terror, and the need for America to deal with this root cause as well as using its military might, is a breath of sanity.

Another excellent piece by Michael Ledeen analysing the 17-page letter from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Palestinian with suspected terror links, to Al Q'aeda asking for help to foment a Sunni/Shia civil war in Iraq. This letter contains the stunning admission that the attempted insurrection in Iraq is going extremely badly because -- surprise surprise -- the Iaqis want none of it. Key quote: 'We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases.' The worst thing of all is the progress being made towards democracy in Iraq, when 'the sons of this land will be the authority...This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts.' Instead, Zarqawi gasps 'by God, this is suffocation!'

As Ledeen points out, it is startling that the US is not making more of this admission. At the same time, it is likely that for the very reasons laid out in the letter terrorist abominations, like the mass murder of the Iraqi rookie policemen yesterday and the second car bomb today, will unfortunately escalate as handover day approaches. And as Ledeen goes on to say, the key to peace and stability in Iraq is to defang Iran, from where so much of the terrorist insurgency is being instigated, but where both the US and Britain are currently dancing delicately around the despots.

War hero yesterday, appeasenik today. Senator John Kerry's claim to be as resolute against terror as President Bush on the grounds of his Vietnam war record may just take a bit of a knock from this Tehran Times report of an email his office has sent to an Iranian news agency. Here it is:

'The office of Senator John Kerry, the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary in the U.S., sent the Mehr News Agency an e-email saying that Kerry will try to repair the damage done by the incumbent president if he wins the election. The text of the e-mail follows.

'As Americans who have lived and worked extensively overseas, we have personally witnessed the high regard with which people around the world have historically viewed the United States. Sadly, we are also painfully aware of how the actions and the attitudes demonstrated by the U.S. government over the past three years have threatened the goodwill earned by presidents of both parties over many decades and put many of our international relationships at risk.

'It is in the urgent interests of the people of the United States to restore our country's credibility in the eyes of the world. America needs the kind of leadership that will repair alliances with countries on every continent that have been so damaged in the past few years, as well as build new friendships and overcome tensions with others.

'We are convinced that John Kerry is the candidate best qualified to meet this challenge. Senator Kerry has the diplomatic skill and temperament as well as a lifetime of accomplishments in field of international affairs. He believes that collaboration with other countries is crucial to efforts to win the war on terror and make America safer.

'An understanding of global affairs is essential in these times, and central to this campaign Kerry has the experience and the understanding necessary to successfully restore the United States to its position of respect within the community of nations. He has the judgment and vision necessary to assure that the United States fulfills a leadership role in meeting the challenges we face throughout the world.

'The current Administration's policies of unilateralism and rejection of important international initiatives, from the Kyoto Accords to the Biological Weapons Convention, have alienated much of the world and squandered remarkable reserves of support after 9/11. This climate of hostility affects us all, but most especially impacts those who reside overseas. Disappointment with current U.S. leadership is widespread, extending not just to the corridors of power and politics, but to the man and woman on the street as well.

'We believe John Kerry is the Democrat who can go toe-to-toe against the current Administration on national security and defense issues. We also remain convinced that John Kerry has the best chance of beating the incumbent in November, and putting America on a new course that will lead to a safer, more secure, and more stable world.'

Iran is of course a key player in the axis of terror and hell-bent on adding nuclear weapons to its terror arsenal. Yet Kerry wants to 'repair' America's relationship with it. He appear to think that to 'collaborate' with terror states is what the defence against terror is all about. Oh dear.

For those appeaseniks who fondly believe that militant Islam has no quarrel with the west except over Israel, here are a couple of the latest utterances to illustrate how far that view is grounded in reality. Muhammad Mahdi Othman 'Akef, the new leader of the Muslim Brotherhood -- the Egyptian-based movement which lies behind much of the extremism which has engulfed Islam -- has said in recent interviews:

'I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.'

Meanwhile a leader of Hamas, Mahmoud Zahar, has expressed his movement's modest intentions thus: 'The march of resistance will continue until the Islamic flag is raised, not only over the minarets of Jerusalem, but over the whole universe.'

Tell me again there's no threat to the west.

Can this be true? A report alleges infiltration of the FBI's Arabic desk by terrorist sympathisers, quite apart from gross and systematic incompetence in translating documents and wiretaps. If it is true, it might explain quite a lot.

At last, the grossly over-rated playwright Sir David Hare is being put on the spot. His latest play The Permanent Way (which I have not seen), a blast against rail privatisation, is playing to packed houses at the National Theatre. Now it has been roundly attacked by rail industry executives. Well, they would, wouldn't they. But however self-serving their justifications may be against many of the criticisms made by an understandably irate public, the fundamental point they make is correct. Key passage:

'Adrian Lyons, director general of the Railway Forum, an industry lobby group, wrote to Sir David before opening night asking him to correct the play’s central message that privatisation had made the railways dangerous. Mr Lyons pointed out that the rate of train crashes had halved since BR was broken up and sold off in 1994-96. While the privatised industry had suffered a series of high-profile crashes at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar, none had resulted in as many casualties as the disaster at Clapham in 1988, in which 35 people had died.'

Since the driving point of the play appears to be that privatisation was responsible for rail accidents and deaths, this would appear to be a pretty damning blow to Hare's credibility. These critics also accuse him of taking comments they made in interviews out of context to present a misleading view, and then refusing to anser their questions 'just like one of the scheming politicians he portrays.'

The charge of manipulating information is particularly damaging because the play purports to be not a work of the imagination but a kind of drama-documentary. As the Times observes: 'The playwright claims the drama has attained the highest "level of truthfulness" because he and the theatre company conducted dozens of interviews with railwaymen and train crash victims.'

Quite apart from the veracity or mendacity of his representation, this whole approach calls into question Hare's reputation as a playwright of any stature. Time after time now, his work -- albeit entertaining and witty in part -- has been deeply disappointing because of its agit-prop quality, which reduces it to little more than a kind of animated New Statesman column. As Stephen Pollard writes also in the Times, Sir David is a saloon-bar bore of the boards:

'There seems to be no left-liberal cliché which escapes Sir David’s attentions. His current play, The Permanent Way — in which he uses transcribed interviews to show the evils of rail privatisation — is merely the latest in a long line. Since his first outing at the National Theatre, Plenty, he has delivered a series of plays all with one thing in common: a slavish adherence to the left-liberal received wisdom of the day. Plenty was about a French Resistance fighter who becomes — as if you couldn’t guess — disillusioned with Britain. Pravda was about nasty, brutish press barons, Racing Demon the cynicism of the Church, Murmuring Judges the deformities of the legal system, and The Absence of War the betrayal of the Left by modernising Labour politicians.'

I think Stephen is a little harsh. When Hare puts his ideological fixations to one side and concentrates on character, as he did in Plenty, The Silent Rapture and even Racing Demon, his work takes life. But much of the rest is, frankly, risible and tedious. Stephen also makes a broader and more disturbing point:

'The rise of Sir David, and the Establishment’s veneration of him, symbolise what is so wrong with the artistic life of the country. Can you think of a single play dealing with, even on the loosest definition of the word, a political issue, which has been commissioned by the National Theatre — or indeed by any subsidised theatre — which does not come at its audience directly from the Left? Of course you can’t. Even to ask the question is ridiculous. And that does not cover directors’ habit of imposing their own agendas on existing plays. Last year’s National production of Henry V was not about Henry V but, as the director put it, the “dubious legitimacy” of the Iraq war (as opposed, one presumes, to the obvious legitimacy of a subsidised theatre pushing an explicit political agenda in its productions).

'When Sir David and those of his ilk put their political beliefs into the form of their characters, they claim that they are giving an issue breadth and depth. What they usually do, however, is to sterilise debate with caricatured portrayals of evil, money-obsessed capitalists. Power, money and status are almost always, in their world-view, to be despised.

'Fine. Sir David is as entitled to his views as the rest of us, and to test the success of his plays alongside all-comers. What he should not be entitled to do is peddle his views at our expense, as the beneficiary of a funding mechanism which refuses to allow any alternative to show its head.'

Again, I demur slightly in that I thought that production of Henry V was magnificent. But the general point is bang on. Along with the BBC and the universities, the conformism of the theatre (and not just the subsidised bit) dramatises the stranglehold of noxious ideas on our intellectual life.

From now on, readers will only be able to post comments on each thread for a few days. This is to keep discussion topical and current, and to prevent the site from becoming unmanageable.

As John Humphrys escalates the BBC's internal civil war by firing a warning short at acting Director General Mark Byford, an excoriating critique appears by Gerard Baker in the Weekly Standard. Baker makes all the right points about Hutton, the reaction of the media plutocracy and what's wrong with the Beeb. As he says:

'The Hutton Report was, to read the British media, the Night of the Long Knives, the bonfire of the vanities, and the Cultural Revolution all rolled into one hideous assault on cherished press liberty. If you live in the fantasy world of self-adulation and preening pomposity of high-powered liberal journalists, I suppose the aftermath of the Hutton Report might seem like that. But for those who have to toil in the less sensational world of reality, the unassuming 72-year-old peer may just have done the world one of the greatest services in the history of journalism and public broadcasting. For Lord Hutton has exposed, from the pinnacle of independent judicial authority, the fatal flaws at the heart of the world's largest broadcaster. His report has confirmed what critics
have argued for years: that the BBC, once one of the cultural treasures of the English-speaking world, has lost its way.'

And he lays bare exactly how that way has been lost:

'THE KELLY STORY was not an isolated incident. It was merely the most infamous example of a left-liberal bias that refracts all news coverage through the prism of the BBC's own distinctive worldview. The BBC's coverage of the Iraq war itself marked a new low point in the history of the self-loathing British prestige-media's capacity to side with the nation's enemies.

'Its Middle East coverage is notoriously one-sided. Its pro-Palestinian bias is so marked that recently the London bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post refused to take part in any more BBC news programs because he believed the corporation was actually fomenting anti-Semitism. If anti-Americanism is on the rise in the world, the BBC can take a fair share of the credit; much of its U.S. coverage depicts a cartoonish image of a nation of obese, Bible-wielding halfwits, blissfully dedicated to shooting or suing each other.

'Its suppositions are recognizable as those of self-appointed liberal elites everywhere: American power is bad; European multilateralism is good; organized religion is a weird vestige of unenlightened barbarism; atheism is rational man's highest intellectual achievement; Israel (especially Ariel Sharon) is evil; Palestinians (especially Yasser Arafat) are innocent victims; business is essentially corrupt, or at best simply boring; poverty is the result of government failure; economic success is the product of exploitation or crookedness. And so on.

'This will be familiar to consumers of news in much of the United States. Liberal media bias is by now, fortunately, increasingly widely recognized. But the difference is that BBC bias is so much more powerful and much more pernicious because the BBC is still seen by viewers and listeners, in Britain and around the world, as objective. And when the BBC conveys its slanted views of the world, there is very little means of checking and correcting it.

'I worked at the BBC for six years. I never saw a BBC journalist actively promote his own political agenda. Almost all were honest, hardworking men and women dedicated to reporting the truth as they saw it. The problem was that it was the truth as they saw it.'

Yup; that's about the size of it. And there is absolutely no sign that anyone recognises this, not in government (for all its fury at the Beeb), not in the wider media and certainly not in the Beeb itself. Instead, all we are likely to get is nervous conformism, which will not only fail to address the root problem but compound it by adding another one.

My suspicions about Michael Howard's gross opportunism, voiced here as soon as he became Tory leader, have now finally been proved to be true. In his 'like me, I'm a human being, honest' speech yesterday, be backed gay partnerships. Although he had previously said his party would not be whipped on the issue, this is the first time he has indicated how he intends to vote. Despite his platitudes about marriage, he has now consigned it to the bin as far as the Tories are concerned. He is backing a proposal whose purpose is to destroy normative values of behaviour. If the Conservatives don't stand for conserving such values any more, they stand for nothing.

He made his speech to the Portillista Policy Exchange, thus signalling a rapprochement with the libertarian wing of the party. Since Howard himself is not a libertarian, it lends support to the suspicion that he came to power in the party by way of a deal with Francis Maude, who was thought to have offered him his (surprising) backing in return for an endorsement of the Portillista programme -- which embraces the fashionable trend to promote various types of social suicide on the grounds that it 'makes the Tories relevant again'.

Whether or not such a deal was actually struck, the opportunism is deeply dismaying. If you put it together with other similarly cynical ploys, such as Howard's expressed support for the backbench 'Tony Martin's law' (which would allow householders to shoot fleeing burglars in the back) or his leaping aboard the anti-war bandwagon, a pattern emerges which is not pleasant. It is a deeply symbolic moment -- the point where the Tories' renunciation of principle and return to their customary habit of cynicism is now out of the closet.

Those goalposts just keep moving. Fascinating to see the way the anti-war line has changed in order to deal with the inconvenient things that David Kay actually said which showed that Saddam was actively working on WMD. The former spy David Tomlinson deals with this in the Guardian by redefining the casus belli once again and then redefining WMD themselves. Forget the UN resolutions; now, apparently, the war the war 'could only be justified if we find evidence of strategically significant WMD.'

'Strategically significant' is clearly a strategically significant phrase as he repeats it. So what does it mean? Well, it appears to boil down to a 'deployable nuclear warhead'. Anything else is not strategically significant, it seems, and so doesn't count. So chemical weapons? Mere piffle! They are only 'tactical battlefield weapons - and poor ones at that. Illegal, yes. Nasty, yes. But WMD? No.' So he redefines WMD to be only the one weapon Saddam definitely didn't have.

And lo and behold, this objective truth-seeker who inveighs against spin and 'cherry-picking' the evidence (tut tut Mr Scarlett) somehow manages completely to omit biological weapons altogether from his inventory. Are these WMD? He doesn't tell us. Could that be, perhaps, because Dr Kay found clear evidence of dozens of covert biological programmes and recorded the fact that several stashes of biological agent were known to have gone missing? A small amount or ricin or VX nerve gas or anthrax can kill a very large number of people. But no doubt Mr Tomlinson regards that as not 'strategically significant', and therefore not WMD at all.

Absolutely riveting speech by a German Green MEP, Ilke Schroder, which lifts the lid on the attitude of the European Union towards Israel. Schroder goes far beyond the observation that the EU is both prejudiced against Israel and motivated by anti-Jewish feeling. She also makes the explosive claim that the EU is backing Palestinian terror in order to position itself as a rival power base to the US. Key passage:

'The primary goal of the EU is the internationalisation of the conflict in order to underline the need for its own mediating role. Here is the prevailing European view: The longer the conflict continues and the deeper it gets, the more evident is the incapability of the US to moderate a peace process. The EU thus concludes that both sides are in need of - ironically speaking - the good uncle from Europe to resolve this conflict with European democratic and ecological values, its welfare state and civil society. How good for both sides that there is Europe and how bad for the world that one side, and this is Israel, is affording a wild west type of policy in the style of the US.

'The need for a solution only exists as long as the war continues. This is why the EU does not want the conflict to end before it gains a major role. And this is why the EU does not wish the PA to give up too early and why the EU is strengthening the PA. The EU is getting up to the cynicism of stirring up a conflict that it supposedly wants to see resolved by financing one side. This is the inherently inhuman purpose of EU humanitarian aid in the region. The Palestinians are playing the ugly role of being the cannon fodder for Europe's hidden war against the US.'

To such geopoliitcal cynicism is added -- of course -- the oldest hatred:

'A peace process of the sort that the European Union would like to create includes European soldiers stationed in Israel. Mr. Poettering, the chairman of the biggest political group in the European Parliament, the Conservatives, said on October 9th 2003 in Parliament "that we need an international peacekeeping force“ and he did not hesitate to stress that these forces should include European soldiers. He added: "We Europeans should start an initiative, especially now when our American friends are taken up by the presidential election campaign — and we all know how important the support from some groups is in order to get elected in America“. It is quite clear whom this gentleman means.This is just one of many examples how anti-Semitic stereotypes affect the perception of the Middle-East conflict by high-ranking EU politicians.'

As she adds:

'European policy in the Middle East is an important link of European anti-Zionism and Arab anti-Semitism which is as disastrous as it is effective; a coalition that is all the more effective because it is accompanied by an emancipation of the EU from the US. The relationship between foreign policy and mass consciousness is particularly important in the case of growing, openly expressed anti-Semitism...The greatest danger today is that the globalisation critique, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism which exist in the heads of millions of people is amalgamated into a common sense that is supported and used by European policy. There is no difference in the consciousness of an average Member of the European Parliament and an average German peace demonstrator and I consider this to be a mixture of naivete, moralism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and an altogether serious danger.'

Schroder's devastating analysis surely needs the widest possible circulation. The evil nexus she describes is a major factor behind continuing terror and rising anti-Jewish hatred. The fact that a member of the European Parliament itself is blowing the whistle on it should be thrust in particular in the face of EU Commissioner Chris Patten, who has done so much to brush this under the carpet -- and who, if he becomes, as trailed, the next chairman of the BBC, will hardly use this position to expose such vileness to the light of day.

President Bush is clearly rattled. He has just given what is being described as a 'rare extended television interview' all about the fact that he is a war leader. This is undoubtedly because, as he drops below a 50 per cent approval rating, it looks increasingly likely that his Democratic opponent will be John Kerry. And as Julian Coman points out in the Sunday Telegraph, the one thing Kerry has got which Bush does not have and on which he is intensely vulnerable is a war record. Indeed, there are questions about his failure to be drafted in Vietnam which may now be raked up and do him terminal damage, faced as he may be by a Vietnam war hero. As Coman reports:

'According to one senior Democratic adviser, the sudden revival of interest in Mr Bush's military record is simply explained: "It's the Kerry factor. Or you could call it the tale of two lieutenants. In one corner, you have the man who is now the likely Democrat candidate for the White House, former Lt John Kerry. He has three purple hearts, a bronze star and a silver star from Vietnam. In the other corner, you have former Lt George W Bush. In the same period of history, President Bush flew planes at weekends in Texas and then went missing in Alabama. Who do you trust with America's future in difficult times?" '

This is an irony indeed. As Charles Krauthammer has noted, what was thought to be Bush's biggest advantage -- the issue of war-- and which indeed would have seen off Howard Dean had he survived the primaries, now threatens to lose him the presidency because he cannot compete with a hero from history.

The Telegraph reports:

'The National Theatre is to pile on the agony for the Government later this year by staging a new play about the Iraq war by the Left-wing playwright Sir David Hare. Sir David, a fierce critic of Tony Blair, George W Bush and the Iraqi invasion, is to focus particularly on the role of the American Neo-Conservatives in driving the war.'

Mel Brooks made a film called The Producers, whose plot revolved around a musical called 'Springtime for Hitler'. This was a side-splitting joke. Now Sir David Hare is evidently about to do for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion what Leonard Bernstein did to Romeo and Juliet. This will not be funny.

I remain baffled. As the weapons of mass argument proliferate from one Today programme to the next, I cannot understand the logic behind the foaming fury over the 45-minute claim. Let's take it very slowly from the top.

1) The claim was the basis on which we went to war.

A: No it wasn't. Read any of Blair/Straw's speches, and the September dossier. The 45-minute claim was mentioned in speeches only once, and in the dossier four times, of which three were repetitions in internal summaries.

2) The claim was what made the public support the war.

A: Extremely unlikely. It was given prominence in the London Evening Standard, the Sun and the Express. It figured in the coverage of the dossier in other papers. That was it. After less than 24 hours, it disappeared from the radar screen altogether. No-one paid it the slightest attention until Andrew Gilligan inflated it on Today.

3) It frightened people because it said WMD could be deployed within 45 minutes of the order to use it.

A: This makes no sense at all. What difference would it have made if it had said Saddam could deploy WMD within four hours of the order to use it? Would that have made his weapons any less dangerous or frightening? Would the fact that it took several hours for the Enola Gay to reach Hiroshima have brought comfort to the Japanese? (If you think this means I didn't get the point of including it in the dossier in the first place, you're right. Maybe that's why it disappeared afterwards.)

4) If we'd been told it referred only to battlefield and not to ballistic missiles, we wouldn't have been frightened because this wouldn't have been WMD; we were only frightened because we thought it referred to missiles that could hit British troops in Cyprus. So we were grossly misled.

A: Of course battlefield weapons can be WMD if the shells are filled with chemicals as they were when they were used against the Kurds. WMD is an imprecise and confusing phrase, but it has been used from the start of the Iraq crisis to mean biological, chemical or nuclear weapons all of which cause casualties disproportionate to their size. The suggestion that such weapons were an unconscionable menace if they could hit our boys in Cyprus but somehow stopped being an unconscionable menace if they could 'only' hit our boys on the Iraqi battlefield is ludicrous.

5) Since they were 'only' battlefield weapons, they would only have been used defensively. So Saddam would only have used them if he was attacked. And anyway he didn't, which shows he never had them.

A: Yes, the defensive point is probably true about battlefield weapons. But this assumes these 45-minute johnnies were the only WMD he had, which is not true (see below). As for the last point, why can't people grasp that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence?

6) Blair is lying when he says he didn't know this referred to battlefield weapons; of course he knew, so he should be sacked /if he didn't know it referred to battlefield weapons, he sent our boys to war without bothering to find out what kind of threat they faced and so he should be sacked.

A: I don't think he was lying. What he says makes perfect sense. The spooks told him Saddam had BCW that could be used in a variety of ways. They told him some of it could be deployed within 45 minutes. Why should he have inquired about the technical details of the delivery systems? All this WMD was a clear and present danger, period ( as well as a breach of the UN resolutions). As for ignoring the safety of our troops -- puh-lease! How can this seriously be argued when they were bristling with BCW suits?

7) Since the 45-minute claim was wrong, this proves that Saddam's WMD didn't exist at all.

A: Eh?? First of all, we still don't know it was wrong. Second, it didn't apply to all his WMD. Third, the danger posed from his WMD came not just from missiles or shells but from the fact that he could give it to terrorists, or simply use it to blackmail the west to do nothing if he ever stormed into Kuwait again or in some other way tried to realise his oft-stated ambition to be a second Saladin.

In short, this whole frenzy about the 45-minute claim is based on nothing other than the deepest irrationality and political malice.

Interesting to see, after I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph about the way Dr David Kay's remarks had been misreported, that there is some grudging movement in that direction from other organs. The Guardian looks again at the text of his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee and quotes large chunks of it, but fails to reach a conclusion. It also still leaves out some of the specifics Kay mentioned in this and in other comments to the media, such as Iraq's attempt to produce weaponised ricin right up to the war, as well as its ballistic missile programme. In the Times, Bronwen Maddox -- who previously told us that President Bush came close to distorting what Dr Kay had said to give false backing to his claim that Saddam did have WMD -- today grudgingly concedes that Dr Kay did say that Iraq may have posed an even greater threat than was realised, but concludes that his remarks overall were 'riddled with contradictions'. Well yes, they were; but these 'contradictions' weren't noted in the previous stories in the papers, which falsely claimed he had ruled out any WMD, period. And the contradictions in what he said appear mainly in his theorising about what the hell was actually going on in Iraq, on which Dr Kay appears to be as much in the dark as everyone else. What was not riddled with contradictions was his report of what he had found, which was evidence of biological, nuclear and ballistic programmes -- ie, WMD activity, which made Saddam the menace some of us always thought he was.

I am an implacable opponent of most of what this government does. But the tenacity with which Tony Blair is standing his ground on this issue, in the teeth of widespread catcalls, ridicule and pressure from so much of the country and the media, is heroic. He is doing so, it seems to me, because he still genuinely believes what he was told when he came to office, that Saddam was an unconscionable threat that had to be dealt with and that the nexus between terrorism and WMD was the most deadly danger facing the whole world. Like him, I still believe that to be the case.

The Independent newspaper has triumphantly published an article by Dr Brian Jones, the former leading expert on WMD who has expanded on the evidence he gave to the Hutton inqury to claim that not a single DIS expert backed the most contentious claims in the famous government September dossier. The first thing to say about this scoop is the misleading nature of the Independent's presentation. Its headline over its front-page splash screams: 'Intelligence chief's bombshell: we were overrruled on dossier'. This implies that, contrary to the Hutton finding, the government did in fact overrule the intelligence services to sex up the dossier. In fact, as Dr Jones makes abundantly clear, he is claiming that DIS analysts were overruled within the DIS by their own superiors. Although this is in itself a serious claim, it is a very different matter from the charge of political interference. What it reveals is that the intelligence world was disagreeing within itself -- hardly the first time this has happened. This was in fact perfectly clear from Dr Jones's testimony to Hutton, as was the fact -- which he has now repeated -- that he and the other DIS staff never actually saw the intelligence relating to the 45-minute claim bcause it was so sensitive. In other words, whatever doubts he had about the claim were not worth a great deal because he hadn't been shown the relevant intelligence. He had been kept out of the loop. To say this devalues his complaint is an understatement. He also says this:

'The two DIS representatives on the dossier-drafting group were told at the last drafting meeting on 17 September that the compartmented intelligence would be shown by the SIS (MI6) to only the two most senior members of the DIS, the Chief of Defence Intelligence (CDI) and his deputy (DCDI). At a subsequent DIS meeting on that day, the DCDI ruled that he was satisfied by the SIS reassurance and that no further objections on the contentious issues should be raised with the Cabinet Office Assessment Staff. It transpired from evidence to the Hutton inquiry that the clinching intelligence was never seen by the DCDI.'

But was it seen by the actual Chief of Defence Intelligence? Intriguingly, Dr Jones doesn't tell us one way or the other.

Most tellingly, however, he makes it clear that the motivation for his complaint that the DIS analysts' concerns were brushed aside is simply to mind his department's own back. He says:

'Earlier in my intelligence career, I and others in my branch had not taken similar precautions and suffered for it. We believed that no large stockpiles of chemical weapons, such as those present in 1990/91, existed because if they did they would probably have been detected by intelligence. The smaller quantities of chemical weapons that might exist would be hard to find, as would small but significant amounts of BW agents and delivery systems. I foresaw that after the likely invasion and defeat of Iraq, it was quite possible that no WMD would be found. If this happened scapegoats would be sought, so I decided that we should record our concerns about the dossier in order to protect our reputation.'

So he thought there might indeed be small amounts of WMD -- but because they were small, they might not be found; and if that happened he wanted the DIS to escape any finger-wagging! What cynical self-serving opportunism! And so he went to the Independent -- according to its editor, because he was impressed by its reporting of the Iraq issue. This is revealing in itself since that newspaper was so partisan against the war, and revealed its less than straightforward service to the truth by giving his comments such a deeply misleading headline.

Clearly, the disputes within the intelligence service over this whole issue are important. But intelligence is ultimately about making judgments, which mere analsyts within the service -- however skilled -- are not competent to make.

There are indeed legitimate concerns about whether the intelligence services have been politicised at the top. The cosy relationship with government is far too close for comfort, not least becasue it erodes trust in their judgment. But Dr Jones's intervention should be treated with some scepticism. It is regrettable that the Tory leader Michael Howard has nevertheless promptly leapt on the Dr Jones bandwagon as yet another weapon to fire at Tony Blair. But it is not only Blair who is being damaged by all this. It is the capacity and willingness of the west to fight against the terror that threatens it.

More facts that you won't see reported in the British media in this article by Robert Fulford in the Toronto National Post about Palestinian on Palestinian terror. He quotes Bassam Eid, who runs the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group:

'Eid reported that in the town of Tul Karm, local security is now managed by the Al-Aqsa Brigades when they are not running terrorist operations against Israel. In October they shot down, in the street, two men accused of collaborating with Israel. Criminals, in other words, now function as police and sometimes executioners. This makes it less surprising that it was a Palestinian "policeman" who killed 11 (including a psychologist originally from Toronto) in a Jerusalem bus on Thursday. Last summer Eid reported there had been at least 73 vigilante killings of accused collaborators since the start of the current intifada in 2000. He says that the town of Nablus is currently ruled by two armed, illiterate thugs.'

How reminiscent of Belfast, that other great triumph of appeasement processes.

A number of trolls who object to my views about drugs have been attempting to hijack the site by clogging it up with the kind of drivel that deters those who want to take part in intelligent debate. Accordingly, I have been deleting those posts which I consider to be mischievous or malicious, and will continue to do so.

Some of them, however, have been trying to post links to last week's Moral Maze debate on cannabis in which I took part. While it is unhelpful to have such posts interrupting sensible discussion, I am delighted to post the link here, http://www.ukcia.org/mp3s/moral_maze_cannabis_28_01-04.mp3 so that anyone who is interested can listen. My exchange with the noted drug smuggler Howard Marks received the supreme accolade of inclusion on Radio Four's Start the Week last weekend (which, alas, has no play-back facility). The trolls have been wetting themselves in delight over his performance, which says all one needs to know about them, I fear.

I don't usually reply to readers' comments, but some posts by Brendan are so defamatory of myself and contain such serious misrepresentations that I cannot leave them unanswered. He accuses me of 'distortion', 'twisting the truth' and 'bending facts'. He says that my account of the Hutton report is untrue on the basis that:

'The BBC mainly accurately reported what had been told to its journalist by a senior and credible source. It was corrected in subsequent broadcasts and he apologised almost immediately afterwards for using those words.' Elsewhere, he states: 'It was a mistake to which he immediately admitted.'

Brendan's account is false. Andrew Gilligan wrongly reported Dr Kelly. The particular error he refers to was never corrected; it was simply not repeated by Gilligan in precisely those words. Gilligan did not apologise or admit to a mistake at all until the Hutton inquiry. Brendan also alleges I did not read the Hutton report. I have indeed read it. It is one thing to disagree with my interpretation or opinions. It is quite another to make allegations which are false or otherwise impugn my integrity.

Not content with misrepresenting the report and making gratuitously false assertions about me in connection with this, Brendan makes further defamatory claims about me. He refers to an article I wrote in the Sunday Times in 2001 about the Middle East, after which, he says, he wrote to me ( I have no memory of this). This is what he now says:

'I wrote to her pointing out some of her factual inaccuracies: for example Jerusalem did not have a majority Jewish population at the time of partition and neither did it form part of Israel in the partition plan. I thought she might publish a correction. She did not even acknowledge receipt. But most telling of all, is that she has continued to repeat these distortions after I had pointed out the errors that she had made, meaning that she is knowingly relying on deliberate falsehoods in order to make her political case. Of course, since then I have come to realise that there is almost no distortion which is too great for her to make, no smear too base for her to use, almost no level to which she would be unwilling to stoop if she feels it helps her vision of the cause.'

I have now dug out this article. In it, I did not say that Jerusalem formed part of Israel in the partition plan. As for its population, Brendan is once again wrong. Jersualem did have a Jewish majority at the time of the partition plan. Indeed, Jews have formed the largest single group of inhabitants in Jersualem ever since the 1840s. In 1948, Jerusalem contained 100,000 Jews, 40,000 Muslims and 25,000 Christians. In 1931, there were 51,000 Jews and 39,000 Muslims and Christians; in 1922, 33,000 Jews and 18,000 Muslims and Christians.*

Normally, of course, I would not correct readers' mistakes. I do so here only because Brendan has used these errors to attempt a character assassination upon me, which is a gross abuse of this site. Readers may care to reflect on both his motivation and his veracity if they read any more of his posts.

As I have noted here before, in the interests of promoting discussion I tolerate readers' comments which I may find offensive or repugnant. I will not tolerate, however, gratuitous personal abuse, reproduction of private email correspondence, libels, unlawful comments or other posts designed to frustrate civilised discussion. These will be deleted.

*Sources: 'Jerusalem', ed John Oesterreicher and Anne Sinai; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.

At last, some sane voices drawing attention to the blizzard of lies with which the media are now bombarding the public and twisting debate out of any recognisable relationship with the truth. In the Times, Michael Gove makes the fundamental point that anti-war journalists and politicians are seizing on every development and brazenly twisting or chopping the facts to fit a pre-arranged view. As he says, this is fuelling two myths: that Andrew Gilligan's story was 'mostly true', when in fact it was a tissue of lies; and that there never were any WMD and David Kay's remarks have proved this, when in fact Dr Kay said Saddam had been actively trying to produce WMD, leading him to conclude: ' I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein. Iraq was even more dangerous than we thought.'

In the Guardian, meanwhile, Martin Kettle sits rather surprisingly alongside the usual Grauniad conspiracy theorists claiming Hutton was a whitewash to deliver an impressively courageous, impassioned denunciation of the sheer infantile mendacity of the media over these issues, which he compares to journalists throwing their rattle out of the pram because they haven't got what they wanted -- the Prime Minister's head on a plate. In particular he skewers Rod Liddle, the ex-Today editor who has tirelessly asserted that Gilligan's story was 'mostly true':

'Liddle is the man who hired Gilligan. He is also the man of whom a former colleague said (as told to Today's historian): "Rob didn't want conventional stories. He wanted sexy exclusives ... I remember Rod once at a programme meeting saying 'Andrew gets great stories and some of them are even true' ... He was bored by standard BBC reporting."

'Liddle's article in the current Spectator exemplifies this approach, and incarnates a great deal of what is wrong with modern journalism. Liddle's article is wrong on the facts (Lord Franks, chairman of the inquiry into the Falklands war, was not a judge, much less a law lord), sneering (Lord Hutton's Ulster brogue is mocked, and he is described as anachronistic and hopelessly naive), and unapologetic (the best Liddle can manage is that Gilligan's famous 6.07am report went "a shade too far"). Above all, Liddle's piece is arrogant, embodied in his remarkable final sentence: "I think, as a country, we've had enough of law lords."

'Think about the implications of that. To Liddle's fellow practitioners of punk journalism, it can be excused as sparky, or justified on the grounds that it is what a lot of other people are saying. To criticise it is to be condemned as boring or, like Hutton, hopelessly naive. To me, though, it smacks of something bordering on journalistic fascism, in which all elected politicians are contemptible, all judges are disreputable and only journalists are capable of telling the truth, even though what passes for truth is sometimes little more than prejudice unsupported by facts.

'Liddle is an extreme case, if an influential one (he was ubiquitous in the studios last week, acting out his juvenile Howard Marks fantasy). But he is the iceberg tip of a culture of contempt towards politicians (and thus of democracy) and judges (and thus of the law) that is too prevalent in British journalism (think Jeremy Paxman, for instance, both as interviewer and author). Too much of the initial response to Hutton has wallowed in that fashionable but ultimately destructive cynicism.'

And he concludes: 'I do not believe we have even begun to realise the damage that some modern journalism is doing to the fabric of public and private life.'

In a letter to the Times, Geoffrey Goodman puts this more pithily: 'In some cases there is also now a danger of journalists arrogating to themselves a new role — a kind of House of Columns to replace a House of Commons.'

Speaking as a newspaper columnist, I can only agree. The duty of the media is to invigilate authority and speak the truth to power. The problem now is that journalists are now themselves abusing their own considerable power by their refusal to recognise the importance of the truth.

One of my correspondents has referred to the article by William Rees-Mogg in the Times to take me to task for deriding the critics of Lord Hutton when someone as apparently grounded as Lord Rees-Mogg also thinks Hutton got it completely wrong. Another correspondent expresses the very understandable bafflement that comes from being bombarded with rival interpretations of the controversy, but with no way of verifying which of them is right.

This is indeed a problem. However, despite the fact that this may only worsen my second correspondent's headache, I believe the evidence shows Lord R-M's argument is complete rubbish from start to finish. I wonder whether he has actually read the evidence to Hutton, as opposed to the press reports of the evidence which so grossly misrepresented it.

For example, he says Hutton gave too little weight to the evidence of Susan Watts. The significance of her evidence to the anti-Hutton camp is that she revealed conversations with Dr Kelly in which he confided to her his concerns about the 45-minute claim being hyped up. However, there were very significant differences between what he told her and what appeared in Andrew Gilligan's reports -- in particular that the government had not behaved dishonestly, as Alastair Palmer noted in his coruscating analysis of Gilligan's behaviour in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph. There was all the difference in the world between Susan Watts' stories based on her interviews with Dr Kelly, and Gilligan's. As the ST's leader pointed out, Gilligan's story was wrong in every significant particular:

'Everything that was new in Mr Gilligan's report has been shown to be wrong. The 45-minute claim was inserted late in the process of the dossier's drafting, not because Number 10 was growing desperate for material, but because the new information was not received by MI6 until August 29, 2002. It was inserted by the Joint Intelligence Committee itself, not foisted upon the JIC by Alastair Campbell and his colleagues. And Mr Gilligan's claim in his 6:07 am broadcast that the Government "probably knew" that the intelligence was wrong has been shown to be utterly unfounded.'

And as for the claim that Dr Kelly's remarks to Susan Watts proved that Gilligan's story was basically right, the rest of the evidence to Hutton showed that Dr Kelly, who was not an intelligence officer and had not seen the relevant 45-minute intelligence, was talking beyond his competence, thus reducing some of those remarks to little more than second-hand gossip -- as Susan Watts herself rightly observed.

Lord Rees-Mogg claims that Hutton disregarded the evidence about the naming strategy, which he says showed that 'Downing Street wanted to get Dr Kelly’s name out, but did not want to take responsibility for doing so. The strange game of guesswork with the press was designed to achieve that end,' and that being so named was 'one presumable cause for his suicide.' To take that last claim first: this is quite absurd. The idea that a man as robust as Dr Kelly would kill himself because he was publicly embroiled in a controversy is highly unlikely. It also does not square with the attitude displayed in his emails, even on the day of his death, expressing a stoical expectation that the storm would eventually blow over and he could get back to Iraq to search for the WMD he was certain were there. And from the start, he knew he was likely to be named and displayed no undue distress about this.

As for the so-called 'naming strategy' which people are so sure existed because of Alastair Campbell's diary entry in which he said the source had to be got out in order to **** Gilligan, the actual evidence just doesn't support it. It is quite clear from what Hutton was told that it was a classic British muddle. The government did not want Dr Kelly named because they weren't sure whether he was really Gilligan's source. Tony Blair actually overruled Campbell, who wanted to get this information out sooner, for precisely that reason. On the other hand, once he had come forward they knew they had to make that fact known otherwise they would have been accused of a cover-up. On the other hand again, by saying an official had come forward but not naming him would have cast suspicion on other officials (one of whom actually had journalists tapping on his window to attract his children's attention). That was why they decided to put out relevant information about Dr Kelly to journalists who asked relevant questions, including the eventual confirmation of his name. Cock-eyed and ham-fisted? Sure. So cock-eyed and ham-fisted, in fact, it's wholly unlikely that it was a machiavellian plot. It would have been so easy, after all, simply to leak his name if that's what they wanted. It is said they wanted him named but to deny responsibility for doing so. But why? What opprobrium would have followed from naming him? The whole sinister theory just doesn't stand up, and there was simply no evidence to support it.

And that's the point. Every single piece of apparently incriminating testimony which was seized on and hyped up by the press as the inquiry proceeded, such as Sir Kevin Tebbit's late evidence or Jonathan Powell's desire for harder intelligence in the dossier or Campbell's requests for changes to the text, all had perfectly reasonable explanations -- if you actually read that evidence. Thus the 'change' made by the committee chaired by the Prime Minister -- Sir Kevin's alleged 'smoking gun' which on the Chinese whisper circuit was going to blast the PM into oblivion -- was merely to issue the statement that an official had come forward. No incompetence there by Lord Hutton -- the press had just not understood the evidence. Powell's request for harder intelligence was justified by two things: the dossier was the government's presentation of its case and he was within his rights to want to make it as strong as possible, and most crucial of all he prompted John Scarlett to revisit the intelligence where he discovered there was indeed much harder stuff that could be used. In other words, it was his professional judgment that it should be used. Nothing wrong there either. As for Campbell -- who was only in charge of the dossier's presentation, not its content -- some of his suggestions were accepted but others were thrown out because Scarlett thought they were wrong; and the ones that were accepted were mainly about ironing out contradictions rather than requiring the wording to be changed in a particular direction.

The backlash against Hutton is fuelled by the impression people received from media coverage of the inquiry which, it cannot be said often enough, bore little relation to the actual evidence. It is also fuelled by the view that if the PM announced the day of the week, he would be lying through his teeth; and most fundamentally of all, by the belief that because no WMD have been found they never existed, that we were taken to war on a lie and that Gilligan was basically right -- even though on every point he was actually wrong.

The country is in the grip of a hysterical irrationality and gullibility, from which not even as grand a personage as Lord Rees-Mogg is immune.

Interesting piece by Michael Ledeen on Dr David Kay. It rather bears out my view that what lies behind the weapons inspector's outburst -- which has detonated likely inquiries into possible intelligence failures here and in the US --is not a belief that Iraq was not trying to produce WMD but rather his white-hot fury at the incompetence of the US machine in failing to look for the stuff properly. Key passage:

'Last August I called him in Baghdad to tell him that I had a person — a good person, like himself, a person I trust — who was prepared to take him to an underground laboratory from which a quantity of enriched uranium had been taken a few years ago, and smuggled to Iran. Wow, he said, let's go look. Have the guy call me, we'll check it out.

'The guy could never get David on the phone because the CIA decided not to investigate after all. The CIA never went to look, and I don't know if that stuff was real or fictional. But this case was totally different from the Potemkin WMDs of David's elegant theory. Because my guy was in contact with the people who said they had moved the stuff from Iraq to Iran. They were now sick, and wanted to tell their story before they got much worse. But, as I say, the CIA never went to look. They pretended they wanted to, they finally met with my guy, but they told him they didn't believe his story (although there was really no reason to either believe it or not, it was a matter of either looking or not, and if you didn't look you couldn't know anything one way or the other). He said the people who had done the smuggling had a full description of the material on a CD Rom, which they were willing to provide. CIA wasn't interested. And that's the end of it, so far as I know.

'So there's one instance where the CIA wasn't curious enough to take a ride and look at a lab. And I ask myself whether there were other such cases. I know of other examples, not involving WMDs, but involving Saddam's money, where CIA refused to look, and the stories they were told — and decided not to believe — turned out to be true.

'And then I read the words of Peter Hain, the leader of the House of Commons in London. He says "I saw evidence that was categorical on Saddam possessing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction." And we know, from the recent Hutton Report, that Tony Blair's claim that Saddam could be prepared to launch WMD attacks against Coalition forces "within 45 minutes," had come directly from MI6. Were the Brits fooled too? Hain insists they were not.

'And then there's the story from the Syrian journalist in Paris who claims to have maps from high-ranking military intelligence officials in Damascus, identifying the sites where, he says, some of Saddam's stockpiles were moved. Have we checked that story?'

Good question. What's the answer?

So now we know without a doubt, it seems, that all the intelligence on Iraq was false; that all intelligence on everything is false because the intelligence agencies are a bunch of incompetent morons who can't tell a missile from a Mars bar/heroes who fought vainly against the evil war-mongers Bush and Blair who pulled out their toenails until they fabricated evidence about Iraq's WMD; that the war on Iraq was waged on a total fiction; that the weapons inspectors who found and destroyed WMD in the 1990s were hallucinating; that the UN and the intelligence services of every western country including France and Germany who were adamant that Saddam was producing the stuff were all totally wrong; that Saddam destroyed all his WMD material in secret knowing that this risked both sanctions and the eventual invasion of his country; that Saddam believed he had WMD programmes but was led up the garden path by his operatives who, knowing that he had a tendency to feed people into the shredders feet first if they displeased him in any way but especially if he thought they were deceiving him, conducted a deception upon him on a vast scale by fabricating extensive paperwork and other activity documenting WMD programmes; that Dr David Kay has said there were never any WMD and we can all cheerfully ignore the fact that he included the words 'large-scale' and 'stockpiles' in that assertion, along with his report that Saddam was trying to produce weaponised ricin right up to the war along with his re-started nuclear programme and his ballistic missile programme, not to mention the WMD that Dr Kay found had been hidden in Syria (see my article, The selective reporting of Dr David Kay); that the agencies warning of a renewed terror threat to air routes to the US are all telling lies and indeed that the very idea that there is an Islamic jihad at all is a total fabrication, as that profound seer Peter Preston vouchsdafes in today's Guardian; that Lord Hutton is an ass and an establishment lickspittle because he was idiotic enough to base his conclusions on the evidence he received; and that black is white, lies are truth and absolutely no-one in authority is to be believed under any circumstances because we all know better than them on the basis of the gospel truth we read in our objective newspapers and hear on the impartial BBC every day.