Oliver Kamm has an interesting post about Wikipedia. Regular readers will know that I disagree with him on the merits of blogging, but when it comes to Wikipedia I am with him 100 per cent.

I cannot understand how anyone with the least interest in factual accuracy gives Wikipedia the time of day. I have yet to read an entry on a subject about which I know something that has not been marred by glaring errors. The entry on me, for instance - probably the only subject about which I can claim to the the world's leading expert - has so many basic errors of fact that it is laughable.

I have made a point of never correcting it because once I start, there will be no end to it, as it is forever altered with new errors.

But here is just one sentence:

He is the official biographer for David Blunkett and is an occasional guest on the BBC's flagship Question Time discussion show.

Both statements are wrong. My biography was not official. Nor was it ever stated, anywhere or at any time, by me, my publishers or David Blunkett that it was. I started it off my own back, wrote it to my own schedule and editing criteria and published it as I saw fit. Mr Blunkett gave me interviews for it, but that in no way made it official, since I chose what to report and how. But because someone wholly ignorant of the facts about which they have chosen to write makes that claim on Wikipedia, it will now be repeated elswhere as fact.

As for my being "an occasional guest on the BBC's flagship Question Time discussion show"; I have never appeared on it. Not once. And I think I should know.

I could go through the rest of my entry and point to the similar inaccuracies which litter it, but what would be the point?. Wikipedia is a pernicious tool, and no one should rely on it. Ever.

(No doubt someone will read this and change the entry to reflect my corrections, but that will merely prove my point. If I hadn't happened to be vain enough to look at my entry, and then to write about it here, the errors would stay.)

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Plus ça change.

(From Iain Dale.)

I don't think I've ever read a piece by Bryan Appleyard that hasn't made me think. Typically, his piece in last Sunday's Sunday Times on blogging is full of insights and stimulation. Do have a read. (And I recommend a look at his excellent blog.)

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This Wall Street Journal report shows what lengths the enemies of Paul Wolfowitz will go to smear him - and show that his current difficutlies are entirely manufactured by his opponents. It's a salutary lesson in the need to know all the facts before jumping on a 'scandal' bandwagon.

(via Daniel Finkelstein)

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The following column of mine appears in today's Times:

I’m glad I kept up with yesterday’s news. Had I not, I’d have remained ignorant of two important pieces of research. According to analysis of the names used to identify the days of the week, it seems that, since today is called Wednesday, tomorrow will be Thursday.

Even more interestingly, researchers have used a complicated computer program to trawl through more than a million books and have found that there is a consistent pattern in the Roman alphabet. The letter M always follows L, which in turn follows K. I was intrigued to discover that these are preceded by H, I and J.

No less obvious were the two genuine pieces of research that were revealed yesterday. David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, has used official figures to show that . . . well, a look at the headline above the story in yesterday’s Times tells you all you need to know: “Discipline crumbles in large schools.”

Expulsions from schools with more than 1,500 pupils have risen by 28 per cent since Labour took office. That date matters because the number of such schools has more than doubled since then. The figures also show that 10 per cent of pupils in schools with more than 1,000 children are temporarily excluded, compared with 3 per cent in schools with fewer than 1,000 pupils.

It comes as a shock, I know. Who would ever have thought that large, anonymous comprehensives would have discipline problems? Not the Department for Education, that’s for sure, which responded to the figures thus: “Large schools can, of course, face additional challenges, but with strong leadership and good staff they can also use their size to benefit their pupils and the wider community by offering out-of-hours clubs and community facilities.”

Well, yes. Big can indeed be an advantage in some circumstances. But although the fact I weigh too much could come in useful if I ever have to sit on someone to restrain them, in the real world it simply means I am more prone to ill health, as one look at me would make obvious. And large schools are, as is equally obvious to most of us, more likely to have discipline problems.

The problem is not that research is otiose. It’s always important to have facts behind any argument. The problem is that what should, without any need for research, be obvious is all too often either ignored or disputed by the people who take our money and spend it on our behalf.

As for my weight: yesterday we learnt that researchers at the University of California have made an astonishing discovery. In what is described as “the world’s largest study of weight loss”, they analysed the results of more than 30 studies of dieters and discovered that, after an initial loss, most dieters regain even more weight. Who would ever have believed that?

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I was planning to write a post taking issue with my friend Oliver Kamm's piece in yesterday's Guardian, which he concluded thus:

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

I disagree with Oliver's view of blogs. In my view, blogging is not in itself a good or a bad thing, just as TV news is not a good or a bad thing in itself. TV news can educate and it can mislead (the same holds, of course, for newspapers and other media). What matters is the quality of a blog (which has nothing to do with its political standpoint), just as what matters with broadcast news is the quality of the output.

To contradict myself, I do think the fact that without blogging we would not have beeen able to access the opinions of writers from Oliver himself through to the writers on Harry's Place, Tim Worstall and Scott Burgess (my favourite non-professional writers' sites) is a strong positive in favour of the medium itself.

But when I read the stupid, abusive and illogical comments which dominate the responses to Oliver's piece on the Guardian site, I have to wonder if perhaps Oliver has a point, albeit a misdirected one. Until I made commenters register on my site I spent a ridiculous amount of time having to delete abusive, libellous and bigoted comments. Although the sheer number of such comments is now reduced, I am still shocked at the level of personal abuse which some commenters think appropriate in response to a post with which they happen to disagree. Perhaps it is not bloggers who are, as Oliver puts it, responsible for the poisoning of debate. Is it not (some) commenters?

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I read this interview with Julian Baggini, author of Welcome to Everytown: a journey into the English mind, with a mix of anger, puzzlement and humour:

He stands out because he has done what very few of his contemporaries are prepared to do and confronted England. Not by denouncing its government or letting out long sighs about its lack of sophistication, but by living among people he wouldn't ordinarily notice, in an attempt to understand the core beliefs of the England which doesn't listen to the Today programme.

...Baggini expected to find sexism, racism, homophobia, celebrity worship, provincialism and unreasonable fears about crime.

...After he had finished his breakfast, I asked if he felt more comfortable with his country. "I think I've learned that most people here are fine with you as long as you treat them fairly."

I haven't read his book. but on this evidence I have no interest in doing so. The gist of it seems to be the amazing discovery by the author that normal people are alright, that not eating pasta, olives and drinking wine whilst listening to the opera does not mean you are a cretin, and that people are not racist, just stuck in their ways.

Doesn't that say everything you need to know about the London liberal elite?

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Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, gives the UN Human Rights Council a dose of the truth:

Six decades ago, in the aftermath of the Nazi horrors, Eleanor Roosevelt, Réné Cassin and other eminent figures gathered here, on the banks of Lake Geneva, to reaffirm the principle of human dignity. They created the Commission on Human Rights. Today, we ask: What has become of their noble dream?

In this session we see the answer. Faced with compelling reports from around the world of torture, persecution, and violence against women, what has the Council pronounced, and what has it decided?

Nothing. Its response has been silence. Its response has been indifference. Its response has been criminal.

One might say, in Harry Truman’s words, that this has become a Do-Nothing, Good-for-Nothing Council.

But that would be inaccurate. This Council has, after all, done something.

It has enacted one resolution after another condemning one single state: Israel. In eight pronouncements—and there will be three more this session—Hamas and Hezbollah have been granted impunity. The entire rest of the world—millions upon millions of victims, in 191 countries—continue to go ignored.

So yes, this Council is doing something. And the Middle East dictators who orchestrate this campaign will tell you it is a very good thing. That they seek to protect human rights, Palestinian rights.

So too, the racist murderers and rapists of Darfur women tell us they care about the rights of Palestinian women; the occupiers of Tibet care about the occupied; and the butchers of Muslims in Chechnya care about Muslims.

But do these self-proclaimed defenders truly care about Palestinian rights?

Let us consider the past few months. More than 130 Palestinians were killed by Palestinian forces. This is three times the combined total that were the pretext for calling special sessions in July and November. Yet the champions of Palestinian rights—Ahmadinejad, Assad, Khaddafi, John Dugard—they say nothing. Little 3-year-old boy Salam Balousha and his two brothers were murdered in their car by Prime Minister Haniyeh’s troops. Why has this Council chosen silence?

Because Israel could not be blamed. Because, in truth, the dictators who run this Council couldn’t care less about Palestinians, or about any human rights.

They seek to demonize Israeli democracy, to delegitimize the Jewish state, to scapegoat the Jewish people. They also seek something else: to distort and pervert the very language and idea of human rights.

You ask: What has become of the founders’ dream? With terrible lies, it is being turned into a nightmare.

Thank you, Mr. President.

For the first time in this session I will not express thanks for that statement...I am sorry that I'm not in a position to thank you for your statement. I should mention that I will not tolerate any similar statements in the Council. The way in which members of this Council were referred to, and indeed the way in which the council itself was referred to, all of this is inadmissible.

A Human Rights Commission which does not believe in free speech. Doesn't that say it all?

(UPDATE: Melanie Phillips has the same reaction.)

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This piece of mine appears in this week's So London magazine:

I’ve lived in Zone 1 for all my adult life. Indeed, for much of that time I’ve been in the middle of the city, in W1.

I’ve not just enjoyed living there myself. I’ve also, I have to admit, looked at down at those unfortunates who, rather than being able to walk to any number of wonderful restaurants or the wonderful array of cultural lures, have had to get the…I can barely bring myself to write it…the…ugh…the…Tube.

So it is with a large dollop of humility that I write what follows: I have been happily ensconced out of Zone 1 for the past year, and I am about to move even further out, when I get hitched. And do you know what? Not only am I relishing the prospect of leaving; I can’t understand how I could have been so blinkered in my Zone 1 ways and so, well, plain wrong.

I’ve always believed that the point of living in a city is to live in a city – to take full advantage of the summation of human achievement which cities represent. Not for me the countryside or green land. Land is for building on, for turning into the adventure playgrounds of advanced humankind which urban life is about. Cities have everything the human soul needs, from the physical sustenance of the food available in the eye-blinking array of specialist shops or restaurants, to the mental and emotional sustenance of culture, the like of which is, in London, unrivalled on the planet.

Few things are more annoying than Londoners who don’t take advantage of our theatres, our cinemas or our concert halls. If you want to spend your evenings doing nothing, go and live where there’s nothing to do. Try Norfolk.

Where I’ve been quite wrong, however, is in dismissing Londoners who live outside Zone 1 - or, let’s be generous, even Zone 2.

I had things entirely back to front in thinking that to enjoy London properly one needed to live in proximity to its heart. In fact, I now see from my own experience, the only way one can properly enjoy London is to treat the centre – the area within Zone 1 – as a facility to be utilized as often as possible but from which one can retreat – or, perhaps more accurately, escape – when the need arises.

Because the plain fact is that, today, living in central London is not a pleasure but a penance. After 7 years in Fitzrovia, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t have to be woken up at least once a night by a fight in the street outside. I didn’t have to walk home at night through a urine-drenched Soho. I didn’t have to fear being attacked by drunken louts if I set off home after chucking out time. And I didn’t have to walk in streets with dirt as a sort of perpetual motion that forced the street cleaners to start again before they’d even finished.

There was a solution: leave.

Now I have the best of all worlds. I go into the centre for what only the amenities of the centre can provide. But instead of fighting a daily losing battle against my surrounding environment, I have discovered that London living can be a pleasant experience. I know the names of the shopkeepers in the parade near me. I have made friends with other coffee-hounds in the local café. Passers-by smile at me and I do not immediately think that it’s a distraction before they mug me.

I’ve recently been scouting out all sorts of areas for when my fiancée and I get married. And my zonal prejudices have melted away. Because it turns out that even in the wilds of Zones 3 and 4 one can live the full, enriched London experience. Call it gentrification, call it yuppification, call it what you will. The phenomenon is nothing new. But it’s been given a new impetus by the ever-growing unpleasantness of living in the middle. Areas which were once the death-knell of vibrant living are now beacons of life and prosperity, each with their own micro-economy of cafes, shops and services, all proof that it is indeed possible to have full access to London life but to live without the aggravation.

When I think how much time I spent in the middle, pretending to myself that I liked the dirt, and that the hassle was all part of the urban lifestyle, I have only one reaction: what an idiot. I should have moved out years ago.

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The following piece of mine appears in today's Times:

So now I know. It’s taken me until this weekend to discover the real reason that I’m two stones heavier than I should be. There I was, thinking it was because for most of my adult life I ate too much and took no exercise.

What a relief to discover — from the Public Health Minister, no less — that it’s not my responsibility. When I stuffed that extra piece of rye bread in my mouth this morning, I wasn’t to blame. The man with whom I need to remonstrate is the chap who sold me the loaf and didn’t point out that if I eat too much of it I’ll get fat. As for the waiter who let me eat two pieces of cheesecake when I went out for my 14th birthday and never once told me to be careful; there’s a 28-year grudge I ought to bear.

According to reports yesterday, Caroline Flint, the aforementioned Minister, has threatened the drinks industry that if it does not agree to put a warning label on every bottle of wine saying “Know your limits”, and then demanding that women should “Avoid alcohol if you are pregnant or trying to conceive”, then she will consider legislating to force them.

We have, of course, been here before. Cigarette packets now contain the message “Smoking kills”. And quite so, just as excessive drinking is dangerous.

But danger is inherent in almost every aspect of human existence. Running out into the middle of the road without looking, talking into a mobile phone in the street, having valuables in view; all can be dangerous if a car suddenly appears, if a mugger is following or if a thief is on the lookout. No one, surely, suggests that we need messages to warn us against such behaviour.

Have you been to the cinema recently? Alongside the glossy multimillion-pound ads for cars, for mobile phones and for all sorts of valuables are glossy multimillion-pound ad campaigns warning us against . . . running out into the middle of the road without looking, talking into a mobile phone in the street, having valuables in view. Ads we pay for as taxpayers, the sole purpose of which is to instruct idiots not to behave like idiots.

Ms Flint is merely carrying on in the same vein. If she really expects drinkers who are unaware of the deleterious consequences of their excessive drinking to pick up a bottle, notice the warning label and see the error of their ways, then she has a touching, albeit deeply misguided, view of idiots and their idiotic behaviour.

To function properly, a society requires its members to be responsible for their actions. For all the apparently frivolous stupidity of this latest proposal, its implications are profound, emanating in a philosophy that holds not only that government knows best but that it can — indeed, must — take responsibility for the behaviour of its citizens.

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We're from the government. We're here to help.

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David T has an interesting post about the notion of giving Nick Griffin a piece in the Guardian. It's thought provoking stuff. My instinctive reaction is to recoil at the idea, but David T makes some persuasive points in support of his argument. I especially like his response to one argument:

So, what is the objection to running a Comment piece by Nick Griffin in the Guardian.

...It cannot be that the Guardian would not publish a piece by a supporter of totalitarian politics, as it regularly hosts pieces by the Communist Party of Britain's Kate Hudson and Andrew Murray. Andrew Murray, you remember, is the man who stressed his Party's "basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea". I assume that the Communist Party of Britain is still in favour of revolution, followed by the establishing of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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Daniel, be careful. One of the first lessons I was taught by my old boss, Peter Shore, was that sarcasm and irony don't work in print.

How about a spread bet on the hours before your post is cited on a conspiracy site?

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This is not The Onion. It's all too real:

China treats Internet ‘addicts’ sternly Leaders see ‘a grave social problem’; treatment includes electric shocks

Greg Baker / Associated Press

DAXING, China - Sun Jiting spends his days locked behind metal bars in this military-run installation, put there by his parents. The 17-year-old high school student is not allowed to communicate with friends back home, and his only companions are psychologists, nurses and other patients. Each morning at 6:30, he is jolted awake by a soldier in fatigues shouting, "This is for your own good!"

Sun's offense: Internet addiction.

Alarmed by a survey that found that nearly 14 percent of teens in China are vulnerable to becoming addicted to the Internet, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation.

Read the rest. Horrific.

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This Notebook of mine appears in today's Times:

One might wonder why a biography first published ten years ago, that tells the story of a Cold War espionage case from the 1940s, is so searingly relevant today. But it is. A British edition of Sam Tanenhaus’s masterful biography of Whittaker Chambers is published next week with a new introduction that shows why the story is still so important.

Chambers was a Communist spy in the US who, realising the true nature of the Soviet Union, became a key witness in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee’s investigation into Communist infiltration. Chambers named a senior State Department official, Alger Hiss, as a member of the Communist Party. Hiss then sued Chambers for libel, forcing him to reveal evidence that Hiss had been a spy and leading to Hiss’s conviction for perjury.

The relevance of the case today lies in what happened afterwards. For decades, Hiss’s innocence became an idée fixe among left-liberals. The notion that Hiss was innocent and the victim of a witch-hunt was almost impossible to shift. Even when the Soviet intelligence archives were opened up and proved that Hiss had indeed been a spy, there were — are — still those who maintained that he was the victim, not the culprit.

The Hiss case is a classic example of the psychology that leads to people holding to an idea so firmly in their mind that, even when it is destroyed by the evidence of reality, they refuse to accept it.

Take those who argue that the threat of Islamist terrorism is somehow exaggerated. The evidence of such terror, and the real threats of the terrorists, are simply ignored as if they did not exist because they do not fit in with the worldview of “US bad, antiUS good”. The denial of the threat posed by an Iranian nuclear bomb is in a similar vein. Existing Iranian terror, and the words of President Ahmadinejad, are simply brushed aside. If the West is always the guilty party then his words and deeds do not fit.

George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The lesson from the Hiss case is that evidence only persuades those who are willing to be persuaded by evidence.

********************

Tomasz Schafernaker, a BBC weatherman, has had to apologise after referring, in a broadcast, to the Western Isles as “Nowheresville”. For goodness’ sake, it is Nowheresville. Its population (22,000) is a third smaller than an average gate at Bramall Lane. It is at the far end of the country. Why should its residents be offended by a perfectly accurate description?

**********************

I got engaged a fortnight ago. Everything my married friends told me about being engaged has proved accurate. But no one told me the most immediate impact: almost every day has involved at least one celebratory meal or drink and it is impossible not to put on weight.

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The following piece of mine appears in today's Times:

I’m mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. If I hear another person refer to me as a “ Times contributor”, I am going to explode with anger. When Matthew Parris writes, he does not write for me. When Alice Miles writes, she does not write for me. I am Stephen Pollard. No one else speaks for me.

The last straw was walking into a restaurant and being greeted as Mr Finkelstein. So what if we are both fortysomething ginger-haired Jews who write for The Times? Do I not have an identity of my own?

They get the chance to write every week. I have to make do with occasional appearances. I call that crude censorship, just because I hold different views. Surely I should be given the chance to write whenever they do, so that I can make clear to you, dear reader, that we do not all have the same opinions. But the powers that be at The Times won’t let me. They are, clearly, waging a campaign to silence me, by only allowing me to write every other week.

It seems I’m not the only one who is censored in this way. According to a new organisation, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), those Jews who disagree with the policies of the Israeli Government are silenced by the rest of the Jewish community. As Brian Klug, one of the founders of IJV, writes: “Individual dissenting voices get lost or drowned out when weighty bodies (like the Board of Deputies or the Chief Rabbi) appear to speak on behalf of all Jews in Britain. It is the combination of these two factors that closes down a debate that should be open.”

Looking at the signatories to IJV’s founding statement, one can see what he means about voices being drowned out. There’s a bloke called Harold Pinter. No idea who he is or what he thinks about anything. There’s another one called Stephen Fry. Who is he? He seems to be wholly absent from the TV and newspapers. And there’s a Professor called Eric Hobsbawm. Some kind of historian, apparently. Never heard of him. Never read a word of his in the newspapers.

Anyway, Googling the Pinter chap, it turns out that he’s a playwright. Some of his plays have titles such as Old Times and The Homecoming, so he appears to be some kind of nostalgic Tory.

Forgive me for labouring the point, but really! There has never been a shortage of preposterous arguments emanating from intelligent minds, but few match the idea that Jewish opponents of the Israeli Government are somehow denied access to the media to put their point across.

IJV are far from the only people whose viewpoint somehow manages both to dominate the media but who also complain that their voices are squeezed out of it. Pinter barely has to think an anti Western thought and it’s splashed across every newspaper. Indeed, I do not recall a shortage of coverage when he wished it to be known that he was joining the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. Should there be other genocidal butchers he wishes to defend, I have no doubt it will be duly, and prominently, reported.

IJV’s complaint is simply a variation on the recurring theme of those whose shtick is that they are somehow brave dissenters against an overwhelming consensus. Whenever one reads the words “political correctness” it’s now more often than not in the context of a lamentation that it is impossible to stand up to the growing dominance of political correctness. That such a complaint is made in a weekly 1,000 word column in the national press usually escapes the notice of the writer. I think the correct term is “unintentional irony”.

In The Wicked Son, David Mamet’s new book on anti-Semitism, he describes a version of this trick as the Hot Hen’s Kiss – when proof is manufactured to buttress a belief that flies in the face of objective reality. Take the supposed evidence of those who claim that Shakespeare did not write “his” plays. He had little formal education, little exposure to the court and had not travelled. So he could not have written with the breadth and scope that the plays necessitate. To prove this, they cite a secret code devised by Francis Bacon, which is comprised of As and Bs. Examining Shakespeare’s works, they claim to find a similar code, which reveals the hidden word SASSOHHKINTE – an anagram for SHAKS IS NOT HE. Bingo!

The same letters, however, also read A HOT HEN’S KISS – proving nothing other than the willingness of those who wish to prove a point to distort objective reality to further their cause.

Those whose views dominate the media – that Israel is a criminal state, that Western foreign policy is the cause of terrorism, you know the sort of thing – but then complain their voices are never heard are classic Hot Hen Kissers. Their version of the “Shakespeare didn’t write his plays” trope is “we are silenced”. And their equivalent of the “evidence” of the Francis Bacon code is to point out the number of pieces written by those who take a different view from them. Neither proves anything.

Far from being silenced, the likes of IJV get, if anything, a disproportionate amount of space – just as do those such as Harold Pinter who believe that Slobodan Milosevic was a peace-loving leader concerned only with the material betterment of his people, rather than a genocidal butcher.

The truth, as any successful editor will tell, is that diversity sells. Yes, people like to have their prejudices confirmed. But they also like to be challenged, and to have a different take on the usual roster of subjects. Dull conformity is, well . . . dull.

Stephen Pollard is chairman of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, a new think-tank that will be launched soon

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Quote of the day, from an International Herald Tribune piece on the rise of Viagra in Spain:

"Now, she added, "I have sex six times a day, but I do miss going to the opera."

At last, someone has put in words what I have long felt: I hate Macs:

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

UPDATE: Lord above. When one links to a jolly piece and endorses it, a reasonable assumption might be that one shares its jolly sentiments. I don't hate Macs in the sense that I hate antisemites or racists. I don't actually care that much.

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Well that's my March ruined:

Channel 4 has postponed transmission of its "wank week" programming in a bid to avoid further controversy in the aftermath of the Celebrity Big Brother racism row. The network's short season of three late night documentaries about masturbation was to have been broadcast next month, but has now been taken out of the schedule.

Looks like I'll have to find another way of entertaining myself.

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My day has been something like this.

The latest thing has been putting £40 cash on my Oystercard last night, getting on a bus this morning and having it record that I have only 90 pence on it. And when I then go back to the station where I put the money on, being told that it is not possible that I added £40 as the system cannot fail. In other words, I am a liar.

It's only the second time I have used cash to top it up. Usually I use a credit card online, but I couldn't log in when I tried last night. Why do I never use cash? Because the last time I did, some 18 months ago, I stuck a fiver in, the machine said it was recorded and...when I went to use it, it had no record of the fiver.

Have other Londoners had a similar experience using cash to top up their Oyster?

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This piece of mine appears in today's Times:

When it comes to self-advancement, there is no interest group that comes close to the British Medical Association. When trade union officials speak, we know what they are up to. They are trying to increase their influence and power. And we judge the sense of what they say accordingly.

The BMA is, except in one crucial respect, no different. It is like any other trade union, with the same overriding motivation: to increase its influence and power. The crucial difference, however, is that when the prefix “Doctor” is attached to a name, we lose our critical faculties. We assume that anything emanating from the BMA is disinterested and motivated only by the desire to increase the sum of human good.

Often, this is obfuscated by our lack of medical knowledge. We have to take on trust the recommendations of experts. But just occasionally, the transfer of money into doctors’ hands — which the BMA exists to pursue — is made blatant.

There is no clearer example of this than the report it issued on Tuesday. Problem gambling, it said, should be treated on the NHS like any other “illness”.

You can safely ignore the bulk of the report, designed to put the fear of God into us about gambling and the horrific prospect — in the BMA’s eyes — of the Gambling Act giving human beings the ability to decide for themselves how to spend their own money.

The real purpose of the report was revealed in the words of Vivienne Nathanson, the BMA’s head of science and ethics: “The BMA is concerned that there are insufficient treatment facilities available.”

So £10 million should be spent through the NHS, and another £10 million on campaigns against gambling. To translate: hand over your money to us now.

The BMA is only able to make this demand with a straight face because we have been hoodwinked into the idea that it our duty to make good other people’s character flaws.

I gamble. At least once a week, I log in to one of the 15 bookmakers sites with which I have an account and place a sum varying from £5 to £50 on the horses. I have no idea if I am an addict. I know only that I have enjoyed it since — horror! — childhood, and it does me no harm at all.

Maybe one day I will go crazy and put £5,000 on a horse. Maybe I’ll put £50,000 on and lose. Maybe I’ll bet another £50,000 to recoup my losses, take out a second mortgage and lose again. Maybe I’ll lose everything. And — there’s no maybe about this — it’ll be no one else’s fault, and no one else’s duty to help me but my own.

Life is full of choices about how to behave and, as Anna Karenina learnt, actions have consequences. If you can’t gamble safely, don’t. Or suffer the effects. It’s that simple.

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I'm back from a week in the US. And what a week to be there. The week when, of course, David Beckham signed for LA Galaxy.

You think I'm joking? I was astonished by the level of coverage in a country where 'soccer' is a minority pursuit. Not only was it splashed across the front page of the New York Times, it was high up on the network TV bulletins, the local TV stations (this in New York!) and the breakfast shows.

There could be no further proof that Beckham is no longer a footballer, but is a free-standing brand.

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This Notebook of mine appears in today's Times:

How ignorant are you? Not how stupid; that’s something very different. I doubt that you’re stupid, since you have the discernment to read The Times. But you are definitely ignorant.

We are all ignorant. Even Oliver Kamm, my colleague on these pages, who appears to be able to recall with total accuracy the contents of every book ever published, has his blind spots. You will wait forever for a column by him on the influence of Rinus Michels’s Dutch “total football”.

Ignorance is not always something to be ashamed of. I am, for instance, almost wholly ignorant of any pop music composed since the 1970s. I am not proud of this; but I am certainly not ashamed, since it makes no difference whatsoever to my life.

There are, however, some aspects of my ignorance of which I am deeply ashamed: science, for instance, is a closed book. The older I get, the more I realise the necessity of a grounding in science for even a basic understanding of the world. And the more I regret not having paid attention at school and having, as an accurate biology report, D for quality, E for effort, “simply not interested”.

But it’s quite another thing to revel in ignorance. Jade Goody, a former Big Brother contestant, has made a multimillion-pound fortune as a result of her one recognisable characteristic — ignorance. Ms Goody established her credentials by asking: “Where is East Angular, is it abroad?” Yes, her fans were laughing at, not with, her. But Ms Goody has had the last laugh. She is back, this time as a millionaire, in the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother.

She has competition now, however. In the words of one newspaper, she is “set to clash in a battle of the bimbos” with glamour model Danielle Lloyd. Asked if Winston Churchill was a rapper, a US president, a prime minister or a king, Ms Lloyd replied: “Wasn’t he the first black president of America? There’s a statue of him near me — that’s black.”

But not everything Ms Goody says should be laughed at. She is capable, albeit unintentionally, of profound utterances. Last week, she said: “I’m the 25th most influ-inflin-inf-influential person in the world. I don’t even know what the word means.”

I stopped laughing at Ms Goody when I realised that, in a society in which Ms Goody is a millionaire icon, she is frighteningly right.

*************************************************

Talking of ignorance, where would we be without Guardian columnists? My old boss, Peter Shore, the late Labour Cabinet minister, used to read the Daily Express every morning just to get angry. I prefer The Guardian. Yesterday Zoe Williams informed us that “there is no precedent for a country to be diamond (or petroleum) rich and not spend the rest of its history bogged down in civil and/or external war.” I suppose that she has never heard of those two obscure countries, the US and the UK.

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This site - www.katemiddletonfans.com - is simply beyond wonderful:

Kate Middleton, born with her real name Catherine Middleton, is the current girlfriend of the prestigious Prince William of Wales. She was born and raised in the small town of Buckleberry in the county of Berkshire in the southern area of the country of England. Her father is Michael Middleton who is a business man in England. Along with her mother Carole, both parents own the company “Party Pieces” which as the name suggests, sell party supplies. She also has a younger sister named Pippa and a brother named James.

As for her education, she attended Marlborough College which is a public British boarding school nearby Berkshire County in the county of Wiltshire. She was a very good student in college. She got eleven General Certificate of Secondary Education! These certificates certify various courses a student has passed very strenuous tests in. Not only did she do that, but of these eleven certificates, three of them were at the A level.

In 2001, she was a student at the University of St. Andrews in the Fife, Scotland. It was here at St. Andrews where she met her sweetheart Prince William of Wales. At first they were just friends. Then in 2003, she broke up with her then boyfriend and befriended William. They have been a couple ever since. They were seen as a couple for the first time on a ski trip to Switzerland. Although she was originally a small time girl, she knows, because of her relationship with William she has had a lot of attention from the media. She aspires to one day make a clothing company and design the clothing herself.

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Do read this Richard Cohen column about Monica Lewinsky, which is indeed thoughtful and humane, as Daniel Finkelstein puts it.

(1)

How's this for some public sector 'sod the public' attitude:

I have a couple of tickets for Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells tonight. It turns out that I am now unable to go. The performance is long since sold out and there is certain to be a queue for returns. So I rang the box office to ask if they would accept them as that. Yes, providing you bring them to us. Well, I said, that's why I can't come - I am physically unable to get to Sadler's Wells theatre today or tonight.

No, I was told, we need them back. 'Sometimes we accept faxes, I'll check with my manager.' She did. He said no, for whatever arbitrary reason.

I don't even care about the money, I said. It just seems stupid that a performance which has had rave reviews when it premiered, which is sold out, and which will have lots of people disappointed in the returns queue, will have at least two empty seats. You can have them back for free, and make twice the money on the seats.

'No, I've told you our policy', she said. Except of course that it isn't, since 30 seconds before she had told me they sometimes accept a fax in lieu of physically taking the tickets back.

In itself it's a minor story. I will lose my money and, more importantly, two people who have queued for returns will miss the chance to see a wonderful performance of a great opera. But it says so much about the 'sod the public' attitide of the so-called public sector.

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Just heard a spokesman for First Direct say they are going to charge some customers because they want them "to deepen their relationship with us".

I love corporate speak.

Mind you, I don't get the fuss. First Direct is a business. Anyone who banks with First Direct is free to leave them if they don't like their terms. And do you know what? Forget all the worries about changing banks being an enormous hassle. It's so easy. I used to be with First Direct. They were so astonishingly incompetent that I did just what I've suggested above other people should do if they don't like their new terms. I left. It was a doddle. My new bank handled everything, and did it flawlessly.

So if you don't like being charged by First Direct, either keep your balance over £1500, or leave.

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In the great scheme of things, this ranks somewhere close to bottom, but...

Sometimes you read a piece and you wonder why the writer couldn't even be bothered to do a Google search. This Guardian piece is based on David Walliams (of the dreadfully unfunny Little Britain fame) taking a role in a new Stephen Poliakoff film. And its premise is entirely, 100 per cent, wrong. "David Walliams is to take his first serious dramatic role in a film by Stephen Poliakoff". From that observation the writer goes on to warn of previous comedians who have had the urge to go straight.

Except for just one thing. It's not Walliams' first straight role. In fact, it's entirely the wrong way round. Walliams is a straight actor who has gone into comedy (well, he previously did both).

As I say, in the scheme of errors by the Guardian it's entirely trivial. But oh so typical in being based on an entirely false premise.

This is good. But I have an even better name story.

One of my best friends was once referred to the leading specialist in his (medical) field. His name was Dr Klingon. He was, my friend tells me, astoundingly ugly.

That alone would be amusing. What lifts it into the realms of the too-good-to-be-true - but nonetheless completely true - is that he was not just a Klingon but the Klingon. Dr Klingon, you see, had been a classmate of Gene Roddenberry. The Star Trek creator disliked him intensely, and when it came to naming the Federation's loathsome enemy, he knew exactly where to turn.

So my friend has been treated by both a real and a fictional Klingon.

Never let it be said that I don't give you the information which really matters.

Here's a good sign of the times. I was standing by the lifts in John Lewis this afternoon, and there was an elderly couple in front of me. They were guessing which lift would come first, and the husband said: "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by his toe. If he hollers let him go, eeny, meeny, miny, moe" and pointed to the centre lift.

There must have been half a dozen of us there. We all looked at each in breathtaken horror, and then at the chap who had said it. He looked utterly baffled as to why people were looking at him with such disgust.

A woman said to him: "Don't you know that's incredibly offensive?".

"I beg your pardon", he replied with anger, not humility. "Mind your own business".

"It is my business. It's the business of everyone here. Every one here is disgusted. If you are going to go around using words like nigger, you can expect people to take you up on it".

To which he replied "Bugger off", and walked away with his wife.

I repeat the story simply because, for all the gloomy news about racial tensions and race relations, an ordinary, random group of people (who were, I should add, all white) now find the use of the word nigger disgusting. It may not signal much, but it is progress of a kind.

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Gordon Brown says that carbon trading could lead to 100,000 new jobs. Don't you just hate those entirely spurious figures that get bandied about? Why not 98,000? Why not 102,000? Truth is it's a guess, and no more than that. He might as well have said 100,876 new jobs, for all the idea he or anyone can have.

One has to hope - I say this not yet having seen the Stern report - that the basis of the rest of this morning's figures isn't equally spurious.

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I think this has to be close to the top of the list of most boring news stories ever published:

TV star taken ill

Trinny Woodall, the TV presenter, has been told to rest after being taken ill. Woodall, 41, was flying back to Britain from a promotional trip to New York with screen partner Susannah Constantine when she complained of dizziness and nausea. Woodall had suffered from bronchitis before the trip, a spokeswoman said.

Yes, that's the sum of it. D-list TV person has bronchitis.

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I would say this is beyond belief, were it not entirely believable.

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This piece of mine appears in today's Daily Mail:

When Ted Rogers offered a booby prize to contestants on his Saturday night game show, 3-2-1, I’m sure he didn’t think that in a few years time the Dusty Bin – which losers took home with them – would mark another stage in the encroachment into privacy and freedom in Great Britain.

But yesterday it was revealed that some 500,000 wheelie bins across the country have been fitted with electronic ‘spy bugs’. The gadgets – which have mainly been installed in secret, and with no consultation – record information about the contents of each bin, and the waste habits of individual addresses. The devices have a unique serial number which can be scanned when the bin is tipped into a refuse lorry. That information is then transmitted to a central database.

The plan is that within two or three years this technology will be used across the country.

The official explanation is that such information will boost ‘efficiency’. Preposterously, one explanation given for its implementation is that it will settle disputes between neighbours about the ownership of wheelie bins – hardly, one would think, an issue of such scale that it necessitates such a major erosion of individual privacy.

The reality, however, is very different. Yesterday, the Institute for Public Policy Research - a think tank which provides many of the ideas adopted by the Labour government – proposed that rubbish collection should move to a "pay as you throw" system. According to the IPPR’s Director, Nick Pearce, "The government should give local authorities powers to charge for collecting non-recyclable waste”.

It does not take a psychic to realise what is happening here. Whenever the justification of ‘efficiency’ is used in justifying a policy, make no mistake that there is always a hidden agenda. To government, all individual behaviour is a hindrance to the smooth running of bureaucracy. Things would run far more ‘efficiently’ if we acted precisely as we were instructed by officials who know best.

In this case, it is obvious what is going on. The government is preparing to take refuse collection outside of the normal council tax and to impose extra charges – a new rubbish tax.

But in some ways that is the least of it. When one looks across the whole range of government activity, a pattern is clearly emerging. Our privacy – and thus, inevitably, our freedom – is increasingly under attack.

Take driving. Britain has become the first country on the planet which is to record the movement of every car on the road. Even North Korea does not hold such records. Using a national network of cameras, a huge database is to be built up to enable to the police and security services to trace the journeys of every car – and, of course, every person who drives. Held on a central database alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, the computer will hold details of 35 million daily number-plate "reads".

Add that o the existing behaviour of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the worrying potential becomes clear. We already know that the DVLA sells the names and home addresses of motorists on its drivers' database to all sorts of people – including, as was revealed last year, to convicted criminals.

The justification given for the number-plate database is – of course - that it will aid ‘efficiency’ in the fight against terror and other crime. No-one wants to jeopardise that. But those who have lived under the tyranny of totalitarian regimes will recognise the usual words, and the usual justifications. All encroachments on privacy and freedom are justified on the grounds that they are part of a fight against crime.

Taken together, the information which government agencies already hold on us amounts to the most detailed and personal records of our behaviour ever maintained. Our innocence or guilt has nothing to do with it. Our lives are now recorded, with ever increasing detail, by government agencies. And the scope and scale of such records are growing.

The monster of all such databases will be the National Identity Register, set up under the Identity Cards Act which was passed earlier this year, to enable the introduction of ID cards.

There is already almost no part of lives which is not part of a government database – even supposedly private consultations. The computerisation of the NHS may, so far, have been a chaotic – and hugely expensive - farce, but when it finally comes together then our medical records will be maintained online. And in October 2004, the then Home Office minister, Hazel Blears, said that there would be a biometric scanner in every doctor's surgery.

That is not all. Last week, a small pilot database scheme in Manchester was hailed as a terrific success. The UK Biobank project is intended to be a DNA database which includes health information and all sorts of lifestyle factors. It has been welcomed as a tool for helping to find cures for killer illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Pooling all relevant information was, we were told, far more ‘efficient’ – that tell-tale word again.

But there is a more worrying way of looking at it. There is already another national DNA database: the Police National DNA Database. That one contains DNA fingerprints and human tissue samples not merely of convicted criminals, but also of innocent people - and even of innocent children.

On their own, almost all of these databases appear to have a justification in terms of ‘efficiency’. The worry, however, is when the information which they contain is combined – an awesomely frightening prospect of the state’s power and knowledge of every part of our lives.

The government argues that this sort of fear is nonsense. Legislation, it says, stops this sort of cross-fertilisation of information.

But anyone who has faith in such self-denying powers must have a very naïve view of the state. Take such apparently benign databases as the UK Biobank. Can anyone seriously believe that, in time, its operators will not start to suggest that it makes sense for them to have access to the National Indentity Register, or even the Police National DNA Database – so that they can do their job, as they will put it, more ‘efficiently’?

And, even if it is not done legally, there is simply no such thing as a totally secure database. When I was researching my biography of the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, a very senior member of the security services told me that there was some critical security information about ensuring Home Secretaries’ and Prime Ministers’ safety which was not put on computer anywhere. The information needed to be as near 100 per cent secure as possible, and in the last resort all information on a computer was vulnerable.

Each time we allow the state to keep a further record of our movements, our habits, or our health, we get nearer to the day when, one day, we will wake up and realise that the state is no longer our servant. Instead, it will be our master. And, knowing everything there is to know about us, there will be no escape.

This piece of mine appears in today's Daily Telegraph:

There is a useful rule of thumb in life that has yet to let me down: almost anything suggested by a management academic is best consigned to the bin.

It's a good job the rule is so reliable, because otherwise I would have been admitted to the Priory Clinic long ago. Gayle Porter, a professor of management at Rutgers University business school in the US, says use of a BlackBerry can be as "damaging to the mental health of the worker" as "chemical or substance addictions".

Employees, she argues, will soon be able to sue their bosses for causing them to become dependent on their BlackBerry - a gadget nicknamed the "crackberry" because it is so addictive - by making them stay in touch with the office.

I have a rather straightforward view of technology: if it makes my life easier, I use it. That's why I'm typing this on a laptop keyboard, rather than scratching at parchment with a quill.

And that's how I see my BlackBerry. In the dark days before this miracle of technology - mobile phone, e-mail and internet all in one - was invented, I was indeed something of an addict. If I was in an office, I was a man possessed. I could barely walk past someone else's computer without asking them if I could quickly check my e-mail. Now I am calmness personified. I can go for a walk or indulge in a matinee, safe in the knowledge that should work beckon, I can respond immediately via my BlackBerry. I am always contactable. And all the more relaxed.

Rarely have I read a more wrong-headed sentence than Prof Porter's: "The fast and relentless pace of technology-enhanced work environments creates a source of stimulation that may become addictive." No! To have a Blackberry about one's person is to be tranquil, serene, unflustered. That, perhaps, is the difference between management academics and people who manage their work in the real world.

Far from being stressed by my BlackBerry, the problems start only when I don't have it on me. Last year I went away for three weeks with my then girlfriend. At the outset, she made clear her prime rule: my BlackBerry was to remain at home. By her reasoning, the point of a holiday is to relax, and since my BlackBerry was my main tool connecting me with work, it was inimical to that purpose.

This, of course, is the same fundamental mistake made by Prof Porter. When I am parted from my BlackBerry, I twitch. I fret. All I can think about is what I might be missing; what disaster I will discover when I am finally reunited with it. And that is how I react when I am without it for a few hours. For three weeks? That's what I call stress. So we compromised. I could bring it with me, but not turn it on.

Any of the 5.5 million BlackBerry users would know, of course, that having an unconnected BlackBerry would have been even more traumatic than not having one at all. So I cheated. First thing in the morning, I would sneak into the bathroom and press the "on" button. And every morning I was reassured. The result? A relaxed me, an unsuspecting girlfriend, a holiday success. I may be a BlackBerry addict, but it's a habit I've got under control.

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I loved this delicious story:

A 21-year-old US man ended up in hospital after spending two hours trapped in a vat of chocolate, police in Wisconsin said on Friday.

The man said he had climbed into the tank before becoming trapped waist-deep in chocolate, police chief Randy Berner told AP news agency.

However, other reports suggest he was stirring the chocolate when he fell in.

Rescue workers and staff at the Debelis Corporation used cocoa-butter to thin out the chocolate and pull him free.

"It was pretty thick. It was virtually like quicksand," Captain Berner said.

"It's the first time I've ever heard of anything like this," he added.

The worker said his ankles were sore after the incident, and he was taken to a local hospital where he is recovering.

The accident involved dark chocolate.

Nowhere does it answer the one question I want answered: why? The man said he had climbed into the tank before becoming trapped waist-deep in chocolate... OK. But why did he climb in? And did no one watching think it, ahem, odd?

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And this is truly inspired:

July 17, 2006 -- Hans Peter Niesward, from the Department of Gravitationsphysik at the ISA in Munich, says we can stop global warming in one fell swoop — or, more accurately, in one big jump.

The slightly disheveled professor states his case on WorldJumpDay.org, an Internet site created to recruit 600,000,000 people to jump simultaneously on July 20 at 11:39:13 GMT in an effort to shift Earth's position.

Niesward claims that on this day "Earth occupies one of the most fragile positions in its orbits for the last 100 years." According to the site, the shift in orbit will "stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogeneous climate."

The Man Who Wasn't There

Niesward's theory has at least one major flaw: Niesward doesn't really exist. He is a character created by Torsten Lauschmann, a German-born artist living in Scotland. Lauschmann — a live performer, filmmaker, DJ and photographer — may be best known for his work "Misshapen Pearl," described as a "phenomenological investigation of the streetlamp's function in our consumer society."

A friend's just emailed me this, from Holy Moly:

My friend lives two doors down from Patricia Hewitt. On Saturday night, my friend had a little party that involved a jar of liquid LSD, a lot of tree-climbing in the back garden and raucous laughter.

Eventually, at 8am, after hours of hilarity in the garden, Mrs Hewitt threw open her bedroom window and bawled, `I think, we've been very patient, we haven't phoned the council yet. Now can you please all fucking shut up?'

She's gone up quite a few hundred percent in my estimation.

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Sorry for the sporadic posting. Too much work, too little time! Things should be a bit easier for the next few weeks.

In line with my statement on the left, that this blog is for all the things which need to be said, I point you to Euan Ferguson in this week's Observer:

Worst, of course, of all: horrid three-quarter length horrid khaki horrid shorts designed (presumably) to be worn by men who can't be bothered to carry around all the time a big placard saying 'Don't touch me because I have nasty twig-legs and no sense whatsoever of style or decorum or courtesy or humour and will bore you for hours about my caring feminist side while sliding surreptitious glances at your nice brown tummy and all the time pretending to be clever despite that being patent nonsense because I am wearing these giveaway horrid twig-leg shorts.'

Hear, hear. Such things (it is an insult to all that is decent in this world to refer to them as trousers) are truly horrendous. On women, they can look incredibly sexy. On men, they are shorthand for: I am a prat.

I have a number of golden rules, such as never trust a man with a beard. Never give the time of day to a man in three-quarter length shorts is right at the top of the list.

PS Apologies for the comments being overrun with spam. I can't cope with deleting them all - there were over 50 left yesterday alone.

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Today's bank holiday is the most honest day of the year. It is not a pretend religious holiday, such as Easter. It is not a supposedly political holiday, such as May Day. It is simply what it is: a day off work. The truth is that national holidays are now fundamentally dishonest. Only a minority of the population regards Christmas as anything other than a gorge-fest. An even smaller number treats Easter as something beyond a four-day break.

I write this in New York, where today is Memorial Day, ostensibly the day when the nation pays its respects to soldiers who have given their lives to defend the freedoms embodied in the US. There could be no worthier cause for such a commemoration.

In most respects the US has a far greater sense of the respect owed to the fallen than do we. Our Remembrance Day is patchily observed and, other than in formal ceremonies, only by the generation old enough to have direct memory of the Second World War. There has been a modest resurgence of the two-minute silence, but stand on any street at 11am and the modesty of that resurgence will be all too apparent.

Even in the US, where veterans carry political weight and patriotism is regarded not with shame but pride, Memorial Day is now little more than another holiday. It is more widely recognised as the semi-official start of summer than as the day of remembrance for the fallen. Even more, it is the start of the summer sales.

It might be that there are few more appropriate ways to celebrate the sacrifices made in defence of our freedom than exercising that very freedom through shopping. But I would be surprised if that was the motivation behind the scrums at Bloomingdales this weekend.

Just as the occurrence of national holidays on days of Christian religious significance is now little more than tradition, so even secular commemorations are merely excuses, rather than reasons, for holidays. We do such occasions a disservice by pretending that they matter to us as anything more than days off work. We should give up the pretence, take holidays for their own sake, and restore some dignity to the nominal purpose of existing national holidays.

Instead of paying them little more than lip service, we should leave it to individuals, families and communities to celebrate them as they see fit — holiday or not.

UPDATE: Yes, I know. Bad phraseology on my part. I should have written that no one even bothers pretending that today's Whitsun holiday is anything other than a day off work.

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(via Harry's Place.)

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If I can get a green card, I’m off to live in the US. Forget our rapacious Chancellor’s record tax burden; it seems that paying tax in the US is entirely voluntary.

If only I’d known this years ago. To think how much more money I’d now have, instead of handing it over to the Inland Revenue for the Government to squander.

It seems it’s not only in America where taxation is a matter of choice. The same goes in Germany and Switzerland.

You’re wondering how this has escaped your attention. Like me, you probably find it hard to credit that Americans, Germans and Swiss decide for themselves if they want to pay tax.

Trust me. It’s information that comes from the highest authority — David T Johnson, Minister at the US Embassy in London.

The US Embassy, you see, is refusing to pay at least £270,000 in congestion charges that its staff have racked up. The German and Swiss Embassies are similarly refusing.

The reason, according to Mr Johnson, is that under the Vienna Convention diplomats do not pay taxes. And, he argues, the congestion charge is a tax. Ipso facto, US Embassy staff do not have to pay it.

Mr Johnson speaks on behalf of his Government. So when I move to the US I will simply put a line through my tax return and write that I have decided not to pay anything. I’ve been told by the US Government that taxes are voluntary.

If the US Embassy considers that the congestion charge is a tax, after all, then it must believe that taxes are a matter of choice.

In Britain, we do not decide for ourselves if we want to pay a tax. Taxes are compulsory. If we don’t pay, we end up in jail.

But no one has to pay the congestion charge. It’s simply the price to be paid, much like paying for a swim in the local pool. No one has to drive their car into the zone. If you don’t want to pay, don’t make the journey. Or take public transport.

The US is the finest country on earth, a nation that has advanced the good of humanity more than any other in history. But those of us who defend it against the rising tide of anti-Americanism are too often reduced to tearing our hair out in frustration at its bone-headed diplomacy.

A word of advice: stop putting forward specious arguments. Pay up now!

UPDATE: Just to clear up one point made in the comments, I do of course realise that diplomats pay taxes in their home country. I might be stupid, but I'm not that stupid.

And you might think I'm wrong, but my omission of that statement makes not the slightest difference to my argument that the Congestion Charge is not a tax but a charge, and that diplomats should pay it like anyone else who uses a facility for which a charge is made.

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The open thread at the Daily Ablution today has an intriguing new game:

Dinner Party Conversational Gambits (or 8 Things You Should Say To Liberal-Leftists)

1. If there was one dominant culture in Britain, life would be easier because we would all know where we were.
2. The poorer health outcomes of the lower socio-economic groups are largely a result of their own choices.
3. The present high levels of taxation and regulation in the UK diminish self-reliance and discourage job-creation, and the massive increases in public expenditure have bought few improvements in services.
4. Countries with substantial private sector contributions to healthcare have superior health provision to the UK with its state monopoly.
5. Prison works and represents excellent value for money.
6. If it is occurring, there is not much that we can do about global warming.
7. Even feminist fashionistas dress to please men, though they refuse to acknowledge it.
8. Islamic migration into the UK should be severely curtailed until there is clear evidence that the Muslims already here are integrating into British society.

As it happens, I have a tried and tested gambit which has guaranteed results. A little while ago, a friend and I had terrific fun at a dinner party winding up an archetypal Californian lefty-liberal with the assertion that the Golden Arches is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. Specifically, that one can enter a McDonalds anywhere on the planet and get exactly the same product, guaranteed the same quality and taste, whether it be on the battlefields of Iraq, or in Moscow, Hampstead or Delhi.

Such an assertion, whilst deliberately designed to wind up said liberal-leftsts, has the added advantage of being entirely and demonstrably true.

UPDATE: Someone has emailed pointing out a howler above. You can't buy one in Delhi. Oops. You know what I mean, though. Let's say Melbourne instead. Or anywhere else McDonalds operates.

As it happens, I've probably only ever eaten a dozen McDonalds in my life. I don't like fast food at all. It's The French Laundry, The Fat Duck, El Bulli or nowhere for me. The point is though that it's a stunning feat of humanity to make them available for those people who do, across the globe.

You do get some superb insights into economics listening to phone-ins. I've just heard this:

I work in the public sector and my pension costs me 12% of my wages per month. Not per year like the private sector, but per month.

Goodness me. What a scandal.

Jamie Whyte (author of the wonderful Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking) has a terrific piece in today's Times:

When last employed, I sold my employer five of my 28 days’ holiday. The price was one week’s pay. It was a perfect deal for me because my work habits made it difficult to distinguish the days I was working from those I was taking off. My salary increased but my efforts did not.

So I was not surprised to read that the European Court of Justice has declared such transactions illegal. Employers must somehow be protected from this kind of exploitation.

Do read the whole piece. But the gist of it is this:

All redistribution of wealth should be in cash. There are today no state supermarkets or state tailors. The unemployed are given cash with which to buy food and clothes. They may choose how to allocate their wealth between food and clothes, and they may also decide what they will eat and wear. Why not give them, and everyone else, the same autonomy with respect to education and healthcare.

Left-wing friends always object to my “all cash” suggestion on the ground that people would spend the money unwisely.

...The objection also reveals an extraordinary admiration of politicians. Is Mr Brown so vastly superior to you in morality and intellect that, sitting in his office in Westminster, knowing nothing of your circumstances or preferences, he can decide better than you how to allocate your spending?

Back from a week in Israel to the LibDems in chaos, first over Mark Oaten and now over Simon Hughes.

I loathe Hughes. I think his politics are awful and I find his manner intensely annoying. He fought a contemptible campaign against Peter Tatchell in the Bermondsey byelection.

But even more than I loathe Hughes, I loathe the repugnant gloating and accusations which have followed his 'admission' that he is gay.

Yes, he lied. And lying is wrong. But he lied in response to an a question which he should never have had to answer in the first place. It is no one's business but his own whether or not he is gay.

As if the reaction to the Oaten story - which has destroyed the career of an able man and has, one imagines, probably destroyed a family, too - was not bad enough, the reaction to Hughes' decision to out himself leaves a foul taste on my return.

The inimitable Peter Briffa.

I admit nothing of the sort. I am proud that I hate New Year’s Eve. It is quite beyond me how any sentient human being could actually enjoy it.
When Sartre wrote that hell is other people, he clearly had in mind one specific gathering — that which takes place annually on December 31.

Despite the fact that every year it serves up the same combination of discomfort, expense and misery, come the following year people behave as if the entire wretched experience has been wiped from their memory and look forward to it once again as the greatest party night of the year.

Almost certainly you will know — at most — half a dozen people at the party. As midnight strikes, you must celebrate joyously with strangers. Yes, I can think of nothing I would rather do than be pushed into a conga around the room in the middle of the night with people to whom I have never spoken.

Then there is the sheer bloody pointlessness of the thing. Why is it happening? Celebrating the forward movement of time might just as well be done at 03.47 on April 15 or at any other random moment.

It’s not just parties, of course. Restaurants are even worse. A bog-standard bistro near my flat, where a toasted cheese sandwich normally costs me a fiver, is charging £75 a head “including a glass of champagne at midnight”.

There is clearly a large market of idiots. The evening is fully booked.

I admit that I like: being in bed when you lot are partying.

My proudest moment was going to bed at 10.30pm on December 31 1999. I’ll do the same thing this year. There are few greater pleasures than walking the empty streets with a clear head on the morning of January 1 as the rest of the country nurses its hangover.

Smug, me? You bet.

Well, that's over for another year. Now we can start having some fun.
Is there anyone — anyone, that is, who is older than about 10 — who actually enjoys Christmas Day? I don’t mean enjoying slouching in front of the TV, or eating too much; there’s nothing unique to Christmas Day about doing that. I mean the rest of it.

Can you really say that yesterday was a day you’d like to repeat? That if someone waved a magic wand, you would like to do it all over again today. And tomorrow. And the day after. And then the day after that.

Christmas Day is something to be endured, not enjoyed. It is the single most boring day of the year. And that’s making the best of it. Almost everything is shut. The television and radio are full of dross. There is no sport.

Yes, that presents a great opportunity to read or listen to some music. But even they are opportunities denied. If your family celebrates Christmas, then absenting yourself for the day to go and read a book is simply not on. If you are alone on Christmas Day, then even the most engrossing book will struggle to raise your spirits above the message which blares everywhere, that Christmas Day is a day for families.

And if, like me, your family has never celebrated Christmas — in my case because we are Jewish — then, however much you will relish the opportunity to catch up on a long-delayed book, you will nonetheless eventually get depressed by the sheer gloom of a day where nothing — nothing — is happening.

I used to live in Bayswater, a part of London where there is a large non-Christian population. Almost every shop that wasn’t part of a national chain was open, and the streets on Christmas Day were like any other day. They were the only Christmas Days I have ever enjoyed.

Boxing Day, on the other hand, has everything. Some of the best sport of the year — a full football programme and fabulous horse racing (I’ll be watching my horse, Major Miller, run at Towcester in the 1pm).

If you like shopping, today’s the day. And if you don’t want to spend the day with those wretched relatives you only see once a year for the very good reason that you can’t stand them — you don’t have to.

If a magic wand could repeat Boxing Day every day — now you’re talking.

I'm not sure what the moral of this horrfyingly simple identity theft is, other than: crikey.

If you haven't already read it, do have a look at Oliver Kamm's latest Times piece, on good and bad English.

Writing of the Plain English Campaign, he says:

Every year undeserved attention is paid to a group that might more accurately be called the Obscurantism Organisation. Its gobbledegook award is not about English usage so much as a populist suspicion of ideas. Past winners include Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, for a long analysis involving “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns”. The campaigners described it as “truly baffling”, but the joke was on them. Rumsfeld’s statement was intricate but pellucid. The intricacy was intended to be funny, and succeeded.

Quite right. Their 'award' is an annual celebration of stupidity, with its mocking of perfectly formed sentences and ideas. Oliver puts these idiots in their place.

Mark Steyn is on glorious form today:

I was slightly surprised by the number of e-mails I've received in the past 48 hours from Britons aggrieved about the new mega-mosque. To be sure, it would be heartening if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced plans to mark the Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practising or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews.

...[S]ignatories to the Kyoto treaty are meeting in Montreal this week - maybe in the unused Olympic stadium - to discuss "progress" on "meeting" their "goals". Canada remains fully committed to its obligation to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by six per cent of its 1990 figure by 2008.

That's great to know, isn't it? So how's it going so far?

Well, by the end of 2003, Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions were up 24.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, how are things looking in the United States? As you'll recall, in a typically "pig-headed and blinkered" (Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming "uninhabitable" (Michael Meacher), "Polluter Bush" (Daily Express), "this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician" (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the "Toxic Texan" (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.

...Likewise, those public sector union workers determined to keep their right to retire at 60. I've had many conversations with New Labour types in which my belief in low - if not undetectable - levels of taxation has been cited as evidence of my selfishness. But what's more selfish than spending the last 20 years of your life on holiday and

There are few more sombre events than yesterday’s Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph. And no symbol is more instantly recognisable than the red poppy.

But where once the poppy rightly stood apart as a tribute to those who gave their lives to defend liberty, today it is just one of an almost limitless number of lapel badges. So ubiquitous has the lapel badge and its cousin, the wristband, become that they are now little more than fashion accessories; jewellery that has no meaning other than “I wear, so I care”.

No lapel is now complete without its own attached ready-made statement to the world that its wearer is a deeply caring person. But in the sea of ribbons and bracelets, any message that they might be intended to send has become almost worthless.

Whether it is the red Aids ribbon or the white Make Poverty History bracelet, there are similar fashion statements for every conceivable idea: pancreatic cancer mauve, “youth mentoring” blue, anti-racism violet, child cancer gold, ovarian cancer dark green, “chemical injury awareness” entwined mauve and yellow, spaying and neutering cats brown, multiple myeloma dark red, feminists against dieting turquoise, “genital integrity” (whatever that might be) entwined pink and blue and gambling addiction orange.

That it is impossible for anyone to guess which one of those I have made up is itself a demonstration of just how fatuous such badges are.

In truth, they do not remotely show that their wearers care, least of all that they have any special devotion to the cause of the latest adornment to their lapel. All they make clear is that their wearers are the victims of political fashion and emotional blackmail.

God forbid that, among certain social groupings, one does not wear an Aids ribbon. And heaven forfend that one does not demonstrate one’s support for Make Poverty History.

So prevalent are these badges and wristbands that the act of not wearing one has become a far more eloquent statement — of independence of mind.

Last week David Davis announced that he would target the “wristband generation”. So much for Mr Davis’s claim that he is the unspun candidate. If he means what he says, we must conclude that a Davis-led party would, like the wristband wearers, be vacuous, ignorant, fashion-obsessed, posturing, trend-following and pointless.

From the Indie:

Creeping urbanisation 'could destroy rural England in 30 years'

At least there's some good news around.

A superb column by Alice Miles on the misplaced smugness of so much comment about the US' racial divide revealed by Katrina:

The subtext, and often the main text, of much of the reportage from New Orleans has been what a nasty, divided, unjust place the US has been revealed to be. Nature has overturned its smug certainties and left it reeling. And it strikes me that there is more than a little smugness in the reporting as well. British journalism revelling in racial division the other side of the Atlantic rarely seems to trouble itself to look at the ethnic splits this side of the pond.

What, she asks, if it happened here?

So let’s assume that the worst happens and the east of London is engulfed. Tower Hamlets, Stratford, and in the south, Lambeth would all be awash...

Let’s take a look at Newham, where the Olympic stadiums are being built. Sixty per cent of the population are not white; not far off the 67 per cent African-Americans in New Orleans. A third are Asian; another fifth black. Travel upriver and see the people of Lambeth: more than a quarter are black. In the neighbouring borough of Kensington and Chelsea, that falls to only 7 per cent...And what were we saying about racial ghettos in the United States?

Let us not be complacent about our own society. We pile our social problems into ghettos of our own, which most Britons do not breach. In America, 24.7 per cent of black people live below the poverty line, compared with 8.6 per cent of whites and a national average of 12.7 per cent. In Britain, according to the Office for National Statistics, 68 per cent of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are living in low-income households, and a barely more creditable 49 per cent of black Caribbeans, compared with 21 per cent of whites. They may be measuring different things, but the ratios are similar.

Unemployment among Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black men is three times the rate for white British men. And look at the jobs that they do: one in three Bangladeshi men, according to the 2002-03 labour force survey, are cooks or waiters, compared with one in 100 white British men. Around one in ten black African women is a nurse, compared with around one in 30 whites. Pakistani women are eight times more likely than white British women to be working as packers, bottlers and canners, while Indian women are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to be working as sewing machinists. They may not be living among us, but they feed, drive, clothe and care for us. Wouldn’t it be nice if the country could do the same for them?

...[I]n 2002 in England and Wales, of children born to a mother herself born in the UK, 7.8 per 1,000 die within three months. This rises to 10.5 for mothers born in Bangladesh, 10.6 for mothers born in India, 14.5 for mothers born in Pakistan and 15.4 for mothers born in the Caribbean.

So tell me, again, what do we have to be smug about? I look forward to seeing all those television reporters currently flooding the American South filing earnest reports about Britain’s divided society when they get home.

The Day Today lives and breathes:

James Landale on Ken Clarke, on the Ten O'Clock News

He's a big beast. What kind of a beast is he? He's a leopard. He won't change his spots.

Why do we not have our own ESA? It is imperative that the government introduces an ESA ASAP. IMO. ASAP.

I'd happily pay more tax to finance it.

This, from today's Racing Post, has to be one of the saddest paragraphs I've ever read:

Sandown on Variety Club Day is all about star-spotting, and there will be many a star to spot today.

Floella Benjamin, Bonnie Langford and Anthea Turner's sister Wendy will all be in action on the Esher slopes...

Anthea Turner would be pathetic enough. But it's not even her.

Quote of the day (from a profile of Michael O'Reilly):

Concerns about climate change, O'Leary maintained, are nothing to do with him. He proudly declared that Ryanair intended to increase its emissions of carbon dioxide, adding that if his customers were worried about the environment, his advice was straightforward: "Sell your car and walk."

Ashley Gibbins: hero to us all:

When taxi driver Ashley Gibbins called the helpline of NTL hoping to have broadband installed, he was told that all its operators were busy right now, but if he cared to hold the line his call would be dealt with as soon as possible. So Mr Gibbins held. And held. Then held some more. Eventually, after an hour, Mr Gibbins decided he had had enough. He put the phone down and decided to wreak his revenge.

By chance, Mr Gibbins discovered he could alter NTL's recorded message, and after he'd tinkered with it people seeking help were met with something altogether more blunt.

"Hello, you are through to NTL customer services," they were told. "We don't give a fuck about you, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just fuck off and leave us alone. Get a life."

...The magistrates decided Mr Cleveland's rant was merely offensive, and did not make the "grossly offensive" standard required for prosecution.

Jeremy Paxman, in the Telegraph:

The sight of president Chirac inviting Mr de Villepin to become prime minister of a country which so proudly proclaims its identity as the home of democracy had a wildly comic aspect to it. Talk about old boy networks. Here was one graduate of the École Nationale d'Administration inviting another to form the government of a democracy, when the latter has never gone to the minimal inconvenience of getting himself elected by the public.

De Villepin - yet another Frenchman who believes in the greatness of Napoleon - happens, however, to be the son of a senator.

By my calculations, all of the last four French prime ministers have been products of ENA, apart from the just-departed Mr Raffarin, who was at the very slightly more blokeish École Supérior du Commerce.

By contrast, the last four British prime ministers include two who did not go to university at all, and none who had a parent in the ruling class. The next time some smug, ignorant Frenchman starts to hold forth on the British class structure, you might invite him to ponder this fact.

I passed a fancy schmancy new dvelopment in Stoke Newington this afternoon, with this boast on a billboard:

Architect Designed Flats!

I'd love to see what flats which haven't been designed by an architect looked like.

I have no idea if this is correct, but...wow:

[T]he Star Wars series has made so much money that, were it a country, it would rank 70th in the wealth scale worldwide.

It has made more than the GDPs of 11 African nations put together...

UPDATE: An economist writes:

As a government economist, I feel compelled to point out that GDP is a measure of annual output, whereas Star Wars’ lifetime earnings have accrued over nearly thirty years. I’m sure if you took a median earner in the UK, added up his wages over the last thirty years, and compared it with everyone else’s annual salaries, he’d look quite rich. So what?

God, I love being an economist. It makes you so interesting at parties.

Is the Pope Catholic? Er, yes.

I'm back from my travels. The news is, of course, domintated by the death of the Pope. I am, as regular readers will know, not a Catholic. Nor did I find myself in sympathy with many of Pope John Paul's views. But I have found the quiet dignity of the crowds in Rome very moving.

What a contrast with the grotesque display in this country after the death of the Princess of Wales. Diana was a trivial woman. Her only lasting legacy was in the reaction to her death, a public emoting which demeaned those caught up in what was a form of mass hysteria and which bodes ill for the future, in what it reveals about our national psyche.

The contrast with the behaviour of the crowds in Rome is instructive. The Pope, whatever one's views of his moral dictates, was clearly a towering figure of the past two decades, a man who shaped the world and had a direct influence on many - and in one particular for the good, given his part in the downfall of communism. If ever mass public wailing could be appropriate it would be now, in Rome. But there has been nothing of the sort.

Italians are supposed to be demonstrative, Brits withdrawn. So much for national caricatures.

I'm moderating part of a superb looking conference next Thursday in Brussels: Does the West Know Best?, which looks at how the former Warsaw Pact countries can teach the rest of us a thing or two about reform.

The line up of speakers is first class, with a keynote speech from Ivan Miklos, the Slovak Deputy Prime Minister who is one of the most important and radical reformers in Europe. Add in other speakers of the calibre of Adam Michnik and it's a conference which looks well worth a day in Brussels.

(2)

You might think you know the meaning of genocide, a word that, because of the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, has been ever present in the media this week.

But there are now two words — genocide and “genocide” — that look the same, sound the same and are spelt the same, yet have very different meanings.

Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, 1948, (UNCG) defines genocide as an act committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

The word itself is a recent construct, combining the Greek for group or tribe, genos, with the Latin for killing, cide. It was coined by the jurist Raphael Lemkin, who in his 1944 monograph, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, used the word genocide for the first time to describe the Nazis’ “practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups”. It was Lemkin who was the driving force behind the UNCG.

This meaning of genocide is clear. The Holocaust — the deliberate attempt by the German State to exterminate the Jewish people — was genocide. The murder of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis between April and June 1994 was genocide.

The bombing of Dresden, on the other hand, might have been a controversial act of war, but it was no more genocide than were the murders of Peter Sutcliffe.

But genocide, in its original definition, is increasingly having to compete with another word — “genocide” — that means something very different. Indeed, it means many things, each of them different, because the person using the word “genocide” redefines it to mean whatever he wants it to mean.

Thus, according to Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, it seems to mean the defence of Israel against terror. Mr Sacranie announced that the council would boycott this week’s commemoration because “it excludes ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine”.

Mr Sacranie clearly cannot mean genocide in its old formulation. Israel, after all, exhibits no “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”; it seeks, rather, to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians.

Mr Sacranie is obviously using the new word, “genocide”, defining it as he sees fit — in this instance as Israel’s attempt to defend itself from suicide murderers.

Not that the Middle East is free of genocidal intent, according to the original definition of the UN Convention, 1948. Hamas seeks to murder Jews precisely because they are Jews. As Hamas has put it: “We will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land.” That is would-be genocide. It is not “genocide”.

(2)

My friend and colleague Alberto Mingardo has an excellent piece in the WSJ on the Italian ban on cigarette smoking. As he puts it:

So in the country of the Cirio and Parmalat financial scandals, the police will make sure the air, if not the financial books, are clean.

(1)

Have you ever wondered how stupid some of your fellow countrymen and women are? The answer seems to be “very”. Here’s the evidence. It’s in the form of a small, two-part test. To begin: what’s your birthday? That might not strike you as too difficult, but the final part will surely catch you out.

In what year were you born? You don’t think it was difficult? You don’t understand how anyone could find it complicated? Plainly, you possess an altogether superior intellect.

If you successfully managed to remember the answer to both parts, you kept in your mind one number out of a possible 31, one month out of a possible 12, and one year out of a possible — to be realistic — 90 or so. Congratulations. It seems such a fiendishly complicated task is far beyond many of us. Even remembering a simple number is apparently impossible.

The papers have been full over the past few days of stories of “chaos” in shops as retailers introduce new “chip and PIN” debit and credit cards. To use them, we have to remember a four-digit PIN and then — my brain is exhausted at the mental gymnastics even thinking about it — tap the number into a keypad. Oh, the stress! Oh, the anguish! Oh, the sheer difficulty of it all!

The Forum of Private Business in Scotland says that it gave warning back in October that the new arrangements needed to be delayed to avert chaos. And a retail analyst at PA Consulting, Alastair Charatan, says that there could now be a 59 per cent increase in queueing times: “The public is confused.” (It’s the precision of his 59 per cent that I most admire about Mr Charatan’s research.)

Even the banks, which are trying to minimise the idea that there is any chaos (the new system is their idea), say that only eight out of ten consumers are up to the task. In other words, if you gather five shoppers together, there will be one who is incapable of remembering a number with four digits.

In four months’ time we are likely to have a general election. The future of the country will be decided. Are you happy to hand the choice over to people who cannot remember a number higher than 1,000? Here’s a modest proposal. To qualify to vote, ought we not first to have to enter our PIN?

(15)

It is almost impossible to overstate the capacity of the British for generosity. We all know about the success of Live Aid, Comic Relief and Children In Need. The latter appeal received £17 million on just one night last month, and Comic Relief has raised more than £210 million since its inception.

But none of that really prepares one for the staggering amounts that have been donated to the Disasters Emergency Committee, to help deal with the consequences of the Asian tsunami. Within the first two days of the appeal being set up, more than £25 million had poured in, at the rate of over a million pounds an hour. As the chief executive of the DEC, Brendan Gormley, put it, the response has been "remarkable and humbling".

The question has to be asked: why? Yes, there have been Brits caught up in the horror, with heart-rending stories of drowned families and friends. And Phuket has indeed become a very popular destination for British tourists. But relative to the full scale of the devastation, British losses have been minuscule. And a holiday destination is not the "home" where charity supposedly begins. Could one really have expected the British to be quite so generous?

The answer is a resounding "yes". Take Comic Relief. More than £130 million of the £210 million raised has gone not to relieve poverty in Britain but to Africa. History shows that we do not put ourselves first. Not only do we give generously; we give to strangers.

The British Social Attitudes Survey shows who gives money and why. Thirty per cent of us never give any money to charity. Of the rest, the typical, generous donor is a university-educated, over 35-year-old. Intriguingly, non-Christians are far more likely to give than Christians: one in three non-Christians donate money, as opposed to one in eight Christians. Fourteen per cent of those who earn between £20,000 and £56,000 a year regularly give money to charity. Strikingly, however, the proportion of those earning between £12,000 and £20,000 who donate is much greater: 72 per cent. Indeed, giving is most prevalent among those who live in council accommodation. And 80 per cent of Conservatives give money, compared to 66 per cent of Labour supporters.

It's that latter statistic which comes closest to explaining why we give. The greater generosity of Conservatives reflects the value they place on individual philanthropy above publicly-funded welfare services. In the 19th century, British philanthropic giving was world renowned: but it did not solely depend on the rich giving to the poor.

The strongest, longest lasting Victorian institutions – building societies, mutual societies, hospitals, libraries, schools, educational associations, even the Labour Party – combined an impulse to help others with that sense of self-reliance that still runs deep in the British psyche. It was an understanding that in a complex world, selfishness is not sufficient; that to improve our own and our families' lives, it is best also to improve the lives of those around us.

The welfare state has diminished much of the need for that mutual security, but it hasn't eliminated our feelings of shared responsibility. Which is why the British in the last 50 or more years have been such notable donors to overseas charities. We have a deep-seated desire to help – and a thrifty, common sense understanding that a pound sent abroad will make more of a difference than a pound spent here.

The urge to give has never died in this country; sometimes it sleeps, but never for long. When disaster strikes, when people need our help, we are ready, wallets open.

(4)

Call me a party-pooper - and I’ll take it as a compliment, not an insult, thank you very much - but in my book today is by quite a long way the worst day of the year. To be more specific, I’m referring to the last four or so hours, tonight. There’s nothing wrong with the first twenty hours of the day. They’re much like any other. The misery kicks in when the New Year’s Eve parties begin.

For days now, no conversation with a friend is without the killer question: ‘What are you doing on New Year’s Eve’. Give the answer I most like to give – ‘I’m sitting at home and then going to bed’ – and you’re told not to be such a misanthrope. It’s party time! Get out there and party!

No thanks. Earlier this month I celebrated my fortieth birthday and I’ve decided that, now that I am a mature, sensible, adult, it’s time to stand up to the crowd and reveal the truth: I hate New Year’s Eve. I always have and I always will. No other night of the year manages the unique combination of misery, discomfort, expense and sheer downright unpleasantness. New Year’s Eve, in a word, stinks.

In my personal pantheon of New Year’s Eve horrors the winner has to be the night I was surrounded by a dozen legless nuns.

They weren’t real nuns. They were fellow students, dressed as nuns. And they weren’t literally legless. They had simply had too much – way too much – to drink. It wasn’t the fact of their drunkenness that was so bad, either. It was the consequence of their drunkenness – that, as they started leaping into the air to celebrate the passing of the old year and the coming of the new, they began, almost in unison, to empty the contents of their stomachs onto the bar floor.

It is just possible that, had I too been drunk, I might have regarded this all as a hoot. They certainly did. But I was stone cold sober. As the only one in our group who had a car, and thus as the regular chauffeur for my pals, I was always sober.

That New Year’s Eve (some time in the late 1980s; I have tried to forget the exact date) stands for me as the epitome of why I loathe the night. Despite being reminded every 31st December of its all consuming awfulness, we seem annually to forget how bad the experience was the previous year, and to embrace it as the greatest party night of the year.

Well it isn’t and I won’t. Count me out.

The worst aspect of New Year’s Eve is the false bonhomie on which the whole affair is built. Turn up at a party tonight and the chances are that you will, if you are lucky, know half a dozen people. The rest will be strangers. But that will not stop them from assuming that there is no one else on the planet with whom you would rather be. It will not stop them from assuming that, as the clock strikes twelve, you want them to take hold of your face and plant a smacker on your lips. And it will not stop them from assuming that you want them to grab you from behind and push you into a conga dance through the room.

Some of the others at the party will, perhaps, be people you met for the first time last year at the same event. They, like you, will have been browbeaten into returning this year lest they be thought a killjoy for staying at home.

Others will be complete strangers who – poor, deluded fools – are under the impression that this year will be different, and that they are going to have the fabulous New Year’s Eve night that they have never had before, but which they think everyone else but them always does.

I’ll let you into a secret. No one is having a fabulous night. Everyone is asking themselves the same questions: What on earth am I doing here? Why did I relent and come? Why did I forget how awful it was last year?

New Year’s Eve is an annual compendium of party lowlights, all lumped together into one truly terrible evening. You want specifics? I give you karaoke. Has mankind ever managed to come up with more depressing an idea? Having to listen to a succession of what sounds like half cut, tone deaf cats, screeching their way through My Way or butchering New York, New York, is an annual treat which I have not yet fully understood.

I am, as a man, lucky enough – usually - to avoid the attentions of every party’s statutory lecherous, fat, belching, ugly, sweaty bloke, who sees New Year’s Eve as his annual opportunity to grope his way through the entire female contingent of the party. But I must nonetheless suffer with everyone else the joy of being pinned to the wall by the drunken bore, who is convinced that I am thrilled to have met him and to be forced to listen to his gripping account of his family Christmas.

Not that it’s only parties which need to be avoided. Supposedly civilised evenings in a restaurant are, if anything, still worse. A below average bistro, which might be a rip-off at £25 a head, feels no compunction in charging £75 a head tonight – and because anywhere half way decent has been booked up for months, off we all trot to a restaurant we wouldn’t dream of frequenting on a normal night.

And all of this is without even thinking about the pleasure of getting home. Think you’ll get a taxi? As if! If you’re prepared to wait for two hours then you might, with luck, have the privilege of paying treble the normal fare.

However unbearable such things may be, all of them are, in the end, superficial. The real problem with New Year’s Eve is philosophical: the idea that somehow everything in our lives is going to change, and that a new year heralds a new dawn. It doesn’t. All it heralds is the clock ticking from 23.59 to 0.00. 1st January is 31st December with a minute added on. And if there’s anything sadder than pretending to enjoy the grotesque pain of a New Year’s Eve party, it’s pretending that it matters.

Might I make a small suggestion? Have a really good night tonight. Go to bed.

(22)

HEAR! HEAR! Let us be upstanding for the words of wisdom of the Duchess of York. As the “guest editor” of the Today programme this morning, the former member of the Royal Family — now slumming it as a bog standard duchess — informs us that snobbery is a bad thing.

As she put it to a newspaper yesterday: “I believe that snobbery is a form of grandiose behaviour which really stems either from believing you’re someone more important than you are, or from having too much money too quickly.”

Quite right, too. There may be few more pointless specimens than aristocrats notable only for the curiosity of their inbreeding, but there are also few more irritating sounds than braying toffs, and few more annoying sights than titled juvenile twits getting sloshed.

But before we go overboard in applauding the duchess’s condemnation of snobbery, perhaps we can subject it to a smidgeon of further examination. Social snobbery is indeed a pointless exercise. But beyond the trauma of its adherents barring victims from a few dinner parties, does it matter? I have never been away on a country-house weekend. I can’t say the consequences of such deprivation have scarred my life.

If I wait my turn, maybe I can break my duck at the not- remotely-snobbish Duchess of York’s Sunningdale House. Call me a snob, however — an intellectual snob, if you please — but I’m afraid that I have no wish to spend even five minutes in the company of a woman whose greatest achievement seems to be marrying and then divorcing a fellow aristocrat.

And I await an explanation from the BBC as to what else it is that makes her views more worthy of respect than those of anyone else plucked off the street. But God help me if I say that — sweet, lovely person as she may be — her lack of intellectual ballast means that I value her contribution to public discourse as worthless.

There is one form of snobbery beyond the pale: intellectual snobbery. Heaven forfend lest anyone say that all opinions are not equally valid. I think global warming is bunkum. But I am not a scientist, and I have not studied the issue in depth. My view isn’t worth reading.

I have nothing against the Duchess of York. I just have zero interest in what she has to say.

(6)

Very good piece by Johann Hari on alternative medicine.

As he quotes Richard Dawkins:

'Alternative' is another word for 'ineffective'.

(6)

I'm normally incapable of reading a Rod Liddle piece without retching, but I loved his comment today about Bono et al...

It’s about time we instigated a prestigious award for the first world leader to tell Bono to get lost. Here is the U2 lead singer, talking about his chat with Gerhard Schröder: “Germany’s bumpy economy was making Chancellor Schröder nervous about spending more money on aid. I asked him if he thought history would accept that excuse.”

The appropriate response to such a self-regarding, presumptuous question from the David Brent of pop is either a swift punch to the nose or the immediate reoccupation of Alsace-Lorraine. Blair, Brown, Bush, Mandela, Archbishop Tutu and even the bloody Pope put up with him. Why? Whenever politicians feel tempted to take pop stars seriously, they should repeat to themselves these words, reportedly said by the singer Mariah Carey: “Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean, I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.” I really didn’t make that up.

UPDATE: One of my commenters points out that the supposed Mariah Carey quote is in fact entirely fictitious. See this site, which appears to show that it is indeed made up. (Glad to have my faith in Rod Liddle restored to its normal non-existence.)

(7)

Scott Burgess has some fun at Polly Toynbee's expense over her discussion with Roger Scruton on Today.

The subject was Prince Charles' remarks in a private memo about - or, rather, reported as being about - people knowing their place. The Mail this morning, for instance, splashed on the story thus:

DON'T GET ABOVE YOURSELF.

And the Times' headline read:

Prince attacks culture that gives people ideas above their station

Regular readers of this site will know my views on Prince Charles and the monarchy. I'm a republican. Aha, I thought: more grist to my mill. As Ann Richards said of George Bush: Poor George. Born with a silver foot in his mouth.

So I was all ready to write a rant against this son of privilege and his views.

And then I read what he wrote.

What is wrong with everyone nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities? This is to do with the learning culture in schools as a consequence of child-centred system which admits no failure.

...People think they can all be pop stars, High Court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability. This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history.

...What on earth am I to tell Elaine? She is so PC it frightens me rigid.

I think I am able to read and understand (if not always write) English. I defy anyone to tell me where Prince Charles argues that people should not aspire beyond their station.

Quite the opposite, surely. He is, rather, attacking the idea that we are entitled to achieve as if by right, rather than through dint of hard work and proven competence - a modern day “social utopianism” which profoundly misunderstands the lessons of history, which is that we do indeed have different capabilities and skills, and that we need to work hard to improve them and benefit from them.

This has nothing to do with poverty of aspiration. Aspire, yes, but aspire on the basis of hard work, skills and ability.

Prince Charles is simply saying that aspirations need to be based on ability. The real insult to people, surely, is not giving them with tools by which they might live up to their aspirations. And for that, one must indeed blame the education system and the lack of a genuine learning culture rather than an 'all must have prizes' disease.

Charles is spot on.

(19)

If you want to know why Sainsbury's is in crisis, pop along to its Tottenham Court Road branch. (The same no doubt applies to most of their shops.) If you don't know it, it's large - not one of those small express shops, but a proper (supposedly) supermarket.

I went there this morning to get three things.

First, a screw top light bulb. Hardly unusual, you might think but there were none. Not one. Of any wattage.

Second, Andrex toilet roll. None. Only their own brand.

Third, some chicken breasts. None, other than covered in breadcrumbs.

The shop is, then, completely useless.

I can't imagine how chaotic their distribution system must be if they can't manage to have in stock even one of such staples. And as a result, I can't imagine the circumstances in which I will shop there again rather than the smaller but better stocked Tesco just up the road.

(7)

The Chavhemian Rhapsody.

(4)

A reader's post at Harry's Place points out an astonishing editorial on the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the Index on Censorsip magazine. Associate Editor Rohan Jayasekera writes that Van Gogh was a

free speech fundamentalist on a martyrdom operation...Van Gogh's juvenile shock-horror art finally led him to build an exploitative working relationship with Somalia-born Dutch MP Ayann Hirsi Ali, whose terrible personal experience of abuse has driven her to a traumatizing loss of her Muslim faith.

Together they made a furiously provocative film that featured actresses portraying battered Muslim women, naked under transparent Islamic-style shawls, their bodies marked with texts from the Koran that supposedly justify their repression. Van Gogh then roared his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities. An abuse of his right to free speech, it added injury to insult by effectively censorsing their moderate views as well.

Fortuyn and van Gogh freed the Dutch from responsibility to rationally debate the country's cultural crisis. So without fear of further disturbing already ravaged public sensitivities, applaud Theo van Gogh's death as the marvellous piece of theatre it was.

AN ABUSE OFHIS RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH!? This, especially coming from someone who is meant to be defending freedom ofspeech, is chilling.

(16)

Wonderful letter in today's Times:

Sir, An English teacher of mine received from his book club a demand for £0.00, which he ignored. Increasingly threatening demands followed, despite correspondence pointing out the stupidity of the same.

The demands ceased only when, in desperation, he sent a cheque in the sum of £0.00.

(7)

The inimitable Peter Briffa:

"Sexuality is a right, not a privilege",

claims Suzie McKenzie. Really? And how are we to go about enforcing such a right? Is Patricia Hewitt really be going around knocking on our doors and ordering cowered citizens to give Stephen Hawking a hand-job?

(12)

The Anthony Powell Society is to give its annual Widmerpool award this year to the journalist Sir Max Hastings. The award is in honour of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the 20th century’s great fictional characters, a recurring presence in Powell’s series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time.

According to the society: “Widmerpool is variously pompous; self-obsessed and self-important; obsequious to those in authority and a bully to those below him. He is ambitious and pushy; ruthless; humourless; blind to the feelings of others; and has a complete lack of self-knowledge.”

The description is redolent of so many characters in public life that more must be made of it. I therefore have a modest proposal: that at a time when the honours system is in disrepute, the Queen bestow Widmerpool awards just as she awards other honours. Those invested need not exhibit every detail of the above description but they should be true to the essential spirit of Widmerpool.

Rather than allowing the award to be determined by the existing honours committee, it should instead be placed in the hands of a triumvirate of Widmerpools, uniquely qualified to adjudicate as to the Widmerpool-worthiness of their fellow citizens. To wit, from each of the main parties: Lord Hattersley, Lord Hurd of Westwell and Sir Menzies Campbell, QC. Sir Edward Heath and Lord Irvine of Lairg, QC, would make delightful patrons.

To be accepted as a worthy honour, it is important that the award is not confined to politicians and, in a spirit of generosity, I offer some suggestions.

Tracey Emin is gloriously Widmerpoolian: she takes her outpourings entirely seriously and appears blissfully unaware that most of society sees her as a standing joke. In the same vein, Martin Jacques, a former editor of Marxism Today and now self-appointed political seer, is an ideal candidate: he has published many hundreds of thousands of words; not one is worth reading.

Sir David Hare continues to display admirable Widmerpooldom. Other winners might include Lord Lloyd-Webber, Baroness Blackstone, Sir John Drummond, Dame Helena Kennedy, QC, Patricia Hewitt and Lord Birt.

The heavy burden of nomination is an onerous task. Recipients must understand the weight of public feeling which will underpin their award. Let us salute Kenneth Widmerpool, icon of the modern age.

(14)

Clearly, there is no requirement to be able to write English to work in the Department of Media and Film at Sussex University. One Sally R Munt, head of the department, has written to The Observer:

Thank goodness for David Aaronovitch's challenge ('The thinking classes: too clever by half', Comment last week). It is time for the nostalgic wailing against dumbing down, therapy culture, widening access/falling academic standards etc to be properly named.

Ironically, these attacks are trumpeted by the left, what remains of it. A radical social analysis should depend upon the recognition of, and respect for, the dexterity by which most people negotiate an active self in this world. Let's see some humility then in the analysis for those experiences that go beyond the narrow precepts of these grumpy old men.

Professor Sally R Munt
Head of Department Media and Film, School of Humanities, University of Sussex, Brighton

A radical social analysis should depend upon the recognition of, and respect for, the dexterity by which most people negotiate an active self in this world.

Let me write that again. I think you'll need to look at it once more to gain some kind of foothold on its meaning.

A radical social analysis should depend upon the recognition of, and respect for, the dexterity by which most people negotiate an active self in this world.

It is hardly surprising that a woman who writes such a sentence - I still have no idea whatsoever what it means, after ten minutes staring at it - should wail against those who wail against dumbing down.

Given her inability to communicate in written English, I suppose the narrow precepts of these grumpy old men of which she so disapproves include that the ability to communicate in written English.

Glorious.

(47)

I'm back from my holidays, refreshed and ready to kick ass, as they say in Colorado (from whence I have returned). Doesn't seem as if I have missed much, although I will have to ensure that I learn from today's revelations about Sven's seduction technique (We had a wonderful dinner. When we finished I was full of anticipation—but he wanted to clear the plates away first. After he'd filled the dishwasher he led me up the stairs to his bedroom.) Clear the dishes: the secret of success in the bedroom.

(6)

For some inexplicable reason, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain has been condemned by some as inappropriate. Diana’s late mother, Frances Shand Kydd, for instance, criticised the construction as having a “lack of grandeur”.

It is hard, however, to imagine a more fitting tribute to Diana than a lump of glorified concrete. There are few more shaming indictments of the British disregard of intellect in favour of emotion than the cult of Diana. A fountain through which water flows endlessly, going nowhere except round and round, perfectly reflects our nation’s reverence for style over substance on which the entire Diana-worshipping edifice is built.

Whatever Diana’s merits — her demonstration that Aids victims should not be treated as pariahs and her campaign against land mines, for instance — they were dwarfed by the deleterious effects of her behaviour.

In life, Diana would have been an unremarkable woman but for happening to marry into the Royal Family. Had she not been a clothes horse with an attractive visage, her charitable deeds, which were mere interruptions to the rest of her showbiz life, would have barely been noticed. The Princess Royal, for instance, has done no less charitable work, as have almost all the Royal Family. We do not salute them for it; we expect it of them. That is what they are paid — more than generously — to do. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women across the country whose lives are dedicated to good deeds, with no publicity and no reward other than the deed itself.

Revering Diana for her charitable work is a canard. The real reason she is worshipped is far more pernicious. It is the combination of her banality and instability — a combination which has had a deeply damaging impact on public manners.

Had Diana chosen to use her celebrity to patronise genuine artists, writers and scientists, then her fame might have served some useful purpose. Instead, she chose to associate with fashion designers and pop stars. When she did patronise genuine artists, such as Pavarotti, she did so only when they were prostituting their talent in quasi-pop concerts.

But then she would never have had her celebrity in the first place if she had not associated with such people. Had she promoted those with worthwhile talents whose names did not grace the catwalks or the pop charts, she would have been ignored.

Her banal cultural pursuits were the very point of Diana. In her, the country saw itself reflected, but with added glamour. She was adored precisely because, fundamentally, she was so ordinary in her taste.

Had that been all, her memory would have disappeared soon after her death. What transformed her legacy from the forgettable to the damaging, however, is that she let loose a hitherto buried predisposition for public emoting. Diana was regarded as an icon. By refusing to keep her emotional problems to herself and instead parading them in front of the nation, she implied — nay, screamed — that such behaviour was not merely permissible but required. Instead of keeping emotions under wraps in consideration of the impact their release might have on others, we were now to think only of the impact on ourselves. If we wanted to cry, we should cry.

This reached its apogee in the orgy of public emoting prompted by her death, when quiet dignity was ditched by those who felt that, to commune properly with her spirit and to pay her proper respects, they too needed to behave without the slightest regard for the feelings of their neighbours.

That genie is now out of the bottle — as yesterday’s commemoration shows. Instead of celebrating her legacy, we would have done far better to bury it.

(28)

Mary Ann Sieghart accused me last week of being hilarious in one part of my analysis of Glastonbury:

I doubt that he knows much about the wet and the mud since he hilariously compared the festival with Cowdray Park, Royal Ascot and Glyndebourne.

Well, I seem have the Glastonbury set's in house journal with me on this one. As today's Guardian leader puts it:

The embourgeoisement of the Glastonbury music festival has been under way for some time, but when this past weekend's event encompassed Sir Paul McCartney, Basement Jaxx and the English National Opera, then something is up. The ranks of people carriers in the car park, the 14ft high steel fence and CCTV cameras allow the mean-spirited to suggest the festival is now about as alternative as the Chelsea Flower Show.

...As has been remarked often enough, Glastonbury has joined "the season" - the informal summer timetable of high-profile events such as Ascot and Glyndebourne - hence the arrival of "Glyndestonbury", bringing together the SUVs and highbrow picnic flavour of one musical event with the mud and fashionable fringe of the other...

Those who seek to defend the current Glastonbury experience by enumerating the undoubtedly rich and varied musical talent on show may have missed the point. While the line-up has become more diverse, it is the audience that has become narrower, in every area other than its waistline.

(10)

A heated debate!

BTW, some of the comments below my piece about Glastonbury are fascinating. I don't reply to comments one by one - life's too short - but there is a common theme (as in many of the emails I've received) which is that I clearly cannot believe what I wrote and thus did so purely for the money. I'm sorry to disabuse you, but I believe every word of it. As far as I'm concerned there's only one such 'festival' which is worse, and that's the Notting Hill Carnival. But you'll have to wait until August for my views on that.

Just one further point to those of you who seem incapable of understanding English: where do I say that I would ban Glastonbury? I despise it and wouldn't let a child of mine anywhere near it. But in what language does that mean 'I would ban it'? I also despise Big Brother, most 'lads' mags' and Edward Heath. As far as I'm concerned the correct response is to ignore them, not ban them.

That said, I can see the case for a mass police presence to make sure that those selling cannabis and other illegal drugs are arrested.

(19)

Do you long to free yourself from the shackles of convention? Do you gaze into space, bemoaning the fact that your life is one long obligation to family, work and friends? Are you panting with anticipation at the thought of this week’s Glastonbury Festival, knowing that for just a few days in the year you will be free to be yourself, free to commune with Nature and free to indulge in the hedonism you think life should really be about?

Then grow up.

There are few more pathetic sights than the annual paeans of anticipatory pleasure in the run up to the Glastonbury Festival. To hear the drivel that pours forth from its habitués, one would imagine that Glastonbury is some sort of mystical experience: an opportunity for the world to be a better place thanks to the positive karma that spreads throughout the ether, for those who make the effort to attend to turn themselves into better people for communing with Nature, and for those who miss out to think about how, next year, they too might take part.

The truth is that, far from making the world a better place, Glastonbury represents much of what is wrong with it today.

Glastonbury is not a departure from the norm but its very archetype — a clichéd, typical and deeply worrying reflection of how those with time and money choose to abrogate any sense of propriety, decency and upholding of legal, let alone moral, values.

The illegality of the drugs that fuel the Glastonbury experience is the least of it. Far worse is its sheer immorality and hypocrisy, based on the idea that law-breaking is fine so long as it is confined to “our sort of people” and takes place in a field of teepees. It’s only wrong when it’s committed by oiks.

There are few more grotesque double standards than those of the moneyed middle classes who take their children with them to experience the “mellow” (or, to be precise, drug-addled) atmosphere. It is what used to be known as the moral corruption of minors. They complain about drug-fuelled crime. Yet they somehow think it right to teach their children, by their own example, that drug taking is a good thing — the best way to relax.

Glastonbury is the epitome of the “let it all hang out” attitude that has so warped society — the idea that restraint and attentiveness to others is something not to be admired but to be sneered at, and that we are only truly free when we respond to our inner-most urges. It is the difference between sitting still and quiet at a string quartet recital and lying spaced out on the ground as the caterwauling of a fellow drugged-up performer wafts over you. One is despised as old-fashioned and buttoned up, the other commended as being at one with nature.

Not that Glastonbury is entirely without merit. It does allow one to apply the “Glastonbury Test”, a useful guide to public policy. Whether it involves welfare (“the tests for benefit eligibility are too harsh”), education (“a proper education revolves around children being allowed to express themselves”) or crime (“we need to appreciate the social stresses that force people to commit crime”), we can use the Glastonbury Test to determine the moral framework from which such ideas emanate. If the advocate eulogises Glastonbury then we know immediately to rule out his opinion as being based on the same dangerous, deluded fantasy that underpins the festival.

If you doubt me, look at the sheer crass stupidity of those who worship at the Glastonbury altar and claim that they are somehow leaving their usual life behind. Tickets to this year’s event started officially at £112; they were trading yesterday on eBay for more than double that amount. Add in the cost of getting there, camping (or, for the true hypocrites who want to empathise with nature but then retreat to the comfort of a hotel, the cost of a bed) and the ubiquitous drugs and we’re talking perhaps £500 a person. It is no more a retreat to Nature and feeling at one with the rest of humanity than a meal at Gordon Ramsay’s or the August villa in Tuscany.

Glastonbury should, rather, be seen for what it really is: the ultimate well-off druggie-wannabe- hippy weekend — a venue no less exclusive than Cowdray Park, Royal Ascot or Glyndebourne but without the restraint. And a gathering which, in its celebration of so much that has destroyed the norms of decent behaviour, has nothing to commend it beyond making for an easy identification of the forces that continue to warp society.

(20)

We Brits are not confining ourselves to exporting our traditional behavuour to Portugal. Baghdad, too, is benefitting it seems:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)
...In a city where few people drink, Baghdad's sealed-off green zone counts at least seven bars, including a Thursday night disco, a sports bar, a British pub, a rooftop bar run by General Electric, and a bare-bones trailer-tavern operated by the contractor Bechtel.

...An American government worker said the British residents are especially keen to drink. A joke running through the green zone says that British officials overseeing construction of their new embassy are giving highest priority to opening the embassy pub.

Since the most important element of a night out in Britiain - an overwhelming sense of impending violence - is already present, all that is needed is the stench of urine and vomit in the street and it'll feel just like Blighty.

(2)

You may not realise it, but yesterday was your first day of the year. Your first day, that is, rather than the Government’s. Yesterday, you see, was Tax Freedom Day — the day when you stop working for the Government and start working for yourself.

It is now, according to the Adam Smith Institute, six days later than when Labour took office in 1997. Tut-tut, and all that. But if Tax Freedom Day is getting later and later, so too is another day which deserves equal obloquy: Pap Freedom Day.

Not a day is free of the pap that infects British culture. Last week saw the start of Hell’s Kitchen — a programme that rounds up D-list celebrities who can’t cook, puts them in a restaurant kitchen and then builds hours of mind-numbingly dull TV on the shock revelation that the food isn’t very good.

This week — and for the next ten weeks, too, God help us — we have the even deeper stimulation of Big Brother. Turn on BBC One any night of the week — not to mention the daytime pap — and you can but weep at the thought that, through your licence fee, you are paying for — to take tonight — EastEnders, Changing Rooms and Murphy’s Law. Pap.

So I have a proposal. Instead of the drip, drip, drip of pap that suffocates us from January to December, why not push it all together, morning, noon and night, from January 1 every year. Then — this is critical — take action to ensure that, instead of merely charting its progress, Pap Freedom Day is, literally, the day on which we are freed from pap. Between January and Pap Freedom Day, you know never, ever, to turn on the TV. But from then onwards, it’s safe: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The West Wing. No soaps — pap; no reality programmes — pap; and no lifestyle makeovers – pap.

I use TV as an exemplar. But Pap Freedom must be an across-the-board measure. Next month it will be impossible to escape that most dreaded phenomenon, Henmania. Instead of allowing the virus to escape in the middle of the year, confine it to January. Confine, indeed, the entire Wimbledon fortnight to January. And when it is rained off, so much the better.

The news, too, needs to be brought to heel. Is there anyone who has the slightest interest in the sexual antics of Lord Coe?

Or in the sexual antics of whichever other TV or sport personalities are to be fingered playing away over the rest of the year? Or in most of the minor political nonentities who are the usual subject of exposés? Confine all the sex scandals to before Pap Freedom Day.

And why do we have to listen to Charles Kennedy throughout the year? The undiscriminating might, I concede, see no harm. The rest of us understand that a second of exposure is a second wasted of our lives. He has a democratic right to be heard. But we have a right not to stumble upon him unintentionally. So confine him to before Pap Freedom Day. That way safety lies.

But forget all the above. There is one compelling reason for the introduction of Pap Freedom Day and criminal sanctions against those who infringe it: Harry Potter. The latest film will unleash, once again, the embarrassing and worrying spectacle of grown men and women proclaiming their love of the books and the films. They need help. They are plainly in the grip of a disease that is steadily rotting their brain.

Removing all access to Potter items might well be too great a shock to the system. Instead, references to the stories should be confined to before Pap Freedom Day. That way, with additional professional help, they stand a chance of being weaned off as the year progresses.

If you value your time on this planet, and you resent being force- fed a diet of pap, join me in my crusade to introduce Pap Freedom Day. You know it makes sense.

(13)

It seems that Robin Cook has formed his own party in Italy:

Beauty gets its own political party in Italy
Italy's beauty is her international role

By Anna Somers Cocks and Vittorio Sgarbi

“Aesthetics first, ethics second” is the slogan of Italy’s new political party, the Party of Beauty, founded in April by former Under Secretary of State for the ministry of culture, Vittorio Sgarbi. Mr Sgarbi, a member of parliament for the same party as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia, has nonetheless allied his new creation formally with the old, established Republican party, with which it will share the ticket in the June elections to the European parliament.

(5)

Did you have a good May Day holiday yesterday? I hope you used your day off properly, protesting about the exploitation of your fellow workers. You didn’t? Shame on you. Have you no conscience?

There is something gloriously contradictory about the May Day holiday, which exposes more clearly than any other of our eight bank holidays just how stupid the idea of a state-determined day off work now is. Michael Foot’s sole lasting achievement — as Employment Secretary in 1978, he introduced a Bank Holiday on the first Monday in May — has had precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended.

In theory, the May Bank Holiday, that most socialist of occasions, gives poor, oppressed workers an extra day of rest, away from their vicious employers. But what really happens? Those of us who want to, take the day off. We stay in bed until ten o’clock, take it easy for the rest of the morning and then potter off to the high street to indulge in the country’s favourite pastime — shopping.

Who serves us? Some spotty 18-year-old who can’t afford to take any time off work. And when we wander off for a pizza, who waits on us? The waiter who can’t afford to turn down the double time pay because his rent’s a week late.

The world of work has, you may have noticed, changed since bank holidays were first introduced in 1871 by the Bank Holidays Act. Holidays are no longer taken en masse. Wakes weeks, the traditional Lancashire milltown summer holiday, long ago died out as anything more than a quaint historical memory, just as have other similar communal holidays. The reason: because we like to take our holiday when we choose, not when we are told we should.

But still we pay lip service to the farce of bank holidays. In a society where, quite rightly, we want access on our holidays to the things we most enjoy doing, bank holidays are not only mad in theory but self-defeating in practice. If everyone is to have a day off, then everything has to be shut. But no one bar a few killjoys wants that, which means that some people have to work. In which case, they lose their supposed purpose.

The sheer tedium of Good Fridays of old are, thankfully, a thing of the past. Now, if I want to buy a car and someone wants to sell me one, I can. As someone to whom December 25 is simply the day after the 24th, why shouldn’t I be able to wander off to the supermarket to buy whatever takes my fancy from a fellow heathen for whom December 25 is just another day for making money by providing a service?

So who is it that doesn’t get to have a holiday on bank holidays? Those who can’t afford not to work and those who value as greater the money they can earn from working than the time they are told by the State they should have off. People such as me, in other words, who don’t want a day off in the first place.

And don’t give me any of that guff about the sense of community engendered by a national day off. Where’s the community in half of us going to the shops and the other half serving us behind the counter?

There’s a perfectly valid case for saying that we should have a set number of days that the State guarantees we should have off — if, that is, we want to take them. But in what possible way can it be right for the State to tell me when I should use them — that, having taken the first Monday in May off, I now need to take the fourth Monday, too? I worked yesterday, writing this. And I’ll be working, too, on 31st. I choose to. It’s the less well off who I feel sorry for — they don’t have the choice, because the State has decreed that it’s a bank holiday, and the rest of us want serving.

(17)

Forget about Iraq. This is the real reason we're hated across the globe: we don't wash up properly.

(4)

I remember when Good Friday was quite the dullest day of the year. Everything - everything - was closed. Now it's like pretty much any other Bank Holiday.

That was brought home to me with this email, which I've just had from the Irish bookies, Paddy Power:

Hi StephenPollard, Turn your Good Friday into a well spent Friday at the Paddy Power Casino. This Good Friday you get a 20% bonus on your first deposit. This is a one day special only!

Things have indeed changed.

(10)

Did you have a good time on Saturday night? The chances are that, if you’re under the age of about thirty, you’ll answer ‘yes’ if you woke up yesterday morning – more likely still, yesterday afternoon – with a hangover.

Something has changed in the way we define a good night out. Increasingly, a good night out is a night whose purpose is getting drunk. And what used to be a primarily male obsession – going down the boozer and getting hammered – is now an equal opportunities activity. Between 1988 and 2001, the number of women drinking more than 14 units a week rose by over fifty per cent. Go to any pub or bar and you’ll see as many women as men, all doing the same thing: deliberately drinking as much as they can (and, often, far more than that: alcohol abuse costs the NHS £1.7 billion a year, with 150,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions each year; between midnight and 5am, alcohol is responsible for 70 per cent of all A&E admissions).

The Home Office is publishing today the results of a four year study into our boozing habits, and it makes pretty awful reading. Three in five men and one in five women drink well above the maximum safe drinking limit. Because getting drunk is now seen as the definition of a good night, eighteen to 25 year olds are now regularly drinking five times the recommended daily limit.

The bald statistics, though, miss the point. Awful, yes; but hardly shocking. We know we’re drinking too much, and we like it. As a nation, we go out specifically to get drunk. That’s what it is today to be British. It’s the culture, stupid.

I live ten minutes walk from Soho in London. I’ve been in some pretty unpleasant parts of the world, and had some pretty scary moments. But for the sheer foulness of the atmosphere, you’d have to go some to beat Soho after about 11 at night – chucking out time. The streets smell of piss. Boozed up twenty-somethings roam the area, some throwing up, others looking as if they can barely stand. And all in the pervasive ambience of impending violence (it’s no wonder that the British Crime Survey shows that only16 per cent of violent acts by strangers are prompted by drugs, as opposed to 53 per cent by alcohol).

It’s not just Soho, of course: the same picture holds true in other city centres and, increasingly, in rural villages. Unless you’re drunk, too, Britain is a pretty disgusting place after the pubs shut.

I also live in Brussels, near the Grand Place. Wander there at night and you’ll see a very different sight. In the summer, no matter how late it is, there’ll be tables outside and groups of friends sitting, talking and enjoying themselves over bottles of wine or Belgian beer. The rest of the year the same thing happens, just indoors. And not a hint of violence.

Now there’s one obvious difference which causes one to be so foul, and the other so pleasant: the licensing laws. If you tell people that they have to get drinking NOW, or they’ll be done for the night, then that’s what they’ll do: they’ll push down as much as they can before closing time. If, on the other hand, you treat people as responsible adults, then that’s how they’ll behave, and they’ll drink as and when they want to.

So yes, our licensing laws are crazy. But that’s not the real explanation. If we had no closing time, we’d simply drink more, albeit taking longer to do so. And I’d bet my mortgage that if the Belgians closed all their bars at 11pm, the Grand Place would not start to look like a vomitorium. The only effect would be a lot more miserable Belgians.

And it’s also not the ever extending ‘happy hour’, when we’re encouraged to drink even more than usual. They exacerbate the problem, but they don’t cause it.

The explanation is far more subtle, and far less amenable to governmental
action. It’s the culture, stupid. It manifests itself in the difference between a café culture and a pub culture. On the continent – yes, I know that’s a generalisation, but most generalisations become that because they are, indeed, generally true – alcohol is an aid to the success of an evening. The amount drunk is not a measure of the success of an evening. We drink to get drunk, and arrange affairs to do that as efficiently as possibly. And children are taught from an early age to drink in their respective cultural tradition.

The roots behind that difference go far deeper than drink, and range across…well – how long have you got? They lie in the degradation of British culture itself: the hero worship status accorded to louts, the infantilisation of public debate, the decline of any generally accepted notion of acceptable public behaviour (spitting in the street, now barely even noticed, is merely a step away from vomiting), the failure of schools to instil a worthwhile sense of self-worth and responsibility in those they churn out, and pretty much everything else you can think of which is wrong with Britain today. They all have an effect on the way we live our lives, and one of those effects is a drinking culture which reduces pleasure to drunkenness.

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