Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of tax. It pays for schools, hospitals, roads, disability and unemployment benefit, and all the other things that, way back when, we as a society collectively realised it would be damn stupid to hope the free market would provide. (It also pays my wages, since I work for the NHS, so I have a bit of a vested interest in it). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then there’s very little that pisses me off more than people complaining about paying their taxes, particularly as in my experience those most likely to moan are also the ones least likely to be suffer any kind of pecuniary hardship as a result of paying their taxes.

With that said though, yesterday’s announcement that over a million people are going to have to pay more tax next year to make up for the fact that HM Revenue and Customs undercharged them this year is a bit of a special case. The 1.4 million people who paid too little will have to pay an average of over £1,400 extra in tax next year. 50% of earners in the UK make less than £20,000 (figures from 2007). If you were earning that, you’d probably take home about £1200-£1300 a month (depending on deductions for pensions etc). So if you’re earning less than the median, you could effectively lose more than a month’s wages next year because of a miscalculation that had nothing to do with you (the underpayment effects employees whose tax is paid by their employer, so the errors were either HMRC’s or the employers’). When you’re on that kind of wage, and especially if you have bills to pay and dependents to feed, that could make life pretty damn unpleasant. Apparently if people think they’re being unfairly charged there’s a form they can fill in (they need to demonstrate that HMRC had all the right information and calculated wrong), but given that HMRC is one of many government departments being cut to the bone, what’s the likelihood that scarce resources will be prioritised to deal with them? And how many people are going to be put off making a claim because they find the forms too complicated? (Tax forms aren’t traditionally noted for their clarity or simplicity, after all.)

In cases like this the burden of proof shouldn’t be on individuals. If people pay too little tax thanks to a miscalculation, the onus should be on HMRC to demonstrate that they didn’t screw up, not on individuals to prove that they did. If it turns out to be the employers’ fault, then maybe they should pay the difference rather than HMRC. But making poor people lose out on more than £100 a month because of someone else’s mistake just doesn’t add up.

In the last month we’ve all heard about David Cameron’s proposed crackdown on benefit frauds. Lots has been said around the left about how these proposals are completely missing the mark in terms of where the government can be saving money if need be, but there hasn’t been much of a defense of the benefit frauds. There seems to be a tacit agreement that the fact that these people are “stealing our tax money” means that they are doing something wrong. The problem is that this idea comes out of the premise that there is something noble about working: that it is “the right thing to do” and “the right way to live.”

The fact is that benefits in our country are piss poor. As a young unemployed person in London you can be expected to live on approximately £50 per week. Many large families are squeezed into tiny accomodation. Many have to live in estates that are, due to decades of poverty and lack of investments in boom periods totally run down. Although a steady stable job might allow people to escape from these conditions, it does not signify anything noble. In fact it is entirely the existence of these conditions, the fear of poverty, which is shown to us every day in its true horror, that forces people to work.

And on a more general level, there is nothing in the slightest bit noble about most jobs. Yes, there are the jobs that can help people, but the fact is that when the profit motive for your job disappears, whether you’re a miner or a doctor, your job disappears with it. And now, when there are so many people unemployed, when there are so few jobs, the myth of the nobility of labour is a nasty pernicious lie invented to beat those who are least well off in our society.

The thing that keeps people in our society in work, ultimately, is not the myth of meritocracy, rather it is the reality of the possibility of starvation. Meritocracy is merely the spoonful of sugar that encourages us to continue swallowing this toxic medicine, but without the sugar we’d still have to take it.

So I pose this question, when people live in a society that is so unfair, when people are forced to live in such conditions, is it really so wrong that people steal from the state? The fact is that there are a whole bunch of more profitable ways to make money illegally, and they tend to be a whole lot worse for the whole society than taking a bit of extra money alongside benefits. The fact that people are willing to put themselves through the possibility that they may lose everything (their houses, their benefits, their freedom), that they go in for such a difficult method to get a bit of extra money, should show us something about their motives.

Part of the problem is how the question of money is seen by the rightwing press, tax money is always treated as our collective money, as if in a very American way we could take a class action against these benefiit frauds. But we can pose the question in the negative: Is it not correct to say that the money that we have paid in tax money has been consistently been misused, that instead of being used to help the country and its people, it has been used to prop up a system that has resulted in massive unemployment, a system that is totally sustainable alongside the impoverishment and immiseration of millions of people. Would it not be better that these people on benefits were bringing a class action against all those who voted for governments that rather than stealing a few pounds a week have instead stolen any opportunity for these people to live a reasonable existence?

And so it seems right that when people are subjected to such conditions of living they do the moral (if not quite legal) thing of taking money from the state to which for whatever perverse reason we say they are not entitled. This is a battle against inequality, and we must accept that whilst there may be the odd occasion of benefit fraud by someone taking real liberties, most people are simply taking what they need to exist in a world in which living is becoming an increasingly difficult.

Democracy in Britain leaves a lot to be desired – like actual democracy, for example. Governments secure unconscionable power with 33% of the popular vote; parties run multi-million pound election campaigns, ensuring they owe some millionaire or business, something, sometime; the anachronism of the constituency MP is still firmly in place and not going anywhere – I could go on.

But we should recognise what’s of value in our political system, and I can think of nothing more valuable than Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) and the adversarial zeal that it epitomises.

Think of it. The PM has to stand before the dispatch box, in front of a crowded chamber filled mostly with political enemies, and face half an hour of questions for which no preparation can really be taken. We can boot these people out of power with little pencils on strings once every five years or so, but the public standing of a PM can be destroyed by one bad performance (as they well know). Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan, that unflappable Tory, recounted in his memoirs that he would often have to pop to the gents’ to vomit with nerves before a performance at PMQs; a First World War veteran, he compared the experience to ‘going over the top’.  Who doesn’t want the PM to experience that kind of terror on a weekly basis?

The principal value of all this is that it makes the holding of the executive to account worth watching. This is something remarkable and very rare: compare those theatrical half hours on BBC Parliament with the legislative processes of most other countries, and you’ll see that this needs defending. Most European countries have hopelessly dull, ‘consensus’ – based affairs to sit through, and the goings on in the houses of America’s Congress could almost have been designed to make the savvy American voter change the channel.

C-Span, America’s main public service broadcaster (and a phenomenal aid to democracy and transparency in the US) broadcasts this half hour live to an American audience; it is one of its most popular shows. We can all feel rigid with pride thinking of Americans, living in a country racked with infantile consensus politics, sitting in their living rooms thinking, ‘Why don’t we have this?’ Image the chimp-president George W Bush subjected to this treatment for eight years. (Footnote: Proposals for an American Question Time, on the British model,  have been suggested since the days of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it was a little commented upon electoral pledge of John McCain, though sadly far outweighed by his choice of an illiterate demagogue for running mate).

PMQs, and the adversarial nature of Parliamentary proceedings in general, have their basis in a very British form of public culture, which has been termed a ‘boisterous democracy’. We argue in pubs, argue in our courts, argue in the street. We gravitate towards writers who don’t give a shit and have a sturdy tradition of ‘English Troublemakers’,  as A.J.P Taylor called them, who stand at the back and shout ‘Shame! Rubbish!’ at elected heads of state. Let the yanks make soothing noises about ‘bi-partisanship’, their Congress is boring.

Nigel Farage (a degenerate righty, I know) exported a bit of this spirit when he confronted our European overlord, Herman van Rompuy, in the EU Parliament. I’d encourage you to watch the short video below, and feel proud:

Nigel Farage harangues EU President Herman van Rompuy

Look how the Dutch-speakers boo and hiss!

Here’s one of the great parliamentary performances of the late Michael Foot, berating the then Industry Secretary Keith Joseph:

Michael Foot\’s Magician

This tells you all you need to know: in British political culture, it is quite acceptable for an MP to publicly humiliate a member of Her Majesty’s Government, providing the flowery language is kept to and some wit is on display.

Here’s the paragraph about how this wonderful thing is under threat: John Bercow – a lurid misogynist as it happens – has stated that the ‘abusive’ nature of PMQs needs revising. From the BBC website:

‘Mr Bercow…suggested the prime minister and opposition leaders of the day agree a “common understanding of behaviour” among their MPS, enforced by the whips, which would allow the Speaker to operate “the parliamentary equivalent of yellow and red cards…if that were to prove absolutely necessary” [My emphasis]‘

Never mind the fact that members can already be suspended for failing to keep to protocol; never mind the fact that this would constitute a great increase in power for the already over-powerful whips; and never mind the fact that the drama of PMQs  - in particular watching two grown men insult each other in fancy language – is its main appeal. David Cameron talked about ending the ‘Punch and Judy politics’ of Westminster: you know what a slimy bastard this man is when he references one quintessentially English institution to attack another. Swine.

Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still deeply entrenched”. Now, two schools – one 90+% white, one 90+% asian – are to be merged next month in a dramatic effort to ease racial tension in an area in which proximity is no guarantee of community.

This is the subject of a Newsnight series entitled ‘Crossing the Line’, and the report aired last night shows something quite revealing about race relations in some parts of our country. (You can watch it here, if you can sit through ten minutes of thick northern accents).

In the report we meet Jean as she drops her thirteen year old daughter, Hannah, off to drama club (which requries a commute through the predominantly asian part of the town). Jean admits that she feels ‘uncomfortable’ doing this, even for a few minutes when shielded in a large metal box on wheels. ‘In Oldham there isn’t a community anymore’, she says.

Hannah’s views are a bit more strident. “People have been saying that they’re going to build better houses for asians an’ that, immigrants an’ that. It’s like they can just come into the country and get treated like they’re kings and queens…and we get treated like we’re nothing”.

This is a common view, especially, it seems, among the young. Said one boy from the majority-white school, ‘Over there, it’s like totally different; it’s, like, Muslim culture’. The feelings are returned, certainly, and the animosity of the ‘other’ side forms the worldview of the very young. One asian girl, about ten, said simply, ‘They don’t like us asians’. Impressions formed the in the minds of the young can hard to dislodge.

These impressions can only be maintained with extreme seperateness. (Remember, the BNP performs best in areas with little or no immigration).

There have been concerns that the students to be integrated are too old, and that the project will backfire. These concerns I won’t address. What I would like to focus on is the vacuous little objection always raised whenever a humane policy is proposed. The accusation is that the government is just engaging in ‘Social Engineering’

Let’s examine this twaddle.

It might seem to make sense at first. The governemt – cynically, we can presume – is engaging in policies to force certain people in society into different positions etc. (‘Ticking boxes’ one person called it in the above case.) It does this to produce certain politically correct goals, and in callous disregard for the people involved.

Picture it: There he is, the faceless, ‘rationalising’ bureaucrat, manipulating people against their will to satisfy some politically expedient goal, and to make liberals and vegetarians feel better.

Do people realise what they’re saying when they make these kinds of hollow objections, use these hollow words? Society is not a ‘natural’ thing. It is based on human institutions and human agreements which we can control. If we deem equality to be a good thing, we can implement policies to encourage equality; just as we can pursue policies to produce more millionaires. Each produces dramatic social consequences. The abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women could be described in this manner, but would we call them ’social engineering’? We should never tolerate the idea that social relations are the outcome of human nature; more often than not they are the result of some design.

So the definition I’ve come to is this:

Social Engineering: Humane policies with which I disagree, and to which I have no morally acceptable objection.

This cry of ‘Social Engineering!’ carries with it, I think, a rather depressing worldview in which we cannot attempt to change society for the better without government failure and ill effect. Nonsense – society should be ours to engineer.

Let’s hope for the success of this schools program, and look forward to the communities of Oldham coming together in the light of day to see their common humanity. And from that glorious point on they can address their real problem: the fact that they live in Oldham.

Despite the fact that most of the people who write on this blog are Cambridge grads, we have (rightly, in my view), kept posts about matters Oxbridge to a minimum so far. So with that in mind, I apologise in advance for this post – given that it follows Dave Osler’s post at LibCon on Thursday and Paul Sagar’s reply at Bad Conscience (with another response by Laurie Penny potentially still to come,), the left blogosphere is somewhat more Oxbridge-focused than it perhaps should be at the moment. However, unlike Dave Semple, I don’t think this is necessarily a tangential distraction from more important debates we need to be conducting. It actually has the potential to be a useful way into those wider discussions.

Image: Francisco Diez/flickr

There are two main issues Dave Osler raises in his original post, which he blurs together somewhat. First, a massively disproportionate fraction of those in positions of power (Osler talks about politics but the same could just as easily be said of the worlds of finance, law or the media) in our society are Oxbridge graduates. Second, those who get into Oxbridge are far more likely than average to be privately educated and from a wealthy background.

Both of these are undeniably true, but I don’t think either Osler or Sagar give an adequate account of the reasons behind or implications of these facts. The dominance by Oxbridge alumni of various elite professions is principally a reflection of the extent to which those professions are anti-meritocratic, dependent on networking and personal contacts rather than individual talent. Surely the lack of meritocracy in politics is more likely to be due to systemic flaws in the way career structures work in the political world than to the universities our politicians attended? (I don’t think Paul Sagar’s suggestion on this topic that Oxbridge graduates really are a cut above the rest holds much water – yes, we might work harder than at other universities, but I’m unconvinced that that in itself makes you more intelligent, open-minded or intellectually curious.)

It’s also worth pointing out at this point that there’s one assertion in Osler’s original post that’s both pretty dodgy and totally unsupported by the rest of his article; his claim that “a place at Oxford or Cambridge is itself a privilege, in so far as it is almost a guarantee of career success”. This seems to be based on his earlier point about Oxbridge dominance of the professions, but ‘most wealthy/powerful people in the UK are Oxbridge alumni’ doesn’t entail ‘most Oxbridge alumni are wealthy and/or powerful’, any more than ‘most trapeze artisits have thumbs’ entails ‘most people with thumbs are trapeze artists’. Going to a university with a good reputation will probably do a fair bit for your career prospects, yes (though it’s anything but a cast-iron guarantee – I’m laughably overqualified for my current job), but this is hardly unique to Oxbridge even within the UK, as Reuben pointed out some time ago.

It’s the issue of who gets into Oxbridge, however, that’s far more interesting and important – if Oxbridge’s intake was representative of society at large, the dominance by Oxbridge alumni of politics, the media, law and so on wouldn’t be so much of a problem (though it wouldn’t be wholly unproblematic, mainly because of the issue of the meritocratic deficit I talk about above). Sagar’s analysis of why Oxbridge’s intake isn’t representative in this way gets a lot right, but I think he overstates the effect of teachers and pupils at comprehensives being under-informed about the admissions process. Of course this is widespread, which is why Sagar came across it a lot when he volunteered to visit schools as an undergrad (I did the same and my experiences were similar). But it’s also about the only factor affecting the social makeup of the student body that Admissions Offices can have any influence over. That’s the reason why they devote so much time and attention to it, not because it’s the factor that has the biggest impact.

Sagar’s also right that one reason private schools get so many students into Oxbridge is because they have the resources to offer a better education. It seems hard to argue otherwise without resorting to a definition of intelligence that’s implausibly (and unpleasantly) genetically determinist. Where Sagar goes wrong, though, is his conclusion that the main problem is deficiencies in the state school sector which the Government hasn’t done enough to address. This seems to almost wilfully ignore the more likely culprit – the fact that we have an education system that lets wealthy parents buy an education for their children that massively raises the odds that those children will grow up to be wealthy as well, meaning that the rich will stay rich (and probably do all they can to make it easier for the rich to keep on getting richer when they get political power) and the poor will, with very few exceptions, stay poor. By the time people reach the age where they’re thinking about applying to university (or not), the class divide is already well-established. This is obviously not to say that all schools should be at the level of the weakest-performing comprehensives – of course there are any number of things in the state sector that could be improved – but the principle that being rich lets you buy success for your children irrespective of any natural talent that they have is what we should be concerned with.

The social makeup of the student bodies at Oxford and Cambridge (and most other traditionally prestigious universities) reflects the massive class divide and laughable lack of social mobility in the UK, but it doesn’t cause it. Our society is a long way from being socially just, and looking at who gets admitted to Oxford and Cambridge shows us that vividly. But blaming two universities for the entrenched class division in our society is nothing more than shooting the messenger.

As I write this on Saturday evening, news sites are all abuzz over the…er…shocking news that the Children’s Commissioner doesn’t think we should try ten-year-olds as adults, while the government appparently thinks it’s perfectly OK, despite the fact that no other country in Western Europe does so.

So far, so predictable. But in all the furore over Maggie Atkinson’s comments (in particular her allegedly ‘insensitive’ remarks about James Bulger’s killers), no one seems to have picked up on something far more strange from the same Times interview. Atkinson seems to have some seriously odd views on both what young people’s lives are actually like and what they should be like. For starters, she’s either profoundly unobservant or has just never used Facebook:

After the murder of a young girl who met a rapist on Facebook, Dr Atkinson says that the social networking site must “get with the programme” and have an automatic button that people can press if they feel uncomfortable about somebody who contacts them.

What, like this one?

This link is on every Facebook profile page. Apparently Maggie Atkinson has never seen it.

She then goes on to claim that

Young people will network whether you want them to or not. But if all they do is close the door of their room and play Sudoku down one side of the screen and MSN texting down the other side, with their homework down the middle, and they never go out and meet other youngsters face to face, that’s very sad.

There are several things to note here, which I’ll list in ascending order of importance:

• She seems to think that instant messaging and texting are the same thing – not exactly the most important thing in the world, but definitely the kind of distinction you might expect someone whose job it is to know about the lives of children and young people to be aware of.
• She thinks that kids and teenagers spend their evenings on the internet doing Sudoku…
• …and that this is a bad thing, bearing in mind what else they could be doing on the internet.
• Most disconcertingly, she’s apparently bought into the tired myth that online social networking makes you lonely and socially isolated in the real world (because god forbid that you might ever talk to people you’ve met offline via the internet).

I’ll be nice and leave aside the bit just above the stuff I quoted about kids reading the Beano, because apparently there are some children (albeit a declining number) who still actually do that, but this total ignorance of how children and teenagers use computers isn’t a good sign in someone whose job it is to promote young people’s interests.

Thirdly, there’s this:

If…you take it for granted that when they [children] say ‘I don’t want you in my room’ that’s OK, then you need to have a very serious think about your parenting. The adult in the relationship is the adult.

And finally, on the issues of violent computer games or the sexualisation of children:

If you would feel uncomfortable about it being discussed at your family dinner table, whether it’s violence or sexual images, then you shouldn’t be letting your children look at it… You have to let children be children.

I’ve bolded that last sentence because it encapsulates everything I find unsettling about the views Atkinson is expressing. It’s not that ‘letting children be children’ is a bad idea in itself (it’s so vacuous it could mean pretty much anything, good or bad), but Atkinson’s opinion about what that entails seems to be incredibly narrow. In her view, children and young people (up to the age of 17, mind) don’t have a right to keep any kind of secrets from their parents, and shouldn’t ever encounter anything more disturbing than would be an appropriate topic for conversation over dinner. Seriously? I recognise that parents want to protect their kids and that they probably have their children’s best interests at heart, but is she seriously saying that young people don’t have any right to privacy, to the point that they shouldn’t be able to ask their parents to leave their bedrooms and give them some time on their own? The notion that being under 18 negates your right to a private life is disturbingly authoritarian. As to the sex and violence, Jacob’s already written about how misguided so much of the hand-wringing over ‘sexualised’ children is, and if violent imagery is a problem then banning kids from watching the news should probably be next on the agenda. alongside Asterix books and Playmobil, those other notorious corrupters of today’s youth.

This post isn’t meant to be a hatchet job. As you could probably guess from my post last week, I totally agree with her that ten-year-olds shouldn’t be tried as adults and that we need a more sensitive approach to young offenders, no matter how terrible their actions. Her defence of single parents and criticism of the Tories’ stance on marriage are both laudable as well. I also sympathise with anyone who wants to protect children from the nastier features of the adult world, but there’s a fine line between being protective and being controlling. Atkinson seems to be clamouring for parents to cross that line, and that should really worry us.

Image: flickr/Valentin.Ottone

As you may or may not have noticed, smoking is an issue fairly close to the hearts of some among The Third Estate’s bloggers. And as today brings news of proposals for even stricter restrictions on smoking in public places, you could be forgiven for expecting another angry denunciation of government policy on the issue. But, just this once, that’s not what you’re going to get. Now, admittedly as a (near-)non-smoker, I’m probably a bit less likely to view the right to smoke as a fundamental human freedom in any case, but take a close look at what the Department of Health is actually suggesting:

This next push offers a radical vision for a smokefree future. It sets out several key commitments:

• Stopping young people being recruited as smokers by cracking down on cheap illicit cigarettes. Immediate investment in extra overseas officers will stop 200 million cigarettes entering the UK every year.
• Every smoker will be able to get help from the NHS to suit them if they want to give up – new types of support will be available at times and in places that suit smokers.
• The Government will carefully consider the case for plain packaging.
• Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines – a significant source of tobacco for young people.

So, let’s consider these proposals one by one. A crackdown on cigarette smuggling? More tax money for the Treasury’s all-too-empty coffers as more cigarettes are bought legitimately? Sounds OK to me. Some smokers – well, OK, most smokers who are aware of the issue – are undeniably quite pissed off that taxes on tobacco bring in considerably more money than the NHS spends on treating smoking-related diseases, but I don’t see that they have much reason to complain, particularly if they argue against restrictions on smoking on the grounds of personal liberty (as is commonplace on this blog). No one’s coercing smokers into buying tobacco products, so raising taxes on them isn’t authoritarian. Sure, most smokers are to some extent addicted (so perhaps they can’t exactly be said to be choosing to buy tobacco), but if they want to spend less money then they have the option of free smoking cessation help from the NHS – help which, according to the second bullet point above, is becoming better-funded and more widely available under the new proposals. There’s no compulsion involved.

Banning branded packaging – if indeed the government decides to do this – doesn’t seem much of an affront to liberty either. I fail to see how distinctive designs on different brands of tobacco products enhance the freedoms of those who are buying those products and as such likewise fail to see how banning said designs restricts their freedom. It certainly restricts the freedoms of the tobacco companies to influence consumers through marketing and branding, but surprisingly enough I don’t really give a shit about that.

Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines is, again, not something I can really bring myself to care about. Unless you think the UK’s ban on alcohol in vending machines is a gross violation of our fundamental liberties (or that there’s some fundamental difference in how alcohol and tobacco should be treated as controlled substances), I really don’t see that there’s a great deal to make a fuss about.

As for the final point, there seems little reason why a campaign to dissuade people from exposing children to secondhand smoke should be seen as controversial, and a prohibition on smoking in the entrances to buildings is barely an extension of the previous smoking ban. The principle – that non-smokers shouldn’t be exposed to high levels of secondhand smoke – is exactly the same. Walking through a large group of smokers clustered round a doorway is pretty comparable to walking past a group of smokers indoors, and obviously unavoidable if you want to go into the building outside which said smokers are standing. Whether the previous smoking ban was right or wrong is a question on which I’m agnostic, but this is hardly a tougher restriction.

In short, smokers’ rights advocates might do well to rein in their outrage. Whether the government is right to care so much about the harms of smoking is certainly debatable, but if it is trivial then attacking these proposals as part of a war on personal liberty seems a little lacking in perspective.

(For the benefit of any new readers, FJM is explained here. But to be honest, it’s not very complicated. You’ll probably get the idea pretty quickly.)

It’s been a good week, both for the liberal left and for Twitter. First there was the whole Trafigura thing, which finally came to a decisive end yesterday evening, when the injunction on the Minton Report into the toxic waste dumping was lifted. This followed the lifting earlier in the week of the injunction against reporting a Parliamentary question mentioning it, which was what sparked off the whole thing. But before that came to an end, a whole new storm of outrage was brewing over Jan Moir’s egregiously offensive piece in Friday’s Mail, which, thanks once again to a campaign on Twitter, attracted a huge number of complaints and not a few derisory reactions from the rest of Fleet Street and the blogosphere. So a few hours later she decided to try and explain herself, in a manner wholly deserving of being FJM’d:

Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

Um, I really don’t think most people were upset because they thought you saw Gately as charmless or sour. But I suppose you can never be sure about these things.

However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read –

Hang on, you’re a columnist for the Daily Mail, and you’re claiming that the criticism you’re on the end of is nothing but an uninformed kneejerk reaction? This is truly special.

…was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

O…kay. First, you didn’t say that there were ‘unanswered questions’ about Gately’s death, you categorically stated that ‘Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.’ So now you’re just lying, very clumsily. Second, you’ve already been taken apart by any number of people (see links above) for implying you magically know the circumstances of Gately’s death better than the qualified coroner who examined his body. Doing the same thing again really isn’t helping you.

The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned.

Ooh, what lessons might these be? Please enlighten us.

On this subject, one very important point.  When I wrote that ‘he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine’, I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended  to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality.

Got that, kids? Drugs and casual sex might not have had anything to do with Gately’s death, but they’re still bad, mmmkay? I hear he didn’t always get his five fruit and veg a day either. Maybe his death could teach us a lesson about the importance of eating our greens?

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Fair point. Of course, it would help if you could cite a single case of someone arguing that civil partnerships wouldn’t have the same problems that marriages do, since without that all you’ve got there is a pathetic straw man argument, but I suppose I’m quibbling over details here.

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

So…your grand finale is to insinuate that the protests about this article are some kind of gigantic conspiracy rather than the result of people actually being genuinely offended? Sterling job there. If for some reason you find yourself looking for work in the near future, maybe Carter Ruck’s PR department could hire you?

Yesterday’s Iraq war memorial service can’t have been much fun for Tony Blair. Not only did he get called a war criminal by the father of a soldier who was killed in the conflict, he also had to sit quietly through the Rowan Williams’ polite denouncing of those who ‘look for short cuts in the search for justice – letting ends justify means, letting others rather than oneself carry the cost, denying the difficulties or the failures so as to present a good public face’ and ‘policy makers… who were able to talk about it [the war] without really measuring the price, the cost of justice.’ The biblical reading before the good archbishop’s sermon can’t have been too comfortable either, with its pronouncement that ‘we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’.

Image: Steve Punter/flickr

Now, I’m firmly of the belief that a little awkward squirming at a memorial service is some way short of the bare minimum that Blair should have to endure for the invasion of Iraq, so my first instinct is to be very pleased that the Archbishop of Canterbury is making statements like this (though since he opposed the war from the start it’s hardly a surprise), and I’m more than happy that he should get plenty of press coverage when he does. But am I being hypocritical here? When the Catholic Church pokes its nose into issues like the creation of hybrid embryos, my first instinct is to quietly despair that an opinion spouted from just above a dog collar is not dismissed as uninformed rubbish but rather treated by the media as if it magically has the same worth as that from an expert in the relevant field. So what’s the difference? Am I just cherry-picking, supporting the right to media attention and a public platform for religious leaders only when they’re making moral pronouncements I happen to agree with, and demanding that they be ignored the rest of the time? Well, maybe. At least, that might explain my instinctive reaction to the two different cases. But there’s an important difference between the two. I don’t think there’s anything in Rowan Williams’ sermon that even the most hardline supporter of the war in Iraq would claim was factually inaccurate, regardless of how much they might disagree with the moral arguments. In the debate over the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill last year, by contrast, (which permitted the creation of hybrid embryos) various members of the Catholic clergy, whether intentionally or not, said things that were actively misleading. They repeatedly made us of words like ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘horror’, conjuring up lurid images that bore no relation to what was actually being proposed. If the debate had been honest the priests would have focused solely on the ethical status of embryos, since that was fairly obviously the issue that really bothered them. And if they’d done that, I don’t think I’d have a problem with it.

Unlike some of my fellow devout secularists, then, I don’t see a problem with giving over airtime and column inches to the views of senior religious figures on ethical questions, provided that if they make misleading or factually dubious claims, journalists will actually call them on it. Most of the time it’s pretty likely that the holy man or woman in question represents a point of view shared by a significant proportion of the population, and if that’s the case it’s entirely legitimate that that point of view be heard. I don’t really care that Rowan Williams doesn’t share my view about the plausibility of The Feeding of the Five Thousand – I’m still happy to support him when he lays into Blair about Iraq. It’s true that religious figures don’t have any special insight into moral questions simply in virtue of their vocation and shouldn’t be treated as if they do, but nor do politicians (including unelected ones like peers) or journalists, and we’re still expected to take their views seriously. That’s not really a good enough reason to shut them out of the debate.