Johann Hari

Rev up your SUV. Jump in a plane to New York for a morning meeting about how global warming is a "scam", and head back in the afternoon. When you get back to your empty centrally-heated house, turn on that gas fire - and toss a copy of the Kyoto treaty on to the flames. This was the message this weekend from David Bellamy, still routinely dubbed one of Britain's "leading environmentalists". Global warming? Chill, baby, chill.

For more than a decade now, the climate change deniers have been in retreat, humbled by the thumping weight of scientific evidence against them. More than 10,000 reputable, peer-reviewed climate scientists believe the evidence that rapid shifts in global temperature are caused by human activity. Seven - that's seven - doubt it. But Bellamy's increasingly erratic outbursts over the past year have given the beleaguered band of anti-environmentalists a fresh gallon of petrol to fuel their flailing pro-carbon crusade. "My belief is that global warming is a largely natural phenomenon and the world is in danger of wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can't be fixed and doesn't need to be anyway," he said, producing ecstasy in the offices of dozens of J R Ewings.

Whenever a journalist writes about man-made climate change, a cascade of e-mails from across the Atlantic floods in. The Arctic ice-sheet has lost half its thickness in the past 30 years? The 1990s were the hottest decade of the entire millennium? The level of carbon in the atmosphere has been consistently rising over this period? "Coincidence!" they cry.

They claim that anthropogenic climate change is "unproven". They send "briefing papers" from corporate-funded think tanks, designed to give the impression that this is "a controversial debate with two sides", and the UN Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - consisting of the world's 2,500 best climatologists - was "fixed". They claim that they are "debunking myths" - but when you look at the evidence, it becomes clear that they entertain more myths than the ancient Greeks.

Their first claim is intuitively appealing. It goes like this: climate changes naturally in slow, inexorable cycles over millennia. It is simply egotism on the part of human beings to assume that our puny emissions have any effect at all.

At first, this sounds persuasive. Aren't we tiny? Isn't the world huge? I put this to Geoff Jenkins, Britain's leading climatologist, based at the Hadley Centre. He replied: "Of course it is true that many factors affect the climate, from changes in the sun to volcanoes. But levels of carbon are a key factor as well."

Everyone agrees there is a natural greenhouse effect, he explains. It's simple: carbon and water vapour in the atmosphere trap heat, and they keep us about 3C warmer. This is basic science. All climatologists are saying is that if you increase one of those properties - carbon - then more heat will be trapped and the temperature will rise further. "Nobody denies the natural greenhouse effect and nobody denies that humans have massively increased carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution," says Dr Jenkins, "so why does anybody dispute this unnatural greenhouse effect, especially with all the evidence of its effects?"

Dr Jenkins invited Professor Bellamy to the Hadley Centre to explain to him that levels of carbon in the atmosphere are now higher than they have been for the past 420,000 years - with an obvious impact on the greenhouse effect. "He doesn't seem to have grasped basic scientific evidence," says Dr Jenkins, a mild-tempered man, about the meeting. "When you understand how the atmosphere works in even a rudimentary fashion, his argument doesn't hold water."

Because the deniers are so out of tune with this overwhelming scientific consensus, they have been forced to turn on climatology itself. They say that - out of hunger for research grants - climatologists have all begun to skew their evidence. The more disastrous their predictions, the more money they are given by government agencies, so you can't trust what they say.

This is the opposite of the truth. Swaths of the most reputable climate change research has been funded by the US government. Who can seriously claim the White House of George Bush is eager for proof of climate change? In fact, there is political pressure - but it is for scientists to play down the evidence of climate change. We know, for example, that the former chairman of the IPCC, Dr Robert Watson of Harvard University, was removed from his position after heavy lobbying from the White House because he was too outspoken. For any scientist prepared to defy the evidence and deny anthropogenic climate change, there are huge "grants" and "consultancies" waiting for you from gas and oil companies.

The deniers then take a different tack: in the 1970s, they say, climatologists were warning about the dangers of a "new Ice Age". Now they say we'll boil. Isn't the truth that they don't know?

This is largely a myth. A handful of scientists in the 1970s believed they were witnessing a process of "global cooling" that - if extrapolated for a very long period - would lead to an Ice Age. They said this was simply a possibility worth exploring, and they admitted the evidence was woefully insufficient. A few populist magazines ran with the idea but the scientists always expressed extreme uncertainty.

Today, by contrast, there is a near-complete scientific consensus that man-made global warming is happening and could be disastrous. The evidence is not patchy and partial, as the "global cooling" scientists always admitted theirs was; it is massive and overwhelming.

There are countless more myths: that if global warming happens, it will be a good thing (a view held by several Republican senators); that plants will absorb the extra carbon in the atmosphere and even benefit from the extra emissions; and so on. It would take a whole issue of The Independent to debunk them all.

My favourite idiotic objection to the evidence about climate change is that of Mark Steyn, the American far-right's court jester who is inexplicably published by newspapers that would presumably decline to publish the fascist burblings of Ann Coulter or Nick Griffin. Steyn argues that there isn't even any evidence that warming is happening - a ludicrous notion - and then smirks at the supposed irony that liberals and progressives who seek change in so many areas suddenly become 'conservative' when it comes to climate. "Scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists of the western media, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen... in some unchanging Edenic state," he writes. Ah, Mark, Mark. I don't believe in using all the world's nuclear weapons simultaneously. Does that mean I am conservatively clinging to an Edenic non-radiological past? Or does it simply mean that I want to preserve the basic conditions for human life? Human beings have never endured a 10C shift in temperature; to risk it now - something that the world's climatologists say is at the margins of the possible in the next century - is not conservatism. It is insanity.

But these arguments with climate deniers are distracting dances on the precipice of a volcano. The IPCC says we are now poised on the brink of a temperature rise in the next century of 1.4C to 5.8C - bigger than the difference between the present day and the end of the last Ice Age. Many distinguished climatologists now believe that, if there is a 'feedback loop', these predictions could be conservative and changes as high as 10C are possible. The changes, the IPCC explains, will "translate into climate-related impacts that are much larger and faster than any that have occurred during the 10,000-year history of civilisation." Nobody knows where this will lead.

The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers. Indeed, given that 25,000 people died in Europe in the 2003 heatwave caused by anthropogenic climate change, given that the genocide unfolding in Darfur has been exacerbated by the stresses of climate change, given that Bangladesh may disappear beneath the rising seas in the next century, they are nudging close to having the moral credibility of Holocaust deniers. They are denying the reality of a force that - unless we change the way we live pretty fast - will kill millions.

When I saw George Galloway at the hustings in Mile End on Wednesday night, he seemed uncharacteristically pale and shaken. Throughout the election campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow - where he is standing as the Respect candidate against the Labour MP Oona King - he has been running a high-volume, high-rage contest. Most of his campaign has consisted of legitimate political comment, even if I disagree: attacking the war as "evil", savaging King as "a Blairite android", and so on.

But some has burst beyond those boundaries: he has been telling the most alienated Muslim men in Britain that Tony Blair is "waging a war on Muslims ... at home and abroad". He is nudging towards a kind of inverse Powellism that tells the Muslim community it is under siege from a brutal terrorist state that will stop at nothing. Rivers of blood, he implies, are only months away.

The mood was becoming so ugly that I began to fret there would be violence. King was being attacked with eggs hurled by young Muslim men everywhere she went. Her tyres were slashed. Was worse on the way? At the first set of hustings, I saw similar men threatening Labour Party members as they spoke against Galloway, slamming their fists into their palms.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, I kept thinking about Theo Van Gogh, beheaded by an Islamic fundamentalist in the streets of Amsterdam with a butcher's knife. His "crime" was to make a film exposing domestic violence in the Dutch-Muslim community - and attached to his corpse was a death threat against a young immigrant MP. She is still in hiding. If it happens in this country, I kept thinking, it will happen in the East End.

Just as I was beginning to think I was heading into melodrama overdrive, I heard that Galloway had been told he was going to be hanged for being a "false prophet" by an Islamic fundamentalist group who believe democracy is "evil".

Suddenly Galloway was talking about his "respect" for Oona King, and King reciprocated by saying that "although George and I disagree about many things, we do not want to be violent towards each other." Incredibly, much of the audience at the hustings booed this sentiment; I hope they just misheard.

So what is happening in the East End? I know a few members of the Hizb al-Tahrir group who have been accused of threatening Galloway, although the group fervently denies it. They often man a stall just outside my local McDonald's and sometimes, when I am very bored, I pick a row with them. (Perhaps I should stop doing that now). They are intelligent and furious young conservatives, driven by hatred of Western liberalism in all its forms, and absolutely convinced they are being viciously persecuted by the "infidel" state. It is very hard to engage them in a political dialogue that makes sense - you talk tax credits and they talk Caliphate, you talk a higher minimum wage and they talk about Mohammed's third wife.

But I am programmed as a leftie to try to find the root causes of their anger. I search for it in every conversation, but these aren't displaced Palestinians or Chechens; they are fairly wealthy, fairly well-educated young men (never women, of course) who have grown up in free countries. I cannot find a root cause for their beliefs; they seem to be simply intoxicated by a superstitious, reactionary ideology. You may as well ask about the root cause of the Cambridge spies' conversion to Soviet Communism.

This week, Galloway had the look of a man who has been romancing a beast, only to find the beast has raced beyond his control. For several years now, he has been performing political cunnilingus on the most hardline Muslim groups in Britain. Look at the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), whose chief spokesman, Dr Azam Tamimi, says that Arab women "ask for" wife-beating, and believes thieves should be punished by cutting off their hands.

After years of wooing them and adopting their ultra-conservative position on abortion, euthanasia and more, Galloway has coaxed the MAB to urge its supporters to give him "maximum support." He has even adopted the mullahs' line on drugs, attacking King for her "soft" views on cannabis and calling for a "much tougher" war, no matter how many Muslim lives it takes.

Galloway clearly believed this ideology could be used for his political ends. Perhaps now he will see it for what it is: an authentically totalitarian movement capable of extreme violence against democratic politicians.

But would even this realisation stop Galloway stoking and supporting it? The other extraordinary aspect to the fight in Bethnal Green and Bow is that Galloway seems to have given up pretending he was sincerely opposed to Saddam. After describing Saddam's programmes of genocide as "a civil war with massive violence on both sides", Galloway has now called for Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to be released without charge. Not to an international court; just released. "An eminent diplomatic and intellectual person" held "without any justification," was how Galloway described the man he spent a very merry Christmas with in 1999.

Aziz could have defected at any time. Instead, he stayed as one of the leaders of a fascist state. The vast majority of people who opposed the war had no sympathy with Baathism, and I have never met a pro-Saddam Muslim; but for anybody with eyes to see, Galloway's beliefs are now plain. I can understand why many decent people cannot vote for King because she supported the war, even though I don't agree -indeed I am campaigning for her. But why vote for an alternative who seems to be an apologist for even more Iraqis deaths?

I asked Galloway how many Muslims had been murdered by his friend Aziz. The correct answer: even more than have been slaughtered by Ariel Sharon, or by Israel in 38 years of occupying Gaza and the West Bank. Galloway said, "Why don't you go and take some more drugs, you druggie?"

This is part of a pattern. Galloway consistently sides with unelected, unrepresentative Muslim leaders at the expense of the majority of Muslim people. When he talks about "siding with Muslims", I am always tempted to ask: which Muslims? Female Muslims, chafing under their veils and reeling from the fists of too many of their men? Democratic Muslims, braving suicide-bombers to vote all over Iraq? Gay Muslims, living in terror and locked in mock-heterosexual marriage? Muslim trade unionists in Iraq, dismissed by Galloway as "quislings"? Tariq Aziz, or his victims?

In a column on Wednesday, I talked about how excruciatingly boring this election campaign has been. After hours watching two candidates who might be facing death, I'm almost tempted to swallow the valium of Blair vs Howard. Anything - even comatose boredom - is better than a Theo van Gogh on the streets of the East End.

Is there a serious election campaign happening when my back is turned? Is there a corner of Britain where somebody in the past fortnight has mentioned climate change, Iraq, Europe, education ... or anything other than MRSA, refugees and Gypsies?

The aggressive triviality of the campaign is having a deadening effect on the electorate. This week, I have made an effort to talk to those mysterious creatures called Real People who live somewhere beyond Medialand. It's a strange experience, like wading through the wreckage left by an apathy-tsunami, with only the odd rock of disconnected rage to break up the emptiness.

"None of it makes sense," said one woman on an estate near where I live in the East End of London, showing me the handful of leaflets that had dribbled through her letter box. "Forward not back? What does that mean?"

The few people who had followed the coverage of the election campaign saw it as happening in a strange parallel universe. "They don't talk to people like us. They talk to each other and to journalists. It's all about who's up and who's down, and I'm sure if you know the people that's very interesting, but when I want a soap opera I watch Coronation Street, dear," said Anna Castle, a woman in her sixties .

Even when an actual issue emerged, it was usually distorted beyond recognition. Look at the biggest issue of the campaign so far. One man told me he knew "for a fact" that asylum seekers are given £40,000 a year each (in fact, it's £40 per week). Another guessed asylum seekers make up 20 per cent of the population. One told me it was "obvious" that refugees are more likely to be rapists. These people aren't stupid: they have been lied to. How many Britons know that asylum seekers and immigrants make a net contribution of £2.5bn to the economy? How many politicians or journalists have tried to tell them?

I returned home from a day talking to mystified or furious voters and tried to watch political programmes with Anna's eyes. Michael Portillo was wittering on about whether Blair likes Brown. Somebody asked if Michael Howard was "a strong leader". Five minutes passed and nothing - literally nothing - was said about the world at the other end of Westminster Bridge. I flicked over to a news channel: somebody else was talking about how some Tory grandees had challenged Howard, another Westminster tale with no real-world meaning. Flick again: an analysis of the opinion polls. Will Letwin lose his seat? Will Howard keep the leadership?

Froth built on froth, gossip drawing on gossip: this is what passes for politics in one of the most powerful democracies in the world. Politicians and the press often collude in this cretinisation of the electorate. And I kept thinking: what if they held an election and nobody came?

If ordinary voters want to find straightforward information about how this election affects their lives, they have to wade through so much rubbish I don't blame many of them for giving up. Look, for example, at an issue that affects at least two million: the minimum wage. Un-noted by the press, Labour is committed to a nine per cent rise this year and more rises year on year - hundreds of extra pounds for cleaners, hospital porters and dinner ladies. This kind of cash makes a real difference if you are skint. The Tories, by contrast, are committed to freezing the minimum wage, gradually driving its value down in real terms.

But I spoke to five people who admitted to being on the minimum wage, and none of them were aware of this hefty potential change in their lives; all said they would seriously consider voting Labour because of it. It's a shaming indictment of the media that the only way to get serious attention for this policy would be if Blair and Brown had a bust-up row about it.

If we wanted to take democracy seriously - if we wanted general elections to be more than a quadrennial plebiscite approving whatever the political class has already decided - what would we do differently? In an iPod age where we all expect to be able to access 10,000 songs in a second, it is bizarre that our political choices are restricted to two homogenous parties (or, at best, three). In every area of our lives we expect personalisation and nuance - but when it comes to politics, we are expected to be blunt and bovine. Only a multi-party proportional electoral system can make politics compatible with complex consumer preferences, giving us a political menu that stretches from the Greens to the BNP.

There are smaller measures that could help to make general election campaigns more lively. Perhaps the boldest proposal for making our democracy meaningful is put forward by American political scientists Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin in their book Deliberation Day.

It's deceptively simple: they suggest that election day is declared a public holiday, and every citizen is offered £150 to participate in a day of deliberation on democratic issues. It would be structured like jury service: citizens would form groups of 15 and would watch a televised debate between the main political leaders. They would then retire for an hour and discuss the questions they want to ask of local representatives of the parties. All the groups would then reconvene and the "foreman" of each "jury" would put questions on behalf of his group. After lunch, there would be an afternoon session repeating this process - and, finally, payment. I explained this idea to the Real People I met this week, and most said they would be keen.

Ackerman and Fishkin believe this would drive up wider political standards: politicians could be capable of communicating in more than soundbites and idiot-speak. They would know that their statements are going to be subject to widespread scrutiny, rather than just skewed media scandalmongering.

To readers engaged enough to buy The Independent, this might seem irrelevant or patronising. But two-thirds of British people tell pollsters they either never discuss politics, or spend less than 10 minutes a week on it. What kind of meaningful democracy can emerge from such ignorance? Doesn't it simply encourage voters to get lost in a sea of £35bn-counterpledges and either drop out altogether or judge politicians on the shininess of their smiles? For many, Deliberation Day would be a bottle of Perrier in a political drought, a chance twice a decade to think seriously about the future of their country and their planet.

It's too late for this election, but on 6 May the government - whatever its political hue - should begin seriously discussing ways to make British democracy meaningful. The alternative is to carry on with campaigns like this one. Do we really want to be trapped in this political Groundhog Day, where once every four years we spend a painful, barely democratic month witnessing the airless, grinding circulation of ignorance?

My book 'God Save the Queen?' is still available in all good bookshops (and probably some crap ones).

Here's the opening chapter as an extract:

PART ONE – FEEDING THE BEAST: HOW THE MONARCHY HAS DESTROYED THE LIVES OF THE WINDSOR FAMILY

Monarchists are torturing the very people they claim to love and respect. Every member of the Windsor family has been fed at birth into the sausage-machine of The Monarchy, and it has pulled and tugged and stamped at them until they are Monarch-Shaped. In the process, they have become deeply damaged human beings. This book will show how every Windsor has been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment which would never be accepted if it were forced upon a ‘normal’ citizen.

In royal circles, they refer to the sacrifices they are forced to make for the monarchy as “feeding the beast.” I will, first of all, show just how painful that feeding frenzy has been, and, secondly, ask whether the institution of monarchy is a beast worth feeding at all.

But before we begin that painful journey, I need to tell you a little bit about how I came to be writing this book. In January 2002, I wrote a cover story for the New Statesman which surmised, on the basis of evidence already in the public domain, that William Windsor does not want to be King. I drew only on very reputable sources, and my editors and I had confidence that we could make this sensational set of revelations stand up. The story caused a small ripple – ‘Le Monde’ ran it on their cover, with the headline ‘L’affaire William’; the Daily Mail cheekily ran on their cover a story headed ‘The Boy Who Would (rather not) Be King’, without crediting me as a source; and so on, for a week or so. I thought the story had run its course and I shut royal affairs out of my mind.

Three weeks later, I met (through a mutual friend) a person who is unquestionably very close to William. He was very eager to know “how I had found out.” He didn’t say quite what he thought I had found out. I was of course very cagey and deliberately ambiguous, hoping to give the impression that I knew more than I did in the hope that he would inadvertently reveal some interesting facts. It swiftly became clear that in William’s closest social circle, there is a frenzied debate about whether William wants to be King, and he was only talking about his real plans to a select few. My contact explained, “There’s only one of about ten people who can have talked to you. With everybody else, he avoided the topic. But with us, he’s always been very honest that being King is the last thing he wants. So which one of the twenty was it? Was it -” and then he began to reel off a few names, none of which I knew.

I blabbered something about not revealing my sources and then chuntered to a halt. I was obviously very intrigued by what I was being told, but somehow I had to act very calm, as though I’d heard it all before. Clearly, this guy had assumed that somebody was blabbing to me - how could I use this? Hmmm. Then, for reasons which I still don’t understand, I suddenly used the bluntest (and most ridiculously unrealistic) instrument in my armoury. I tried to calm my heartbeat and asked ever-so-sweetly if, maybe, perhaps, ummmm, William himself would be interested in talking to me, off the record? He paused. In those beautiful, precious seconds, I had visions of writing ‘William: His True Story’, and reaping an Andrew Morton-sized fortune to go with it.

“I’ll find out…” he said. “But don’t hold your breath.” Then it all went quiet again.

I rushed about working on other stories, as usual, for the next month, and gradually lost hope. One day, I was in our offices, in the middle of talking on the telephone to a radical plastic surgeon who believes he can give people wings (it was for an article, I don’t want wings m’self), when my mobile began to vibrate. I glanced at the screen: it was William’s close friend. I hung up without even saying goodbye.
“Hi, it’s (name deleted),” he said in that odd, semi-cockney accent which only the exceedingly posh can ever achieve.
“Oh – hello. I’d forgotten you were due to call,” I said with a shrug. Like he’d believe that.
“Can we meet for a drink some time? Totally off the record, yah?” he asked.
“Well, let me check my diary…” I rapidly flicked some random pieces of paper so it would look like I was checking whether I had space in the diary I had (as ever) forgotten to take off my desk at home. “Well, actually,” I explained, “I have got a window in my schedule, err… NOW!” Okay, too desperate. Calm. Calm. “I mean, if that’s okay, it’s just that the rest of this week is terribly…”
“Okay. Where?”

Three minutes of agonising small-talk and sipping Pepsi. Oh, god, I just want to ask you if he said yes. Enough already!
“So, err, did you get a chance to…”
“Look. I tried. I talked around the subject. I mentioned that I had seen your article…” – I was virtually panting by this point. Morton megabucks, here I come… - “and he hated it.”
I pasted a smile onto my face. I’m a hardened journo, me, it was meant to say. Burst into tears just because one person hated my article? Pah! That’s for wimps! I grinned as hard as I could.
“Do you want a tissue?” he said.
“That obvious? No, I’m fine. Why did he hate it?”
“His dad went mental. The Queen went mental. He was forced to have arguments he wanted to put off for a few years.”
“So I was right?”
He swigged from his glass of gin. “Johann – of course you were.”

We talked for over two hours that day, and much of that conversation informs the chapter on William in this book. By the end of our long chat, my source was obviously getting anxious. He was slightly drunk and perhaps realised that the alcohol had loosened his tongue a little too much. He excused himself with a brisk handshake and strode off, a little too purposefully given the gin he’d been drinking all night because he walked straight into a pillar.

This is how royal history gets made, I thought: by rat-arsed posh people walking into pillars. I tried ringing him lots of times in the next few months. I always got his answer phone. He has never returned my calls.

So, alas, what you’re holding isn’t ‘William: His True Story’, or anything like it. But it is an informed insight into the very cruel world William has been forced into. What I am trying to craft here is a new argument about monarchy, and it is one I now know William agrees with. I support all the old republican principles, but, frankly, they ain’t winning the argument yet. So we need a new, Williamesque republicanism (apologies for sounding a bit Tony Blair circa 1997 here) which argues that not only is monarchy bad for Britain, it’s bad for the Windsor family themselves.

As I ploughed through the research for this book, I was amazed again and again by how blindingly obvious it is that the monarchy has broken and destroyed each of the Windsor family in turn. We must not let this happen to William and Harry, and their children, and their children and their children and so on verily until the Apocalypse. The monarchy is now an institution that can only produce fucked-up and unhappy people. It’s time we ended the misery. This, then, is how the centuries of British monarchy will end: Not with the bang of a revolution but with the whimper of a Prince.

But in order to get to the day when the Windsors are set free from the monarchy, I need to do something which no doubt monarchist critics of this book will accuse of hypocrisy. I am going to intrude into the Windsors’ privacy. I am going to draw on sources (including the tapes of private conversations which were, disgustingly, made public by the tabloids) which should not exist, because they are so intrusive. Yet one of my central arguments against the monarchy is that it opens up the individuals at its heart to a completely unsustainable degree of monitoring and supervision by the media. So how can I justify doing the very thing I’m attacking?

In order to show how intrusion has fucked up the Windsors, I need to use the fruits of intrusion. All I can do is admit that I feel very uncomfortable doing it, and I hope in some small way it begins a debate which will end with the Windsor family being released from intrusion. I pledge – and I expect all decent republicans to do the same – that once the Windsor family retires from public life and ends the institution of monarchy (an event which I fully believe will happen within my lifetime), I will never write about them ever again, and I will violently condemn anyone who does. The intrusion into their privacy within this book is a regrettable necessity designed to show how the monarchy has damaged the Windsors. It is a means to an end: setting us on the road to the rescuing of the Windsor family from the clutches of the cruel institution which is destroying their lives.

Of course, there are some decent and honourable republicans who say it is wrong to talk about the Windsors at all. Tony Benn opposes the personalisation of this debate; it should, he argues, be about constitutional principles. Against this, I argue that in practice the British monarchy is inextricable from the Windsor family. Nobody seriously suggests that we could keep the institutions of monarchy but ditch the Windsors. We’d have to find a new royal family – and though the House of Beckham would certainly be tempting, it’s extremely unlikely.

We cannot discuss the monarchy, then, without discussing the individual Windsors. Prince Charles himself, in an interview in 2001, made it clear that personalities are central to any debate about monarchy. When Mary Riddell asked him what monarchy was about, he replied, “God, all I can talk about is the way I think it should be. That is not necessarily how my successors see it. It is a personal thing, the whole business of monarchy.” Similarly, in the 1992 BBC documentary ‘Elizabeth R’, Elizabeth says, “In this existence, the job and the life go together – you can’t really divide it up.” So both Charles and Elizabeth have placed their own personalities at the absolute centre of the debate. If they are prepared to do that, I am only too happy to discuss it in their terms.

The monarchists have unashamedly used any favourable aspects of the personalities of the Windsor family to bolster the institution; we republicans are therefore perfectly entitled to reciprocate by discussing those very personalities. Remember, it was the other side who introduced the personality weapon into the war, so don’t blame us for its presence on the battlefield.

When he retired as Palace Press Spokesman in 1967, the famously reactionary Commander Colville publicly expressed his prescient fears about the lives of the Windsors being “progressively more exposed to public scrutiny,” and he said that there was difficulty distinguishing between “what may be properly termed as ‘in the public interest’ and what is private.” He seemed to think that a line could be drawn in the sand and consensus achieved about where this division lay. But he misunderstood the fact that monarchy in a celebrity age can only sell the individuals at its heart: and once it begins to sell that product, it cannot control the appetite for it. It cannot say, thus far and no more; it cannot reserve anything for the private individuals at its core.

The justification behind press intrusion into private lives of the famous is that the celebrities have asked for it – and monarchy cannot exist without asking for it. The royal family are therefore doomed to perpetual press intrusion against which they have very few sensible retorts, and certainly no effective ones. The days are gone when the Windsor family thrust themselves and their new-born babies into the public spotlight and expected nothing but praise in return.

This is not to attack the royals and say therefore they must surrender their privacy. Rather, we need to all agree that nobody should be put in a position where they are forced to make that choice. It’s nobody’s fault that we ended up with this situation. Nobody planned to put people in this untenable position. It’s just that, by chance, the monarchy has evolved over time in a way which makes it unbearably cruel to the individuals who happen to be the royal family. You might be feeling sceptical about this argument right now. So: let’s look at each of the Windsor family in turn…

You can buy the book at www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk

Christopher Hitchens said about it, "Here is the plain proof of the child-sacrifice that underlies our most absurd and sinister institution."

Julie Burchill said, "I love this book! It's like eating a whole box of chocolates in one go."

The Independent on Sunday (before I worked at the Indie!) called it, "Fantastically gripping and provocative...one of the most convincing books on the monarchy you'll ever read."

Arena Magazine said: "An enchanting, boisterous read that provides further sound argument for the forced removal of the House of Windsor... Hari makes a compelling case that monarchy is an institution inflicting abuse not only on democracy, but also on the Windsors themselves, denying them religious, political, and sexual freedoms that even their most strident supporters enjoy."

Janet Street-Porter (again, before I worked with her) called it "excellent", Victor Lewis-Smith in the Evenign Standard called it "brilliant". Rachel MacAlpine said, "This book is shockingly rude and intemperate and I believe every word. Johann Hari articulates what a lot of people know, but never say, at least in mainstream newspapers and journals. He pulls no punches. This is no measured, objective analysis: it's a rave, born of frustration and anger... I'm glad I read this scary little book."

The New Zeland Herald said, "Johann Hari has transformed our view of the monarchy... Excellent." The Scotsman called the book "fascinating", and the Syndney Sun-Herald said, "It would be easy to assume that an analysis of the royal family by a republican journalist would be a series of vicious character assassinations. But it is quite the opposite. Without the sycophancy expected of those granted royal access, Hari shows a compassion for the Windsors that monarchists would find disturbing.

In fact, this is Hari's main thesis. 'Monarchists are torturing the very people they claim to love and respect,' he writes in his opening essay. Of them all, Charles receives more of Hari's pity than anyone. He has become a walking, talking example of how badly a royal life - one spent waiting for your mum to die so you can assume her job - can screw you up... This is republicanism with verve and wit. It should be embraced by Australians, along with, of course, all the positive reasons for having one of our own as head of state."

You can hear the audio of the Institute of Ideas debate about 'The Right to be Offensive' that I participated in a few weeks ago by going to

http://www.theatrevoice.com/the_archive/

and searching for my name.

If any lovely person wants to type up a transcript, I'll put it on the wesbite and send you some books to say thanks.

If you want to see the dozens of small ways a Labour government is better than Tory rule, look for blank spaces. Remember the deadly "winter crisis" that would freeze the NHS every year? Gone, because Labour has tax-and-spent our hospitals out of the abyss. Remember cardboard city, and streets lined with beggars? Gone, because Labour has tax-and-spent the issue of homelessness away, slashing the number of rough sleepers by two-thirds.

And remember the periodic outbursts of Hun-bashing, frog-thrashing xenophobia, as a Tory minister would declare he was off to Brussels to slay the Euro-dragon? Remember the "beef wars" and the sense that Britain was a Europe-hating freak, forever trashing the source of Europe's 50-year peace and prosperity? Now, all this is only a blank space.

Nobody today talks about Britain wrenching itself out of Europe. Well, almost nobody. Ignored by the press, the Tories now have the most vehemently anti-European policies of any major party since Labour ditched its withdrawal plans in 1983. This - in all seriousness - is their plan: at their first EU summit, they will simply announce that they will never again belong to the Common Fisheries Policy, the Social Chapter, or any common European immigration regulations, and they will never sign up to an EU Constitution of any kind, ever. Unpick the Treaty of Rome right now, Johnny Foreigner, or... or what?

John Redwood, the shadow Deregulation Minister, was asked about this a few weeks ago - and he pointedly refused to rule out withdrawal. He's right - if the Conservatives make these demands, they will have to threaten to leave. In the end, either the Tories will have to break their core manifesto promises, or Britain will be forced into the logic of withdrawal.

The Tory election campaign so far has been "Hague - The Director's Cut", a new version of the 2001 campaign with - crucially - Europe snipped from the picture. The Tories know their Europe policies are vulnerable to even the most fleeting scrutiny. (By the way, William Hague said in 2001 that "after another term of Labour government, Britain will be a foreign land". Okay William - since this isn't your country any more, hand in your passport and off you go.)

Below the political radar, the Tory party has been UKIPped. If the Tories are ever returned to power without a drastic change in their policies, the summer of 2004 will turn out to have been a silent turning-point, not just for the party but for the country. The surge of the United Kingdom Independence Party in the European elections will be seen as the moment the Conservatives were nudged beyond the point of political sanity . This isn't just my judgement. Nigel Farage is one of UKIP's MEPs, and he has a vested electoral interest in saying the Tories are not as hardline as UKIP. But even he says with a smile that it is "interesting" to see the Tories "talking for the first time about renegotiating Britain's membership of the EU".

Today, more than 30 Tory parliamentary candidates have included withdrawal from the EU in their local manifestos - and Michael Howard has silently waved them through. For example, the leaflets for Douglas Carswell, the Tory candidate for Harwich, say: "The EU doesn't know where to begin to solve Europe's problems. That's because it is the problem ... Britain must be an independent country." One newspaper investigation has found that 70 per cent of Tory activists are in favour of total withdrawal, and it seems they are selecting candidates who match their prejudices.

The Tory pro-Europeans - Clarke, Heseltine, Heath - are old and can no longer offer any counter-balance. The hardline Eurosceptics - once dubbed by John Major as "the Broadmoor wing of the Party" - have total control of Conservative policy. (Britain's political debate is so shallow that Tory divisions are A Big Story, but Tory unity behind a crazy policy isn't.)

But the Tories can only get away with such extraordinary policies because pro-Europeans have allowed themselves to be bullied into silence by the right-wing press. Britain's Europhile politicians have been - with a few honourable exceptions - feeble. There was a bleak moment at Labour's manifesto launch this week when Tony Blair was asked if he had given up on joining the euro. There was a long, chilly silence. Blair looked to Brown and back again. Tumbleweed floated past. "I don't think anybody would say we should join the euro right now," said Blair at the start of a rambling answer that can be summarised in one sentence: yes, I have given up.

Blair's Things-Can-Only-Get-Better commitment to challenge Europe-haters has now shrivelled so far that many people close to him believe he actually wants the French referendum to reject the European Constitution next month. A Gallic Non would rescue him from a nasty, up-hill referendum campaign at home. Has it really come to this? Hoping for the victory of Euroscepticism abroad so we can avoid confronting Euroscepticism at home?

Roger Liddle, Blair's policy adviser on Europe from 1997 to 2004, warns that "Labour cannot afford to let the case for Europe go by default". He points to the root of the problem: British pro-Europeans have failed to develop a new set of arguments. The old Heathite case - that the EU prevents war - has been a victim of its own success. Nobody expects Germany to bomb Poland, even if the EU crumbled. But all we have found to replace this argument is a low drum-beat of threats: leave Europe and we lose 3 million jobs. Leave Europe and you give a victory to foul xenophobes. This is true enough, but it's not enough - where's the pro-European carrot to accompany the stick?

Liddle tries to point pro-Europeanism in a new direction. He argues that the best case for the EU comes from the centre-left - we must sell the EU as offering a way for Britain to maintain its social democracy in an age of globalisation. Do you want to milk the benefits from the global economy without being relentlessly Bushed by business's demands for lower taxes and lower spending? Do you want to maintain a strong welfare state and high public spending? These are the things the British public wants, according to every opinion poll: they are mainstream European social democrats, without accepting the label. So look across the Channel: only the EU offers a way to "mould global capitalism in a social democratic way". Only the EU offers a path leading away from Texas.

But just as Blair is silent about his Government's social democratic policies at home, he is silent about the social democratic potential of Europe. Today, he is reduced to trying to fend off the most extreme Euroscepticism simply by changing the subject, while the euro recedes into a hazy fog far beyond the horizon.