Johann Hari

The ugliest issue in British politics has been kicked awake. Government ministers have been scouring the TV studios this week to brag that the number of asylum applications in Britain have fallen by 9 percent. The fake-liberal Tories have been braying for an even bigger drop, achieved by ever-harsher 'punishments'. Through it all, it has been taken forgranted by politicians, presenters and public we should roll out the bunting to celebrate the news that in a world scarred by war and tyranny - many of them of our creation - we are offering safety to fewer and fewer of the victims.

And then Gordon Brown's team went a step further. The Prime-Minister-in-waiting gave a thoughtful if flavourless speech about Britishness. But there was a problematic pair of sentences, in which Brown suggested immigrants should carry out some unspecified "community service" in preparation for citizenship. It was a bad choice of words, implying that immigrating to Britain is on a par with committing a crime, but if done intelligently, it could be a good idea. Most immigrants - like my father - want to contribute, and would be happy to do all sorts of things, from visiting the elderly to translating for the police to giving talks at schools about their home country. It could be a good way to help immigrants feel they are welcomed, and to give a demonstration to everyone else of how immigrants enrich this country. (Since 1997, immigrants have added £36.7bn to the UK economy - equivalent to paying for the entire NHS for a year and a half).

The problem came with how this idea was sold to the right-wing press. "Sweep streets to get UK passport!" shrieked the Sun, next to an article by Brown. This clearly came from private briefings, since that idea appears nowhere in the speech. It's one of a string of depressing statements by Brown in which he tries to prove to the Murdoch media that he is Hard Enough to be Prime Minister. Remember his statement - in India! - that we should "stop apologising" for the British Empire? (When did we start?).

Brown's increasingly bombastic speeches about Britishness - demanding we uncritically celebrate British history - are falling into a nationalist error that was highlighted a century ago in a row between G.K. Chesteron and Rudyard Kipling. Chesterton criticised Kipling - the imperial drum-beater - for his "lack of patriotism". In a spluttery rage, Kipling demanded to know what he meant, and Chesterton explained: "He admires Britain, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires Britain because she is strong, not because she is Britain." I don't love my mother because, on every objective criteria, she is The Best Mother In The World, but because she's mine. I don't love my country because it is the best country on all measurements, but because I belong here.

By promoting this Britain-is-best nationalism, Brown is offering a Kipling vision, when a Chestertonian one actually reflects better the warmth most of us feel for our country. We don't think of abstract "British values"; we think of the relief when we get off the plane at Heathrow and realise we're home.

But there is a harder, crueller flaw in Brown's statements. He has demanded all immigrants learn the English language. He's absolutely right: we cannot be a shared community if we can't talk to each other. But he has simultaneously cut off funding for one of the government's best innovations - free English language lessons. From this September, only immigrants on benefits - a small minority, despite the lies - will be given free language courses. My local further education college, Tower Hamlets College, has more than 250 people on waiting lists to learn English, desperate to be able to participate in the community Brown talks about. Now they almost all will have to find £900 - or go without.

For most immigrants, this means being left to flounder. My Congolese friend Marie-Jean Ndoki came here speaking no English, and cleaned offices for the minimum wage at night, learning English by day. After six months of lessons she got a job as a translator and now works for a group of solicitors, paying taxes. Under the new government plans, she would have been denied lessons, since the idea of finding £900 back as a cleaner makes her hoot. She would have been stuck at home, struggling to understand the country around her, and taken far longer to become a net contributor to the Exchequer. How can it be right to demand immigrants learn English, but take away the means to do it?

In a neat coincidence, this new rash of immigration-panic has coincided with a rare opportunity to deal with the man who has done more than anyone else to curdle the debate about Britishness: Rupert Murdoch. He has recently bought a fat stake in ITV, which has promoted Alistair Darling, the trade and industry secretary, to reluctantly order a government review of a media empire that relentlessly presents asylum seekers and immigrants as swan-baking, MRSA-spreading scum.

From Fox News to the Sun, the core of Murdoch's politics is an inverted populism, turning the public's rage away from tax-evading billionaires and their lackeys and onto the weak and helpless - with immigrants first in line. The case for reigning this overweening power in is strong: the first time Murdoch expanded his British media ownings, he only got it past the government regulators by making a promise he has totally dishonoured. He was allowed to buy the Times and the Sunday Times because he assured regulators they would have "full editorial independence." The editors who have worked for him regard this as a joke. Andrew Neil has described Murdoch's management style as "terrorism"; Kelvin McKenzie says he would have published the Sun in Sanskrit if he suspected Rupert wanted him to.

Murdoch's private, unaccountable power is now so great that Lance Price - who was Alistair Campbell's Number Two - says he "seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard ... but his presence was always felt."

Of course some anti-immigrant fears will always naturally occur - but Murdoch fosters and feeds the most toxic strain of foreigner-fearing nationalism, and makes successive British governments bow to it with the threat of a Kinnocking. Would Brown - a cerebral and essentially decent man - be letting his team talk about forcing immigrants to sweep the streets if Murdoch and other right-wing press barons didn't hold such power to poison public opinion?

Yet there seems to be no chance the latest government inquiry will restrict Murdoch to a sensible one-paper, one-TV-channel only ration. On the contrary, Brown is eagerly bowing to his power, warping his views on Britishness to fit a Murdochian mold. Meanwhile, David Cameron, the absurd Alan Milburn, and all major other political pretenders genuflect to him just as quickly. This is one bleak reason why the ugliest issue in British politics will never be allowed to rest.

When I was in the bullet-pocked, rocket-rocked Gaza Strip last month, I could feel the Palestinian political ground fracturing beneath my feet. The rival political parties Hamas and Fatah were tooling up for a civil war, in their weapons dumps and in their minds. The dull cruelty of killing the other side's children had begun. Even the two leading campuses in Gaza - the Islamic University (Hamas) and Al Azhar (Fatah) - were firebombed just after I visited them, their status as inviolate oases of peace suddenly burned away. Locked in their box by the Israeli army, starved of resources by the international blockade, the Palestinians were turning on each other.

If Palestine turns into a Somalia-replica, it will obviously be a catastrophe for the sallow children of Palestine, who have already been so strangled by the four decade-long Israeli occupation and the current international boycott that more than half of them will go to bed hungry and traumatised tonight. But it will also be a catastrophe for Israel. At the moment, Hamas and Fatah could - in the context of a peace deal - ensure between them that there is all quiet on the Qassam Front: an end to missile attacks on civilians in Israeli cities. But if Gaza dissolves into civil war with a hundred different warring centres of authority, this slips off the table. Every side will instead demonstrate its machismo by firing into Israel. Nobody will be able to stop them.

So you would expect Israel - and all decent people - to welcome the Mecca agreement smelted in Saudi Arabia over the past fortnight. Hamas and Fatah have agreed to join together in a national unity government. This is partly to stem the sectarian killings, and partly a desperate attempt to end the international sanctions imposed on Palestine since last year the population democratically voted "the wrong way" in electing Hamas. The world has been demanding a unity government under Mahmoud Abbas ever since - and now we've got one.

The response? The US and Israel are doing everything they can to break it apart. Even the European Union is insisting the sanctions that shuttered Palestinian hospitals and schools will stay. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Condolleeza Rice has "remonstrated" with Mahmoud Abbas "in a bad temper" for signing the agreement, leaving Abbas to splutter that the US is "pushing the Palestinian people towards civil war."

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, says it is not enough that Hamas has pledged to "respect" all the agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority, including implicitly the recognition of Israel's right to exist within the 1967 borders. No: Olmert demands more. Even though Israel is imposing violent occupation on them, he wants the Palestinians to pre-emptively disarm and renounce all violence, even that offered in self-defence. (It's like demanding in 1992 that Sinn Fein recognize the Royal Ulster Constabulary, hand over their guns and pledge alleigance to the Queen, or all talks are off).

What Palestinian government could do this? Yet the world is backing this impossible Israeli hurdle. "Israel cannot negotiate with a government that has extremist components which deny Israel's right to exist", says German chancellor Angela Merkel. Why doesn't she mention that the Israeli government has extremist components who deny Palestine's right to exist - not least Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who openly advocates ethnic cleansing and the drowning of Palestinian prisoners? Why doesn't she mention that Israel is physically preventing Palestine's right to exist as we speak, by occupying the West Bank?

There are many decent Israelis who can see that this behaviour is disastrous. Israel's former chief of military intelligence, General Shlomo Gazit, calls these conditions "ridiculous, or an excuse not to negotiate." He explains, "We must negotiate on concrete problems, not declarative issues. I am in favour of starting negotiations today... Why should Palestinians stop fighting against us when they know we are unwilling to make an agreement?"

There are three potential motives for Israel's behaviour. The first is a lingering belief that if they resist Hamas, they will get a softer, gentler Palestinian leadership. This seems implausible, since when they actually had this softer, gentler leadership under Mahmoud Abbas, they shunned and humiliated him too. The second is incompetence. The third is more disturbing. Is this stoking of a civil war in Gaza an attempt to legitimize holding onto the West Bank? We withdraw, and see what happens! This is a bizarre misreading of Israel's own self-interest - but it may be the the government's nonetheless.

If the signiatories to the Mecca agreement can't show real progress on the ground to their followers, it will collapse. Already Abbas is being attacked within Fatah, and Hamas is being savaged by the Islamic Army. This weekend, five people died in fights between clans allied to the different sides.

The US government is fast-forwarding this failure. It seems they view the rise of Hamas not as an internal Palestinian issue, but as another round of gun-fire in the show-down between the US and Iran. They see Hamas as Iranian puppets, and Amhmadinejadh as the demon puppet-master. This is largely mythical: if Iran had never existed, Hamas would still have won the election, and would still be fighting. But the Bush administration, soaked as ever in delusion, seems to be prepared to turn Gaza into the site of a proxy-war between superpowers - like Nicaragua circa 1985, only with more beards and less saltza.

Today, a glistening opportunity to avert a Palestinian civil war is being kicked into the trash by 'the international community' with a glib, finger-wagging sneer.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to j.hari@independent.co.uk

Is it bigoted to oppose a politician because of their religious beliefs? This question will keep slapping us across the face in 2007. We have a Mormon running for the White House - with a credible chance of clutching the Republican nomination. We have an Opus Dei cultist in the British cabinet trying to block moves towards full equality for gay people. And we have all spent so long wading through multicultural mush about how we should respect religion that we have lost the capacity to respond.

Even here, in an irreligious country where only 7 percent of people regularly attend a religious service, we feel preternaturally anxious about criticising another person's faith. If a person declares that he believes a whale swallowed a man and burped him out alive and well a month later, or that cartoonists should be imprisoned simply for drawing a man who lived 1400 years ago, most of us would mock him. But if he says this is part of his religion, we fall silent.

Once an idea is labelled as religious, it becomes surrounded with a rhetorical electric wire fence that few people try to pass. Look at the recent trial of Abu Hamza for inciting violence, where his defence stated - accurately - that many of the the offending passages in his sermons consisted of quotes from the Koran. If it's in a religious book, the defence argued implicitly, it can't be condemned. Too many of us have bought into this logic: only 27 percent of British people in a recent poll agreed that "one of the good things about a democracy is that we can criticise each other's faiths." (Muslims were slightly more inclined to agree, with 28 percent).

Amidst all this, it's necessary to restate a basic truth: a religion is simply an idea a human being had some time in the past that he then declared was sanctioned by an intangible supernatural being. Virtually everyone believes this - except about their own religion. Find me a Christian who believes Ron L. Hubbard genuinely had visions of Xenu, the intergalactic tyrant who terrified the universe ten million years ago according to Scientologists. Find me a Muslim who believes that the followers of Wicca really do have a spiritual connection to the trees and plants.

So how does this truth apply to Mitt Romney and Ruth Kelley? We should test their religious ideas - and how they drive their political behaviour - in the marketplace of ideas, just as rigorously as we test their ideas about, say, taxation.

Romney - the Governor of Massachusetts and wannabe-President - is a follower of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, better known as Mormons. This faith was smelted in 1830 by a professional treasure-hunter living in upstate New York called Joseph Smith, who declared that ever since the time of Jesus, the Church had fallen into filth and decadence, and he was the man to save it. He produced The Book of Mormon, a 500 page guide explaining that Jesus had visited America after he died, because America is the real focal point of sacred history. (The Garden of Eden is in Jackson, Missouri). The book counselled that we are now living in end-times - hence the "Latter Day" - and the Messiah will imminently return and rule the world from American soil. Smith believed US politics was the central focus of this celestial battle - the true Zion - which is why he ran for President until he was martyred by an angry mob in 1844.

Romney says this faith "informs very dramatically" his politics. Yes, it is true Romney defies some of the most cliched criticisms of Mormonism: when he competes in the Republican primaries against Rudi Guilliani, John McCain and Newt Gingrich, the Mormon will be the only one who has only had one wife. And yes, it is possible Romney has somehow managed to melt the parts of this religion that are most weird into meaningless metaphor. But if so, he's a pioneer, because there is no liberal tradition in Mormonism. The faith has been based from the beginning on pure prophecy: whatever is "revealed" to the Church's head - originally Smith, now a pontifical successor - is Divine Truth. End of. No reason. No scope for debate.

In parallel, Ruth Kelly - Britain's Minister for Women and Equality - is a member of Opus Dei, a Catholic sect founded in 1928 by an obscure Spanish lawyer-priest called Jose-Maria Escriva. He wrote a book called The Way which outlines how all followers must behave. They are ordered to keep their membership as secret as possible: "Remain silent, and you will never regret it." They must always show "unreserved obedience to whoever is in charge" of the sect. The cult stresses personal sin and painful penitence, like wearing a wire tied tight around your leg as you go about your daily life. Opus Dei has always been located on the hard-right of the Catholic Church, providing leading figures for a string of openly fascist governments including those of Franco and Pinochet. They vehemently oppose homosexuality, contraception, and life-saving scientific progress like stem cell research.

The Dei today, like Mormonism, has no liberal tradition. Its religious philosophy is described by Robert Hutchison, an award-winning journalist who studied the movement, as "totally authoritarian". Religious people are often good and decent, but they are good and decent primarily when they have developed elaborate atheistic ways to disregard the teachings of their hallucinatory pre-modern religious texts. Romney and Kelly's religions have only literalism.

Is it really bigoted to question the bigotry inherent to these beliefs? They have already nearly shaped a major Government Bill. When Kelly was recently responsible for the legislation that would ban discrimination against gay people, she fought hard for an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies that would have rendered the ban meaningless. (Imagine if racists could choose to opt out of the race discrimination legislation because helping black people was against their fetid consciences). Only a cabinet rebellion defeated her.

Yet when secularists make these criticisms of faith poisoning the public sphere, we are compared to racists and sexists. How, the critics ask, is discriminating against a Mormon or an Opus Dei follower different to discriminating against a black person or a woman? There is a key difference: the religious choose their faith. Barack Obama cannot choose to stop being black. Hillary Clinton cannot choose to stop being a woman. But Mitt Romney could leave the Mormons and Ruth Kelly could leave Opus Dei tomorrow. If they choose to remain, we must be free to condemn their choice.

Many defenders of religion in high office will at this point wheel out the bloodied corpse of John Kennedy. Wasn't his 1960 Presidential campaign - when he defended being a Catholic against widespread suspicion - a triumph for tolerance? But Kennedy reassured American voters by saying that the wall between church and state is "absolute", and he would never breach it. He made the case against religion in the public sphere, not for it - precisely my argument. There are some forms of religion so vehement, so militant, they cannot accept the separation that Kennedy endorsed. It is not only acceptable but necessary to oppose the politicians gripped by these species of superstition before they can contaminate public policy.

I do not 'respect' Romney's beliefs, or Kelly's, or Hamza's. The current social stigma around challenging religion - married to a condescending multiculturalism that treats religious minorities as excitable children who cannot cope with disagreement - is protecting ideas that are intellectually weak and morally repellent. Peter Tatchell puts it best: "All human beings are worthy of respect, but not all ideas deserve respect." Right now we need less bogus respect for bad ideas, and more open argument - before we multiculturalize ourselves into swallowing even more religion.

In our week-long national shriek about South London slowly morphing into South Central, one key word has been missing: prohibition. We have stared at the soft no-need-to-shave face of Billy Cox, the fifteen year old weed-dealer shot in his concrete bedroom in the shadow of the City of London. We have half-sniggered at the Ali G names of the gangs he was up against: the Brick Lane Massive, the Paki Panthers, the Ghetto Boys of Peckham. We have learned you can buy handguns for £200 and a machine gun for £4000 on the street. But we have failed to see that the events of the past week are simply following the inexorable logic of drug prohibition.

Here's how it works. By criminalising the trade in cannabis, cocaine and heroin, we don't make the drugs disappear. We simply hand this multi-billion pound industry - around 3 percent of Britain's GDP - to armed gangs. A fortnight ago, two of the most powerful drug dealers in South London were sent to prison, so a slew of gangs is now fighting to take over their patch, their trade and their profits. The boys who are being gunned down are rivals for these riches. They will keep shooting their opponents until one gang emerges as the clear winner, or until a few gangs band together in an obviously unbeatable alliance. So these gun-toting possees of kids have not tooled up simply to play the Big Man and look like Snoop Dogg (though no doubt it's an incidental pleasure). This is not Colmbine-style senseless violence. It is happening for hard economic reasons. Milton Friedman - the late Nobel-Prize winning economist - understood this. He explained, “Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.”

He saw a central truth. Guns are not inherent to the sale of drugs. They are only inherent to the sale of drugs under prohibition. Go to a pub or off-license in Hackney, and you'll find that Oddbins and Costcutters are not engaged in a turf-war. The Tesco Posse and the Sainsbury's Massive are not taking out each other's homies over the right to sell Tetley's Bitter. Why? Because their trade is not subject to prohibition. If somebody tries to steal their stock, they can call the police. But prohibited substances can only be protected with private force. That's why the underground bars in Chicago needed Capone's guns, and why today - according to Scotland Yard estimates - 95 percent of the guns in Britain are linked to the drugs trade. Friedman calculated that there are 10,000 additional murders in the US every year as a result of drug prohibition: a mass grave of slaughtered dealers, their families, and (mostly) random people caught in the crossfire. We are now building a replica-pit in Britain.

Yet our politicians are too pickled in prohibitionist platitudes to see this. Tony Blair is talking about extending prison sentences for carrying guns, but this is a weapon with no ammunition. If you talk to any of these gang-kids, they'll tell you their odds of ever being caught are tiny. They're right. As Stephen Lander, chairman of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, puts it, "If you are an organized crook for 20 years, you have a 5 percent chance of getting nicked." This isn't because of police laxness; it's because the drugs trade is so vast the police can only ever hope to pick at its surface. Adding a few extra years onto a hypothetical sentence you'll never serve is no deterrent at all to a gang member.

David Cameron is offering a parallel fantasy-solution when he talks about gluing together broken families as The Answer. He points to research that shows the children of divorced parents are more likely to turn to crime - but this is irreperably punctured by the findings of sociologist Louie Burghe, who discovered that these kids actually start to do worse on every indicator long before their parents split up. The problem isn't divorce; it's having incompatible parents who can't stand each other. Bribing warring parents to stay together, as Cameron wants to, may actually - according to this evidence - make the problem worse.

No - the only real solution is to take the drugs trade back from the gun-wielding gangster-children, and hand it to doctors and pharmacists and off-licenses. This would bankrupt most of our criminal gangs overnight, and remove the need for (and purchasing power behind) 95 percent of the guns in Britain. Of course many criminals will try to move into other forms of illegal enterprise, like money-laundering or people-trafficking, but none will have the profit margins of the old drugs trade and all carry higher risks, boosting the relative utility of going straight. A boy like Billy Cox would not be drawn to them. He would still be alive today - and so would thousands more victims of our failing, flailing 'war on drugs.'

In Britain today, rape has become an almost unpunished crime. Fly-tipping, shop-lifting, cannabis-smoking - all are dealt with more stringently than forcing a woman into sex and forcing her mind into meltdown.

This sounds impossible, but the cool hard academic studies show it starkly: fewer than 1 in 100 rapists now end up behind bars. A British man has to rape over 50 women before it becomes statistically probable he will be sent to prison. As the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel puts it, "rape might as well be legal".

A new reality TV show - The Verdict, which started last night on BBC2 - demonstrates why, with a steady drip-drip horror. The producers have gathered Twelve Angry Celebs to act as the jury in a rape trial. Jeffrey Archer, Honour Blackman, Patsy Palmer and a slew of refugees from Liverpool FC and Brookside Close have to stand in judgement over a rape case that is performed before them by real defence and prosecution QCs, and presided over by a real judge. The rape victim and the accused are played by actors.

As we watch a rape victim being picked to pieces by a lawyer who jeers at her sexual history and jabs that her friend behaved "provocatively" (so what?), it becomes obvious why 75 per cent of rape victims never approach the police. And as we watch the "jury" discuss the case, spewing out antediluvian myths about rape victims with barely a splutter from the rest, it becomes clear why so many rapists walk free. This programme should relegate Celebrity Big Brother to the status of second-most screamed-about reality show of the year.

The Jade Goody and Danielle Lloyd of The Verdict are Stan Collymore, the veteran footballer, dogger and girlfriend-beater, and Megaman, one of the seemingly-infinite members of So Solid Crew. Confronted with the testimony of a distraught 19-year old-girl who has clearly been raped, they offer scorn.

"What is she doing going to a guy's room?" Collymore asks, as if there is no line between entering a man's hotel room in a large group and agreeing to anal sex with him. Megaman agrees. "It puzzles me she's not looking at anyone when she speaks," he says, and later adds with a jeer, "How can you be raped anally and vaginally and not [immediately] take it to the police?" (If he had been pinned down and raped, would he want to talk about it at once, to strangers, with full eye contact and a winning smile?)

The presence of a few ignorant people perhaps isn't shocking - but hardly anyone else on the jury fights back. Almost all agree in the first episode that the feeble defence case is more persuasive than the howling, broken woman in front of them.

These attitudes are not freakish exceptions. An Amnesty International survey in 2005 discovered that 96 per cent of British people underestimate the prevalence of rape in this country. One third of us believe that rape victims are "partially" or "totally" responsible for the crime against them. Some 26 per cent believe a woman who wears sexy clothes is effectively asking for it, and 23 per cent believe a woman who has many sexual partners is too. An amazing 8 percent believe a woman who has slept with several men is "totally" to blame.

And a great many more of us - people who think of themselves as more liberal and caring and Noughties - still act as if the slump in rape convictions is a force of nature. Michael Portillo, in an article ruminating about his jury-service on the show, concludes: "The wretched truth is that women who take their cases to court take a big risk. The odds are against them. There is little that we can do about it."

What? There are dozens of measures that have been proven, all over the world, to bolster rape convictions. The most obvious - argued for by feminist ministers within the government, like Harriet Harman, for years - is for the prosecution in rape cases to call a trauma expert who can explain apparently odd behaviour on the part of raped women. Having A Professional Person talk people like Megaman through it can tip the balance in the victim's favour.

There's a patchwork quilt of policies like this that can be introduced quickly. We should screen jury members with simple questionnaires: if they blame women for rape, they don't belong on a rape jury. We should ban discussion of the victim's sexual history, instead of merely restricting it. A woman has a right to have sex with a different man every night from Monday to Friday, and still say no to a sixth man on Saturday. And we should make sure the prosecution liaises with the victim.

At the moment, astonishingly, the first time a raped woman sees the lawyers who are meant to be making her case is when she enters the witness stand. As one friend of mine who went through a rape trial says: "He got a year with his lawyers to polish his performance, and I didn't even get 20 minutes to talk over what had happened to me."

But we can't focus only on the problems in the courtroom, because very few rapists ever get that far. The first time a victim describes her ordeal is very often to a rape hotline, so they are in a unique position to help women go to the police - but many are going bust. In 1985, there were 68 women-only rape crisis centres or helplines in Britain. Today, there are only 32 - and they are closing at a rate of two a month, according to the Survivors Trust.

And if they embolden a woman to come forward? The Crown Prosecution Service has to choose to take the case to court. One sexual liaison officer described in a recent Home Office study how the CPS would drop a case "before even the toxicology reports had come back form the lab", adding, "I just feel that the CPS give up too easily, too soon".

There are thousands of cases to back this claim up. In 1998, a school janitor in Grimsby seized a 15-year-old girl, dragged her into an alley and sexually assaulted her. The CPS didn't pursue it. His name? Ian Huntley.

So don't turn away from The Verdict tonight with a snobbish sneer. It forces you to watch as a raped woman goes undefended, even among a jury of her peers. The same thing will happen in jury rooms today and the next day and every day until we force our government to change it. The only reasonable response is to watch with rising rage and declare - as the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst once did - "I incite this meeting to rebellion."

j.hari@ independent.co.uk

I am standing at the heart of the glittering glamour-dump of the BAFTA awards, and He is walking towards me. It is Bond. James Bond. His expression is an angry blank, because he has just gunned down dozens of Armenian bomb-makers. (Or perhaps because he has failed to win the Best Actor award). I was sitting almost directly above him when the award slipped from his bloody grasp barely an hour ago, and he offered a forced hard handclap, each meeting of his hands representing another small fracture in his heart. I knew then Our Time had come. What Daniel Craig needs now to comfort him, I declared to the people sitting in the Royal Opera House with me, is the love of a fat homosexual. "Daniel!" I cry as he strides along the corridor. He stares suddenly with his shimmering blue eyes. I smile. He does not. "Oh Daniel," I ask with a sigh. "Why didn't you wear your little blue speedos? Maybe you would have won then." He stares at me. Is it? Can it be? Love? "You're a fucking fool," he says, and walks away with an angry frown.

"There's no need to play hard to get Daniel! I'm yours!" I cry after him. But he is gone. This, it seems, is how my BAFTA night - my first peek behind the rope-line, into the vortex of Celebrity - will go. It began only a few hours ago, on the muddied entrance to the red carpet, where a great swathe of central London has been sealed off, as though it is subject to a Celebrity Terror Attack. I linger on the mud, naturally, until Her Royal Highness Helen Mirren appears. I immediately curtsy to her. "Are you all right?" she says with a frown, before being whisked by her equerries up into a thunderstorm of flashbulbs and howls of "Helen! Over here, Helen!"

I let her entourage storm ahead, and follow a few minutes later, as the crowd of Real People buzz with post-coital glee. By this stage, they seem to be screaming for anyone. "Oh my God! that's the producer of Shameless! Chris! Chris!" a group of teenage girls howl. (When did teenagers become TV industry nerds?). Then they see me, and one screams "Him! He's someone!" They stare carefully, and then their leader shrugs, "No, he's nobody. But - look! It's Nicky Clarke! Nicky! Nicky! Aaargh!" This I cannot accept. "Girls - he's a hairdresser," I snap. "He works with scissors, like a six year old. Youc an't cheer him." But Nicky Clarke glares at me from behind his bouffant and I run up the rest of the carpet, terrified he will spray his super-strength hairspray into my eyes and blind me forever.

I pass through the entrance, lavishly waving my black BAFTA pass at distracted guards, and drift through into the main foyer, where I smack face-first into a frenetic frenzy of networking. Business cards are being swapped with industrial speed; necklines are plunging like Thelma and Louise into the Grand Canyon. They are talking to each other in Celebrity Speak, which has lashings of hyperbole and always ends! in exclamation! marks! Somebody yells to the actor Ben Wishart, "Ben, I loved! Perfume! It was! an amazing! film!"

I decide I too must speak to Celebrities. I walk up to Richard Griffiths - another Best Actor nominee - who is occupying a sofa the size of a minor continent in the corner. But when I ask him questions, I discover he has been inexplicably turned into a Platitude Machine. "It's an honour," he says, "It's a privilege." This goes on for a long time, no matter what I ask. "It's such a joy to be nominated along side such amazzzzzz..." I'm not quite sure what he said next because I briefly lapsed into a coma. I stagger away and find Stephen Frears, the director of the Queen. His wife Annie declares at the top of her voice, "Well, I've refused to go to the Oscars, because it'll be even more ghastly than this! It's so bloody boring!" Her daughter Lola pinches her and says, "No more champagne."

But then a bell, and we are summoned to our seats for the ceremony. As I settle in, I notice that Sienna Miller has positioned herself next to Frears on the front row, whispering in his ear, flicking her hair, running her hands over her breasts, and pretty much doing everything short of mounting him there and then. But suddenly the lights come up in the Opera House. Jonathan Ross is standing in front of a massive lop-sided Bafta lying limply on the stage, whic looks as though it has just been severed from a gigantic golden body by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "Welcome," he declares, "to London's prestigious mugging district." He offers a special welcome to "our American guests who have flown here partly for these awards, but mainly to escape Victoria Beckham." The audience roars, and the giant BAFTA head rumbles, as though it is about to fall from the stage onto the front row and level the British film industry for a generation.

And then the ecstasy-slog of the awards ceremony itself begins. The obscure awards - Best Short Film, anyone? - pass in a surreal slur at the start. Most of the winners of the technical awards don't speak English, so they offer models of concision. "No speak English. Gracias!" one cries and exits. Another confines her remarks to the yell "Viva Mexico!" When the ex-Top of the Pops dancer Andrea Arnold wins an award for best tecchie newcomer, she says, "I understand money comes with this award and my boiler's packed up, so it's welcome." This adds a new note of tension to the night. Will Helen Mirren mention a patio extension she could really do with? Will Daniel Craig say his car engine's packed in and he'll be flogging his award on e-Bay to pay for it?

This glittery endurance test is only leavened by a string of kamikaze actors crashing and burning with impromptu 'gags'. Damien Lewis, the ginger Old Harrovian, decides the way to present the Best Cinematographer award is to pre-meptively insult all cinematographers. "I looked up the dictionary definition of cinematography... Well, my digital camera does that for me," he declares with a shrug. "But cinematographers make us actors look better than we are, so let's be nice to them." What? Then Dominic Cooper - an actor marinated in his own arrogance - comes out to present the best make-up award. He says, "Make-up artists have to make actors look good. Sometimes they even have to make us look terrible - and it's not always easy." With that, he raises his eyebrow, as if to say "I can't be uglied up, baby". At that moment, as one, the Royal Opera House heaves.

Jonathan Ross soberly introduces a reel of films paying tribute to the friends of BAFTA who have died in the past year. (The Artful Dodger is dead - who knew?). Robert Altman gets a cheer; others are passed over with a "who the fuck?" shrug. It seems that even the corpses are subject to status games. Some dead people are in; others are so last year.

But then the acting awards tumble out, and the audience shakes itself awake. Eva Green wins best newcomer with her hair jutting chaotically into the air, looking like she has just staggered out of Hurricane Katrina. Somebody tells me this is called "birds' nest hair". It must have been one psychotic bird. The victory of HRH Helen Mirren for Best Actress is so pre-ordained that when Ricky Gervais gave out an award earlier in the night, he declared: "The BAFTA for best animated film goes to... Helen Mirren! Oh, this is getting ridiculous. You can't even lick a stamp any more."

But the Best Actor award goes, amazingly, to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Borat-style, he remains entirely in character as a bumbling actor called "Forrest Whittaker" through the night, so I decide to challenge him at the post-awards dinner. "Mr Amin," I say to him as he faces the photographers in the Grosvenor House Hotel, "I think you were very cruel to the Ugandan Asians." He looks at me blankly. "I don't know what the BAFTA committee are thinking." I consider performing a Tatchell-style citizen's arrest, but he chuckles - no doubt the same chuckle he gave as he ordered ethinic cleansing - and says, "I'm Forrest Whittaker, m'man. It was a great film to make." Film? You might fool everyone else, Mr Amin, but I know who you are.

It is, I am told in hushed tones by the assembled hacks, an open secret that the celebs never go to the official after-show. So I blag my way into the Miramax Party, on the highest floor of the Hilton Hotel. As I step out of the golden lift, Penelope Cruz is sitting in the corner, chatting to Pedro Almodovar, and Jamie Bell - the once-and-always Billy Elliot - is wandering lost around the room with dead eyes, looking as though he was raised by wolves. In every creivice, people are looking at each other to make sure they are being looked at. This is the heart of the film industry, and it is - I suddenly realise - empty save for the glitter. But standing here, at the top of London, snubbed by Daniel Craig, Helen Mirren and everyone else, I think of an old Woody Allen line about sex. Sure, the BAFTAs are an empty and hollow experience. But as empty and hollow experiences go, it's one of the best.