Johann Hari

In the sudden slurry of revelations about Michael Ashcroft, are we missing the bigger picture – and a far larger scandal? The immediate disgrace is plain enough. The billionaire Ashcroft has jostled his way into the heart of the Conservative Party, and altered the shape of British politics, with money hoarded away in a tax haven. He evidently finds the idea of paying a small share of his fortune to keep his country's schools and hospitals and defence running so abhorrent that he would rather stash the vast majority of his cash in the bitterly poor tax haven of Belize. (He pays no tax at all there, despite the fact that 30 per cent of the country's children go hungry.) And he did it all disingenuously: when he was scraped into the House of Lords on William Hague's recommendation in 2000, he gave a "clear and unequivocal assurance" he would become a "permanent" resident in Britain.

Every political party is a jangling coalition of interest groups and ideas and paymasters, all rubbing against each other under one umbrella: think of it as the Rihanna principle. These coalitions shift over time: some groups get shunted out into the rain; others get to huddle at the middle, snug and smug. Under David Cameron, the Conservative coalition has subtly shifted. Two groups who have long held sway in the party now have a firmer hold on the umbrella than ever before – and if the Tories win power in just a few weeks' time, these largely unnoticed shifts will affect all our lives.

The financial services industry – you remember: the people who just crashed the global economy – have almost always been part of the Tory tent. They regularly poured funds into the party throughout the 20th century, and hyperventilated with pleasure at the Thatcher revolution, wobbling only when Tony Blair created New Labour. But the hot dish of City cash was always one food group among many for the Tories. They have never been their biggest provider of funds – until now.

According to the Financial Times, donations from the financial sector have "quadrupled" on David Cameron's watch to an unprecedented proportion of the party's income. The City has given Cameron £16m since 2006, compared to just £3.7m under the previous three leaders combined.

It was decades of lobbying and donations from the City that pushed politicians to deregulate almost everything the financial services industry indulged in. Previously impossible scams – from sub-prime mortgages to credit default swaps – became scattered through the system. The resulting economic implosion can be seen in every shuttered window on your high street.

The sector is now fighting a rearguard action against reregulation – using the same tactics and the same arguments. Boris Johnson, the most senior elected Conservative in Britain, has shown the Tory MO: he took large wodges of City cash and told the British people to stop "whingeing" and succumbing to "neo-socialist claptrap". Given a choice between City spin and the facts, he chose the corporate propaganda every time. For example, he claimed the puny 50 per cent top rate of tax would drive 9,000 City workers to Switzerland: in fact, the rate of workers leaving has fallen by 9 per cent. He even still says sub-prime mortgages were a good thing.

So it's highly significant that Cameron is choosing to fund his run for the premiership with City money, even inhaling funds from hedge funds that engaged in short-selling the collapsing share price of Bradford and Bingley. While he assures the public that he will slap "tough regulations" on this sector, privately he is eager to woo them. Speaking recently to the heads of Goldman Sachs, Barclays and an array of hedge funds, he assured them that protecting the City was in his blood, saying: "My father was a stockbroker, my grandfather was a stockbroker, my great-grandfather was a stockbroker." They cheered.

Cameron claims that he is not affected in any way by the money, but his donors put it differently. Andrew Perloff, of the property speculators Panther Securities, says: "It's a foot in the door. There is definitely an advantage ... because they know you're a supporter."

Cameron's biggest paymaster of all is Michael Ashcroft, a man who became a billionaire in the financial services sector. He has a base in the tax haven of Belize. He has been made deputy chairman of the party, accompanies William Hague on visits to foreign leaders, and is paying for marginal constituencies to be carpet-bombed with Tory election materials. Yet he won't even tell us if he is domiciled in Britain, or pays taxes here.

The attempts to get the Tory frontbench to explain whether their election campaign is being funded through the fruits of tax avoidance have become like a Monty Python sketch. The Information Commissioner has ruled that the party is being "evasive and obfuscatory" – a neat euphemism for dishonest.

The City of London is providing the fuel that the Tory party runs on, and these hard-headed businessmen will expect a return on their political investments. They clearly believe Cameron will be significantly softer on regulating them than even Labour's pitiful efforts. The result? We will all be left more vulnerable to 2008 redux. Can you afford to risk another crash and another bailout?

At the same time, a very different force is swelling within the Tory ranks – with an agenda of their own. Evangelical Christian fundamentalists have preferred the Conservatives to the other parties for a very long time – but it is only now that their relative weight within the party is swelling so rapidly that one panicked Tory MP recently told the FT (in a separate story): "They're taking over the party."

As the Conservative Party has shed its mass membership – like every other party – even a relatively small number of people with a determined agenda can become dominant. So evangelicals have been signing up as Cameron's Militant Tendency. Where the Tories have held open primaries to select its candidates, they pack the meetings to secure one of their own. Candidates are increasingly frightened to take on their agenda. A ConservativeHome poll of candidates selected to fight marginal seats for the Party found that large majorities want to curtail a woman's right to choose an abortion, and say it's OK to discriminate against gay couples who want to provide a home for an orphan.

While David Cameron has defied the evangelicals on a few issues – to his credit, he supports civil partnerships, for example – he is poised to deliver them the biggest gift they will have received in generations. He will provide state funding for any group of parents who want to set up a school and can attract pupils. We know from Sweden – where this idea was taken from – that one sector is always waiting with the willpower and the organisation and the disgust with the existing schools system: religious fundamentalists.

As the National Secular Society has shown, Cameron's proposals will cause an explosion in fundamentalist schools. This will, over time, subtly alter the shape of Britain. Far more kids will be taught that abortion is evil, homosexuality is sinful, and evolution didn't happen. (Gay kids are 10 per cent more likely to be attacked in faith schools, a Stonewall study found.) And the horrible effects caused by New Labour's expansion of faith schools will get even worse.

More children will be segregated according to their parent's religion: the kids of Christians packed off to one school, Jews to another, Muslims to another still. They won't get to know each other at the most formative ages, when prejudices can be wiped out so easily. After the 2001 race riots in Oldham, David Ritchie – chair of the investigation – warned that faith schools were one of the biggest factors "contributing institutionally to divisions within the town."

Now Cameron is clearing the way for even more, in the most blessedly irreligious country on earth. When I interviewed him recently, he angrily said criticisms of faith schools were "a load of tosh". It's as if he looks at Northern Ireland's segregated school system, and thinks it is an inspiration, rather than a disgrace.

A small twist in a political party's composition can swirl its national policies. It's time we paid attention to the unsavoury groups who are beaming as David Cameron choruses: "Now that it's raining more than ever/ Know that we'll still have each other/ You can stand under my umbrella- ella -ella...

David Cameron made his own face the apex of the Conservative Party’s first burst of electioneering. He stared out across Britain’s high streets and motorway overpasses with a giant airbrushed glower of concern, while the word ‘Conservative’ was tucked away on the posters in small letters, like a slightly embarrassing smell. There’s a reason for this: the reality of the Conservative Party today severely punctures Cameron’s central pitch – and he knows it.

Since he became leader, he has been telling us “the Conservative Party has changed”. But is it true? Let’s start with the issue that Cameron said was “terrific evidence” of a “different Conservative Party” – global warming. Until 2005, he had never mentioned the subject, except to mock wind farms as “giant bird-blenders” and to demand “a massive road-building programme” in defiance of all environmental sense. But then he abruptly announced he was the true champion of this cause and people should “vote blue to go green.” The influential website ConservativeHome thought the New Cameron didn’t speak for the Party, so last month they commissioned a poll of the candidates selected to fight the most winnable Tory seats. They were asked to rank nineteen issues facing Britain in order of importance – and global warming came at the very bottom. The soon-to-be Conservative MPs think radically altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere is less important than imprisoning even more people and reclaiming powers from Scotland.

But even this is misleading. The party doesn’t just accord a low priority to deal with this problem – most actively deny it exists. The Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth, reports: “At Tory country-house gatherings, global warming scepticism has replaced Europe as the issue of the day.” Tim Montgomerie, the head of ConservativeHome and physical embodiment of the Tory id, says: “I’m confident the sceptics are going to win. It’s for Cameron to decide how he’s going to get out of this – he’s lost the battle already.” This has only grown over the past month, when a handful of the tens of thousands of scientists working on this issue have been shown to have made a few mistakes. The massed ranks of the Tory party have seized on this as “proof” that releasing massive amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere won’t cause the planet to get warmer. The true message is: vote blue, screw green.

How about opposing the stale old prejudices the Party used to marinate itself in? In his mid-twenties Cameron went on a week long “jolly” to white supremacist South Africa, breaking sanctions against the regime, paid for by a shadowy pro-Aparthied lobbying group. But he says he regrets that and the party now abhors racism. There’s a fascinating insight into whether this is true in the new book ‘True Blue: Strange Tales From A Tory Nation.’ For the past three years, the journalists Chris Horne and David Matthews have volunteered for the Conservative Party, to uncover what its activists really think. Matthews is a warm, charismatic – and black.

Everywhere he went, he was treated with suspicion and contempt. Horne writes: “The proportion of people who gave him a wide berth was around three quarters, and it was hard to escape the conclusion that this was because he was black…. The Tories we met seemed fantastically uncomfortable around David.” Even in the most liberal Tory surroundings, like inner London, there was a “constant, almost knee-jerk mild racism,” where they felt the need to obsessively talk about immigration and race in disparaging ways in his presence. At a typical Tory dinner they attended, according to the book, Cecil Parkinson said of Africa: “God decided to create the most beautiful continent on earth – wide rivers, fertile land, and every kind of natural resource you can think of. An angel said to God – if you make a place like that then it will completely dominate the earth. And God said – wait until you see the people I am going to put in it.” The assembled party members loved it, and said they missed good old Ian Smith, the last white supremacist ruler of Rhodesia.

When they were campaigning against the Liberal Democrat Susan Kramer, they were repeatedly told to emphasize she was an “outsider” and a “foreigner.” Horne asked what it meant, and he was told: “She’s a Jewess, but we aren’t allowed to say that… So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.”

Everywhere they went, the Party’s candidates and members said Cameron’s claims to have reformed are mere spin to win the election. For example, Ian Oakley, who was selected to be Tory candidate for Watford, bragged: “Last year it was all green this, and all green that… all that bollocks. People just want lots and lots and lots of cheap petrol. And we are going to give it to them.” He then boasted that he planned to make many trips to Israel where he would take a machine gun and a flame-thrower to destroy Palestinian villages. (He was later forced to resign, ove an unrelated matter.) Yes, there are some nutters in every party, but Horne and Matthews found similar reservoirs of prejudice everywhere they looked in Conservatism.

Indeed, any minor attempt to put meat on Cameron’s professed agenda is being met with projectile vomiting from the guts of the party. When Joanne Cash – a pregnant woman – was imposed on the constituency of Westminster North, there was a rebellion by the local party that forced Cash to resign. They said she wouldn’t be able to have a child and work at the same time. The local party agent Jonathan Fraser-Howells was reported as having commented: "It makes me sick seeing pregnant stomachs around", though he denies saying this. Cash was only reinstated with great effort, after the Cameroons realised what a biting PR disaster it was.

Next week, I’ll look at how two other forces – cash from the City, and evangelical Christians – are also distorting the Party’s agenda.

Of course, you might say that none of this matters. Cameron is the leader, and he is sincerely committed to a modernized agenda. But there’s two flaws with this argument. Cameron can tuck away the Tory Party on a poster, but he can’t tuck them away in parliament: they will be the source of his power. A leader can’t defy this Party’s core instincts for long, especially when he has (at best) a small majority. Every barking-right backbencher will have to be wooed and soothed and fed red meat to get legislation through. Cameron will be accountable to deeply retrograde forces – and they will demand policies that worsen poverty or global warming or prejudice.

Even more importantly, Cameron’s commitment to this agenda is shaky and superficial anyway. Remember: his reaction to the Great Crash was to tell the City “we must not let the left use this as an excuse to wreck an important part of the British and world economy” and to start preaching hardcore Thatcherite slash-and-trash economics. He told the Spectator: “If you want to know if I’m a Tory, ask John Redwood” – the global warming denying, market fundamentalist Vulcan who represents the ugliest fringe of the Major years. When he thought an election was looming, the Tory leader decided to make it a front-of-the-window policy to give a huge tax cut to the richest 3000 estates in Britain – a revelation of his priorities that should cause any claim he is “progressive” to be greeted with belly-laughs.

The evidence suggests that when he is faced with a challenge, Cameron rushes right back up the road to Damascus – into the loving arms of an unreformed right-wing party.

The great mystery of British politics is striding into the room, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. In the flesh David Cameron looks thinner and younger and smaller than on television. The caricaturists are wrong: his cheeks don’t appear full and ruddy at all. He looks sleek, and wired, with an intense gaze. He knows he could be a few months from Downing Street and the history books – so he is here to woo a crucial electoral block that is wary of falling into his arms, by giving an interview to Attitude, Britain’s best-selling gay magazine. He calls for coffee and dispenses with the photographer briskly: he poses for two minutes before saying, “Right, that’s enough,” and walking out of the shot. He places himself on his settee, in the shadow of Big Ben, and says: “Right. Let’s start.”

Until 2005, David Cameron was a conventional anti-gay Tory. He attacked Tony Blair for “moving Heaven and Earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools”. He mocked Labour for supporting the “fringe agenda” of equality for gay people. He supported the homophobic law Section 28 until its dying breath. But since he became Conservative leader, he has dramatically changed his position. He apologised for Section 28, got a Tory conference to applaud the principle of gay marriage, and has moved a flotilla of gay candidates into winnable seats. It seems at first glance like an amazing starburst of progress – making it possible at last for gay people to pick political parties from anywhere on the spectrum. The party of Norman Tebbit is now led by a man who poses for photographers outside a screening of Brokeback Mountain.

But a fat question mark hangs over Cameron’s Yellow Brick Road to Damascus. It is the same question mark that pervades so many of Cameron’s policies – and British politics itself. The Conservative leader has had conversion after conversion, on everything from the environment to SureStart to bank regulation. Is it for real? How can a man’s political views really change so far and so fast? Is his party behind him? Of his shadow cabinet team, 85 percent of those eligible voted for Section 28, and 90 percent voted against equalising the age of consent. By testing how honest he is about gay equality, can we tease out how authentic his claims to a softer, gentler Conservatism are?

I Shedding dead skin

He immediately starts with an apology. “I know there are gay people who have conservative values – like wanting us to be supportive of business and enterprise, wanting to have strong defence, believing in the strong defence of liberty and these kind of things – but in the past have felt held back because the Conservative party was sending them a signal that we didn't support them or their lifestyle,” he says in one long gulp of prose. “That has changed. I think we can look gay people in the eye and say you can now back us… because we now support gay equality.”

Cameron starts to list a range of ways he says the Tories have shed their homophobia like dead skin. “I would particularly point to that speech [at Conservative party conference] where as a Conservative leader I stood up and said I support commitment and marriage – whether it is between a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Find me another Conservative leader not just in Britain but somewhere in the Western world who has done that – and been applauded for doing it. I didn’t have to stand up in front of my own party and say that. Politics is about taking some risks. That was a proper good old-fashioned, heart-in-the-throat moment. This is my chance. If you lead the party it’s your chance to put your own stamp on things and do things your own way. And sorting out this issue has been a complete pleasure in terms of that, and badly needed doing. Am I the first person to spot it? No. But I think we’ve done some big steps on that.”

He stresses that any benefits his government gives to marriage will also go to civil partnered couples, and there are now two people in his front-bench team who have had civil partnerships themselves. He is speaking fast and rhythmically, holding my gaze, like a debater sealing his case.

How did he get from backing homophobic laws to this public homophilia in just four years? “I think now looking back you can see the mistake of Section 28,” he says, talking about the Thatcher-era law that made it a crime to “promote homosexuality” to children, which he supported so strongly he put it in his election literature several times. “There’s only one thing worse than making a mistake and that’s not putting your hands up and admitting it.”

But what exactly is he apologising for? He insists he never believed that it was possible to ‘promote homosexuality’ or make children gay. So what did he think the law was about? “You know, we can go over history, but what it came out of was this concern that local authorities were getting too involved in messaging in schools.” Yes – about gay sex. “But look, you can have your arguments about what local authorities should and shouldn't be getting involved in,” he says, waving his hand. He says his mind was changed by a gay friend who told him: “You can argue forever about this but in the end it’s something that a lot of people in this country find very offensive, and on that basis it can't be a sensible thing to do.”

The more I ask about Section 28, the more he repeats this point – it was offensive, it was “finger-pointing,” so it had to go. Yes, but it wasn’t purely a symbol. It was a law that did real harm to gay people. It prevented teachers from stopping homophobic bullying; it prevented proper sex education for gay kids at the height of the AIDS crisis. He repeats it again: it was an insult. He isn’t going to venture deeper than that.

He says he didn’t know any openly gay people as a child, or even at university. The first openly gay people he met were at the Conservative Research Department, after he had graduated. Perhaps this explains how he formed the attitudes that kept him opposed to gay equality for so long. I start to go over his record beyond Section 28 – and slap into a brick wall. In 2002 he voted against allowing gay couples to adopt. Yet when I ask him why, he flatly denies it. He says: “No… we were three line whipped on that vote and I abstained on it.” I point him to Hansard, which records his vote against gay marriage in cold black ink. He says “my memory” is that he abstained, and that he now thinks “the ideal adoption is finding a mum and a dad, but there will be occasions when gay couples make very good adoptive parents. So I support gay adoption.”

Even since his apparent conversion, he has voted to block a piece of progress. In 2008, he wanted lesbians who receive IVF treatment to be required to name a father figure – a requirement that gay equality groups say would obviously makes it harder for them to receive treatment. “No, I think that's a classic way to try to misinterpret what the vote was about,” he says. He insists he only wanted fertility clinics to have to “ask the question” about “the need for a father.” But why ask the question, if you don’t have an answer in mind? “I think those are important questions to be considered,” says, and looks away.

II A whistle-stop tour

On an hour-long tour of the policies he will make as Prime Minister that specifically pertain to gay people, Cameron is by turns impressive, mediocre, and worrying. He is at his best and at his clearest – to my surprise – when it comes to refugees who are fleeing homophobic persecution. He says: “If you are fleeing persecution and that fear is well-founded, then you should be able to stay. As I understand it, the 1951 Convention [on the rights of refugees] doesn’t mention sexuality but because it mentions membership of a social group, that phrase is being use by the courts, rightly, to say that if someone has a realistic fear of persecution they should be allowed to stay.”

At the moment, gay refugees are often told – under a Labour government – to go back home and hide their sexuality from police forces who would imprison, torture or kill them for it. I ask him if that is wrong – and he says unequivocally: “I think it is. If you have a legitimate fear of persecution, that it seems to me that is a perfectly legitimate reason to stay.”

Similarly, he is admirably disdainful of the ban on gay men giving blood. He says there is an independent investigation into this and he has to wait for its results, but “it sounds perfectly logical and sensible to make the change... Logic would dictate that it’s time to change.” He even tells the Church of England to follow his lead, saying: “I don’t want to get into a huge row with the Archbishop here… but the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through – sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line full essential.”

Yet on perhaps the two biggest issues affecting gay people in Britain – violence in the playground, and violence on the streets – he doesn’t have much to say. Ofsted has found that homophobic bullying is “endemic” in our schools, and a Stonewall study found that 42 percent of gay kids get beaten up and 17 percent get told they are going to be killed. Cameron says: “I think there’s a broader question of bullying and how we deal with it. A part of it is about trusting teachers and head teachers more to instil a sense of discipline in their schools, which they find very difficult at the moment – partly because of all the bureaucratic rules and regulations about what they are and aren’t allowed to do.”

But how will he specifically tackle homophobic bullying? “The most important instrument of the state is to allow head teachers to keep order in their schools. To search for things, without having to have evidence that there’s weapons involved. To set proper punishments in schools, to exclude pupils who are bullies, or take part in bullying, without being overruled by an appeals panel.” He nods, as if agreeing with himself, and continues: “ I think you need a framework of what is taught from above, but the discipline and order and actually making sure that bullying is stamped out has got to be done by the head teacher and teachers.”

But I point out this is, again, talk about general bullying, rather than the hugely disproportionate amount directed at gay kids. Does he agree with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg that schools should be required to teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless,” just as they respond to racist bullying by saying all ethnicities are equal? He pauses and looks a little sceptical. “I think the point is, there’s now proper guidance from the [Department of Education] about this and I think that’s right,” he says.

There is, however, some evidence Cameron’s policies will unwittingly make homophobic bullying worse. The keystone of his education policy is to allow any group of parents who want to set up a school, and can attract pupils, to receive state funding. But the National Secular Society warns that wherever this has been tried, there is a huge rise in religious fundamentalist schools. We know they are far worse for gay kids: the Stonewall study, for example, found that anti-gay bullying is ten percent worse in faith schools.

At first Cameron’s response to this is to sound bemused. He says he doesn’t understand why homophobia would be worse in faith schools. But I ask: is it so odd? Some of these religious groups – not all – believe homosexuality is a sin. For the only time in the interview, Cameron looks irritated. “That’s so wrong,” he snaps, his brow furrowed. “My daughter goes to a church school and it’s not like that.” He angrily says “a lot of what you’ve read in the newspapers is actually a lot of tosh.” With a firm glare, he says he will put in place “ground rules” to make sure new religious schools “teach equality,” and that’s that. He gets up to turns the radiator next to him down.

When it comes to how to tackle the sudden spike in homophobic violence – 40 percent in a year – Cameron’s answer seems strangely scrawny. He says: “Culture is important. Some of the things that rappers and others sing are completely unacceptable. I was sort of laughed at when I first made this point four years ago, but I do believe that it’s important.” He says he won’t ban the songs, but he will argue against them. “Don’t underestimate the power of the bully pulpit, it is important. The idea of social and cultural leadership in these things does make a difference.”

I assume that’s the first step in his answer, and he is going to list many more ways to reduce homophobic violence – but then I realise he is staring at me, expecting the next question. That’s it? What else will you do? “Well, I think we can stop some of these people [meaning rappers] coming in to the country.” When I tell him a Home Office study has found homophobia is “endemic” within the police, he looks surprised. He says the police force “is making some progress”, and “what is required now is leadership.” In the middle of hugely disproportionate violence against gay people, he’s offering a weak cocktail: more Prime Ministerial criticism of rappers, more power for headmasters, and a vague call for “leadership” in a police force where homophobia is rife.

III “He is not homophobic.”

Yet Cameron has most shocked gay people who want to support him when it comes to Europe, where he has allied with men who accuse gays of paedophilia and destroying Western civilisation. After he became leader, he pulled out of the European People’s Party (EPP), an alliance in the European Parliament with the moderate centre-right parties of Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, in favour of a new coalition of Eurosceptics, largely from Eastern Europe. His new grouping is led by Michal Kaminski, a Polish politician who has been filmed calling gay people “faggots”. When the interviewer expressed surprise he had used such an offensive term, he replied: “What can I say? They are faggots.” Tory MEPs now sit under his leadership in Brussels; he was invited to address the Conservative Party conference. Cameron said on Sky News: “He is not homophobic.”

When I raise the subject, he nods, sits up, and drinks from his coffee in a big gulp. “I think you should form European alliances on whether you agree with these people’s views on the broad direction of the future of Europe, that’s what its about,” he says. “Now, does that make it a more difficult message to explain to gay people who want to votes Conservative? Yes it does, I accept that. One of the reasons for doing this interview is hopefully to try and get across a sense that I have not joined with these people because of their views on social issues. I have not.” He stresses that he has joined with these groups because “there should be a centre right group in Europe that wants [the European Union to be] an open flexible trading Europe, rather than the endless progress towards a more federalised Europe.”

This is obviously true, and perfectly defensible. But Cameron has gone further than that. He has repeatedly said that Kaminski and his party are “not homophobic,” and he wouldn’t ally with them if they were. The evidence shows this is wrong – and shockingly so. A few days before we met, the MPs of this “not homophobic” Law and Justice Party demanded a crackdown on what they called “positive paedophilia by some homosexual circles.” Their senior MP Stanislaw Pieta said: “I’m not saying every gay is a paedophile, but in Britain 43% of paedophiles are gay and they only make up 1% of the population.” Their leader Lech Kaczynski says “the human race would disappear if homosexuality was freely promoted.” There are hundreds of such statements from the party, all on video.

“Obviously, I don’t agree with that [statement],” Cameron says when I read it to him. So does he now admit they are homophobes? “I’m not allied with parties that have views on homophobia or racism that I think are unacceptable.” But these are the leaders of the party. They are not marginal. I read him more and more shocking statements. Poker-faced, Cameron refuses to address the contradiction in his position: he says he wouldn’t ally with anti-gay politicians, yet here they are, making blatantly anti-gay statements.

Whenever I raise it, he tries to change the subject. All the parties in Poland are equally bad on gay rights, he says. I tell him that’s not what the Polish gay equality groups say. The veteran gay activist Waldemar Zboralski says: “The Law and Justice Party is by far the most homophobic party in Poland and Mr Kaminski is the leading symbol of homophobia in this country. It’s very strange for Mr Cameron to deny this, it is indisputable.” So he throws into the air a confetti of different distractions. These aren’t “minor parties,” he says, “they were parties of government” recently. The Liberal Democrats have anti-gay allies too: “Where are the questions for Nick Clegg?” Finally, he says: “Funnily enough, who’s now in the EPP? Italian fascists. Would you be happier if we went and joined a bunch of Italian fascists? No.”

But Mr Cameron, why can’t you simply condemn people who call us “faggots” and “paedophiles” as homophobic? If that isn’t homophobia, what is? How can we believe you are not the old Section 28 Tories underneath if you invest so much energy defending these bigots? His brow is furrowed. He says finally, in a quick, snappy tone: “The fact is, in some Eastern European countries they need to make progress towards equality and rights… Conservative parties have had to go through a real change over this issue. I think we’ve done it faster in the UK than some others. Will other European conservative parties be on a similar journey? Yes. Have they finished? No.” Finally, after a huge amount of wrangling and jangling, he argues these parties “are changing”, and will change more if he engages with them. But change from what? He won’t say.

IV The mystery

Is Cameron’s reinvention convincing, in the flesh, and in the end? He is a former corporate PR man, so you would expect him to be able to deliver a convincing sales pitch – and he does. He does have some real progress to sell: he talks about getting the Tory conference to applaud gay marriage, and the selection of gay candidates, with passion. His defence of gay refugees and opposition to the blood ban went further than he has to politically. Yet there was enough evasion and dissembling in his answers to sow doubts. He didn’t tell the truth about his own voting record, and he made ludicrously false statements about his anti-gay European allies. On the biggest obstacles facing gay people – the real, on-going violence – he had little to offer beyond words of condemnation.

David Cameron is a hazy cloud of charm and platitudes: no matter how hard you peer into him, you cannot find anything solid to focus on for long. There are flickers of apparently real pro-gay feeling, but they are soon followed by excuse-making for some of the most anti-gay politicians in Europe. Which is the real Cameron? On this issue, I suspect even he doesn’t know. But over the next four years, we are all going to find out: the beaming lights of power will part this mysterious and contradictory fog.

To read Johann’s full 6500-word interview with David Cameron, buy the latest issue of Attitude, Britain’s best-selling and most award-winning gay magazine.

...from the Progressive London conference this weekend online. Just click here.

I hereby renounce my republicanism – on the condition that Stephanie Beacham is immediately crowned Queen of England. Two weeks ago, the honey-voiced grande dame of Dynasty wafted into the Celebrity Big Brother house alongside a babbling gaggle of non-entities. She had nothing with her but an I'm-being-paid-lots-for-this Zen and an expensive handbag. But she has proceeded to show something that is almost never allowed on to television, or into any British workplace: a 61-year-old woman who is cleverer and wiser and more confident than anyone around her, freely expressing her complex emotions and longings and lusts. If we peer into the surprising story of Stephanie, we can see one of the great scandals of Britain today: the premature consigning of my mother's generation of women to atrophy and decline.

The Big Brother house is the graveyard of dignity. It is a place where every burp is recorded and replayed, and rows about a burnt chicken cause an international race row. It reduces everyone inside it to pettiness and tribalism and shrieks. Yet Beacham has an inherent poise that no amount of fish guts sprayed into her face while she is strapped to a roundabout (yes, they did) can dent. While the other "celebrities" neurotically fret about their status, she is the one who does the work, annihilates the fundamentalist political ravings of Stephen Baldwin, and makes languid but piercing observations about what is really going on. She gets the hot young men to massage her feet – "Darling, you can never be too hard" – and when they are given absurd tasks asks Ivana Trump with a chuckle: "Are we whores, or fools?"

Against a chorus of self-pity from the rest, she says simply: "This is the best holiday I've had in years ... I feel lighter [and] happier to just be me than I have in years. I could fuss around and try to make my hair and my face look better but [I choose] the pleasure of giving in, of just being."

This is the wisdom of so many sixtysomething women. It comes from a lifetime of seeing hopes fulfilled and dashed; from decades of being scarred and seeing the scar tissue heal, getting crinklier and richer every time. Yet we are a country that, today, is systematically writing off these women – in a way that is bad for all of us, whatever our age.

At the same time as the nation was falling for Beacham – she is favourite to win – Harriet Harman was giving an important speech about their generation. Today, when a woman turns 60, or a man turns 65, she is told her life's work is over, and to go home. Whatever expertise she has built up – my mother worked with victims of domestic violence for decades, for example, until last year – is dismissed. Retire. The end.

Millions of people don't want to live like this. While only 11 per cent of people work beyond retirement age, a recent opinion poll for Saga found that 38 per cent had wanted to carry on. The sacking of Arlene Phillips from Strictly Come Dancing – for a younger, dumber model – resonated because it happens in workplaces across the country. It hits both sexes, but women especially strictly: Brucie is still tap-dancing in his eighties, while Arlene is dismissed as a dried-out husk 20 years sooner.

Harman – another woman who has taken a kicking in her life, and only emerged more dignified and poised – says we need a more "mature" and flexible way of thinking about retirement. It should be about empowering people to live their lives, their way – not blocking them off in their prime, against their will.

It's essential to preserve the right to retire. My grandmother worked tough manual jobs, including scrubbing toilets, all her life; by the time she got to 60, her knees were ruined and she couldn't go on. That's why the Conservative proposals to rapidly jack up the retirement age, by millionaires who have never done a day's manual work in their life, are cruel. But it's equally absurd to say a woman like Beacham, or my mother, or Harman herself, is past it, has nothing more to give, and should be consigned to living life in her living room. This isn't just bad for them: it's bad for all of us, because it wastes great swathes of the country's talent.

So Harman has proposed a more open form of retirement. Today, it's a crash landing: you go from 9 to 5 to a P45 in one sudden fall. In Harman's vision, people could glide towards retirement more gradually. At 60 or 65, you would have the right (but not an obligation) to continue part-time. It's good for you, because you remain within the social network and stimulation of work, and you don't suddenly find yourself at a loss. It's good for your employer, because the knowledge you have built up continues to fertilise the company. It's good for the country, because we won't have so many clever, able people twiddling their thumbs. We are going to need their labour, too. In Britain today, there is a growing pool of older people, and a diminishing stream of younger people. In 20 years' time, half the population of Britain will be over 50. For the millions who want to work, it's crazy to block them off, and push them into dependency on a diminishing pool of the young.

Today, these are only suggestions being put up for discussion, and the current government clearly won't live long enough to implement them. But Harman has a long track record of pushing ideas that are derided at the time, and later become accepted as common sense: back in the early 1980s, she was derided for saying the Government should have a national childcare strategy and must require companies to allow parents to request flexi-time. It's a familiar pattern by now. They hurl sexist insults and call her mad, then 10 years later say that of course they support those feminist ideas – just not the mad ones pushed by Harriet Harman.

When women in their sixties are finally shown to us in all their richness, people respond: look at the glorious renaissance of Meryl Streep in the past few years. But too often they are bundled away, out of the workplace, off the TV screen, dismissed as too wrinkled to sit alongside a wrinklier man in his seventies. They are assumed to steadily lose the characteristics of human beings, like (for one) sexuality. Fellow housemates Dane Bowers and Cisco admitted Stephanie Beacham was "the fittest woman" in there, and they were startled to discover they could fancy a woman her age. We live in an airbrushed culture where 60 is always presented as sterile. It's a nasty trajectory: first jobless, then sexless, and finally characterless.

This is part of the reason that when it comes to people who are older still – the swelling army of eightysomethings and beyond – we avert our gaze. We skim over the headlines revealing that nursing homes are forcing elderly people to have unnecessary operations jabbing tubes into their stomachs because it's "a hassle" to clean them up. We don't want to know that hundreds of thousands of them are being given "chemical coshes" – anti-psychotic drugs that reduce them to drooling zombies. The dehumanisation begins at 60 and is complete by 80.

It doesn't have to be like this – but it requires a change in the culture and a change in the law. Arise, Queen Stephanie: your sixtysomething subjects await a better Kingdom.

You can find details here. I'll be on a panel with Ken Livingstone and Harriet Harman discussing how to beat the right in 2010.

It is not only David Cameron's glossy, tie-less election poster that has been airbrushed. The ugly spots and oily patches in the Tory leader's policies have also been successfully pixellated out of the public mind – by a Prime Minister with the communications skills of a malfunctioning speak-your-weight machine, by a Labour Party engaged in self-strangulation, and by a malfunctioning media pitched at the intellectual level of the Mr Men books. So nobody sees Cameron's policies; nobody knows. Most of us will only discover them after he has won, when we will wonder why nobody told us this was coming.

For example, a perfect laboratory experiment in Cameronomics has been taking place just next door, in Ireland – but who knows about it? One of the remaining real differences between Labour and the Conservatives is over how governments should behave in a recession. At first glance, David Cameron's proposal sounds like common sense. When times are bad, you – as an individual, or a family – figure out how to cut your spending and pay down your debts. No more fancy nights out. Holiday at home. Put the stuff you don't want on eBay.

Cameron says government should do the same: it should slash its debts, even if that means dramatically slashing spending. This was the view of economics that prevailed until the Great Depression – and it has only just made a comeback.

Gordon Brown has a different view. It has underpinned his economic decisions since the Great Crash of 2008 – but unfortunately, he is such an atrocious communicator that I will have to quote somebody else to explain it. Barack Obama says: "Economists on both the left and right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. You see, when this recession began, many families sat around their kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. That is a completely responsible and understandable reaction. But if every family in America cuts back, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, and the economy gets even worse. That's why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand." You keep stimulating until we are back on our feet – and then you pay back the debt in the good times.

This is, when you first hear it, counter-intuitive. It means governments have to decide to spend more when we as individuals are deciding to spend less. It can seem hard for those of us who are not economists to figure out which of these views is right. Sure, we can listen to people like the Nobel Prize winner for Economics Paul Krugman, who told me he was "shocked" by Cameron's policies and they would worsen the recession "for sure". We can see that the Great Depression got much worse when governments took the Cameron route, and was ended by a giant programme of debt-funded government spending. But the best guide is to look at countries that are trying the Cameron approach and countries that are trying the opposite tactics now, and check the results.

Throughout the nineties and the noughties, Ireland was held up as a poster child by the right. People like John Redwood and (yes) David Cameron said its model of low taxes and almost-total deregulation showed the way forward for Britain. In fact it produced the most corrupt and over-extended banking sector outside Iceland. Just one bank – Anglo Irish – is now on course to receive a €30bn extended bailout, equivalent to every penny of tax collected in the country in 2009. The Celtic Tiger had its claws ripped out, and it's shaking at the back of its cage.

But the Irish government has continued to cleave to Tory solutions. After the crash, its government rejected the case for a stimulus package, and insisted its "number one priority" was to "cut the deficit and get the public finances back in order". It sawed deep into spending on teachers, pupils, the disabled, and childcare. Out of total annual spending of €60bn, they are en route to ditching €15bn. The government is paying off its debt as its first, second and third priority, just as Cameron demands.

So what happened? The economy has collapsed. As the economist Rob Brown writes in the latest issue of the New Statesman, the country is now embarked on "an astonishing 15 per cent shrinkage in the Irish economy overall – the sharpest contraction experienced by any advanced industrial nation in peacetime". Unemployment has soared to 12.5 per cent: it would be even higher if so many young people hadn't left the country. Only 14 per cent of Irish citizens are happy with the government's performance.

By contrast, the countries that have most strongly defied Cameronomics are pulling out of the recession first and fastest. China has ramped up state spending to 88 percent of GDP growth, paid for by increased government debt. This is Brown to the power of a hundred. If Cameron was right, this would be economic suicide, and they would be plummeting down. In fact, the recession there is now over. That's why even right-wing leaders that initially shared Cameron's instincts, like Angela Merkel, are reversing course.

Obviously, this is a crucial debate that will alter your life and mine – but have you heard it plainly expressed anywhere? Cameron states his incorrect case with his usual suave charm, while Labour isn't even putting their correct case at all. Incredibly, there has clearly been a decision by the Government that explaining the case for Keynesianism is too complicated, so they won't even try. When they are challenged about the deficit, they should reply: "Yes, we absolutely have increased the deficit. That is what you should do in a recession. And we will keep on increasing the deficit and stimulating the economy until this nightmare is over. Look at Ireland. Is that what you want?" (If they were smarter still, they'd use the stimulus money on launching Britain on a massive, labour-intensive transition to renewable energy sources, solving two crises at once.)

Instead, Labour offers a mumbled, evasive pledge that they too will cut the deficit, just a bit later. Without hearing the case for Keynesianism, this just sounds like incompetence or evasiveness. They have set themselves an artificial target of cutting it by half in the next four years. This throws away their best argument – and the theory that has guided their response to the recession from the start. If the global economy gets worse, we will need a lot more stimulus, funded by borrowing, to stave off terrible pain.

The idea that we can't do this because we have maxed-out the national credit card is simply false. For almost the entire time since the 1750s, Britain's national debt – now at 80 per cent of GDP – has been as high or higher than today. Japan's is currently 198 per cent, and they have no problem getting international loans at reasonable rates.

Why won't Labour say so? Why make it seem like Cameron is on to something, when he is so wrong? Brown seems to think that matching the Tory language in this way cleverly "neutralises" their argument. It doesn't. It makes it seem like they were right all along.

There are too many people's lives at stake to continue with this empty fact-free conversation. Labour's policies have been bitterly disappointing – but David Cameron's set us up for economic disaster. When will we start to say so?

Under the current Labour government, there has been a stunning sweep of progress for gay people – with civil partnerships, an end to Section 28, and openly gay people in the army and the government. The culture of Britain has been changed forever, and for the better. Yet when I interviewed Gordon Brown for Attitude last month, it became clear that – although he is genuinely proud of these advances, and eloquent in their defence – the internal pressure for further improvements has leaked away. He had few ideas for how to carry on beating back irrational prejudice against gay people.

So it is impressive that Nick Clegg has articulated – in full, and with striking passion – an action plan the next stage in the fight to make gay people truly equal. It starts with the few areas left where gay people are still unequal under the law. Civil partnerships should, he says, be called marriage, and have exactly the same rights, rather than the inferior second-rate option they represent today. The ban on gay men donating blood – as if we are all Typhoid Marys – would end.

But he also wants the government to begin the harder job of tackling homophobia out on the streets and in the playgrounds. He knows why: some 41 percent of gay children get beaten up in school, and they are six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings. So he says every school must teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless and something that happens”. There can be no religious excuses. He wants to see this tightly policed: “We need to put serious pressure on them. It needs to be a requirement.”

In the same way, he said the government needs to drive homophobia out of the police, where a 2005 Home Office study found it to be “endemic.” He compared several recent cases where gay people were murdered and the investigations appeared to go badly wrong to the Steven Lawrence tragedy, and said there needs to be a change of culture “on patrol, on the beat, in the changing room, in the officer’s mess, in the staffroom.”

And he defended the least popular and most vulnerable group of gay people – the refugees who reach our shores because they would be murdered at home for being gay. Today, they are often deported and told to “hide” their sexuality back home. When I asked if they had a right to remain, he said: “Of course! And, by the way, it’s not just me that says this, it’s international law that says it.”

This is genuinely brave, because Clegg is taking the fight to the last remaining bastions of bigotry. He will get a nasty kick-back from religious fundamentalists who say loving gay couples should never be allowed to marry, and who claim they have a “right” to teach homophobia to children in a way that produces such disproportionate rates of violent bullying and suicide. They right wing press will savage it as an attack on “freedom” – when in fact it is a defence of the freedom of gay people to live their lives free of irrational hate.

David Cameron claims he genuinely regrets his support for homophobic laws like Section 28. Clegg is sceptical, pointing to his recent decision to ally with “faggot”-baiting politicians in Europe – but he has also provided Cameron with an opportunity. When I interview the Conservative leader for Attitude soon, I will ask – will Cameron now support the Liberal Democrats’ bold programme to make Britain a genuinely equal country?

You can read my interview with the Prime Minister here.

This year, we all need to become more like Utah, under its Republican governor – and then go further. No, dear reader, don’t panic – I have not converted to Mormonism, nor have I tossed out my sanity with my old Santa hat and Christmas decorations. The people of one of the most conservative states in the US have stumbled across a simple policy that slashes greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent, saves huge sums of money, improves public services, cuts traffic congestion, and makes 82 percent of workers happier. It can do the same for us – and point to an even better future beyond it – without the need for the Arch-Angel Moron (yes, Mormons really do believe in him) to offer his blessing.



It all began two years ago, when the state was facing a budget crisis. One night, the new Republican Governor Jon Huntsman was staring at the red ink and rough sums when he had an idea. Keeping the state’s buildings lit and heated and manned cost a fortune. Could it be cut without cutting the service given to the public? Then it hit him. What if, instead of working 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, the state’s employees only came in four days a week, but now from 8 to 6? The state would be getting the same forty hours a week out of its staff – but the costs of maintaining their offices would plummet. The employees would get a three-day weekend, and cut a whole day’s worth of tiring, polluting commuting out of their week.



He took the step of requiring it by law for 80 percent of the state’s employees. (Obviously, some places – like the emergency services or prisons – had to be exempted.) At first, there was cautious support among the workforce but as the experiment has rolled on, it has gathered remarkable acclaim. Today, two years on, 82 percent of employees applaud the new hours, and hardly anyone wants to go back. Professor Lori Wadsworth carried out the most detailed study of workers’ responses, and she says: “People love it.”



A whole series of unexpected benefits started to emerge. The number of sick days claimed by workers fell by 9 percent. Air pollution fell, since people were spending 20 percent less time in their cars. Some 17,000 tonnes of warming gases were kept out of the atmosphere. They have a new slogan in Utah – Thank God It’s Thursday.



But wouldn’t people be pissed off that they couldn’t contact their state authorities on a Friday? Did the standard of service fall? It was a real worry when the programme started. But before, people had to take time off work to contact the authorities, since they were only open during work hours. Now they were open for an hour before work and an hour after it. It actually became easier to see them Monday to Thursday: waiting times for state services have fallen.



Think of it as the anti-Dolly Parton manifesto, puncturing her famous song: “Workin 9 to 5/ What a way to make a livin/ Barely gettin by/ Its enough to drive you/ Crazy if you let it…” A queue of US cities and corporations like General Motors are following suit, and Britain’s councils and companies should be sweeping in behind them. It’s a win-win-win – good for employees, good for employers, and good for the environment.



And once we started on this course, it could spur us to think in more radical ways about work. If this tiny little tinker with work routines leads to a big burst of human happiness and environmental sanity, what could bigger changes achieve?



Work is the activity that we spend most of our waking lives engaged in – yet it is too often trapped in an outdated routine. Today, very few of us work in factories, yet we have clung to the habits of the factory with almost religious devotion. Clock in, sit at your terminal, be seen to work, clock out. Is this the best way to make us as productive and creative and happy as we can be? Should we clamber into a steel box every morning to sit in a concrete box all day?



Some of the best artworks of recent years – Joshua Ferris’ novel ‘And Then We Came To The End’, Ricky Gervais’ TV series ‘The Office’, Mike Judge’s film ‘Office Space’ – have distilled the strange anomie of living like this, constantly monitored, constantly sedentary, constantly staring at a screen. When I started working from home, I suddenly found my productivity shot up: when I stopped being Seen to Work just by sitting at a desk, I actually knuckled down faster and with fewer distractions to work properly. In a wired lap-topped world, far more people could work more effectively from home, in hours of their own choosing, if only their bosses would have confidence in them. They would be better workers, better parents and better people – and we would take a huge number of cars off the road.



But the problem runs deeper than this. Britain now has the longest work hours in the developed world after the US – and in a recession, those of us with jobs scamper ever faster in our hamster-wheels. Yes, we now make the Japanese look chilled. This is not how 2010 was meant to turn out. If you look at the economists and thinkers of, say, the 1930s, they assumed that once we had achieved abundance – once humans had all the food and clothes and heat and toys we could use – we would relax and work less. They thought that by now work would barely cover three days as we headed en masse for the beach and the concert-hall.



Instead, the treadmill is whirling ever-faster. This isn’t our choice: virtually every study of this issue finds that huge majorities of people say they want to work less and spend more time with their friends, their families and their thoughts. We know it’s bad for us. Professor Cary Cooper, who has studied to effects of overwork on the human body, says: “If you work consistently long hours, over 45 a week every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically.” You become 37 percent more likely to suffer a stroke or heart-attack if you work 60 hours a week - yet one in six of all Brits are doing just that.



We don’t stop primarily because we are locked in an arms race with out colleagues. If we relax and become more human, we fall behind the person in the next booth down, who is chasing faster. Work can be one of the richest and most rewarding experiences, but not like this. In a recession, this insecurity only swells. Under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the 1990s, the French discovered the most elegant way out of this, taking the Utah experiment deeper and further. They insisted that everyone work a maximum of 35 paid hours a week. It was a way of saying: in a rich country, life is about more than serving corporations and slogging. Wealth generation and consumerism should be our slaves, not our masters: where they make us happy, we should embrace them; where they make us miserable, we should cast them aside. Enjoy yourself. True wealth lies not only in having enough, but in having the time to enjoy everything and everyone around you.



It was the equivalent to an arms treaty: we all stop, together, now, at the 35 hour mark. The French population became fitter, their relationships were less likely to break down, their children became considerably happier, and voluntary organisations came back to life. According to the national statistics agency Insee, the policy created 350,000 jobs, because so many people moved to job-shares to ensure their post was filled five days a week. But under pressure from corporations enraged that their staff couldn’t be made to slog all the time, Nicholas Sarkozy has abolished this extraordinary national experiment. The French people were dismayed: the polls show a majority still support the cap.



From the unlikely pairing of Salt Lake City and Paris, a voice is calling. It is telling us that if we leave our offices empty a little more, we can find a happier, healthier alternative lying in the great free spaces beyond.

The political class has been entranced for a year now by the camp charm of Peter Mandelson: the Comeback. The de facto Deputy PM glides from yacht to Downing Street, receiving awed applause for the cut of both his suits and his jib. It feels almost vulgar, then, to mention his policies. Yet Mandelson is enthusiastically pushing Britain further down a path that is damaging one of the great tools for human progress – scientific research – and slowly corrupting the medicine you take and the air you breathe.

At Mandelson's instigation, universities have been taken out of the Department for Education and moved into his Department for Business. He explains why: "I want the universities to focus more on commercialising the fruits of their endeavour ... business has to be central." He wants individual corporations to be more closely involved in steering research in university science departments and profiting from the results. He says it is just common sense: we are all part of UK plc, and the ivory towers should be tilted towards serving British business.

A new report by Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) lays out the consequences of this process. They start with a story most of us know. The tobacco companies knew from the early 1950s that smoking caused lung cancer but they denied it relentlessly and paid university scientists to give the impression there was an ongoing "debate". A similar process is speeding across Britain's science departments. From drug trials to the energy sector, companies are ensuring that publicly funded research serves their profit-margins rather than the public interest.

For example, oil companies are one of the biggest providers of private funds to our universities. As Mandelson says, this funding "isn't something for nothing". They get to direct the scientists we employ and the labs we provide towards their purposes – which are to find ever more elaborate ways to drill the last dregs of oil and gas from the earth. That's why in our universities five times more is spent on research into fossil fuels than into renewable energy sources – even though fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem, and renewables can save it.

At the heart of science is the idea that a good scientist should follow the evidence wherever it leads. It's this blue skies thinking that produces the greatest breakthroughs. But corporate funding prevents this from happening: if research veers from the immediate interests of the corporation, it is shut down. Edinburgh University used to have a Centre for Human Ecology that looked into corporate damage to the environment, until the director of an affected company wrote furiously to the head of the university: "You really will have to gag [them, because they] will alienate most, if not all, wealth creators." The Centre was shut down. It only reopened years later, at the Open University.

Drug companies today are the largest funders of university research, and they too expect a return. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 370 randomised drug trials, an essential phase in finding out if medicines work. It discovered that if a study is sponsored by a drug company, it tells you the drug is safe to use 51 per cent of the time. But if the scientists are publicly funded, they say the drug is safe only 16 per cent of the time.

The consequences of this process can – according to the SGR report – be startling. In 1996, Dr Nancy Olivieri was commissioned at her university to study a drug developed by Apotex Inc that treats a rare blood disorder. She discovered a serious side-effect. When she tried to inform her patients, the company brought the study to a sudden halt, and told Dr Olivieri that she could be sued. She then discovered another more dangerous risk – and they threatened more lawsuits. At this point many scientists would have shut up. In 2002, a series of independent reviews completely vindicated her.

How many cases like this happen in the shadows? It's hard to tell, but the more universities are dependent on corporations, the more it will occur. In 2002, Proctor and Gamble paid for scientists at the University of Sheffield to evaluate the effectiveness of their new osteoporosis drug Actonel. One of the lead scientists on the study, Dr Aubrey Blumsohn, noticed that when the research was published under his name, some 40 per cent of the data had simply been left out. P&G refused to tell him why, saying it would breach commercial confidentiality.

He complained that the company was manipulating medical data – and according to the SGR report Blumsohn says he was offered $300,000 by the University of Sheffield to stop embarrassing their corporate sponsor. When he spoke out to the media, he was suspended from his job. When I put these allegations to Sheffield University, their spokesman said: "This is a confidential internal matter and I wouldn't want to go into any details." P&G say they adhere to "the highest standards of research integrity".

The corporate capture of medical research now runs remarkably deep. A recent study by Professor PC Gotzsche found that 70 per cent of published articles in the biosciences had been ghost-written in part by corporate PRs. The risks are plain, but Mandelson wants to take us deeper. Only research that can make a short-term buck for a big company will occur. Malaria research out; treatments for "shyness" or "sexual dysfunction" in. Tidal power out; leeching petrol from tar sands in.

Mandelson claims there is no other way to pay for research in a recession. It's not true. The wealthy OECD nations currently spent £48bn on military research and development a year, and only £33bn on health and environmental R&D combined. Transfer just half of the cash we currently spend on weapons to human needs and we don't need any of this corporate contamination.

British science gave the world Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. They figured out how we became human and the shape of the universe. Now Peter Mandelson wants to bend that great tradition to serve the yacht-owning overclass he adores. If he succeeds, we may never know the magnitude of our loss. We won't see the health risks that go unreported, the cures to diseases that pass unfound, or the green technologies never invented. They will all pass silently into the corporate-sponsored night.

The most common complaint against David Cameron is unfair and untrue. Critics keep charging that he has no policies – but in truth, now he has dropped his early attempt at kum-bay-ya Conservatism, Cameron is offering a fairly detailed prospectus. Unfortunately, it is of policies that will harm Britain.

There is a laboratory where these Tory policies are being played out now. It is called London. Boris Johnson said he was a "progressive conservative" who would "help the poor" and "green the city". One of his first acts in power was to lay off half the people in London government working on lowering the city's carbon emissions, and to kick plans to limit pollution levels into the long grass.

One year in, it is clear he has delivered handsomely – for the rich. He has given them a de facto tax cut by abolishing the extension of the congestion zone to well-heeled west London, and by abandoning the £25-a-day charge for SUV drivers. He has paid for it by pushing up costs for the poorest people in London, ramming up bus fares by 20 per cent. He has opposed all new regulation on the City of London, and still praises sub-prime mortgages – the cause of the Great Crash of 2008.

Under the Conservative council of Hammersmith and Fulham – named by Cameron as a model for how he will rule – things have gone further. It has paid for tax cuts by shutting down 12 homeless hostels, increasing the cost of meals on wheels for poor pensioners by 60 percent, and suddenly charging disabled people who need home help £12.40 an hour.

The council's leader, Stephen Greenhalgh, says he wants to abolish council housing and let rents rise to market levels. He argues that council estates today are "barracks for the poor" and complains their residents are "hard to get rid of". A recent meeting of Tory policymakers – including Cameron's housing adviser Owen Inskip – dismissed council housing as a "dead end" and mooted charging market rents. Prices for the poorest people in London would soar to between £150 and £650, stripping many of a secure roof over their heads.

Yes, New Labour has often been dire – but the people who say nothing could be worse are learning the hard way that it ain't so. Poring through Cameron's policy documents, I could find only one instance where there would be a clear improvement: he would not build a new terminal at Heathrow. He deserves credit for that. But otherwise, his announcements casually write off British lives. For example, he says he will not erect any more speed cameras, no matter how bad a car crash hot-spot becomes. When it is pointed out that they cut deaths by 40 per cent and currently save 900 lives a year, he keeps his eye on the speedophile vote and refuses to budge.

Cameron will oversee a huge rise in religious fundamentalist schools. His policy is to allow any group of parents who want to establish a school to be given public money. In every country where this has been tried, the groups organised enough to snaffle the cash are extreme religious followers who want to "protect" their children from secular values. Secular campaigners are staring at Tory plans in a new kind of disbelief.

Of course, the most consequential policies so far cover the economy, where Cameron is promoting a fringe philosophy rejected by every other elected government. Most economists believe that when private spending collapses, the Government has to fill the gap in demand by borrowing and spending – or a recession turns into a depression. Yet Cameron says governments must cut spending to pay down the debt, however bad the economic weather.

The country that has steered out of the recession fastest – China – did precisely the opposite. It ramped up state spending to 88 per cent of GDP growth. Even Angela Merkel, who used to share Cameron's analysis, was so struck by this she now plans a large debt-funded stimulus. Professor David Blanchflower – one of the most distinguished economists in Britain – says Cameron's policies mean another million people will lose their jobs. "It could send the economy crashing into a ten-year depression," he warns.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Cameron and George Osborne can adopt policies that are so harmful towards ordinary people and the poor because they have never really known any. Barely a week passes without Osborne making a slip showing he is surreally out of touch.

He recently claimed his inheritance tax cut on properties worth £1m would be enjoyed by people living in ex-council houses. He then said his £20,000 a year private school, St Paul's, is "incredibly liberal" because "your mother could be the head of a giant corporation, or a solicitor in Kew."

If you think council houses are worth a million quid and solicitors in Kew are the lowest rung on the social ladder you can imagine, how does it affect your policies? Of course you can blithely advocate increasing the retirement age to 66: I doubt he even knows that in the place where I was born, Glasgow, most men are dead years before they reach that age.

This Cameroon-cocoon is best captured by the soon-to-be Tory MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who at the age of forty is accompanied at public events by his nanny, who he calls "Nanny." He recently snapped: "If I've got a nanny, I've got a nanny. And if anybody doesn't like it – tough!" He then added: "I do wish you wouldn't keep going on about my nanny. If I had a valet you'd think it was perfectly normal."

In the midst of all this, Cameron's policy documents show he will try to change Britain's political landscape to make it harder for the Tories to be defeated. He will abolish 10 per cent of parliamentary seats, almost all in Labour areas. He will scrap the rules requiring commercial broadcasters to be politically impartial, unleashing the rabid Fox News model against the British left. And he will threaten to outlaw trade union funding for Labour.

So let's be fair to him: David Cameron has policies. Lots of them. They suggest a sound-bite for the new election: Vote blue, and we'll all be singing the blues.

Britain is facing the real risk today of a bombing campaign that targets random civilians for death – but it is being virtually ignored. When its supporters step closer every day to mass murder, nobody notices. When its perpetrators are caught, there is (at best) a little flick of information in News in Brief, before everyone goes back to talking about the Strictly Come Dancing race row. This silence suggests something dark about us – and requires us to change our behaviour, fast.

The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white "neo-Nazis" who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a "race war".

They have struck before. Exactly a decade ago, a 22-year-old member of the British National Party called David Copeland planted bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane (where I live), and a gay pub in Old Compton Street. He managed to lodge a nail deep in a baby's skull, and to murder a pregnant woman, her gay best friend, and his partner. He bragged: "My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There'd be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people would go out and vote BNP."

The police are warning ever-more urgently that similar attacks seem to be coming today. The West Yorkshire Police recently launched a huge series of raids against far-right groups and found them in possession of 80 bombs – considerably more even than any jihadi group has been caught with in British history.

Last year, a 43-year-old man called Neil Lewington was arrested "on the cusp" of waging a "terror campaign", it emerged at his trial. He had built a bomb factory in his parents' house which he planned to use to launch attacks against people he considered to be "non-British". He was only caught by chance: he picked a panicked fight with a train conductor, and the police who turned up found he was laden with explosives.

The list of far right-wingers who have been busted for planning violence has spiked up in the past few years. In the home of a BNP election candidate called Robert Cottage in 2008, the police discovered "the largest amount of chemical explosives ever found in this country", they said.

The same year, a thug called Martyn Gilleard was caught with a huge stash of nail bombs, and rage-filled letters in which he declared: "I am so sick of hearing nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back, only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act." He was only caught by fluke: the police busted him for distributing child porn.

It's not hard to get in on this act. There are dozens of far-right websites that explain – with handy video links – how to make bombs, and then urge you to head to the nearest mosque, synagogue or gay club.

But as the New Statesman's Mehdi Hassan has pointed out, as far as public debate goes, it's as if these crimes never happened. While planned attacks by jihadis (rightly) dominate the news agenda for days, these remarkably similar plans pass unmentioned and unnoticed.

This disjunction exposes a rash of hypocrisy. The parts of the right that gleefully blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny minority are mysteriously reluctant to apply the same arguments to themselves. If Martin Amis was consistent, he should now declare: "The white community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation. Strip-searching people who look like they're from Hampshire or from Surrey ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

But of course he won't. It shows the bigotry at the core of these make-all-Muslims-pay arguments: they see brown-skinned people as a homogenous mass who can be collectively punished, while they see white people as discrete units who should only be punished individually.

But these white bomb-makers also blast holes in the arguments put by some small parts of the left, who claim "terrorism" is only a response to "legitimate grievances". We can see that somebody like David Copeland simply had an insane hatred of black, Asian and gay people. It's a form of soft racism to fail to see that the same lunacy can happen to non-white people. The vile Islamist gang who wanted to blow up the Ministry of Sound really did say the women there were "slags" who deserved to die for wearing miniskirts. Sometimes (but not always), the grievances that drive violence are simply deranged and have to be resisted.

While the threat of far-right violence is rising, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, is going to appear on Question Time next week. It would be easy, and emotionally satisfying, for me to join the many well-intentioned protesters who are saying he shouldn't be there, but I can't do it. There are two reasons – one moral, and one pragmatic.

Freedom of speech includes the freedom to say abhorrent and repulsive things, or it isn't worth having. Why is our Britain vastly morally superior to the fantasy island that the BNP dream of building? Because we do not silence them – even though they would silence so many of us.

Then there's the pragmatic reason. The BNP is doing increasingly well in elections because there is a huge gap between the reality of the BNP and how their voters see them. I see this on the run-down estates where many of my relatives live: most of the BNP's voters believe they are a patriotic party who will peacefully defend the rights of the white working class, just as other organisations peacefully defend the rights of other ethnic groups.

When they find out the BNP leaders have in fact praised Britain's greatest enemy, Adolf Hitler, derided the Holocaust as "the Holohoax", had violent maniacs in their senior ranks, and want to deport many of our national heroes like Ashley Cole and Trevor McDonald, they are disgusted, and withdraw their support. There is only a very, very small constituency in Britain for Holocaust denial, mass "repatriations", and the mongering of "race wars".

So how do we close this perception gap? Shutting the BNP out of debate hasn't worked. They have been shut out and they have grown. In the darkness, the fungus can spread. The greatest disinfectant is sunlight, shone straight into Griffin's face. The only people who should fear free speech are the BNP, because when the British people hear what they have to say, and their lack of answers to basic factual questions, they are repelled.

One of the areas where everyone should see Griffin being challenged is over this question of far-right violence. He claims he is "strongly" opposed to these freelance attacks – yet he has kept violent attackers in his senior team.

His chief lieutenant for years was a man called Tony Lecomber, who was jailed for three years in the 1980s for plotting to blow up the offices of a left-wing political party. After he was released, he and a gang then beat a Jewish teacher unconscious. When he was freed after another three years inside, he was swiftly promoted through the BNP ranks. He was only ditched after he approached a Liverpool hitman to discuss how they could "take out" a cabinet minister.

One of the leading figures in the BNP's online operation, Lambertus Nieuwhof, tried to blow up a mixed-race school in South Africa in 1992. The BNP is happy to have him nonetheless. Nieuwhof says: "Everybody should be allowed to make a mistake."

The BNP is not directly organising violence, but it has tolerated violent madmen in its midst, and its arguments have encouraged violence. Griffin has demanded "rights for whites with well-directed boots and fists". He reacted to the Soho nail-bomb by one of his own party's members by attacking the victims, saying they were "flaunting their perversion in front of the world's journalists, [and had] showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures disgusting".

Let Griffin speak his filth to the nation, and sweat under David Dimbleby's forensic questioning. He will only discredit himself.

But the country also needs to start acknowledging the danger of bombs thrown from the far right. David Copeland came from within the ranks of the BNP; so might the next one. The police need to monitor neo-Nazis as closely as jihadis, and the Government projects to prevent violent extremism should be working with white kids as well as Muslim children. We need to prepare ourselves now: the next person to bomb Britain might not look like Mohammed Sidiq Khan – he might look like me.

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101

He is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

We thought the fever of this autumn was going to be swine flu, but we were wrong. It has turned out to be National Debt Hysteria. Our entire political class has taken to their beds with this fever, crying for nurse to bring cuts, cuts, cuts. The symptoms are simple: the sufferer becomes convinced that debt levels lower than almost all other wealthy nations, and lower than almost all of modern British history, are "a disaster", and so we must immediately slash our spending. They keep up this wail even though the most qualified doctors, like the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Economics, Professor Paul Krugman, stand by their beds and tell them this will bring our real sickness, the recession, back with a vengeance.

The hysteria will reach a Cameroonian crescendo today when the Tory leader delivers his party conference speech promising Austerity For All. (Except for millionaires like himself, of course, who will receive a massive inheritance tax cut.) So let's calmly study the patient – and see how this National Debt Hysteria is going to do us far more harm that the real national debt ever could.

Let's start with a few facts that have been forgotten. Britain went into this recession with one of the lowest debt levels in the developed world. According to the International Monetary Fund, Japan's debt in 2008 was 198 per cent of national GDP, Italy's was 104 per cent, Germany's was 76 per cent, France's was 65 per cent, the US's was 61 per cent, and Britain's was 43 per cent. All countries have rapidly increased borrowing during this recession – for very good reasons we'll get to in a second – and Britain has nudged closer to the middle of the league table. But to claim, as Cameron does, that Gordon Brown had "racked up debts in the good times" so we "can't afford more" is simply untrue.

Cameron and George Osborne say that a national debt at 75 per cent of GDP makes a country "bust." Using this measure, the most successful economies in the world are bankrupt, and have been for a long time. Japan has apparently been trebly "bust" since the 1970s, yet it has just elected a government committed to higher public spending. The US, Germany – "bust" and "bust", yet spending more.

Oh, and Britain has been "bust" for almost its entire history since the 1750s if Cameron's standard is right. There have only been two 40-year periods when we had a debt that dipped below Cameron's supposed catastrophe-level: the end of the 19th century, and from the 1970s to now. As the economist Will Hutton puts it: "From 1750 to 1870, Britain won wars, assembled an astonishing navy, built an empire and launched the Industrial Revolution to become the envy of Europe, yet the national debt was consistently above 80 per cent of GDP. Nobody cared. High national debt was a precondition for winning two world wars in the 20th century. Periods when the over-riding preoccupation has been lowering the national debt have coincided with industrial, economic and strategic decline. So it will again."

So is the world – and Britain's history – bankrupt, or is Cameron's reasoning? In all indebted countries, there have always been people who warned that the fiscal sky was about to fall in. In 1752 the philosopher David Hume cried: "Either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation." As the great historian Thomas Macaulay explained: "At every stage in the growth of the debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt went on growing, and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever."

But on the basis of this faulty reading of economics, we are about to dramatically slash our public spending – in a way that will cause real harm, rather than the phantasms conjured by Cameron.

There is a reason why governments should increase spending in a recession, explained by John Maynard Keynes from the 1920s onwards. When the economy sickens, businesses and consumers stop spending except on essentials. This causes demand to fall. If the government cuts back at the same time, then nobody is buying anything – and recession turns into depression. The only way out is for governments to pick up the slack and borrow money to spend on public projects and subsidies that get money running through the economy again. Then, once we are back to work, the government pays down the debt with the proceeds of growth.

This has been demonstrated to work time and again. In a recession, it's irrational for you to rack up debt, but essential for the government to. Keynes called this "the paradox of thrift." Yet Cameron and Osborne deny these truths: Osborne actually claims public spending claimed no role in ending the Great Depression.

What happens if governments – in the middle of rising unemployment – panic about debt and stop stimulating the economy? We don't need to speculate. During the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt launched a huge stimulus funded by debt, and the economy began to recover. Then, in 1935 and 1936, he was besieged by people offering the Cameron argument: the recovery will be stronger if we cut the debt now. The result was that the depression came back with a nasty slap, and it was only wiped out when the gigantic stimulus of the Second World War sent debt soaring to 119 per cent of GDP. This debt was easily repaid once this stimulus paved the way for the biggest boom in American history.

Cameron and Osborne would repeat this mistake. When I read their statements to Krugman – the Nobel Prize-winning expert on depressions – he said he was "shocked." I asked if this approach would make the recession worse, and he said: "Yes. For sure." Professor David Blanchflower, until recently on the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, warns that Osborne's cuts could well send unemployment soaring to five million.

Indeed, Cameron's cuts set us up for failure twice over. Stimulus spending can – if it's done well – not only get the immediate economy running again, but set us up for future success. A recent detailed US study by Colombia Teachers' College found that cutting high-school dropout rates in half would generate $45bn in new tax revenues, by saving on welfare payments, imprisonment, and so on. Cameron is proposing to do precisely the opposite. He will end the Educational Maintenance Allowance of £30 a week that makes it possible for poor kids to stay on to sixth form college, setting them up for a lifetime of diminished expectations.

So why is Cameron getting away with it? Partly, of course, it is due to a media that has an allergy to arguments that take more than 30 seconds to explain and a bias to the Tories. But it is also due to a failure by Labour and the Lib Dems. Instead of standing up for the idea of a debt-funded stimulus to get us through the recession, they have panicked and accepted the bogus Tory framing. They have been reduced to whimpering: we do need cuts now, only we'll be a little nicer in the way we do it. It has been a disaster. The British people are not having the looming Cameron slasher flick explained to them: we will only grasp the plot once the film has begun.

The biggest risk to our economy today is not debt, it is the fear of debt. Somebody needs to invent a Tamiflu for our national hysteria before we start frantically cutting into our flesh to carve out a hallucinatory disease.

There is a scandal in British politics that is passing almost unnoticed in the night. It will alter the ecology of our politics – and our culture – in ways that will damage us for decades to come. There is one thing most British people think we do best: broadcasting. A recent ICM poll found that 77 percent think the BBC is an institution to be proud of, and 63 percent say it is good value for money. This makes the BBC by a long way the most popular public institution in Britain – yet both main political parties are lining up to happy-slap Auntie. The link between the license fee and the Beeb is about to be broken by a Labour government, and a Tory government will sweep in and widen the gap, while unleashing a snarling pack of Fox News-style hounds across the rest of the channels. And for what? To win the favour of a foreign right-wing billionaire.

Let’s start with the good news. The BBC works. For just £2.60 a week, the British get a package of the best television and radio in the world. We get the best comedies, the best drama, and the best news. There’s a reason why we have won seven of the past ten international Emmies, and the BBC News website is the most popular on earth. As soon as he took power, Nicholas Sarkozy asked how he could make French broadcasting more like ours. It is a model for the world of how to create journalism that isn’t contaminated by either corporate advertisers and proprietors on one side, or state ownership on the other. Three independent polls have found that a large majority of Brits would happily pay more for it.

Of course we can all find some parts of its output we don’t like. I can’t stand Jeremy Clarkson, Andrew Neil’s blatant editorializing, Chris Moyles, or bogus questions about whether Gordon Brown is popping pills. A right-wing bias still seeps into a lot of its news coverage: see the new book ‘Newspeak’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell for details. But other people will loathe the parts I love – In Our Time, Start the Week, Eastenders, Question Time, Lauren Laverne, Mark Kermode, BBC4. It’s a package: it’s impossible for every part to delight every individual. But when there are so many riches, we almost all find something to enjoy: a London Business School found that 99 percent of us use it every week.

Far from becoming outdated, the BBC model is more necessary now than ever. Commercial television is losing its ability to produce quality programmes, fast. Advertising money is leaking away to the internet: this week, for the first time, online advertising overtook TV ads in Britain. Revenues are expected to fall by 20 percent in the next decade, and to continue spiralling after that. As more of us get digital packages that make it possible to record programmes and fast-forward through the ad breaks, it will only get worse. Budgets for shows on commercial channels are in freefall. We won’t get good programmes for nothing again. The BBC is the simplest answer, and we are overwhelmingly happy to pay it.

So why would our politicians start trashing this system? Rupert Murdoch has long despised the BBC, for the simple reason that although it works well for us, it works badly for him. He can’t step in and make a profit by providing his import-filled alternatives, because we’re happy with what we have. So he has launched a long campaign through his newspapers to delegitimise the BBC. They relentlessly present it as poor value, biased to the left, and bloated. It’s not working with the public: the BBC is 9 percent more popular today than a decade ago. But he is determined to shrink the BBC to a feeble service like PBS in the US, producing worthy programmes watched by a handful.

Despite losing the public argument, Murdoch has another way to exert influence: his newspapers have long applauded the politicians who most serve his interests, and savaged the politicians who lag behind. It’s part of a long pattern that stretches across continents: anyone who wants to understand it should read ‘The Murdoch Archipelago’ by Bruce Page. In the debate about the Sun’s endorsement of David Cameron this week, many naïve observers have acted as if the newspaper is a pressure group with only the interests of the British people at heart, rather than the arm of a corporate machine acting bluntly in its own self-interest.

The Labour government began the bidding for Murdoch’s favour by proposing – for the first time – to break the link between the license fee and the BBC. From now on, a chunk of it will be given to other broadcasters like Channel Four and regional news providers. At first it sounds like a small and reasonable step – it will go to support valuable programming – but it begins a process that will bleed the BBC. You won’t be able to see so clearly where your money is going. Gradually, more and more money will be dispersed from the BBC by a Tory government eager to keep Murdoch’s favour, and the corporation will shrink back. As it provides less easily traceable value, it will be harder to defend the license fee itself – and Murdoch will win.

The Tories then upped the bidding. This summer Ofcom – Britain’s broadcasting regulators – found Murdoch’s BSkyB guilty of effectively pricing other companies out of the pay-TV market. David Cameron responded by saying he will quietly put Ofcom to sleep, scrapping most of its regulations. Then he gave Murdoch another bauble he has craved for decades: he is going to scrap all the political impartiality rules covering British television (except on the BBC). If Cameron succeeds, Sky News will mutate into Fox News, pumping its poison 24/7. Murdoch duly endorsed the Tories.

This quid pro quo is unspoken – there are no meetings in darkened rooms – but Murdoch is quids in nonetheless. His son James Murdoch has been at the forefront of trying to rationalize these grabs for profit. He called the impartiality rules “an impingement on the right to free speech.” This is based on a basic error. Your right to free speech – which is the closest thing I have to a sacred belief – doesn’t include the right to speak wherever you want. I don’t have a primetime show on BBC One to expound my views, but that doesn’t mean I’m being censored. Your right to say what you want doesn’t entail a right to say it on the public airwaves. They are a shared public resource, and it is right to regulate them in the public interest.

Murdoch Junior then claimed the BBC “penalizes the poorest in our society with regressive taxes and policies.” This is hilarious. If Murdoch is against regressive taxes, why has New International – which makes billions – paid no net taxation in Britain for over a decade? Why do his newspapers vehemently oppose moves to tax the rich more and the poor less? After this argument belly-flopped, he claimed the only “guarantor of independence [in broadcasting] is profit.” Perhaps he should visit Italy, where the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns half the TV channels, and makes them support his political campaigns.

Enough. We can’t tolerate a clandestine campaign to trash one of our great national institutions, just so a foreign billionaire can make more profit. Where are these politicians’ spines? Where is their patriotism?

Details here. (About the ranking, not my plan to kill them all, obviously... That must be kept secret. For now.)

Sometimes it takes a casual phrase to really reveal the gap between a slice of our ruling class and the rest of us. The Tory front-bencher Alan Duncan says that living on £64,000 a year – which puts him in the richest 4 percent of the population – means a life on “rations”, and “no-one who’s done anything” will want to live on it. Boris Johnson says wages for a second job of £250,000 are “chicken-feed”, even though they are more than 99.99 percent of us earn. (He must have an army of gargantuan chickens). David Cameron doesn’t even know how many houses he owns, and his heiress-wife says a windfall of up to £250,000 from selling a property is “nothing life-changing.”

Yet out in the real Britain, the median wage is £23,000 a year. Half earn more; half earn less. Below this figure, there’s another: the average personal debt is £29,500. As individuals, we owe more than we earn in a year. This is a relatively recent development – and it happened for an underlying structural reason.

Since the early 1980s, average incomes have stagnated, even as the economy – and people’s expectations – have continued to grow. How is this possible? Under Thatcher and (alas) her New Labour successors, for the first time since the 1920s, growth went almost entirely to those at the top. People like Boris and former oilman Alan Duncan saw their real incomes soar – and shoot off far beyond everyone else. So to keep up, the middle class and the poor turned to credit. They stayed with the rising tide by building a life-raft out of credit cards and personal loans.

But now the chickens we bought on Visa are – for many of us – coming home to roost. There are 20,000 debt collectors in Britain chasing £20bn of overdue debt. In this slump, one business is booming: private debt collection agencies. They buy debts from banks at very low rates – as little as 6p in the pound – and then chase them hard, often demanding immediate full repayment from the unsuspecting debtor.

While Johnson and Duncan were whining that their super-incomes are a pittance, I was prying into this shadowy world – and finding people who really are left with something close to “rations.”

Nick Pearson, the director of the Debt Resolution Forum, says many debt collection firms are “out of control.” Their job often involves chasing debtors who have been lost – and one way of tracking them down is a “fishing expedition.” If Mike Jones from Edgware owes £2000 and the creditor lost touch with him, they can write to every Mike Jones in Edgware demanding he pay up – and threaten he’ll get a credit blacklisting and get taken to court if he doesn’t.

This often ends with non-debtors being harassed and intimidated. For example, Beryl Brazier, a 61 year old widow from Derbyshire, was amazed to be told by debt collectors she had to pay a £17,500 debt. She explained that she had never taken out any such loan, but they wouldn’t leave her alone. They said they would seize her house if she didn’t pay. Many people pay up just to stop the harassment: there is no legal aid to defend yourself with any more. So after three years of fear, she drowned herself in a lake.

When a genuine debtor is found, the agencies frequently exceed the rules in an attempt to shake money from people faster and harder than they can afford to pay it – sometimes needlessly leaving them homeless or on benefits.

For a recent edition of Channel Four’s Despatches programme, the journalist Tom Randall went undercover at Marlin’s Financial Services, one of the leading debt collection agencies in Britain. They pick up debts from HSBC, Lloyd’s and others. After they bought a fresh batch of debts from Yorkshire and Clydesdale Bank, he was instructed by his supervisors not to accept payment by instalment. Demand full payment within 14 days. “Tell them – you’re going bankrupt,” his supervisor announced. Randall was also told he could point out that “others” had borrowed yet more money to pay off their debts.

It costs these firms man-hours to slowly regain a loan over years. It is more cost-effective to reclaim it all in one lump sum – even if that means repossessing a house and putting a family out on the street. We as tax-payers then have to step in and help them out – so this is yet another area where people are hurt and all of us pay out just so a few at the top can profit.

Later, Randall was told off for giving a two-week reprieve to a man whose baby had just died. His supervisor said: “I would have said to him probably: ‘I’m really sorry for that but you’ve not paid since October, what would your reasons for that be?’” Then the supervisor shrugged and said: “Tough, mate.”

In his training, the person held up as the company’s top collector was a man called Mark. They said he “uses stuff we perhaps wouldn’t want to be used but he brings [in] the money… He is good.” Mark seemed to have walked off the stage of a David Mamet play. He said proudly: “The easiest way I can explain collections to you… It’s pantomime. It’s all an act.” He gives an illustration. In front of Tom he calls up a woman in debt who is paying off £20 a month. She explains she and her husband have had to go onto disability allowance and are paying the most they can afford. He threatens her with bailiffs, saying while she’s on hold: “Twenty quid is shit, man… Scare her a bit.”

He says if the firm doesn’t use threats, “We’re fucking ourselves, and if we fuck ourselves, the profits are going to go like that.” He indicates down. Later, Tom saw Marlin staff routinely impersonating solicitors. Marlin say they operate within the rules, they train their staff to be respectful at all times, and these are “exceptions” that have resulted in retraining.

If this out-of-control industry starts to crack the whip, then another out-of-control industry is sent in – the bailiffs. They are free to charge huge “fees” for seizing your property, sending your debt spiralling even further. The Citizen’s Advice Bureau gave me an example of how they routinely operate. A man owed £12 to a catalogue that he failed to pay. Bailiffs turned up at his home demanding £400, saying the increased amount included their fees. When he refused to pay such a huge amount, they seized the Motability scheme car he needed to get to hospital to have kidney dialysis three times a week and drove it away.

A National Debtline study found that 40 percent of bailiffs lie about their powers of entry, half levied unfair fees, and a quarter even threatened the debtor with imprisonment. Anthony Lewisohn, an 82 year old retired judge from Surrey, was amazed when bailiffs turned up on his doorstep demanding payment of more than £500 for a parking fine he had never heard about. It turned out they had been sending letters to his old address – but still they forced him to pay. Lewishon calls them “thugs.”

The poorer you are, the easier it is to become trapped in this system. If I need a new washing machine, I can go and buy one upfront from Curry’s for £337. If I have to take a loan from one of the “alternative credit agencies” for the poor, I pay 254 percent APR. The same washing machine ends up costing £1137. The government should be banning these practices, and guaranteeing reasonable credit for the poor.

Of course debt is an essential part of our economy, and people do have to pay their debts. Those who have the cash but refuse to cough up need to be compelled. But there are far better ways than this cruel and irrational system. Judges should be empowered to study a debtor’s accounts and set a realistic amount to be deducted automatically each week from their wages or benefits. The amount should – by law – be required to keep them and their children above the poverty line.

We will eventually regard our current system with the same shame we feel when we learn that Charles Dickens spent his childhood in a debtors’ prison. Even the most egregious acts by debt collection agencies and bailiffs now pass unpunished. In theory, the Office of Fair Trading regulates debt collection. Last year they found that thirteen companies had breached the rules in serious ways – but they refused to publicly name them, and they have never fined these companies a penny. Bailiffs are subject to even more toothless oversight. The government first said they would regulate them in 2003 – but now they say it’ll happen in 2012.

In a nasty little twist, many of these debt collection firms are owned by private equity groups and hedge funds – the very people who caused this slump in the first place.

This story tells us something dark about Britain today. When the rights of rich people are threatened, the state swoops in fast: every day, there are arrests for counter-feiting designer clothes and pirating DVDs. When the rights of the rest are threatened – in much more damaging ways – the state becomes sluggish and forgiving.

Yet still the wealthy moan that they are the ones being hard done by. If you want to know what rations are like, Mr Duncan, try having a debt collection agency chasing you, and bailiffs thwacking at your door.

For more details, click here.

The reigning political cliché of the day is that Britain has to cut its public spending fast – and it should start today. This sentiment is intoned by David Cameron with his best lip-biting impersonation of Diana Spencer, and it is parroted by political commentators who wave frightening national debt figures in our faces.

There’s just one problem – it defies everything we have learned about economics since the 1930s recession was unnecessarily turned into a Great Depression. Oh, and as an ugly little coda, we are already starting to see in subtle ways what “cuts” look like – and who pays the price for them.

The cut-cut-cut chorus appear not to have heard of what John Maynard Keynes called “the paradox of thrift.” In a recession, it is rational for you and I to cut back on our spending. You holiday at home, put any spending plans on ice, and save what you can. So it seems instinctively right to expect governments to do the same. But Keynes showed that if governments cut back at the same time as its citizens cut back, the recession gets even worse. Nobody is buying anything; demand collapses.

The people complaining about growing spending and the growing national debt have missed the point. Indeed, Gordon Brown’s failing has been in the opposite direction. His recession-time spending – although far better than Cameron’s voodoo economics – isn’t nearly big enough: he should be boosting the economy far more, paid for with (yes) temporarily higher debt.

But the people demanding cuts are speaking louder than the quiet, rational Keynesians – and they are already having a toxic effect. Brown is embarked on some boosted spending, but is sawing off other areas of state expenditure – claiming real victims. This process is worth looking at closely, because it shows how the government cuts now so glibly demanded almost always fall unequally.

The people who caused this crisis – the bankers at Barclay’s, say – are partying like it’s 1999, splashing around grotesque bonuses with our tax-money. Meanwhile, the blameless are seeing the services they depend on snatched away. I live in the poorest part of Britain, the East End of London, in the shadow of the reinvigorated towers of the City of London. I’ve noticed three examples of shrivelling spending that are already hitting the most vulnerable people here.

Help for elderly people to stay in their own homes is being sawed off. Imagine you are assessed as having ‘basic’ or ‘intermediate’ needs: it means you are “unable to carry out several personal care or domestic routines”, like washing yourself throughly, or cooking an egg. Now, in more than 75 percent of the country, you get no paid visitors or supervision any more. You have to wait until you hurt yourself.

Even then, you will now find only over-stretched services with little to offer. Prices for Meals on Wheels have soared under the recession, so the number of elderly people who can afford this one hot meal a day has haemorrhaged away. Three councils – Northumberland, West Berkshire and Wokingham – have cancelled them altogether for all elderly people except those assessed as having their “life in danger.” It means a lot of frightened old people who can barely leave their homes – the generation who saved us all from Nazism – are being left a little more lonely and a little more hungry.

Another unnoticed target of cuts are Britain’s rape victims. This country has one of the lowest rates of rape conviction in the democratic world: barely 5 percent of rapists end up behind bars. One of the reasons why we manage to convict even that puny dribble is that we have an excellent network of Rape Crisis centres, where victims of rape can find a safe place to describe what has happened to them, receive counselling, and gather the courage to approach the police. A friend of mine only managed to take her rapist to court after their careful, caring support.

But over one hundred local authority services don’t have a rape treatment centre at all – and now over half of the existing centres face the prospect of closure due to funding short-falls. Local authorities across the country are reneging on their commitments, pointing to the recession. For example, Boris Johnson promised during the mayoral election campaign to give £744,000 a year to rape crisis centres – but the only one in London hasn’t seen a penny from him.

The guillotine also fallen on the programmes to help recent immigrants who desperately want to learn English and integrate into British life. In 1998, the government introduced free English language classes for refugees and poor immigrants. It showed that while we (rightly) expect integration, we will help willing immigrants to get there in a spirit of generosity.

A typical class-member here in Tower Hamlets is Muni Monir, a young Bangladeshi woman sent here to get married at the age of 18, who was bewildered and largely confined to her house. Then she started coming to these classes, slowly learned English, and now makes a real contribution to her community, helping her elderly (white) neighbours and co-organizing the residents’ association. Her children will go to school fluent in the language, needing less support.

But today these lessons are being severely curtailed. In Tower Hamlets College, the courses have been slashed by half, a pattern repeated across the country. Many of the people who used to come – from Somalian cleaners to Chinese migrant workers – can’t any more, because fees have been imposed. As a result, they are more likely to be ripped off for less than the minimum wage, less able to report crime, and less able to enrich our society with their thoughts and dreams and labour.

Perhaps it’s for the best that when politicians wag their fingers and declare “English isn’t optional in Britain,” they won’t be able to understand.

These cuts are happening under the local authority control of all three parties – but they are most severe in Tory areas. It’s easy to pose as a political hard man by saying we have to face the music and slash. It’s hard to make the counter-intuitive Keynesian case for more spending to get us through – but somebody has to. Our pensioners, rape victims, and recent immigrants – and the other vulnerable groups waiting in the firing line – can’t afford any more of this callous cost-cutting.

Another David Cameron policy has been proved to be based on false right-wing myths in the past month – but who has told you about it? Who knows that his set-piece proposal for fixing Britain has just been shown to make things worse?

You know the script. David Cameron says “the only way to mend Britain’s broken society” is to “mend the institution of marriage” by handing £40 a week to married couples. This Married Couple’s Allowance would, he says, discourage them from splitting up.

Set aside the question of whether any couple would actually take a £40-a-week bribe to stay together. The logic behind the policy itself is based on a plausible-sounding reading of the facts.

At first glance, the sociological evidence shows that the kids of broken homes or single parents are more likely to drop out of school, slip into crime, and become drug addicts than children whose parents stay together. So the solution is, to Cameron, obvious: keep parents together using the tax code and these problems will slowly be reduced. Stop Jimmy’s mum and dad splitting, and Jimmy will be more likely to stay in school, on the right side of the law, and off drugs. Isn’t that what the stats show?

A major study has just shown that this is based on a simple misunderstanding of the evidence. Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University have carried out a study of children whose parents stay together for the sake of the kids. We all know some: parents who can’t stand each other, but have made a hard-headed decision to stay together nonetheless. They are exactly the kind of people who would be glued back together by Cameron’s policies if they succeeded in their goal.

It turns out their children do worse than any other group – including those of divorcees or single mums. If you are raised by arguing parents who stayed together only for you, then you are 33 percent more likely to become a binge-drinking teen than if you have a single parent, for example.

Having parents locked in live-in combat damages children more than having separated parents, or just one single parent – and the damage lasts well into adulthood. The offspring are more likely to have bad marriages themselves, and more likely to have children at a very young age.

It makes sense. Would Jimmy rather have a happy mum and dad who live apart, or depressed, stressed, angry parents sharing a bed?

So Cameron’s first glance at the figures turns out, then, to be wrong. He was comparing divorcees and single parents to happy two-parent families who want to stick together. But happy two parent families who want to stick together are not what his policy would create. If he had an effect at all, he would be tying together miserable couples who would otherwise have split. To assume you would get the same sociological outcomes from them is an Enron-style accounting error.

In fact, this new study shows that Cameron’s policy would actually unwittingly harm children. It’s not his intention, but we would have more children in the worst-performing category of all, and so in the long-term increase the very social dysfunctions – like drug addiction and crime – that the policy was designed to erode.

David Cameron’s solution to a “broken Britain” would break us more. Yet that sound-bite itself reveals a deep conservatism at the core of Cameronism. If Britain is “broken” today, when was it fixed? In the 1950s, when women were beaten with impunity and gays were jailed? The 1890s, when rickets ravaged the land? When? Of course Britain can be improved – it always can, like every country – but to imply we have degenerated from a lost golden age is regressive dog-whistle politics.

In the real past – as opposed to the phantasm of Tory creation – divorce was low not because every couple was living in a happy wholesome hearth, but because the door of divorce was barred shut. You don’t have to read much Victorian fiction to see that no matter how much a couple detested each other, they were trapped behind binding vows. Women, of course, suffered worst, since they were largely trapped in the home, and if in desperation they tried to flee, they lost their children, their homes, and their reputations.

Far from being a time we should pine for and try inexpertly to rebuild, we should be proud we have left this behind for a more civilised and compassionate world. Isn’t it a strength that we accept marriages fail, not because of wickedness or moral laxity, but because of ordinary human incompatibility? Yes, it brings some problems – but this study underlines that they are far less than the problems of imprisoning people in dead marriages, and lecturing them it’s for their own moral health.

Cameron’s plans for married couples create a false “pro-family” sheen that prevents us from seeing how he will actually make life more stressful for parents in very tangible ways.

The one thing every mum and dad I know wants is more time to spend with their children. But Cameron is committed to pulling Britain out of the European Social Chapter as a “top priority”. Britain’s ten million part-time workers only have the right to paid holidays and other basic rights because of the Chapter. When it goes, so do the rights – and lots of stressed parents will suddenly have less time to spend with their kids. The Tories’ market fundamentalism and anti-Europeanism trumps their warm rhetorical commitments to the family every time.

For all his upbeat let-the-sunshine-win flim-flam, Cameron’s policies would simply shift more power and money towards those who already have it. The Married Couples Allowance would be a big redistribution of wealth to people who don’t need it, paid for by slashing help to the poorest people who really do – from Tax Credits to SureStart to the Educational Maintenance Allowance. And all for a dysfunctional outcome.

That’s the Britain we are sleep-walking towards, while we inanely discuss Gordon Brown’s smile and David Cameron’s bike. Isn’t it time we started to scrutinize his policies, before Cameron has the power to start imposing his right-wing regression on our country?

Now there's a brilliant new blog that does it much better.

I am about to say something I thought I would never say. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; my stomach somersaults. Okay. Deep breath. Here goes. Vote for Ann Widdecombe.

When Ann Widdecombe first warbled into British public life at the end of the Major years, she seemed like a mutant symbol of all that had gone wrong in this country. As Home Office minister, she defended the chaining of female prisoners even as they went into labour, claiming they would otherwise waddle to freedom as they waters broke. She was instantly dubbed “Doris Karloff”, the purest face of Tory cruelty.

Widdecombe’s politics are the polar opposite of mine: she believes the state should keep out of the economy but ram into people’s private lives. Her fundamentalist Roman Catholicism – chosen because she thought the Church of England was insufficiently Old Testament – makes her toxically anti-feminist and anti-gay. When broadcasters want somebody to defend the nastier shores of social conservatism, they point their cameras her way.

So why do I think she is the best candidate to be Speaker of the House of Commons and custodian of our democracy today?

Widdecombe is standing down as an MP at the next election – which has to happen in the next ten months – so she is running to be a short term Speaker with a very specific remit.

After Expensageddon, the House of Commons is viewed with only marginally more affection than a paedophile ring – and the results at the next election could be dangerous. Some 42 percent of the electorate say they are considering a protest vote against all the main parties next time. Expect foul parties like the United Kingdom Independence Party (whose leader, Nigel Farage, calls Enoch Powell “my hero”) and the British National Party to do well. Only the only excellent Green Party will be the deserving beneficiaries of this rage, probably taking its first parliamentary seat in Brighton Pavilion.

Anything we can do now to ensure the MPs who ripped us off have been punished, and a decent new system of payment has been built over the wreckage, will blunt that drift to the vile fringe. To get there, we need a high profile, no-bullshit Speaker, calling out the crooks and explaining to the public how a defensible system should work.

Widdecombe is in the best position to do that for a smorgasboard of reasons. She has shown that – for all her often nasty policies – she has a form of real integrity. It’s not just that she has stood against her party on important occasions, like when she opposed the fox-hunting David Cameron and his chums to say the ritualized torture of animals should be banned.

No: it’s that when she saw a form of corruption at the heart of her party, she stood boldly against it – and risked wrecking her own career.

When she was Number Two to Michael Howard at the Home Office, Widdecombe saw her boss try to save his own hide by destroying the career of an innocent civil servant. He was trying to escape calls for his resignations by claiming it wasn’t his fault the prisons were in chaos – it was the fault of Derek Lewis, the head of the Prison Service. (This is what Jeremy Paxman famously asked him about fourteen times.) He made a number of claims that turned out to be false.

The careerist path for Widdecombe was plain: keep your head down and look the other way. She didn’t. She spoke out. When Howard was poised to become leader of her Party in 1997, she warned that there was “something of the night” about him. Many people predicted her career had collapsed at that moment in a death-embrace with Howard, but knew she had done the right thing, and that’s what mattered to her.

Since driving a stake through Howard’s heart, she has developed a broad reputation among the public – even those of us who think most of her beliefs are toxic – for being honest and straightforward. I am sure she would sincerely expose the corruption in the House, and use her ten months to build an alternative way of working that would begin to build public support again.

The Speaker doesn’t have much formal power, but she has – to borrow Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase about the US President – an enormous bully pulpit to name the bad and demand the good. With the public behind her – she’s our clear favourite in every poll – and the hourglass running down every day on her remit, Widdecombe could play a crucial role in forcing through reform and booting out the worst offenders.

Too many of the other candidates seem determined to repeat Michael Martin’s core mistake. He saw himself as the shop steward for backbench MPs, defending their collective interests against all comers, most notoriously by using fat sums of public cash to try to block the expenses details from coming out. But the Speaker needs to be the champion of the democratic process against all comers.

By the way, although Martin got this badly wrong, nothing justifies the torrent of snobbery directed towards him. He was dubbed “Gorbals Mick” by a few vile newspaper sketch-writers. The implications were plain: a Speaker from the Gorbals! A former manual labourer! How vulgar! How base! We all know Speakers should be from the Home Counties and speak in Received Pronunciation, don’t we?

There are some other good candidates. The Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda has been seriously impressive, demanding that the power to set debates is weaned more away from the executive and the whips, and restored to the public. He has suggested taking debates out to town halls across Britain, and allowing a slice of the House of Commons debating agenda to be set by on-line votes of the public naming the issues they want to see discussed. If Twitter can rock the Iranian Ayatollahs and Facebook can force the Chinese Communist Party to release a rape victim for fighting back against one of its officials, surely the internet can permeate the stale air of the House of Commons?

Similarly, John Bercow has had some good suggestions. But Dhanda and Bercow will still be there in ten months’ time, when Widdecombe would stand down. Between now and then, there is an oil-slick of deep cynicism over Westminster – and the tiny determined arms of Doris Karloff are best placed to begin scrubbing it clean.

Last Thursday the British public queued at their polling stations to quietly and politely lay three ticking bombs under British politics. If we don't hear the tick-tock and steadily defuse the voters' anger, the eventual blasts will damage Britain for decades to come.

The first shelf-full of Semtex was aimed at the Prime Minister. I hate talking about politics in terms of personalities, and I find the vindictive tone towards Gordon Brown - booing him at a D-Day commemoration? - unpleasant. But we can't live in a fantasy world. Brown has turned out to be electoral kryptonite. Labour has just taken its lowest share of the vote since 1910, before the First World War - and if it keeps on marching in the same jerky formation, it is heading for a political Somme.

The reasons why the Brown stuff has hit the fan have to be understood properly. The attempts to take Brown down have come almost exclusively from the Blairite wing of the Labour Party - people like Stephen Byers, Hazel Blears and Charles Clarke. They have always thought Brown was too left-wing, and now grasp for his few tiny millimetre-shuffles towards social democracy as explanation for his failure.

But this is surreal. Gordon Brown has failed because he has been paralysed, unable to take any substantial decisions at all - except to keep drifting in a Blairite direction. With the honourable exception of using the state to stop the banks collapsing, he has carried on with hardline Blairism: building more airports, trying to part-privatise the Post Office, and apologising profusely to millionaires for his meager tax rise, even though 68 per cent of the public support it.

In reality, he has failed because of a double-whammy: he has continued with lousy and unpopular right-wing policies, and he sells them appallingly. If he remains as Labour leader, he will hand the country to David Cameron, who will dismantle the few good left-wing policies that snuck through New Labour - tax credits, SureStart (our equivalent to HeadStart), Educational Maintenance Allowances.

The Independent's poll shows that another Labour figure, Alan Johnson, can stop the hemorrhaging and confine Cameron to a hung parliament, where he will be able to do far less damage. Labour would need more commitments from Johnson that he will respond to the recession-heavy mood for greater social democracy - but it would be an act of political self-harm to stay with Brown. It is sad for his political career to end like this, but it will be much sadder to be poor in a Cameron-led Britain. In the name of Gord, go.

The second bomb came crashing in from the extreme right - the British National Party - which now has two Members of the European Parliament, both with records of extreme bigotry. Its leader Nick Griffin has palled about with David Duke and bragged about how much he learned from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, while as a young man Andrew Brons joined the National Socialist Movement, set up on Hitler's birthday as a tribute to him.

But it is not the case that 10 per cent of people in Yorkshire are sympathetic to Holocaust-denying lunatics. No: they were overwhelmingly broke young white men who would, a generation ago, have formed the Labour core vote. They are angry about low wages and chronic shortage of housing - and simply telling them they are bigots won't get us very far.

Any conversation with BNP voters has to begin by agreeing that they are right to be angry about both subjects. There is a housing scandal in Britain today. In the 1980s, the revenues from council house sales were squandered by Margaret Thatcher on tax cuts for the rich, instead of being used to build more social housing. Labour allowed social housing construction to fall even further. We now have a housing drought, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stuck in cramped, damp homes. Similarly, our minimum wage is one of the lowest in the developed world. Tax credits are good, but today they only go to people with families: the rest watch their wages sink.

Only once this is agreed should the conversation move on to the fact there is a more effective and more deserving outlet for their rage than other poor people with different pigmentation. The white working class has a shared interest with black and Asian people in demanding higher taxes on the wealthy - and less squandering of cash on pointless projects like Trident and ID. cards - to lift up everyone stuck at the bottom. But what mainstream party has advocated that for years? In the absence of any socialism, we will see its antithesis, National Socialism, rise as a nasty intimidating fringe. If we want to choke this off, we need to deal with the real issues it feeds on.

The third bomb is the rising rejection of the European Union. We have now reached a point where Britain's governing party has been beaten by an organisation whose sole purpose is to yank us out of the EU. This undercurrent is tugging at the entire political system: the British Conservatives in the European Parliament are now withdrawing from their alliance with Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest of the European centre-right, and cobbling together a coalition of Polish gay-bashers, Czech global warming deniers, and assorted Europe-hating loons to sit with. Cameron's Tories would form the most anti-European government in living memory: they even voted against European co-operation to track down child molesters.

How long can we spit at the 450-million-strong trading block on our borders, with which we do 60 percent of our business, before it has consequences? How long can we try to kick out the foundations of unprecedented peace in Europe before it begins to crack?

This can't go on. The Liberal Democrats - a third party who are a lonely, brave British voice in defence of Europe - have been arguing for years that we need a rerun of the 1975 referendum: should we stay or should we go? The arguments for Europe - and the real cost of leaving - would be drawn into the open. The case would become clear at last.

Since the majority of Britain's trade is with the EU, after withdrawing the country would have to abide by almost all its rules anyway to be allowed to sell to them - but it wouldn't have any influence on drawing them up. Think of it as the United Kingdom Isolation Party, where the UK won't even be on the sidelines; we'd be outside the stadium, on an empty street.

So Brits would gain little, but we would suffer horrible self-inflicted wounds. Three million jobs would melt away to a Europe that would now be wrapped away behind tariff walls. The millions of Brits living elsewhere in the EU - one million in Spain alone - would be left stranded, and have to come home, or apply for immigration rights they were no longer entitled to.

Britain's ability to shape the future of the world, especially on global warming and foreign affairs, would be dramatically diminished. Our ability to reform the very real flaws within the EU would be gone. And we would have helped to bring down an extraordinary political project that shows the world that even the most bloody and war-ravaged continent can pool its sovereignty and live together in peace.

The British electorate just booted Brown, brown-shirt nostalgists and browning-off Europe to the top of Britain's agenda. The ticking will only get louder if we try to brush these bombs under the Westminster carpet - and carry on as if the people have not spoken.

Hidden away in the crumpled forehead and gruff barks of Sir Alan Sugar, there is a parable about how to drive sexism out of the British workplace. If you want to understand how Harriet Harman’s new Equality Bill will work, watch ‘The Apprentice’ – and see how even the hardest Sugar can melt if it is dropped into hot water.

On the BBC reality show, twelve clawing, cloying young businesspeople compete for the right to sit at SrrrrAlan’s feet and lick up £100,000 a year along with his entrepreneurial wisdom. But in series after series, he has made strange choices – which seem to veer in one direction. The final two contenders are almost always a likeable but mediocre man, and a fantastically clever and hard-working woman. The choice seems obvious to a watching nation – until SrrrrAlan boots the woman and hires the man.

Workplace sexism is incredibly hard to prove in any individual instance. Maybe somebody really would prefer squawking Lee over hyper-efficient Claire. Maybe a boss sincerely would prefer nice-but-dim Simon over clever Kristina. How can you be sure?

It becomes plain only when there is a pattern – and with SrrrrAlan the pattern was plain. He has repeatedly asked women about how they look after their children, and when they tried to explain, he said: “I’m getting worried here.” He even told an interviewer that in everyday business life, “you're not allowed to ask [about their children], so it's easy – just don't employ them.”

So the woman lost the job to a less competent, less impressive man. It happens in the offices of Britain every day. A study this weekend by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that women outperform men at every stage in higher education. But as soon as they enter the workforce, this is immediately wiped out. For the same work, women now earn 17 percent less in full-time positions, and 40 percent less in part-time jobs. The Alan Sugars blame this on them having babies – but it’s not true. How do we know? Because the pay gap is in place and fully-grown before they have their first child.

This is bad for everyone in Britain, including men like me – because our companies aren’t being run by the most talented and hard-working candidates. The only woman who has ever won ‘The Apprentice’, Michelle Dewberry, says: “It’s not just Alan Sugar – there is this male mentality, which is that when they interview a lady, they look at her as a baby-making machine.”

Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill is an attempt to shame bosses into turning this around – and we know it will work, because a similar process has changed even a T-Rex like SrrrrAlan.

The Bill requires companies to calculate the gap between what women are paid and what men are paid in their organization, and publish it. Some companies have squealed that their gap will be large, because their managers are overwhelmingly male, and their cleaners are overwhelmingly women. Well, yes. Do you think women are better suited to scrubbing than managing? Do you want to make that case to the public?

Many companies will face a firestorm about sexism – and most will be embarrassed (or panicked by potential law suits) into turning their companies around. Alan Sugar has. After last year’s bush-fire of negative publicity, four of the five finalists this year are female. Startled by the public contempt, Sugar seems to have started assessing women with a more open mind. If it can happen to Alan Sugar – a man who asked questions that bordered on illegality just a few years ago – it can happen to any boss.

The final four female contestants this year show how foolish it is to stereotype women in the workplace. Kate Walsh seems consensual and soothing yet always gets what she wants. Debra Barr is an ultra-aggressive fighter who rhetorically stabs anyone who gets in her way. Yasmina Siadatan is a do-it-cheap, sell-it-fast corporate girl. And Lorraine Tighe is a Matalan-clad Cassandra, endlessly declaring the task is doomed to fail before it’s even begun. What do they share, other than business acumen?

David Cameron has come out against pay audits, and tried to scupper the Equality Bill entirely. He wants a company to have to publish its pay gap only in the very rare cases where a woman has fought a sex discrimination case and won. So instead of every company doing it, virtually none will. The message to every woman in Britain is clear: David Cameron doesn’t want you to know if you’re being ripped off at work.

But the Labour policy of mandatory pay audits only gets us part of the way – and it comes twelve years too late. If we are going to use women’s talents to the max, we need a parallel reform that only Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, has had the guts to talk about it publicly. Today, women are entitled to 52 weeks maternity leave after a baby is born, while men are entitled to just 2 weeks. This silently encourages the Alan Sugars to discriminate – but the solution is not the repeal of maternity rights.

In Iceland, they equalized maternity and paternity leave in 2003, and really encouraged men to take the time off to bond with their babies. The result has been that a pay gap narrowing faster than in any other developed country – and they are nearly at equality.

Yes, it costs money to let men take time off – but it costs even more money to squander the talents of half the population on jobs that are beneath them. When Norway ruled that 40 per cent of all seats on corporate boards must go to women, growth shot up. When McKinsey studied the effect of having women in senior positions, they found it boosted stock-price growth by 53 per cent. Boosts like this pay for increased paternity pay several times over.

At a bleak hour, here is a way to dramatically improve our country, if only we will seize it. If we demand a few meaty legal changes, this can finally be an island where the Claires and Kristinas aren’t wasted anymore, but instead hear that sweet sound from their bosses: “You’re hired.”

The political H-bomb of Expensaggeddon has confirmed the belief that our politicians are a homogenous class of crooks only interested in themselves. The gaps between the parties look increasingly like a fatuous blur, designed to cover the looting of the tax-payer. And it’s true those gaps are way too narrow, clustering the parties well to the right of public opinion, where they are largely accountable to the rich and their media lackeys rather than us. But these differences are, in reality, still wide enough to determine whether millions of us will keep our jobs and our homes. Today, a wildly biased media is refusing to tell you how.

The dry rot is not only running through Margaret Moran’s second home. No. It now runs right through our coverage of politics – and especially of the man most likely to be the next Prime Minister.

A series of disturbing facts have leeched out about David Cameron over the past fortnight – but they have been virtually unreported. The Tory leader has started advocating a form of economics so extreme it was derided even by the first George Bush as “voodoo economics”, and revealed he is so out of touch with ordinary people he doesn’t even know how many houses he owns. We failed for years to expose the MPs’ expenses scam. Isn’t it time for journalists to pull the news agenda out of Douglas Hogg’s moat and start exposing the facts about Cameron that will affect us even more bitterly than the stench from the Fees Office?

Let’s start with a tiny story, that points to a bigger untold tale. A few days ago, the Lader of the Opposition was asked how many homes he owns. “I own a house in North Kensington and… in the constituency in Oxfordshire and that is, as far as I know, all I have,” he said. He then started to get confused, said he might own four homes after all, and pleaded: “Do not make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got.” Imagine if Neil Kinnock said this in 1991. Do you think you might have heard?

The fact that David and Samantha Cameron are worth an almost-entirely-inherited £30m, according to financial expert Philip Beresford, isn’t in itself damning. Franklin Roosevelt was very rich, but became a great crusader for the poor. But Cameron is advocating policies that will benefit his tiny class of super-rich Trustafarians at the expense of the rest of us. He is committed to spending billions on a massive tax cut for the richest inheritees, paid for by the bottom 94 percent of us – and now he has announced his enthusiasm for a bogus economic theory that will justify shovelling far more of our money their way.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the coverage, David Cameron’s economic philosophy was already surprisingly far outside the political mainstream before his latest revelation. President Barack Obama explained why in a recent speech, where he was arguing the Republican hard right who take the same line. He said: “Economists on both the left and right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. You see, when this recession began, many families sat around their kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. That is a completely responsible and understandable reaction. But if every family in America cuts back, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, and the economy gets even worse. That's why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand.”

Cameron is almost alone in the democratic world in disagreeing and demanding immediate cuts in public spending as the global economy grinds to a halt. When I asked this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman whether this would make the recession worse, he replied: “Yes. For sure,” and then added that Cameron’s policies were “pure Herbert Hoover.”

This is serious enough – although hardly anyone knows it. But then, two weeks ago, Cameron went even further. He was asked about whether the government’s proposals to increase taxes on the richest one percent would raise more money for the Treasury. He replied: “It’s a very difficult calculation about where we are on the Laffer Curve… We have to put this [top rate of tax] in a queue of things we would want to get rid off… and I’m always interested in topping up my study of Laffer.”

To most people, this sounds like gibberish. Who is this “Laffer” who Cameron is turning to as the measure of whether tax policy works?

Arthur Laffer is an economist who was fired from the Nixon administration in disgrace and went on to invent a false economic theory. He was picked out by the Watergate-wet Richard Nixon when he made a prediction about economic growth that was way ahead of every other economist. Nixon put it into every speech – until it was revealed that while other economists had used thousands of variables to arrived at their predictions, Laffer had used just four – and got it totally wrong. He was fired, and that should have been the end of him.

But Laffer was befriended by Dick Cheney, and in 1974 they invented an economic theory on the back of a cocktail napkin – literally. Laffer claimed that cutting taxes on the rich was always right, because when you cut their taxes the rich had extra incentives, so they worked harder, and paid the money back (and more) in extra revenue.

To illustrate this, he drew a diagram. As the writer Jonathan Chait explains in his must-read book ‘The Big Con: The True Story of How Washignton Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economists’: “He pulled out a cocktail napkin and drew a parabola-shaped curve on it. The premise of the curve was simple. If the government sets a tax rate of zero, it will receive no revenue. And if the government sets a tax rate of 100 percent, the government will also receive zero tax revenue, because nobody will have an incentives. Between these two points – zero taxes and zero revenue – Laffer’s curve drew an arc. The arc suggested that at higher levels of taxation, reducing the tax rate would actually produce more revenue for the government.”

It was a magic formula – you can cut taxes for the rich and you won’t lose a penny in tax revenues! There’s no business cycle – only marginal tax rates make the economic weather. Cut! Cut!

There’s just one problem. It’s a fantasy. Look at the facts in Laffer’s own country. From 1947 to 1964, the top rate of tax in the US was 91 percent. Using the Laffer Curve, the economy should have been in the tank – but in fact it was enjoying the longest sustained boom of the twentieth century. In the 1980s, Reagan slashed the top rate – but there was a severe recession in 1982, and the growth that followed was merely an average recovery. Then in 1993, Clinton increased the top rate of tax from 31 to 39.6 percent, and Laffer predicted an economic collapse. In fact, there was the next long boom.

And so it goes on. Chait puts it well: “It is impossible to see how events could have turned out worse for them, short of God appearing on Earth to denounced the Laffer Curve as an abomination.”

Why would Cameron want to surf the Laffer Curve now, when it is discredited except among the fringes of the Republican Party and the Spectator right? Because it sets up a logic where there should be more tax cuts for his own tiny bloated over-class – the only people he has ever known. (Remember: this is a man who said his wife is “highly unconventional” because “she went to a day school.”)

If you bother to read Cameron’s statements, it’s clear how he will pay for these cuts for himself and his friends – by slashing the few redistributive programmes for the poor built up over the past decade, like the Educational Maintenance Allowance for poor kids to stay on to sixth form which his team derides as a “bribe”, or the tax credits which his frontbench openly compares to the disastrous nationalized industries of the 1970s, or the SureStart centres which he has described as “a microcosm of government failure.” They belong to a world he has never seen, or shown any interest in.

But none of this is explained to the British people. Instead, the media colludes in the slick presentation of Cameron as an ordinary bloke who will govern in the interests of us all. Yesterday, his call for minor constitutional tinkering was reported as it was a big-picture solution to our busted political system – even though Cameron scorned the reform that matters most: proportional representation.

This mis-coverage is as shameful and un-democratic as the great expenses con – and more consequential in the long term. The fact that Labour is lying by the roadside barely twitching is no excuse for failing to inform us about what the alternative will mean. The political journalist Kevin Maguire recently said sardonically that if Cameron announced the slaying of the first born, the press would applaud it as a great policy for second children. When will we start doing our job?

Gordon Brown has released yet another book about Britishness to clutter the nation's bookshelves. He proposes an abstract statement of "British values", or maybe an expanded oath of loyalty, to cement us all together under the Union Jack – but all this well-meaning ho-humming misses the point. Most of us love our country simply because it's ours. I love my flat not because it represents "Johannish" values, or because it's objectively the best flat in the world, but because it's where the things I know and love are cluttered together, and I feel a wave of calm when the door shuts behind me. I feel the same when I step off the Eurostar at Waterloo or stagger out into Terminal Five: Ah, I'm home.

One small but revealing symbol of how we get patriotism wrong in Britain can be spotted if you read the stultifying vow we make immigrants take when they become citizens. It says: "I swear by Almighty God to solemnly, sincerely and truly affirm and declare that, on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs, and successors." There is a suggestion to make kids chant it at schools. So in the name of a non-existent deity, I promise to follow an unelected leader, wherever that ends up. Woo-hoo – I'm British now!

I think we need an oath of office that reflects the real reasons why British people love our country. No, I beg you, not some airless guff about "fair play" and "a sense of decency". Show me a country on earth that prides itself on unfair play and indecency. Here is my proposal for how our new pledge – and our new patriotism – should go:

"I pledge allegiance to the Queen Vic, not Queen Elizabeth. I pledge allegiance to Coronation Street, not Downing Street. I pledge allegiance to The Office, not the office of Prime Minister. I pledge allegiance to the Life of Brian, not the Life of Christ. I pledge allegiance to Marmite – and to people who can talk for hours about precisely why they hate Marmite.

"I pledge allegiance to deep-fried Mars bars, cold doner kebabs, and girls who wear mini-skirts in sub-zero temperatures. I pledge allegiance to the NHS, the BBC, and M&S. I pledge allegiance to Shakespeare and to the belief that "there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio".

"I pledge allegiance to Radio 4 documentaries about the history of drinking water, told in six parts. I pledge allegiance to George Orwell, George Formby, George Eliot, and George Michael. I pledge allegiance to the Notting Hill Carnival, the Edinburgh Festival, and the people who – for no reason at all – wander around Glastonbury dressed as giant pigeons.

"I pledge allegiance to our national dish, chicken tikka masala. I pledge allegiance to the people who sell candy floss on muddy beaches on muggy days. I pledge allegiance to fog and hail and rain, and to people who wear three layers of clothing and shed them and put them back on several times a day, each time declaring with an optimistic smile, "The weather's lovely today".

"I pledge allegiance to the Beatles and the conviction that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I pledge allegiance to queuing, and to the people who tut and cluck and scrunch their faces when anybody tries to push in. I pledge allegiance to William Wallace played by an Australian and Gandhi played by an Englishman.

"I pledge allegiance to Fawlty Towers and faulty trains and that small, almost silent sigh that shudders across a carriage when the train stops for no reason in empty fields. I pledge allegiance to the wrong kind of snow.

"I pledge allegiance to the fact that the London Olympics in 2012 will be messier and shabbier and far more prone to disruption by protesters than the Beijing Olympics.

"I pledge allegiance to the boys who died in the mud at Normandy so I could be free. I pledge allegiance to the women who slept in the mud at Greenham Common so I would not burn. I pledge allegiance to Ateeque Sharifi, who came here as a refugee from Taliban Afghanistan, only to be blown up by Talibanists on the Circle Line. I pledge allegiance to everyone who drives an ambulance or teaches a child on this rainy island for paltry wages because they know it's the right thing to do.

"I pledge allegiance to the people of Britain, not because they're the best in the world, but because they're mine."

The celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s ascent to power have had a surreal quality. The moist panegyrics from David Cameron and Boris Johnson – followed by an army of cheering commentators, and a distant, shameful echo from Gordon Brown – have been filled with statements that are the opposite of the truth. Yet there they stand, unchallenged, as the road-map for our future.

The defences of Margaret Thatcher invariably have three prongs. She made it possible for ordinary British people to “get ahead”, and “aspire” once more. She expanded freedom. And her strip-down-the-state economic model saved Britain – and spread prosperity across the world. Each of these is simply asserted, as if these claims can’t be measured objectively. Just shut up and rejoice!

But your ability to “get ahead” – to rise up the social ladder – isn’t simply a matter of hunches; it can be tested scientifically. And every study has found one thing: social mobility collapsed under Margaret Thatcher. As a massive recent London School of Economics study showed once again, in the 1980s and 1990s we became a country where if you were born rich, you stayed rich, and if you were born poor, you stayed poor.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise. Every country that adopts a low-tax, low-investment model sees the same. The evidence shows only countries that tax the wealthy and use the cash to lift up the rest – like Sweden – consistently achieve the dream of allowing anyone with talent to make it.

So thanks to her policies, a whole generation of poor and lower middle class children remained stuck, unable to achieve their potential. Look at the new generation of rising Tory candidates and MPs and you see this failure of social mobility writ large. They are overwhelmingly the children of the wealthy, educated at the most expensive schools. Everybody else is stuck, unable to get up and out.

While you are entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts. To claim Thatcher boosted aspiration is false – unless you mean merely the aspiration of the rich to become super-rich.

How about Thatcher’s support for freedom? This is a leader who called Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and vandalised all attempts to place sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, while her husband cheerfully referred to black Africans as “coons.” This is a leader who called the self-described “fascist” General August Pinochet “a great man”, after he toppled an elected leader in a violent coup and rounded up thousands of dissidents to torture to death.

This is a leader who upheld a system of Protestant supremacism in Northern Ireland, while the police force there conspired with criminal gangs to murder Catholics. This is a leader who at the height of the AIDS crisis criminalized any mention of homosexuality in our schools. Freedom?

What about the idea that her economic model “saved” us? Thatcher wanted to build a “night watchman state”, where the government stopped anyone invading the country or your home, but otherwise stood inert and passive. She saw regulation as “red tape”, and boasted of building a “bonfire” of it. And what happened? Her apostles took this to its logical conclusion, building a “shadow” banking system free of all government interference. If she had been right, it would now be the self-regulating engine of the global economy, pulling us all to a better world.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. As John Campbell, her best biographer, has written, the tragedy of Margaret Thatcher is that she sincerely believed rolling back the state would create a generation like her father, a moral, self-reliant grocer. Instead, it created a wave of businessmen like her son, a parasitic amoral crook.

Yet David Cameron’s election song could be the old Honeybus hit “I Can’t Let Maggie Go.” He cheered the ugliest of Thatcher’s policies while they were happening: he even accepted a free holiday jaunt to Apartheid South Africa paid for by one of the most depraved corporations backing the whites-only regime. Today, he says she will be his inspiration in power, as his claims to moderation burn away under the pressure of recession.

But oddly, the party that has found it hardest to get out of Thatcher’s shadow is Labour. They drank so deeply of Thatcherism after the collective trauma of 1992 that they have become tarred with its worst failings.

As Labour now collapses into a mess of fratricidal sound-bites, it would do well to pause and remember a slap-in-the-face fact. Contrary to the ahistorical waffle pumped out over the past week, Margaret Thatcher never won over a majority of the British people. At every single election where she was leader, 56 percent of the British people voted for parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending. She won because the centre-left majority was divided and at war with itself – and because of our lousy electoral system.

Over the past year, there have been small hints of what a de-Thatcherized Labour Party could look like – and it’s a world away from both Toryism and the old, hellish Scargillite closed shops. It is simple Scandinavian-style social democracy that marries thriving markets to an interventionist state. It would tax the rich more, both to reduce inequality and to pay for public services. Despite the out-of-touch press shrieking, some 68 percent of us supported the new 50 percent top rate of tax on the richest 1 percent of Brits.

It would argue for a Keynesian stimulus directed at transforming Britain into a low carbon economy – the only sane response to a depression and an unravelling climate. And it would put at the forefront of its agenda moves like Harriet Harman’s excellent Equality Bill, which will require local authorities to spend most on the poorest areas, and to put greater equality at the heart of all decisions.

The logic of this legislation fits with the egalitarian, European mindset of the silent liberal majority of British people. If we leave it to the market Thatcher-style, it will take eighty years before women are paid the same wages as men for the same work – and we will all be dead. Who wants to defend that? Who wants to say companies shouldn’t even have to publish their gender gap, as the Bill demands? A long queue has been forming outside TV studios of Tory MPs saying just that. But a recession is the time when we can least afford to waste talent and promote mediocrities just because they are men. We need the best talents in the best positions now.

Yet all this comes far too little, and far too late in the day. Brown’s “Green New Deal” is pitifully small, and his ability to sell any policy is limited by his own lousy communication skills and his refusal to decisively cast off the shroud of Thatcher. Even the 50 percent tax rate was introduced with a nervous, quaking commitment to reverse it once the recession ends. Who will point out that during America’s largest boom – the 1950s – it had a 92 percent top rate of tax under a Republican President?

And so the window to a better, more social democratic Britain seems to be creaking shut. Gordon Brown stands frozen as his Blearsy-eyed colleagues hiss and snap all around him, protesting at even the tiniest nudges to the left. Why won’t Labour let the Iron Lady rust?

To read more of my articles about British politics, click here.

Cripes and golly gosh: it’s nearly a year since the outer ring of Londoners booted out Ken Livingstone and installed mop-topped Boris Johnson in the glittering glass testicle of City Hall. Liberal-lefties like me predicted BoJo – with his record of calling black children “piccanninies” and cheering when Bush refused to sign up to Kyoto – would be a disaster. But as far as the media coverage goes, it’s been a quiet twelve months. So is Boris a better mayor than we thought? The answer needs to be absorbed across the country, because Boris’ London is the test lab for David Cameron’s “progressive conservatism” – a hint of what’s waiting for us all after the next election.

Let’s start with the positive. There have been two unexpected and excellent moves from the Mayor. He knows that most of Britain’s half-a-million illegal immigrants have washed up in London, where they live in constant fear, can’t approach the police, and face grinding, binding poverty. It’s to his credit that he has called for an earned amnesty that will allow these people – who skivvy for us, and keep London’s wheels turning – to come out of the shadows and live here legally.

He also changed the policy of the Greater London Council so all their employees and contractors now have to pay their staff the London Living Wage of £7.45 an hour. This is the amount you need to earn so you don’t fall below the poverty line – and it’s made a hefty difference to thousands of people. And there’s more: I think Boris’ verbal acrobatics are to his credit. He doesn’t talk in pre-processed politicsese but in a real, vivid language that doesn’t send voters into a coma. The skills that made him an excellent comic novelist and poet make him a good – if odd – communicator.

Yet on the two great challenges of our time that threaten the future of London – the credit crunch, and the climate crunch – Boris’ policies have been shocking. As a commentator and Member of Parliament, Boris was one of the most enthusiastic defenders of the deregulation of financial services, saying it would bring “an era of amazing prosperity”. Once the model he cheered on began to collapse all around us, he lashed out – at the people who had been proved right.

He declared this winter that the British people should stop “whingeing” and succumbing to “neo-socialist claptrap”. He then – astonishingly – became the only British politician I know of to continue to defend the "the sub-prime sector", saying, "These products allowed millions of Americans to own their own homes." When I read this quote to Paul Krugman, this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economist, he said: “Wow. This is economically illiterate. The increase in home ownership by sub-prime mortgages has all been wiped out by repossessions. We’re back where we were, only with all the terrible problems you see all around you, and massive debts for the people who took them out.”

This isn’t just a verbal outburst from Boris. He is making policy – and lobbying the government hard – to insulate the very people who caused this crisis, and to rebuild their collapsed model. He says the government’s pathetically minor and overdue new regulations on the City are “a vindictive attack on one of the most successful industries in this country.” He objects to even the pitifully low increase on the very richest people’s taxes by just 5 percent, claiming it is “not economically sensible.” He is fighting to retain the system where David Beckham pays a lower proportion of his income in taxes than his secretary.

On the climate crisis, he is worse still. Until he ran for mayor, Boris opposed every single move to prevent the destabilisation of the climate, saying George Bush’s trashing of Kyoto was “good for the world.” But, like David Cameron, on the road to elected office he claimed to have a Damascene conversion and pledged “a greener, cleaner London.” We need one, since this city is highly vulnerable to rising sea levels. Since millions of us live on flood plains, after Hurricane Katrina the London Assembly investigated our flood defences – and found many are “appalling.”

But Boris in power has been true to his core beliefs. He has done everything he can to encourage car use, and binned Ken Livingstone’s carbon-reduction plans. He has halved the size of the environment team, scrapped the expansion of the Congestion Charge to West London, postponed indefinitely the expansion of the city’s Low Emission Zones, and cancelled Ken’s plans to charge ultra-polluting SUVs an extra £25 a day. Despite constantly inviting photographers to snap him on his bike, he has hacked £27m out of the budget for building cycle lanes, wrecking 300 proposed new lanes. The political symbolism is exposed as a sham by the political reality. Other than planting a few trees, his environmental policy has been “totally appalling”, according to Darren Johnson, the excellent Green member of the London Assembly.

And Boris is formulating all these policies as a part-time mayor of London. He apparently can’t live on a mere £130,000 a year, a wage that puts him in the top 0.5 percent of British people, and 0.0001 percent of human beings. So he makes two-thirds of his income not from the electorate but from the Barclay’s Brothers, the mysterious right-wing billionaires who live as tax exiles on their own private island. They pay him for a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph, and as mayor he is highly unlikely to take decisions that go against the interests of his primary employers. A recent Channel Four documentary suggested Boris has already intervened on behalf of the Barclays’ in planning procedures. But doesn’t London – especially at this time – deserve a full-time mayor, accountable to us?

Boris has made other decisions that suggest darker policy decisions to come. He has appointed as his Director of Policy a creepy hard-right journalist called Anthony Browne, who has claimed “there is little British left” about London, and that “Britain will be a foreign land” soon. He has raged against “the growing social fragmentation of Britain under the weight of Third World colonization,” blaming immigrants for spreading deadly diseases. His writings recycle preposterous urban myths as fact, like the claim that councils were banning black bin bags as “racist.”

Browne has enthusiastically posted on a far-right US website called V-Dare, named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. The site is dedicated to exploring "whether the United States can survive as a nation-state” in the face of “mass immigration and affirmative action.” The British National Party’s member of the London Assembly, Richard Barnbrook, said of Browne’s appointment: “I cannot help but think that this is at least a step in the right direction.” Browne is now the main hand guiding Boris’ policy-making.

What does all this suggest about how David Cameron would govern Britain? Like Boris, Cameron claims to be “a new kind of Conservative”, committed to environmentalism and “a more moral capitalism.” Like Boris, he claims to have undergone a Damascene conversion: until 2005, he was a standard right-wing backbencher who cheer-led deregulation, and whose only statement on green issues was to mock wind farms as “giant bird blenders.” The evidence from London suggests that, given power, he will make a few concessions to modernity on the margins – and regress to rampant right-wingery on the core issues. As George Osbourne said cheerfully in 2002: "We have a lot to learn from George Bush's compassionate conservatism."

Elton John ne viendra pas chanter Candle in the Wind aux funérailles de Jade Goody. Une chose est sûre, c'est qu'à l'instar de la princesse Diana la jeune cancéreuse a su, à sa manière rugueuse et populaire, réveiller les consciences britanniques. Sa vie a révélé la face sombre de notre inconscient. Comment une jeune femme au caractère aussi généreux que truculent, arrivée quatrième à une émission de télé-réalité en 2002, est-elle devenue une telle icône au Royaume-Uni ? Parce que nous avions besoin d'elle pour apaiser nos consciences meurtries.

Au cours de sa brève existence, Jade a montré à quel point, alors que la Grande-Bretagne est devenue l'une des sociétés les plus inégalitaires et les plus immobiles de la planète, nous avons pris l'habitude de nous moquer ouvertement des gens coincés en bas de l'échelle. Nous nous sommes allègrement servis d'elle comme d'une "preuve" montrant que, si certains malheureux moisissent dans des cités abandonnées, ce n'est pas par un triste hasard de la vie mais parce qu'ils sont stupides, laids et sectaires. Tout ce que nous avons démontré, c'est notre stupidité, notre laideur et notre sectarisme.

Un jour est arrivée une jeune fille de 20 ans au rire sonore, quasi sans culture mais ayant le sens de la repartie. Elle pensait que l'"East Angular" était un pays [l'East Anglia est une région de l'est de l'Angleterre] et se demandait quelle monnaie on utilisait à Liverpool. Les médias se sont empressés de la qualifier d'"écervelée". Surnommée la "grande prêtresse de la salopocratie", Jade était "la manifestation du sous-prolétariat anglais".

Mais personne ne s'est jamais demandé d'où venait cette ignorance. La réponse, la voilà : fille d'une toxicomane gravement handicapée, Jade a passé plus de temps au chevet de sa mère que sur les bancs de l'école. A 5 ans, elle s'occupait déjà des repas, du ménage et du repassage. Son père cachait une arme à feu sous son lit de bébé, et son premier souvenir est la vision de ce père se piquant à l'héroïne dans la chambre de sa fille. Pour finir, après quelques séjours en prison, il a été retrouvé mort d'une overdose dans les toilettes d'un Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Malgré ce lourd bagage, Jade a toujours travaillé, dans des magasins, pour le salaire minimum, et n'a pas touché à la drogue (sauf au cannabis). Elle s'est portée candidate à Big Brother [en 2002] parce que sa propre mère devenait accro au crack, et elle ne voyait pas d'autre moyen pour éviter d'assister à ce naufrage. C'est ainsi qu'elle est devenue un personnage public en Grande-Bretagne, et que dans un concert de moqueries nous l'avons hissée au rang de symbole du sous-prolétariat britannique. Jade n'a pas tardé à faire preuve d'une certaine intelligence en monnayant au prix fort sa quatrième place à Big Brother. Elle a lancé sa propre marque de parfum, ouvert un institut de beauté et publié une série d'autobiographies sensibles, plutôt belles, qui ont su séduire des jeunes femmes qui n'avaient jamais vu de gens comme elles à la télévision. La perception qu'on avait d'elle a lentement évolué. A mesure que les gens apprenaient ce qu'elle avait vécu, beaucoup ont compris à quel point leurs moqueries sur son accent étaient déplacées. Leur sentiment de supériorité en a pris un coup, au moins provisoirement.

Puis elle a participé à Celebrity Big Brother [en 2007], et alors là qu'est-ce qu'on s'est régalé... Jade a dû coexister dans la maison avec la charmante et naïve Shilpa Shetty, une star de Bollywood qui a grandi entourée de serviteurs. La jeune vedette a réveillé chez Jade la sensation d'avoir toujours été traitée de haut. Jade a dit que Shilpa n'avait pas la moindre idée de la manière dont vivaient les Indiens "d'en bas" et lui a hurlé : "Ça te ferait du bien de passer une journée dans les bidonvilles !" Ce qui a été pris pour du racisme, comme si elle lui avait dit de retourner dans son pays. Nous avions enfin l'occasion de revenir à notre bonne vieille conception de la classe ouvrière blanche. Si nous ne pouvons pas nous sentir supérieurs aux pauvres parce qu'ils sont stupides, au moins pouvons-nous nous croire supérieurs à eux parce qu'ils sont racistes.

Et même quand elle était mourante, nous avons continué à nous moquer d'elle. Personne n'a dit que John Diamond [journaliste mort en 2001] "exploitait" son cancer en écrivant sur le sujet dans The Times, mais la décision de Jade de parler du sien à la télévision afin de laisser de l'argent à ses gamins était bien la preuve de sa "vulgarité". Un journal se plaint que nous allons avoir droit à des "funérailles nationales chavs ["Jeune personne, souvent sans niveau d'éducation très élevé, qui suit une certaine mode vestimentaire", selon l'Oxford Dictionary]". Maintenant qu'elle est décédée, nous persistons à considérer Jade Goody comme une chav idiote. Elle nous rassure inconsciemment quant au fait que notre rang plus élevé dans la hiérarchie sociale est dû à notre intellect, notre sensibilité et notre antiracisme, et non au hasard de la naissance. En croyant cela, ce n'est pas Jade que vous condamnez, c'est vous-mêmes.