You can hear a first class discussion on globalisation from Saturday's Talking Politics here. (You need to click on the link to the latest programme.)

It begins with an interview with Johan Norberg, author of the outstanding In Defence of Global Capitalism which I would easily make my book of the year (a slight cheat, since it's been available since 2001, but only made it really big this year).

The discussion afterwards is well worth a listen, too; my friend Helen Disney , calm and full of sense against the rather pompous Robert Fox and an archetypal cliche-ridden but intelectually empty academic called Ian Linden.

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Donald Rumsfeld, person of the year.

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Health Secretary John Reid’s announcement today that ‘health tourists’ are to be charged in advance for treatment on the NHS has profound implications – and not just for the NHS.

As the NHS operates at the moment, anyone can turn up at a hospital and expect to be treated. That means that they do – and this includes some people from abroad who come here specifically to take advantage of a free NHS. Mr Reid calculates that this ‘health tourism’ costs the NHS £200 million a year, and his announcement today is designed to plug that leak.

But money is not the real issue. In terms of the NHS’ £68.7 billion budget, £200 million is, after all, chicken feed. And there is little evidence that ‘health tourism’ is any worse today than in previous years. What has changed is that, in the past, the idea of an NHS which was free – to everyone - was so widely shared that we put up with what we now think of as abuses, such as health tourism.

Indeed, the real waste is not these headline grabbing issues but more prosaic problems such as bed-blocking, when the elderly are forced to stay in hospital when they are medically fit to leave. Every day, more than 3,500 older people remain in hospital simply because no follow-up care is available outside. Around one-third of those are stuck in hospital for over a month. This bed blocking accounts for 1.7 million lost ‘bed days’ every year. Even with the reforms which the government has already introduced to deal with this, the Department of Health does not expect to be able to reduce the number of people delayed to less then 2,500 by the end of 2005.

So Mr Reid is looking to the US, where elderly patients of Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit health insurer in California, spend a third of the time in hospital that NHS patients spend for such problems as asthma, bronchitis and strokes, and yet achieve far better clinical results. That is also why he has decided to give foreign health care providers most of the £2 billion programme to build fast-track treatment centres to cut the NHS waiting list.

Times have changed since the days when no one really cared whom the NHS treated. The government is now ploughing so much money in - money which it has taken at our expense through tax increases - that the public is no longer prepared to put up with paying for the treatment of foreigners who come to the UK to mend their health on someone else’s money.  Mr Reid well knows that if he doesn’t demonstrate that he is alive to such concerns, he risks undermining Labour’s entire case for taxing and spending.

Once, however, we accept that health care should be made available not on the principle that everyone is always treated, but only to those who qualify for it then we transform the entire debate about the provision of health care. The Conservervatives brought this onto the agenda with their "Patient's Passport" proposals. Now New Labour is taking up the baton. And that means that although the sums involved in today’s announcement may not be that large, the implications are huge and their consequences range way beyond the NHS.

David Blunkett may have based his case on the introduction of ID cards on their use against criminals – and especially to deter terrorists – but Mr Reid has also become a strong supporter of the idea. If we had to carry ID cards then, of course, it would make it much easier to determine who should, and who shouldn’t, be billed for their treatment. It is one of the most controversial ideas dividing Cabinet: but Mr Reid's determination to act on it is a sign that it won't go away.

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Can you contain your excitement? There are just three more days to get through and then, whoopee, it’s the big one: New Year’s Eve. The blow out to end all blow all outs. Fun with a capital F. The party of parties.

Excuse me, if you will, but I’ll pass. I’ll take myself off to bed at half past ten and wake up on Thursday morning. I’ll sleep through the whole wretched night. Now it may just be that I am what is known as - to use the technical term – a miserable git. That’s for you, and my friends, to judge. I like to think there are other reasons. But whatever the cause, there are at least a thousand other things I’d rather be doing at midnight on Wednesday than greeting the New Year with a glass of champagne and my fellow party guests. – banging a nail into my skull, translating Clarissa into Esperanto or hosting a dinner party for a dozen National Union of Teachers activists, to consider just three.

I hate New Year’s Eve, you see. I don’t just dislike it; I hate it. If New Year’s Eve was a person, I’d hate it as much as I hate Edward Heath and Roy Keane, my two hate-figures. In fact I’d hate it even more than I hate them. (That’s, seven ‘hates’ in this paragraph so far. I hope you are getting an inkling as to just how much I hate it – and that’s now eight.) Neither Mr Health not Mr Keane expect to be liked; they seem, in fact, to relish being unpopular. New Year’s Eve is different. To admit that you loathe it is to announce that you are a misanthrope, and to court the sort of mystified stares which are usually reserved only for those of us who think George Bush is one of the truly great American Presidents. It is, in short, to reveal to the world that you are weird.

It depends on your definition of weird, I suppose. Maybe it’s not the thousands who turn up at Trafalgar Square to attempt to recreate the Hillsborough Stadium crush, only this time with added booze. Maybe it isn’t even people who go out on 31st December to parties full of people they barely know, get plastered, grab the nearest person for a snog, throw up, dance, throw up again, and then discover that they’re miles from home and there’s no transport. Maybe it really isn’t those wretched souls who have their own little party watching Jools’ Hootenanny and haven’t got a clue that the New Year cheer was recorded one dull autumn teatime? And maybe it isn’t, either, the ones who drink so much, so badly, that when they wake up on New Year’s Day they feel as if they are on a ferry crossing the North Sea in the middle of a force ten gale.

So maybe it is, after all, those of us who put the shutters up and enjoy ourselves when we want to, not when total strangers decide we should. In which case, I’m weird and I’m happy to be weird.

My proudest achievement – and yes, I do realise this speaks volumes about the limits of my accomplishments – is that on the night of 31st December 1999, a night which amplified everything which is so dire about New Year’s Eve by a factor of about a million, I was in bed, asleep, by eleven o’clock.

I’ve tried to think if there are less obvious reasons for my hatred of New Year’s Eve – less obvious, that is, than the grotesque forced jollity, the loathsome parties full of celebrants with whom one would normally not share a taxi, let alone a kiss or a bottle, and the puerile determination that EVERYONE IS GOING TO HAVE THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES. Perhaps. When I explained my view recently, I was asked ‘didn’t you cop off when you were younger?’. Quite prescient, as it happens, since the answer is a less than resounding ‘no’. So maybe it’s all deeply Freudian. The fact I didn’t pull at New Year’s Eve parties when I was young means that I reject the entire concept now.

I’d put it another way. Even as a kid, I loathed the whole thing. But when you’re fifteen, you can’t say ‘I’m not coming, I’m going to sleep’. Not, that is, if you want to have any friends. So I’d drag myself along to The Victory in Pinner, where we used to hang out - a foul enough pub even on normal evenings - and spend the night stewing in the corner with a false smile on my face. Now that I don’t have to go along with the crowd, I can stay at home and go to sleep.

I’ve discovered over the years that there are others out there who share my view. And since I don’t want to be wholly negative, I’d like to make a proposal. Since celebrating New Year’s Eve is an entirely arbitrary choice, why don’t those of us who would rather smother ourselves with rotting fish than go out on 31st December choose our own, random date, and quietly celebrate it, on our own. 23rd February will do for me. So if anyone wants to see me then, I’m afraid I’ll be busy getting quietly sozzled. Happy new year.

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Here are some carols/songs for you to sing today (from John Derbyshire):

Mad Dogs and Neocons (after Noel Coward) Mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East. The Germans just don't care to, the French would never dare to, In Luxembourg and Amsterdam they don't care in the least; But neocons all hate a dictator. China's PLA just waits for the day they can massacre students and monks; While Kim Jong Il has orders to fill — without cash from his nukes, he's sunk. In Istanbul the only rule is to keep the Kurds policed, But mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East.

Mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East.
The Democrats would much prefer if to the U.N. we'd defer;
The ACLU want the motley crew at Guantanamo released —
But, please, no order on the border.
The paleo crowd will applaud out loud anyone who torments Jews;
A pogrom or a human bomb is easy to excuse.
At the New York Times talk of Bush's "crimes" has hardly ever ceased.
But mad dogs and neocons wage war in the Middle East.

O Come All Ye Faithful
(Adeste Fidelis)
O come, all ye faithful,
Take your Ten Commandments,
Hide them, O hide them
Where no-one will see.
If you believe in
Absolute morality —
Then you're just too judgmental,
Your faith's too fundamental,
Your rock so monumental
Has no place in here!

The Battle Hymn of the Multicultural Republic
(Apologies to Julia Ward Howe)
Mine eyes have never noticed any difference at all —
Black, brown, or white; gay, bi, or straight; or thin or fat or tall;
Male, female, or transsexual — they're constructions soci-al:
We must celebrate each one.
Glory, glory, there's no difference!
Yet still, we'd better give some preference.
To enrich our own learning experience,
Till critical mass is here.

We're stamping out all images of Christianity,
That religion of colonialists, of war and slavery.
To faiths of every other sort there's none more kind than we;
So let them all come in!
Christians have no special standing.
Moslem numbers are expanding.
Flight-school lessons they're demanding —
Sharia law is here!

Ten million illegals? — Oh, what need for any fuss?
Let's give them driver's licenses — they're just as good as us.
In fact, they're slightly better, for they're more industrious.
Who else will mow our lawns?
Down with dull assimilation!
We're a multicultural nation!
Celebrate the transformation!
Diversity is here!

Word! da White-Boy Rapper Sings
(To the tune of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing")
Word! da white-boy rapper sings
Of bitches, ho's, an' homie t'ings.
He one cool s***-kickin' mutha
Got mo' fans than any brutha.
Now he's called for Bush's slayin' —
Thass too much, kna wha' I'm sayin'?
Anyway, they's took his heat —
Fool's defenseless on da street.
Word! da white-boy rapper sings —
Suburban teens all think he's king.

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David Carr says

I do not want the sodding Olympics. Not in 2012. Not ever.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I have literally not met a single person who has told me that they want them here. So I propose the most unscientific poll in history. If you are British, and you do want us to bid for the Olympics, can you just leave a comment saying so, please. Not the reasons - we all know those tired arguments. Just the mere fact that you want us to bid.

I have no idea what spurious conclusions I'll be able to draw from all this, but I've no doubt I'll manage something...

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I have discovered the woman I want to marry, on Andrew Sullivan's site:

While having a beer at a neighborhood bar/restaurant in NYC's West Village last weekend, I was party to a situation that I think you'll find directly on point.
Three mid-50's liberals were going on about the capture of Saddam; how it was a conspiracy, that the president knew where he was at all times and picked a politically opportune moment to capture him, it was all about the oil, etc.
The mid-20's girl sitting next to them broke from her conversation to chime in with the following, "I wish 60's sensibilities had stayed there. Someone points a gun in your face and you think 'My Fault', when you should be thinking 'You just picked the wrong fight'. Get your heads out of your asses".
They responded with dismissive claims about Republicans and tourists from the midwest.
She replied with, "One, I've grew up in Brooklyn. Two, I voted for Gore -- but I'll sure as hell take W. over someone who thinks the French are the height of moral authority and without ulterior motive."
I asked her out on the spot, and have a date for this Friday. Foxy, Cunning, and Fearless -- wish me luck!

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Norman Geras has one of his polls on at the moment, this time for the 10 Favourite Movies of All Time.

Here, to give you all something to sneer at, is my little list:

All The President’s Men

Annie Hall

Lost In Translation

A Man For All Seasons

Hannah And Her Sisters

High Society

Metropolitan

The Producers

Rushmore

When Harry Met Sally

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An interesting, albeit not wholly convincing, theory on the Gaddafi move.

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The idea may be regarded by many as heresy but, amongst my acquaintances, I know of no one who disagrees with the notion that Spurs and Arsenal should share a ground.

I can't put it better than Patrick Barclay does in today's Sunday Telegraph, not one word of which would I dissent from. He even suggests my own pet idea, that the ground should be in King's Cross:

When the Tottenham chairman, Daniel Levy, recently spoke of extending the ground's capacity to 48,000, he must have known he was flogging a horse that was not only dead but dog-food; there are simply not enough council-tax payers in London to pay for the infrastructural improvements required to make a journey to or from White Hart Lane pleasant. In this sense, Spurs have indeed been left behind. Any fan who fits the footballing definition of ''middle class''- in other words who is capable, when sober, of rising marginally above the savage - will know that a car, due to congestion, about as much use as a powerboat in the Sahara and that, once you have been disgorged by public transport, there is nowhere to dine or browse or engage in any recreation other than trying not slither on discarded trays of pale,fat chips. Down the side streets there may be cosy homes, but the face of the Tottenham High Road scowls.

Much as I like the stadium, I do not think Spurs can afford stay there. Meanwhile Arsenal, though their environment is more congenial, are already planning to leave Highbury for a 60,000-capacity place nearby. So is this another instance of Arsenal getting it right while Spurs, who will next year effect their fifth change of management since Arsene Wenger moved into Highbury, get it wrong? I am not so sure.Arsenal have a deserved reputation, based on developments such as the new North Bank, for doing things properly and the scale of the Ashburton Grove project reflects this. Their sense of style is admirable. Yet,every time we hear how the figures stack up, I am reminded of that game in which you keep carefully adding to the stack wooden blocks until eventually the whole thing topples over. Football is almost as risky an affair and,when clubs budget for continued success, as Arsenal seem to be doing, they are gambling.

So how do Arsenal play safe while Spurs progress? You may have guessed the answer by now. Move in together. It will not happen in the foreseeable future. It may never happen. It truly should, and I cannot think of a more suitable method of invigorating the desolate, seedy environs of King's Cross railway station than by giving the North London neighbours a more central home, a showcase for the game, logistically convenient, architecturally imaginative and perhaps capable of adaptation to a variety of the capital's other needs. Arsenal and Spurs could then grow separately; all they would need a joint property company to create and administer an edifice that might command the respect of even such distinguished visitors as United.

This would be infinitely preferable to their sharing the new Wembley. But even that might be preferable to their separate prospects. Certainly Tottenham's. So let Spurs and their fans start the thinking afresh.The alternative is to stay small - but stop moaning about it, because it is just the price to be paid for tradition.

Meanwhile, I'm off this afternoon to watch Spurs beat Man U (without the nauseating cry baby Rio Ferdinand, it seems) 3-0.

UPDATE: A man can but dream...The northerners won 2-1. Drug assisted, doubtless.

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I have a question for Tony Blair, for Jack Straw, and for anyone else who says that they oppose the death penalty for murderers such as Ian Huntley but are, nonetheless, prepared to see Saddam hang. It’s a very simple question, made up of just three letters.

Why?

All my adult life I have opposed the death penalty. My reasons are pretty standard; shared, I’m sure, by the vast majority of those who oppose capital punishment. Of all of them, one stands out: better that ninety nine guilty men should go free than that one innocent man should be killed.

That is, of course, a practical rather than a moral objection, but I have also had a principled objection to the idea of the state taking a life when it sees fit. War, certainly, presents a different circumstance, when there is no simply no choice but for the state to kill in order to survive. But it is impossible to imagine how, in response to criminal behaviour, life imprisonment rather than execution would put at risk a country’s very existence.

So if last week had been a normal week, my reaction to the conviction of Ian Huntley would have been that he should be locked up for ever – that, as David Blunkett is now attempting to ensure, “life means life”. And I would have had very little concern for the conditions in which he was kept – other, that is, than that they should not be comfortable.

But it was not a normal week. By the end of it, I had come to realise that I can see no reason, either moral or practical, why Ian Huntley should not be executed – or why other murderers, too, should not be killed.

Saddam’s capture leads to no other conclusion. It is one thing to argue that taking life is always immoral. Such an absolutist view may be wrong headed – self defence, by both states and individuals, is the most obvious refutation - but those who argue that Saddam should be punished not through execution but by life imprisonment have at least the virtue of intellectual consistency.

Those, however, such as the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, who say that they oppose the death penalty – indeed, as Mr Straw put it on Monday, that they continue to “campaign hard to try and extend the abolition of the death penalty” – but that in this instance they are prepared to acquiesce in what they must consider to be state-sponsored, judicial murder have no such virtue. Their position is incoherent, unprincipled, and plain wrong. If they believe that it is wrong for the state to punish murderers by execution – a perfectly valid position - then it is, well, wrong. It’s not wrong in Britain but right in Iraq or wrong in California but right in Texas.

They explain their position – that it is OK to hang Saddam, but not OK to hang Huntley - with a decidedly specious argument. According to Mr Blair, “it is for them [the Iraqis] to determine what penalties there may be”. Aha! Now we’re getting to the nub of the issue: Iraqis are barbarians of whom we can expect no better – a view which has been implicit in the comments of those who say that Saddam must be tried by an international, rather than Iraqi, court. Such a stance, which seems at first instance to be respectful of Iraqi feelings, turns out on further examination to be deeply patronising.

Either capital punishment is immoral or it isn’t. By refusing to condemn any potential execution of Saddam, Messrs Blair and Straw and the others who have fallen into line behind them are, from their perspective on capital punishment, supporting a grotesquely immoral act.

They are also exposing the deep flaws in their opposition to the death penalty at home. If it is wrong to execute Ian Huntley, it is wrong to execute Saddam. But that works in reverse, too. If, as the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary appear to believe, it is morally acceptable to kill Saddam, how can it be any less so to kill Ian Huntley? It is a perverted moral calculus which holds that murdering two children is somehow more acceptable than murdering three hundred thousand.

I have never been an absolutist in my opposition to ending human life. Since I accept that there are times when it is right to kill, I have this week had to ask myself an unsettling question: when could there be a clearer cut example of living, breathing evil, and when could the extermination of that evil be more justified? As I watched the wonderful pictures of Saddam’s humiliation, I could not – nor can I still – think of a single reason why he should not be executed. I am left with only one response, which is that Saddam should indeed be put to death – after due process.

And, much as I have tried to escape this conclusion, I cannot: there are no sensible grounds on which one can argue that it is morally right to execute Saddam but not Ian Huntley. Anyone who accepts that Saddam should be killed must also accept the case for capital punishment more generally. We can argue about details – to which forms of murder it should apply, and in what circumstances – but the principle is clear. Accept the moral validity of executing Saddam and you must accept it for executing Huntley – and, indeed, for other cold blooded and deliberate murderers.

The imprisonment of Saddam has made me realise that, far from opposing the death penalty, I can see no moral alternative to it.

As for the idea that it is better that ninety nine guilty men go free than one innocent man dies, the response of one Chinese jurist to that statement is perhaps the most pertinent observation: “Better for whom?”.

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Hours of harmless fun for misanthropes everywhere...

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I was about to post a sneering comment about this piece today by Polly Toynbee in which she tells how she was taken in by a Nigerian scam. Something along the lines of 'you can't fool all of the people, all of the time, but you can fool Polly'.

And then I stopped myself (I hope you appreciate that little journalistic trick of saying what I said I wouldn't after all say). Read the piece, and then tell me in all honesty that you would never have made the same mistake. Anyone with any charitable instincts would be vulnerable to such a scam, and she made what seem to me like pretty sensible checks.

I can't stand Polly T. I have to change channels if I see her on TV, her liberal pieties and condescending, smug superiority far more than I can take. But I have to say that in this instance she emerges with a lot of credit as someone who is prepared to put her money where her mouth is - and is prepared to admit in public that she was hoodwinked.

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British Spin is as interesting as ever. This post, positing a scenario whereby a Dean-like insurgent almost snatches the Labour leadership, requires some leaps of the imagination, but is well worth reading.
(And, by the way, it's all pretty passe in the Conservative Party. The insurgent won in 2001; a chap by the name of Iain Duncan Smith.)

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You can hear my little discussion on Guantanamo Bay with John Humphrys and Hugo Charlton of the Green Party here. Click on the item at 7.23 on the running order.

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A superb piece by David Blair on what might have been:

What made Saddam different from other dictators was the sheer scale of his ambition. Not for him the limited horizons of a Mobutu or a Mugabe, who wanted nothing more than to plunder their own countries.

Instead, Saddam saw himself as an immortal hero of the Arab world in the mould of Nebuchadnezzar or Saladin. His goal was to change the course of history by dominating the Middle East through the possession of oil and nuclear weapons.

For a few weeks, he came within an ace of achieving this. When Iraq's army rolled south and occupied Kuwait on Aug 2, 1990, Saddam believed that he had pulled off a master stroke.

Iraq was facing bankruptcy after his ruinous war with neighbouring Iran. Yet with Kuwait's oil reserves added to his own, Saddam could not only avoid financial collapse but become the pivotal player in the international oil market.

...Moreover, by August 1990, Iraq was on the brink of possessing a nuclear weapon. Immediately after the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam ordered his scientists to begin a crash programme and produce a bomb within six months. While this timetable was unrealistic, there is no doubt that Iraq was a few years away from having a nuclear capability.

...A nuclear-armed Iraq in possession of Kuwait and controlling 20 per cent of the world's oil was what Saddam came close to achieving.

Had he done so, any American talk of "regime change" in Baghdad would have been fanciful. The idea of Saddam as an internationally isolated, reviled leader would have been unthinkable.

Why Saddam failed reveals much about his character. Like other dictators, he was steeped in history books and believed in the triumph of the will. Saddam knew in minute detail how Nebuchadnezzar had taken Jerusalem and destroyed the temple in 586 BC. He understood Saladin's defeat of the Crusaders in 1187.

He believed that a similar display of iron determination would deliver victory for Iraq. To Saddam, willpower was enough; tactical skill in pursuing his goals was beneath him.

So he bungled, over and over again. To start with, he got the timing of his Kuwait adventure wrong. Why did he launch the invasion first and then begin the crash nuclear weapons programme, instead of the other way round? This was perhaps one of the world's luckiest escapes in the last century.

Had Saddam waited until his nuclear weapon was ready before attacking Kuwait, he would undoubtedly have pulled off his master stroke. If he had possessed an ounce of tactical skill, Saddam would have occupied Kuwait on a Monday, carried out a nuclear test on Tuesday and then declared that his bomb would be used against anyone attacking any inch of Iraqi territory, including its latest gain.

Then Kuwait would have disappeared forever, there would have been no Gulf war, no question of deposing Saddam and he would have achieved regional dominance. At some stage, he would probably have attacked Israel and the ultimate result could well have been a nuclear exchange in the Middle East.

Having bungled the timing of the Kuwait invasion, Saddam could still have snatched victory even after America and Britain declared their resolve to expel him. For he did not need all of Kuwait's territory.

Saddam needed his neighbour's oil, which came largely from the Rumaila oilfield straddling the Iraqi frontier. He needed the strategically vital Bubiyan island at the head of the Gulf, which would have lifted the stranglehold imposed on Iraq by its tiny coastline.

He could have withdrawn from the rest of Kuwait and left the Emirate a crippled, rump state. Then Saddam would have placed America and Britain in an impossible position. How could they have justified going to war when Kuwait had been restored, minus a tiny island and an oilfield?

King Hussein of Jordan, who sacrificed much of his international standing by declining to condemn the Kuwait invasion, repeatedly pressed Saddam to choose this option. Saddam's last words to the king on Dec 5, 1990, when the full might of the American-led armada was poised to expel Iraq from Kuwait, revealed much about his state of mind.

Rejecting any idea of yielding an inch, Saddam said: "The entire universe is against us and God is with us. Victory will be ours, so don't worry and don't trouble yourself."

Barely six weeks later, on Jan 14, 1991, the allied juggernaut began pounding Iraq's army to pieces. Saddam was thrown out of Kuwait and his dream ended.

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I think I might change the strapline of this site from 'never knowingly understated' to these words from Tom Watson:

Unravel the DNA code of this man and it spells "no surrender - new labour original".

I kind of like that...

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This piece was to be published in tomorrow's Independent, but the capture of some bloke in Iraq has put paid to that...

If I hear anyone else tell me that the BBC’s Big Read has been a glorious triumph because sales and library borrowings of the featured books have shot up, then I’ll be forced to respond in kind. I’ll lock the offender up in a darkened room and have them force-read The Lord of the Rings, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and His Dark Materials.

The assumption on which the entire project has been based is patronising nonsense – that somehow the mere act of reading is itself to be praised, no matter what dross it is that is being read. Yet almost no one who comes out with the line would be seen dead reading any of those four shortlisted books.

Pride and Prejudice aside – and that, no doubt, crept on to the final list on the back of Colin Firth’s frilly shirt – not one of the winners would stretch the average ten year old. Jeffrey Archer must be livid – with good reason - that not one of his oeuvre made the list; his books have the considerable benefit of being shorter, and thus more bearable, than the Lord of the Rings.

There are few more depressing sights than the country’s arts establishment pandering to the lowest common denominator in a desperate attempt to appear ‘relevant’. On any judgement of literary merit, four of the five winners would be lucky to appear even at the bottom of a list of the top 100,000 books. Two – the Rowling and the Pullman - are children’s books pure and simple. One – Adams – is a one dimensional, somewhat puerile, comedy. And the winner is written for adults whose thought processes have remained stuck in childhood and whose preference is for stories of elves and magic above those of realistic human beings.

At this point I must apologise to my postman. You will soon be carrying sacks of hate mail to my flat; I know from previous experience that one criticises Tolkien at one’s peril. I have written before on this page about the infantilisation of British culture, of which the popularity of Tolkien’s drivel is a prime example. As if the book’s readers’ obsession with such infantile rubbish was not evidence itself of their stunted intellectual development, so their reaction to criticism of their favourite book is conclusive proof. Like children in a temper tantrum, they pen letters in response almost as long as the wretched book itself. Believe me, I know what is coming my way.

C’est la vie. The fact is, however, that whilst The Big Read’s poll may be an accurate judgement of contemporary popularity, it has nothing to do with quality. If people want to spend their time reading this stuff, fine. It’s a free country (yes, Tolkien readers, a free country – which means I will continue to refer to The Lord of the Rings as mindless tosh, no matter how much it annoys you). But the idea that this elevates them – that because they are spending their time reading rather than sitting in front of the TV, for example, they are somehow engaging in a superior pursuit - is a grotesque distortion, and an all too typical abrogation of responsibility by public service broadcasters. Reading is, of itself, no more worthwhile an activity than nose picking. It is the quality of the reading material which matters, not the act of reading itself. An hour spent watching a well written, well directed, well acted TV programme such as The Sopranos or Six Feet Under is a far more stimulating hour than any time spent reading Harry Potter – unless you are a ten year old.

If the BBC’s plan with The Big Read was to say ‘here’s what you like, now here’s what is better’ then it would have been acting in its finest traditions. But nothing could be further from its purpose. Those fine traditions are from a bygone age when the BBC believed in public service broadcasting. The Big Read is no different from the vast majority of the BBC’s output today: levelling down rather than up, reflecting the public’s taste rather than working to improve it. Other than programmes which it shunts off to BBC4 in the confident expectation that no one will watch them, the BBC is now incapable of performing the proper function of a public service broadcaster, so suffused has it become with the idea that ratings, ratings and ratings are all that matters.

The poll which determined the results of The Big Read is of a piece – the public’s taste is sovereign, and only to be gloried in. The fact that The Lord of the Rings is not fit to be considered in the same breath as Pride and Prejudice (and I say that despite having a personal Jane Austen blind spot) is irrelevant. All that matters is that the Tolkien is more popular than the Austen – or rather, given the fanaticism of Tolkien readers, that they are more likely to vote than discerning Austen readers.

I’ve been trying to decide what is more depressing: the results themselves, or the fact that it’s impossible to imagine the BBC doing anything other than appealing to the lowest common denominator in making such a programme. I can’t. They’re equally so. What a shoddy exercise.

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Can there have been a more hypocritical and repellent performance than Charles Kennedy appearing everywhere opining on how the arrest of Saddam marks a new beginning for Iraq?

If it had been up to Mr Kennedy, Saddam would still be in power, and still be butchering his citizens.

What a disgrace that man is. If he had any sense of decency he would keep very, very quiet.

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Justice.

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