Johann Hari

In the long fake boom of the Nineties and Noughties, we were sold a thousand scams. End government regulation of the financial system! Turn banks into casinos! Pay CEOs 500 times more than their staff! Bow, bow, bow before our mansion-dwelling overlords and the Total Efficiency they will bring! Yet from under the rubble left by these delusions, one of the greatest scams has skipped out unscathed, and it is now successfully selling itself as a solution to the fading of the boom-light. It is probably in your workplace now, or coming soon. Its name? Management consultancy.

There are now half a million management consultants in the world, and they all grumble that they face one question wherever they go: yes, but what is it that you actually do? They claim to be able to enter any organization, watch its workers for a short period, and then - using graphs, algorithms, and a jargon that makes quantum physics look like Sesame Street - render it dramatically more efficient, for a fee. They are everywhere: in the US, AT&T (to pluck a random company) spent $500m on them in just five years, while the British state will soon be spending more on management consultants than on upgrading its nuclear weapons.

Yet the process of management consultancy has always been shrouded in priestly secrecy. Over the past few years there has been a string of memoirs by highly successful former management consultants, finally pulling back the flow-charts.

David Craig gives a typical explanation of what the consultants Actually Do. After getting a degree specializing in romantic poetry, he was astonished to be hired by a prestigious management consultancy, given three weeks training, and then dropped into major corporations to tell them how to run their oil rigs, menswear stores, and factories, for tens of thousands of pounds a pop. In his brave memoir "Rip Off!" he explains: "We were proud of the way we used to make things up as we went along... It's like robbing a bank but legal. We could take somebody straight off the street, teach them a few simple tricks in a couple of hours and easily charge them out to our clients for more than £7000 per week." It consisted, he says, of "lies, lies and even more lies."

He worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week - and then tell the company's bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed - People Off Payroll.

Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 percent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.

Yes, you might say, but surely he was just a bad management consultant. The rest must get results. The evidence suggests not. The Cranfield School of Management studied 170 companies who had used management consultants, and it discovered just 36 percent of them were happy with the outcome - while two thirds judged them to be useless or harmful. A medicine with that failure-rate would be taken off the shelves.

Matthew Stewart, another former consultant, summarizes his high flying years in the industry by saying: "I felt like a snake oil salesmen without snake oil." When he was sent into a company, he was told to use complex formulae to analyze the productivity of its staff, but he soon realized that the results were "nearly random... Similar results could have been achieved by having four monkeys throw darts at a few matrices." Yet on this basis, he was taking a fortune in payments, and firing thousands of productive people.

The recession has given a fresh burst to this industry, as corporations beg to be told where to apply the leeches. The number of senior consultants has swollen by 10 percent in the past year, while the number employed by local government has grown by 11 percent.

But there is a growing body of academic research showing that the strategies pushed by these consultancies are in fact disastrous - and hasten the collapse of a company or service. Professor Wayne Cascio of the University of Colorado has studied the relative costs and benefits of POPing your workforce. Corporations and governments are receptive to the idea that the quickest, easiest way to save money is to fire workers. But Cascio has shown that, most of the time, the costs outweigh the gains. Obviously, you have to immediately find large amounts of redundancy and severance pay. But the costs don't stop there. Your workforce becomes very nervous - and a nervous workforce is dramatically less productive and less innovative. The best people leave. The service to the customer deteriorates - so they abandon you even more.

The facts backing this up are striking. The OECD has studied developed economies over a 20-year period, and it found labor productivity growth was much higher in the countries where it is hardest to fire people. The better you treat a workforce, the better they work. Professor Peter Cappelli studied 122 companies and found that lay-offs most often shrank their future profitability, instead of swelling it.

Yet this is the antithesis of the management consultancy mindset. Stewart says "consultants are the cattle prods of the modern corporation. The chief message to be communicated, in almost all situations, is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you have ever imagined." It's a dark, dehumanized vision of workers as cogs in a machine - and it's been there from the beginning. Frederick Taylor, the founder of management consultancy, compared workers to "an intelligent gorilla" and said "our scheme does not ask for any initiative in a man. We do not care for his initiative."

When challenged, the paltry evidence base of this industry soon becomes clear. Tom Peters, the author of management consultants' bible 'Excellence', snapped at an interviewer who asked about his way of analyzing businesses: "Of course, we all know this is to some extent phoney baloney."

David Craig suggests a simple way to call out this scam. Insist that, from now on, all management consultants are paid by their results. If they promise greater productivity or higher sales, fine: don't pay them until it comes through. Today, almost no management consultancy works on this basis. If they did, they'd all be bankrupt.

And yet, and yet... you almost have to admire the rancid chutzpah of it. As the management consultant Bruce Henderson once sniggered: "Can you think of anything more improbable than taking the world's most successful firms and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses - and [getting them] to pay millions of pounds for this advice?" It's tempting to chuckle at the absurdity - until you realize the cack-handed consultants' scythe could come for you.

Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour — but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye’s superb, unsettling new history, “Churchill’s Empire” — and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire.

Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save and the world he helped to trash?

To read this article from the New York Times in full, click here.

Here’s a series of questions that should be fairly straightforward, but are actually excruciating. When were you last wrong? What has been your most recent serious screw-up at work? What has been your biggest mistake in your personal life? We all have a weird and paradoxical relationship with our mistakes. We can see that everyone around us makes errors all the time – yet we are always astonished when it turns out we are getting things wrong too. It’s because, deep down, we see being wrong as shameful proof that we’ve been sloppy, or stupid. This belief pervades our culture: we applaud the public figures who “stay the course”, even if it’s wrong, and boo the ones who admit a mistake and “u-turn” or “flip-flop”. But what if – apologies for the irony landslide here – we are wrong in the whole way we think about being wrong?

A brilliant new manifesto has just been published urging us to reassess our relationship with our own mistakes: ‘Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,’ by the American journalist Kathryn Schultz. Perhaps the best place to start her story is with an experiment first staged in the University of Berlin in 1902 by Professor Frank Von Liszt. In a classroom, two students began to have an angry argument, until one pulled out a gun. As the panicked students around them drew back, a professor tried to intervene – and a shot was fired. The professor collapsed to the ground. The witnesses, unaware that all three were actors following a script, were then taken outside and quizzed about what they had seen and heard. They were encouraged to give as much details as possible.

Everyone got it wrong. They put long monologues into the mouths of spectators who had said nothing; they ‘heard’ the row as being about a dozen different imagined subjects, from girlfriends to debts to exams; they saw blood everywhere, when there was none. Most people got a majority of their “facts” wrong, and even the very best witness offered a picture that was 25 percent fiction. The more certain the witness, the more wrong they were. Every time the experiment is run, the results are the same.

The implications are pretty startling. Human beings can’t even accurately describe an event of great importance that we have just witnessed with our own eyes. What does that suggest about our ability to be easily right about much more complex questions. In ‘American Pastoral’, Philip Roth calls life “an astonishing farce of misperception.” Our abilities to perceive and reason are painfully limited, while the world is unutterably complex. We are peering at an entire universe through a drinking straw.

So the meaningful question about any human being isn’t: does he get things wrong? With these limitations, we will all make big mistakes. The real question is: does he take the time to understand his mistakes and learn from them? But you can only do this regularly if you know how to think about mistakes in a healthy way.

There are a few areas of human life where people have found a way to do this. Revealingly, they are the areas that make things work better than any other – the sciences. To pluck one example of millions, when Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infections in the 1980s, almost all scientists disagreed. Now, after conclusive tests, everyone agrees. It’s not that scientists have less ego than the rest of us, or feel less sting when they are proven wrong. It’s that they have developed rigorous techniques for constantly checking their claims against the evidence, and ruthlessly hunting out their errors and figuring out what they mean.

This approach can be extended. After two planes collided in Tenereife airport in 1977, killing 600 people, the airline industry introduced radical new protocols. Crew and ground members are now actually rewarded for reporting their own errors and screw-ups. The result? Accidents fell dramatically, from 0.178 per million flight hours to 0.104.

Now compare that to the way we conduct public life. One of the most predictable applause lines for any politician is to boast that he won’t back down, look back, or say sorry. Mitt Romney’s latest book is called ‘No Apologies’, while Sarah Palin says she will “never apologize for the United States of America.” Tony Blair wasn’t unusual when he bragged: “I can only go one way, I’ve got no reverse gear.” But a car without a reverse gear would be banned from the roads. And we have a word for somebody who, in their ordinary life, never apologizes: an asshole.

Yet we have structured our public life so these seems like sensible statements, while anyone who ever admits a mistake is talking themselves out of a job. You can hear the carping interviewers now: “How can we ever trust you again, if you were wrong about this?” We make it easier to continue in error than to admit error and put it right. The number of politicians who ever admit they’ve been seriously wrong and changed course is so few that they are famous for it: Charles De Gaulle on Algeria, Richard Nixon on China, Bobby Kennedy on Vietnam.

If we want to face up to our mistakes more regularly, then we need to change the way we think about them. If we see them as proof of our own incompetence, we will continue to puff out our chests and pretend they aren’t there. Is there a different way?

Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer. Every scientist leaves behind a trail of disproven hypotheses and papers shot to pieces by colleagues. He doesn’t see them as shameful, but as part of a process that was bringing him closer to the truth through experimentation. Similarly, James Joyce, thinking about all the drafts he wrote that failed, said “a man’s errors are his portals of discovery”.

But error may be even more fundamental than that. From the moment we are born, human beings are creating theories about the world, based on limited evidence. It’s how we survived: if our ancestors hadn’t generalized that all lions are dangerous, you wouldn’t be reading this. Errors are often simply this necessary impulse reaching too far, or misfiring. So the impulse that makes us wrong is also the impulse that makes us human.

Since reading Schultz’s book, I have been trying harder to train myself to think systematically about my own mistakes. Every week, I make a list of what I have got wrong, personally or professionally, and try to figure out how to get it right next time. I can’t entirely drain the pain from it, but I do think there’s a hunger out there for this approach: the most positive reaction I have ever had to a column was when I tried to publicly explore how I had got the Iraq war so horribly wrong. What I leaned from that awful mistake – the true factors that drive US and UK foreign policy, rather than propaganda claims – have led me, I think, to positive insights since. If I had instead run from the error and insisted it wasn’t there, I would be stuck in a bloody blind alley, devoid of insights.

Tim Harford of Radio 4’s More or Less has suggested an annual prize for the politician who makes the most constructive admission of error. It’d be a good start - but we will best seek a healthier approach to error in public life when we achieve it in ourselves.

You will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don’t have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it – or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.

Remember the horrific story about the suicides and mass deaths in Chinese factories where they are manufacturing stuff for us that I wrote about last week? Well, Richard Littlejohn thinks they're hilarious. (You have to scroll to the end.) Really. He uses a football chant to describe young men and women hurling themselves to their deaths only to be caught by suicide nets: "Back of the net!"

He also argues that the safety record in Chinese factories is much preferable to the "'Elf N Safety" in British factories. We are talking about a system where 600,000 people are worked to death every year, and 50,000 fingers are severed every month (*), Yes: if only we got rid of the Elf N Safety Nazis here, British people could experience such freedom and liberation.

I assume, however, that Littlejohn wouldn't want to actually apply these standards to white people. As I've explained before, he is profoundly racist. No doubt he would concede that white British people having their bodies broken, or killing themselves to escape that fate, was tragic. But when it comes to people in Asia, it's a hilarious punchline. 

Imagine viewing such unbelievable human suffering, to manufacture your consumer goods, and laughing. Pity Richard Littlejohn: he is a diseased and damaged man.

(*) This figure has been corrected, I originally got it wrong. 

And now congregation, put your hands together and give thanks, for I come bearing Good News. Britain is now the most irreligious country on earth. This island has shed superstition faster and more completely than anywhere else. Some 63 percent of us are non-believers, according to an ICM study, while 82 percent say religion is a cause of harmful division. Now, let us stand and sing our new national hymn: Jerusalem was dismantled here/ in England's green and pleasant land.

How did it happen? For centuries, religion was insulated from criticism in Britain. First its opponents were burned, then jailed, then shunned. But once there was a free marketplace of ideas, once people could finally hear both the religious arguments and the rationalist criticisms of them, the religious lost the British people. Their case was too weak, their opposition to divorce and abortion and gay people too cruel, their evidence for their claims non-existent. Once they had to rely on persuasion rather than intimidation, the story of British Christianity came to an end.

Now that only six percent of British people regularly attend a religious service, it's only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are automatically given to the religious to wield over the rest of us. It's a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds. Yet the opposition to this sensible shift is becoming increasingly unhinged. The Church of England, bewildered by the British people choosing to leave their pews, has only one explanation: Christians are being "persecuted" and "bullied" by a movement motivated by "Christophobia." George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, says Christians are now "second class citizens" and it is only "a small step" to "a religious bar on any employment by Christians".

Really? Let's list some of the ways in which Christians, and other religious groups, are given special privileges every day. Start with the educational system. Every school in Britain is required by law to make its pupils engage every day in "an act of collective worship of a wholly or mainly Christian nature". Yes: Britain is still a nation with enforced prayer. The religious are then handed total control of 36 percent of our state-funded schools, in which to indoctrinate children into their faith alone.

These religious schools, paid for by you and me, are disfiguring Britain. I know one reason I grew up without the prejudices of some of my older relatives was because I went to school with kids from every conceivable ethnic and religious group, and I could see they were just like me. A five year old will make friends with anyone, and he'll be much less likely to believe smears against those friends for the rest of their lives. But in Britain today, that mixing is happening less and less. Increasingly, the children of Christians are sent to one side, Jews to another, Muslims to another still, and they never see each other except from the window of their parents' cars. After the race riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001, the official investigations found that faith schools were a major cause.

So why keep them? Their defenders say these schools perform better in exams - and at first glance, it seems to be true. On average, they get higher grades. But look again. A number of studies, including by the conservative think thank Civitas, have blown a hole in this claim. They have proven that faith schools systematically screen out children who will be harder to teach: children from poor families, and less bright children. Once you look at how much a school improves the pupils it actually admits, the only real measure of a school's success, it turns out faith schools do less well than other schools - which isn't surprising given they waste so much time teaching them crazy nonsense like Virgin births and Noah's Ark. The British people instinctively know all this: 64 percent want every state school to be neutral when it comes to religion.

Special rights for the religious don't stop at the school gates. They automatically get 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords. Public broadcasters are required by law to give them large amounts of money and time to screen religious propaganda. Jews and Muslims are allowed to ignore the laws on animal cruelty and engage in the barbaric practice of slitting the throats of live animals without numbing them in order to create kosher and halal meat.

And it seems that, in crucial cases, religious figures are virtually exempted from the law. There is now overwhelming evidence that Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope, was involved for over twenty years in an international criminal conspiracy to cover up the rape of children by priests in his Church. (Check out the superb edition of the BBC's Panorama, 'Sex Crimes and the Vatican', for the evidence.) But when he arrives in Britain in September, our politicians will fawn over him, rather than dialling 999.

Given all this unearned privilege, how can Christians claim they are in fact being "persecuted"? Here are the cases they offer as "proof". A nurse called Shirley Chaplin turned up to work wearing a crucifix around her neck. Her hospital told her that they were worried the elderly and confused patients she worked with could grab at it, so they said she could pin the crucifix to her uniform instead if she liked. That's it. That's their cause celebre. Oh, and a woman called Theresa Davies who worked in a registry office, but refused to perform civil partnerships for gay couples, so... she was moved to working on reception.

In response, Carey and the CofE demand Christians be allowed to break the law requiring them to treat gay people equally when providing a service to the general public - and that any case where a Christian feels discriminated against should be judged by a special court of "sensitive" Christians. If we started allowing religious people to break basic anti-discrimination laws, where would we stop? Until 1975, the Mormon Church said black people didn't have souls. (They only changed their mind the day the Supreme Court ruled this was illegal, and God niftily appeared to their leader that morning and announced blacks were ensouled after all.) Would we let a Mormon registrar refuse to marry black people? Would it be "Mormonophobia" to object?

When Lord Chief Justice Laws, who is a Christian himself, ruled the exemptions demanded by Carey would be "irrational, divisive, and arbitrary", he threw an extraordinary tantrum and said Christians might begin to engage in "civil unrest". When I saw Carey make these threats on television, red-faced and rageful, it made me think of a nasty child in the playground who had been beating up the gay kids and spitting at the girls for years and is finally told to stop - only to start bawling that he's the one who is being picked on.

As their dusty Churches crumble because nobody wants to go there, the few remaining Christians in Britain will only become more angry and uncomprehending. Let them. We can't stop this hysterical toy-tossing stop us from turning our country into a secular democracy where everyone has the same rights, and nobody is grantedspecial rights just because they claim their ideas come from an invisible supernatural being. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Holy Lamb of God to carve into kebabs - it's our new national dish. Amen, and hallelujah.

This article appeared in GQ magazine, where I write a monthly column. To get these articles a month in advance of this website, you can subscribe to GQ at www.gq-magazine.co.uk

Sometimes, the most urgent truths are rolled up and hidden away in the most apparently trivial news. So if I tell you that Moody’s, the leading credit rating agency, has downgraded Ireland’s debt, it sounds pretty irrelevant. In fact, if you unwrap and decode this story, you’ll discover the reason why you are going to be more likely to lose your job or your home soon – and how David Cameron is rapidly ramping up the risk.

George Osborne visited Ireland a few years ago to say it was a “shining example” for Britain to mimic. When the recession hit, the country’s government immediately applied the medicine Cameron and Osborne are now imposing on Britain. They argued that when the economy withers, the government needs to react like any responsible family and cut spending to pay down its debt. They warned that if they didn’t do it fast, the international bond market would charge Ireland more for its liabilities, and the debt burden would become intolerable. Better to purge now, so you can get back to fiscal health as soon as possible. “Look and learn from across the Irish Sea,” Osborne said.

So they have brought this vision home. During the election campaign, Cameron promised that his cuts wouldn’t be “swingeing” – but in power he is ordering cuts of 25 to 40 percent in almost all departments. To give you a sense of how drastic this is: Margaret Thatcher actually increased public spending by 1.1 percent in real terms per year.

We are in a strange hush while the axe is suspended in the air above us. If you read the small print, you see the spending plans put forward by this government of inheritee-millionaires will hit the poor first and hardest. The National Housing Federation says the number of homeless people will double as a result of their slashing of housing benefit. Half a million children living below the poverty line are having free school meals – the only nutritious meal of the day for many – cancelled. The unemployed are having £6.50 knocked off the £65 a week they have to live on. Ian Duncan Smith says “tons of elderly people” are going to be forced out of their “underoccupied” council homes. The list is long enough for a dozen columns. One minister recently told the Times the rationale behind it off-the-record: “The undeserving poor,” he said, “are undeserving.”

Meanwhile, a recent Financial Times headline summarised the situation at the other end of the economic heap: “Well-paid breathe collective sigh of relief.”

Before power, Cameron promised his cuts would not affect “frontline” services, but only the “backroom” and “waste”. Now NHS bosses have drawn up plans to slash hip operations, cataract surgery, and the number of acute hospital beds. All frontline services are facing similar shut-downs. When David Cameron promised he wouldn’t get rid of free bus passes, who knew it was because he would get rid of the bus instead?

A detailed study for Oxford University led by Dr David Stuckler calculates that there will be 38,000 premature deaths over the next decade as a result of all this – due to the reduced healthcare, dismantled services for the elderly and vulnerable children, increased suicides, and so on.

The Cameroons say – yes, this is rough, yes, it hurts, but it is for a necessary purpose. If we don’t do it, the bond markets will downgrade our debt and we will be even worse off. Only austerity can hold off the prospect of a debt crisis.

So let’s return to the truth buried in that little story on the financial pages. Ireland has been doing exactly what Cameron and Osborne urge, with a two year headstart. What are the results? Last week, a study by the International Monetary Fund – nobody’s idea of a left-wing pressure group – found that country’s economic collapse now “exceeds that being faced by any other advanced economy, and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress [anywhere] in post-World War Two history.”

Why? During a recession, ordinary consumers quite sensibly cut back and spend less. But if the government does the same, it means nobody is spending. This is bad enough for all the people who suffer immediately: the swelling army of the unemployed, the repossessed, the abandoned. But it turns out it makes its original goal – paying off the debt – impossible too. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains: “If you introduce austerity measures, the amount you can raise in tax falls, and welfare payments go up – so you don’t have enough money to pay your debts anyway.”

That’s why the bond markets have turned on Ireland. The country introduced austerity to pay off their debts – and the austerity killed their economy, making it impossible to pay off their debts in any case. It was self-defeating. So introducing all these cuts doesn’t only inflict misery: it doesn’t even achieve its professed goal.

Why choose this as a model to copy? Another Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, writes this deficit hawkery “isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis… What sounds like hard-headed realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy.” Krugman points out that they incessantly warn us “invisible bond vigilantes” will beat us up if we don’t cut, cut, cut – when the real bond market is beating up the people who have cut and left their economies to bleed out.

In 2010, to preach austerity as the solution to depression is the equivalent of drilling holes in your head to cure your migraine, while dismissing aspirin as for wusses. It’s a dogma, chosen because it fits with the slash-the-state instincts they learned as privileged young men in their 1980s champagne-dream.

Krugman, like most economists, says there is only one real way out. When consumer spending collapses, governments need to borrow and spend to prevent a depression – and then pay off the debt from the proceeds of growth once we have brought the good times back. It’s revealing that the countries that have done this hardest and fastest – like South Korea, which spent a fortune on employing people to green the country’s infrastructure – have been the first to pull out of this recession, while the countries glugging Cameron-juice have sunk deeper into the gloop.

Yet few people outside economics are making a full-throated defence of stimulus spending as an urgent moral cause. We need to say it loud: the choice today is between a deficit and a depression. It is immoral not to borrow and spend when it could revive the economy and prevent all these lives being written off. I remember what happened to some of my relatives in the eighties. The children who are supposedly being protected from the cost of the debt a generation from now need, in reality, to be protected today – from their parents becoming jobless and depressed, their homes being repossessed, and their schools and hospitals being chronically underfunded.

None of this has to happen. The more fuss the British people make – the more we demand the axe is put away, and replaced with jump-leads for the economy – the less leeway the government will have for self-defeating cuts. Protest needs to be focused on the Liberal Democrats in particular: they are mostly good people who do not want to be part of a Thatcher-on-mephedrone crusade. They have the power to pull the plug at any time. The more we spook them, the more likely that act of national self-preservation becomes.

Oh, and here’s a financial tip to leave you with. If you hold any bonds in Cameronomics, sell. They are about to slip from the AAA standard accorded by the right-wing press to junk status in the real world. To borrow a phrase from Osborne: look and learn from across the Irish Sea.

Is your life worth more to your government than a few pence added onto Big Oil's share price? At first, this will sound like a foolish question. But sometimes there is a news story that lays out the priorities of our governments once the doors are closed and the cameras are switched off. The story of the attempt to trade the Lockerbie bomber for oil is one of those moments.

Let’s start in the deserts of Iraq – because the Lockerbie deal might just reveal what really happened there. Many people were perplexed by Tony Blair’s decision to back George W. Bush’s invasion, which has led to the deaths of 1.2 million people. Blair said he was motivated by opposition to two things – terrorism and tyranny. First off, he said Saddam Hussein might give Weapons of Mass Destruction to jihadis. When it was proven in the rubble after the invasion that Saddam had no WMD and no links to jihadis – as many critics of the war had said all along – Blair declared he would do it all again anyway, because Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, and all tyrants should be opposed.

Most critics of the war said the real reason was a desire for Western access to Iraq’s vast supplies of oil. This debate has gone on for years. Now it emerges that Tony Blair plotted to hand a convicted terrorist – the worst in modern British history – to a vicious tyrant, in exchange for access to oil for British corporations. It seems to settle the argument in the darkest possible way.

Here’s how it happened. Just before Christmas in 1988, a flight from London to New York City was blasted out of the sky above Scotland by a bomb in the cargo. All 259 people onboard were killed, along with 11 on the ground. One man was convicted for the mass murder at a Scottish trial in 2000: Abdelbasset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer. Following the bombing, most Western governments imposed sanctions on Libya that forbade their companies to invest there. If you are opposed to terrorism and tyranny, it was a happy ending: an alleged terrorist was tried in open court and convicted, and a tyrant was shunned.

But within a few years Tony Blair was not happy. Why? The oil company BP wanted to be able to drill down into Libya’s oil, and tap the profits that would gush forth. Their then-CEO, John Browne, flew to Tripoli in the company of MI6 agents to find out what the dictatorship wanted in return for opening the country’s wells. It was, of course, clear. They wanted Megrahi back.

BP has admitted it lobbied Tony Blair to hasten into effect a prisoner exchange with Libya. They say they didn’t specifically mention Megrahi – but there was no need to. There were no other Libyan prisoners of particular note in Britain.

Blair’s administration was so intertwined by that point with the oil company that it was often dubbed “Blair’s Petroleum”. There was a revolving door between BP and Downing Street: BP execs sat on more government taskforces than all other oil companies combined, while Blair’s closest confidantes like Anji Hunter and Phillip Gould went to work for the corporation. He made two of the corporation’s successive CEOs into Lords, even appointed one as a minister to his government, and slashed taxes on North Sea oil production, causing BP’s share price to sky-rocket. By 2005, he was talking to Lord Browne at Downing Street dinners about what he would do after he left office. There were rumours at the time he considered working for BP.

Blair responded to BP’s lobbying with apparent pleasure. His Foreign Office Minister, Bill Rammell, assured Libyan officials that Blair did not “want Megrahi to pass away in prison.” His Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said a desire for Libya’s oil was “an essential part” of this decision. So Straw began negotiating a prisoner swap agreement, and urged the Scottish authorities to release the convict. He told the Scottish government in a leaked letter that it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to let Megrahi go.

The chief negotiator for the Libyans was Mousa Kousa, a thug who had been expelled from Britain after bragging about plots to murder democratic dissidents here on British soil. These supposed opponents of tyranny didn’t blush.

There are, of course, some serious commentators who argue that Megrahi was framed. It’s a legitimate debate. But if he was, it should have been settled in court, at an appeal, not in a dodgy deal with a dictator to benefit BP.

Both sides now admit what was happening: they were trying to trade a convicted mass murderer for oil. Saif Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and second in command, said it was “obvious” that attempts to free Megrahi were linked to oil contracts, adding “we all knew what we were talking about.” When he later appeared on a TV chat show alongside Megrahi, he told him: “In all the trade, oil and gas deals which I have supervised, you were there on the table. When British interests came to Libya, I used to put you on the table.”

There is no question there was a plot. The only question is whether the plot worked, or whether it got what it wanted anyway by a remarkable coincidence. It was, ultimately, up to the Scottish politicians whether to release Megrahi, and they publicly refused a prisoner swap. We know that Straw lobbied them to do it, but they insist they made the decision independently on “compassionate grounds.” A year ago, Megrahi was sent home to Triploli to be greeted by cheering crowds after serving eleven days for each person murdered. Officially, the Scots had assessed him to have only three months left to live.

There are several facts that batter these claims with question marks. The most obvious is that, eleven months later, Megrahi isn’t dead. It’s the most amazing medical recovery since Lazarus. Or is it? It turns out the doctors who declared him sick were paid for by the Libyan government, and one of them says he was put under pressure by Libya to offer the most pessimistic estimate of life expectancy. Susan Cohen, whose only daughter died in Lockerbie, says: “Why didn’t the Scottish pay for the doctors?”

Indeed, a detailed investigation by the Sunday Telegraph reported that “the Scottish and British governments actively assisted Megrahi and his legal team to seek a release on compassionate grounds” – suggesting they were hardly neutrally trying to discover the medical facts. The Libyan dictatorship certainly took the release as a gift from the British government. The tyranny’s chief spokesman, Abdul Majeed al-Dursi, said: “This is a brave and courageous decision by the British… We in Libya appreciate this and Britain will find it is rewarded.” BP has indeed been rewarded: it is now drilling in Libya.

But releasing him this way was certainly easier. It’s hard to tell the public you released a mass murderer out of compassion for him, but it’s almost impossible to tell them you did it for oil. Senator Charles Schumer of New York says: “Once Megrahi is released, all the roadblocks to that oil deal are removed. If anyone thinks this is a coincidence, I have a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn.”

This affair seems to reopen the Iraq debate, in a way that vindicates Blair’s most severe critics. Tony Blair’s remaining defenders say he was motivated in Iraq by a hatred of terrorism and tyranny and had no regard whatsoever for getting access to oil. Yet at the very same time the Labour government was plotting in Libya to hand the worst terrorist in British history to a tyrant in exchange for oil. It’s proof that oil and corporate power were a much bigger factor in driving foreign policy than the public rhetoric of opposing tyranny or terror.

David Cameron refuses to establish an investigation into how this was allowed to happen. He has tried to soothe anger by saying he will release all the relevant documents – but the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, added soon after that Blair’s permission will be needed before any records of his conversations are shown to the public. Imagine if the police allowed suspects to take this approach: “Certainly, officer, you can look under my coffee table. But not in any of my wardrobes. Good day.”

For the families of all the innocent people slaughtered in Lockerbie, this has been a cold-water education in what their governments really value. Cohen, remembering her murdered 20 year-old daughter Theodora, says: “Western governments seem to be run by one thing now – the great God money. All that matters now is profits and money. Blood-money.”

There’s a revealing little postscript to this tale. Last month, Blair went to Libya on behalf of the large corporations who now employ him. He was greeted by Gaddaffi himself – who tortures dissidents and terrorizes his population – “like a brother”, according to the Libyans. There has even been rife press speculation that, now they need a CEO, Tony Blair will go to work for BP. In many ways, it seems, he always has.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

To read his latest article for Slate, click here

 Well...

At the edge of Parliament Square, Winston Churchill squints – hunched and impervious and marble – over the gothic heart of British democracy. Usually, his only company is the smoggy traffic and snapping tourists. But for the past four months, he has been joined by another symbol, and another style of democracy.

In April, a smattering of tents was set up on this diesel-tinted green by citizens protesting against the war in Afghanistan. When I first saw them they were a mixture of students and activists and professors, voicing the conviction of 72 percent of British people – that the war is unwinnable and should end. One of them, Maria Gallasetgu, told me: “We have a responsibility to stand up to what they’re doing. It’s immoral.” She added: “We support the troops, that’s why we want to bring them home. They” – she pointed to parliament – “are the ones sending them to die.”

They held up signs with pictures of maimed Afghan children, and waved them at the MPs as they walked to work. The MPs invariably looked down and away and they hurried through parliament’s iron gates. These protesters are needed: despite the clear will of the British and American people, the war is being escalated, with an increase in slaughtered civilians of 23 percent in the past year.

As I looked out over this rag-tag of tents and posters, I realized that they didn’t only express the will of the people here – they were expressing the will of the people we are invading and bombing. The International Council on Security and Development just conducted an opinion poll of ordinary Afghans in Kandahar and Helmand, the places where these MPs have sent a surge of troops. Some 70 percent of them stand with the tents and camp-fires, saying the military operation is harming them and should stop.

So just a few metres from where the Prime Minister lives, people sat on an open green barbequing food and sharing drinks and calling for that Prime Minister to be indicted for war crimes. They had daily meetings where they shared out the responsibilities, while every fifteen minutes, Big Ben bonged. In that first month, I saw a group of Chinese tourists staring at the camp in disbelief. “This would never be allowed in China,” one of them said to me. “Not anywhere. Never mind at the centre of power. This is, I guess, what democracy really means.”

As the months went on, the tent-city developed and mutated with each time I visited. More protesters arrived, with a more eclectic range of grievances. A man appeared announcing he was starving himself because the courts wouldn’t let him see his children: he hasn’t eaten for more than 20 days. After hearing there was free food, a group of homeless people set up camp there too. (They are a harbinger: Shelter say David Cameron’s current policies will lead to a “disastrous” increase in the number of homeless people.) Suddenly, MPs didn’t only have to stare at the victims of their war – they also had to stare at the victims of their failed social policies.

That’s how it should be. They should see it every day – the faces of the Afghan children we have caused the deaths of, and the faces of the mentally ill people we have left to rot on the streets. I can’t think of a healthier sign in a democracy – that we don’t allow our problems to be cleansed, China-style, from the sight of the powerful, but leave them there, in full view, demanding to be dealt with.

Yes, a few parts of it smelled. But waging war in Afghanistan, against the will of the people there and the people here, smells a lot worse. Yes, there were a few crazy people in the tents. But none were as crazy as the belief that we can win a land-war in Afghanistan now, after nine years, with the population rapidly turning against us and pleading for a peace and reconciliation process. Freedom is not an “eyesore”, as London mayor Boris Johnson claimed: citizens pressuring their government for justice are the most luscious sight in the world.

Very early on Tuesday morning, the police came to force the protesters out, after Johnson got a court order. So now there is a clean, clear lawn again. Repressive governments the world over have seen footage of protesters being cleared from the lawn of the Mother of Parliaments, and chuckled with vindication. MPs will look out on a reassuringly empty space as they stroll in to make their decisions, with the public will unvoiced. And Winston Churchill stands alone once more, save for the tourists, and the traffic, and the false silence of a displaced citizenry.

Back when David Cameron was first trying to rebrand the Conservative Party, he touched down on the melting Arctic tundra to be photographed looking pensive and hugging huskies. He promised to lead "the greenest government ever. "Vote blue, go green," his posters cried. Some of us were skeptical, because the only time he had ever publicly discussed global warming before was in a statement where he mocked wind farms as "giant bird blenders." Now, two years later, he was building one onto his house.

But I hoped I was wrong. Preventing the biosphere from unraveling shouldn't be a left/right issue: rising sea levels and super-charged hurricanes will displace lefties and Tories just the same. So what happened?

Deep breath: Cameron has put the man most to blame for the worst environmental disaster in living memory in charge of his cuts agenda, and appointed a man who has faced accusations of wriggling out of cleaning up a environmental atrocity to run his party's finances. He has slashed programmes to prevent global warming first and hardest. He has decreed that the Department of Transport will take the hardest cuts, which will shutter much of our public transport network and force far more people onto smoggier roads. And he has appointed an oilman to ensure we begin deep-water drilling, Gulf of Mexico-style, off the coast of Britain - just as every newscast in the world is showing how well that turns out.

Let's start with the personnel. The Prime Minister thought the best person to be his 'Cuts Tsar' was John Browne. You might remember him - he was the head of BP, until he was forced to resign in 2007 because he was shown to have lied in court testimony. He does indeed have experience with cutting. Browne arrived at BP promising to do exactly what Cameron is promising to do to the British state - "produce more for less." He said you could slice out great chunks of staff and provide the same standard of service.

The workers he sacked included BP's specialist engineers. As the investigative reporter Tom Bower has written: "Hundreds were fired and replaced by subcontractors... Browne ditch[ed] BP's in-house expertise, which could second-guess every technical operation on land and under the sea."

The consequences were soon clear. BP's Texas City refinery blew up, killing 15 workers, and the official investigation found that BP "tolerat[ed] serious deviations from safe operating practices, and [showed] apparent complacency toward serious safety process risks at each refinery." Browne carried cutting on anyway, in a process Bower argues "led directly to the current catastrophe."

So the Prime Minister believes the best person to oversee his cuts agenda is an oilman whose last cuts job destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, possibly forever. It's an inspiring model to apply to our schools, hospitals, and transport.

At the same time, Cameron has appointed a reclusive tycoon called David Rowland, who has a history of being severely condemned by environmentalists, to run his Party's finances. In 1989, he bought a US company that had several years before built a smelting plant in Idaho that poisoned the local waters and caused acute breathing problems among the local children, until it was forcibly shut by the US government.

Rowland bought it as they were ordering the company to pay for the $100m clean-up - and he was accused of moving the company's assets overseas and engaging in a fiscal tango to get out of paying. Rowland denies the allegations, saying they are "unsubstantiated and false" and there is "no evidence" for them and "the case was settled with no payment being made by David Rowland nor by any company connected with him." But clearly, for Cameron, being reviled by environmentalists is no deal-breaker when making senior appointments.

This approach to the environment has seeped, like a slick, over Cameron's policies. He commissioned another oil man, Tim Eggar, to go and ask the world's oil companies what they want from his government. They won't let me see the findings. But we know oil companies received big tax cuts in the budget, and the government's subsequent energy policy paper (to read it, you can follow the link from here) says life needs to be made "simpler [and] clearer" for oil companies to drill in British waters. Even though it is our addiction to oil that is causing and worsening global warming, the paper says: "We need policies designed for hunting [oil]... We need policies that offer the right incentives to explore for and extract the remaining reserves of oil and gas, and to keep existing fields open for as long as possible."

It pledges to open the oceans off the Shetland Islands to deep-sea drilling. Yes - that's the deep-sea drilling you've seen in every newscast for the past month. Cameron is promising Big Oil tax breaks to drill, baby, drill.

At the same time, projects designed to provide alternatives to oil are being axed. The Financial Times headline put it bluntly: "Climate projects face axe from Cable." (Remember: Saint Vince is a former oilman himself, who worked for Shell through its worst atrocities, including working intimately with the Nigerian military as they were murdering democracy activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.) Some of the very best programmes are expected to go. For example, Mitsubishi and Siemens pledged to come to Britain to make offshore wind turbines if the government made a £60m upgrade to our ports to make it possible - but Whitehall whispers are that it will be abandoned. Britain will miss out on a head-start in one of the great growth industries of the twenty-first century.

Under Cameron, many more people will have no choice but to engage in more environmentally destructive behavior: if 40 percent of our spending on trains and buses goes, much of the system will sputter to a halt, and the roads will jam. He promised to require all power plants to meet the standards of a modern gas plant - which would condemn monsters like Kingsnorth - but now civil servants say no such pledge will be in any legislation. Even Cameron's one green measure so far, opposing the new terminal at Heathrow, turns out to be a trick: his close ally, London mayor Boris Johnson, simply wants to build another airport just as big nearby. Vote blue, turn oil-black.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. A survey of Conservative parliamentary candidates before the last election found that 91 percent did not believe anthropogenic global warming is even happening. Tim Montgomerie, the voice of the Tory grassroots, bragged back then: "I'm confident the sceptics are going to win. [Cameron has] lost the battle already." But was Cameron's "conversion" ever more than a PR stunt? Yes, it helped to detoxify the Conservative brand - yet, given power, he is choosing to retoxify the real atmosphere.

I'm sorry - I know lots of people in the US want to argue that the British right shows it is possible to be a right-wing party that also cares about global warming. It should be. But this party ain't it.

Cameron is making these dark decisions just as an important new book, 'Turned Out Nice' by the science writer Marek Kohn, lays out the best evidence for how global warming will affect Britain this century if we let it rip. It's a picture of a shrinking, sweltering malaria-plagued island inundated by climate refugees from the parched parts of the world that have been rendered increasingly uninhabitable. They will look back at this period - and the preceding years, when New Labour's record was almost as bad - and curse us, unless we build a mass movement to change the country's direction.

The evidence is plain. Yes, David Cameron hugged the huskies in opposition. But as soon as he got into government, he walked them into the Downing Street garden, and shot them in the head.

So now we know. If you are a 44-year-old man, you can drug and anally rape a terrified 13-year-old girl as she sobs, says "no, no, no," and pleads for her asthma medication, and face no punishment at all. You just have to meet two criteria: (a) You have to run away and stay away for a few decades, and (b) You need to direct some good films. If you manage this, not only will you walk free. There will be a huge campaign to protect you from the "witch-hunt" of the laws forbidding child-rape, and you will be lauded as a hero.

Polanski admitted his crime before he ran away, and for years afterwards, he boasted from exile that every man wants to do what he did. He chuckled to one interviewer in 1979: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But... fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!"

But this is not enough, it seems, for the Swiss government to return him to the United States to face trial. They have found a legalistic loophole that enables them to let him go - while admitting "national interests" may be a factor in the release. This may be a reference to pressure from neighboring France to free their citizen. As a Swiss citizen, I think I can say without being offensive - we all remember the bargains Swiss governments have made in the past to preserve their "national interests." This is in a long tradition of helping criminals and calling it Swiss hard-headedness.

The campaign to release Polanski has leeched into the open a slew of attitudes that I thought were defeated a generation ago. Whoopi Goldberg said it wasn't "rape-rape." Others hinted darkly that she wasn't a virgin at the time of the rape. So if a 13 year old has been raped before, she's fair game for all future rapists?

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who led the campaign, said a little bit of child molestation isn't his problem when Great Art is at stake. He wrote: "Am I repulsed by what he got up to? His behavior is not my business. I'm concerned about his movies. I like The Pianist and Rosemary's Baby." That's worth saying again: this campaign was led by a man who thinks the drugging and raping of a child is "not my business," when compared to a film about Satan inseminating Mia Farrow.

The novelist Robert Harris, who is a friend of Polanski's, said: "It strikes me as disgusting treatment." He wasn't talking about the child-rape. He was talking about the attempt to punish the child-rape. He said Polanski was being subjected to a "lynch mob." Where is this lynch mob? All I can see are people patiently suggesting the law should be enforced, and he should be given a fair and open trial. This is the polar opposite of a lynching: it is sober justice.

Do these defenders of Polanski understand what they are saying? Do they mean it? Harris has four children. If a great film director drugs and rapes them tomorrow, will he call the police, or will he say it would be "disgusting" to do so? Would he say the police and prosecutors trying to protect his children were a "lynch mob" and shoo them away? If the rapist ran off, would he say that after three decades on the run (boasting about his crime) he should walk free? I doubt it. So why do Harris' words suggest he thinks Polanski's victim is worth less than his own children?

Now the campaign has succeeded. So congratulations to Whoopi and Bernard and Robert: an unrepentant, bragging child-rapist won't face his day in court, thanks in part to you. Have fun at the victory party. But -- just a word of advice -- you might want to leave your daughters at home.

The media has been lasciviously describing every blood-flecked cranny of the murder spree in Northumbria this week, while blankly ignoring the most important question – did we help to pull the trigger? Every time there is a massacre by a mentally ill person, like Derrick Bird’s last month, journalists are warned by psychologists that, if we are not very careful in our reporting, we will spur copycat attacks by more mentally ill people. We ignored their warnings. We reported the case in precisely the way they said was most risky. Are we now seeing the result?

At first, this question will sound baffling. Raoul Moat would obviously have been paranoid, abusive and mentally ill even if newspapers and television had never been invented. He wasn’t made this way by reading about Derrick Bird. So what’s the media got to do with it?

Dr Park Dietz is America’s leading forensic psychiatrist, and he has extensively interviewed many of the country’s most notorious mass murderers, from Jeffrey Dahmer to Andrea Yates. His research found that, in a country the size of the US, “saturation-level news coverage of mass murder causes, on average, one more mass murder in the next two weeks”. Given Britain’s size, that makes Moat’s massacre strikingly punctual.

But how can this be? Let’s start with two examples of copycat epidemics that have been proven to be triggered by unrestrained media reporting. The first is forgotten now, but was once one of the biggest stories in the world. In 1982, a still-unidentified maniac in Chicago placed cyanide capsules in a popular over-the-counter pain remedy. Seven people died. It became the most covered story since the Kennedy assassination – and there was suddenly thousands of copycat cases or threats. By 1986, there were more than 4000 a year. Each new case made the hysteria balloon further.

Dr Dietz suggested the media coverage had created an epidemic of copycatting. He implored journalists to restrict their coverage of product-tampering to the local area in which it occurred, where it would be presented in a more sober, restrained tone. They finally agreed. Within months, the cases of product tampering were in dramatic decline. As the media coverage shriveled, so did the threats and the tampering. Who, today, has even heard of it?

The evidence is clearer still when it comes to suicides. We have known for a long time that when the media reports on a high profile suicide in detail, there will be a significant surge in the suicide rate. In the month after Marilyn Monroe killed herself, the suicide rate in the US rose by 12 percent. There are over 42 scientific studies showing that this is part of a general trend: the more intense and detailed the coverage, the more copycats you create. The night an episode of Casualty prominently showed a character taking an overdose, the overdosing rate in Britain rose by 17 percent.

It works the other way too: when the media shows restraint in reporting suicide, there is a dramatic decline. For example, from 1983 to 1986 there was a huge rise in people hurling themselves in front of trains on the Vienna subway system. Each jumper provoked a rash of lurid news stories recounting the victim’s life at length. Finally the press, urged by the Austrian Association for Suicide Prevention, agreed to stop reporting on suicides. Within a year, the rate had fallen by more than 50 percent, and it has never gone back.

Obviously, the media doesn’t make people suicidal.: nobody is that distressed by an episode of Casualty. But it does provide people who were already feeling suicidal with several tools – a guide to how to do it step-by-step, a role model, and a narrative where suicide seems inevitable and suffering finally ends. This helps to erode their internal resistance. It pushes many that last fatal inch.

Can the same thing happen with mass murderers? We certainly know that mass killings come in clusters so often that more than coincidence is at work. For example, in the year before the Columbine High massacre, there were two threats of shootings in Pennsylvania’s schools. In the 50 days after it, there were 354. This pattern seems to hold true in every culture: last August, a schizophrenic janitor in China stabbed 14 children, prompting a huge media telethon-autopsy. Soon after, a bus driver stabbed 24 kids, a teacher stabbed 16 children, and on and on.

Dr Dietz believes – based on his long experience interviewing mass murderers – that he understands the process at work here. “Mass murderers are almost always depressed to the point of suicide, and angrily blame others for their problems,” he tells me. “You’ve got to imagine this small number of people sitting at home, with guns on their laps and a list of people they hate in their minds. They feel willing to die. When they watch the coverage of a mass murder, one or two will say – ‘That guy is just like me! That’s the solution to my problem.’… They will say this quite openly to you when you interview them. It’s a conscious process… The massacre seems to offer them both an escape from their unbearable pain, and an opportunity to punish the people they blame for their plight.”

Suddenly, they are shown a path where their problems won’t be trivial and squalid and pointless. No: they’ll be the talk of the entire country. They’ll be stars.

The way we report these cases can make that man more likely to charge out of his house to kill, or less. The psychologists say that currently we are adopting the most dangerous tactics possible. We put the killer’s face everywhere. We depict him exactly as he wanted, broadcasting his videos and reading out his missives. We make his story famous. We present killing as its logical culmination. We soak him in glamour: look at the endless descriptions of Moat as “having a hulking physique” and being “a notorious hard man.”

We present the killer as larger than life, rather than the truth: that these people are smaller than life, leading pitiful, hate-filled existences. The journalist Dave Koppel suggests we may as well run a sidebar in every newspaper asking: “Are you a hate-filled sociopath? Are you upset because you have an intense feeling of superiority to other people, even though you have accomplished little or nothing? Your hateful screeds will not meet our standards for publication as a letter to the editor. However, if you perpetrate a mass murder, we will put your picture on our front page, publish your writings there too, and do our part to ensure your name is remembered forever.”

What’s the alternative? The American Psychological Association, in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, suggested some simple guidelines. Don’t show the killer’s face, or incessantly repeat his name. Don’t repeat any of his manifestos or grievances. (They’re always tedious drivel anyway.) Don’t glamorize him. Don’t offer up a 24/7 drumbeat of excitement. Report the facts soberly. Where there must be coverage, lead with the victims’ stories at length. Make them human. We should hear the name of Chris Brown, the man he murdered, more than Raoul Moat’s. In general: play down the coverage. Don’t give the killer what he wanted.

Yes, in an internet age, it’s hard to keep these things totally out of the public view – but we know from the suicide studies that sheer quantity and repetition and prominence can make all the difference. If the killer’s name and face and ravings are tucked away on some obscure site, it’s far less dangerous than having him smirking down at us from every media outlet in the country.

Is this so hard? Journalists do exercise self-restraint sometimes: we could publish, say, the route the Prime Minister’s children take to school, but it because that would be a foolishly risky and serve no public interest, we don’t. Doesn’t this fall into the same category? Shouldn’t the Press Complaints Commission develop strict guidelines now so we don’t run this same slaughter-script next time?

If we don’t, we will be making a cold calculation - that flashier front pages and extra revenue in a slow summer is more important to us than saving innocent lives. Is the British media more interested in making a killing than in preventing one?

slogan of every political party in Britain today is: “Fetch the axe!” There is a frenzy to find ways to slash spending stalking through every Westminster corridor, as if our national life has morphed into a posher, duller remake of The Shining. Never mind that cutting spending so soon after a recession is terribly dangerous, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, and could well create a double dip recession. Never mind that, in fact, Britain’s national debt has been higher in every single year since 1750, through all the booms and all the busts, except for two fleeting 30-year gaps. Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!

But if you are determined to seek immediate cuts, there is a rational place to start: with a government policy that costs billions, yet backfires badly. We have a prison system that costs a fortune – £41,000 per prisoner, per year – but places us in greater danger. In the Eighties, Conservative home secretary Douglas Hurd called prisons “an expensive way of making bad people worse”. From that low point, the system has imploded even further, and you and I are more likely to be robbed, mugged or glassed as a result.

This lock-’em-in-the-bogs reflex has become bog-standard in a system close to collapse. Since 1993, the number of prisoners in Britain has risen by more than 70 per cent, as jail became a first resort for politicians posing as hard men. People have been arrested for such heinous crimes as collecting and selling lost golf balls, stealing birds’ eggs, cutting down a hedge, exaggerating the test results of school children and shouting abuse at somebody with a suntan. More women are now in jail for shoplifting than for any other offence.

But as the number of prisoners has swollen, the prison budget has barely budged. As a result, prisons have turned into dank, damp warehouses, with the education, drugs and mental health wings shut and shuttered.

There are now two prison systems in Britain. There is the one described in the press, in which prisoners live in pampered luxury, having pedicures as they watch plasma-screen televisions. Then there is Her Majesty’s Prison Service, which doesn’t quite answer to that description. These prisons – as I have seen as a reporter in jails across the country – are exemplified by what happened at HMP Doncaster last year. The prison had been forced to cram 
so many people into tiny concrete cells designed for one that it ran out of space. So it decided to put beds in the toilets, and lock people in them.

You might be thinking: “Why should I care? Prison isn’t supposed to be fun.” You’re right that punishing people is an essential part of the system – and it is certainly in place. But prison is also supposed to be about rehabilitating prisoners so that when they come out, they won’t make victims out of you, or me, again. That part of the system has been all but abolished. Within a year of being released, 47 per cent of prisoners are back to crime. Among young men, it’s 73 per cent. Within two years, almost all are committing offences once more. There’s nothing inevitable about this: in Denmark, it’s just 27 per cent. That’s a huge number of robberies and knifings and rapes that they prevent, and we don’t.

What explains the difference? Most people who get banged up are illiterate, addicted, or insane. In Denmark, they get education and treatment; in Britain, they get worse. An extraordinary 82 per cent of prisoners in Britain can’t write to the level expected of an eleven-year-old – yet less than ten per cent are given literacy lessons.

Instead of turning criminals around, the prison system curdles them even further. An incredible 70 per cent of prisoners have two or more diagnosable mental illnesses, and ten per cent are severely mentally ill – but there is almost no treatment. In the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs, I once found a 45-year-old man called Anthony who had been arrested for walking around his neighbourhood naked. He was diagnosed by doctors as suffering from severe brain damage caused by repeated epileptic fits. When he shuffled towards me, clutching a bag of rubbish, he asked if I was the judge at his trial. Then he asked if I was his father. He mumbled incoherently in half-sobs for half an hour. When I left, he kept saying “Dad, Dad, why are you leaving me, Dad?"

Crime policies are presented in a tabloid drumbeat as a choice between being tough or soft. But the choice is between being smart or stupid. Is it tough to jam an addict into a toilet cell to rot – or is it just stupid to ignore the evidence that they will be more likely at the end to mug my granny?

Here’s where the politicians’ axe could be useful. Violent offenders should go to jail – but they make up only 16,000 of prisoners. For the rest, there is an option ten times cheaper but proven to be more effective in reducing crime. Give a hefty community sentence as punishment, where they earn money that goes to repay their victim. At the same time, require them to attend education or drug treatment or mental health hospitals, as needed. A study by Professor David James found that when an addict or mentally ill person is given treatment, they are 50 per cent less likely to offend than if sent to jail. That’s a lot of rescued victims.

Britain has been here before. In the late 19th century, there was a mania for jailing people who were mad, addicts, very young or guilty of minor offences. In 1908 a young Liberal politician said this was “uncivilised”, and as home secretary he began a halving of the prison population. Crime fell because prisons were better able to rehabilitate the hard-core that remained. The politician’s name was Winston Churchill. Was he soft – or was he smart?

This article appeared in the last issue of GQ magazine, where I write a monthly column. (It appeared before Ken Clarke's speech about prisons, suggesting some of this might now happen.) To subscribe, go to http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/

When David Cameron and Nick Clegg stood on the doorstep of Number Ten Downing Street to declare their ConDem coalition to the world - shiny and smiling and suddenly yoked together - every journalist in Britain reached for civil partnerships as a metaphor. Till Elections Us Do Part... for richer or richer... With this ditched policy on inheritance tax, I do thee wed... But what will the new government mean for actual gays? Should we be scared, or celebrating?

In the run-up to the election, something extraordinary happened to the gay vote. When he became Tory leader, David Cameron realised that gay people are a hugely important voting block: we are 5 percent of the population, disproportionately likely to vote, and disproportionately living in urban swing seats. So he worked hard to strip the Tory brand of its long history of anti-gay crusades. This was tricky, because until 2005 Cameron had been a firm supporter of the homophobic Section 28 and he savaged Tony Blair for "moving Heaven and Earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools." But nonetheless, he apologised, got a Tory Party conference to applaud his newfound support for civil partnerships, and promoted openly gay candidates. It seemed to be working: with six months to go to the election, 39 percent of gays were primed to choose the Conservatives, more than any other party. It looked like a moment of real optimism, when homophobia had
been driven out of mainstream British politics, and gay people could choose from across the political spectrum.

But then, under the heat and lights of the election campaign, the Tory claims to modernisation seemed to suddenly melt away. Cameron did two interviews with the gay press - and both were disasters. In his interview with Attitude, he lied when he claimed he had never voted against gay adoption. When we showed him the vote in Hansard, the parliamentary record, he simply mumbled: "Well, that's not my recollection." When we read him the comments of the far-right politicians he has chosen to ally with in Europe, calling gay people "faggots" and "paedophiles", he refused to say these comments were homophobic. In his interview with Gay Times, when asked about the contradictions in his record, he was so stumbling and uncertain that he eventually demanded they stop recording, and stammered: "Can we stop for a second?... I'm finding it... I'd almost like to start again from scratch... I'm finding the whole thing actually..." and turned bright red.

Then it got worse still. Cameron's Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, was caught on tape saying it should be legal for Bed and Breakfast owners to refuse to rent rooms to gay people - and Cameron refused to sack him. Does anybody doubt that if Grayling had been caught saying B&Bs should be allowed to throw out black people, he would have been fired on the spot? Then a leading Conservative candidate, Philip Lardner, announced that homosexuality is "not normal behaviour" and he would "not encourage children to indulge in it."

And then came the worst revelation of all. The Observer newspaper alleged that a leading Cameroon Conservative, Philippa Stroud, had been involved in trying to "drive demons" out of gay people and transsexuals, in ceremonies at her extreme evangelical Church. One transsexual victim told them: "The session ended with her and others praying over me, calling out the demons. She really believed things like homosexuality, transsexualism and addiction could be fixed just by prayer." Stroud refused to comment directly on the story, and has not answered repeated inquiries about whether she believes gay people are possessed by demons. David Cameron refused to condemn her. The Tory rebranding had bled from a Richard Curtis film to a remake of the Exorcist.

After all this, the Tory vote collapsed to just 9 percent, according to a poll for Pink News. That means Cameron managed to attract only half the number of gay voters that Michael Howard, the author of Section 28, achieved in 2005. Given how close the election result was, it's fair to say It's the Gays Wot Lost Cameron His Majority.

And yet, and yet... we still got Cameron as Prime Minister. He immediately appointed as Minister for Equality Theresa May, a woman who supported Section 28, opposed an equal age of consent, and as recently as 2008 voted to discriminate against lesbians. Some Equality.

He got only 36 percent of the national vote - but the Liberal Democrats decided to team up with him. To a lot of gay voters - who opted for the Lib Dems more than any other party - this was a real shock. A YouGov poll of Lib Dem voters found they describe themselves as "leftwing" over "rightwing" by a ratio of 4:1, and most thought they were voting to stop Cameron, not install him.

How will they work with the Tories on this issue? The Liberal Democrats, and Clegg specifically, have a superb record on equality for gay people. They were the first party to demand the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the first to demand the huge advances that were finally made under the last Labour government. In his political career, Clegg has consistently supported renaming civil partnerships marriage and ending the ban on gay men giving blood. Most impressively, he demands much more intrusive inspections of schools to ensure they are clamping down on homophobic bullying - and he was brave enough to say in his interview with Attitude that there should extra monitoring of faith schools, where homophobic bullying is significantly worse. During the election campaign, pictures emerged of him when he was a (hot) student at Cambridge, playing a gay man in a play. Clegg is sincerely and deeply committed to equality for gay people.

So... There are reasons to be worried about the new government, for sure. The most pro-gay government in British history has been defeated. There are now a slew of weird and gay-hostile Tory backbenchers back within reach of power, and a Tory Prime Minister who is reduced to stammering incoherence on this issue. But before he is anything else, David Cameron is a vote-seeking automaton - and he knows there are more votes in being pro-gay than in being a homophobe, so I suspect he will try to throw us some bones over the next few years. It's possible civil partnerships will be renamed marriage, and the blood ban will end. And if the ugliest instincts of the Tory party do prevail, I am sure Clegg will block them: it is impossible to imagine him as Deputy Prime Minister supporting anti-gay prejudice.

Few gay people will be inclined to toss confetti over the Clegg-Cameron civil partnership, and I certainly won't. But, on this issue, we don't need to panic either. Britain has come too far, and the British people have become too liberal, for us to be dragged back into the 1980s.

This article appears in the current issue of Attitude, Britain's best selling gay magazine. I'm a contributing editor. To subscribe, go to www.attitude.co.uk

We are emerging now from a long dream- boom, built on a mess of financial trickery rather than on producing anything worthwhile. In the Nineties and the noughties we didn’t become more efficient or more productive – we simply became better at being conned. All the “triumphs of deregulation” bragged about by market fundamentalists from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair were built on a nitroglycerine- base of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. The profits went almost entirely to the richest one per cent, while the bill after the burst goes to all of us.

It will take years to drive out all the delusions that cropped up in the mirage years. Even now, the bank lobbyists are fighting against re-regulating their sector – with the money we gave them in the bail- out. A few addled market fundamentalists are still singing their old tunes, warning that regulation will lead to “disaster”, as if the disaster hasn’t already happened in the system they midwifed into the world.

But under the cover of this row, more bad ideas are trying to crawl out of the rubble unnoticed. One of the most dramatic changes in the fake years was the transformation in pay for people at the top. In 1980, the average CEO in America and the UK took 42 times the average worker’s wage. By 2000, it was 531 times. Did CEOs become 12 times more effective? Or was this another trick of the boom-light?

The answer – and the solution – lies in an excellent book by the business writer David Bolchover called Pay Check: Are Top Earners Really Worth It? (Coptic, £11.99) It contains a stark contrast. In 2008, the CEO of the world’s largest and most successful bank earned £150,000. His name is Jiang Jianqing, and he runs the Industrial and Commerce Bank of China. By contrast, the head of the most unsuccessful investment bank earned £22m. His name was Richard Fuld, and he ran Lehman Brothers.

How does the CEO class in Britain and America justify the gap? It has constructed what Bolchover calls the “talent ideology”. Just as Rio Ferdinand is one of a handful of men who can kick a ball with great skill, just as Angelina Jolie is one of a handful of women who can pack out the multiplexes, so there is a handful of people who can be CEOs of large companies. They determine whether corporations rise and fall. They carry billions on their backs. For great talent, you must pay great cash.

But is it true? If you look at the biggest surges in CEO pay, they bore almost no relation to their "talent" at all. You can prove it on a graph. To pick just one example: CEO pay at the top of the global investment banks soared when the overall global economy was booming. Then, when the global economy sank, their pay dipped a little (although never even close to the level it had been before the boom). In truth, as Bolchover explains, "Whether he had talent or not was irrelevant. He just happened to be the head of a company that was performing, more or less, as it would have done with a different leader... He was not a hero [or] a dunce. He was just there." It's like paying the captain of a ship a massive bonus when the tide comes in, and then dipping it a tiny amount when the tide goes out, while he brags about his "genius" at every turn.

The same principle runs across many industries. The CEOs of oil companies can rake in half a billion dollars a year when the oil price is high – but how is that their achievement? Conversely, after the crash, CEOs who could not have shown less talent – who oversaw the destruction of their companies – walked away with fortunes. No: “talent” was always a cover for seizing the most they could get. In practice, these men were setting their own wages, with little supervision from shareholders. Imagine you could go into work tomorrow and do the same. Wouldn’t you be earning more than you are today – or than you deserve? I hereby demand that GQ pay me £40,000 for this column, now, with a £20,000 bonus for meeting my deadline and an extra £10,000 for not torching their offices.

Yes, there is a real talent in being a CEO – but it is not especially rare. Bolshover argues that there are a dozen people in the hierarchy of any large company who would be as plausible a CEO as anybody who gets the job, and dozens of contenders who could be poached from a competitor, and hundreds in other fields.

Of course, the very same people who told us the market would deal efficiently with subprime mortgages and credit default swaps are throwing up their hands and saying that the market will deal efficiently with CEO pay. But it doesn’t, and it won’t.

There is a better way. Bolchover suggests when a company has narrowed its CEO selection down to six good candidates, it should ask everyone on the shortlist to name the lowest wage and bonus package they are prepared to work for. The one who comes in with the lowest bid should get the job. (There would be a reasonable floor to make sure independently rich people didn’t fill them all by offering to work for £1.)

Plenty of extremely able people would be happy to run a major corporation for a fraction of the current pay: the prime minister earns £130,000 a year, and there’s no shortage of candidates. Government regulation should make this standard practice. Suddenly, instead of the endless puffing up of CEO pay, it would start to fall to reasonable levels. It would be hugely popular: a poll for the Financial Times found 80 per cent of us think business leaders are overpaid.
It would be a sign – at last – of a return to sobriety after the crazed, confected amphetamine rush of the boom-dream.

This column appeared in the June issue of GQ magazine.

David Cameron has asked Niall Ferguson to rewrite Britain's history syllabus. Here are the articles I wrote about precisely who this man is, and another about Cameron and Ferguson's close friend Andrew Roberts who has also apparently been offering advice. If we were a country that took its past atrocities seriously, this would be a national scandal. 

So the yellowish liberal haze has now parted and we are Camer-on. The Prime Minister and George Osborne this week showed the first flick of their knife, marking out the areas they intend to cut much more deeply into over the next five years. Who have they decided can afford to take the pain first? Not rich people like them: they will continue to enjoy big state subsidies to build up their savings and maintain their estates. No. Step forward instead the unemployed, poor kids who are falling behind in their reading, children in care, the elderly, the disabled, and any feeble little steps we were making towards building a low-carbon economy.

Very few people in Britain would say our first move during a recession should be to shut down programmes that get the growing number of young people with no qualifications or training into their first job. Yet that is what the Conservatives have done. I've seen in my own part of east London how the Future Jobs scheme takes demotivated and lost kids and gets them into paid, on-the-job training for six months. It was too small, for sure – but now the programme has been abolished altogether, along with the £1,000 subsidy for employers who take on anyone who has been on benefits for more than six months. The Tories say they are not making cuts to "the front line" – but don't the long-term unemployed, stuck on £60 a week, live on the front line of British life?

The next set of cuts is well disguised. When you hear that the Communities Department has taken a 27 per cent cut, it sounds anodyne: what is it anyway? It's the money that goes to local authorities to pay for home help for the elderly and disabled, for monitoring children at risk, and children in care. Osborne has said he doesn't want councils to make up the difference by increasing council tax. So, very soon, there will be a big increase in the number of confused old people left unwashed and untended, and abused kids we never find in time.

Many of these cuts will end up costing us money in the long term. Over the past few years, children – mainly in poor areas – who have not been able to learn to read have been given special one-on-one tuition to get them up to a decent standard, rather than tumbling through their school years getting more confused and angry. Literate people are far less likely to commit crime and much more likely to pay taxes later in life. Cameron just closed the programme. The same child who loses her reading tutor now also won't get a small Child Trust Fund of £2,000 when she turns 18 – thanks to a Chancellor of the Exchequer who lives on an £4.2m trust fund of his own.

David Cameron's claims to care about global warming also just drowned. The subsidy to build wind turbines, the encouragement to buy electric cars – all gone. His massive cuts in the transport budget will make the trains and buses worse, pushing more people into their cars. They have even cut our low spending on flood defences – a bad idea on a stormy island as we go into a century where sea levels will rise.

Of course, the Cameroons say they have no choice but to do all this, because we are "bust". There is currently a £178bn-a-year gap between what the Government takes in, and what it spends. But there are two crucial questions here: when the Government should close this gap, and how it should close it.

It seems logical to pay off a debt as soon as possible. That's what you and I, as individuals, should do. But everything we have learnt about economics since the 1930s shows that behaviour that is rational for an individual will be disastrous for a government during a recession. At a time like this, consumers naturally spend less, causing demand to fall. This causes the economy to get worse still. This spiral can only be broken by the government borrowing and spending money to get the economy moving again. The reason why our Great Crash hasn't been followed by a Great Depression is because governments have done just that.

Now Cameron wants to stop the stimulus. That's what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1937 – and it triggered a collapse, requiring far more state spending in the end. FDR cursed his mistake. The economists who were most prescient about the dangers of the 1990s, including Nobel Laureates Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Professor Paul Krugman, say there is little risk of Britain going the way of Greece, since our national assets are vastly more valuable, but there is a big risk of a double-dip recession being Os-born from these policies.

Better a deficit than a depression. Better to pay interest tomorrow than the dole to millions more today. And when the time for closing the gap does come, there is a much better way to do it – by closing the income gap. The first people to pay should be those who can afford it: the wealthy. For example, the 1,000 richest people in Britain have added £77bn to their wealth in the past year alone. Can't they afford to make sacrifices a little more easily than a 17-year-old on the dole?

It looked at first like the Liberal Democrats had managed to inject a serious piece of progress into the Tory programme by insisting on an increase in Capital Gains Tax back to 40 per cent. This would hurt only wealthy people with shares and second homes. But there are signs that Osborne is now backing off from this pledge after a rebellion from the Tory backbenches, who – hilariously – say it hits "the middle class". The median income in Britain is £23k a year: how many of them own second homes? This policy is a key test of whether the Lib Dems really can tame the Tory right.

One obvious next step would be to restore the top rate of income tax to the level it was for the first decade of that notorious red, Margaret Thatcher: 60 per cent. The right says people will leave in droves and the Exchequer will end up with less. But they said that when the last government increased the top rate to 50 per cent – and it turned out that the number of rich people leaving actually fell by 7 per cent.

There are many other creative ways to raise extra funds. In California, they are about to hold a referendum on legalising and taxing cannabis – a move that would bring in $1.4bn in revenue, and save over $20bn in pointless police prosecutions and imprisonments. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fan: will former cannabis smokers Cameron and Clegg do the same?

And cuts? The entire bill for the current wave could have been covered simply by ending the war in Afghanistan, which more than 60 per cent of British people say is "unwinnable". Over the long term, we will have to pare back more of our massive military spending, which more often simply stirs hatred against us than it does any good.

And there is a smorgasboard of subsidies for the super-rich waiting to be dismantled. To pluck one random example – why do we give the Duke of Westminster, who is worth £5bn, an estimated £326,000 a year to "maintain" his land?

But Cameron has not chosen any of this. He has chosen instead to start his slashing early, and to target it the weakest and the greenest. Prime Minister, the 1980s are calling – and they want their dogma back.

Should Britain be giving refuge to Islamic fundamentalists, while sending the men and women who have been brave enough to challenge Islamism back to their deaths? This sounds at first like a straw man question. Who would ever suggest such a policy? Who would defend it? But the facts suggest we are doing it, every day.

On the day when the Special Immigration Appeals Commission decided to allow two Pakistani men they say are al-Qa'ida members to remain in London this week, two other young people were waiting for the British police to seize them and hand them over to men who will kill them. Their "crime" is to resist Islamic fundamentalism, in the name of human rights.

Kiana Firouz is a 27-year-old woman who grew up in revolutionary Iran, and slowly realised that if she ever acted on her natural impulses – to kiss and hold and love another woman – she would be subjected to a hundred lashes. If she did it again, she would be hanged, in a public square, before a jeering mob. But Kiana believed the freedom to fall in love was more important than her own safety. She stood up in Tehran and made a film showing that there are gay people there just as there are gay people everywhere, and they deserve to live and love freely. The police began following and threatening her. She knew what had happened to other gay Iranians – a bullet, a ditch, a lynch mob – so she came to a country she associated with freedom for gay people, Britain, and appealed to us to save her life.

We refused. The Home Office told her to go back to Iran and be "discreet" about her sexuality. But the law in Iran doesn't say discreet lesbians get out of jail free. They are tortured and killed just the same.

Dr Amit is a 29-year-old Pakistani who has asked me not to use his surname, for reasons that will become clear. He grew up in the Punjab, but since he was a young child, he found the religion that was relentlessly promoted by the state and the mosque and the schools absurd. Where was the evidence for this "God"? Why should we follow "His" dictates?

In 2008, he began to write a series of articles online, criticising Islam and all religions. He knew that people are jailed and tortured and executed for critically analysing Mohammed or the Koran or the power of institutionalised Islam within Pakistan, but, again, he believed somebody had to ask these questions, or no progress would ever happen. He knew the police would come looking. So he came to a country whose philosophical and intellectual traditions of scepticism towards religion he revered, and asked us to save his life.

We refused. He was told to go back and be "discreet" in his opposition to religious fundamentalism. But his articles are there, online, for the not-so-secret police to read and torture him for. By the time you read this, he will have been forced on to a plane. He told me: "I will try to hide myself somehow – change my name, not contact anyone I knew before. Maybe then I can survive. I'm terrified."

The courts have condemned Kiana and Amit, but at the same time, they have given a reprieve to Abid Naseer and Ahmed Faraz, who they say are strong al-Qa'ida sympathisers. (Remember though: this was a Kafka-trial where the defendants were not allowed to hear the evidence against them.) The judges ruled they cannot be deported to Pakistan, because there is a serious risk they could be tortured or executed by the Pakistani authorities.

Let's leave aside the repellent double standard for a moment and, for the sake of argument, assume the courts are correct about their affiliations. It is instinctively maddening to have to allow people to remain in Britain who despise many of the great things about this country – freedom for women and gay people and freethinkers – and pine for a theocracy that negates it all.

But that does not mean it is wrong. Would you ever hand a human being over to a torturer who was waiting with a blow-torch and a pair of pliers to take them apart? I doubt it. Our government mustn't do it either. No matter how despicable a human being is, they must be protected from torture and murder. That's why we can't send them back – although we should, of course, put them before a real trial immediately if they were involved in plots to commit murders of their own.

Far from showing us to be weak in the face of Islamism, this would show true strength. The Islamists say we are an empty materialist shell of a society, a brothel that believes in nothing but our own self-gratification. What better refutation is there than to say – here's what we believe in. We believe that torture is absolutely wrong. We believe it so strongly that even you – you, who hate us, and want to kill us – are protected from it.

This approach is far more effective than the neoconservative screeching for the water-board and the B-47. When I interviewed the growing movement of young Muslims in Britain who had been jihadis and trainee suicide bombers but have recanted and are now arguing for democratic values, I was struck by one thing. Every time we behaved like actors in an Osama Bin Laden rant-tape – by torturing and killing civilians in illegal wars – they became convinced he was right and resolved to kill us back. But when we refused to play to that script, doubt crept in.

To give one example of many, Majid Nawaz was in prison for being part of a hardcore Islamist plot to try to topple the governments of Egypt and Pakistan and seize its nukes – but when Amnesty International campaigned to protect him from torture, he realised the "Infidel" were rescuing him, because we have strong moral principles of our own. Now he is one of the most articulate campaigning enemies of Islamism. Of course, few Islamists will recant – but they are stripped of some of their most powerful recruiting tools and intellectual reinforcements when we sincerely oppose torture and murder.

So, yes, Naseer and Faraz should be kept safe from torturers and tried here because it is the right thing to do, and because it shows why the liberal way – if we follow it, instead of Bushite lunacies – is far better than their way.

But if we are going to protect them, how can we possibly not protect the people who are brave enough to stand up in Iran and Pakistan to denounce everything Islamist thugs try to force on innocent people? This isn't just about basic humanity. It is in our interests, too. There is a battle of ideas going on in Muslim societies between fundamentalists, and sane people who are happy to live alongside people who are different. At first, voices for secularism will be intimidated and small and scattered, as they were in the history of our country. But over time they will prick holes in fundamentalist certainties and bleed them. The more the fundamentalists are challenged – by their own countrymen, in their own language – the safer we become.

Brave, bold voices like Kiana's and Amit's do more to undermine Islamic fundamentalism than a thousand bomber-planes that only vindicate the Bin Laden narrative for so many. By sending these remarkable dissidents to die, we aren't only betraying them – we are endangering ourselves.

We are all supposed to now laze back and watch the latest Richard Curtis film: Politics, Actually, a charming tale of two 43-year-old rich men who have to run Britain together despite having different colour ties and eccentric armies of supporters tossing buns at each other in the background. Larks and hijinks no doubt ensue. But before you reach for the popcorn, can I briefly refer back to the will of the British people, before our ballots are so casually binned?

David Cameron went into this election with every conceivable advantage – a half-mad Labour leader randomly insulting his core vote; a comically biased media; a massive financial advantage over his rivals, flowing from a tax haven in Belize; 13 years out of power; a major recession – and yet he got only 36 per cent of the electorate to endorse his vision. To be fair, let's assume the 3 per cent who voted Ukip also broadly prefer it, and call it 39 per cent. Against this, 55 per cent of us voted for parties of the (relative) centre-left – the same proportion who say they want a country that is less unequal and less unfair. In any other European country, where they have democratic voting systems, it wouldn't even have been close. This would have been a centre-left landslide, with Cameron humiliated.

Elections are supposed to be an opportunity for the people to express the direction in which they want the country to travel. By that standard, this result is an insult. Don't fall for the people who say the Lib Dem vote was "ambiguous": a YouGov poll just before the election found that Lib Dem voters identified as "left-wing" over "right-wing" by a ratio of 4:1. Only 9 per cent sided with the right. Lib Dem voters wanted to stop Cameron, not install him. So before you start squabbling about the extremely difficult parliamentary arithmetic, or blaming the stupidly tribal Labour negotiators for their talks with the Lib Dems breaking down, you have to concede: the British people have not got what they voted for.

So what kind of government will we now get? There are two possibilities – and nobody (including Cameron and Clegg) knows which it will be yet. The first is a muzzled and castrated Conservatism, where the Lib Dems stop the Tories doing their worst, and smuggle some progress under the radar. There is some evidence for this. As part of the coalition deal, Clegg got the Tories to ditch a few of their ugliest policies – like giant inheritance tax cuts for double-millionaires – and got them to accept some excellent Lib Dem ones. Schools will now get a big cash bonus for taking in poor children, reversing the social apartheid in our playgrounds. There will now be considerably higher taxes on Capital Gains – the shares and second homes owned by the rich. Planes, the most environmentally destructive form of travel, will now face higher taxes. It's a shaming indictment of New Labour that they didn't do all this years ago.

Clegg deserves real credit for these changes – although it will be very hard to get any of this past the parliamentary Conservative party, who are now even more right-wing than before. To pluck just one example: an incredible 91 per cent of them don't believe man-made global warming exists. This oddball rabble are five times bigger than the Lib Dems, despite getting only 13 per cent more support.

Which leads to the second possibility: that the Lib Dems can only splash a few yellow dots on to a deep-blue juggernaut. This is what a lot of the Conservative right are gleefully anticipating. Fraser Nelson, hardcore Thatcherite editor of The Spectator, boasts this will be "a radical reforming Tory government with Lib Dem backing vocals". Indeed, it may be worse. Startlingly, during the negotiations, the Lib Dems actually talked the Tories out of their commitment to ring-fence spending on the NHS, dragging them to the right. Nelson smirked: "You gotta love these Lib Dems." In this vision, Clegg's sweet smile makes it easier for Cameron to drop the Rohypnol into our drinks.

In this febrile Dave New World, the Labour leadership election matters even more. Cameron and Osborne are committed to turning off the stimulus and cut-cut-cutting now, even though we aren't safely out of recession: check out the history books for 1937 to see what happens next. All their instincts are to cut services for people at the bottom and the middle. So long as the President of Argentina doesn't invade the Falklands, they must be odds-on to lose the next election – provided Labour gets this right.

So before the personality parade begins, Labour needs to ask – what did it get right over the past 13 years, and what did it get wrong? The right-wing policies pushed by the Mandelson Tendency that were supposed to make them "electable" were, in the end, albatrosses dragging their support down – from the City-licking that made us so vulnerable to the crash, to the one million killed in Iraq. By contrast, it was the true Labour achievements that remained popular: redistributive tax credits, doubled spending on the NHS, the minimum wage.

David Miliband is the candidate of the people who poisoned the New Labour years with right-wing fantasies. Peter Mandelson is merrily pushing him as the Blairite who can most attract wealthy donors and remains unrepentant about Iraq. His brother, Ed, is much more appealing: he gets global warming more than almost any other British politician, and injected some social democratic steroids into the Labour manifesto. Yet both Milibands – raised in a cerebral, highly political family – speak with a peevish anti-populism that doesn't communicate well.

While everyone is concentrating on the drama of two brothers standing against each other, there's a family battle that should matter more. It looks like Yvette Cooper is standing aside for her husband, Ed Balls – but she is a far more impressive candidate, and should be urgently pressed to reconsider. The politics of the next few years will feature a bunch of wealthy men shutting down SureStart centres, ending Child Trust Funds, sandpapering down tax credits, and increasing unemployment. Who better to oppose that than a down-to-earth young mum who has herself spent time on the dole when she got ill?

Cooper is rooted in the Labour tradition – her grandfather was a miner, her father was a trade unionist – but she has the ability to speak beyond it to the real Middle England, who earn on average £23k a year. In government, she piloted some of its most popular progressive policies, from SureStart to free fruit for all schoolchildren to tax credits. She defended them on TV in the election better than anyone else I saw: she's clever (a First from Oxford) but entirely normal, an unusual combination. Labour hameorraghed female voters at this election, while women in all parties were relegated to the role of silent beaming wives. It ended with a cabinet that has only one more woman than Afghanistan's. Isn't Cooper a great attention-grabbing antidote? Or do we still live in a 1950s world of brilliant women stepping aside for their less impressive husbands?

But whoever Labour chooses, it looks like we are about to face years of a ConDem coalition we didn't vote for and don't want. I hope I'm wrong and Clegg really will tame the Tories – but I'm braced for this movie turning into One Shotgun Wedding and A Bloody Long Funeral.

This is likely the last day of a Labour government – for a parliament, for a generation, perhaps forever. And amid all the canvassers and the swingometers and the hum about a hung parliament, I can't stop thinking about where this all began, on a day that was very like today, and yet not like today at all. May 1st 1997 seems to have dissolved into a few scattered cliches now: Things Can Only Get Better; the sun rising over the Royal Festival Hall; the sun setting on Michael Portillo. But beneath these discarded Kodak-moments was a hope-song. I was 18 years old the day my friends and I skived off college to go and cheer outside Downing Street at the vanquishing of the Conservatism we had – in our tiny way, with our little wooden pencils – helped to bring down.

If this were a film, it'd be tempting to slam-cut to the gurning ghost of Tony Blair that strutted across this election campaign – orange and wild-eyed and bloated by his millions, pursued by people who have a powerful case that he should be in prison for war crimes. It would be a film about betrayal. We thought we were voting for a more equal Britain when in fact the "filthy rich" – to use the term Peter Mandelson purred – became filthier and richer and crashed the global economy. We thought we were voting for "an ethical foreign policy" when we got a war that killed a million civilians, and complicity with torture.

That's one story about this Labour government, and it's a true one. But it's not the full story – and if we carried only that tale to the polls today, we would be guilty of a betrayal of our own.

When you remember the country that we voted to leave behind on May 1st 1997, what do you see? I remember the science block in the sixth form college I was studying at, where they couldn't afford to fix the roof, so every time it rained, water seeped through, and lessons had to stop. I remember my friends who earned £1 an hour, because there was no legal limit on how little you could offer a human being for their labour. I remember one of my closest relatives having to decide whether to buy nappies or heat her flat, because there were no tax credits, and single mothers were the subject of a Tory hate campaign. I remember how it felt to grow up gay and discover I could never have a legally recognised relationship. I remember my elderly neighbour waiting two years for a hip operation on the NHS, crying every night with the pain.

None of those things happens in Britain today, and it's not by fluke. Spending on public services has risen by 54 per cent since 1997, paid for by higher taxes. The result? Nobody is on a waiting list for more than 18 weeks – and the average wait is just a month. Nobody goes to school in buildings that are falling apart. Nobody can be legally paid less than £5.93 an hour. The poorest 10 per cent receive £1,700 in tax credits a year each – meaning their children get birthday parties and trips to the seaside, and parents who aren't constantly panicked about how to buy food at the end of every week.

Is this any comfort to an Iraqi child orphaned by British bombs? Is it any comfort to a kid imprisoned in Yarl's Wood, whose only "crime" is to have a parent seeking asylum? No. That's why you have to join the groups arguing for justice all year round, whatever party is in power: democracy isn't a twice-a-decade trip to the polling booth, but a constant ongoing process of monitoring and pressuring your government.

But I can't deny it is a real difference – and it wouldn't have happened without that vote, that day. How do we know? Because the Conservative Party opposed every one of these changes. Under them, all the horrors of the Labour years would have happened, plus some, without any of the progress. Even in an age of retrenchment caused by the global recession, the differences between the parties will matter – perhaps even more. Cameron has made his priorities plain: he will introduce a lottery-style £200,000 tax cut for the richest 3,000 estates in Britain, the people he knows best, while slashing his way through services for the rest. It's a policy more extreme than anything Thatcher advertised in advance.

And it will worsen. Cameron says he wants to model his economic policies on Ireland's, where the government has opposed any economic stimulus and introduced drastic and immediate cuts. As the economist Rob Brown explains, after they introduced this strategy, there began "an astonishing 15 per cent shrinkage in the Irish economy overall – the sharpest contraction experienced by any advanced industrial nation in peacetime". Unemployment is close to the highest in Europe: Irish eyes are weeping at this full-colour reshoot of the 1930s headed our way.

The British people don't want to slump back into Conservatism. That's why, even in the very best-case scenario for Cameron, more than 60 per cent of us today will vote against him, for parties to his left. So how do we stop him seizing power against the will of the majority?

First, we have to remember that, as Noam Chomsky says: "Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing. The cliché makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing. You get less evil." On polling day, you have to vote to limit the damage, and the rest of the year, you join the campaign groups that fight for the good. Under our 19th-century voting system, you can only choose the most unambiguously good option – the Green Party – in one constituency, Brighton Pavilion, where they might well win. Everywhere else, if you are serious about producing the least damage, you need to find the main anti-Tory force in your area.

Put your postcode into torymergency.webfreehosting.net/ to find out who it is. If we, the anti-Tory majority, cast our ballots smartly, we will strip Cameron of a majority – and make it more likely we'll finally get a democratic voting system, so we don't have to make these squalid compromises any more. But if you choose to split the anti-Tory vote in your area, you should know: you will be more likely to wake up tomorrow and find David Cameron in Downing Street to the tune of Things Can Only Get Worse.

The gap between Labour and the Conservatives is far too small, but a lot of people live and die in that gap. If you say this difference doesn't matter, you are saying all these people whose lives have been changed since the sun rose over the Royal Festival Hall that morning in May don't matter to you. You are saying to the call-centre worker paid five times more because of the minimum wage, the gay couple getting a civil partnership, or the old woman who doesn't have to wait two years to be able to walk again – that difference in your life isn't worth a cross in a box to me. Wouldn't that be a betrayal as ugly as New Labour's? Don't these people – the beneficiaries of what we all did on May 1st 1997 – deserve more than a defeated and dejected sigh to protect them from the Tories?

 This is a dispatch from David Cameron's Britain, the country that could be waiting for us at the other end of the polling booths and the soundbites and the spin. I didn't have to take a time machine to get there; I just had to take the District Line. In 2006, a group of rebranded "compassionate Conservatives" beat Labour for control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, a long stretch of west London. George Osborne says the work they have done since then will be a "model" for a new Conservative government, while Cameron has singled them out as a council he is especially "proud" of. So squeezed between the brownish dapple of the Thames and the smoggy chug of the Westway, you can find the Ghost of Cameron Future. What is it whispering to us?

Hammersmith and Fulham is a sprawling concrete sandwich of London's rich and London's poor. It starts at the million-pound apartments on the marina at Chelsea Harbour – white and glistening and perfect – and runs past giant brownish housing estates and Victorian mansions, until it staggers to a stop on Shepherd's Bush Green, where homeless people sit on the yellow-green grass drinking and watching the SUVs hurtle past. Here, high incomes squat next to high-rises in one big urban screech of noise. In such a mixed area, the Conservatives had to run for power as a reconstructed party "at home with modern Britain". They promised to move beyond Thatcherism and make the poor better off. They were the first to hum the tune that David Cameron has been singing a capella in this election.

People who took this at face value were startled by the first act of the Conservatives on assuming power – a crackdown on the homeless. They immediately sold off 12 homeless shelters, handing them to large property developers. The horrified charity Crisis was offered premises by the BBC to house the abandoned in a shelter over the Christmas period at least. The council refused permission. They said the homeless were a "law and order issue", and a shelter would attract undesirables to the area. With this in mind, they changed the rules so that the homeless had to "prove" to a sceptical bureaucracy that they had nowhere else to go – and if they failed, they were turned away.

We know where this ended. A young woman – let's called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council's emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would "investigate" her situation to find "proof of homelessness" – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.

For four nights, she slept in the local park, on the floor. She is still traumatised by the memories of lying, pregnant and abandoned, in one of the wealthiest parts of Europe. The Local Government Ombudsman investigated but the council recording of the case was so poor she said it "hindered" her report. After a long study, she found the council's conduct amounted to "maladministration". Since they came to power, the Conservatives are housing half as many homeless people as Labour – even though the recession has caused a surge in homelessness. That's a huge number of Janes lying in parks, or on rotting mattresses by Hammersmith Bridge.

Why would they do this? The Conservative administration was determined to shrink the size of the state and cut taxes as an end in itself. Rather than pay for it by taking more from the people in the borough with the most money, they slashed services for the broke and the broken first. After the homeless, they turned to help for the disabled. In their 2006 manifesto, the local Conservatives had given a cast-iron guarantee: "A Conservative council will not reintroduce home-care charging". It was a totemic symbol of leaving behind Thatcherism: they wouldn't charge the disabled, the mentally ill or the elderly for the care they needed just to survive.

Within three months, the promise was broken. Debbie Domb, 51, is a teacher who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994. She had to give up work, and now she needs 24/7 care. After being lifted up by a large metal harness and placed in her wheelchair so she can talk to me, she explains: "This was always such a great place to live if you were disabled. You were really treated well. Then this new council was elected and it's been so frightening... The first thing that happened when they came in was that they announced any disabled person they assessed as having 'lower moderate' needs was totally cut off. So people who needed help having a shower, or getting dressed, had that lifeline taken away completely. Then they started sending the rest of us bills."

She "panicked" when a bill came through saying she had to pay £12.50 for every hour of care she needed. "I thought, 'Oh my God, how am I going to do this?' The more care you need, the higher your bill, so the most disabled people got the highest charges. Everyone was distraught. I had friends who had to choose between having the heating on in winter and paying for their care ... I know a 90-year-old woman with macular degeneration who can't see, and she had to stop her services. There are lots of people who have been left to rot, with nobody checking any more that they're OK, and I'm sure some of them have ended up in hospital or have died." One of the council's senior social services managers seems to have confirmed this, warning in a leaked memo that the charges could place the vulnerable "at risk".

Debbie co-founded an organisation to fight back – the Hammersmith and Fulham Coalition Against Community Care Cuts – and, after appealing, she finally had her charges cancelled. "But there are a lot of people who can't appeal," she says. "You're talking about very vulnerable people – the very old, the mentally ill, the blind. A lot don't know how, or would be ruled to have to pay anyway, because the rules are so arbitrary. Now they're being taken to debt-collection agencies for non-payment. I know an 82-year-old woman who's never been in debt in her life who is being taken to a debt-collection agency for care she needs just to keep going... They want volunteers to do it instead. But you don't want to have to ask your friends or a volunteer to pull up your knickers for you."

Each year since the Conservative council was elected, the pressure on the housebound has increased. Meals on Wheels brings one good, hot meal a day to people who can't get out. The council jacked up the charges for it by £527 a year – so half of the recipients had to cancel it. A local Labour councillor documented that the council rang up a 79-year-old woman with dementia, and when she seemed to say she didn't need any food, they cut off her meals.

The cost of almost all council services has sky-rocketed, to fund tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy. David Cameron says he wants to make Britain "the most family-friendly country in the world" with "childcare as a top priority", but his showcase council has increased charges for childcare by a reported 121 per cent – a fact that makes the warnings about Michael Gove's planned "top-up fees" for nursery places seem even more ominous.

As I spend days walking across the borough, I find the detritus of the old thriving public sector now shut and shuttered. Next to a big council estate I stumble across the large red-brick Castle Youth Club. It was built in Dickens' time and bequeathed to the local council "to benefit the children of this area for perpetuity". The Conservatives shut it down two years ago to sell it off. The deal fell through, so now it sits empty while the local kids hang around on the streets outside.

***

Ricky Scott, 18, tells me what it used to be like: "It was a really good place. When I left school they found me a part-time job at Sainsbury's – they taught me how to write a CV – and they persuaded me to go to college. They gave you a place to go to stay out of trouble, they got you into the gym, they helped us learn loads of stuff ... They did a lot to teach us about knife crime and how to stop it. When my friend was stabbed they helped us organise a big campaign about knives." After the youth club was closed, there was a surge in anti-social behaviour orders in the area. Ricky isn't surprised. "People don't want us on the streets, but then they take away the only place for us to go, so what do they expect? It feels like we used to have some good things but now they've all been taken away. It always gets taken away."

And in this boarded-up youth club, in Debbie's panic, in the image of Jane and her bump on the floor of the park, I realise I am peering into the reality of David Cameron's "Big Society". The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody opened their home to Jane, or volunteered to feed Debbie, or started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed. It's a rebranding trick. The Conservatives know that shutting down public services sounds cruel, while calling for volunteerism sounds kind – but the effect is exactly the same. It's as if Marie Antoinette called in Max Clifford, and he told her to stop saying "Let them eat cake" and start saying: "Let them form a workers' co-operative to distribute cake on a voluntary basis."

But it turns out that it's not just the services on the council estates here that are threatened by the council – it's the estates themselves. Recently the leader of the Conservative council, Stephen Greenhalgh, co-wrote a pamphlet called Principles for Social Housing Reform, recommending that Cameron adopt a radical new approach to council housing. He said it provides "barracks for the poor" and helps create "a culture of entitlement", while "deliver[ing] a risible return on assets". He asked: why do we continue to "warehouse poverty in the core of our great cities", on land that is worth good money? Instead of following "the same narrow agenda of 'building more homes'", he said councils should "exploit [the] huge reserve of capital value" in the houses and the land by selling it off and charging "market terms", with some mild subsidy for the very poorest.

He seems to be trying to act on this agenda. He has stopped building any affordable houses for rent, and he is searching for council estates to sell off. I walk to the Queen Caroline Estate along the river, and it is one of the most calm and bright council estates I have ever seen – a walkway of houses and flats lined with trees, all washed over by a gentle river breeze. Teenagers are playing on a football pitch; an elderly couple is watching them, eating sandwiches. Everyone I talk to says they like it – "You've got a good mix of people, and it's so friendly," says one woman. On the other side of the Thames, staring down, is the £25,000-a-year St Paul's School, where Greenhalgh was educated alongside George Osborne in the 1980s.

Greenhalgh has declared that this estate is "not decent", and has offered it for sale to property developers. Maxine Bayliss is a 42-year-old mother who lives here with her two children. She says: "It's frightening to discover there are plans to sell off your home so they can give the land to rich developers. At first the council denied it, but when we challenged them they finally said, yes, we do have plans, actually. One Conservative councillor shouted at me that this was a ghetto and I shouldn't want to live here. Does it look like a ghetto to you? This is my home, it's my children's home. If they charged market rents, people like me would be forced out of London totally. This should be a city for normal people too, not just rich people. It's so insulting to say people like me shouldn't be living here."

Together with a coalition of other mums from the estate, Maxine has formed a group to stop the sell-off. When David Cameron came on one of his visits to the area to cheerlead for the council, she asked him about the threat to her home – and he accused her of "black propaganda". When she explained that the council itself had admitted to having plans, Cameron snapped: "If you don't like them, you should stand for election."

***

Do we want our cities to look like Paris, where the rich own the centre, and the poor are banished to grey concrete slums on the outskirts where they riot with rage once a decade? If we hive out all our housing to the market, that will be our future. Or do we place a value on our land – and who lives there – that is more than purely financial? Do we think some things are more important than the market price? Later that night, I watch Greenhalgh on YouTube, lecturing these single mothers, and I keep thinking about that phrase he is so fond of: "a culture of entitlement". Who has really grown up in "a culture of entitlement": Maxine, who has so little, or Cameron and Greenhalgh, who have so much?

I walk the borough for days, trying to find what Cameron celebrates about this council – until, at the tip of the borough, I find a large grassy metaphor for Conservative priorities that seems so crude that I wonder whether it could have been secretly designed by the Socialist Workers Party cartoonist and plonked in my path. Hurlingham Park was a big vibrant patch of green where kids from the local estates could play, and run on one of the few professional running tracks in the country, in a setting so classically beautiful it was used in the film Chariots of Fire. But then the Conservatives were elected. They handed the park over to a large international polo consortium that has ripped out the running track and shut the park down for a month every year – so rich people can watch polo for hundreds of pounds a day.

Lying in the sun on the edge of the green, I find Nick Anderton, a 17-year-old from the local estate. He stares at it sadly and says: "The park is meant to be for everyone, isn't it? But we have to stop our football now so they can get it ready so these people can play polo, and we won't be able to use it for most of the summer ... My friend used to run on the track every day, he wants to be an athlete, but they got rid of it so he can't now ... It feels like we don't have the right to be here any more. They've taken our park and given it to these snobbish people who've got nothing to do with this area. Look at us. Does it look like we need a polo pitch round here?" Later, I read that Monty Python came to this park to film one of their sketches: "The Upper Class Twit of the Year."

So what is Cameron so proud of here? There seems to be only one answer: in this area the Tories have managed to cut council tax by 3 per cent. They've given back about £20 a year to somebody on an average income, and about four times more to a rich person. That's why, when Cameron was challenged about what has happened here, he said: "When I look at the record of what the Conservatives have done here in Hammersmith and Fulham, far from being embarrassed as the Conservative leader, I'm proud of what they're doing." As I heard this, I remembered that earlier this year Cameron's close friend and shadow cabinet member Ed Vaizey said Cameron is "much more Conservative than he acts, or than he is forced to be by political exigency". The principles that run through Cameron's politics seem to become visible at last, as clear and as stark as the Westway on the Hammersmith skyline: tax cuts, whatever the social cost.

Is wielding the Hammersmith hammer really worth it? Is cutting taxes by a fraction justified if it means abandoning the most desperate people – the homeless, the disabled, the poor? Is that who we want to be? The last time I see her, Debbie Domb tries to move a little in her chair – painfully, slowly – and says: "People should look at what they have done to us in Hammersmith. This is what Cameron and Osborne want to do to Britain. They say so. Remember, the people running this council said before they were elected that they were compassionate Conservatives. I can see the Conservatism. Where's the compassion?"

 ...by clicking here. We argued about housing, immigration, faith schools, and more.

A leader describing himself as a "compassionate Conservative" is on the brink of victory. He has shown his party has changed. He puts his black and Asian supporters out front. He promises to "unleash" the potential "of volunteers to ... change our country". This time, he says, his party "will be different". It is the year 2000, and his name is George W Bush. It's no surprise to discover that George Osborne said in 2002 that "we have much to learn from Bush's compassionate conservatism". They are following the Bush script to the mis-spelled letter.

Most parties offer only scattered clues to the electorate about what they will do when they get power, buried in baskets filled with cotton wool and fluffy bunnies to distract us. Read Thatcher or Bush's pre-election speeches and they're pleasingly fuzzy. You have to infer the big, swooping changes they will make from the small tilts in direction offered in policy documents - and Cameron's small policies are surprisingly revealing.

Revealing Policy One: Today, 1,600 British people are killed every year just doing their job, putting us behind many poorer countries for workplace safety. They are people like Michael Adamson, a 26-year-old electrician who went to his job one day and was given a massive electric shock because his employer hadn't bought a £12 piece of safety equipment. The average fine for killing one of your workers is £2656.

Yet David Cameron is promising to dismantle the very weak protections currently in place, and replace them with a system where corporations will be able to "organise their own inspections", carried out by a team of their choice. Cameron's people justify this by pointing to made-up stories in the right-wing press claiming health and safety inspectors spend their time stopping children playing conkers. UCATT, the astonished construction workers' union, has been protesting outside Tory HQ, with members dressed as the Grim Reaper. Michael Adamson's sister, Louise, who is a lawyer, says:"Cameron's proposals are outrageously dangerous. They will end with a lot more people dying. It takes the very light touch regulation that gave us Lehman Brothers and Enron, and applies it to workplace safety. This time it's not money you lose, it's lives. This isn't about conkers, it's about people like my brother, who could have been saved for £12." This policy suggests Cameron instinctively puts corporate profits ahead of the the safety of ordinary people - a dangerous habit to act out in Downing Street.

Revealing Policy Two: Today, most serious crime in Britain comes from cross-border criminal gangs - whether it's jihadism, human trafficking, or paedophile rings. Until recently, the police had to rely on a slow, confusing tangle of different agreements with each individual country in Europe when trying to track these criminals - and many hardcore criminals escaped as the police waded through bureaucratic treacle. So Europe's police forces, including Britain's, proposed a single, simple procedure called the European Arrest Warrant: one swift standard for serious crime. It has been a superb success story. It meant we busted some of the worst paedophile rings and jihadi cells in the world, and are now shutting down the Costa Del Crime, where British gangsters fled for decades to Spain beyond the reach of our extradition agreements.

But David Cameron's Conservatives oppose the warrant, calling it "over-reach by Brussels". Of course he wants to catch jihadis and paedophiles; but his hostility to European co-operation trumps that desire. He chooses dogmatic Europhobia over pragmatic British needs - and we should assume he will continue to.

Revealing Policy Three: Most British people now acknowledge that heroin addiction is an illness. Yes, it begins with a bad choice by an individual, but it can rapidly become a ravaging sickness beyond their control. Sadly, even the very best rehab in the world fails for 80 per cent of addicts, who soon relapse. So what do we do with the 250,000 people who can't stop? Over the past two decades Britain has followed Europe in giving these people steady, clean medical prescriptions of the substitute drug methadone. Wherever this policy is introduced, burglary and robbery rates fall dramatically, as addicts stop stealing to feed their addiction. As the former deputy drugs tsar Mike Trace told me:"These prescriptions are the secret reason why crime has fallen so much under the current government."

Iain Duncan Smith has been put in charge of Tory drugs policy by Cameron, and has dismissed this approach as "methadone madness". He says that addicts live an immoral "half-life" and government policy should be to force addicts off substitutes and direct them towards voluntary abstinence groups like Narcotics Anonymous. Doctors and charities who work with addicts are incredulous. Danny Kushlick, of the drug charity Transform, says:"If the Tories acted on their current rhetoric, what would actually happen is clear. If they can't get the drug from the doctor, you'll have hundreds of thousands of addicts getting it on the street. You would see a huge increase in street heroin use, and everything that goes with that - burglary, shoplifting, prostitution, homelessness, and far more HIV and Hepatitis C infections as the level of injecting went up. It would be a public health and crime disaster, in place of sensibly reducing harm." Cameron's policy suggests he prefers finger-wagging moralism to a calm study of consequences.

Revealing Policy Four: Cameron says he is demanding spending cuts not because he has a theological belief in a small state, but because they are necessary to pay off the deficit - but this claim is undermined by the fact that he wants to strip funding from state programmes that actually save us money. Look for example at SureStart, the network of 3,000 children's centres across Britain built under the current government. They are based on a fascinating series of discoveries. It has been proven that most poor children fall behind in language skills and stimulation long before they ever walk through the school gates - and they never catch up. The first few years of life are crucial for the formation of a child's mental abilities. Get them early and give them intensive encouragement, with expert advice for their parents, and you can change their life.

This isn't speculation. In 1964, they launched the first SureStart-style project in Michigan - and Dr Lawrence Schweinhart and a team of academics has been monitoring the kids ever since. Did it work? Well, they were 50 per cent less likely to become teenage mothers than their siblings who weren't put in the programme, and by the time they were 40, they were 46 per cent less likely to have been to prison and 26 per cent less likely to be on welfare. Their incomes were 42 per cent higher. So for every £1 you spend on it, you save the state £7 further down the line. Yet Cameron, on becoming Tory leader, dismissed SureStart as "a microcosm of government failure". Now he says he will keep it in some form, but already he says huge chunks of its budget will go to other things, and few expect it to survive long. If he can't keep the single best policy for reducing inequality - one that costs less than nothing in the medium term - what shreds of progress can survive his rule?

You don't have to scrape off much of the glitter and gloss to get to Cameron's less-than-fluffy Bush. Who really wants this cocktail of market fundamentalism, Europhobia, and haranguing of the vulnerable for the next five years?

 ...by clicking here. We argued about inequality, arresting the Pope, and more. The audio of the Cambridge debate will follow soon too.

When did this switch from an election scripted by Charles Saatchi to one painted by Salvador Dali? If I had told you a month ago that Gordon Brown would be despatching naval warships to Spain, David Cameron would be jostling with a man dressed as a chicken and down to 30 per cent, and Nick Clegg would be identified alternately as "the most popular leader since Churchill" and a Nazi, you would have called for Nurse Ratched.

But something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

To understand what these forces are, you have to start with a fact that is usually kept obscure: Britain is a country with a large liberal-left majority. Eighty-five per cent of us say the gap between rich and poor should be "much smaller", and a majority would get there by introducing a maximum wage that caps the incomes of the rich at £135,000 a year.

Fifty-eight per cent support a dramatic increase in the minimum wage. Fifty-eight per cent want to ditch Trident – an act of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Seventy-seven per cent want to bring the troops home from Afghanistan now, or within a year at the latest. Fifty-three per cent say people come out of prison worse than they go in, and would rather spend money on more youth clubs than on more prison places.

Across most policies, our views are to the left of all three parties. (These statistics are all from Mori, Ipsos or YouGov polls.) And Brits hold these views even though they are constantly told by the media that they are marginal, impossible, or mad.

Ah, you may say, but that's just what people tell pollsters. They vote for the polar opposite: look at Thatcher's victories. But look again. At every election where Margaret Thatcher stood, 56 per cent of the British people voted against her, for parties committed to higher taxes, higher public spending, and lower inequality. The media declared this to be a "landslide" endorsement of her programme of deregulation that continued for decades, and has now crashed the global economy.

Yet in this election, one of those distorting forces – the media – has been bypassed for an electrifying moment, and the second force, our dusty 18th-century voting system, may break entirely on election day.

The British media is overwhelmingly owned by right-wing billionaires who order their newspapers to build up the politicians who serve their interests, and marginalise or rubbish the politicians who serve the public interest. David Yelland, the former editor of the Sun, bravely confessed this week that as soon as he took his post, he was told the Liberal Dems had to be "the invisible party, purposely edged off the paper's pages and ignored". Only a tiny spectrum of opinion was permitted. Everyone to the left of Tony Blair (not hard) had to be rubbished – even when their policies spoke for a majority of British people.

The TV debates, then, were a very rare moment in which a slightly more liberal-left voice could speak to the public without the distorting frame of pre-emptive abuse and distortion. The window of permissible opinion was opened a little – and people responded with a wave of enthusiasm. It could've been opened wider still – to the Greens, say – and found a receptive audience too.

The reaction of the right-wing press to briefly losing the ability to frame how politicians address the public has been a frenzied panic worthy of Basil Fawlty. They have "revealed" Clegg is a paedophile-cuddling, Gaddafi-licking foreigner and crook who wishes we had lost the Second World War. But now – for a change – people can test the smears against what they see and hear with their own eyes, unmediated, on TV.

Rattled, the right-wing press now demands Cameron start publicly thumping the table and articulating the agenda he whispers to them behind closed doors, and can be uncovered in his policy documents: big cuts in public spending, big tax cuts for the rich. But Cameron sees the polling and the focus groups, and he knows the public loathe his real agenda. That's why his performances in this campaign are so stilted. Once Cameron is forced to address us directly, without being bigged-up by the Murdochracy he has promised to feed and fatten, he withers under the weight of his own deception.

For a moment, the media demonisation of the liberal-left was switched off in favour of equal time and open access – and it revolutionised our politics. If this happened day in, day out, how would our national conversation change?

The second force that badly skews Britain to the right is – I'm sorry – a coma-inducingly dull subject. Even as I mention it, I have to start guzzling Red Bull – but we are now seeing plainly why it matters. At the moment, we have a 19th-century voting system system called First Past the Post (FPTP) which tosses out perverse results – and might be about to produce the most perverse of all.

It is based on a crude principle. An MP is elected if he has more votes than his nearest competitor in his constituency – even if he has nothing like a majority. In many places, they get only 20 per cent of the vote, and still win. These weird distortions only get worse as you get to the national level. Nobody ever adds up the votes at the centre and makes sure the seats in parliament resemble the votes we cast: in 2005, Labour got 100 per cent of power with only 35 per cent of the vote.

But most of the time, this disproportionately benefits the right. Why? Because the British right is unified behind the Tories, while the people who prefer a more social democratic Britain are split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Under Proportional Representation, this isn't a problem: the split left would come together and form a coalition – and the Lib Dems would be able to block Labour's worst policies, like Iraq. But under FTPT, the divided liberal majority more often loses and has to watch a right-wing minority rule. That's why the Tories in the twentieth century repeatedly got power despite being opposed by a majority.

This system is about to snap. Now the vote is pretty evenly split between three parties, FPTP can't function: nobody knows what freaky result it will throw out. Maybe Cameron will be rejected by 65 per cent of us, but still get 100 per cent of the power at the end of it.

Maybe Brown will come third in the popular vote, but still be the largest party in parliament. Maybe Clegg will come first in the vote, but get barely a third of the Tories' seats. Shouldn't this be the last election fought under rules designed for Lord Salisbury's day?

In Britain today, the liberal-left are not just a silent majority: they are a silenced majority. But in this election campaign, the forces shutting them out and breaking them up have been exposed, for a flickering moment. Do we want to go back?

Come along - you can get free tickets here.

In the election campaign here in Britain, there is a big blood-splattered hole we are all supposed to ignore. We are at war. It is a war that 64 percent of Brits believe is "unwinnable" and should end now. It is a war that has killed 281 British people and an untold, uncounted number of Afghan civilians. It is a war that costs £4.5bn a year. It is a war to keep Hamid Karzai in power - even though he announced last week: "I swear I am going to join the Taliban." Yet the three biggest political parties are shouting their slogans over the hole as if it does not exist.

So what are they refusing to see? Hamid Karzai was picked by the US and British governments as the Afghan leader most likely to serve their interests, and his regime exists solely because of massive military support from them. Yet - in a sign of how Afghan opinion has tipped after eight years of war - even he now speaks with rage against them. He says the US and Britain's planned military assault on Kandahar this summer must not go ahead because the local population strongly oppose it. He warns there is "a fine line between resistance and revolt" and soon "this revolt will turn into a resistance and I will join it."

Now Karzai is following his own script, the authors of this war have dropped all pretence that they wanted an independent democratic government in Afghanistan. For example, Rudi Giuliani, who was one of the leading neoconservatives making the case for invasion, just said: "Karzai's there because of us, he's our creation, we put him there... I'm not sure we want to engage in the fiction that we're dealing with a democratically elected [leader]... that'd be a major fiction." He said that now Karzai fleetingly follows his people's demands rather than ours, there "might be grounds for shooting" him, and "we need to think about what comes after." He then added, with no irony: "This guy's a thug."

So - we are currently sending young people to kill and die in order to prop up a sort-of-kinda-elected President who (like his people) opposes almost all our actions and is threatening to defect to The Enemy. You might think that is worth discussing. Yet when Afghanistan comes up in this election, the sole subject of complaint is that our helicopters don't work as well as they should.

Why would Karzai, and so many Afghans, and Brits like me, turn like this, after welcoming the toppling of the vile Taliban in 2001? Here's a moment that distils why. Last month, General Stanley McCrystal, the NATO commander, was talking about how he guards the massive military convoys that move through the country. He said: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

That wasn't considered a story. It didn't dominate the headlines. It was considered a normal thing to say. But imagine somebody bragging that he had shot "an amazing number" of British people, but "none has ever proven to be a threat." How would we react? Ah, the main political parties say, but all these complications and casualties are worth it, because there is a wider driving purpose to the war. They say we must stay for one reason: to fight jihadism. If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here. If we don't deprive them of bases, they'll be hitting our places.

At first glance, this may sound persuasive. But look closer. Al Qaeda's attacks don't originate in these "bases", and don't require them: 9/11 was plotted in Hamburg and Florida; 7/7 was planned out in Yorkshire. Anything that could be done in a cave in Torah Borah could be done on a mountaintop in Yemen or a moor outside Manchester: it's highly mobile. If we charge in with Bazookas to conquer one of these places, they simply move to another - and goad us to follow. General Jim Jones, Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, says there are just 100 foreign jihadis in the whole of Afghanistan. They've simply packed up and gone elsewhere. So who are we fighting there? The CIA says they are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power" and have "no goals" outside the country.

But while the war is catching or killing very few jihadis, it is creating a huge number of them. After every bombing and every massacre, there is a swelling pools of relatives who scream at the camera that they now want to become suicide bombers. Those tapes are beamed back to Britain - where they are used to radicalize young Muslims. I have interviewed dozens of ex-jihadis - and they almost all named those videos as a key point in pushing them over from repellent religious bigotry into overtly planning violence. The 7/7 bombers themselves named it; the Detroit pantsbomber was howling about Afghanistan as he tried to detonate his scrotum.

If you really loathe and oppose jihadism, you have to soberly assess the best way to erode its power over time. Charging around with a blowtorch isn't putting out the fire. Indeed, the jihadists say quite clearly that they want the war to continue for as long as possible. Osama Bin Laden brags that it gives him extra recruits and will "bankrupt" the West.

The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."

The defenders of the war are reduced to chanting "Back Our Boys!" To use the troops as rhetorical human shields to shut down democratic debate about whether they should carry on killing and dying is the worst insult to the soldiers I know. If the only way to Back Our Boys was to demand they stay on an unwinnable battlefield, no disastrous war would ever have been stopped, and we would still be fighting East of Suez. If you really want to back our boys, get them out of the crosshairs and into their homes.

You may think I'm wrong about all this. I respect that - but don't you at least think this should be part of the election debate? Don't you think you should be presented with a choice? Why has it been left to the small, unfairly marginalized Green Party to speak for 64 percent of the public on this?

In Israel earlier this year, the former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons reassured the massed ranks of the Israeli establishment that growing British disgust at the military occupation of Palestinian lands was nothing to worry about because "public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue." She was saying - don't worry; Britain isn't a real democracy - its foreign policy serves the interests of geopolitics and corporations and elites, not those messy, fickle, inconvenient majorities. It's a view that spreads far beyond our policies towards Israel/Palestine. In a fascinating leaked CIA report on European public opinion, they say they are "counting on public apathy about Afghanistan" and boast that so far leaders have been "enabled... to ignore voters". They are worried the charge into Kandahar could cause disgust, but the British election will be over by then.

This muffled cry from the caves of Kandahar is a useful counter-point to this election. It reminds us that, while the small differences between the main parties at election time do matter, they often aren't the primary force that transforms the country. Almost every civilising change in Britain - from feminism to worker's rights to opposing bad wars - came from ordinary citizens banding together and demanding it all year, every year, whether there was an election or not, no matter how unlikely it seemed, until they prevailed. The British ambassador to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill says we will be there "for a generation" more. If you want to prove him wrong, then you have to demand it publicly - long after the terribly limited ballot papers are gathered into a fake middle and tossed away.

It is very hard for the British people to make a serious choice in this election without talking about one factor above all others – class. This isn't about David Cameron's background; it's about his policies. It is a provable fact that he will redistribute wealth – substantially – but in a strange direction: from everyone in the big wide middle and bottom of British society, to the very top.

Here are the facts. He will give a £1.2bn inheritance tax cut to the richest 2 per cent in Britain – with most going to the 3,000 wealthiest estates (including his wife's). Then he promises to end the 50p top rate of tax, giving another £2.4bn to the richest 1 per cent. Then he has pledged to cut taxes on the pensions of the richest, handing another £3.2bn to the same 1 per cent. Then his marriage tax relief policies will give 13 times more to the rich than the poor. To pay for this, he will slash programmes for the middle and the skint, like the Child Trust Fund, SureStart and state schools.

But this is not called "class war". No. The nasty "class warriors" are the people who try – with hard statistical facts – to point out this rip-off by the rich. This exposes the assumptions that underpin our politico-media debate. Money being endlessly shovelled up to the top by the state is considered the natural state of affairs; anybody trying to speak for the interests of the majority is considered a rude and irrational "warrior." These premises were best rebuffed by the billionaire Warren Buffett, who quipped: "Let's face it – if there's a class war, my side's winning."

Yet the media is trying to render all of this taboo, by claiming that any discussion of class is an attack on Cameron's childhood at Eton. One front page screamed: "Now The Class War Begins!" – referring not to Cameron's policies, but Gordon Brown's mild reference to himself as "middle class." But how can the British people know what they are choosing, if we can't discuss which class will benefit from Cameron – and which classes will lose?

Yes, the differences between New Labour and the Conservatives are far too small, on this as on all issues. There are myriad ways in which the current Government has also spoon-fed the super-rich. They cheer-led the economy-crashing deregulation of the banks; they turned Britain into a de facto tax haven for non-doms; when you add it all up, a tycoon still scandalously pays a lower proportion of his income in tax than his secretary.

But it is wrong to say, on this issue, there is no difference at all. The gap is real, and millions of people live in that gap. The Institute of Fiscal Studies just published a long-term study of how Labour's tax changes have affected different classes, compared to the last Tory government. It found that the richest 10 per cent have seen their incomes cut by 9 per cent, to pay for an increase in the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent. A rich man has lost on average £25,000 a year; a poor woman has gained on average £1,700 a year. I have seen these changes among my own family and friends: gaining £1,700 is the difference between struggling to pay the bills, or being able to give your kids a summer holiday. Yes, there should have been much more – but the cigarette paper between the parties is big enough to make a pretty fat roll-up.

Cameron's policies make it pretty plain: this redistribution will be slammed into reverse by him, with state cash flowing in the opposite direction. Is this due to the fact that Cameron has lived his life in a bubble of extreme privilege, and thinks it is natural that People Like Us should be the primary beneficiaries of government action? This is a question that matters – but it needs to be answered carefully. It is idiotic to attack somebody for a decision their parents made when they were a child, or money they earned before he was conceived. There's nothing wrong with being an Etonian: George Orwell went to Eton, and went on to become the greatest left-winger this country has ever produced.

The problem isn't Cameron's extreme privilege – it is that he has never tried to see beyond it. He keeps accidentally revealing how warped his view of Britain is, and how little of it he understands. For example, Cameron said in an interview: "The papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school."

Read that sentence again. Now imagine how Britain looks from inside David Cameron's head, where the 97 per cent of us who went to day schools are "very unconventional". (In the Bullingdon Club, he called George Osborne "oik", because he had gone to the £20,000-a-year St Pauls, not the £30,000-a-year Eton.) This points to a wider mindset. The group he considers "conventional" and "normal" are the only people he has ever really mixed with, and they are the people he chooses to staff his office with today – very rich people. Is it any surprise he makes policies that serve them, not us?

But this attempt to stop the British people understanding the class differences underpinning the election campaign is part of a wider effort to stop us understanding how our society still works. Cameron keeps saying class doesn't matter any more, and "it's not where you're from that matters, it's where you're going." But today, a child born into a poor family has to be 20 IQ points smarter than a child born into a rich family to have the same income when he is an adult. To a kid born in east London, the glistening towers of the City – just a 10-minute walk away – may as well be on a different planet.

But any discussion of this is stigmatised as old fashioned, gauche, or even "spiteful." Look at how the term "middle class" is used in our political discussion. The median income in Britain – where half earn more, and half earn less – is £23,000 a year. That's the middle class. Yet routinely the media will refer to taxes on people earning more than £100,000 – the richest six per cent – as "attacks on the middle class." Even the BBC has been referring to Cameron as "upper middle class", when he is related to the Queen and, with his wife, is estimated to be worth £30m – more than 1,000 times the middle-class wage. How is that the middle? The middle of what – White's gentlemen's club? By creating a false middle in this way, they obscure how much Cameron's policies serve a tiny clique at the very top.

Labour must not be intimidated into silence on this issue. On this, it is closer to public opinion than Cameron or his media cheerleaders. Poll after poll finds 75 per cent believe Britain is too unequal, and virtually nobody believes tax cuts should not be targeted at the rich. Indeed, public opinion is substantially to the left of Labour, choosing more progressive policies almost across the board – revealing yet again that New Labour's tragedy has been its conservatism and capitulation to the right. Despite all the disinformation, the British people are whiffing the truth: a Populous poll found that 50 per cent think Cameron is on the side of the rich, compared to only 42 per cent who thought he was on the side of ordinary people.

Yet Brown keeps lapsing into a feeble technocratic line of attack instead, complaining "the Tories' sums don't add up". This will fail and fail badly. People are so disgusted by politicians they assume all their plans are lies anyway – so finding a supposed "£6bn black hole" leaves everybody cold. He needs to appeal to people's visceral instincts instead.

The truth is plain, and it is provable. David Cameron's policies will take money from the hard-working majority of Brits, and hand it to his friends and relatives on landed estates and in tax havens. He is not on your side; he is on the side of a tiny clique who have every luxury in life and now bray for even more. Cameron bragged to his supporters last month: "Nothing and no one can stop us." It's up to the majority who will lose out if he become PM to say – oh yeah?

The Conservative Party's claim to have abandoned its long history of homophobia seems to be imploding as the general election approaches.

David Cameron's putative Home Secretary has just announced that he thinks B&Bs – places open for hire to the public – should, in practice, be legally permitted to put up signs saying "No Gays". How is this different to turning away black people or disabled people or Jewish people – except that Cameron would sack Grayling if he supported discrimination against them?

Meanwhile, Cameron has given two interviews to the gay press – and both have led him to tell shocking untruths, or demand the interview be stopped.

In his recent interview for Gay Times with a sympathetic former Tory researcher, Cameron offered a few tongue-tied answers defending his record – he supported the homophobic Section 28 laws until 2005, and included it in his personal election literature – before suddenly snapping that the cameras should be switched off, and adding: "Can we stop for a second?... I'm finding it... I'd almost like to start again from scratch... I'm finding the whole thing actually..." and then he petered out. No other issue has reduced him to such inarticulate stammering.

In his interview with me for Attitude, Cameron denied voting to ban gay people from having the chance to provide an adoptive home for children in care. When I showed him the vote in Hansard, he mumbled, "That's not my recollection." He repeatedly said that he wouldn't ally with homophobic parties in the European Union, but when I showed him evidence of his closest European allies – indeed, those who were invited to address the Conservative Party conference – calling gay people paedophiles and "faggots", he simply kept repeating: "I'm not allied with parties that have views on homophobia or racism that I think are unacceptable."

Only a few years ago Cameron was attacking Tony Blair for "moving heaven and earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools". It's a statement that shows he really didn't understand what homosexuality is: did he think a child can be taught to be gay?

Now he is allowing his leading law and order spokesman to advocate open discrimination against gay people. It is the intermediate stage – when he said he "abhorred homophobia", despite choosing to ally with some of the worst homophobes in Europe – that seems increasingly like a vote-wooing anomaly.

Grayling's excuses for allowing on-going discrimination against gay people are bizarre. Nobody is forced to open a B&B. They choose to do so – and that means they can't turn away people based on arbitrary prejudices.

Gay couples aren't barging into people's homes and demanding a bed for the night. They are simply trying to use a publicly advertised service, without having the door slammed in their face because of a harmless natural difference they were probably born with.

This is a tragedy primarily for the large number of naturally right-wing gay people who want to vote Conservative.

It will be a great day for Britain when gay people can choose any party on the political spectrum, knowing it won't support prejudice and bigotry against them. David Cameron told us that day had come. His actions, alas, show that it has not.

Can you feel the election fever yet? Me neither. Britain seems to be stricken instead with election swine flu. A few of us are sweating and vomiting – Brown and Cameron, mainly – while everyone else is refusing to touch infected election-surfaces and hoping it will pass us over.

There are days when this screw-them-all sourness seems apt. In this final dissolute week before parliament is dissolved, the main parties have come together to push through two changes to the law that will harm Britain – and they have done it while putting on their serious, superior statesman-faces. One is a huge gift to Britain's armed criminal gangs; and the other deliberately exempts one reactionary super-rich family from basic democratic checks.

Almost everything you have heard about the drug "Meow-Meow" is fake – including its name. Here's the reality. Since late 2007, some young people have been using a party drug called mephedrone, which you can snort or wrap in rolling-paper and swallow. It gives you a quick euphoric ecstasy-style high, and then passes from your system. It's become pretty popular, with 33 per cent of clubbers using it, according to a study for Mixmag magazine.

This is part of a very old story: in every phase of our existence, in every culture, human beings have sought out different ways to get off our faces. In his book The Chemical Muse, Dr D C A Hillman documents how the ancient philosophers who formed the basis of Western thought were getting mashed up all the time – including when they wrote their classics. The urge for chemical intoxication is very deep – and has at some point driven everyone from Barack Obama to David Cameron.

Yet you have been told that this drug is a new and unique menace. It has killed 27 people in Britain, makes teenagers try to "rip off their scrotum", and a ban will stop the harm it causes. Each of these claims is false.

The first mephedrone death was reported last November, when a 14-year-old girl called Gabrielle Price died in Brighton after apparently taking the drug. Immediately, there were calls for a ban. Three weeks later, the autopsy found the drug had nothing to do with her death: she was killed by "broncho-pneumonia which resulted from a streptococcal A infection". But the campaign didn't pause. They were now identifying deaths from mephedrone everywhere – mainly among clubbers who had taken a huge cocktail of different drugs washed down with alcohol. In truth, one death has been found to be caused by the drug. That's one. This makes jmephedrone somewhat less dangerous than peanuts, which kill 10 people a year by causing an allergic reaction.

What about the drug's other effects? The excellent New Scientist magazine tracked down the origins of The Sun's claim that it made a teenager "try to rip off his testicles", which rapidly became an established fact in news reports. They discovered it was based on a claim that circulated on internet chatrooms, and had been written as a joke. The drug isn't even called "Meow-Meow" by anyone: that term was randomly inserted into Wikipedia just before the hysteria broke, and picked up by journalists.

Of course mephedrone could turn out to have dangerous long-term effects we haven't picked up on yet. That's true of all new medicines too, from SSRIs to new breast cancer drugs. But let's assume – for the sake of argument, in the face of the evidence – that the worst fears are true, and this drug will cause long-term harm. The people demanding a ban act as if there's a simple equation here: it causes damage, so ban it and the damage will stop. But the evidence shows this is not how prohibition works. In practice it doesn't stop people using the drug – but it does add a whole new tsunami of harm on top.

Let's start with an easy parallel. Alcohol currently causes the death of 40,000 people a year – which is around 39,999 more than mephedrone. Like most Brits, I know people who have been broken by booze, and never came back. If harm is reason enough for a ban, the case is a slam-dunk for criminalising alcohol. But we don't. Why? Because we have a mature understanding – based on history – that when you criminalise a hugely popular recreational drug, people don't stop buying it and selling it. No: all that happens is that the market is taken over by armed criminal gangs, who sell a stronger and more adulterated version of the drug, and kill to control their patch.

So what will happen in a fortnight when the ban comes into effect? It'll still be on sale to anyone who wants it. We can't even keep drugs out of our prisons, where we have an armed, guarded perimeter: Policy Exchange just found 85 per cent of prisoners can get any drug they want. Use won't fall: ketamine was criminalised in 2006, and the same number of people use it every weekend now, according to the British Crime Survey. (Indeed, it may even increase. Portugal had a higher level of drug use – especially among the young – before 2001, when it decriminalised personal possession of all drugs.)

But what will certainly happen is an early Christmas for criminal gangs. They are about to be handed a big new market – and they will buy a lot of guns to protect it. In Guernsey they criminalised mephedrone last year, and gangsters there – who find it hard to get guns – have been guarding their mephedrone patches with samurai swords. It's the logic of prohibition, in shiny silver.

And all for what? So a few right-wing newspapers and a few politicians – Labour and Conservative – can pose as Tough on Crime, while unleashing a wave of Real Armed Crime. In the name of safety from our own natural impulses, they will make us all less safe on our streets.

The same cross-party cabal is also rushing before the election to enact another pernicious legal change. There is only one group of people anywhere in Britain who are automatically placed above and beyond the Freedom of Information Act, so you and I have no right to know how they are affecting policy. They are determined by birth. Their surname is Windsor. But concerned citizens have nonetheless been able to get some information about these people, to whom we pay tens of millions a year, by requesting to see the exchanges between Charles Windsor and ministers.

This is how we know he has been demanding NHS funds be used for junk science like homeopathy, trying to cancel building projects he personally finds ugly, and trying to thwart real and potentially life-saving science like nanotechnology research.

Now ministers are moving to hide these demands from the public forever by changing the law to make even these communications permanently secret. How will he act behind an even stronger veil of secrecy? Former ministers like Nicholas Ridley have described how Windsor would "scream" at him and "throw" papers if he – an elected politician – didn't accept his royal demands. Soon, we will be even less likely to find out about this abuse of democracy.

When the main parties band together to pursue such foolish policies, it's easy to turn off (and reach for the mephedrone). But there's another way. There are terrific groups campaigning against these policies – and virtually every bad policy out there. On drugs, the Transform Drug Policy Foundation campaigns for a sane strategy of taking drugs back from the armed gangs and legally regulating them. On the Windsor family, Republic campaigns for Britain to finally select our head of state by voting lines, not blood-lines.

So before the nausea-inducing election begins, it's worth stopping for a second, and remembering this is how most political change happens. Not primarily by choosing between parties bunched in the middle, but by ordinary citizens banding together by setting up or joining or volunteering for groups like this, and demanding better policies, even if it takes decades for them to finally be accepted in Westminster.

If this election feels like a bout of swine flu, remember there's a batch of Tamiflu waiting on the shelf – becoming a diligent, committed campaigner for political sanity yourself, all year round.