Would PR stop the political pendulum swinging?

Here's the Conservatives' nightmare, and the squishy left's wet dream. There's a hung Parliament, perhaps with Labour soundly beaten into second or even third place yet clinging onto their status as the single largest party. Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg do a deal: full proportional representation, alongside sundry other constitutional tinkerings. The referendum is carried. Result: permanent centre-left government. "The danger facing the Conservatives is existential" thinks Ben Brogan. While Guido brings us a panicky email from Peter Bingle of PR firm Bell Pottinger:

If David Cameron does not become PM on 6/7th May the electoral system will be changed. The first past the post system will be abolished and there will not be a Tory government for a very long time if ever again. Perhaps John Major will go down in history as the last Tory PM.

These gloomy assumptions spring from the unstated belief - perhaps gleaned from paying too much attention to the output of the BBC - that Britain has a permanent left-wing (or at any rate "progressive" majority) and that, therefore, it is only the Labour-Lib Dem fracture, combined with the minority-rule that comes with First Past the Post, that allows the Conservatives ever to form the government.

Would a changed voting system really sink the Tory party, though?

Imagine that PR had been in place at the last general election in 2005. Labour would have been considerably short of a majority and with not much more than 35% of the vote there would have been a strong case that it had been rejected by the electorate. The Lib Dems might have propped up Tony Blair (if only as a more attractive proposition than Michael Howard) but they would have extracted some serious concessions - killing off ID cards, perhaps. At any rate, it couldn't have been worse than the past five years.

Now fast-forward to today. The coalition has struggled on to the end of the Parliamentary term, but - buffeted by recession and revelations of the way many MPs have abused the expenses system - it has become deeply unpopular. Charles Kennedy was forced to resign as foreign secretary and party leader after an incident at a Brussels summit at which he appeared to be incapable. The Chancellor, Vince Cable, is widely regarded as a doomsaying misery-guts. His rows with Gordon Brown are legendary and with the two at loggerheads economic and fiscal policy has become deadlocked. Few believe the coalition could last much longer, even without the election. Indeed, many express astonishment that it has survived as long as it has, given the contrast between the two parties. Since most Blairites were swept away in 2005, Labour has returned to a semblance of traditional socialism. The Miliband brothers, while still loyal to the coalition, are standing at the election under Liberal colours.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, as the only major party untainted by incumbency, were able to sell their message of change to a disillusioned public - among them many former Lib Dems unimpressed by their party's support of a discredited prime minister. Other voters - including many young people - have signalled their intention to vote Green. After Caroline Lucas was controversially allowed to participate in one of the leaders' debates one opinion poll put Green support at almost 30%. Wilder commentators speculated that they might become the second largest party in the new Parliament. It's certainly quite possible that they will hold the balance of power. David Cameron, it had been noted, has increased his environmental rhetoric recently as a part of a "love bombing" strategy, though the post-debate polls brought panic in Tory ranks, with senior members of the shadow cabinet touring TV studios to explain how the Green manifesto, if implemented, would prove economically ruinous.

In the end, the Green surged subsided, as anti-government feeling coalesced around the Conservatives. UKIP also put up a strong showing, as did some independent candidates who were forced by the system to stand under a collective banner - Society, Trust and Liberty (or, as one wag adapted it, Sod The Lot). While the Tories' 41% put them short of an overall majority, David Cameron managed to cut a deal with the DUP and UKIP (Nigel Farage accepting a post as health secretary, much to his own amusement) and the independents signalled that they would respect what everyone agreed was a public desire for a new government. So David Cameron walked into 10 Downing Street.

The big losers, it turned out, were the Liberal Democrats. Tainted by their association with Labour, and widely seen as fractious and incoherent, the party split. One faction, led by Chris Huhne, joined the reduced Labour benches. The other, restyling itself the Liberal Party and led by a young ex-public schoolboy by the name of Nick Clegg, signalled that it saw its long-term future as in a loose alliance with the Tories. Many on the traditional Left vowed that they would never forgive Blair for agreeing to voting reform - which, they reasoned, had doomed the Labour Party to long-term oblivion. The future, they gloomily predicted, would be one of almost permanent centre-right government.

They were, of course, wrong.
Read the rest of this article

The Chaos Election

This election is now officially fascinating.

Politically, it's dead, of course, which is why Thursday's debate degenerated into a beauty contest won by the most plausible salesman. That so vapid a performance as Nick Clegg's attracted so many plaudits is testimony both to the low level of expectation prior to the event and the fickleness of public opinion. In truth the debate was a dismal spectacle: three men squabbling for possession of a tiny patch of ground marked out for them by focus groups. That's not to say that there are not real philosophical and policy differences between the main parties; just that they weren't on display the other night. Some have been impressed by the attention to detail shown to varying degrees by all three men. They were expecting nothing but soundbites and cheap caricatures; instead there was what passed for forensic dissection of the implications of various policies. It was an illusion. The real issues - the gargantuan budget deficit, the futile and unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan, the approaching pensions crisis - figured scarcely at all.

Instead, three members of the political elite were allowed to interact with each other before a silent, and silenced, audience. That Nick Clegg came off better than the others in a three-way face-off isn't particularly surprising - he was the least familiar face, he spoke first and he had a straightforward (if disingenuous) message: I'm different. What is significant is that his victory should have been translated so rapidly into a turnaround in the polls. It was, after all, only a TV show. And we are not electing a president (even though it is so often - and deliberately - made to seem as though we are). The volatility is a sign that the electorate is unenthusiastic about any of the parties on offer, yet still sufficiently connected with the democratic process to have a residual feeling that they ought perhaps to vote for someone. Cleggmania is the last dying gasp of a bankrupt political system.

So what's so fascinating? Not the politics, but the maths. The interaction between the three main parties, combined with the uneven distribution of seats, means that the election is - in the technical sense - chaotic. It cannot be predicted. All results are possible, including a nightmare one in which the Lib Dems secure the largest number of votes and are a distant third in terms of seats, while Labour, soundly beaten into third place, romp home with an absolute majority. It could happen, though a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party - though far fewer votes than the Conservatives - increasingly looks the most likely outcome. Neither result would be remotely acceptable from a democratic point of view, and the former could result in a crisis of confidence making the expenses business look straightforward. And then what? Crowds out on the streets, as would be inevitable in a country where democracy was newer and less careworn? A collective shrug, more likely.

What is happening at the moment isn't really a democratic election. It looks and sounds like a democratic election, but it isn't. It's a game of three-dimensional chess played by statisticians and PR experts, none of whom have a clue how it will play out. That's what makes it so fascinating, but also so infuriating. Read the rest of this article

What I didn't tell the leaders

I was sad not to feature in any of the party leaders' homilies during last night's TV debate.

It's my own fault, I know.

While not in hospital for the operation I was not having to correct a rare but treatable condition, I was unable to explain to a visiting David Cameron how, owing to New Labour's obsession with target-setting and centralised top-down control in the NHS, the hospital trust was unable to access the medicines I needed but which NICE had not got round to approving. Nor did I see the troubled frown that would have crossed his features when I told him about the rat I'm sure I would have seen scurrying across the sheets as I shivered, starving, in the undignified hospital gown that New Labour had delayed replacing until just before the election.

I also missed the opportunity to let him know that while not laid up in the hospital my house was not burgled by an early-release prisoner who stole literally everything in the place to fuel his drugs habit; and I was unable, therefore, to hear his assurance that under a Conservative government there would be no such burglaries by early-release prisoners, and that even if there were I would be quite at liberty to kill any that invaded my home.

Mr Cameron would, I'm sure, have listened carefully to my succinctly-phrased explanation of how Labour's policy of inviting millions of immigrants to enter the country legally and illegally had impacted on local services. And he would have heard, with a suitably concerned expression, that as a teacher my job had been made impossible by the four hundred thousands separate boxes I am required to tick each morning. But since neither he nor I were there, we were unable to have this important conversation which would, I'm sure, have provided much material for the debate and thus improved what was generally regarded as a disappointingly flat performance.

Sadly, Nick Clegg was unable to hear my exasperation, as an ordinary hard-working citizen who expects fairness and honesty from politicians and those with power and influence in society, with the greedy bankers and spoilt arrogant MPs who had stolen all my money. He therefore missed the opportunity to assure me that none of the MPs concerned were Liberal Democrats and while some of the bankers may have been he was pretty sure that most of them were Tories.

As a black gay woman, I would have liked the chance to thank Gordon Brown for making it possible for me to have my operation in a hospital that was not only new - thanks to the private finance initiative which he wisely pioneered - but which took issues of equality seriously enough to employ many well-paid staff to monitor the race and sexual orientation of patients. This, the prime minister (who would have been on a purely low-key, private visit unhindered by the presence of journalists and film-crews) was not in a position to stress, would never have happened under a Tory government.

I'm also sorry that I was not there to hear him congratulate me on the record exam results that my non-existent children are not achieving, year on year, thanks to the record investment put in by his government. Nor did I hear him remark, as is apparently his wont, that Nick Clegg certainly agreed with him on this, as on all other policies and topics, except the most important one, which is the need for five more years of a continued Labour government.

No, I missed a treat. Still, it was fun to watch Nick Clegg's total humiliation, wasn't it? Out-classed, out-gunned, and out-of-shot, I can't have been the only one wondering why they ever let him on. Read the rest of this article

British Spinewizards Association: Setting the Record Straight

The British Spinewizards Association is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of its long-lasting legal action against the defamatory and hurtful lies of Dr Simon Singh.

Technically, the decision of the Court of Appeal went against us, in that it wrongly found that when he accused us of happily promoting bogus treatments for which there was not a jot of evidence he was expressing an honest opinion. Rather than making the scandalous claims about us that he obviously was. However, we are still satisfied that we won a resounding victory, for the following reasons:

1) Mr Justice Eady agreed with us. Mr Justice Eady is the most experienced libel judge in the country. His opinion matters far more than three tossers in the Court of Appeal, one of whom humorously styles himself Lord Judge. And expects to be taken seriously. Bogus or what? The Court of Appeal know nothing about libel and were obviously talking out their arses. So really, we won.

2) Simon Singh has repeatedly said that he did not intend to accuse us of lying. All he meant to say was that we couldn't care less about scientific evidence, which is entirely different and in no way harmful to our reputation. Get that? Simon APOLOGISED. So we have magnanimously agreed to accept his grovelling apology.

3) Our lawyers - who advised us that we could screw money out of Simon Singh by taking him in front of Mr Justice Eady - think we could have won in the Supreme Court. That's good enough for us. Simon Singh hasn't won, it's just we aren't going to give him the opportunity of losing properly.

4) Thanks to all the publicity the case has attracted, many more people not just in Britain but throughout the world are aware of the benefits of spine-wizardry in treating all manner of ailments. Business is booming. That's why our members will be happy to stump up the costs of Simon Singh's legal team. This one's on us, Simon.

We leave this libel action with our heads held high. We won the support of the country's top libel judge, Simon Singh APOLOGISED, and we have demonstrated our commitment to free speech and scientific debate by allowing his phony so-called "victory" in the Court of Appeal to stand. Basically, we won. Got it?

An alternative version of this statement (pdf) appears on the website of the British Chiropractic Association (no relation). Read the rest of this article

Why shouldn't eight year olds wear padded bikinis?

After months of campaigning by tabloids, moral-panic merchants, members of the child protection industry, the increasingly tyrannical Mumsnet and David Cameron, Primark (a shop, I'm told, that specialises in cheap imported clothing of questionable durability) has bowed to the inevitable and removed padded children's bikinis from its shelves.

The clothes-shop horror has united normally antagonistic parts of the media and the world of politics. It was, according to The Guardian's Kira Cochrane, the bikini that "should never have existed". Meanwhile, a story appearing under the headline "Paedo Bikinis Shelved" celebrated "a victory for the Sun". This may seem a strange development from a newspaper that used to feature 16-year old topless girls on Page 3 until the practice was banned, but perhaps the paper has developed a guilty conscience. Or perhaps not. Gordon Brown joined David Cameron in condemnation. "There's something wrong when companies are pushing our kids into acting like little grown-ups when they should be enjoying being children" he said.

I don't want to be contrary just for the sake of it, but what is really so evil about these garments? There seem to be two main arguments against them. First, we're told that the sight of little girls with what appear from a distance to be abnormally developed breasts will entertain - and perhaps encourage - paedophiles. Girls wearing the tops would be "made attractive to predatory perverts" as the Sun had it. A "child protection consultant" quoted in the paper went even further, saying that "It never fails to amaze me just how many High Street household names are now prepared to exploit the disgusting 'paedophile pound'." Paedophile pound? Were these items being bought by paedophiles for their own amusement? Or is any pound spent, however innocently, on an item that might appeal to a paedophile therefore a "paedophile pound"? After all, where vulnerable children are concerned you can't be too careful.

Somewhere, somehow, the justified desire to protect children from horrific abuse has metamorphosed into something that is itself pathological. "There are paedophiles everywhere!" exclaimed a concerned-sounding woman on the radio this afternoon. She sounded literally paranoid. But has anyone ever demonstrated a link between the wearing of padded bras (or other "sexualised" clothing) and actual abuse?

Has any child been abused after her age-inappropriate clothing attracted the attention of a passing pervert? Or is the argument that the mere possibility that a paedophile might glimpse such a garment is in itself a reason to ban it? Similar faux concerns have, after all, been adduced to disrupt activities that previous generations considered entirely harmless or even beneficial - parents taking photos of their and others' children performing in school plays or taking part in sports, for example, or even playing in the park or on the beach. Richard Dawkins, in a passage from The God Delusion which reads oddly in the light of his recent enthusiasm for arresting the pope, wrote that

We live in a time of hysteria about paedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692....Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).

He went on to say that, in his opinion, the Catholic Church "has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America." Oh dear. Still, his main point stands. The principle that something should be banned because it might conceivably appeal to paedophiles - which has led to legal absurdities like the recent ban on cartoons featuring imaginary teenagers - has no logical end-point. There are millions of images - quite innocent to most eyes - that might light some twisted part of a paedophile's brain. But the vast majority of people are not paedophiles, and society should stop distorting itself as though they were.

The other argument, of course, is "sexualisation", subject of a high-profile though seriously flawed report by media-friendly psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos. Thus a spokeswoman for the Children's Society criticised Primark for "premature sexualisation and unprincipled advertising". The Sun's "online parenting editor" Sam Carlisle, meanwhile, lamented the destruction of childhood innocence. "Seven year old girls still dream of ponies and pianos" she wrote, "not cleavage and fake tan. They are little kids, not Lolitas." I thought the whole point about Lolita was that she was a kid. For a newspaper as demotic as The Sun, incidentally, the class bias in Carlisle's phrase "ponies and pianos" is remarkable. But perhaps that's what really horrifies the politico-journalistic elites: these stuffed bras aren't just inappropriately sexualising, they're chavvy.

The report contained several mentions of "shocked parents" and predictions that outraged mothers would boycott the store if it continued to stock the offending garments, which "come in candy pink with gold stars or black with white polka dots." But if the bikinis are so offensive, why did they go on sale? Who was buying them? Could it be that, far from pandering to the "paedophile pound" or pushing children into premature mock-sexuality, the padded bikini-tops in fact appeal to the quite normal and healthy instincts of many young girls?

Whisper it quietly, but children are not asexual. Even if they aren't aware of sex as adults understand it, they are certainly aware of sexual roles. Much to the chagrin of blank-slate idealists who want to bring children up in gender-neutral fashion, sexual identity tends to assert itself in early childhood. Little girls are intrigued by and want to explore the world of adult womanhood. That's why they play with baby dolls - they are practising, semi-consciously, for the day when they will become mothers. That's why they play with their mother's make-up box. It's entirely natural - and innocent - for them to dress up in grown-up clothes, even stuffing their fronts with to give themselves make-believe breasts. It's not a bad thing. They are looking forward to the day they will become women.

"Let children be children" is the cry. But only adults want children to be children all the time. Adults retrospectively romanticise the childish state. Children don't. They live it; and sometimes they'd rather be grown up. Or at least pretend to be. It's part of childhood, even if it occasionally makes knowing, over-protective adults uneasy.

This is where the padded bikinis, boob-tubes and the like come in. That they should be appealing to little girls, with their bright colours and resemblance to the outfits worn by tweeny pop idols, is hardly surprising - however much they might horrify some parents. Small girls want to emulate Britney or Miley or whoever it is this week - of course they do - and Britney and Miley didn't get where they are by being dressed like bank cashiers. And while the pop stars' costumes might seem obviously sexual in nature, it is young girls, teen and pre-teen, who form (and have always formed) their core audience. How many thirty-five year old men will you find in a typical Britney gig, who aren't either gay or accompanying their daughters? Very few. For all the apparent sexualisation, it is a juvenile product, aimed at juveniles.

Another thing. How many of those kicking up a fuss about the presumed sexualisation of pampered Western preteens will be sparing much thought for the children slaving in third world sweatshops to produce these tawdry clothes at ridiculously cheap prices? Read the rest of this article

Back to the Future? A review of Red Tory by Phillip Blond

Phillip Blond's Red Toryism is high-concept political philosophy, a deliberate oxymoron, which may account for its popularity with sections of the media. That and the notion that he provides philosophical and moral ballast for the Cameron project. If Cameron wins on May 6th, this book may be seen as seminal - though it is no more likely to influence policy than Will Hutton's The State We're In did for New Labour. If the Tories don't win the election, it will be forgotten within a month.

Some of Blond's practical suggestions - centred around local community involvement and freeing public services from the deadening control of Whitehall targets and bureaucracy - have found their way into this morning's manifesto, though it's not clear to what extent, if any, he was personally responsible for them. But in any case they seem small-scale and meagre when set against the author's profoundly bleak assessment of the national condition, which takes up rather more than half the book.

His opinions will find an echo, somewhere, among many who find themselves out of sympathy with aspects of modern life. Religious conservatives of all denominations will bemoan, with him, the decline in marriage and the multiplication of pornography. Civil libertarians will share his distaste for the apparatus of a surveillance state which he is not embarrassed to call totalitarian. Daily Mail readers will like his attack on Welfare dependency, while Guardianistas will thrill to his evisceration of Thatcherism and neo-liberal free market economics. At times he sounds like a younger, less intellectual Roger Scruton, at others like Prince Charles. And throughout there's an undercurrent of barely-suppressed hysteria. "Passive and compliant," he writes, in a sentence that sums up both the tone and the content of Red Tory, "all we can do is shop."

I both agreed and disagreed with Blond's analysis, sometimes at the same time. The key point of his critique is that the monopolistic tendencies of the state and big business reinforce one another to the detriment of ordinary people and of the human-scale neighbourhood relationships that make life rich and rewarding. Society has been hollowed out. Instead, the state assumes a dominant position, and each individual's relationship with the state is one of dependence and supplication. By mitigating the worst effects of market capitalism, through the provision of basic services and a social safety net, the state makes possible the very exploitation it presents itself as counteracting. At the same time, social liberalism - and the solipsistic pursuit of individual gratification which (Blond thinks) it implies - dissolves social bonds, requiring an authoritarian state to maintain the peace. There's thus a close connection between the rampant liberalism of the markets and the increasing authoritarianism of the state, resulting in an increasingly unequal, fractured, mutually-suspicious and morally vacuous society.

"Back to the fifties" seems to be the message - though whether he means the 1950s, the 1850s or the 1250s isn't entirely clear. His evocation of the past is drenched in nostalgia. The vision he offers is bucolic and, in a sense, deeply reactionary - he complains, among other things, about the 18th century enclosure of farmland, and bemoans the decline of Northern working-class choral societies. A lot of bad developments turn out to be the fault of the Bloomsbury group. He hates television, which "presents children as sexually available"(!) and rhapsodises about real ale. Thinkers he disapproves of include not just the obvious (Adam Smith, Jean Jacques Rousseau) but Kant and John Locke. It's harder to identify who he does agree with, though he speaks highly of G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, both of whom were essentially humourists - and, well, not exactly in the same league as Kant.

More than occasionally Blond recalls WS Gilbert's "idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and all countries but his own." He praises German manufacturing prowess, Italian banking and Swedish community values. But then he lambasts Big Brother for "broadcasting casual sex between the 'housemates'", oblivious to the fact that such scenes occurred with much greater regularity in continental versions of the show. He damns the public services by pointing out that they have become less productive under Labour, while private productivity has increased by a third. That doesn't sit terribly well with his attack on big business for sacrificing human values to the bottom line, though, does it?

There are other gaping holes in Blond's analysis. In particular, he ignores the role that the market has played in lifting the standard of living of the great majority of people, bringing them material goods, cheap travel, entertainment, and indeed medicines that would have been unimaginable even a few decades ago. He says nothing whatever about immigration which, like it or loathe it, has wrought profound changes to the social fabric; but perhaps to admit this would spoil his odd vision of an unchanging community, cut off from the rest of the world and the forces of globalisation, which the markets and the state have invaded and despoiled. The book is long on rhetoric, much shorter on verifiable facts. His call for a "new politics of virtue" is so quixotic as to be practically meaningless.

Characterising the current state of society as combining private libertinism and public authoritarianism, Blond prescribes the reverse. But the past wasn't just a place of happy families and virtuous public spiritedness: it was also characterised by poverty, bigotry, low expectations and early death. The communities he hymns were stifling prisons for anyone who didn't conform to a narrow set of social expectations, for women who wanted to fulfil their potential, for gay people, and for those who lacked family to look after them. There were workhouses and debtors' prisons.

And yet, and yet... There are things here I found myself responding to. Blond's prescription for improving front-line public services by handing responsibility to front-line professionals answerable to the public rather than the administrative target-setters, for example, rings true. He suggests a model of co-ownership in which there is a direct relationship between citizens and service-providers, with the state doing little except providing resources. He argues for "a complete reversal of decades of employee mistrust and the embedding of centralised management as a result" - easier said than done, perhaps, but surely a goal worth aiming for. And sometimes I think he hits a bullseye:

The welfare state in itself is a vast body of employment, ranging from the front-line staff administering benefits to the professionals at the top managing the whole scheme. In essence, the social underclasses have become a product, the careful supervision of which gives constant opportunities both for employment and career advancement for those claiming, no doubt sincerely, to assist... Herein lies the great tragedy of the welfare state: it produces a managerial class whose interests, however unconscious or unintended, are intimately tied up with the eternal perpetuation of the problem they purport to address.

How true.

An odd mixture, then, of sensible moderation and romantic silliness. Ultimately, as befits a former theology lecturer, Blond has produced a tract - a Thought for the Day spun out to the length of a book. For all its pretensions, this is rather a shallow book. But his analysis, however sketchy, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. He's definitely onto something.


Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It, is published by Faber&Faber (£12.99) Read the rest of this article

Dawkins and the Pope

I was a bit suspicious when I read yesterday the Sunday Times headline "Dawkins: I will arrest Pope". True, the professor's pronouncements concerning His Heiliness have been somewhat theatrical of late - "a leering old villain in a frock", for example. But after telling us that Dawkins was planning "a legal ambush" during the Pope's visit to Britain, the article went on to describe the idea as a joint venture by the professor and Christopher Hitchens, backed up by two lawyers - and I couldn't help thinking it seemed much more like Hitch's style. Also, one of the lawyers mentioned, the human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC, had already had an article in the Guardian (on Good Friday, deliberately or otherwise) setting out the case he intended to put before the courts. So I guessed one or other of them must have had the brainwave, with Dawkins lending his name as additional weight.

Almost. It turns out the idea was, indeed, Hitchens'. Here's Dawkins' version of events:

Here is what really happened. Christopher Hitchens first proposed the legal challenge idea to me on March 14th. I responded enthusiastically, and suggested the name of a high profile human rights lawyer whom I know. I had lost her address, however, and set about tracking her down. Meanwhile, Christopher made the brilliant suggestion of Geoffrey Robertson. He approached him, and Mr Robertson's subsequent 'Put the Pope in the Dock' article in The Guardian shows him to be ideal. The case is obviously in good hands, with him and Mark Stephens.

Who was the high profile lawyer Dawkins suggested, but couldn't find her address? I'm guessing Helena Kennedy.

The business reminds me of the story of Camp Quest, the humanist summer camp, whose launch in the UK was supported by the Richard Dawkins Foundation with a modest contribution. The Sunday Times inevitably described it as the Dawkins Atheist Camp and presented the initiative as part of the professor's cunning scheme to indoctrinate the next generation in the faith of Atheism and Evolution. He had "come up with a novel idea to wean our children away from God" the report lied, "summer camps for would-be little non-believers." Dawkins was understandably miffed, and did his best to set the record straight. With only limited success, as the Camp Dawkins line had already been recycled on hundreds on news sites. The notion of Richard Dawkins as sort of atheist Pope, personally orchestrating anything ever done by an atheist, is almost as pervasive in the media as the idea that Benedict XVI bears personal responsibility for anything ever done by a priest, and with even less justification.

Similarly, the good professor was angered by yesterday's headline, which he described as "a straight lie". "Needless to say, I did NOT say... anything so personally grandiloquent" he insisted. The title was eventually changed to something less misleading, but which still implied the stunt was his idea. As for Hitchens, he probably would like personally to arrest the Pope; he must be getting fed up with Dawkins always being billed as Number One Atheist.

Of the four horsemen of the Popocalypse, so far it's Robertson who has put forward the most elaborate legal justification for the move. He devotes part of his article to an attempt to prove that the Vatican is not a proper country and that therefore the Pope is not entitled to diplomatic immunity. He points out that the Vatican owes its origin to the 1929 Lateran Treaty with Mussolini's fascist regime and finds it "risible" that statehood "can be created by another country's unilateral declaration." (What about Robertson's native Australia, which was brought into being by a "unilateral" act of the Westminster Parliament?) He also makes much play of the fact that the Holy See is not a full member of the United Nations but only enjoys observer status. But membership of the UN has never been part of the definition of statehood. Switzerland only joined the organisation in 2002. The People's Republic of China was unrecognised by the UN until 1971, largely as a result of the United States vetoing its membership in preference to Taiwan.

An interesting technical point skirted over by Robertson: the Holy See is not quite the same as the Vatican, or even its "metaphysical emanation", as Robertson describes it. It is much older (having a continuous existence since the days of Roman Empire) and does not owe its existence or its diplomatic character to the Lateran Treaty. The Papacy retained its diplomatic missions even after the extinction of the Papal States in 1870. The Vatican, however, is a fully sovereign entity under international law - arguably it possesses greater legal independence than any of the member states of the European Union. It has full diplomatic relations with almost every country in the world (the only significant exceptions being China, Saudi Arabia and Israel) and its officials travel on Vatican passport. Whatever the precise status of the Holy See the Pope's status as a head of state is not really in doubt. Whether or not he should have that status is of course a different question.

The other lawyer involved, Mark Stephens, told the Guardian that he was "convinced we can get over the threshold of immunity." Is he really, or is it just bluster? And even if he managed to persuade a judge that the Vatican did not qualify as a state the problem would remain of finding a crime with which to indict the Pope. One idea would be to send him to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Robertson writes that the ICC "now counts the widespread or systematic sexual abuse of children as a crime against humanity." But even its worst enemies don't seriously suggest that the Catholic Church was systematically - as a matter of policy - organising the abuse of children. At most officials within the church failed to act against the abusers or failed to share information with the civil authorities.

These are grave charges, but by no stretch of the imagination do they come within the purview of the ICC. There's more chance of them issuing an arrest warrant for Tony Blair, frankly. No-one suggests that Ratzinger himself abused anyone. If heknowingly suppressed information regarding Father Hullerman while he was Bishop of Munich in the early 1980s there might be a case to answer - but the judicial initiative would have to come from Germany. British lawyers have no authority to launch such actions themselves. "The third option" said Stephens, "is for individuals to lodge civil claims." As he is presumably well aware, however, civil claims for compensation would not lead to anyone's arrest, least of all the Pope's. But then Stephens specialises in media law - and Robertson wrote the textbook. And whatever specious legal reasoning they may employ, this is really just a publicity stunt.

I didn't think I'd say this, but I'm beginning to come round to Damian Thompson's way of thinking, at least in part. It's not that the pope bears no responsibility for his past mistakes - he does - and Thompson minimises the catastrophic damage caused both by Benedict's failure to act more decisively and by his reluctance to offer a full public and personal apology to the victims. But Thompson is surely right to point out that there were bishops and Vatican officials whose actions were more reprehensible, yet who are escaping the intense scrutiny reserved for the man at the top. Ratzinger did too little, too late - but he did so at a time when there were still powerful voices in the Curia who wanted to take no action at all.

That said, the media feeding frenzy is understandable. The Pope is supposed to be the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, and he has conspicuously failed to give a lead. He has behaved throughout like a bureaucrat rather than a moral and spiritual leader. He has managed to convey the impression (which may well be true) that the "good of the universal church" matters more to him than the suffering of abused children. Every day he remains in office the church's reputation declines. As Dawkins himself writes gleefully,

He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

Some in this country hope that legal fears will keep the pope from our shores this autumn, or that the government will withdraw its invitation to him. I don't. It'll be fun. Read the rest of this article