On Any Questions this week Peter Hain decided to condemn me for a speech I made 14 years ago, without clearly having bothered to read it.

Uncorrected by Jonathan Dimbleby – who is usually careful about panellists making false and disparaging remarks about others – Hain claimed I had made a savage attack on single mothers.

The speech was entitled "There aren’t many fathers around here". It put the case for fathers to be asked to make a financial contribution where they were not living with their families, a policy which both the Conservative and Labour parties subsequently took up.

What did I say about single mothers? I said "Everyone would wish to help the young family that has suddenly lost their father through death,or if the mother has been badly abused or badly treated by the father and the relationship has broken down" – savage stuff, Mr Hain? I went to say that if no relationship between the mother and the father is being tried the state should pursue the father – not the mother! "It would be better for the child and better for the family and better for the state if more fathers assumed their natural responsibilities". Doesn’t Peter Hain think exactly the same on that matter?

Come on BBC, do your job – be impartial for change – stand up to the appalling Labour spin machine which makes up myths about opponents and then never stops spinning them. The BBC allows endless comment on me about things I have never said or done which Labour?? wants them to discuss, but seems more reluctant to engage with the 2 million words I have published.

One cheer for Gordon Brown trying to take the celebrity out of politics. In the modern version served up by New Labour it will be a bit like trying to make bread without flour, but I can see why he thinks the cult of celebrity has all gone too far. When the Defence Secretary tries to make our navy look like contestants in Big Brother it is certainly time for a change.

Gordon Brown has also shown??surprising restraint in dealing with the wayward Mr Milliband. He should beware. It is increasingly clear that Mr Milliband thinks he is on a win win strategy. If the party snaps with Mr Brown in time he will put up. If the coronation plans roll on Mr Milliband will emerge all smiles claiming he had always supported Mr Brown all along, but is now such a "big beast" that he needs a better job than Environment Secretary.

The Brown machine needs to show Mr Milliband there will be some downside if he carries on like this. Big beasts need big ideas and a big following for them. ??The Milliband camp need to show he is braver and does really stand for something if they want to prove "big beast" status. I would find it difficult to tell you what Mr Milliband stands for, other than self advancement. If only he would set out an agenda for the self advancement of the many people in the Uk who are held back by the tax system, the poor state education??in many places, and the badly damaged housing market, he might find some new friends that Labour sorely needs.

Readers of this blog will know I am all in favour of the government dropping the phrase "The war on terror". I am pleased Hilary Benn?? will be saying as much today. Calling it a war on terror glorifies the terrorists, and can lead to inappropriate thinking about how best to counter the terrorist threat. Invading and bombing some of the societies that harbour terrorists is not the way to stop this threat.

??I want to see?? the government means it when it says "No more war on terror". It will require?? a different approach to?? tackling terrorism at home and abroad. Any approach must be intelligence led. We need to eavesdrop, infiltrate and spy on the terrrorist networks. We need advance warning of terrorist activities so there can be a police response. We need to find, arrest and try these people.

At home we need to alienate the terrorists from the local community, by ensuring??that those who might fall prey to the terrorist recruiting camapign instead find more worthwhile ways of spending their time. You squeeze and finally kill a terrorist movement by preventing it having easy access to friendly communities at home which harbour and support its activities.

If we had proper control of our borders we could?? also check or prevent people from going abroad to overseas terrorist training camps. With proper intelligence we could know who went for several weeks at a time for Al Quaeda training. Why let them back in if they insist on doing this??? Or if you must let them back in, shouldn’t they immediately stand trial on a charge of training to be terrorists?

It is a sign of the times that the Labour party is only bothering to contest 6 out of 10 of all the Council seats up for election on May 3rd. This is a new low for ruling party in a mid term local election.

Maybe it shows just how unimportant Labour now thinks local government has become. They have centralised more and more, seeking to guide and control most things from Whitehall. Why bother to try to win Councils if you pull the striings from the centre?

Or maybe it shows just how pessimistic they are about winning. Doubtless the spin doctors have already decided that they can show a bigger proportion of the vote for Labour if they leave out all the non contests from their figures which will be in areas where Conservatives or Liberal Democrats are well entrenched.

It is probably also because they cannot find people to stand with a red rosette on. The left are disillusioned by all the neo con rhetoric from Blair, and the floaters feel let down by the actions as Labour has reverted to type, taxing and borrowing its way to more control over our lives.

On the doorsteps there are many adverse comments about the Labour government. Many people seem to think there is going to be a General Election soon – if only! The most common complaint is the surge in the tax bills that people have experienced in recent years, as they count the cost of Council Tax, National Insurance, Inheritance Tax, Airport duty, Congestion charges and the rest.

Many want a change, but think??the change they need must come at Westminster. The best way of sending this message to the government is to vote against the Labour candidates that are putting up – and try to get a lower tax Council into the bargain.

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The government uses a funny public sector definition of key workers.

In?? my life the "key" workers are the fishermen who find my fish, the bakers who bake my bread, the oil company employees??who supply my fuel, and the water company which supplies my fresh water. They never get a mention.

Of course if I were very ??ill I would value the services of the good doctors and nurses, but it is a strange world where only public sector employees qualify as "key".

House prices are soaring again in London. It’s not surprising when you add the large inflow of new people to the slow rate of new construction and the ever more??racy lending policies of the major banks and building societies.

I am told some financial institutions will now lend 6 times a person’s income in certain circumstances. If that person remains in a job then interest charges at 6% will take 36% of the income – just about managable. If interest rates rose to 10% they would face having to spend 60% of their income on mortgage interest. That’s when you would have problems like the sub prime crisis in the USA today.

The Barker review of house prices just concentrated on the supply of new homes, arguing it was too low. She failed to look at the supply of new people, where we have been adding more than 200,000 extra every year from migration which is adding to the demand for homes, and failed to look at the supply of finance, where the old norms of 3 times income have long since been revised upwards.

The government’s seller’s packs and high Stamp duties will restrict the supply of second hand homes more, whilst the government has still not managed to find a way round the planning dilemma to create the extra new homes Barker claimed were needed.

Isn’t it time to look at the other factors fuelling to boom? Why doesn’t the government look again at the Conservative proposals for managed migration? And why don’t the financial regulators have words with the lending institutions about margins of prudence on home loans?

The French Presidential election wallows on. The main centre right candidate swaggers as the next President because the polls show he has almost 30% support! The leading centre left candidate, Segolene Royal has the support of fewer than one in four of the voters, and the coming from nowhere centrist Francois Bayrou is stuck on 1 in 5.

The election is played under a type of PR so of course in the first round it encourages candidates and parties to go to extremes. Some left of centre voters are attracted to the Workers Struggle or?? the Revolutionary Communist League candidates, in an effort to push Ms Royal further to the left. Some voters will pledge support to Jean-Marie Le Pen or Philippe de Villiers to try to get any of the mainstream candidates to be tougher on immigration and nationality issues.

??Part of the atomisation of the French vote occurs because of the system.?? PR naturally encourages a movement to the extremes. Part of it is occuring for the same reason as in the UK – the growing power of the EU.?? Jose Bore, from the anti corporatist left is a candidate who made his name campaigning against the EU constitution.?? Dupont Aignan is a candidate who is running against EU integration. Jean Marie Le Pen?? and the far left candidates??are also critical??of EU interference in French life.

The EU political establishment should be very worried by the way the main parties in France can no longer command majorities. Jean Marie Le Pen this time is only on 13% in the polls, although they may be understating his true position. Last time we saw left of centre voters having to vote for Chirac to keep??Le Pen??out of the Elysee.

The true message of the French electorate is they do not see anyone capable of lifting France out of high unemployment, or capable of restoring proper control over their??government to elected and responsible French politicians. There was a Eurosceptic majority in France at the time of the referendum on the constitution. No attempt to explain it away as people wanting more Europe will do. This Presidential election shows the kind of political malaise an overmighty EU creates, inducing a scepticism towards the main French parties allied to?? an inability to unite behind a single candidate of??a Euro-??sceptical disposition to start to change things.

The sad news of a suicide bomber killing Iraqis who are trying to made their democracy work underlines the extent of the crisis in Baghdad. The US troop surge was unable to make any difference. The elaborate security precautions around rhe Green Zone and the Parliament building on this occasion failed.

Democratic societies should be relatively open societies. They are always vulnerable to those who see the jaw jaw of democracy as weak or feeble. Their strength comes from winning over most of the people most of the time to believe in the system, so that those who want to blow it up or damage it have nowhere to hide and no friends to help. There is still insufficient consent to the legitimate power of elected government in Iraq. The US troops in Baghdad are unable to solve that fundamental problem.

David Milliband is beginning to look silly saying he thinks Gordon Brown will make a good Prime Minister, in a way which does not rule out his own candidature once Tony Blair resigns.

It is not easy keeping open options in?? this fevered media whirlpool, when the Brownites are pressing Milliband??to be on board for them and the Blairites want him to be a candidate. His better line to keep open his candidature would be to keep saying it is not currently an issue – he will declare his position when there is a vacancy. The danger of giving 95% backing to Gordon Brown is it makes Milliband look tricky and weak, and it creates hostages to fortune which Brown will use against him should he subsequently decide to stand.

If he really believes Gordon Brown will make a good Prime Minister he should say that he will not stand against him. If he wants to say he, David Milliband, will make a better one but is not ready yet to declare his hand he should brush off media enquiries with a more neutral comment than his current patter.

If he goes on like this he could end up with a poor job or no job under Gordon. Fortune favours the brave. Patronage goes to the loyal. There is no third way.

The US has announced longer tours of duty for its troops in Iraq, as the surge becomes a long slog by more soldiers from an overstretched military. Meanwhile, the bombings continue in Baghdad.

Fighting a war against terrorists in some ways glorifies them. Terrorists in a democracy are criminals. The fact that they use violence to pursue political ends rather than to take your property doesn’t alter the point that they are murderers, committing crimes of violence. They may also be breaking other laws, frequently coming by the money to pay for their violent crimes by illegal means, and often dealing in illegal weapons at the same time. In a democracy everyone has legal means to influence or change the government.

The way to tackle terrorism has to be intelligence led. Because they blend in with a local community of non terrorists, bombing from the air cannot be used, and military intervention on the ground is dangerous, threatening residents who are not part of the terrorist activity, unless the intelligence is very good and the military action surgical. Terrorists want to be treated differently from other violent criminals, so they can be treated differently by the local community. They seek to put them under an obligation to shelter them or to condone their activities.

Terrorism can best be tackled where the civilian power trying to control the wave of violence has the support of most people to find and prosecute the offenders. The civilian power may well need to call on military support when it has tracked down malefactors, as they may well try to fight their way out of arrest or trouble. If the military power it calls on comes from a foreign country it will be easier for the terrorist groups to persuade the civilian community not to assist the police operation. If the terrorist groups are strong and numerous then they may well also intimidate the local community into harbouring them. It will be a long task seeking to build up a group of people who will provide evidence, and important to give them proper protection when they do help the authorities.

The terrorists’ task will also be made more difficult if the civilian authority can show its democratic mandate will offer a way??of resolving conflicts and tensions in the communities concerned which is obviously more effective than??recourse to violence in the eyes of most people.

The US and the UK can help the Iranian authorites tackle terrorism by supporting their police operation, by using their global intelligence networks to track down the sources of the cash, the origin of the weapons, and information on training and planning. The US and UK can train the Iranian authorities in the art of intelligence led counter terrorism, and can offer back office support. The sooner the US and UK troops can be replaced by locals the better from the point of view of reducing tensions on the streets, which just give the terrorists another argument as to why otherwise law abiding Iraqis should turn a blind eye to the terrorist activities.

The US never favoured a war on terror in the case of Northern Ireland. Indeed.people in the US sent money to the those who were trying to blow up representatives of the democratic governments of Northern Ireland and the UK. It is curious that some in the USA seem to think that one more surge will ensure a military solution in Iraq, when what is needed is much more work by the civilian authorities to show that peaceful means work best for most people. Those who disagree and use violence should ??be treated not as resistance heroes but as common criminals who have to stand trial.

Today’s Social Trends publication reveals just how many people now live on their own, and how many live with another but do not marry.?? 29% are living in single person households,and 24% are single parent families.

It is not surprising, given the incentives the tax and benefits system sends, and given the legal framework surrounding marriage.

Single parenthood is commonest in the parts of the country where incomes are lowest and unemployment is highest. The tax and benefit system can make it more worthwhile for a single parent to claim benefits than try to get a small share of a small income out of a partner.

Both Conservative and Labour governments have tried to pursue fathers to make a financial contribution. In some cases this encourages irresponsible men to disappear, or to be out of work, or to claim they are self employed but earning very little. If the payments from the father mainly reduce the benefits paid to the mother there is not a huge incentive for her to pursue the case.

Marriage used to be the norm because social convention and family economics reinforced it. 100 years ago it was regarded as normal for the man in the household to go out to work to bring in an income, and for the woman to stay at home and carry out all the hard work of cooking, cleaning, homemaking and child care in the pre machine and free nursery age. The two needed each other to get?? by. This economic mutual dependence was reinforced by strong social convention, with disapproval in most communities if a couple did not marry.

Today most women go out to work so they have an income of their own, or can claim a benefit income of their own. More men??realise they can ??cook and clean, and have discovered the non iron shirt. There is??no longer the same social pressure to marry.

Some successful men and women are put off marrying in the first place, because it redistributes capital and income form the more successful (financially) to the less successful partner in a marriage. Whilst this may be fair where one partner has sacrificed career and income to bring up children and to mind the home over a long time period, it is less clear why it should happen in shorter failed marriages without children.

Some books and commentators claimed there were 12 stars on the flag because there used to be 12 member states. Several enlargements later that view can no longer prevail.

The current common explanation of the ??12 is they represent the 12 apostles, a reference to the Christian past of western Europe. I presume that means they include a star for Judas, the betrayer. We should be told more about this symbolism.

??Gordon Brown’s 1989 book "Where there is greed"?? was read by friends, colleagues and staffers for Labour as the Preface acknowledges as well as presumably by the author.?? Despite all this attention when it came off the press it contained an errata slip with 19 citations. It was??a harbinger of things to come.

My favourite erratum note is the following:

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P.99 line 18 "overall nearly 40% of the shares bought up in privatisation stocks, 7.34 million shares in total have been sold on." should read: "overall nearly 40%, or 7.34 million of shareholders buying privatisation stocks have now been sold on."(sic)

I wonder if they got good prices for shareholders in those days?

<p>In his 1989 book Gordon Brown wrote of his worries for the 1990s:</p>
<p>"One sad prediction is that one worker in eight will emigrate from the north-west. Nearly three-quarters of a million immigrants are expected to arrive in the already congested south. The demands placed on infrastructure in the south scarcely bear contemplation…"</p>
<p>I wonder how he feels now about the state of the infrastructure and the numbers of migrants??? (Where there is greed p 73)</p>
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We now have Adam Smith on the banknotes, and have heard Gordon Brown praise his fellow countryman as a great economist. I agree.

Strange then, that in his book of 1989 Gordon Brown wrote??about the "sinister insights of the historical Adam Smith".

I wonder when he changed his mind and why?

In 1989 Gordon Brown wrote a book condemning the UK’s economic and social record..

His main complaints were:

1. Too large a balance of payments deficit

2. Too little progress in manufacturing

3. A decline in scientific education and industry

4. Faster growth in the south than the rest of the UK

5. Too many people out of work and on benefits

After 10 years of Gordon Brown as Chancellor we have

1. A bigger balance of payments deficit

2. 1 million fewer manufacturing jobs, with many firms taking their factories abroad

3.??A huge shortage of people with A level or degree level physics, maths and chemistry and a shortage of engineers

4. London has grown two and half times as fast as Scotland over the Brown years

5. More than 5.3 million people of working age are living on benefits without a job

??Some of Mr Brown’s comments in "Where there is greed" are now laden with irony:

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"It is only in manufacturing that the possibilities of large scale trade now exist"… "It is through manufacturing that we will succeed or fail"

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"Our balance of payments matters…. No Chancellor who claims to have a medium term strategy for long term prosperity should treat such a balance of payments deficit with such cavalier disregard"

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"The regions have been growing at almost half the rate of the economy of the south"

By his own words he has some explaining to do.

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If you sign up for the forces – or for that matter become a Minister of the Crown – you accept that everything you do in your day job and in your official capacity is the property of the state paying your wages.

If you do something that is newsworthy you follow orders. You discuss it with your employer. You and your employer together decide if it is appropriate to hold a press conference or issue a statement. You discuss how to respond to the press interest. Because you are working for your country??you do not charge for this release of information. Sensible people release the information at the same time to all outlets, to be fair to all journalists and means of communication and to ensure a more balanced press response.

The best way of doing this is?? a Parliamentary statement. Instead of the government encouraging the sale of individual stories, what we need is a clear and considered statement from the Defence Secretary or Foreign Secretary to the House of Commons. This statement should cover the narrow issues of how the 15 were treated by their captors, why they made the statements they made to the Iranian media and authorities and what they will be doing next. The Statement should set all this in the wider context of how the government wishes to develop Anglo-Iranian relations in the light of this illegal seizure. There should also be some general comments on how UK military personnel are expected to behave in such provocative circumstances and what we have learned from this event.

It beggars belief that this government now wishes to undermine the armed forces by disapplying all these normal rules of conduct, as surely as they have worked hard to undermine other great instiutions they inherited in 1997. There lack of knowledge of our history has developed into a complete failure to grasp the important principles that lie behind public service and Parliamentary accountability for Ministers.

<p>Labour’s defence of the sale of the stories of mariners released from Iran plumbs a new low in the long and dispiriting history of Labour spin.</p>
<p>We are told that these mariners are "instant celebrities". It would be wrong to stop them selling their story. It would be impractical to do so. Their friends and loved ones could sell the story??instead if they were banned.</p>
<p>Some Ministers are instant celebrities – usually when they make some dreadful mistake and attract headline treatment. On the same logic we should say they should be able to sell their account of how they made the mistake.??They ??could carry on this government’s????tendency to tell Parliament after everyone else to keep the street value of the exclusive up and to allow the sale to a single media outlet first.</p>
<p>If criticised Ministers could say "I have become an instant celebrity. It is not practical to stop me selling my story. It might leak out. My wife or friends might tell a newspaper. Far better for me to tell it the way I want as an exclusive to a single paper and single TV channel, to maximise the payment."
</p>

On Easter Sunday Churches around the country celebrate the Resurrection, bishops and vicars lead prayers for a new spirit of peace and rebirth, whilst secular newspapers pick over the ruins of Tony Blair’s Middle Eastern strategy.??Few believe the world is a safer place for the US-UK intervention in Iraq. Many who had doubts at the time are now very critical of what was done in their name. Most experts and commentators recognise that whilst we have removed one tyrant, we have created a new regional power in Iran that will difficult for her neighbours to live with.

??Looking back over the last century I think any sensible commentator has to conclude that the UK has fought too many wars. It was right and necessary to confront the Nazi threat in the 1930s and 1940s. Restoring the Falklands and Kuwait to their own people were both well executed and justifiable wars against the unreasonable use of ??force.

We took a different line over communism to Nazism, although communism was as evil a tyranny, murdering many people for their views or origins and suppressing the freedom of the rest. We decided to co-exist with it until it collapsed under its contradictions. Maybe that also was the right decision, as communists bled their people white to build a huge arsenal of weapons which would have killed many more if challenged.

It is more difficult to justify the military interventions in a series of actions in the Balkans. I was against the Balkans action when in the Cabinet, and concerned about the Kosovo deployments in more recent years. Maybe more sensible diplomacy and peace keeping earlier would have avoided so much military intervention and peace making later. The EU intervention probably encouraged more violence by the main protagonists.

The most destructive of all the wars of the last century was the First World War. We all admire the bravery and loyalty of the many allied troops who fought in that terrible conflict and are eternally grateful to them that once??committed to conflict they ensured allied victory. With the benefit of hindsight we can ask was it the right thing to do? Should??the Prime Minister have been so keen to enter hostilities???Did it really concern Britain if France and Germany fell out? Did total victory in 1918 just make it more likely the evil of Hitler would rise and pose us enormous problems twenty years later? The UK has had no?? imperial or territorial ambitions on the continent for several centuries. The Britain of 1914 was the world’s strongest naval power, unlikely to be threatened whoever had the biggest military power on the mainland of Europe. By opting for such an all consuming war we wasted a generation of young men, weakened our position as a global force and contributed to so much destruction.

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Yesterday I attended the Churches of Wokingham together act of public witness for Good Friday.

We started with a short service in the Methodist Church, walked to the Market Place with the cross, spent an hour hearing the four gospels and singing hymns, and then walked to one of the Anglican Churches for a short concluding service.

About 250 people came out of a town population of some 30,000. The Bishop of Reading joined us, and carried the cross on the second leg of its journey.

??The Church organisers decided that we should walk on the road rather than on the pavements. Several had been designated to hold up and direct traffic. In the modern health and safety idiom they wore fluorescent jackets and carried mobile phones to talk to each other.

I suggested that we use the pavements to make things easier. The organisers wished to use the road, and most walked on the road under their guidance. The procession delayed people in cars for just a few minutes.

??Several car drivers became angry, sounded their horns and then performed high speed manoeuvres to get past the walking party by overtaking on the other side of the road and cutting back just before bollards got in their way.

??The tension was evident. No harm was done. Forty or fifty people were a few minutes later for whatever their next activity would be on a Bank Holiday. Some Christian walkers were upset by the visible annoyance of some fellow citizens.

??Was the Christian community right to use the road on their special day? Or were the motorists right, that England is no longer sufficiently Christian for the majority to tolerate unusual use of the road?

I would be interested in your thoughts. It is a small example of the new tensions arising in our instant gratification?? consumer society where some of the old give and take and some of the old assumptions have gone.