What Dixon actually tweeted was: “I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”

Harmless, one would think, albeit not especially amusing. But this kind of thing is really very mild compared to the polemic which has done Richard Dawkins very nicely in his books, and far less hurtful than the daily knockabout on the subject of religion that takes place on countless websites across the net.

Lest we forget, Scientology is not an officially recognised religion in the UK. But even if it were, most faith groups take a certain amount of ribald criticism within their stride. Dixon was not putting up satirical cartoons of the Prophet, nor was he running an ad campaign mocking the crucifixion. Sacred symbols were not being abused, sacred texts were not being criticised: no deities, real or imagined, were hurt during the making of his tweet.

If he is indeed censured for this (though, if they have any sense, the ethics committee will recognise this as a legitimate comment and let it go, before they themselves become a laughing stock) then we have gone far too far down a path of political correctness over freedom of speech. Was John Dixon inciting religious hatred? Hardly, since Scientology is not officially a recognised religion under UK law. But even if it were, would he be inciting it? I doubt that the term would constitute incitement.

During the General Election, the leader of Stratford on Avon’s ruling Conservative group labelled me and my views ‘stupid’ four times in less than thirty seconds, live on BBC Radio. I thought it was a bit rude. But why, as a recognised British citizen, should I enjoy less protection than an imported American organisation which is not even recognised for what it claims to be?

In a world where our every off-hand comment is now tabulated and Googled, we need to come to a new understanding of what is acceptable and what is not. There has to be an understanding that there is a hierarchy of off-handedness. A statement published in a book for which money is paid is of a different level from a remark in live interview broadcast on local radio, and this is again different from a brief Tweet or a FaceBook one-liner.

Dixon would not have faced this kind of censure if he had written an opinion piece in a published newspaper attacking Scientology.

He should not face it for a Tweet.

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Given that Major’s men were up to their tricks throughout the 1990s, and the current crop of Expenses-scandal-sleaze MPs had been doing what they did since either the 1990s, or whenever they got elected, where did politics go wrong?

It’s a common misconception (pushed forward by those who hope to survive the storm) that it was the system which made MPs claim expenses to which they were not entitled. But this is manifestly untrue. No system makes people act in a dishonest way. Nobody was forced to break the law by claiming for mortgages which did not exist, nobody was forced to break the explicit parliamentary rule that expenses should not be managed in order to render a profit at the tax-payer’s expense, and nobody was forced to use the expenses system to claim for excesses such as moat cleaning, duck houses, and limed oak toilet seats (even as I write this one, I’m forced to think ‘did this really happen?’ Apparently, it did).

Also, how is it that so many of them did it? It’s been pointed out (by me, among other people) that the majority of MPs were not engaged in these practices. But a sufficiently large minority from all three parties (including my own, though to a lesser degree) have done so that the entire class of MPs is not merely under suspicion, but under complete derision.

Political parties are now changing the way in which they assess and select parliamentary candidates. But it’s fair to say that, in the 1990s and 2000s, candidates were not being assessed on the trustworthiness, although (especially in the ‘spin’ years), parties have always been interested in credibility.
So, what’s the difference?
Credibility is whether or not you appear trustworthy to people. Politicians with no interest in football have been told to bone up on the off-side rule in order to appear more credible in urban constituencies. Politicians who live in London but are standing in far-flung rural areas (ie, anywhere outside the M25 that is not 90% urban) are photographed in Barbour jackets. People change their accents, go through teeth-whitening procedures (because people with whiter teeth tell fewer lies… right), and discover obscure ancestries which link them to the constituency. Every ‘parachute’ candidate rents a flat where they intend to stand. Credibility can be bought for the right price with the right advice. It doesn’t always work — we all remember William Hague’s reverse base-ball cap, and David Cameron being photographed cycling to work, followed by a van full of his papers. But, despite these minor mishaps, David Cameron at least has shed most of the Eton / Oxford exclusive dining club / millionaire image that he grew up with.

Trustworthiness is something quite different. Self-evidently, many of the people we trusted were not worthy of our trust.

So, where do we go from here?

If we really want trustworthy politicians, we need to start voting for them. I think it’s fair to say that the big political parties have not got the message. There has not been a flurry to find candidates who are more honest than those of previous generations. The all-women, all-ethnic minority shortlist talk is not about increasing trustworthiness, but about increasing the overall credibility of the party that shortlists them. Actually, a desire to increase credibility without a search for honesty is a mark of the deepest untrustworthiness. Or bad faith, as we used to call it. But the big parties are counting on the public voting on party, political or tribal lines, not lines of trust. They believe that, after we’ve had our rant, we will still lump all politicians together as necessary evils, and get on with voting for the ones we would have voted for anyway. Therefore, we need to disappoint them, and severely.

But, given that every politician will be coming to us at the election with the claim that they are more trustworthy than the others, and given that the richest and best connected will be able to have the best advice and be able to buy the best services, how can we tell?

Here are my thoughts:
1) What did they do before politics?
People who have served the public, perhaps in charities, in the armed forces, in the muckier bits of the public sector, have a very different track record from those who made a killing in the city or played around with inherited wealth before being given a safe-seat. That doesn’t mean that people who work in the city are not trustworthy, or that inherited wealth makes people liars, but a track record of service in the past goes a long way towards underlining a promise that they will serve us in the future.

2) How hard did they have to work to get here?
The vast majority of expenses-scandal MPs have been in what are generally termed ‘safe-seats’. Check out someone’s political track-record. Have they faced disappointment and defeat in the past, or have they been handed easy victories? Easy victories don’t make someone untrustworthy, but the majority of those who cheated did have big majorities to shore them up.

3) Where does their money come from?
People whose every working hour is given to becoming richer are unlikely to give up the habit when they get elected. More importantly, there are some ways to get rich, or, get by, which are in the public interest, and some which are predatory in nature. Someone who trades on other people’s greed, weakness or ignorance in order to gain their money is unlikely to be trustworthy in parliament.

4) For sitting MPs, what have they done?
The ideal MP works hard, claims only reasonable expenses, and arranges their affairs so that there is not even a suggestion that they may be profiting at the public expense. If your MP is seldom in the House of Commons, has claimed extravagantly, or has made a fortune through publicly-funded property speculation, then there is very little reason to believe that they will change their ways in the next parliament.

5) What’s their position on second jobs?
Will your candidate be dedicating his or her paid time exclusively to the House of Commons, or will that time be shared with company directorships, business dealings, lobbying firms and lucrative contracts? The rules, it appears, will not be changing to ensure that they do not, so it’s a good indicator of just how trustworthy they really are. For sitting MPs, you can easily check the register. For candidates, you can write to them or ask them at a public meeting whether they will be retaining any of these income streams, and whether they can guarantee to make the House of Commons their sole source of income. Taking a second job does not make someone necessarily untrustworthy, but, if someone is promising to dedicate their life to serving you in the next parliament, you can legitimately question how much time that will leave them for other things.

6) How do they respond to criticism?
No-one likes being criticised, but it’s instructive to see how people behave when they are accused of an impropriety. Some people flare up, some people become very sad, some people become very earnest. All of these are normal reactions. But some people demonstrate consummate skill in deflecting the criticism. This isn’t necessarily a sign that they are untrustworthy, but, taken with the other indicators, it can reenforce what you already know. Jack Straw, who isn’t from my party, always gets very agitated when people criticise him on Radio 4. A friend of mine who worked with him tells me that he is, in person, very trustworthy. Peter Mandelson, from that same party, is always very smooth in the face of criticism. Partly that’s his job, but, equally, the word is that he is not necessarily the first person you would want to trust.

7) How hard do they try to be credible?
Finally — and for this you need to really meet them and look them in the eye — how hard are they trying to be credible? You probably won’t be able to tell if they’ve had their teeth whitened (some people have naturally white teeth), but, when you talk to them, if you move off the usual subjects, you can get a fairly good impression about whether they are happy to talk about anything, or always want to move the conversation back to them, their credibility, the uncredibility of other candidates, the sins of other parties. Anyone who is too desperate to have you trust them — like a car salesman who keeps saying “I’ll be honest with you” — is probably not someone you should be trusting. Again, some people are naturally eager to make friends. But, generally, those people are more natural at it.

I don’t want to suggest that everyone who fails these tests is a liar, and, I’m sure, there are people even now coaching would-be MPs about how to pass these tests, or others like them. But, if we have no tests, then we are left only with what the candidates tell us about themselves. With their credibility, not their trustworthiness. If you don’t like these, then write down what things would make you trust or distrust someone. But do it, and then vote on it.

Otherwise, as we enter the 2010s, rather than the government we really want, we will once again elect the government we deserve.

Coda
Many people will wish to point out that the decade ends at the end of 2010, and the new decade begins in 2011. I do agree with them. However, the arbitrary decade beginning with the year 2000, which was celebrated (somewhat bizarrely), as the Millennium (bizarrely because, notwithstanding questions about year 0, nothing in particular happened in the Year 1000 for us to commemorate) has reached an end, and it is that decade which I am describing.

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At twilight, a frog rests on wet tarmac between the cliff and the Avon, Marlcliff

You can read the Christmas story in different ways. I read it (and I will argue with anyone, any time, pretty much anywhere that this is the correct way) as a record of events which happened, at a particular point in time, and a particular place in space.

But if you’re not prepared to engage with it in that way, there is still a lot to be read, and understood. Shepherds on the hillside choose to believe, rather than to doubt. But their belief is exercised not in remaining on the hillside saying “that’s great, now we believe — there’s no point going to look”, but rather in going to the stable. Equally, the wise men, astrologers from the East, people whose own belief-system was almost certainly at odds with the nation they were visiting. They believed, and they went. Angels in the sky, announcing a new deal: “peace and good will”.

I expect the usual flurry of emails telling me that the effect of Christianity over the centuries has not always been peace and goodwill. Again, if you want to pick the time and the place, I’m happy to have the discussion with you. But it’s fair to say that, in all of our best endeavours, we only achieve a part of what we seek.

Nonetheless, the belief which puts itself into action, getting to grips with the peace and goodwill, in all of the messy, three steps forwards and two steps back, complicated, difficult and fractious world in which we live, is infinitely preferable to the cynicism which says: “I always knew they were all crooks — why bother anyway?” or “it probably won’t happen in my life time. Why change my ways now?”

Over the past ten years, and more likely the last forty, we have increasingly put our faith in doubt. We would prefer to not believe and not be disappointed, than to believe and act on that belief. I could add a list of all the social ills that stem from that, but you can probably make up your own list, and not have to put up with mine.

I want to wish everyone who reads these pages peace and goodwill this Christmas. But my wish for you — for everyone — is that we can begin to put aside our faith in doubt, and start on the active belief that leads us to change our world. Because it does need to change.

Peace and goodwill, then.

And a happy Christmas.

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Richard Dawkins’s followers will no doubt be quick to claim this is another example of the heinous effect of ‘the God delusion’. But they would be wrong. Under charity law, the Church of England has to diligently pursue all of its debtors, and, coupled with the laws on ‘chancel repair liability’ which date back to Valor Ecclesiasticus in 1535, they have no choice.

At the same time, there can’t be anyone in the entire world who believes it’s right for Andrew and Gail Wallbank to be forced to sell their house to pay for repairs to a public building. And they are not the only ones. There is a long list of people who have been stung this way over the years, and the list is going to get longer by 2013.

For more information, see Chancel.Org.UK, which explains how a change in the law will mean that the Church of England has until 2013 to register its interest in properties with Chancel liability. To see the campaign site of the Wallbanks, look here. The official line is available here.

What lunatic changed the law in that way?

(You know the answer to this one, but, in case you don’t, the legislation is the Land Registration Act 2002.)

Since the Church of England is powerless to extricate itself from a situation which bankrupts ordinary people and brings the church, and thus the entire Christian faith, into disrepute, the government ought to have intervened to simply cancel chancel liability. This would free the Church of England to pursue grants and even Lottery money. This is in fact what the Law Commission and the Church of England Synod recommended in the 1980s.

Parliament long ago abolished tithing laws. Blasphemy laws have largely been set aside. But the Chancel Repair Act itself was updated as recently as 1932.

In 2008, the Prime Minister responded to a petition against it as follows:
“Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption. The Government has, however, acted to make the existence of the liability much simpler to discover. From October 2013, chancel repair liability will only bind buyers of registered land if it is referred to on the land register. By that time, virtually all freehold land in England and Wales will be registered. The Government believes that this approach strikes a fair balance between the landowners subject to the liability and its owners who are, in England, generally Parochial Church Councils and, in Wales, the Representative Body of the Church in Wales.
“The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.”

As far as the Wallbanks are concerned, whatever action is taken is now almost certainly too late.

Parliamentary Questions should have been asked. But it seems that they were not.

We are therefore left with the entirely unsatisfactory statement made by Mr David Lammy, Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, in 2002: “The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. David Lammy): On 14 September 2003 a Transitional Provisions Order relating to the status of chancel repair liability was made under the Land Registration Act 2002. The making of the order follows the reversal by the House of Lords in June 2003 of the Court of Appeal’s decision in Wallbank v Parochial Church Council of the Parish of Aston Cantlow and Wilmcote with Billesley, Warwickshire. The order provides that, for a period of 10 years from the coming into force of the Act on 13 October 2003, chancel repair liability will remain an interest that binds successive owners of land even though it is not protected by an entry in a register kept by the Land Registry. As no land registration fee is payable for applications to protect similar ancient property rights, such as payments in lieu of tithe, Crown rents and manorial rights, the Land Registry intends to waive the fee for applications to protect chancel repair liability for the 10 year period.”

This is pure madness. The government ought to have abolished chancel repair liability outright and filled the short-fall from the public purse — remember, that, at the time, the public purse was overflowing, long before we bailed out the banks and put the nation into debt.

The government can still act. In its dying days, it can set aside a historic injustice: rather like the rhetoric Gordon Brown used in his speech today to drum up a faint pulse among the faithful. While it is certain that Labour can move no major new legislation between now and its forthcoming electoral defeat, it should be able to sort out this mess. Nobody will oppose it, nobody will try to talk it out in committee.

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Revolutionary South America
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is arguably the greatest of the revolutionary South American novels in English, but you might also like to consider John Masefield’s Sard Harker and Odtaa. South America has a lot to offer the novelist: lost cities (and treasure) in the rain forest, the Andes, revolutionaries from Simon Bolivar to Che Guevara and on to Chavez, Eva Peron, gold, silver, ship wrecks, undiscovered tribes.
One of the things which worries aspiring authors is that they may never have been to the places they want to write about, and, if they have, they get so caught up in trying to represent it faithfully that they lose the magic. Don’t worry about this: Joseph Conrad’s Sulaco was entirely fictional. Whether or not you have been to South America, you certainly won’t have been to South America in the time of the conquistadors, nor of Simon Bolivar, nor (unless you are quite old) in the time of Che Guevara. And if you have been, you will not have been to all of South America, nor have experienced all the lives of all the people who live there. Writers these days obsess about research, but it’s the books which make the most use of it that get the most roundly criticised when they get it wrong.
One of the benefits of writing about South America in the revolutionary period is that it’s easy to insert a plausible but non-existent and short lived nation in which to set your story.

Dystopian future
Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed, more famously, as Blade Runner) are all 20th century classics which take us into the heart of a dystopian future. You might also consider William Gibson’s Cyberpunk trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Dystopian futures grew in the imagination of readers and writers throughout the 20th century, gradually displacing humanistic dreams of a perfect society. For a writer, the future city offers endless possibilities, but also a fair few traps. Philip K Dick wrote hundreds of novels and stories which in some sense reflected a vision of a future world in collapse. They have been increasingly mined for film settings: Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Screamers, Second Variety and Paycheck, but, aside from A Scanner Darkly, the film-makers have generally kept the setting and changed the plot. Dick frequently got stuck in the worlds he was creating, and the story lost its way.

Cold War Europe
Cold War Europe is really ‘aftermath of the Second World War’ Europe. It offers endless opportunities for bleak scenery, unfinished business, espionage, blackmail, and revenge. The Cold War runs out in 1989, so there’s a wealth of authentic documentary film, news reporting and photography to work from, although, again, obsession with research has been the downfall of far too many authors. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Berlin and Moscow provide hugely evocative settings, but the less well-trodden streets of Brno, Yerevan, Cheltenham (home to GCHQ), Ghent and Aachen have got a lot to recommend them.

Galactic war
Out of fashion now for a while, galactic civilisations are making something of a comeback. Galactic war is, of course, impossible, because, even at the speed of light, the distances are too great to allow any kind of conflict, and this is probably one reason why science-fiction writers turned their backs on the it. But, as with any other setting, writers should remember that they are crafting fiction, not creating some kind of alternative documentary. Get the stars in more or less the right place, have some plausible method for travelling between them, and then focus the action on the same kinds of conflicts and human relations that drive all other stories. One of the huge benefits of the Galactic scenario is that you can draw on many sources of inspiration without having to make any claims to viable research. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (don’t bother with the subsequent books, written decades later) drew heavily on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire while Frank Herbert’s Dune borrowed extensively from Lawrence of Arabia. The biggest pitfall of galactic writing is a failure to set parameters. EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman series (progressively) became a riot of ever more convenient and bizarre technological advance. An even bigger pitfall is suddenly introducing magic into the science-fiction universe. Although writers such as Tanith Lee have done this with more or less success, but, generally speaking, spell-casting on a spaceship disappoints more readers than it pleases.

Court of King Arthur
The court of King Arthur has drawn and inspired writers since the high middle ages. The ‘original’ story is in several bits, which don’t necessarily fit together especially well: Uther Pendragon, Vortigern, Merlin, the young Arthur and the sword in the stone are one end, while Guinevere, Lancelot, Mordred and the death of Arthur are the other. There’s always some mileage in retelling these, though TH White and Thomas Malory have done it so well that it’s rather a risk. However, the vast majority of medieval romances deal with the adventures of Arthur and his knights in between. Some writers strive for fifth century AD ‘authenticity’, but almost none of the Arthurian stories could possibly have taken place when they were historically supposed to, even if they were ‘possible’ in other respects. TH White’s solution is to mix everything up, including Robin Hood. Thomas Malory set everything in more or less the time he was in (the Wars of the Roses). There’s probably not much mileage in setting things in the present day — though the film The Fisher King makes a good stab at it — but virtually anything which is vaguely medieval will satisfy most readers. More important is getting the atmosphere of courtly love and chivalry, without over romanticising them.

Magical world
JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Ursula LeGuin created entire magical worlds entirely separate from our own, but Alan Garner, John Masefield and JK Rowling were content with rearranging the rules of our own world to create a magical world within our ordinary world. The great attraction to writers (and to readers) is that a magical world is entirely new, entirely fresh. But problems can easily set in when, either, there are no parameters and hence no internal consistency, or when too much is borrowed from elsewhere. Both Tolkien and Lewis borrowed extensively: Tolkien’s world is Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse in its inspiration, but very judiciously and selectively. Tolkien criticised Lewis for mixing the Anglo-Saxon world (dwarves, giants) with the Greek (satyrs, fauns, centaurs), although Lewis’s world is internally consistent for other reasons. Aside from dragons, as much inspired by Tolkien’s Smaug as by mythology, but essentially closes the door to all of the other mythical creatures available. JK Rowling appears, on the surface, to have included everything she possibly could — but this is not the case. Crucially, she excludes both dwarves and Tolkien-esque ‘noble’ elves. Whatever you do, don’t introduce elements which are the distinctive invention of another author, if you want to avoid writing mere ‘fan-fiction’. Hobbits, Hogwarts, Wardrobes and Archmages should all be avoided, at all costs.

Revolutionary France
The Count of Monte Cristo, Scaramouche, A Tale of Two Cities, the Scarlet Pimpernel and many others draw their setting directly and as historically as the author was able from France before, during and after the revolution, which seque naturally into the Napoleonic wars. Historical accuracy is, for once, all important, largely because this is a genre which has been very strictly established. Dumas had a whole team of researchers at his disposal. However, he didn’t have the internet, and so you are probably in a stronger position overall. Interestingly, the ‘great’ French revolutionary novel is yet to be written: A Tale of Two Cities is generally regarded as one of Dickens’s weaker novels, Scaramouche, despite the memorable film, is merely so-so, and the Count of Monte Cristo gets lost in its own endless and contorted revenge. For a setting which promises so much — betrayal, self-sacrifice, riots, sword-fights, the overthrow of a way of life which had lasted from the dark ages, the French Revolution as yet to fulfil its promise for literature: over to you, perhaps?

English Country House
From the Hound of the Baskervilles, to Jeeves, and from Agatha Christie to Scooby Doo (bizarre how many English country houses made their way into America), the English Country House is a world in microcosm which can accommodate virtually any story you care to throw at it. It is its ability to act as an interesting container, with its own quirks if and when required, which makes it such a ubiquitous setting. If you are writing in the UK, there is almost certainly a country house owned by the National Trust within a few miles of where you live. A large number have been made into hotels, and it’s even possible to rent them entire through the Landmark Trust. Older houses frequently do have secret hiding places — if not secret tunnels — which were used variously in the troubles of the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of them have ghost stories attached, especially those that have been a part of the tourist trade for some time. As a way of bringing disparate characters together and then preventing them from leaving (flooded rivers, or the police simply telling no-one to leave), English country houses are hard to beat.

Victorian London
In a similar vein, Victorian London, with its pea-soup fogs, and the hint that Holmes and Watson may be detecting just around the corner, provides enormous resonance for tales of squalor, espionage, crime, ghosts, lunacy and evil in its purest form. Jack the Ripper, the debtors’ prison, the workhouse, strange animals and artefacts brought from the British empire and down the Thames… but also balls, ballet, the music hall, the theatres, Nelson’s column, the underground railway, hansom cabs: 19th century London was in many ways the capital of the world, and a capital place for any interest the author has.

1930s Los Angeles
The world of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, 1930s Los Angeles is another place you will never be able to visit, and are unlikely to be old enough to remember, but which has enormous resonance. By contrast with modern Los Angeles (I’ve never been, but have seen oh-so-much of it on TV), it is almost always raining in 1930s LA. The Great Depression, the rise of Hollywood, the impending second world war, organised crime, the proximity to Vegas, Mexico and, of course, the ocean, mix with the smells of white oleander, sumps of emptying oil-wells, chain-smoked cigarettes, and the generally boozy atmosphere of post-prohibition US cities, are now all hugely nostalgic, and full of strong plot possibilities.

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Originally put forward in a Wired Magazine article, and subsequently in a book by Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing harnasses the skills of the many (as opposed to — dare we say it in this context? — the lust for blood of the mob) to analyse data or to chew over a problem. In this particular case, Guardian readers, and, we can assume, other bloggers and webites, have been combing through the now-published MP expenses data. Despite the blanking out of crucial data, crowdsourcers have already begun to build up powerful profiles of who is spending how much on what.

More important than the actual method used — although it is important — is the fact that all this user-researched data means that finally we, the people, have access to our MPs’ expenses claims, not in driblets issued by the Daily Telegraph to further its own ill-concealed political agenda, nor in the avalanche of mind-numbing detail on which civil servants and politicians have been counting to put us off looking, but in clear, concise analysis, which can be checked by anyone who wants to.

This is what Freedom of the Press is all about — the freedom for any newspaper, or, in this blogging age, any citizen-journalist, to look at the facts for themselves, come to a conclusion, and put forward their own interpretation. Suddenly we are no longer in the hands of a journalistic-elite, themselves under the thumb of a right-wing editor.

This freedom has come too little too late. Too late for Cameron’s ‘old-guard’, who are set to be swept away in sweeping purges. And certainly too late for us collectively to have any faith in the financial probity of our politicians. And too little to set our minds at ease that now everything is in the open and nothing is being hidden. If you haven’t looked at the MP expenses yourself yet, then do. There is something uniquely terrifying about the way in which whole sections have been blacked out, with (crucially, in my mind) no annotations to indicate the reason for the black out nor the text minus the offending details. Nothing is more compelling in telling us that our interests are deemed as less important than those of an MP. Even though any private detective could dig up the real information (or just buy it from the Telegraph) without a great deal of difficulty.

Guardian readers have so far crawled through 700,000 heavily edited documents. The degree of scrutiny they have brought to it is vastly more than the Telegraph’s — in fact, we now wonder if the Telegraph was not tipped off to go straight for the juicier items, since they, in passing, overlooked so many other interesting things.

More to the point, though, is that the Guardian readers are enabling information to be aggregated. We know now that the Tories claim the most for food. But the aggregations also allow us to compare MP total costs for various things with their actual performance in the House of Commons, thanks to a little additional cross-referencing with TheyWorkForYou.Com.

Once MP second job information is published at the start of July, we will be in a position to see a league table of MP value for money. It will not placate the public. But it may give some old, recalcitrant and now entirely embittered MPs the push they need to, in the time honoured phrase, ‘pursue career interests elsewhere’.

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1 Christian parties do not stay Christian for long
We don’t have a history of Christian parties in Britain, but they have lots of them in mainland Europe. The problem is, that it’s fairly hard to identify what the ‘Christian’ component of the Christian Democrats is. This is a problem which has particularly taxed the Dutch, whose own struggles with ‘Christian’ parties that were no longer Christian enough, resulted in a baffling 23 distinct Christian parties during the last hundred or so years. A fascinating timeline of their mergers, splits and acquisitions is presented in this Wikipedia article. Christianity grew up as a counter-culture within the Roman state, and flourished despite intense persecution for around 300 years. It was Constantine, the only emperor to be proclaimed in Britain, who proclaimed toleration for Christians in 313 AD, followed later by the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the empire. We can argue backwards and forwards about the real impact of this, but, certainly, by the fall of the Roman empire, a great many practices, symbols and philosophies from the pagan world had been adopted into Christianity, and the track record of supposedly Christian emperors was, to say the least, patchy, when it came to implementing the teaching of Jesus Christ.

Clearly, in the modern world, no Christian party is going to advocate persecution of non-Christian minorities, or crusades to recover lost ‘Christian’ lands, but the history of a too-close union between Christianity and political power is that the, quite soon, Christian regimes and Christian parties lose the Christian distinctive, and become just like other regimes and other parties. For Christians — such as myself — this creates huge problems. Get into any argument with atheists about the existence of God, and they are certain to bring up the Crusades and the Inquisition as examples of the malign impact of religion on the world. The solution to this problem is to challenge them to identify exactly how the philosophy and practices of the Crusades and the Inquisition were derived from the teachings of Jesus. In fact, they derived almost exclusively from the philosophy and practices of the Roman empire. But, at this point, we, as Christians, need to step away, and accept that applying the label ‘Christian’ to really any brand of politics creates enormous risks for the faith itself.

Over the last years, we have seen the spectacle of American presidential candidates scrabbling to present how ‘Christian’ they are. But, with the exception of Jimmy Carter (and, we hope, Obama), their actions once inside the White House have shown no particular Christian influence. If the only purpose of having ‘Christian’ parties is to bring out a captive vote, which can then be treated in a cavalier fashion, just as Tony Blair was able to treat the left-wing vote, then we would be better off without such parties.

2 Christians are called to be involved in mainstream society
Jesus called his followers to be salt and light in society. Through the pages of the New Testament, we see the early Christians engaged in all manner of ordinary, secular jobs. One of them was a city administrator. At no point do any of the New Testament writers suggest that Christians should distance themselves from secular politics. Going a little further back, the book of Daniel presents a clear picture of godly action by a civil servant and later prime minister in a thoroughly pagan regime.
The moment that we create Christian parties, we put a dilemma before Christian voters: should we vote for the best candidate, or should we vote for the Christian party. In some cases we may even be faced with the challenge of voting for the best candidate who is a Christian in a mainstream party, or the Christian party candidate.
Great Christian politicians such as Gladstone and Wilberforce were Christians active in ordinary mainstream parties. Their influence was much greater because they were involved in regular politics.
At the European elections, which traditionally favour minor parties, less than a quarter of a million people voted for the Christian parties, and their average vote was just 1.64%. But even if all regular church-goers had voted for them, they would not have attracted more than 10% of the vote. Of course, with a low turn-out, as we saw for the last election, 10% of the total electorate, if every church-goer voted, would be 20% of the actual vote — enough to put a Christian MEP into every region, but nowhere near enough to make those MEPs any more than an irritation, in the way of UKIP or the BNP.
For Christian politicians to have an impact on the society in which they live, they need to work with non-Christians. Which, of course, is exactly the way of things in business, the public sector, and most of the voluntary sector. And that means being in parties made up of many kinds of people.

3 Protest votes of any kind do not work
And that brings me to my third point. Everyone likes to make a protest, and the protest vote has a long tradition in British democracy. But not a very healthy tradition. Labour voters protested in their droves at the Euro election by simply not bothering to vote. The result? Two BNP MEPs were elected. And, rather worse for Christians, these BNP MEPs actually claim to speak for Christians. As I have pointed out in a previous article, they have no credentials for doing so, and they have no track record which would support it. However, the result of all the protest voting that took place is that the BNP got seats, whereas the Christian parties got none. I struggle to believe that all the people who voted for non-mainstream parties were happy to see the BNP elected. Nonetheless, the English Democrats, the Christian parties, and Socialist Labour were each worth an average of around one and a half percent, with the others all together probably worth another couple of percent between them. Even if these votes had been evenly distributed across the three mainstream parties, it would have been enough to keep the BNP out.

I am, personally, a committed Christian, and I joined a mainstream political party because I believe that faith does matter in politics. I certainly wouldn’t agree with anyone who suggests that you should keep religion out of politics. This is a frankly baffling and illogical perspective: why should we arbitrarily reject one part of our society from having a role in our common life. We might as well suggest that scientists should keep out of politics, or musicians, or dog-owners, or people who drive particular kinds of motor-cars, or people who do not drive at all. But, just as I would advise against a ‘Science party’, or a ‘Musicians’ party’, or any other kind of single-issue or special-interest party, I would advise Christians who want to have an impact through the democratic process against Christian parties. No party can possibly have a monopoly on Christians, nor can any party guarantee its future to the extent that it can be sure it will always behave in a scrupulously Christian way. History — and mainland European politics — is littered with too many examples of people who believed passionately in what they were doing, but were also entirely wrong.

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First, we must put the BNP success into context. If they were a worthwhile party with a positive contribution to make, we would no doubt be congratulating them on two seats. But they are two seats out of 69, and the BNP managed to attract just 6.2% of the national vote — less than the total of other minor parties. Even if you add the BNP vote to the UKIP vote (something which UKIP would strongly protest), 75% of the population still voted for pro-European, not anti-European parties. Looked at on its own, 93.8% of people voted against the BNP.

Second, we must understand that the BNP result is an artefact of our particular form of Euro-election system. When given the choice of systems, Britain opted for the D’Hondt system — the least proportional of all the ‘proportional’ systems on offer, and the closest available choice to the UK’s standard museum-piece first past the post system. Critics of proportional representation are bound to be saying that the BNP would not have got seats under a true first-past-the-post system. But, equally, they would have gained no seats under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system which most believe to be the fairest and most obvious — at least to the voter. Under STV, each voter ranks the proposed candidates in order, until they have no further preference. Given the make up of the vote last week, it is fairly clear that the BNP would have picked up almost no second or third preference votes. Far from allowing the extremists in, STV would have kept them out.

Third, we must recognise that we have only ourselves to blame for this debacle. British politics has functioned on a constant diet of back-biting and sneering, both from the media, and by politicians themselves. We have lambasted each other as incompetent, destructive, and sometimes even as ‘evil’. Now that we are facing electoral success by a party that is neither democratic nor, in any ordinary sense of the word, benevolent, we need to re-calibrate our language.

I grew up in the Thatcher years, when we were inclined to refer to her party as ‘fascist’. But they were not fascist, and never would become it. The Conservative Home website has a long blog & comments denigrating the Lib-Dems, and accusing us of being ‘liars’. Lib-Dems are not liars. We tell the truth the way we see it—as we should do in a free democracy. Tories may not agree. But that does not make us liars. Everyone has been lambasting Gordon Brown. I was on a TV show on Sunday with a Conservative candidate who, before the show, accused Brown of destroying the British economy. Brown did not destroy the British economy. And, no matter how expedient it might be for us to suggest that he did, to do so plays into the hands of the real fascists.

Likewise, spurred on by the media, the public has been educated to accuse all politicians of being liars, cheats and free-loaders. Journalists may write tongue-in-cheek, but the man in the street believes it to be true. But even politicians who have been found to have cheated on expenses are only part-dishonest. I should certainly not like to see them returned to the House of Commons, and I believe that they should have cleared the air by resigning. But that does not mean that Mrs Kirkbride and Ms Blears have not been working hard for their constituents for a very long time.

Contrast this with the BNP. Just scratch a BNP leaflet or website, and you find deceit right beneath the surface. Dig deeper, and lies and violence, as well as the arbitrary suspension of the human rights of those of whom they disapprove, are written right through their rotten hearts. As a committed Christian, I find the way in which Nick Griffin profaned the name of Jesus Christ in his speech on Sunday night to be an abomination. He claims to be speaking for Christian values and a Christian country, but everything he stands for diametrically opposed to the teaching of the carpenter from Nazareth.

So where should we go from here? The BNP know exactly where they are going. They will use every opportunity to milk the European system for funds, publicity and credibility. They will demand air-time as their democratic right, even though what they will be advocating is the dismantling of democracy. Their strategy has been building up to this for years. Why else would they contest European elections, when their whole ethos is anti-European and anti-internationalist? Their smug victory was bitter enough, but the aftermath will be far worse.

Our response, then, must be equally coherent and consistent. Otherwise, they will build on this to put them in a position of even more appalling strength at the next election.
First, the forces for good in politics must reinvent and reinvigorate themselves. No matter how much they are depending on the income, Members and Ministers who have been irretrievably tarnished by the expenses scandal should go. Parliament should vote soon to create a mechanism for them to resign immediately without loss of their resettlement grants — no matter how much that might irk the public — in return for their swift exit. If this is genuinely impossible, and I do not really understand why it should be, then they should announce now that they will be standing down. We do not need public humiliation and hand wringing — that would only serve the BNP and other extremists — but we do need action.

For us, the candidates and voters for the new parliament, we must bind ourselves not only to a code of conduct in regard to our expenses, but also in regard to our use of language and our conduct of business. The bickering, jeering atmosphere of the House of Commons, since it was first put on radio and subsequently television, has done a great deal to undermine public trust. We must simply stop backbiting, stop running negative, personal campaigns, not digging up any possible piece of dirt (proven or otherwise) to vilify another individual whose only genuine crime is daring to stand for a party not our own.

Second, we need a new, albeit unwritten, contract between the media, the public, and the politicians. Newspapers are, of course, under tremendous pressure, since their means of revenue generation has been dramatically eroded with the rise of the internet. It is unsurprising that they have leapt to whatever means of pumping up sales and increasing publicity that they can find. But politics is not the same as reality TV, and the house under Big Ben is not the same as the house of Big Brother. The constant caustic attacks on everyone who dares to put their head above the parapet are burning away our national life.

I am not suggesting that our papers and broadcasters should become anodyne, saccharine, mouthing platitudes for the sake of the ill-educated. But the duty to hold government to account must be balanced with a duty to contextualise, to explain, and, above all, to propose workable alternatives.

Third, we need to redefine our national project. Since the 1980s, the direction of Great Britain has been — almost without a voice of dissent — maximised prosperity, at the expense of all other things. Anybody speaking out against greater prosperity would have been seen as a lunatic.

I am not, of course, extolling the virtues of poverty. I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and I know which one I would pick any day of the week. But prosperity at all costs has placed an intolerable burden on government to deliver what is not in its gift. We relentlessly relaxed rules on lending, reduced supervision of the financial sector, made it ever easier for people to borrow and enter bankruptcy, and we made every possible arrangement to encourage people in the belief that you are what you own, and your only worth is financial worth.

The personal tragedy of Gordon Brown is that he was remarkably adept at stoking up the prosperity when the world was in boom, so that Britain was one of the greatest long term beneficiaries of the decade of plenty. And he has been — at least as far as international commentators are concerned — remarkably good at stitching together coalitions to limit the damage of the recession. But the public have no patience for this. The public want ongoing, endless prosperity, of the kind they have got used to. Even if the rest of the world was collapsing while Britain endured a mild slump, the public would still be calling for Brown’s blood, because we as a nation, and he, while chancellor, have programmed ourselves to see the success of a government solely in economic terms.

I do not intend to dwell on wasted opportunities. We are where we are. But unless we define our national programme in other terms — call it social capital, if you are on the left, or call it community spirit, if you are on the right, or call it spiritual renewal, if you are from a faith background — then we will inevitably and periodically return in each economic cycle to a point where the electorate believe the government has entirely failed them, see no prospect of better from the other mainstream parties, and are willing to entertain the claims of those who are quick to point the finger at scapegoats, and quick to advocate a simple ‘make sense’ plan, which (in fact) will not result in the return of the prosperity that the public seeks, and will further destroy the threads that hold the fabric of society together.

It is time for those of us who believe in a radically different agenda from that put forward by the BNP to begin long term, effective and altruistic political action.

Time to stand up and be counted.

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But the truth is, Nick Griffin is not a Christian, and he appears to have very little idea of what a Christian is like. I’m left wondering if he has ever met a Christian, and, if he has, has ever taken the trouble to ask them what they believe.

Lots of people of Griffin-like persuasion try to hide behind the argument that the Bible ‘can be interpreted in lots of ways’. But this is utter rubbish, and people who make this kind of argument show that they really have little interest in interpreting the Bible at all.

A bit less than 2,000 years ago a man called Jesus, from Nazareth, announced an entirely new deal. His teaching included love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, keep forgiving. His illustrative stories includes the famous story of the Good Samaritan — deliberately constructed to challenge deep seated racism. He mixed with the outcasts of society.

Not long afterwards, the followers of Jesus were named ‘Christian’ — initially a derogatory term. It was more than three hundred years before Christianity was accepted as a state-recognised religion. In its formative years, Christianity made no claims to ‘own’ any state or country.

If Griffin had bothered to read the New Testament, he would find a book which urges that we do not judge each other, but he would also find a book which both judged and condemned everything that he stands for.

Normally, on that basis, I would not presume to accuse or judge any politician on Christian standards. But by presenting himself as a voice for ‘Christian values’, Griffin brings himself under the full and heavy condemnation reserved by Jesus of Nazareth for hypocrites.

Griffin, you do not speak for us, we utterly repudiate what you stand for. In future, simply cease from trying to attribute your racist rubbish to anything connected with Jesus Christ or the faith he founded.

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Actually, I’m fairly certain even the message they’ve chosen would breach the normal guidelines applying to products, though, I, for one, will not be complaining.

How’s that, you ask? Essentially, if it were a product, the advertisers would have to prove their claim that ‘God probably doesn’t exist’. But in order to prove this, they would have to find some way of quantifying ‘the probability that God doesn’t exist’. Being as there is no ISO standard on the probability of the existence of a deity, this would be tough to prove. Atheist leaders may be hoping that they get the same dispensation as the phrase ‘probably the best lager in the world’, but that was clearly a joke, and this clearly isn’t.

In reality, they are probably (and I mean a measurable probability) quite safe, because the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) doesn’t intervene on issues of a political nature, and takes a nuanced position on religious offence. More importantly, they aren’t selling a product.

I suspect, though, that half of the aim of this campaign is to spur hordes of Christians (and others) to complain vociferously. If you are a person of faith, let me urge you not to give Richard Dawkins and his crew the satisfaction. In advertising terms, it’s not very probable that this ad will achieve anything other than prompting complaints. For a start, it’s too long: the eye takes in typically 18 letters in one go, which is why bus adverts, bill-boards and newspaper headlines are usually no longer than that. Most advertisers work to the old adage ‘AIDA’, standing for ‘attention, information, decision, action’. A good ad is generally considered to have an attention getter, some informative content, something that makes you decide to buy the product or service, and a call to action. The good folks at the ASA did some research a few years ago, where they discovered that messages which work in the UK are first of all informative, then clever, and, finally, enter popular culture. In my own experience, the three other things which make or break an ad are clarity (do I get the message?), credibility (does it sound believable?), and relevance (do I care?).

The British Humanist Association may be very good at representing its members, but (my personal view) probably not going to be getting calls from other voluntary organisations asking for advice on campaigns. This is an ad which will only appeal to people who already agree with it, and (again my view) quite a few of those will be embarrassed by it. Of course, they won’t be admitting that, and certainly not to me. Well, probably not, any way.

If you’re a Christian, and have been embarrassed in the past at well-meant but unappealing church adverts, take some consolation from the fact that the other side are now facing the same thing.

PS: If you’re interested in actual debate on the existence of God, you can catch the video they shot of me (and others) at the Cambridge Union autumn 2007, on the motion (which was defeated) This House Believes that God is Dead.

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