On the AV referendum

I'm sad that Britain voted to reject electoral reform last week, and by such a big and politically incontestable margin. But there we are.

One thing though: those who fought, were imprisoned and even died for our right to vote didn't do it for the paper entitlement, but so that it could be used. Universal suffrage was resisted for so long because of the practical effects it would have at and beyond the voting booth.

I live in a massively safe Conservative seat in south-east England. You, perhaps, live in a nailed-on Labour seat in South Wales or Yorkshire. Under 'first past the post', if either of us doesn't want to vote for the dominant party, ours is a wasted vote - we might as well not do it. Moreover, the system we have just voted to keep encourages us not to do it. Far from it being incumbent upon us to vote out of respect for those who fought for our right to do so, we should be asking whether this is really what they intended.

It's ironic, too, that in a nation where there is widespread cynicism about politicians and about the point of voting, and that has falling electoral turnouts, so many should vote to continue to silence their and others' voices in this way.

I hope that very few of those who are so cynical voted 'No' to reform, as I'm not sure that they can hold both opinions at the same time. Or perhaps they didn't vote at all, in which case maybe they should have. For once.

It's only my opinion, but ...

I remember listening to an argument on the Today programme one morning a few years ago. A government minister and a woman from a pressure group laid into each other for 10 minutes, culminating in the minister saying, "of course, Mrs X [well actually, he called her Judy] is entitled to her opinion, but ...". At this point I dropped my spoon into my Rice Krispies. He had spent all that time disagreeing with everything she said, and then says she is entitled to her opinion!

I pictured the next day's newspaper headlines: Minister admits that slaughtering the first born in poor nations will solve world overpopulation.

I recalled this while listening to the radio this week. The foreign minister of Pakistan said that the CIA was "entitled to its opinion" when it questioned Pakistan's commitment to unearthing bin Laden. In fact he meant quite the reverse, namely that the CIA is wrong and that Pakistan had played a full and supportive role, including holding the coats of the Navy Seals as they went about their grim business. But that's not what he said. The front page of the next day's Daily Mail reared before me: Top-ranking Pakistani admits his government is either incompetent or dishonest.

What he meant of course, if he meant to mean anything at all, was that the CIA is "entitled to express its opinion", which is quite another matter. I am entitled to express the opinion that Charlton Athletic only failed to reach the Champion's League Final this year because of a world conspiracy between Millwall FC, Mossad and al-Qaeda. But I'm not entitled to hold the opinion, because it's not true. The limits to expressing an opinion are legal and to some extent customary and to do with good taste (although we could argue all night about that); the limits to holding an opinion are to do with whether it's true or not.

Can I recommend Jamie Whyte's excellent book Bad Thoughts, which has much to say about the right to an opinion and how the term is not only used wrongly (as above) but also as a dishonest way of shutting up people who have a contrary opinion, or one that is more valid than theirs, while trying to fool you into thinking they're being tolerant. They aren't.

Lines composed upon the Death of Western Civilisation

We once used to give it some welly,
You know – Mozart and Rembrandt and Shelley,
Then the classes that chatter
Said none of them matter
And now it’s reality telly

Lines composed upon the Death of Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden is dead*
Despite being impeccably bred,
For though born into riches
The son of a bitch is
Now poorer for want of a head.

Osama bin Laden, you pointed
That finger like one God-anointed
To further His plan
For the saving of Man
But I fear you will be disappointed

For Osama bin Laden, you taught
That to murder for Allah one ought.
Now they've come to getcha
I'm willing to betcha
He's not quite as nice as you thought.

*it is said

Take from Caesar what is Caesar's

I visited St Paul's Cathedral yesterday with my kids, who are 8 and 7. I wanted them to walk round it, ask why it was there, feel the history and climb the dome. I was shocked to find that the entry price on the door was £14.50 for me and about £6 each for them: nearly £30 for the three of us. That's steep: we could all have watched a same-again Pixar animation for half the price or gone to a cathedral of science in South Kensington for nothing. This shocked me, and not just as a Londoner, or because I had always got in free as a kid or, as an adult, take a Micawberish view of life and am usually a bit hard up at the wrong end of the month, which this was.

So I looked more closely and saw that entry was free if you are attending a religious service or intending to pray. This struck me as odd. Christianity is an evangelical religion: it seeks to convert heathens. People who attend services or wish to pray will already be believers. People who aren't believers tend not to. Why deter those who need to come to Christ by stinging them financially unless they are prepared to commit the sin of lying about their intention?

I challenged the man on the till, who referred me - rather wearily, I thought - to the Chapter House. Dragging my children by the ears I set off, but bumped into a cleric on the way. He said that I was not the first to raise the matter and invited us into a quiet place to discuss it.

Initially we took up strange positions: I, an unbeliever, trying to make the moral case for free admission; he, a cleric, trying to make the utilitarian case for charging. There was a touch of dishonesty in both our positions.

My case:

• A religion that seeks to convert undermines its purpose by deterring those who don't believe and welcoming only those who already do.
• It most deters those who are poor, many of whom the Church might consider most in need of it.
• I'm a bleedin' Londoner (OK, probably the weakest string in my bow, but I'm an emotional guy, and no one messes with my kids' education).

His case:

• The Church of England gets no state support, has to raise its own money, and traditional sources are dwindling in an increasingly secular world.
• Across the UK, the Church owns over 6,000 Grade 1 listed buildings which it is required to maintain, unsupported, at great expense, quite apart from those listed at Grade 2 and below.
• Most people who come to visit St Paul's do so purely as sightseers: they would visit Trafalgar Square, Madame Tussaud's or London Zoo in the same spirit. Compared to them, St Paul's is relatively cheap.
• Voluntary donation schemes have not raised anything like the money needed to maintain St Paul's, let alone lesser churches and the infrastructure that supports them.

I said that I thought the case he was making for charging - and at this level - made complete sense in financial terms (in fact it was pretty well unanswerable), but not in terms of the Church's mission, which St Paul's was surely there to represent and promote. Nor did it make sense in terms of encouraging non-religious but well-disposed people like me, who would make a point of speaking with their kids about the significance of such buildings and the beliefs that lay behind them so that they can, one day, make up their own minds. Had they, the Church, I wanted to know, given up on that; on us?

We then touched on what I think is fundamental to all of this: the demise of religious institutions in a secular age. And here, in a spirit close to lamentation and in a manner more sociological than religious, we began to agree. What he had said was true: most people do see a cathedral as no different from Big Ben or Nelson's Column; most will be no less indifferent to the Church's message than to the genesis of Parliament or naval strategy during the Napoleonic Wars. Are people able any more to have a point of reference (any point of reference) outside the self from which to derive - and with which to debate - meaning?

"People criticise David Cameron," he said, "but the Church has been doing 'The Big Society' for years." And so it has.

I wanted to say more, to talk and listen all afternoon, but one of the kids, who had been promised the climb to the top of the dome, had started to gnaw my right leg in frustration, and my legs are not one of their '5 a day' as prescribed by the secular authority.

The man said that he could give us a free pass to get in. I said that I would donate £10 and gave a fiver each to the kids to put in the donation box as we passed. And they got a right and proper and respectful tour of St Paul's Cathedral from me that day, so they did, and by the end of it I like to think they had a fair idea of where that money - which would have bought all of five ice creams - had gone. And they wowed at the view from the top.

I am not sure that I was right, or that my motives were pure (not that one is necessarily dependent on the other); I disagreed with the utilitarian response I got from the man, and I stand by that; but my God, I like to think I got a flavour of the predicament for them, and for the rest of us too, and I feel just a bit humbler - if not poorer - as a result.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Leon Trotsky would have admired modern Britain: it is a backward country that has achieved a state of permanent revolution while the Germans sit in bourgeois comfort. This is no less so in true-blue Buckinghamshire, where I stable my own Trojan Horse, where the Conservative Party holds 46 of the 57 seats (on fewer than half the votes mind!) and which achieves unintended year on year what the international revolutionary movement failed for decades to foment on purpose.

As a nation which prides itself on being the most stable and settled in the world, and as a people with a name for a cautious, deliberate, pragmatic and almost hostile approach to change, this may seem odd. But, far from drawing on our supposed continuity and deeply-rooted sense of self, look how much changes at the hands of those who most loudly proclaim them, and how quickly; is redefined, renamed, reframed and, like so many wheels, reinvented all the time, even when they may not be wonky. It indicates neither confidence nor vitality but ... uncertainty.

Is it just possible that, to adapt a song about every England football manager that I can remember, We Don't Know What We're Doing?

Look particularly at government - at all levels. With or without recessions, in good times and in bad, it seems compelled to inaugurate change, and somewhat after the manner that Basil Fawlty approached the concept of panic; namely, as the great man said when asked to refrain from it: "What else is there to do?"

For example, when Gordon Brown became Labour Prime Minister, shortly after being voted the most successful ever Chancellor of the Exchequer [IPSOS-MORI poll of 300 academics, all members of the Political Studies Association, November 2006], remember how it was reported that he had used the word 'change' three hundred and nineteen times in his first speech to the Commons? What we needed was more of the same, surely?

And now that the obese and flatulent corpse on which Brown rode to power has burst, what is the solution to our woes and the key to our salvation? With what shall we mop up the mess? Why, 'change'! It was the Conservative Cameron's campaign slogan; great change, unprecedented change; change, moreover, that we, this sceptical and sensible people, must embrace. What we need from the Conservative party is a strong dose of our native caution, surely? Is this man preaching 'the Big Society' without having read his Edmund Burke?

And what of the great responsibilities of the state: education, health, the welfare of the unfortunate (or importunate, as you like)? Shouldn't these be based on a relatively settled and shared understanding of what the state is to provide, and based in turn on a reasonably clear social compact? Yes they should, but no they aren't.

Again, for all the dynamism of the rhetoric it betrays uncertainty; a vacuum into which rush all sorts of bogus, transitory and contradictory little certainties that will be replaced tomorrow.

No wonder that we are all lever-pullers now, and that we ask not "whether?", but only "how?".

My annual lecture: An Invitation

I would like to invite all followers to my forthcoming Wycombe Arts Society lecture at High Wycombe Town Hall on Monday 18th April at 7.30pm.

Taking an unashamedly Health and Safety approach to E.M Forster's A Passage to India, I shall venture that the author's true purpose was not to unmask the failings of Empire or even to attempt a more general treatment of cross-cultural understandings, both of which I regard as 'problematic', but rather to essay an early - indeed, seminal, if flawed - attempt to critique failures to carry out appropriate risk assessments before leading trips and journeys.

I shall contend that this message has never been more appropriate than today.

I look forward to seeing you both there.