A Year Is A VERY Long Time In Politics

I have had to reject lots of very abusive comments today. Some were from the Dawkinsites, one of whom told me to Google "Godwin's Law"! Still, I suppose they have no revision to do now that the SATs at 14 have been abolished.

So, as much for my own amusement as anything else, I repeat: a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis is not the Tradition of the Church, Saint Augustine warned against it explicitly, a purely literal (or purely non-literal) reading of any part of the Bible in un-Traditional, only the fringe of the fringe of Victorian Christianity still accepted the dating of James Ussher (for all its printing in the margins of Bibles), the geological work had been and was being largely done by clergy, and Britain was more religious after the general acceptance of Darwin's theory than before it.

Newman and Kingsley were at one in their willingness to accept evolution, Darwin's work was received with that same ease in both Catholic and Protestant parts of the Continent, and the idea of God as a sort of Great Mechanic was peculiarly English, deriving from the writings of William Paley, though now experiencing a revival in the form of Intelligent Design.

William Jennings Bryan was a Christian Socialist, he was therefore a passionate opponent of Social Darwinism, that was why he took the stand that he did, he did not believe the seven days to be literally so but rather to be vast geological epochs, and Young Earth Creationism dates only from the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961.

The mapping of the human genome is the ruin of the theory (bad philosophy, and not science at all) of "the Selfish Gene", the theory of "memes" (bad philosophy, and not science at all) is the ruin of science, and serious atheist philosophers regard "Universal Darwinists" in the same way that serious theologians regard creationists and the Intelligent Design lobby.

Intelligent Design is a sort of Deism and an example of the arrogant streak among lawyers and scientists, "the survival of the fittest" is a tautology and recognised as such universally among philosophers, for the descent of the human species from another in particular (the only descent of one species from another to be of any moral importance) not the slightest evidence has ever been produced, and human beings therefore remain unarguably in a wholly different moral category from everything else.

There, I feel much better for that. I always do. Now, run along, children.

Adults, on the other hand, may be interested to learn that I have also had to reject many extremely abusive comments from those who do not like that I have dared to point out how David Cameron now speaks. He now always uses an accent suitable to a room containing his own caste and no one else. That is because he now spends almost his entire time in rooms containing his own caste and no one else. Apparently, it is outrageous that I have referred to this taboo subject. But it matters: by this time next year, will anyone outside the upper upper classes be able to understand a word that he is saying?

Not least to enliven my incandescent interlocutors even further, I am delighted to point out that Cameron is not in fact on course to win the next General Election. The constituency map that will be used is if anything even more skewed towards Labour than the present one. Tory support is very unevenly distributed around the country, being piled up as the mining vote for Labour once was. Where are the miners now?

The magic 51% in an opinion poll, without which at some point in the preceding Parliament no Opposition ever goes on to win (if you don't believe me, then ask Peter Kellner), continues to elude Cameron, for all the best efforts of the pollsters so to influence public opinion.

And a year or so before the 1997 Election, Labour was topping the poll of real votes cast in all 11 mainland regions. No, that did not hold up into the General Election. But it both reflected and set the mood. By contrast, Labour's then leads in the South East, the South West and East Anglia have no Tory parallel today in the North East, the North West or Yorkshire. Never mind in Scotland or even Wales (where the Tories are on course to do quite well). Yet it is in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands that the Tories have to win seats. They are going to do so barely if at all, and in nothing approaching sufficient numbers.

But if the Tory threat doesn't really exist, then what is the point of the Labour Party? And no such threat exists on any level. Even if the Tories did win, then they would change absolutely nothing. Labour in 1997, on the other hand, was intent on vast constitutional change, on significant social change (especially in relation to sex and drugs), and on a considerable step to the Right where health was concerned, Tory health policy having been well to the Left of New Labour's for as long as there has been a New Labour. Whereas the Tories in 2010 offer absolute continuity, only with a Prime Minister who is younger, posher, prettier, and not as intelligent.

There is simply no case whatever for the existence of a party, either to bring that about, or to stop it from happening.