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By way of an analogy it does not follow that because some children are abused by their parents the family unit is a discredited entity. The abuse of press freedoms is a less serious crime, though serious nonetheless. Yet the current outpouring of opprobrium towards News International over the criminal misdeeds carried out or sanctioned by an as yet undetermined number of its journalists, executives and associates - and let us agree that the revelations that brought the New of the World down last week speak of a loathsome newsroom culture - has a canting momentum about it that may yet have some form of pernicious satisfaction.

Sporadic outbreaks of inchoate public rage are now expected events in Britain. The bankers, the MPs, the Lib Dems and Ryan Giggs have all copped it. Now it's the turn of the journalists, and, er, the coppers. There's little doubting the hatred is real, and yet one wonders whether there is not a little too much anti-establishment schadenfreude about it. To bow to that sentiment and neuter the press only to find that in the blink of an eye the public pulse has been quickened by some new casus belli would be a mistake. No doubt the Guardian and to a lesser extent the BBC are to be applauded for helping to expose the scandal; but it is perhaps no coincidence that the latter, in particular, stands to gain much from News Corp's ruination, or that the former has long demonised Rupert Murdoch, both on an ideological basis and personally. After the phone-hacking business erupted a couple of weeks ago, one Guardian blogger exclaimed: "Let's hope this is our Arab Spring." In-keeping with the wider narrative if he meant the Guardian's; entirely asinine if he meant the country's.

At any rate the story is unlikely to disappear from that newspaper's front end any time soon; which will surely give its editorial staff the opportunity to flesh out a vision of Britain's post-Arab Spring media world. It is encouraging, then, to note that they do not give credence to the notion espoused by Neil Kinnock - allying himself in this instance with pronouncements on the matter from the Chinese - that newspapers should be made to toe the same line the BBC is meant to on political impartiality. After all, it is for the left an unpalatable truth that in most places where there exists a free market for news and opinion, titles either marginally or blatantly to the right sell rather better than the alternatives.

So the SNP's Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Bill has been kicked into the long grass, or at least the rough. Quite right, too. Seemingly it is to be looked at again later in the year, but the longer the verdure into which it is shanked the better.

Not being in the country I haven't seen them with my own eyes, but I can well imagine the shrill headlines on the front pages of the Scottish editions of the Mail and Express after the minister sponsoring the thing, Roseanna Cunningham, acknowledged in parliament that under its provisions singing God Save the Queen or crossing oneself might "in certain circumstances" (we're sort of, um, not sure) constitute an offence. As those organs of truth will have taken delight in pointing out, you couldn't make it up, and they'd be right: you couldn't. But you didn't have to. It may be a small few who take an interest in what goes on inside the Scottish Parliament, but the transcripts are there for all to read. And Cunningham was attempting to make the case for the bill.

Equally certain is that ponderous commentarists in the lefty, Alex Salmond-hugging broadsheets will have been at great pains to point out that only a relatively small number of prosecutions would ever be likely to arise from this Bill and that nobody would actually be arrested for banging on about the queen because that would be absurd. And furthermore give the Scottish government some credit for trying to Do Something, etcetera etcetera. And in their ponderous way they would probably be right about some of this too.

But if it is agreed that a piece of legislation is so vague that it is only ever likely to be patchily enforced, or indeed so vague that you won't know you're breaking the law until you end up in jail ("behaviour that a reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive" is the key line here), then why bother with it in the first place? The chief constable of Strathclyde police was quoted as saying that "if the legislation stops one person" from doing anything vaguely sectarian, then it will be worthwhile. Really? A wiser man once said that "a corrupt society has many laws", and it is a matter of fact that we already have numerous laws capable of banging those guilty of sectarian crimes to rights, including some fairly robust anti-terrorism laws whose passage I seem to think the SNP, rightly or wrongly, opposed. Yet quite apart from the issue of its superfluity, in extending strictures on sectarian behaviour and language within football grounds to pubs, cyberspace and anywhere else Celtic and Rangers supporters might convey themselves, this Bill strikes rather a sinister, Draconian note. It is, in fact, illiberal in the extreme to presume that the state should have any business peering into men's souls on the feeble-minded presumption that people crossing themselves in an "aggressive" manner may be to blame for the violence of others.

One final point. It is often in the make-up of nationalists to be irritated and exasperated by the nation they would wish to remould in their own image. Neither Rangers or Celtic supporters have tended to promulgate a feverishly Scottish identity. But if we're in the business of proscribing songs about bygone bloodshed, what makes Flower of Scotland exempt?

Last week it emerged that the Metropolitan Police are investigating the Spectator magazine following complaints from a Muslim group about comments made on a blog entry on its website by the Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips. Writing about the massacre, in the West Bank, of a three-month-old Jewish girl, her two brothers and her parents as they slept in their beds, Phillips referred to the murderers as 'savages' and to the 'moral depravity of the Arabs'.

Phillips is not generally noted for even-handedness when it comes to writing about the Middle East. She is often polemical, some might even say tendentious, in her support of Israel. She is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, and perhaps you would include yourself in that. Perhaps you feel that she comes too close to smearing all Arabs. Perhaps you even think hers are the sort of views that should be investigated by the police. But then again, perhaps you don't read her blogs and form your views of the rights and wrongs of faraway bloodshed from other sources. Perhaps you wonder what all the fuss is about.

There are echoes here of the case of another Daily Mail journalist, Jan Moir, who in 2009 upset a lot of people by appearing to attribute the death of the singer Stephen Gately to his lifestyle. Gately was gay. The Crown Prosecution Service eventually decided, about a year ago, not to prosecute Moir, but the whole episode conjured up bizarre images of crown officials poring over words and phrases in a newspaper opinion column for evidence of illegality.

And then there was the case, less well-publicised, involving Douglas Murray, another journalist. He was investigated by the Press Complaints Commission and the police merely for suggesting that the prosecution of an English councillor for telling a joke about an Irishman being a bit dim was ludicrous. And last year, too, a Liberal Democrat councillor was convicted under the 2006 Public Order Act for using 'threatening, abusive or insulting words, with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress'. Shirley Brown, who is black, had called a female Asian councillor, Jay Jethwa, a 'coconut', a colloquial term used to denote a person who is 'brown on the outside and white on the inside' - someone who has, in other words, betrayed his or her cultural roots by pandering to 'white' opinion.

But it's not merely in print and in the debating chamber that solecisms can have repercussions: cyberspace also has its victims. Think of Paul Chambers, who was fined £3,000 and lost his job for tweeting, in jest, words to the effect that he would blow up an airport if its closure due to bad weather disrupted his travel plans. Or of Gareth Compton, the Tory councillor who was arrested in November when - after hearing the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue on a radio programme that the West had no moral authority to condemn the practice of stoning women in the Muslim world - he asked his Twitter followers 'Can someone please stone [her] to death?', adding 'I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really.'

That some users of social media are discovering, to their detriment, that the online environment does not in fact mirror the domain of the private conversation down the pub was perhaps inevitable. But then, as the Sky Sports commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys - who lost their jobs for making off-colour remarks when they thought they were not being recorded - recently found out, even private conversation is no longer safe from censure.

What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal - or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism - a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all.

If UK prime minister David Cameron seemed to grasp this when he spoke of the merits of 'muscular liberalism' earlier this year, it is a pity that his government's Protection of Freedoms Bill - an Act which has been making its way through parliament since last summer and which it is intended will extend freedom of information, turn back the tide of state intrusion into our lives and repeal unnecessary criminal laws - makes no attempt to return free speech to its rightful place at the altar of democracy.

The Lib-Con coalition government may well be less authoritarian than the Labour one that preceded it, but in a way we are still suffering the hangover from New Labour and the ideals it pressed into service when it ditched socialism: diversity, equality, respect. Among the 4,300 new offences put into statute under Labour were those governing 'hate speech', or the giving and taking of offence. First came legislation on racial and religious hatred; later, protection was extended to gay, transgender and disabled people. Doubtless heightened sensitivity about Islam in the wake of 9/11 played its part: the Religious Hatred Act of 2006, for instance, extended outdated blasphemy laws to afford people of all faiths, including Jedis, recourse against things they don't like hearing said or seeing written.

One of the results has been a new culture of fastidious censoriousness in every public body, human-resource department and media organisation in the land. Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that 'incitement to hatred' is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, 'hate speech' can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.

That distinction between incitement to hatred and incitement to violence is a crucial one for Peter Tatchell, one of this country's most tireless and principled human rights campaigners. When I spoke to him last year he had recently been in the news for defending the rights of Christian preachers hounded by the law over homophobic hate-speech crimes. One American Baptist evangelist, Shawn Holes, was fined £1,000 for telling shoppers in Glasgow city centre that homosexuals were bound for hell; Tatchell, who is gay himself and renowned for his campaigning on behalf of gay rights, called it 'an attack on free speech and a heavy-handed, excessive response to homophobia'.

He had also spoken up for the five Islamists convicted of showering abuse at British soldiers at a 'homecoming' march in Luton, but had elsewhere called for sanctions on extremists who incite violence - including Abu Usamah, who was shown in a Channel 4 undercover documentary advocating the killing of gays and Muslims who leave their faith. But there was no contradiction, he insisted. 'If someone says "I want to encourage people to plant bombs in Princes Street in Edinburgh", then that's pretty clear incitement to violence', he told me. 'Saying "I sympathise with al-Qaeda" is not, on the other hand.'

While that view may not be likely to find favour with mainstream political opinion, muscular liberal or otherwise, it makes sense from a First Amendment perspective, if you're talking American. Britain doesn't have a First Amendment, of course, but it did produce John Stuart Mill, who wrote in 1859 that 'there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered'. The limits of such liberty should be defined by the 'harm principle', he said, not by social offence. In other words, dealing with offence is part of being a grown-up in a grown-up society.

Liberals nowadays seem to have lost the stomach for such principles, however. The word 'liberal' itself has come to denote a much narrower set of ideas: vaguely leftish, environmentalist, irreproachably PC, pro-European, pro-Palestine, pro-Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Technology, meanwhile, may have helped to create a more informed and engaged citizenry, but it has also given a leg up to the power of mob rule. Online forums and message boards foster a culture of outrage, indignation and recrimination; they manufacture and mobilise offence.

The Lib-Cons' Protection of Freedoms Act will flush away ID cards, biometric passports and the ContactPoint database of children in England. It includes provisions to restrict and regulate the use of surveillance powers, CCTV and the storage of internet and email records and it will restore rights to freedom of assembly, non-violent protest and trial by jury. It may prove to be a watershed moment for liberty in Britain. It could have been a much greater one. It is time to weigh again the value, as opposed to the price, of free speech.

This article was published on Spiked

It is a dire predicament when Scots are left to go hungry because they cannot find basic foodstuffs like syboes and tumshies in their local supermarket.

I have only just discovered syboes. Apparently they are the same as spring onions, only without a fancy English name. I don't know what they are called in Wales, which specialises in these kinds of vegetables.

Syboe shoppers who are not up to date with these things will search the aisles in vain for the product. Help, it seemed for a while, may have been at hand, but that hope now looks forlorn with the news that Dr Bill Wilson MSP, a list member for the West of Scotland, is on the verge of being deselected by the SNP after opting to go and live in the Lothians, where he has been placed at number eight on "the list".

The small number of people who take an interest in politics will no doubt know what all of this means, but it now falls to ordinary, downtrodden, hungry Scots to agitate for his retention in the political sphere.

Dr Bill has been campaigning for supermarkets to label fruit and vegetables in Scots as well as English for some time now, although this is not the only way in which he has manifested his usefulness: in his spare time he has lobbied for the introduction of "green" pigs, done his best to stop the hot-branding of horses and tried to have cricket banned from Scottish television sets.

It is unclear what Dr Bill might do away from politics. It might be that he decides to follow Lembit Opik into stand-up comedy but, like Gussie Fink-Nottle (the noted newt-fancier in the Jeeves novels), whom he resembles closely, he is expert on ecological matters - hence the doctorate - and may wish to devote more time to studies of insect behaviour and the like.

Alternatively - and I'm sure this has occurred to him - he might put himself forward for next year's The Apprentice. That the programme's makers have shunned Scots contestants for the second year running is a slight to this nation's ability to make thrusting weasels of its sons and daughters, and we should not stand for it.

If Sir Alan Sugar can be catapulted from the boardroom into politics, why not Dr Bill in the other direction? A new platform from which to air his views on vegetables may prove hard to resist.

This article appeared in The Herald

In my experience, if a taxi driver wishes to unburden himself of his woes - or, indeed, of some flatulence - you don't have much choice but to listen. Occasionally there is an ex-wife to berate; more frequently, it is the cooncil. Sometimes, on happier journeys, there may be a ribald joke or a story about a footballer getting legless that you will later relate to friends.

As a matter of personal taste, I'm not much into taking a note of the driver's badge number and relaying his opinions on Twitter, though. Partly, this is because I hold steadfast to the view that Twitter is moronic; partly, it is because I don't work for the Stasi.

However, this is precisely what one business customer in Aberdeen very recently did. The Tweet, which told, apparently, of the driver's less than eulogistic views on Aberdeen City Council, can no longer be traced online. One can only speculate that it was removed, perhaps with the council's benedictions, the Tweeter having been duly thanked for his or her exemplary display of good citizenship, or something like that.

The driver? Well, he was hauled up, of course, apparently "questioned" and sent on his way with his tail between his legs. This, see, is what councils are about these days. Not content with trying to outdo one another in the number of people they employ with long, tendentious job titles containing the words "diversity", "equalities" and "community", they see it as their duty to spend our money getting us to think well of them.

South Lanarkshire Council last month excelled itself by threatening to bring proceedings for defamation against the membership of a community council in the area because its website linked to an article on another site entitled "South Lanarkshire Council and Scottish Coal Hand in Hand at Community LIE-aison Meeting".

In England, stories abound of councils using anti-terrorism laws to justify spying on people to see if they let their dogs dump on the pavement or don't separate their rubbish properly, but this monitoring of the web in search of dissent is every bit as execrable. As a demonstration of contempt for democracy, it is beyond parody.

There is an authoritarian streak in Scottish public life as rigid as the dominie's strap. Taxi drivers should not, you may ultimately decide, be left to stand up alone for free speech. But, for now, I say to them only this: "Let rip."

This article appeared in The Herald

The term "right-wing" is hardly used in Scotland other than as an insult these days. It is, therefore, hard to quantify what support there is for rightish sentiment, as poor right-wingers are forced to keep quiet about their political leanings. Left-wingers are, generally, much easier to identify. Often they are devil-may-care types, have great taste in music and great sex lives. They are also deeply moved by images of polar bears, see discrimination in a handful of dust and think competitive school sports days are a bad thing.

In polite society, right-wingers have a way of keeping the conversation on an even keel, often to the extent that their lack of concern for polar bears is all that gives them away. They also tend to be less fashionably attired than their left-wing friends, would rather not be pestered into giving money to causes and are appalled by people crying on television.

I was quite sure these distinctions were fundamentally sound, but some academics have thrown a spanner in the works: a new study has revealed that significant numbers of middle-aged people may be left-wing "by mistake". Having dabbled with radical left-wing views as students, they still define themselves by those views now, even though the business of holding down a job and raising children has actually led them to be rather more conservative.

The implication is that many people hold centre-rightish views but fail to notice that their outlook has shifted, often because they associate only with others of like mind. Marx, who is thought to have been fairly left-wing, was rather taken with the idea of false consciousness, but I do not think this is what he meant. Later, an Italian fellow, Antonio Gramsci, said that for Marxists to win the political war, they would first have to win the cultural war and, at his suggestion, the left set about infiltrating campuses, the arts and the media, ingraining the idea that to be even remotely right-wing was proof positive of moral deficiency.

It would be uncharitable not to have a degree of sympathy for the faux left-wing middle classes: in renouncing themselves, they would probably have to forego their good taste in music and their great sex lives. Theirs, though, is the generation that spent all the money, thus requiring their children to be altogether more enterprising and self-reliant, if not actually, confessedly, right-wing.

This article appeared in The Herald

Like many people, I was once rather convinced of the merits of republicanism. After being hectored by faux-proletarian Trotskyite agitprop vendors outside Glasgow University library every day for four years, however, the condition eased.

Those who would have done with constitutional hereditary monarchy seem disinclined to acknowledge that revolution never spared France or Russia from despotism, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a sociopath, that banishing Constantine II in 1974 hasn't done Greece much good or that 69p per citizen per year is excellent value for the entertainment Prince Philip alone provides.

That said, it seems only right - in a democratic age - that as we brace ourselves for years of strikes and potholes and libraries closing down, the Queen should also draw in her horns, so to speak. To that end, George Osborne announced this week there will be no rise on the £7.9m the royals receive each year through the Civil List. Of course, the Queen does surrender the revenue from royal property held by the Crown Estate - believed to be upwards of £200m every year - and is loved by all foreigners, even the French, Russians and Greeks, thus swelling the coffers of UK plc via tourism and helping to fund history lessons in our schools about the evils of her forebears and the hereditary principle in general.

But, still, maybe the royals could do a bit more to help reduce the deficit. Even before she was caught offering industrialists access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew for £500,000, the palace thought Sarah Ferguson unspeakably common, but what if she was on to something? If people exist who believe access to Andy might be of any use whatsoever, what harm punting his services by the hour for the country?

In a similar vein, Phil's propensity for gaffes might be exploited. If he agreed to make a donation to the Exchequer every time he offended a foreigner, those tours of the Commonwealth might pay for themselves. Charles, meanwhile, could usefully be encouraged to stop talking about homeo­pathy, Gaia and so on.

The point is: there is time for the royal family to save the country from itself and them­selves from the gibbet. The alternatives are unthinkable: either we'd have to elect a career politician head of state or we'd end up at the mercy of quangocrats or J K Rowling or Ant and Dec.

This article appeared in The Herald

Samuel Johnson once wrote that it was a "universal error" to suppose that every effect has a proportionate cause. "In the inanimate action of matter upon matter," mused the old boy, "the motion produced can be but equal to the force of the moving power; but the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit no such laws. The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation. It is not always that there is a strong reason for a great event".

Gordon Brown has tended to put a very similar reading abroad of the current economic recession. The credit crunch, he would have us believe, was just something that landed on Britain's doorstep one morning, something the Americans cooked up, like cheeseburgers or the idea of intelligent design, and decided to share with the rest of the world. And what he says is partly true: the pricking of a confidence bubble in financial instruments in the United States had profound shockwaves globally. Brown, having been one of those credulous enough to believe the normal dynamics of market economics were vanquishable, was taken by surprise by such a pricking, but he was no doubt also quickly jolted by the reminder that such market corrections are, if not without cause, as naturally occurring as the dissipation of support for unelected Prime Ministers.

The sale of bits of "our" banks this week is a tacit acknowledgement that though the free market may stutter it is still better than any rival system. Brown's scorched earth policy - another "fiscal stimulus" is to be announced in the pre-budget report later this month - in the face of likely electoral repudiation is entirely in-keeping, however, with the wholly irresponsible way in which he has administered the nation's finances for the past 12 years.

Britain now has the worst public finances of any comparable western economy. Interest payments on the national debt are higher than the education budget and stand to increase further if we lose our Triple A credit rating, which seems more and more likely. Nebulous outside forces cannot be held responsible. Public spending, fuelled by borrowing, doubled during the boom years under Labour, debt spiralling against no great collateral. Blair's attempts to reform public services were resisted then ditched; now the public sector is bloated, entrenched in inefficiency and encumbering on those who fund it. The government signally failed to control the supply of money and encouraged an unsustainable house price boom. Brown, in his Mansion House speeches, urged bankers to take ever greater risks, and his tripartite system of financial regulation left neither the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority or the Bank inclined to bother with sniffing out malfeasance in the City.

It will take years before we return to fiscal normality - plenty of time for New Labour to admit its actions postponed the eventual date.

TO listen to the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Annabel Goldie, is to understand that while Tories, either in Edinburgh or in London, are unlikely to confess as much publicly, painful lessons have been absorbed since Thatcherism left the party a spent force in Scottish politics.

David Cameron, the man who looks ever more likely to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, may seem to Scots - the way Thatcher did - as English as clotted cream and country houses; but where the Iron Lady effectively forced her will on Scotland Cameron, Goldie is assured, will respect the mandate of whoever sits at Holyrood and allow the Scottish Tories to dictate their own policy agenda. Devolution, the horse the Tories previously wanted shot at birth, has bolted. Cameron, though, wants devolution to work, and to work better.

In an exclusive interview ahead of the party's Scottish conference, Goldie praised Cameron's honesty and courage in "reconfiguring" the Tory Party, and said he had made it clear that if elected he will work with Scottish politicians in a spirit of co-operation.

Having gained leadership of the party in Scotland around about the same time as Cameron was chosen to head up Her Majesty's Official Opposition, Goldie, who now attends Shadow Cabinet meetings at Westminster, described their relationship as one of mutual respect. "From the word go we got on with each other and that has grown to a very constructive political relationship because David Cameron is a highly intelligent man who is eminently easy to talk to," she said. "In amongst taking the Conservative Party and making it fit for purpose in the 21st Century he has still found time for Scotland, in which he takes a very keen interest. I literally can phone him any time I want to.

"He and I have discussed at length how to get devolution to dovetail better with Westminster, whether it's at party level, parliamentary level or government level. It's interesting that the Labour Party, essentially the architect of devolution, has offered the most lamentable illustration of how to conduct relationships between the two parliaments.

"Holyrood and Westminster should not be in competition - they both have vital and different roles to discharge. David Cameron says 'if I am elected Prime Minister, I will respect the role of Alex Salmond as First Minister. I may not agree with his policies, I may not agree with his politics, but he's a democratically constituted First Minister and I must respect that and engage with him.'"

Any incoming government will have to get to grips as best it can with the parlous state of the UK's public finances and the possibility of a very slow economic recovery, realities which are likely to mitigate against the traditional Tory policy of tax cuts and put an enormous fly in the ointment of welfare reform, a keystone in Cameron's mission to heal "the broken society." Save to observe that Cameron is under no illusions about the severity of these challenges, Goldie was light on the specifics of how he will set out about resuscitating either society or the economy, but she did pay tribute to the way in which he has energised and modernised his party.

"David Cameron has taken decisive and courageous decisions as leader of his party, both on party issues and policy, and that is the character of the man that will be demonstrated as Prime Minster of this country," she said. "The Conservative party of all parties is not an easy entity to reconfigure, and yet he effectively said to it, 'go and think about yourselves and the issues that are going to confront your children and your grandchildren, and understand that time moves on and that there are new issues emerging that are just as significant as the ones we considered were of paramount political importance 25 and 30 years ago.' When he talked about green issues and the environment and society being broken in the context of broken families and social breakdown, I think people thought the Conservative Party saw itself as slightly remote from all that. But David Cameron has made the party face up these things."

According to Goldie, those who portray Cameron as being out of touch with the average Joe deliberately misconstrue him. "It's easy for sections of the media to parody him as a toff and an Old Etonian and so that's what they do, but at the end of the day he's a husband and a father and I believe he is, genuinely, in touch with the lives of ordinary people," she said. "He and George Osborne are saying there are tough decisions and they are being fair and square with the electorate on that. We are stepping into a situation in which the British economy is in hock up to its oxters and to that extent is burdening not just the current tax-paying population but the next generation and arguably a generation beyond that.

"David Cameron is very clear that there is no silver bullet to all of this - he is not going to go into the election claiming it will all be wonderful under a Conservative government. What he will say is that we face a very challenging situation that will require leadership and courage and that he is prepared to provide both."

Part of this interview appeared in the Sunday Herald

Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands, by Aatish Taseer

AATISH TASEER, raised by his Sikh mother and grandparents in Delhi and educated at a Christian boarding school in southern India and in the US, knew when he set out on his travels through Islam's heartlands that he had a limited grasp of what it means to be a Muslim. Not being extensively versed in Koranic tradition, his own faith was threadbare; rather, indeed, like that of his Pakistani father, Salman, who shortly after Aatish's birth in 1980, abandoned his new Indian family to return to his wife in Lahore. In adulthood the younger man has sought to mend that broken relationship, but the pair's disestrangement, complicated from the first by Salman's attitudes towards India and the West, was set back in 2005 when Aatish wrote an article about British Pakistanis and Islamic extremism to which abba took vehement umbrage.

Taseer fils, puzzled that his forebear - politician, businessman and avowed disbeliever - should put such store in calling himself a Muslim, wanted to better understand the 'civilisation of faith' of which he had heard spoken both in Pakistan and Britain. And so, armed with his own lightly-worn Sufism, he decided to travel once more to Pakistan, this time from Turkey via the Arab world, in search of what this supra-national Islamic identity means. If the fact of his being a Muslim at all is his passport on the road, however, it should also be recorded that it gives him licence to be honest about the religion he encounters to a degree western writers tend to shrink from. For this is a book that asks awkward questions of Islam and comes up with unsettling answers.

Part travelogue, part essay, part personal odyssey, Taseer's narrative is probing, exhilarating and shot through with pinpoint observations of people, places and situations, from the menace of Tehran to the ecstasy of religious experience and the commercialism of Mecca. His is an attempt to understand those societies from which Islam takes nourishment.

In Leeds just after 7/7, Taseer had observed a generational divide between older British Muslims, who remembered with some pride their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan, and their offspring, who lacked their parents' instinctive humour and openness and hated the West. To younger Muslims, whose religion seemed the more rigid and forbidding, faith came with an amorphous sense of grievance. Bored and rootless, they found in political Islam a grand narrative not readily proffered by the secular West.

In Istanbul and Damascus he meets many others who feel the same way, who see the West as stopping Muslims from thinking "as the early Muslims thought." The notion of the great Islamic past is everywhere sounded, historical fact skewered to support a narrative of aggression and attack from the Christian West. The message, that the Islamic world is now divided because of the West and the influence of its ideas, is one in which 'cultural Muslims' like Taseer's father can believe, as it has "more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction."

To his dismay, the solution the author finds gaining ground is a sort of retreat from the world, the re-emergence of Wahhabism and its insistence on adherence to letter of the Book, effecting new levels of intellectual incuriosity and cultural homogeneity. All of this is anathema to Taseer, who has a special feeling for the religious plurality of India but, ironically, it is in Iran that he finds reason to believe the 'civilisation of faith' will, not before time, come up against its own illogicality and absurdity. In a country where women are beaten for the merest transgression and young people are criminalised "by a tyranny of trifles", he finds a growing culture of private and public dissent and widespread hatred of the Revolution.

In Tehran he also finds people who make the distinction between the enforced religion of the Islamic Republic, and 'the real faith'; yet shocked perhaps that people like his father can be so unperturbed by fundamentalism, he asks: "Did it really matter whether the Islam of the Islamic Republic was the 'real Islam' or not? Did it matter whether the socialism of Stalin or Mao was the real socialism?" Indeed, among his Pakistani family - supposedly moderate - he encounters hatred of America, Israel and Hindus, as well as a tendency to doubt the Holocaust. "It was too little moderation and in the wrong areas," as he puts it.

In Pakistan itself, he finds feudalism unchecked, corruption king and bitter division amid relative homogeneity, "where once great diversity had been absorbed." His warning that extremists "know the country has to be destabilised, the robust society made bleaker" is all too sage in the light of last week's terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Stranger to History is a beautifully-written book, but the ugliness of what it reveals is what lives on after reading.

This article appeared in The Herald