CentreRight

Newsnight's economics editor wants programmes cut and assets sold to protect BBC staff pensions

BBC Newsnight seems to provide the most militant of the BBC strikers. Michael Crick, the programme's political editor, said “I haven’t listened to the Today programme. I regard listening to or watching the BBC as strike breaking.” Wow. I wonder what he thinks of left-leaning journalists like Steve Richards who appeared as guests on yesterday's Today programme.

 

 

Meanwhile Crick's colleague, Paul Mason, Newsnight's economics editor (captured above in The Sunday Telegraph, on the picket line with National Union of Journalists placard and armband) urged the BBC to cut programmes and sell assets in order to protect staff pensions. Some changes to pension entitlements were proposed by BBC management to correct a deficit in the Corporation's pension fund, caused by retirees living longer and the performance of financial markets. Four out of five unions and the vast majority of non-unionised staff have accepted the changes. The NUJ, which represents just 17% of BBC staff, rejected the proposals. These are the same people who provide reporting of the Coalition's cuts programme.

The Mail on Sunday splashes on the decision of Sarah Montague and Evan Davies to cross picket lines and ensure yesterday's Today programme was broadcast:

"Two of the BBC’s most high-profile presenters, Evan Davis and Sarah Montague, enraged colleagues yesterday by defying the strike that has brought chaos to its news schedules. They ignored a 48-hour journalists’ walkout to present Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. It is understood that they managed to avoid crossing a picket line by arriving at 3.30am – before striking colleagues had arrived. Their decision was a boon to BBC management trying to ensure major news programmes remained on air, but has been described as a kick in the teeth to colleagues striking over changes to their pension scheme."

Other strike-breakers included Jonathan Dimbleby who ensured Radio 4's Any Questions? was broadcast. James Landale also served BBC TV viewers, reporting on Iain Duncan Smith's welfare shake-up. Andrew Neil presented Friday's edition of BBC2's Daily Politics.

The best comment on the dispute comes from a BBC worker, noting that the head of news, Helen Boaden, read news bulletins as part of managements efforts to maintain services; “It’s like the Queen doing the vacuuming.”

John Simpson compares BBC licence freeze to "waterboarding"

This going OTT thing is contagious. Last week Left-wingers queued up to compare perfectly reasonable housing benefit reforms to the "final solution".

This week John Simpson, the BBC's World Affairs Editor, has compared the licence fee freeze to "waterboarding".

It wasn't an off-the-cuff remark but was contained in a letter submitted to and accepted by Ariel, the BBC's own in-house newsmagazine.

According to Mr Simpson, only "far-right idealogues" and the "Murdoch empire" think the BBC should share the pain being endured by the rest of the public sector.

He writes:

"Our income will shrink year on year for seven long years, by amounts that are unknown because we can't tell how high inflation will be over that period of time. It'll be like waterboarding. As our head is pulled out of the bath, we'll be so desperate that we can't be certain what compromises and deals we might be tempted to make. We will be at the government's mercy."

We didn't really need proof that some BBC journalists were given to inappropriate exaggeration but it's good to have it in a such clear form.

A licence freeze isn't waterboarding, Mr Simpson, it's called "living in the real world".

Free The Fink

I hope The Times' paywall works and not just because it offers free-to-air blogs like ConHome new opportunities. It was James Forsyth who pointed me to the customers of Starbucks, clutching their £2-a-go coffee frappuccino and a free copy of the Metro. If people are willing to pay for such luxury drinks I think they should be open to paying for quality journalism too. The £2-a-week it costs to access The Times online is worth it (and not just for my semi-regular column!).

It's far from clear if The Times' great experiment is yet working. Figures released today suggest over 100,000 people are paying to read the newspaper's websites but as Malcolm Coles blogs, many of these are, including him, one-off payers. It's early days, however, and The Times will be hoping, over time, to convert the likes of Malcolm Coles to regular subscriptions and these subscriptions will be worth more than the drop off in online advertising revenues.

I have two recommendations for the high-ups at The Times.

First they should devise a PayPal-style passport that allows people to subscribe to The Times and then use that payment passport to also get behind the News of the World's new paywall*. If NewsCorp own the newspaper payment passport it will open up possibilities for all sorts of future micropayments. The current payment mechanism lacks flexibility. My guess is that Rupert Murdoch's boffins are already working on this but I was surprised it wasn't introduced at the time of the paywall's erection, given the many months that passed between the announcement of it and its arrival.

My second recommendation is to free The Times' blogs from the paywall. Danny Finkelstein's Comment Central blog, for example, was an important part of the centre right conversation. It was. Now, costing pounds to access, it doesn't get much link love. It's also noticeable that Danny doesn't blog so much. That's a shame for us and, I guess, for him. If The Times' blogs were free their columnists would feel more part of the internet conversation. The blogs could also be used to promote the paid-for content. DannyTheFink, David Aaronovitch and Rachel Sylvester could use blogs to summarise their op-eds and lure people into subscribing.

* I've tried twice unsuccessfully to subscribe to the NotW.

Guess where the BBC is holding this week's Question Time?

Middlesbrough - according to Experian research - is ranked at number 324 out of 324 council areas. In other words (according to the BBC website) it "will be the least resilient to such public sector cuts."

The BBC has chosen to go to Middlesbrough for this week's Question Time - one day after the defining day in this government's life, the Comprehensive Spending Review.

They couldn't have chosen a location more guaranteed to find the most voluble critics of Coalition policy.

Allister Heath's daily lesson in economics

If you don't read it but want to understand the economic challenges facing this country I heartily recommend Allister Heath's daily letter in City AM. You can read it here. It's worth adding to your Favourites.

Here's a selection of Allister's wisdom from the last week or so:

Against a graduate tax: "The coalition will fortunately not be imposing a graduate super-tax on students who go into higher-paying jobs, the option favoured by Vince Cable. This would have been a disaster, promoting an even greater brain drain. Ministers may support instead variable interest rates on student loans so that high-earning graduates can be charged more on their borrowing."

George Osborne's badly-designed child benefit reform: "Imagine that you are just below the 40 per cent tax rate. Your boss offers you a promotion and a pay rise of £1,000 – astonishingly, rather than celebrating, you will refuse. As the Institute of Fiscal Studies points out, a family with two children receives £1,750 a year in child benefit. A one-earner couple with two children with a gross income of £43,876-£46,850 would be worse off than if their income were £43,875. Crazy. A one-earner couple with an income of £43,875 would need a pay rise of £2,975 to ensure they were no worse off after paying direct tax and losing child benefit."

Britain's new brain drain: "Kinetic Partners estimates that around 1,000 hedge fund managers have already left the UK; it puts their average income at £1.5m-£2m per year. The loss to the exchequer has now reached a minimum of £500m and is probably much higher. Two individual moves alone will have cut the exchequer’s revenues by £200m. Over time, the biggest problem will not be the jobs that actually relocate – it is the jobs that won’t be created in the UK, including support staff, retailers and others. We ought to be trying to attract companies and labour, not to repel them. The Kinetic report adds that the increasingly nasty political climate, constant banker-bashing and general anti-capitalist mood music is also beginning to drive people away. Nobody likes to be loathed."

How the €uro did for Eire: "Even in January 2006, when many of the more idiotic lending decisions taken by Irish banks were being planned, the European Central Bank’s main interest rate was just 2.25 per cent. This probably made sense for Germany and maybe even for France. But it was an absurdly low rate for Ireland, which could have done with rates of eight per cent or even nine per cent. Inflation in the Emerald Isle hit 4.2 per cent in August, way too high; for 2006 as a whole, Ireland’s GDP surged by 6.0 per cent and its gross national product by 7.4 per cent. In other words, at the height of a property, economic and mortgage boom, Ireland was enjoying negative interest rates after adjusting for inflation."

What 'right-wing' questions would you like interviewers to ask?

Further to my post on BBC institutional bias yesterday, I'd be glad of your help in drawing up a list of 'right wing questions' for interviewers. BBC, Channel 4 and other journalists seem programmed to ask 'red corner' questions. Why aren't you passing a law to outlaw X? Hasn't this problem occured because of inadequate funding? Even when interviewers are giving Labour politicians a hard time it is usually from the Left. Just think of the way the BBC took on Blair over the Iraq war.

In my article for yesterday's Mail I suggested a few of right wing questions...

• Minister, how much of this extra spending will go directly to patients, and how much will be gobbled up by an even fatter NHS bureaucracy? 
• Why don't you cut taxation on small businesses in order to create more jobs for poor communities?
• Wouldn't violent crime be brought under control if we imprisoned more repeat offenders? 
• Given the ineffectiveness of the welfare state, shouldn't faith-based organisations receive a bigger share of poverty-fighting budgets?
• How can you support a benefits system that penalises couples who marry? 
• Why, Mr EU Bureaucrat, do you get paid twice as much as our Prime Minister?

What sort of questions would you, as taxpayers, Eurosceptics, churchgoers etc add to that list?

A look inside the new Spectator

I like it. No conservative magazine should be radically overhauled. The new design is fresher but hasn't tampered too much with a winning format. It's on sale from tomorrow!

Lefties are messier than conservatives!

Washington's Mall after Obama's inauguration...

...and after Saturday's 'Restoring Honor' rally where tens of thousands (perhaps as many as 300,000) conservatives gathered:

Hat tip to Andrew Bolt (essential reading for every clean living conservative).

The American Tea Party movement's movie

I've long thought that the docufilms produced by the likes of Michael Moore, Al Gore and Morgan Spurlock are powerful ways of influencing public opinion and I'm delighted to see that American conservatives are fighting back with a movie of their own:

The movie has its own website here.

And more...

Conservatives and climate change

Two of the world's best conservative columnists write at the very liberal New York Times. I often draw attention to David Brooks' work. Also worth bookmarking is Ross Douthat for his column and for his Evaluations blog.

He has recently written two very thoughtful pieces on the (American) Right and climate change.

In this piece he appears to side with Bjorn Lomborg in arguing that we should not be fighting climate change with immature technologies but should be helping the third world to become richer:

"It’s possible that the best thing to do about a warming earth — for now, at least — is relatively little. This is the view advanced by famous global-warming heretics like Bjorn Lomborg and Freeman Dyson; in recent online debates, it has been championed by Jim Manzi, the American right’s most persuasive critic of climate-change legislation.

Their perspective is grounded, in part, on the assumption that a warmer world will also be a richer world — and that economic development is likely to do more for the wretched of the earth than a growth-slowing regulatory regime. But it’s also grounded in skepticism that such a regime is possible. Any attempt to legislate our way to a cooler earth, the argument goes, will inevitably resemble the package of cap-and-trade emission restrictions that passed the House last year: a Rube Goldberg contraption whose buy-offs and giveaways swamped its original purpose.

Liberals disagree, of course. They think the skeptics underestimate the potential for catastrophe, and overestimate the costs of regulation. They, too, look to the past for lessons, but their model is the Clean Air Act and its various modifications, which reduced domestic air pollution relatively cheaply. But the Clean Air Act didn’t require collective action on a global scale — the kind of action that last year’s Copenhagen conference placed ever further out of reach. What’s more, a crucial technology, the catalytic converter, was already on the way as the act’s provisions went into effect. Cap-and-trade is more of a leap in the dark."

The second Douthat piece on green issues worth highlighting appears on his blog. Drawing on a Bloomberg report, he notes that oil, gas, and coal get 12 times as much government support ($557bn) - across the world - as renewable energies ($46bn). Douthat argues that greens and free market conservatives should work towards a policy environment where fossil fuels lose their subsidy rather than renewables get more and more.

So, in summary, Douthat is reaching towards a position that I can certainly support:

• Global warming IS happening* but because of immature technologies and a lack of international will we can't do much about it.
• Measures to reduce our carbon footprint should be pursued but only if they achieve other objectives, particularly reducing household bills (via better energy conservation) or more security of electricity supply (by building nuclear as well as fossil fuel-powered generating capacity).
• The priority of policymakers should be to help the third world to become richer so that they can tackle their immediate life and death challenges and also, where necessary, have the wealth to deal with extreme weather.
• In the meantime we should ensure a level playing field between energy sources and that should involve a levelling down, not up, of subsidies.

* I would say that natural forces may be dominant in this.

Who are the most influential Tory frontbenchers not in the Cabinet?

In the fourth part* of our search for influential right-wingers I'm asking you to identify Tory frontbenchers (ie ministers) who are outside of the Cabinet but still have significant influence.

You might, for example, like to nominate Greg Clark MP - in Eric Pickles' team - for his decentralisation agenda?

Nick Herbert for overseeing the radical idea of directly-elected police chiefs?

Or what about Chris Grayling, former Shadow Home Secretary and IDS' right hand man at Work & Pensions?

Or Crispin Blunt, Prisons Minister, who is steadily diluting/ modernising/ humanising (take your pick) Michael Howard's 'prison works' policy?

Or Mark Harper, deputy to the Deputy PM?

Your nominations please...

* Already done are nominations for influential journalists, for backbenchers and for thought leaders.

Who are the most influential centre Right thinkers?

In ConservativeHome's search for the most hundred influential people on the Right today, readers have already supplied nominations for influential journalists and yesterday for backbenchers.

Today we'd like your nominations for influential think tank chiefs and other thought leaders including academics and authors.

Three suggestions to help get you going...

• Policy Exchange's Chief Economist, Andrew Lilico, for important economic advice on, for example, opposing the rise in employers' NI contributions and adopting an 80% spending cuts/ 20% tax rises split for deficit adjustment;
• Jill Kirby and the Centre for Policy Studies for their influence on the Coalition (incidentally set out in a new paper);
• Stephan Shakespeare for providing much of the momentum behind the Post-Bureaucratic Age;
• Matthew Elliott and the whole TaxPayers' Alliance team for forcing action against extravagant pay in the public lector.

And, remember, please give an explanation for your nominee(s).

Who are the most influential backbench parliamentarians?

We began ConHome's search for the one hundred most influential people on The Right yesterday when I sought your nominations for journalists.

Today I'm looking for nominations for parliamentarians who, not on the Westminster frontbench, have a big influence. And influence is the key criterion - not whether you agree with them.

A few suggestions to get things going...

• Lord Lawson for his campaigning on climate change.
• Dan Hannan MEP and Douglas Carswell MP for their direct democracy agenda. Dan, in his own right, for campaigning to takeTory MEPs out of the EPP. Douglas for his campaign against Speaker Martin.
• Andrew Tyrie as Chair(man) of the powerful Treasury Select Committee.
• David Davis for transforming the party's position on civil liberties.
• Annabel Goldie MSP and Nick Bourne AM for leading the party in Scotland and Wales.

Over to you... and please, when suggesting a person, give a reason.

Who are the most influential Right-wing journalists?

The Telegraph, with Iain Dale, has for a number of years published a list of leaders of The Right - each year to coincide with the annual Tory Party Conference. It's always a fascinating list that attracts enormous attention. One of the few weaknesses of the list, however, is that it excludes journalists. I presume because The Telegraph (understandably) wouldn't want, say, the Editor of The Daily Mail to appear higher on the list than its own Editor.

Another weakness of the Telegraph list is that it is decided behind closed doors by the great and the good. As great and as good as they are we'd like to begin a process whereby ConservativeHome readers first nominate people for a list of influential Right-wingers (I conceded the problems with that term yesterday) and then rank those nominations by online vote. We'll publish this list in a special newspaper that we'll distribute at the Tory conference in Birmingham.

Beginning today let's have your nominations for influential journalists on the Right.

I'm looking for Political reporters like the Sun's Political Editor Tom Newton-Dunn...

Political columnists like Daniel Finkelstein...

...and Editors like Tony Gallagher.

And the key test, please, is influence rather than whether you like the person's writing.

10.45am: Rather than listing names the most persuasive comments are those that give a quick reason for the nomination.

What is Right-wing?

Tomorrow, as part of ConservativeHome's summer programme we start our search for leaders of The Right.

But before that search begins I readily acknowledge that the term 'Right-wing' leaves a lot to be desired and means different things in different countries.

Satisfactory and unsatisfactory definitions that result from a flash internet search include...

• "Those who support political or social or economic conservatism;
• Those who believe that things are better left unchanged;
• In politics, right-wing, rightist and the Right are generally used to describe support for a stratified society to promote or preserve social order or traditional values;
• Describes a group or person that supports the existing social and political order or longs for a return to an earlier time;
• Orthodox, reactionary, conservative;
• In US politics, usually associated with the Republican Party, and supportive of laissez-faire economic policies and a robust military;
• The conservative and reactionary half of the political spectrum."

And my favourite:

• "Right-wingers include (in varying extremes) free-market capitalists, Nazis, religious theocrats, fascists, racists, nationalists, militarists, and certain Populists."

Being Right-wing is something that's easier to recognise that define. I also accept that Right-wing is a simplistic and sometimes inaccurate way of trying to capture much more interesting distinctions. More interesting distinctions including...

• Social conservatism versus social liberalism;
• Localism versus centralism;
• Radical versus gradualist;
• Foreign policy multilateralism (belief in working through the UN/EU) versus foreign policy maxilateralism (maximising co-operation of individual states on case-by-case bases);
• Fiscal conservatism (cut the deficit by cutting spending and raising taxes) versus growth hawkery (cut taxes to produce supply-side dynamism).

Until tomorrow...

I do NOT believe in a snap election to dump the Liberal Democrats

Last night The Sun put out this on its Twitter feed:

The trouble with Twitter is that you only get 140 characters but in my Re-Tweeting (republishing) of The Sun's message I added: "None to answer Sun's ?". To spell it out: No chance of a snap election to dump the Liberal Democrats.

I do not believe in a snap election and not just because opinion polls are volatile. I think Cameron and the Conservative party would (deservedly) suffer a big hit if they rushed out of the Coalition deal after promising to make it work.

Unfortunately the Evening Standard misread my Tweet and have just reported that I support a snap election - the precise opposite of my position.

The Evening Standard's Paul Waugh has written - in a piece headlined 'David Cameron acts to head off snap election challenge of Tory Right':

"A new YouGov/Sun poll today put the Conservatives on 43 per cent, Labour on 34 and the Lib-Dems on 15 per cent. One senior Right-winger, Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome.com, suggested: “What chance a snap election now to dump the Libs?”"

The Evening Standard has recognised their mistake and have promised to immediately correct their website but I fear it's too late for the print edition. 

Aggghhh.

 

In an age of soundbite TV, the BBC shouldn't be axeing Straight Talk

It must be one of the BBC's cheapest news shows. Filmed with just two cameras, in an all black studio - evoking the Charlie Rose show from the USA -  the BBC's Straight Talk is a thirty minute interrogation of a leading politician by Andrew Neil. At least it was. Unfortunately Straight Talk is to be axed.

We live in a media world where 'I'm sorry we've run out of time' and 'Please be very brief' are interviewers' most-used expressions. It is a great shame that an exception to this rushed interview format - where politicians have the opportunity to give more than soundbite answers - and where the interviewer has the opportunity to properly explore one or two issues - will be scrapped. This sort of extended interview format is exactly what a public service broadcaster should be providing.

My favourite edition will always be Andrew Neil's interrogation of Vince Cable. Because of the lengthy format, Neil had the opportunity to expose the Liberal Democrat as a serial flip-flopper. Guido likened it to slowly boiling a frog. Soundbite politicians can soon sleep a little more safely in their beds.

The Right is wiser than the Left

In his column for yesterday’s Telegraph Charles Moore listed some of the policy areas where the Right had been vindicated in the last ten years:

• “We pointed out that Robert Mugabe would be a Marxist tyrant even before he reached office. It took about 20 years of murder and destruction before this truth was universally acknowledged.”
• “We warned that mass immigration put the worst strain on the poorest people. At the time, this was "racist"; today, it is common ground between the parties.”
• “We said that Gordon Brown's public finances would eventually produce disaster, while sunnier politicians gabbled about "sharing the proceeds of growth".

I’d also suggest that the Right has been vindicated on the importance of family structure, the power of incarceration (a lesson we are unlearning it seems) and the folly of the €uro.

In the years to come...

• We’ll be proven right about the value of school choice;
• The superiority of trade over aid as a cure for global poverty (in fact this may already be won intellectually);
• The danger of trying to ‘green’ our economies with immature and expensive technologies; and
• The fact that individual nation states choosing to work together in successions of one-off partnerships are our only hope of tackling rogue states (and other great global challenges), rather than do-nothing, talk-a-lot multinational organisations.

HMV Scotland withdraws Anyone But England posters after "racism" complaints

HMV stores in Scotland have withdrawn shop front posters advertising 'ABE - Anyone But England' merchandise.

Although the HMV stores will still sell the T-shirts to customers they have faced accusations of racism from the Campaign for an English Parliament. "The Campaign for an English Parliament will challenge any company that incites racial hatred towards the English," the CEP's Stuart Parr said. "Racism is unacceptable no matter who it is directed against, including English people."

I think it's pathetic that so many Scots cheer anyone but England but Mr Parr needs to lighten up.

A HMV spokesman told the Press and Journal:

“If we thought the shirts were in any way racist then we certainly wouldn’t have stocked them. In our view the shirts are not against England nor the English, but are simply about some Scottish fans expressing a view that they want any team other than England to win this year’s World Cup."

I don't like the f word

Interesting piece in The Daily Telegraph (Australian version) about the foul mouth of Kevin Rudd, the Labo(u)r Prime Minister. He's a 'swear bear' (and his swearing pre-dated the recent slide in his opinion poll ratings).

"Those Chinese f****** are trying to rat-f*** us," said Rudd at last year's Copenhagen summit. He was giving an off-the-record briefing to journalists.

The Telegraph's Claire Harvey tells us that the f and c words are staples of every Rudd paragraph;

"A few months ago, I spent a day trailing Rudd around Brisbane. We had a long interview on the Royal Australian Air Force jet during a flight back to Sydney. Repeatedly, although I had two tape recorders running and was taking shorthand in my notebook, Rudd interrupted his own long, circuitous sentences to say something amusingly direct and clear. Each time, it was expressed in profane terms. Sometimes, he strung several swear words together. And each time he used a rude word, he prefaced it with "off the record".... He was simply swearing for the sake of it, as if to let me know that he was a hard man who knows how to swear."

Mr Rudd's foul mouth is one of the big observations in an extended profile by journalist David Marr.

Does it matter? Is anyone surprised? Don't most Australian (and British and American) politicians swear? Yes and most journalists certainly do. A Ruddy lot.

Now, I'm not getting all Mary Whitehouse on readers but despite the massive growth in swearing I can't get used to it. My mum never tolerated it in the home and most people I've worked with haven't sworn. I don't complain when others swear but I don't like it when young kids turn the air blue on a bus and all passengers have to listen in. I don't like to be sat over dinner with friends in a nice restaurant and the f word is used frequently, casually - rather than occasionally to really ram home a point. Does anyone feel the same or am I a fuddy duddy?

PS And before jokers get carried away in the thread below, bad language isn't acceptable in the ConHome comments policy.

God Save The Queen!

I love this...

First they attacked "British" Petroleum, now the Americans are insisting we call football "soccer"

Hat tip to Comment Central.

Barack Obama 32, George W Bush 24*

The number of times America's 44th President has played golf in 17 months of being in office and the number of times America's 43rd President played golf in eight years of being America's Commander-in-Chief.

Source: BBC.

Proportional representation would tug Britain to the Right...

Interesting argument from Andrew Gillgan at The Telegraph:

"A more proportional electoral system is far more likely to tug Britain to starboard. All three major parties are run by a broadly liberal elite. But PR would massively empower the populist Right. On immigration, on free-market economics, and to some extent on foreign policy, the main parties agree with each other more than they've done for generations. Enormous numbers of voters, however, disagree with the elite, liberal consensus – and PR would, for the first time, give them representation in Parliament."

Please discuss!

Would Jesus vote Labour?

The Christian Socialist Movement has chosen the holiest day of the Christian calendar to make the case that Jesus "might" vote Labour. I believe that there are Christians in all mainstream political parties and I don't question their sincerity but the CSM's case - which appears on LabourList - deserves a fisking...

1. His identification with the poor and marginalized. The Labour party has always had a commitment to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves”. The Bible contains over 2,000 verses which speak about poverty and justice. Many theologians speak of God having a “bias to the poor”. There has been a continual attempt in the Labour party to reflect this bias, through structural change rather than mere handouts.

My response: I do believe that there is a role for the state in helping the poor but let's not forget that God's command was for us to love our neighbour as individuals. We cannot fully discharge our responsibility to the neediest members of society via compulsory taxation. The Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity teaches that government should never usurp the central caring roles of the family and other intermediate institutions. For Labour, government action tends to be the first resort and the politically correct agencies of Labour's state have trampled on the free institutions of society, notably the two parent familiy by creating a benefits system that penalises living together.

2. His view that his Kingdom was more important than any earthly kingdom. Nationalism is nothing new. The Jews of the first century were hoping for a national Messiah to once more turn them into “a great nation”, again operating as the political powerhouse of their region. But Jesus confounded their desires. What they got was someone who announced that justice, mercy and compassion were to be extended to insiders and outsiders, friends and enemies alike. He was always clear that his and our primary allegiance should to be to “the Kingdom of God”, and not to any earthly kingdom. Labour has always had an internationalist tradition, favouring international co-operation and reconciliation to nationalism. This is expressed through attitudes to the European Union, peace-making in Northern Ireland and the Middle East and asylum.

My response: There is a difference between internationalism and multilateralism. Labour places too much faith in institutions like the EU and the UN. Although they are built on good intentions their record leaves a lot to be desired. Ask the people of Srebrenica, Rwanda or Darfur if the UN is a good institution. Ask the people who suffered from the Indian Ocean tsunami if they received urgent relief from the UN or from US military helicopters? The EU has become a selfish giant. Its aid budget is riddled with corruption and its agricultural policies hurt developing world farmers. Individual democracies tend to be better agents of international justice than multilateral bureaucracies.

3. In Jesus’ teaching there is a strong ethic of working for “the common good”, to serve a community, rather than our jobs purely being about wealth creation for ourselves. This is reflected in Labour’s investment in public services and a commitment to protect those services which will never have great market value, but immense benefit to the public. Fair progressive taxation ensures we all make progress together, rather than leaving some behind.

My response: Conservatives can sign up to this. The Tory commitment to cut back on welfare benefits for those earning more than £50,000 will actually make a Conservative government more redistributionist - at least in that respect - than a Labour government that is determined to extend state dependency up the income scale. But why the constant emphasis on materialism? Labour has become the materialist party. The deepest forms of poverty have worsened under Labour because it starts from the view that a child's first need is money - rather than the love of a mother and father. The three surest routes out of poverty - family, education and work - have all been penalised under Labour. Family breakdown is accelerating; ill-discipline in schools is at epidemic levels; and many poor families lose disposable income when they start to work.

4. Jesus firmly placed himself in the centre of the “Big Story” of creation and redemption. For Christians who believe that we are called to be part of God’s “Big Story” i.e. the restoration and reconcilation of all things, Labour’s policies of engagement sit much closer to this than opposing conservative theologies of escape for the privileged few to a separate heavenly realm. This is seen in Labour’s responsiveness to NGO and church campaigns to increase its already ground-breaking emissions cut target from 60% to 80% – the first Government to set legally binding Carbon emission targets.

My response: Labour have actually been missing climate change targets in recent years. Progress has slowed since the Tories left office. Much greenbelt has been lost. A third runway at Heathrow is Labour policy. Tories oppose it.