There's been a row all day over at ConservativeHome about whether Conservative MEPs might again push David Cameron off his commitment to remove them from the Euro-fanatical EPP.

Supporters of the EPP maintain that the issue is abstruse, recondite and irrelevant; yet they simultaneously insist that ending our wretched mésalliance would be a calamity of epochal proportions.

For what it's worth, neither contention is correct. Leaving the EPP would allow us to create something that the European Parliament has not had in fifty years: an official Opposition. I made the case for breaking the link on ConservativeHome in January, and I stand by every word. Since then, I have made good my commitment and left. I look forward to my Conservative colleagues doing the same thing in June.

Polly Toynbee thinks that Right-wing bloggers are being funded by the Conservatives. One of those Right-wing bloggers, Dizzy Thinks, deals beautifully with the charge here.

Over on the Right we're just less earnest, Polly

Lefties like to think of themselves as anti-Establishment figures, without realising that they are the Establishment: their views are the ruling orthodoxy. Bloggers like Dizzy - independent, anarchic and, as he admits, skint - are the radicals, speaking for the people against a cosseted public sector elite.

As I've observed before, Rightists often have a contrarian streak. The most avid supporters of City bonuses are, by and large, young bloggers who can't afford to get onto the housing ladder. The fiercest advocates of the free market are other-worldly academics who

We could be going back to the days when travellers ran the risk of having legally bought alcohol and tobacco seized at the channel ports. For several years, British customs officers, without legal authority, arbitrarily confiscated goods that they deemed not to be for personal consumption. Not only did people have their purchases expropriated; in some cases, their cars were impounded. All this happened with no statutory basis: yet another example of how our quangos are beyond any democratic control; but that's a different story.

Those unhappy times could be coming back. The European Parliament has just voted, by 315 votes to 310, to bring back cross-border limits - 400 cigarettes, five litres of spirits, 30 litres of sparkling wine and so on - and to make them mandatory.

Such rules, if

Hurrah! A month ago, I wrote: "I hope we won't hear any more nonsense from my own party about ‘matching Labour's spending plans': it's Labour's spending plans that have got us into this mess." Now, David Cameron has announced that, if Labour continues to spend and borrow like this, it's on its own.

I can understand why my party didn't want to place itself too far in advance of public opinion. As long as Labour had the benefit of the doubt, virtually any Conservative policy would be howled down as "cuts to vital public services". But almost no one believes this any more.

It's worth dealing with the widespread idea that the Tories lost the last two elections by proposing substantial tax-cuts. What tax cuts? When? The only people I remember raising the subject were Oliver Letwin in 2001

As a Cromwellian, I was naturally delighted to read that the Croatian government plans to cancel Christmas. Actually, to be precise, Christmas has not been cancelled but privatised: the hard-bitten Croats have decided that, given the current crisis, it would be wrong for government workers to have Christmas parties at taxpayers' expense.


Oliver Cromwell and Scrooge: 'And cancel Christmas!'

Their approach would, of course, be unimaginable in Britain, where the public sector is immune from the effects of the downturn. The rest of the country may be feeling the squeeze, but the Guardian continues to groan with advertisements for liaison officers and diversity advisers and equality consultants and outreach workers. In the rare event that they lose their jobs, government employees go away with

I'm delighted that Conservative MPs are to be offered a basic grounding in science. Regular readers will know that this blog has long argued that politicians ought to have a rough grasp of the ways in which the universe defies common sense: the counter-intuitive truths which our brains were not designed to comprehend. I don't mean the mysteries of quantum physics: they really are beyond most people. I mean verities which impact directly on public policy, but which run against widespread supposition.


The sleep of reason produces monsters

Let me take an especially uncomfortable, if topical, example: what do we hope to achieve by taking children away from their natural parents? Most people, certainly most politicians, would say that it's to improve their life chances. Remove youngsters from

"But if you elect the people who run the police, you might get the BNP!" The line is always delivered as a knock-out blow, a definitive way to end the argument. And, of course, it might conceivably be true. I mean, if you allow people to elect their MPs or local councillors, you might get the BNP. But, as a rule, you don't. Despite receiving the most disproportionate coverage of any political party in Britain, the BNP has no MPs and occupies just 0.3 per cent of council seats.

Not that this has stopped The Times from running a news item about how the fascist party (which it erroneously terms "far Right") hopes to exploit low turnouts and concerns over law-and-order to seize control of local constabularies.

Where did the story originate? In a BNP press release? It seems unlikely. Ah, hang

Irish supporters of the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty continue to indulge in wishful thinking of the sweetest sort. Stephen Collins - who, although a journalist, is a paid-up member of the Pro-Treaty forces - is very excited about a new opinion poll in the Irish Times that shows the "Yes" side ahead by 43 to 39 per cent.

The EU has ignored Ireland's "No" vote and pushed ahead

Er, Stephen: you and your friends went into the last referendum with a lead, not of 4 per cent, but of 18 per cent, and still lost on the day. I'm something of a veteran of EU referendums, having campaigned in France, the Netherlands, Malta, Sweden and Denmark. In every campaign, without exception, the "No" side surged in the last two weeks as people started to look at the details. The same thing

The pound's slide has Euro-enthusiasts slavering with anticipation. "Calls for the euro are likely to reach fever pitch if there is a collapse in sterling," writes Roland Rudd, chairman of a pro-euro lobby group, in the London Evening Standard. "Suddenly membership of the euro is beginning to look a very attractive escape route," agrees Will Hutton in The Observer.

Hang on, chaps: weren't you arguing that we should join eighteen months ago, when the pound was more than 30 per cent more valuable than now? What if we had taken your advice then? The financial crisis in Britain could not have been cushioned by the exchange rate; it would instead have been felt in output and jobs. Rather than a 30 per cent reduction in sterling, we'd have suffered a 30 per cent reduction in wages, with

The tale of Baby P, say commentators, is an indictment of modern British society: family breakdown, sluttish single mothers, violent boyfriends, pornography, neglect, abuse. There is an element of truth in all this, though we should be careful about extrapolating too widely from one horror story.

What is unquestionably true is that the episode is an indictment of the modern British state. Regular readers will know that this blog has been raging for years against our unaccountable quangocracy, and the "trust the experts" mindset that sustains it. Well, here is as clear a case as you could ask of what happens when "trust the experts" is taken to its logical conclusion. A series of official blunders leads to the worst imaginable consequence, and when the leader of the Opposition gently wonders

Sorry to interrupt the celebration, chaps, but it's not over yet. There are still three critical Senate seats in the balance. If the Democrats win all three (which is by no means impossible), they will have a "super-majority", meaning that the Republicans won't have recourse even to procedural delay. The Dems have swept the House and can also reasonably expect to make between two and four Supreme Court nominations under President Obama. Such one-party domination of all three branches of government ought to alarm Democrats who are also democrats.

Those outstanding seats (there are recounts in Alaska and Minnesota, and Georgia will hold a run-off poll on 2 December) will determine whether the GOP will be able, in extreme circumstances, to mount a filibuster. Forty Republican senators, assuming

Look, let's get this straight. The European Court of Auditors has not approved the EU budget. What it has approved is the European Commission's accounting procedures. The auditors made clear that there remained substantial irregularities and illegalities in the spending itself: they were able certify only eight per cent of the total budget. But they did agree, for the first time, that the EU's figures were accurate.

In other words, if the EU says that it spent €100 on olive subsidies, the Court of Auditors accepts - in so far as accountants ever accept these things - that it did. What it cannot vouch for is that the recipient was actually growing olives.

Now I don't want to be mean-minded about this. The European Commission has worked hard to bring its accounting methods into line

The markets have given their opinion on Gordon Brown's bail-out. Sterling has collapsed and the Bank of England is now predicting a serious recession. But the question remains: why did so many free-marketeers go along with the wretched thing? The various national rescue plans were backed by Centre-Right parties the world over, as well as by conservative commentators. A few of us argued that it was wrong to socialise failure and turn private debt into public debt. But you could have counted us on your fingers: Dan Mitchell of Cato, Eamonn Butler of the ASI, Tim Congdon, Guido, Iain Martin and (with increasing irritability) me.

The curious thing is that we almost certainly had majority support in the country. Opinion polls showed that in Britain, as in the US, most people resented

And what if David Cameron was making a party political point out of a tragic event? Isn't that precisely what Opposition leaders are meant to do?

Of course, few politicians these days dare say so openly. BBC audiences doltishly applaud whenever an MP pronounces, about virtually any subject, "we should let the professionals get on" or "this is too important to be a political football".

An indignant David Cameron at Prime Minister's Questions

Our equivocal attitude towards representative democracy is, as I've often argued, the single most lamentable aspect of contemporary politics.

But it was "letting the professionals get on" that led to the deaths of Baby P and Victoria Climbié. This was the point that David Cameron was tentatively trying to make: that, in cases like

Hang on: I thought it was all meant to be a scare story. Whenever Euro-enthusiasts found themselves losing an argument, they would say, "You're making all this up: it's a tabloid Euro-myth, like bent bananas".

Too bent? Too straight? All a load of nonsense

"Bent bananas" became a kind of Europhile recognition code. In the mouths (figuratively) of Euro-enthusiasts "bent bananas" were a short-hand for "every untrue allegation ever levelled by sceptics". Geoffrey Martin, who was for a long time the European Commission's senior representative in the UK, used to publish newsletters in which he rebutted these supposed fantasies, these false creations proceeding from the heat-oppressed brains of bigoted journalists. His collective name for the phenomenon was "bent banana syndrome".

Yet it now

The rain poured down, as it usually does in Belgium: a small reminder of the quotidian hellishness of the trenches. We stood before the Menin Gate in Ypres, a small group of Conservative MEPs and staff, cold water trickling into our collars.

Millions crossed the world to fight for a country they had never seen

To our right was a group of Irish war veterans, dignified men in berets and blazers, with little shamrocks at the centre of their poppies. To our left stood a dozen Sikhs, some elderly men with snowy beards, some youngsters with bumfluff, the teenagers looking every bit as stiff and soldierly as their grandfathers.

Much has been written during this 90th anniversary of what the Great War did a generation of British men (and women, a generation of whom were left husbandless). But,

Shall I tell you the best thing about Strictly Come Dancing? The pasodobles. If the series sparks an interest in this lovely but neglected form, it will have done the state some service.

Suspiros de España: the saddest song in the world

You will often read that the pasodoble developed out of bullfighting. This isn't quite true: the first pasodobles were written as military marches. But they quickly spread to the bullring, which is where you are likeliest to hear them today. Pasodobles are played when the toreros make their opening parade (except in France, where the bands almost always open with the march from Carmen); and when a matador is performing especially well in the ring (except in Madrid, where music during the faena is considered vulgar). By the early decades of the

For the fourteenth year in a row, the European Court of Auditors has refused to certify the EU budget. Not that anyone seems to care. Even in Britain, people are responding with a shrug so dismissive as to be downright Gallic. Yep, the EU is corrupt: et alors?

I have blogged before about our indifference to Euro-fraud and about how, strangely enough, I find hope in our cynicism. Think of it as a marriage. So long as there is bickering, the relationship is alive: each partner cares enough about the other's point of view to want to change it. But when the arguments give way to indifference, the plate-throwing to scorn, the rows to contempt, the marriage is over. If, as a people, we have given up on any hope of reforming the EU then, in our hearts, we have already determined on separation.

Trevor Philips is right. The British political system is "to some extent closed to outsiders". And he's right that the issue goes wider than race. But why stop, as he does, at race, class and sex?

Diversity doesn't just mean totting up numbers of women and brown people. It surely means genuine pluralism: of age, accent, professional background, geography and - above all - opinion.

It's this last that the multi-cultis tend to have problems with. They are all for diversity, provided it's on their terms: more Muslims as long as they don't hold Islamic views about criminal justice; more women as long as they're not Sarah Palin.

If Trevor Phillips' diagnosis is correct - and I think it is - then the prescription is obvious. Instead of cliques of party officials deciding what constitutes

Shortly before the Glenrothes by-election, David Cameron good-naturedly told a dinner of Conservative MPs that David Mundell, the shadow Scottish Secretary, had been canvassing there and had found a Tory voter. "I'm flying up tomorrow to see if I can find the other," he added, to general merriment.

Had the Conservatives lost their deposit in a by-election in England, it would be front-page news; but, in Scotland, it is taken for granted. The Tories may be ahead in nationwide polls; but they barely register in Fifeshire.

It's true that the Tories won a majority of Scottish seats in 1955: pointing this out has become something of a journalistic cliché. What is rarely mentioned is that this was a one-off. Since 1832 (before which Scotland was essentially a large pocket borough at the disposal

The late Jock Bruce-Gardyne, a Conservative MP who served this newspaper for many years as a leader-writer, had an all-purpose answer to financial crises. "There is no economic problem," he maintained, "that cannot be solved by a stiff rise in interest rates".

He'd have been almost alone in standing aside from the general mood of jubilation at the Bank of England's cut. Every financial writer on the Telegraph is overjoyed, as are all three parties and most business organisations.

I'm sure they know what they're doing. But one thing puzzles me. When inflation is high and interest rates are low, there is no point in leaving your assets in a bank to devalue. The government, in other words, is encouraging people to borrow and spend rather than to save. The press and the Opposition parties

I play the torturer, by small and small to lengthen out the worst that must be spoken: Gordon Smith, who for twelve years represented Oregon in the Senate, has lost his seat. The Republicans have lost a great patriot; and Britain has lost its best friend in America's upper house. (Senator Smith was, among other things, all for offering us membership of NAFTA.) The Democrats have swept the Pacific, and are now three seats short of their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The number of Senate results still pending? Three.

I argued during the campaign that the Republicans should be focusing their energies on the Congressional elections. At a time like this, the last thing America needs is more spendthrift legislators.

The GOP needs to find someone who can play the role that Newt Gingrich

Food is about to become a lot more expensive thanks to the EU. Nothing new here, of course. The Common Agricultural Policy has been inflating our grocery bills since 1960. According to the OECD, it adds £100 to the monthly budget of a family of four, a burden that falls most heavily on poor people, a higher proportion on whose income goes on food.

Still, at least the CAP had a rationale, having been designed to ensure food supplies at a time when memories of wartime hunger were fresh. Alright, it was a wrongheaded rationale, and the reasoning behind the CAP was already obsolete before the wretched system got started, but at least there was some reasoning.

The same, sadly, cannot be said of the EU's proposed pesticides ban, or "Regulation on the Authorisation of New Plant Products",

I know I've been banging on about the American election rather a lot, but there's a reason. The US has preserved the best features of British democracy: features I desperately want us to reimport. Their legislature is sovereign, ours is a plaything of the Executive. Their office-holders are elected, ours are quangocrats. Their states and counties have meaningful autonomy, our counties and cities are micromanaged from Whitehall. They seek to constrain judicial activism, we prostrate our democracy before human rights codes and Eurocrats.

But where did they get their ideas from? What inspired their founding fathers? Subsequent generations of American historians have tended to see the Revolution as a national rising - as, indeed, the "War of Independence". But this interpretation rests on

I'd say the system worked, wouldn't you? The winning candidate made an elevated speech that imbued the whole world with a touch of American patriotism. The loser spoke beautifully, with a pathos that had eluded him during the campaign. The popular vote was closer than some of the coverage suggests; but people on both sides have behaved with exemplary magnanimity.

It's worth repeating that American democracy is too easily taken for granted. Kenya's president, Mwai Kibaki, has granted a national holiday in honour of Barack Obama's success - even though he blocked the election of Mr Obama's clansman, Raila Odinga, at the recent Kenyan elections. When a Luo can more easily become president of America than of Kenya, it tells you something about America.

Watching the coverage, I have been struck

I'm off the US embassy to watch the results. But, before I go, I want to say one thing. Thank Heaven America is the preponderant power on our planet.

It's easy to take democracy for granted. But dwell for a moment on the fact that, following this election, no one will be executed by firing squad or forced into exile. No tanks will grind along the highways to repress the result. No Committee of Virtue will disqualify candidates who believe the wrong things. No European Commission will decree that Americans have come up with the wrong result and should vote again.

The losing candidate will accept the verdict with as much good cheer as he can muster. The winner will promise to govern for the whole nation, those who voted for him and those who didn't; and, after a fashion, he will mean it.

Some of you feel that I have no business blogging when I ought to be concentrating on being an MEP. A comment yesterday was typical: "My point is: as an elected MEP, shouldnt you be getting back to work??"

Well, I like to think that I'm one of the more committed constituency representatives in Britain, having notched up 145 public engagements in my South East region over the past 12 months. As for what I'm doing in Brussels, you can check out on the EP website what questions we're putting down, how many speeches we've made and so on. I don't think you'll find many MEPs who speak in the chamber more often than I do. But, obviously, it's for the voters to decide whether I'm working hard enough.

I do admit to one thing: I have never proposed legislation. In the run-up to the 2004 election,

I have blogged often before about why Germany is Britain's obvious European ally:

We British should be delighted about the normalisation of German patriotism. Germans, are our natural allies, and the European country whose outlook is most like our own. They even resemble us in character: brave, plain-speaking, morose, law-abiding, belligerent, occasionally drunk, much misunderstood.

For hundreds of years, our alliance was regarded as the one fixed point of European diplomacy: the interests of Europe's most maritime state, it was reasoned, could never clash with those of its most continental. That calculation ought, in other circumstances, to hold true today. If it weren't for the wretched EU, we'd be getting along famously.

The main difference between us, it seems to me, is that Germans

Is there a more wretched place on Earth than the Congo? Africa's largest territory didn't simply suffer the lot of an exploited colony; it felt the unique agony of colonisation by a dysfunctional Belgian state. The whole region was treated more or less as the personal property of King Leopold who, under the guise of stamping out slavery, perpetrated monstrous atrocities against the natives.

One story will serve to illustrate what I mean. The Belgian authorities at one stage raised an indigenous militia to fight an insurgency. When they discovered that their troops were using the bullets with which they had been issued to hunt animals, they devised an incentive system: their militiamen must present the severed hand of a rebel to claim a reward. Markets being what they are, severed hands

Mark Steyn is cross with the voters. Contrasting the Millenarian enthusiasm at Barack Obama's rallies with the "stilted cheers" at John McCain's, he writes:

Three stilted cheers for the stilted cheerers. There, surely, is the republican ideal: a land whose citizenry declines to offer anything more generous than stilted cheers for whichever of their fellows presumes to lead them.

Pundits, of course, can be rude about the electors in a way that politicians can't. But, for what it's worth, I agree. I may be an Obamacon, but I am disquieted by the absurd expectations projected onto the man by some of his supporters. As Brian's mother tells the crowd in the Monty Python film: "He's not the messiah!"

None the less, I'd urge Republicans not to repeat the mistake that British Tories made in