The great trouble with Thursday's London Mayoral election - for me anyway - is that I can only achieve certainty when thinking about who not to vote for. Not Ken - because I don't believe he's a democrat. Not Boris - because he just hasn't enough experience of standing in a newsagent's queue while pinched-looking people ask for £2.50 to be put on their Oyster card. Not Brian, not Sian, not Lindsay - because if you don't vote for one of the frontrunners, for first preference anyway, then you're copping out. Very annoying.
The singular thing about the London elections is that every vote counts. I've lived in solid Labour areas all my life, and it's not that interesting, at a personal level. In London, though, voting feels like a serious responsibility. Which is good. But what, in the end, you are voting for, give or take this and that, is who should make transport policy in London, and negotiate with Westminster to pay for it. Only one person has a good track record on this issue - it's Livingstone.
Venerable feminist pressure group, the Fawcett Society, has published a report highlighting the widespread use of lap-dancing clubs as venues for corporate entertainment in the city of London. I don't think it needs to be pointed out too strenuously that the society is not in favour of the practice. Lap dancing clubs, of course, are not illegal, and whether such places disgust you or not depends largely on your personal morality. They do disgust me. I believe they are exploitative of both the women providing the "services" and the men purchasing them.
There are some weird and contradictory attitudes to childhood at the moment. At no time have I found this more clear than when I was browsing in a giant London toyshop, searching for a few accessories in order that my small son might attend his friend's birthday party, dressed as a cowboy. He had everything he needed already, except for a belt and holster, complete with shiny silver six-shooter. Unable to find the item in question, I asked an assistant for help. He told me solemnly that it was not the policy of the store to sell reproduction guns. This was a little bit strange, I felt, because in the store's basement, the full panolpy of computer games was available. Children could not, if they shopped at this emporium, play cowboys and indians, and shout: "Bang-bang, you're dead." But they could avail themselves of the technology to sit indoors all day, blowing cyber-bodies to smithereens on-screen. Is one form of war-play less damaging than the other? Even Dr Tanya Byron, auther of a 224-page report to the Government about children and computers, does not know for sure. But she does suggest that children should not be exposed to violent games, and that the present classification system should be tightened up to reflect this, so that parents can be better informed about what they are buying for their children.
Generally, the media defends its "right" to intrude into the private lives of people in the public eye by suggesting that if "celebrities" invite it in, in the cause of furthering lucrative careers, then they can't complain when material that is not generated by the public relations machine is published as well. I don't really go along with this defence, and I've found it quite incredible to note that it has been used widely even when the public relations machine exists only to find a missing child.
The has been a lot of debate about the idea that NHS patients should be made responsible for their own health through the shock tactic of refusing them treatment if they continue to manifest the behaviour that is causing their health problem. It seems like good sense, but people recognise that such a policy would cross a difficult line.
Yet the government, as it considers overturning its recent decision to downgrade cannabis, is at the same time considering a much more draconian step. Reclassifying cannabis might send out "an important health message". So might bringing alcohol and tobacco into a classification regime. But reclassifaction of cannabis, ostensibly a vehicle for "sending out an important health message", would also once again make possession of cannabis an imprisonable offence. Should people be jailed for damaging their own health? Doesn't jailing them damage their health further?
In a reasonably egalitarian culture, stop and search would be all right. If there really was no way of telling which members of our society were likely to be the "bad apples", then we could all, hand on heart, declare that if it was going to save lives, then we didn't mind being stopped and searched occasionally.
Yet. clearly, it isn't going to be that way. The frightening problems that have inspired this return to policies that proved so divisive a quarter of a century ago, are not problems that affect people generally. On the contrary, the proliferation of gun and knife crime, is highly particularised, and confined almost uniformly to the poorest people, the people with the fewest educational opportunities, the people with the least comfortable family backgrounds, the people who live in the social housing that has been so marginalised in that same quarter of a century.
Call me a pointy-elbowed middle-class snob. But I don't want my children to attend a school with facilities that include weapon-detecting equipment. I'm happy enough to nod earnestly at the academic arguments against such a move, as rehearsed on the Independent's leader page today. But in the end, I just find myself thinking that the only children who ought to be subjected to such policing, are children who have a proven track-record in carrying weapons already.
Usually, I like to think, even when I am vehemently opposed to a certain viewpoint, I can at least understand it. But the viewpont which insists that we all must opt-in to organ donation, instead of simply being able to opt out, is beyond me. I respect the right of people to be absolutely against the idea that their body parts might be used to save the life of someone else if they die. I cannot imagine what other possible use they might believe their corpse to have, either temporal or spiritual. But I do see that if people are disturbed or repulsed by the idea that they might be parcelled off into the bodies of others after death, then that's a worry visceral enough to overcome reason.
John Redwood is right to assert that date rape is different to stranger rape. It’s different because a woman complaining of date rape has to combat not just the sexual violence that has been visited upon her, but also the opinions of people like John Redwood.
Rape by a stranger is horrible, of course. But it is equally horrible to learn in the most physically intrusive possible way that a person you trusted or even loved is capable of violating you utterly.
People already know that this crime is virtually impossible to prove. They do not need to be told also that it is ought to be considered less of a crime, as Redwood advocates. Even more perilously, "date rape" is an elastic term, and also describes crimes which include the scraping of acquaintance with a victim as part of the planning.
Unlike many people who are deeply concerned about the state of the criminal justice system, I don't have a knee-jerk reaction against the building of more prisons. Certainly, locking more and more people away is not what happens in a cohesive and healthy society. A large population of prisoners is a symptom of a malfunctioning culture. But it is definitely not right to lock people up in overcrowded and ancient jails, built for harsher and less complex times either. We do need new prisons. Yet these three huge new jails promised by Jack Straw are not the sort that are needed as part of a progressive reshaping of the criminal justce system.
The most miserable aspect of the Government's extremely limited success in tackling child poverty is that half of the families condemned to living under such stress are working families. If work does not provide a route out of poverty, then nothing does - except the black economy and crime. There's always been something a little weird about the idea that child poverty can be targeted without addressing adult poverty anyway, but there can be no doubt that this sentimental obsession with the idea that only the little innocents can be considered as the deservingly needy makes the question of targeting a lot more complicated. (Apart from anything else, it is a disincentive to those who are hard-up and are rightly worried about their ability to afford a family.) Nevertheless, Gordon Brown has for a long time staked his reputation on a complicated and ever-changing system of tax credits, with means-tested application so daunting that take-up is a long-standing problem. In this spirit, maybe it's time to consider scrapping Britain's most popular tax-free hand-out, child benefit (taken up by all but 2 per cent of families, mine among them), and replace it with a progressive arrangement. I can't quite grasp why the size of one's family can't straightforwardly be reflected in one's personal allowance for income tax.
The last decade has seen an alarming increase in sexually transmitted diseases among the young. The government promised three years ago to "Do something", but in a survey last week one in ten men still thought chlamydia was the name of a flower.
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