God trumps all

When I was having religious intolerance beaten into me by the Jesuits at the start of the sixties, Catholics said simply that homosexuality was unnatural and evil, and those afflicted with it should be forced into celibacy or incarcerated. I'm not sure if they actually told me not to shake hands with one for fear of catching it, but that was the spirit of it.

Catholics took a while catching up with the idea that discrimination isn't fashionable any more, but the adoption agencies row is the second very recent example of a new, and clever, way of turning the discrimination argument against those who use it.

Here's how it works. Yes, the Catholic Church wants to discriminate against homosexuals. And yes, of course discrimination is bad. But if you don't let us discriminate, you're discriminating against the beliefs of Catholics, and that's worse. In the various forms of discimination - sex, race, disability - religion trumps all. Neat, really.

It was trialled a few weeks ago, when the Catholic Church was working on wrecking anti-discrimination laws. You can imagine the nights of anguish (and, I assume, prayer) that went into finding possible scenarios to show that these laws actiually discriminated against Catholics. The regulations, they said, would "force a family-run B&B to let out a double room to a transsexual couple, even if the family think it in the best interests of their children to refuse to allow such a situation in their home."

Now it's us who are doing the discriminating, against Catholic bigots who think homosexuals must not be allowed to bring up children.

The Church of England is convinced, apparently. We don't agree with the Catholics about homosexuality being sinful, they say - but we're not going to stand by and watch co-religionists being discriminated against. For discriminating against homosexuals. "The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning" they say. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,,1997404,00.html.) Sounds good. I dislike what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it. Except, of course, in Catholic countries, where the Church demands legislation to outlaw abortion.

I look forward to the Muslims jumping on the bandwagon. I suspect the Church of England will tie itself in knots trying to find a way not to support them. How's this for a start? A married woman teacher dresses in a way that Muslims consider immodest. If the school refuses to fire her at the request of Muslim parents, who is being discriminated against? Naturally, the Muslims, whose beliefs are being offended.

If we're trying to trump discrimination, two can play at that game. How’s this? A gay couple runs a restaurant, and a Christian family insists on saying grace before they sit down. The gay couple throw them out, on the grounds that, to them, religion means persecution. If we refuse them the right to do this, who is being discriminated against most? Why, the gay couple, of course. OK, there are some rough edges to iron out, but the germ of a trump is there.

Quite how Catholics have the brass nerve to be moralistic about homosexuality after recent revelations about the activities of paedophile priests worldwide, I don't know. Now do I understand how Cardinal Murphy O'Connor manages to do so when he defended his decision to allow a known paedophile to continue working as a priest, despite warnings the man would re-offend. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/840594.stm.)

But perhaps we should hold fire for a bit. The Catholic Church is throwing everything it has into this battle because its power in the land, on which it has grown fat for ten years, is waning every day. It has a Prime Minister who (as David Hencke and I showed in our book The Survivor) is, to all intents and purposes, a Catholic. The Church discreetly boasted about it. Most of our sources for this information were Catholic ones.

But Tony Blair's power is visibly draining out of him, and with it the power to enable the Catholic Church to discriminate against anyone. The Catholic Church may win this battle. It will lose the war.

Why Ruth Kelly is different

Margaret Thatcher was education secretary in Ted Heath's government and sent her children to private schools. No one turned a hair. Today, left wing Labour backbencher Dianne Abbott sends her child to a private school - "I lost my nerve" she told me" - and she's been more or less forgiven.

But Ruth Kelly was a Labour education secretary. She was put there by a Party dedicated to making state education as good as private education, and she was given the power to achieve it. As Jack Straw put it when he was shadow education secretary, Labour's job is to make state education so good that only a fool or a snob would want to go private. That applies to all children, including those with learning disabilities.

She did the job, and moved on. Now she has told us clearly that the system she left behind her is good enough for others, but not good enough for her children.

I can forgive Thatcher. I can even forgive Abbott. But I'll never forgive Kelly.

Why we hate our children

Of course every generation hates its children, but there seems to be a special venom in the loathing shown to its offspring by the sixties and seventies generation.

Our parents disliked our long hair, our scruffy couldn't-care-less clothes. They sneered that we went on anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in our "uniforms" of faded jeans, and longed to encase us in the uniform of the forties and fifties, when you wore grey suits and white shirts and thought yourself lucky to have the chance.

But we were young and free of spirit. We were the beneficiaries of the victory over Nazism and the Attlee settlement. As teenagers we had a bit of spare cash, and fun ways to spend it - things that our parents and grandparents could only dream about. As students we had a grant, and the taxpayer picked up the bill for our teaching. The most phrase most often heard among our parents was: "I want him (and, increasingly often, her) to have the opportunities I never had."

As we got older, they still worried about leaving us money. My mother and my partner's mother, neither of whom were rich, tried to save out of their tiny pensions in the hope of making our futures easier.

Our parents may have grudged us our freedom, but they never grudged us their money.

Now we're the parents, a popular car sticker says gleefully: "Spending the kids' inheritance." The most frequently heard sneer about those of our children who are students is: "He (and, increasingly, she) has come home for another handout" followed by a cynical and intolerant laugh. Yet the only reason they have to come cap in hand to us for money is that we have kicked away the ladder we climbed. As a student, I had enough to live on (my widowed mother being demonstrably penniless) and did not have to work in termtime, or beg from older relatives, or build up a mountain of debt.

That freedom from humiliation and worry, we decided, was too good for our children. We pulled away the ladder we climbed. We kicked away their legs, then sneered at them for being lame.

The intolerance our parents showed towards our clothes is as nothing to what we display. "Hoodie" was just a name for a coat in fashion with children and teenagers, until it was adopted by dishonest politicians anxious to create a shadow enemy they could fight on our behalf.

Teenagers under legal drinking age cannot go anywhere - pubs and clubs are barred to them. What is our solution? To condemn them for hanging about on street corners and making us feel uncomfortable, and to talk darkly of imposing a curfew on them.

Our schools have been turned into education factories, forcing grounds in which a set of predetermined information is crammed into young heads, in which there is no place for flights of fantasy or inspirational teaching. Our children are increasingly being forced back into school uniforms, against which our generation successfully rebelled. And the penalties for truanting are growing, with police now rotuinely frogmarching truants to their school. One of the argument used in favour of school unforms is that it will help the police to recognise those who ought to be at school. We are forcing our children into prison uniform so they will be instantly recognisable when they scale the walls.

Why are we doing all this? I have a theory. We were the generation that had everything. We thought the world could only get better. Under our guidance, it has got a great deal worse. We have squandered the fine legacy left us by the thirties and forties generation. What can we do about our guilt, except hit out at those we feel guilty about - our children?

Saddam's victory

I can't recall feeling so angry as when I woke this morning to a new year and read about the way they killed Saddam Hussein.

Masked men taunted him as he stood on the scaffold, and opened the trap door while he was saying his prayers.

It's no defence that the brutal dictator killed thousands, for no one made me complicit in his crimes; but Tony Blair has made me and all my countrymen complicit in this grotesque piece of sectarian vengeance.

Blair told us we were fighting in Iraq to elminate weapons of mass destruction. When none were found, a tinkly New Labour soundbite was invented to cover the gap, with an attractive bit of alliteration: Iraq, they said, was better off with "Saddam in prison than with Saddam in power."

Then they stopped saying that, because it became obvious that even this modest boast was the opposite of the truth. As the Iraqi academics I interviewed for the Guardian last week told me, things were bad under Saddam, but a thousand times worse now. No one even pretends that letting yet more British and American soldiers be killed will improve matters.

And now comes this revolting spectacle, which diminishes and brutalises those who created it - the British and American governments, speaking for their people.

Saddam Hussein was the only man in that grisly execution chamber to behave with dignity. He showed courage in the face of death, when all around him were men trying to make him behave badly. Compare him to the screaming, vengeful masked men, and their backers, the lying politicians in Britain and America. We have turned a brutal, murdering dictator into a martyr. Saddam could not have achieved that. It took our Prime Minister to do that. Yet still we let Blair prance about the world as our representative. Have we no pride left?