Vince Cable has been unusually outspoken about the BAE results:

"The company's profits depend on major, UK government-supported, export contracts - around which there are unresolved allegations of corrupt commission payouts and pending prosecutions - or on favoured contracts for government procurement."

BAE of course breathed an enormous sigh of relief when the government decided to end the investigation of BAE by the SFO. Some other politicians were unusally quiet on this issue. The "official opposition" spend a lot of time agreeing with the government over issues like Iraq and education. On this they kept their mouths shut - probably worried that someone would notice that the Al-Yamamah middleman was a Tory donor.

Perhaps it is wise to be quiet on this issue. The SFO's reward for investigating the Al-Yamamah deal is to find that they are destined for oblivion. This is what the Guardian says:

Ministers have begun working on proposals to disband the Serious Fraud Office, merging operations with other agencies, the Guardian has learned. The plan comes three months after relations between the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and SFO director Robert Wardle reached an all-time low over the latter's two-year investigation into kickback allegations linked to a BAE Systems contract with Saudi Arabia...

Disbanding the SFO would prompt fresh criticisms that Lord Goldsmith has been pursuing a political battle with the agency as an EU anti-corruption watchdog is considering whether it was wrong for the attorney general to halt the BAE investigation.

More on this story here.

The FT has the story:

"This is a call to arms - a call to be clearer about where we stand and why," Mr Duncan told the FT yesterday. "We've got to make sure we're not wrong-footed by Brown."

A rightwinger but Cameron-supporting moderniser, Mr Duncan will be seen as rebuking the leadership's perceived emphasis on image and marketing.

The context, of course is the same

"The speech comes amid Tory soul-searching over the opposition party's failure to break through the 40 per cent opinion poll barrier needed to regain power. Mr Cameron has established a consistent poll lead over Labour since his election as party leader. But his apparent inability to achieve an election-winning lead, during a very difficult political period for the government, is triggering increasingly vocal criticisms from the party's Thatcherite right wing."

This is the Cameron dilemma. He has made an effort to rid the party of some of its history - and has had the tacit consent of many to whom that history is dear. But he hasn't reached escape velocity: the Tories look like a party that might do better at the next election, not like one on course for victory,

And as Cameron spends so much time agreeing with Blair (on Schools, on ending the investigation of Al-Yamamah, even on the NHS) Conservative supporters (most of whom want the government policies and style to change) are depressed.

Part of the Tory's problem is that the big event this year is the Holyrood election. As the Tories seem to be in favour of breaking up the UK, they might feel they have a role to play. But reading the press you get that the impression that three party politics is alive and well in Scotland - and that the Tories aren't in the mix.

Take Steve Webb for example. His views have been picked up in the Guardian

Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrats' Mr Wonk, said Britain had taken the American, not the Scandinavian road to "consumerist, fractured individualism" in the past 20 years, under Labour and Tory.

That might explain why Ireland gets lumped in with the US and UK in Unicef's rich-but-poor parenting bloc. "Dog eat dog societies," one Unicef author called them.

Like Unicef, Mr Webb notes that national wealth, government spending levels, unemployment, even single parenthood, do not necessarily condemn a nation's children, though they are all factors. "Perhaps the UK property market is partly to blame. You can't live in half the country without being a two-income family where the parents may not see much of the kids," he observed last night.

This doesn´t all appeal to me - some of my best friends and are Scandinavians, and they tend to see the downside of cultural norms that place much higher empasis on conformity. And - as I will discuss below - there are many ways in whch we are different from the Scandinavians.

Russell Eagling's piece for the Free Think blog seems to take a little distance from Steve´s reported remarks:

Steve Webb's positioning on this debate is interesting. He is the Lib Dem often seen to be asking for biggest tax rises. But he is also very much associated with the Christian wing of the party, the pet views of which this story rightly plays to.

The issue generally forces us to examine our own assumptions. No public-spirited liberals would say that the effects of children taking drugs, having sex, being unfit and spending virtually no time with their parents (amongst other sins) are a good thing. But what does the liberal Netherlands (at the top of the list) get right that so-called liberal England gets so wrong?

And Steve himself takes a slightly different line in his own blog. This is how he ends:

I certainly think that the Government should be looking much harder at how some of its policies make family life much more difficult, and also at some of its rhetoric which has regarded bringing up young children at home as somehow a second class activity. We already have a long-hours culture in this country which does little for family relationships, and I'm not convinced that plans to force more lone parents to look for paid work are a step in the right direction.

So should we be more Scandinavian?

The first thing to recognise is that some of the opposing rhetoric is questionable. The "long hours" culture is bandied about, but read this mornings Le Monde and you will find that the average worker in the UK works fewer hours than the average French worker. We have a lot of part-time jobs in this country (my wife has one of them). If you work full-time the likelihood is that you are working more hours than a full-time French worker - but we have more options here.

Steve´s point that the housing market rewards two-income units is of course correct. A large part of the answer would be to build more houses. It would be interesting too to look at whether a limitation on the income multiple used for calculating loans could be imposed, and would have some effect (we Brits spend too much on our housing and too little on the rest of our lives, in my view). I'm not over optimistic though.

Single parents are not a purely British phenomena of course. The Scandinavians have loads of them (and Scandinavian men tend to take their parental leave entitlements when the World Cup is on).

Where do we differ? First, the Scandinavians have worked hard to maintain their manufacturing sector. This is not entirely logical in pure economic terms, but one of the impacts is that they do not have the family stress that we have in some post-industrial areas.

A second issue is immigration: there are many immigrants in the Nordic countries, but a lot of them have simply crossed the nearest border. There are - I believe - only around 400 000 non-european immigrants in Sweden.

Immigration has and continues to bring a lot to the UK - in economic terms and in cultural terms. But it carries with it a certain level of social stress. The shootings in south London have brought the particular problems of the black British family into the headlines again, and Joseph Harden has a moving, almost despairing, piece in the Guardian.

Twenty years ago, as a journalist in the black press, I was optimistic about the future for black Britons, assuming as our presence here grew stronger we'd see our people prosper. Today, though, despite the progress of many, we have seen the growth of an underclass; and without breaking the cycle, it will become more entrenched and more desperate, with teenage pregnancies and ruined life chances becoming the norm.

Our schools throw information about sex and drugs at children from as young as seven. Isn't it time a greater priority was given to teaching youngsters about parenting, about families, and about making sure the next generation doesn't suffer the same traumas as this?

These are tough problems, and the answers are going to be tough too. Steve Webb´s social conservatism and concern for the family may well be part of the solution. But trying to emulate the Scandinavians is probably not going to get us very far.

You can't realy argue with bottom place. If UNICEF says that Britain is the worst out of 21 rich Western countries in which to live your childhood, then somthing must be done.

What you think should be done is up to you. The Telegraph notices that "(t)he nation's high number of single parents and step-families has contributed to the ranking", reverting to one of their favourite themes.

The Guardian found someone to argue that this was the result of long term under investment in children.

Both might be right. But this sort of composite league table doesn´t really test the relative weight of these factors.

Some of the saddest findigs relate to what children feel about their contempories. The UNICEF press release points out that

"The percentage of children who report that their peers are ‘kind and helpful’ varies from a high of 80 percent or more in Switzerland and Portugal to less than 50 percent in the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom."

But the high scores for Portugal and Switzerland contrasts strikingly with the findings on bullying:

"The prevalence of bullying varies more widely, with about 15 percent of children reporting being bullied in Sweden and the Czech Republic and more than 40 percent in Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal."

Frankly I am unconvinced by cross-cultural attitudes of this kind. It is very hard to ensure that you translate workds like "kind" and "helpful" in a way that means they have the same force in different languages. So we should focus on the experience of childhood in Britain, rather than wondering if we are really better or worse than the Swiss.

We also know that the British are pretty poor at eating together - we're also not that great at cooking proper home meals (except for Tabman). So if you compare us iwth the Italians, you know what is going to happen.

But there are plenty of objective factors to focus on. Teenage mothers are three times as common in the UK as in France. British teenagers are much more likely to escape from education and training (and to settle for a low wage employment) at a young age than most of our European neighbours.

The image that emerges from - slowly - from the UNICEF report is of a society that is still class-ridden, in which the most pernicious form of poverty is poverty of aspiration.

David Cameron's membership of the exclusive Oxford University Bullingdon Club has been examined recently in the Mail, the Telegraph and the Independent. The Bullingdon Club, parodied by Evelyn Waugh as the Bollinger Club, is an invitation-only ex-Public School dining society, whose members indulge in the sport of visiting an establishment under an assumed name, smashing the place up, and over-paying for the damage with large denomination notes.

"So what," you might say, "much like Dave's teenage spliff antics, what does a bit of youthful high-jinks matter?" Now he's a respectable man and father."

Well, it does matter. Firstly because the alleged activities of the Bullingdon Club ask questions about whether Cameron's youthful indiscretions might have carried on into later life, and secondly because of the attitudes of a certain section of society to the way they can misbehave (and get away with it).

Cicero speculated recently whether Cameron's drug dalliances ended with his school days. To raise further questions, a report in Oxford University's student newspaper on the Bullingdon, written before Cameron stood for the leadership stated:

Cameron was member of the club at a time when it was de rigeur to engage in the ‘man of the people’ pursuits of washing down “a cocktail of drugs with an honest, working class box of chips and a five pound bottle of wine”.

Drugs issues aside, it is the attitudes that go with membership of such clubs that we really ought to examine. Past misdemeanours, as well as the wrecking of the White Hart Pub alluded to above, are alleged to have included smashing all the windows in Christ Church's Tom Quad, and wrecking the instruments of a string quartet, including a Stradivarius, invited to play at a Club garden party. As the Oxford paper puts it:

My source is quick to impress on me that they tend to leave one-off antique pieces untouched, preferring to infl ict more replaceable damage. I wonder how replaceable a Stradivarius is. Or 550 windows for that matter. A large part of the members’ motivation is the feudal idea that its quite alright to inflict damage on peasants’ property, provided one is able to pay for it.

In essence, such behaviour is about the swagger of exercising power, of causing distress and inconvenience to those less fortunate, and knowing that your wealth and influence leave you above the law in such matters and unlikely to have to face the consequences of your actions.

In an article linking the White Hart incident with the insensitivities and misbehaviour of the younger members of the Royal Family, Libby Purves, who describes herself as a Monarchist, writes a highly-charged attack on the section of society that views itself in this way:

They [are] rich, protected, unlikely to get prison records because their families [can] smooth the feathers of those whose property and peace they destroy. There is a sliver of British society — a very small sliver — that still lives in a different world to the vast, well-behaved middle-class majority, and disdains it. Their young run easily out of control: like the underclass yob, who at least has the excuse of poverty, these rich boys cannot see outside their own rut. It is social autism. In past centuries they might be checked by rigid conventions and parental severity. Now, they aren’t. Their parents bought in to part of modern middle-class childrearing — its indulgence and friendly unjudgmental attitudes — but unfortunately omitted to put in the time, the talk and the closeness which make such modern parenting work. The result is a tribe of well-spoken savages.

Perhaps Cameron is over all that now. But his insistance in surrounding himself with a coterie of hand-picked and like-minded public-school types, in an echo of the days of his Bullingdon Club exclusivity, doesn't bode well. And news that he considers trying to find the time to bath his children once a week is sufficient to make him a good dad makes interesting reading in the light of Libby Purves' comment.

We are currently experiencing mis-rule by a Labour Party that is privileged and sees itself as untouchable and above the law. Do we really want its continuance with Cameron's Conservatives?

Yesterday ConservativeHome reported the latest attack on "Project Cameron" [sic] by the leader of the Cornerstone Group, Edward Leigh. It comments:

Writing for the House Magazine, Mr Leigh lists the ways in which Mr Cameron has offended traditional Tory sensibilities:

"This is the year that Conservative spokesmen have:

- Adopted Aneurin Bevan as a role model (he who vowed to destroy us and described us as 'vermin';
- Praised left-wing Polly Toynbee's view of society;
- Snubbed the CBI;
- Pleaded understanding for marauding hoodies;
- Announced that we, not Labour, were the real defenders of an unreformed NHS, the last Soviet-style, centrally-controlled health service in any large country;
- Rejected tax cuts, despite the biggest tax hike in peacetime history;
- Criticised grammar schools;
- Turned down the volume on Euroscepticism to the inaudible."

While praising Mr Cameron's personal qualities the Chairman of the powerful Public Accounts Committee warns that the party is in danger of "taking our core vote for granted and in the process effectively disenfranchising millions of decent people who feel that none of the mainstream parties speak for them." He continues:

"Our Euroscepticism is deliberately confused with crude nationalism, when in fact we want to help the Third World by breaking down trade barriers. And why did the leader's speech at the party conference not mention immigration at all, when in the last few years we have undergone the greatest-ever wave of increasing immigration into our country?"

Part of the reason Edward Leigh is listened to is because of his leadership of the forty-strong Cornerstone group of Tory MPs.

My colleague Peter wrote recently that such dissent smack of a man considering a move to UKIP. I'm not so sure - as one of the comments to that article pointed out, Leigh still has potentially a number of years left in the house and a responsible job; why would he chuck it in at this stage?

Yesterday, Julian H commented on these pages thus, and it got me thinking:

I'm unsure as to what the Right actually want. Surely they don't want a weakened Tory party being defeated by Gordo in 2009. So do they genuinely think they can oust Dave before then and replace him with one of their own AND win in 2009? If so they are deluded. If not - what is the plan? Get to a hung parliament and then force him out for not doing better? Or do they just want to be seen as being disapproving?

Cameron has had limited success in that he has raised the Tories out of their 30-33% box to 35-38% box, so adding around 5 percentage points. Yet, to form a stable government he needs the low forties. With Labour in such disarray it is understandable that the likes of Leigh are frustrated - Cameron's "touchy-feely" pseudo-liberalism has not delivered. Meanwhile, all the core values that he and many like him feel the Conservatives stand for have been rubbished.

So, to return to Julian's point, perhaps they do want Gordon to win in 2009. Cameron and his approach will have been proved wrong, and the right can reclaim the party. Perhaps they calculate that by the following election, four terms of Labour will have the electorate crying out for a dose of good old-fashioned Thatcherism.

This is a victimless defection - Coun George Price was formerly an Independent. The impact is that the Lib Dem/Green Group (this is getting complicated, isn't it?) becomes the largest group on the council.

Full details here.

The Mail on Sunday claims to have the full story.

David Cameron narrowly avoided being expelled from Eton College when he was involved in the school's worst-ever drugs scandal, it has been revealed.

Police were called in and seven pupils were thrown out after boys were caught dealing in and smoking cannabis.

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The future Tory leader - who until now has refused to say if he took drugs - was caught after another pupil informed on him. Cameron, who at the time was just 15, was hauled in by the headmaster, who forced him to admit he had smoked cannabis.

The furious master punished him by putting him under the top public school's equivalent of house arrest by being 'gated'.

But this did not stop Cameron's drug- taking, according to a book to be serialised exclusively in The Mail on Sunday next month. It says he carried on smoking cannabis when he went to Oxford.

In case you are tempted to take all this seriously, check out this classic paragraph:

Parties of up to ten boys would gather in a room to listen to Bob Marley reggae records and smoke cannabis, said Press reports at the time. Cameron was a big fan of reggae band UB40, but there is no evidence he was at the Bob Marley dope parties.

Just as well young Etonians hadn't heard of Scratch Perry or Peter Tosh...

Most liberals will surely be relaxed about this - and Cameron will probably come to see it as good publicity (although it will focus attention on his privileged background).

But Lord Tebbit is not amused. According to the BBC Tebbit believes that

it would have been better for Mr Cameron to admit to taking cannabis when he was first asked about it during his campaign.

"On the whole I've always thought that it was better to be pretty honest about things because sooner or later the truth of the matter tends to come out and it's always better to have brought it out yourself rather than have somebody else bring it out."

I'm entirely in favour of the idea that schools should have more independence from central government, and should be able to set more of their own curriculum and lesson structure, but this idea can have a dark side. As this case shows, some schools may abuse the freedoms they already have:

The principal of an Islamic school has admitted that it uses textbooks which describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs" and has refused to withdraw them.

Dr Sumaya Alyusuf confirmed that the offending books exist after former teacher Colin Cook, 57, alleged that children as young as five are taught from racist materials at the King Fahd Academy in Acton.

This is plainly, simply and unequivocally wrong. There is not really any need for a debate on the subject; it can be taken as read that such material has no place in a school in Britain. The case raises no greater question than 'why was this not brought to light sooner?'.

Enjoy

According to the Standard, Leigh asks

"Is it any wonder that there is a steady drift of voters to UKIP and the BNP?

"Indeed, UKIP is cleverly making a bid for these votes by espousing a Thatcherite agenda across the whole field of issues."

This sounds rather like defection talk to me.

Yesterday Mike Smithson sparked off a debate on the possibilities and outcomes surrounding a Hung Parliament. The lively discussion in the comments field explored a whole range of possibilities - who would be winners and losers, and the likely effect on the parties of each scenario discussed.

Yet - in one comment Stodge (occasionally of this Parish) noted that almost no-one had looked at what would be best for the country, rather than their narrow political interest.

Whenever the Hung Parliament question is raised, it is framed in terms of "Which way would the Lib Dems jump?" Our MPs always defer along the lines of "It is not right to second guess the outcome of the next election. Until we see the verdict delivered by the British People we wait on their decision." Matthew Parris recently gave equivocal support in the form of suggesting we campaign along the lines of "Vote for us, we'll keep one or the other of the b*ggers honest!"

Elsewhere, blogger Cicero has argued that he sees the future political faultline falling between the liberal and the authoritarian approach to Government. I think this offers us a suggestion as to how to tackle the inevitable question when it arises.

I would hope Sir Ming would pitch his answer something like this:

"I believe in Liberalism as a political creed, and the best approach to take when adressing the challenges facing this country. The liberal approach is the best answer to the problems that beset us.

Many members of the other parties do not believe in a Liberal approach - they are instinctively authoritarian and, to be honest, I feel would be happy in each other's company despite their different party allegiances.

Yet, there are also MPs (and voters) who hold broadly liberal views who, for historical, cultural and pragmatic reasons have chosen to join parties other than the Liberal Democrats.

The verdict of the people for many years now has been that they do not trust one political party to govern outright. It is only our outdated political system that allows one party to gain a majority of seats without a majority of votes. This time, that system has delivered a verdict more in keeping with the electorate's wishes, albeit by accident rather than design.

To move forward, I call on those in all political parties who share broadly liberal views to put aside narrow party differences, and join together to work for the benefit of all the country in enacting a liberal approach to government. We might call this a Venezuelan Coalition, after the colours of that country's flag.

It has worked before in times of national crises. It is my strong belief that the challenges posed to our way of life by the threats of climate change, international terrorism, and the opportunities and stresses of globalisation merit such an approach again, now.

Are we, as politicians, big enough to put party concerns aside for the good of the country? I think, and hope, we are."