No, really. Enough about Obama, already.

Oops. Of course, Nebraska still has a dangling vote. So it could be 365-173 and yah boo sucks to 270towin.com. We still wait patiently, principally because nothing of comparable interest has diverted my attention back to Britain. They know how to put on a show, these Americans.

Did somebody win?

Never a more redundant post than this, but somehow it looks incomplete not to post about it: Obama it is. And with a surprisingly thumping majority, as well. But jolly well done to www.270towin.com, which declared that the most common result of its electoral college simulation was Obama 364 - McCain 174 which, assuming Missouri rather sadly breaks its marvellous bellwethership, will be the end result.

What is a bellwether, anyway?

If the news that Missouri is too close to call is insufficiently stimulating for alert politicos at this time of the morning, then I am delighted to find that an alternative source of excitement is BBC Parliament's coverage of Welsh First Minister's Questions.

RIP GOP

The tone of the BBC election panel has turned to a post-mortem on Mr McCain's campaign already. Even though he seems to have avoided a trouncing, the pundits have begun to bury rather than praise him, thereby preparing the way forward for the death of the current incarnation of the Republican party, and exposing its carcass to the circling wolves of left and right. Or perhaps, right and middle. Or maybe right and far right. Are we being unfair to the cuddly wing of the Republicans, I wonder?

More on that Republican future

A Republican strategist on the BBC comments that there will be "party unity" if they are in opposition to a Democratic government.

I wonder if that is what we shall see. Results are on their way.

Here we go...

Polls are closing in the US shortly and the whole presidential-election buzz is reaching its peak. Meanwhile, one wonders whether much thought has been given to the next steps for the losers.

First up, note that whatever the outcome tonight, the next four years should be pretty difficult, so the president, whoever he (or, a heartbeat away, she) might be, will be vulnerable in 2012 if the economy hasn't picked up and people are still feeling the pinch.

If McCain wins, all very well for him, and I think we would broadly expect to see dismay and disappointment in America, and probably some cynicism worldwide. I suspect Obama would not reappear in 2012, since a great deal of his appeal has stemmed from his newness (it's all been about change, after all). But Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and no doubt a dozen others could jockey to dominate a damaged Democratic party in time to challenge a 76-year-old president in 2012.

If Obama wins, as everybody seems to be expecting, the effect on the Republican party seems likely to be much more extreme. Even during this campaign, there's been a lot of talk of the "Republican base", and McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate to satisfy that base gives a clear indication of where the power in the party lies. So a Republican failure, coupled with the whole "cataclysm" discourse of modern electioneering, suggests that the Republicans would swiftly elbow McCain - the self-professed 'maverick' - aside, and return to their more conservative roots, quite possibly led by Sarah Palin in 2012. Even if it's not the belipsticked pitbull, recent reports suggest that she and her wing of the party will be setting the agenda. So it could be back to babies-guns-n-Jesus for a moral crusade in 2012.

So is an Obama victory, ironically, the outcome most likely to drive a large chunk of the American political landscape back to the right, and therefore to polarise the country?

Ministerial broadcast

Whether it's for Obama or McCain, I find the idea that you can buy half an hour of US TV air time for your own advertisements pretty weird.

Heaven help us if we are ever subjected to thirty minutes of Brown, Cameron, or Clegg. Yikes.

EDIT: If and when they do arrive on these shores, I hope they lose the label "infomercial", as commonly applied. A political broadcast is not information - it's less than that. But it's not commercial, either - it's more than that.

Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the news media...

If there's one good thing about the whole Brand/Ross/Sachs hullabaloo, it's that it's finally driven the economy off the hallowed top story pedestal on which it has been persistently residing for several weeks, allowing media outlets both print and broadcast to put the willies up audiences with sonorous invocations of coming financial woe. So a thousand thanks for that.

I'm even more grateful that this furore seems likely to see us through until the US presidential election next week, which should pick up the headline spot for a good few days. And even more if there's a nice balloty mess in Pennsylvania or somewhere.

Brand and Ross were crude, then apologised, and this was accepted. I can see that there may be a case for disciplining or sacking either of them if it was live, but the real fault appears to be with the staffer/s who listened to the programme and cleared it for broadcast. That surely is the point of recorded shows - the entertainers are there to try to entertain, while the production team produce the thing. So while I think Brand is overrated, I'm not sure he should have been the one to go.

But what dismays me even more than any of these shenanigans is, as usual, the response: we seem to have two received opinions, one that they are both juvenile, irresponsible, offensive and overpaid and should be summarily dismissed, if not caned; and the other, that they are hilarious geniuses and everybody over thirty should get a life.

Why don't more people just not mind about all this? I'll regret writing this, but...is this story really more important than the economy?

Picking Palin...

Some early Palin-spotting now seems interesting and/or amusing. I like the reference in this blogger's post in February that Palin would be "like the Republican Party's Segolene Royal." Not a comforting parallel, but we shall see whether it was prescient.

Like Peter Mandelson....

...we're back.

More soon.

Mugabe, food, Rome, outrage, blah

The reaction to this story seems a little odd to me. What's the point of a conference, if not dialogue? Is the best way to help Zimbabwe's people to refuse to allow its government access to global expertise and opinion on food security?

Of course, there is a sense of deja vu about this. I'm not sure whether this sort of rhetorical flourish is particularly helpful, either.

On-the-spot reporting in the wi-fi age?

There's nothing so exciting as on-the-spot reporting. This, from the BBC:

1309
The BBC's James Landale at London's City Hall says, with 22% of votes counted, Boris Johnson is ahead in 10 of London's election regions, while Ken Livingstone is ahead in four regions.

Talk about finger on the pulse. Except that the count isn't happening at City Hall, but Alexandra Palace, Kensington Olympia and the Excel centre. I don't think anything official is scheduled to happen at City Hall until this evening.

Still, as long as you have a mobile and a laptop, who needs to be where the action really is?

On the Conservatives

Since the final exit of John Major from the Conservative front bench to go and watch more cricket in 1997, the Tories have not found a happy home in the paradise of moderates. Under successive leaders - Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard - the party moved to the right, both on policy and rhetoric. Theresa May's famous admonition that they were the "nasty party" was more than a warning to her troops: it was one of the most precise observations on public opinion since the Tories were deemed to be "in office, but not in power".

David Cameron has managed to do a great deal as Conservative leader. Whether this has been a reform of the "nasty party" soul, or just an effective camouflage of it, it's still been quite an achievement. So the corking 44% result, with the promise of Mayor Boris to follow, is undoubtedly good from a moderate point of view: whether the substance of the party is still "nasty", its public image - on which alone voters can judge it- is moving in a more centrist direction, and this has been rewarded. Whether the rank-and-file really are out of their blue-rinse Thatcherite fake-Tory phase or not, the voters' endorsement of the party as it is now can only be a moderating influence on its future direction.

But the Conservatives still face some problems. Moderation tends to be a winner, as Tony Blair deftly proved at every election he fought. It even outweighed revulsion over the invasion of Iraq. But the Conservatives are not up against a non-moderate alternative. Labour is looking tired, fractious and silly, but doesn't look as alienating as the Conservatives themselves were in the 1990s. I suspect that John Major was held in sneaking regard by those voters who turfed his party out eleven years ago; it was the party on the backbenches which had alienated the voters by looking divided, vindictive and crackpot. Now, it's Gordon Brown and his front bench who are losing public sympathy, not the backbenches. (So would a change of leadership help? Probably not, because that would open up nasty divisions).

Unpopular Brown may be, but his predecessor's success was aided by Major's own destruction at the hands of the Conservatives. Unless Labour goes completely stark staring bonkers, Brown is safe, so Cameron is going to have to pedal still harder to win a general election: despite his successful shift to the centre, the middle ground is still not vacant.

Where have all the politicians gone?

I expect to go and vote, later on today, in the local council elections in my area. Admittedly it's not as exciting as Boris v Ken, I grant you that.

So how will I be making my decision? I've lived in this particular district council area for about six months now, and it's an area I was new to. I'm not immensely interested in local politics - at least, not enough to go hunting for local political news. Yet it seems I should have done - for during this entire election campaign, the sum total of campaigning in my area has been one (yes, one) leaflet dropped through my door about two weeks ago. It was from the Liberal Democrats, who currently control said council. It was not very well written.

I can't decide what I make of this. On the one hand it would be a waste of resources to have been campaigning actively for my vote when I don't think the council can even change hands this time round (only a third of the seats are up for election); but it hardly seems the way to stir voters from their apathy to stick with a rotating system which means that almost no local elections are ever critical.

With so little paper being used up on electioneering leaflets, at least a dull election is better for the environment, though. Every cloud and all that.

He's right, you know

I'm pretty lukewarm about Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, for whom the nickname "Calamity Clegg" seems fairly apposite. But he's right about this, which seems to hint at a sort of regional fragmentation from which it would be difficult to recover. Particularly if those politicians who (or, more accurately, whose successors) really stand to lose continue to ignore it because it's a headache. I don't know whether William Hague's Northern Board and Harriet Harman's hard-nosed Southernness is quite enough. There's something faintly reminiscent of US presidential politics in all this. I wonder whether this division between northern and southern England have ever been quite so pronounced before, at least in terms of its effect on the future of the major parties.

Talking of US politics, this was interesting. I suspect Gordon Brown will have at least a year working with a new US president. It's nice to feel that the relationship with the Bush administration has cooled, but it will be interesting to see what develops with a new guy (or girl) in office over there. If it's McCain, will the pressure on Brown to work closely with the US outweigh any public hostility towards Blairing about with another Republican who supports continuing "operations" in Iraq?

The BBC's wildlife programming just gets more incredible. There is now no doubt that they deserve a doubling of the licence fee, at least.

Moderation in action?

This is the sort of thing with which we respectfully disagree.

The BBC published a story with a headline which misrepresented the nuances of President Bush's speech on the progress of the war in Iraq, and later replaced the phrase "Bush speech hails Iraq 'victory'" with "Bush says Iraq invasion was right". What Bush actually said was The surge has ... opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.

I have no beef with the suggestion that this is an editorial misjudgement by the BBC and that they were right to replace the headline, nor that the original headline misrepresented the president, and probably relied more on stereotyped views of Bush's policy than on a close reading of the text. But does serving justice on a misleading headline really require the marvellously-named Monkey Tennis Centre, despite its commendably thorough coverage and checking of this little volte-face, to be bandying around a clutch of accusations that this is "a thoroughness worthy of Orwell's Ministry of Truth"; "deceitful editing of the story, and [an] equally deceitful headline"; "dishonestly headlined, mendaciously edited"; and "spectacularly dishonest"? Perhaps. But our line is that it doesn't. The BBC, like all news agencies, offers its reportage as products in the marketplace of ideas, and it's up to us to take or leave, learn or ignore as we see fit.

We can't expect to have both constant, around-the-clock, up-to-the-minute coverage of everything and 100% impartiality of language. That's not to say we shouldn't expect accuracy, but we can take into account the pressures of maintaining this level of self-imposed pressure by the media and consider how well organisations are doing overall. Political bias is one thing, but this is a matter of subtlety of phrasing, and launching a little anti-BBC tirade is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I've heard twenty-four-hour news described beautifully as "a stream of information unleavened by understanding or analysis", which seems to sum up what happened here. And it was fixed, after all.

(Another tension, it seems to me, is that between the world of "Web 2.0" and user-generated content on the one hand, and the idea that we are all helpless consumers in that marketplace of ideas, forced to choose only between the sparse millions of pieces of information provided for us and completely unable to make our own judgements and hold our own counsel, but perhaps that's for another day).

Of far more importance is another point in the same post: is it reasonable for a fully-moderated comments section to publish opinions by members of the public that Bush and Blair should be "hanged" for their "crimes"? On that one, as on the general insistence on the highest standards in the media, we are fully behind the Monkey Tennis Centre. But perhaps these aims can be better achieved by moderation than by tubthumping.

Entente Amicale

The last few days have been full of news about the visit of the French president to Britain. There has been a healthy amount of cliche-jockeying, principally about what the Entente Cordiale now looks like (is it this, this or this?), and plenty of froth about the president's wife, although only a little in the way of explanation for the choice of venue for talks between Mr Sarkozy and Mr Brown.

But all in, your humble Stationmaster is surprised and pleased by the generally moderate and approving tone of coverage. British media attitudes towards France seem to veer from the frosty to the xenophobic, all for no substantial reason. So it's been impressive and encouraging to see a new innovation in British foreign policy, a real sense that we are moving on from the muddled and awkward Blair-Chirac years, and taking a sensible and positive attitude towards our venerable neighbour.

Genius.

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports

British values?

These are some of the responses on the BBC's Have Your Say section to the suggestion that teenagers should declare their allegiance to Queen and Country.

Every citizen should swear allegiance to our Queen, obviously this will be unpopular amongst teenagers who are invariably anarchist.

Stop terrorising us all threats and pernicious legislation that criminalises what would otherwise be law abiding folk.

I personally would sooner vomit myself inside out than swear allegiance to the Queen. I find the whole concept quite grotesque.

We are sick of the way we are betrayed by this government.

Didn't Hitler try the same thing?

THIS IS THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS AND DISGUSTING THING I'VE HEARD IN YEARS.

If there's anyone that should pledge allegience to put British interests first, it should be the Labour government!
Gordon Brown, Tony Bliar - I'm talking about you!
This imbecile Britain-hating government always puts foreign interests first, like when Gordon Clown gave 1 billion worth of aids to China and India the other month!

I'm shaking my head in despair, I really am.

Fingers crossed for Clinton...

Don't ask me to do the maths again, but I was mentally doodling earlier and decided that Britain would be worth 77 electoral college votes if it were the fifty-first state. Heavens, we'd have half as many votes again as California has now. So who, forgive the vainglory, would I wish to see 'our votes' go to in the presidential election in January? Well, I got one word for you, buddy: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I base this judgement on my main area of interest when it comes to who sits in the big chair in the round room over the pond: foreign policy. I'm not going to claim to be the closest observer, just a sort of cross between your average joe and your political ubergeek. I've watched snippets of the candidates on British and US news, seen the odd debate, and (here's the geekery) read what McCain, Huckabee, Clinton and Obama make of foreign policy in the snappily-titled Foreign Affairs. For me, without a doubt, Clinton comes out on top. Which surprised me, because I thought I would be pretty happy with either Obama or Clinton, and possibly even McCain - after all, the overall impression is of a swing to the sensible centre after the madness of President Bush.

I won't bore you with the details - you can always read up for yourself (and what Romney, Giuliani and Edwards thought too). But the upshot is that Senator Clinton is the only candidate who seems to me to be coherent and adventurous in the name of common-sense, practical politics -at least inasmuch as anybody can be when they are constrained by the patriotic fantasy of the US political worldview. She may give in at times, in her article and latterly in her campaigning, to the rhetoric of terrorism and national security, but she is never strident in the way that Governor Huckabee is ("We are living on borrowed time...I understand the threats we face today. When I am president, America will look this evil in the eye, confront it, defeat it, and emerge stronger than ever". Nice).

The real surprise for me was the vacuity of Senator Obama's views. I hadn't heard anything from him about foreign policy in the news, so I'm left only with his own Foreign Affairs article. The caveat that it is from last summer doesn't really alleviate my horror at some of his claims and initiatives. For instance, Obama seems to suggest that the US should withdraw from Iraq for the prime purpose of compelling Iraqi politicians to reach their own peace deal:
"The best chance we have to leave Iraq a better place is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political solution. And the only effective way to apply this pressure is to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008."

It seems to me that "pressuring Iraq's leaders to finally get serious about resolving their differences" is what you might call "completely bonkers". The notion that the very idea of peace is so powerful that it will eclipse all other considerations in a divided nation is not just simplistic but dangerous, fitting much more nicely with a happy view of a peaceful, America-led free world than with the rather more threatening reality.

The rest of Obama's views are similarly wafer-thin. One comparison with Clinton stands out for me: he spends a paragraph setting out all the environmental calamities which may befall us in the near future: rising sea levels, crop failures and famine, disease and poverty. His sonorous conclusion to this? "That means increased instability in some of the most volatile parts of the world." You could have knocked me down with a feather. Thanks, Barack. Meanwhile, Clinton is busy boring the pants of her readers with proposals for an "E-8" forum of the naughtiest global carbon-emitting economies, like the G-8 but in order to shove green issues to the forefront of international politics.

All this is not to say that President Obama (will they really swallow that idea on election day?) would be a Bad Thing. For all his vacuities (his solution to the genocide in Darfur, for instances, is to "rebuild our ties to our allies in Europe and Asia and strengthen our partnerships throughout the Americas and Africa") there is plenty of his trademark rhetoric, so eloquent as to inspire rather than fall flat like the usual politician's platitudes. And I suppose this is more powerful to a domestic audience than a foreign observer like me, looking for reassurance that America will have new ideas from next January which might actually make the world a better place. Obama's rhetoric points in that direction, but it's Clinton who seems to have the policies to get there.

So, Hillary looks to me like far and away the best candidate, so bravo for her rescue by Ohio and Texas the other day. Of course, if Britain had those 77 electoral college votes then it wouldn't be foreign policy which informs my decision. Besides, whether it's Clinton, Obama or McCain is unaffected by foreign opinion and in any case will be a welcome, welcome change from the incumbent. Which makes this post either circular, or redundant. A perfect addition to the blogosphere, in fact. Enjoy.

Alas, poor Clegg.

Oh, dear. Poor Liberal Democrats.

Nick Clegg seems to have tried to take the political high ground here. Having upped the ante last week on the European issue, presumably in an attempt to expose the hidden fault lines which must still run through the Conservative party and are increasingly plaguing Labour, he has now got himself into an awful twist.

As one of the Moderation Stationmaster's staff points out, if Clegg had directed his party to vote "no" on a Lisbon Treaty referendum they would have looked vindictive, whereas if he had required them to support the referendum, they would have looked weak and indecisive. But the end result - insisting that they abstain - just looked weird.

There's nothing wrong with Clegg's view - that the real debate is in fact over whether Britain should stay in the EU or not. He's right to see the Lisbon Treaty as a straw man for general public frustration with the Union. But if he believes that the path to a sensible resolution of all this is reached by moderation and consensus, then he was ill-advised to use a three-line whip to reach it, especially when a free vote would have given the same message without the policy contortions.

Seems to me another instance of moderation and common sense being squeezed out by the control-freakery and tribalism of our present system. Victorian prime ministers would be scratching their heads in puzzlement.

The Left that dare not speak its name?

Something struck me as a bit odd after my last post - the BBC seems to be having trouble with the fact that Demetris Christofias, the incoming president of Cyprus, is a communist. They seem to have adopted a strangely bland circumlocution: "a left-wing leader" ; "left-winger...leader of the Greek Cypriot communist party" ; "Left-wing Cypriot leader Demetris Christofias...who heads the communist AKEL party". Some other quarters have a similar aversion - USA Today, awkwardly, call him "communist-rooted".But other outlets don't seem to have the same reticence at all - CNN, al-Jazeera and Reuters, for example.

Of course, Christofias isn't a "proper" communist - the IHT explains why, although the Cyprus Weekly draws direct parallel with Moldova, the only other European country with a communist head of state - and the original Communist party was banned in Cyprus to be replaced by AKEL, the Progressive Party of the Working People - but I was wondering if there is some kind of BBC aversion to the label, as if the only communists we can imagine in the West are Stalinists or human rights abusers. Interesting.

(Talking of image, AKEL themselves don't seem too shy about it!)

Has the Med finally got its Castro?

Here's irony. Fifty years after the US feared that Cyprus was going to get its own "Castro of the Mediterranean", it has - just as the original and best steps down.

Let's hope that Mehmet Ali Talat is right to be this optimistic.

Heartening news - somebody was wrong about something!

This is the sort of thing we need more of. Sundry TV channels and opposition parties have attempted to make mincemeat of Alistair Darling (why aren't there more Blackadder jokes about him?) because he apparently trashed the idea of nationalising Northern Rock a while ago, only to do exactly that over the weekend. But it turns out that Hansard wasn't quite quoting him correctly, so Nick Robinson has gallantly confessed. Bravo. We shall see if this ends all this fuss about Darling resigning - probably not, since admittedly the Chancellor does cut a slightly beleaguered figure at the moment. But the tug of war between an opposition which senses very senior blood in the water, and a prime minister who probably cannot afford to lose his Chancellor at a time when his own economic record is coming under fire, will be interesting, if a little exasperating, to observe.

Is this news?

From the BBC News website ticker: "Actors Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford and Nicole Kidman to hand out Oscars in Los Angeles".



I would suggest it's a slow news day, but that seems to count for news, so best just get used to it, I suppose.

China: the Olympics is not the finish line

I'm not sure that it will enhance my credentials as a self-proclaimed moderate to endorse President Bush's foreign policy pronouncements in my first proper post, but I'm a sucker for nostalgia and by God we'll miss him when he's gone¹. The issue on which he is scoring points is China - specifically this BBC interview, in which he suggests that the West should not mix politics with sport. Despite a principled stand by a clutch of eminent figures, I'm with Bush on this one.

Why? Well, I'm no apologist for China's distasteful, hypocritical and fancifully ornate regime of subcommunists. I'm not going to wish democracy on Beijing automatically - although the signs are that it would find a more comfortable home there than in Russia - but China's "patchy" application of human rights demonstrates that change is badly-needed. Harking back to the peg-on-nose era of Cold War tyrants, the only reason that China isn't one of our bastards is its sheer size - the conventional wisdom after all is that one day soon, we'll be China's bitch.

But my instincts are that hoohah and razzmatazz, campaigning and loudhailering, letter-writing and hectoring will not in this instance make for a clean break. Rome wasn't built in a day, nor Apartheid dismantled, segregation lifted or women granted suffrage. In Burma, for instance, the promising monk riots of last year failed to turn into the coup we'd expected². What could work - what generally does work - is patience and persistence. I don't want to be glib: people will die as a result of China's policies in the mean time and there's no point denying it. But if we shout China down, it's fractious and gigantic enough to exit the tent on its own - and, like Johnson and Hoover, we don't want things to be that way around. (Sudden action doesn't have universal appeal amongst people campaigning for Darfur either).

The Olympics this year should of course be part of the campaigning - a brilliant opportunity to provide a certain amount of focus on China and the terrible issues that centre around it. But the risk that we take, in this age of banner politics, instant zeitgeists and the blurring of the lines between the grassroots and the fickle "public", is that proper ethical issues are dealt with on a "fireworks basis" - a sudden flare of attractive publicity generates intense public interest, and the pressure is on to achieve a bang before the sadly rather monochrome attention of the media moves on and the impetus is lost. Events are great for raising awareness - but the real challenge is to use them not as a finishing tape, but as a launchpad³.

Part of the reasoning here is that doing so is less likely to rub up a powerful country the wrong way at a critical time. China is hoping for a good Olympics, cynical or not; if we really spoil the party by getting heavy in the run-up, we'll only worsen our chances of a proper, challenging dialogue. China doesn't have to listen, and if those campaigning for change overplay their hand, it simply won't. This is not a recipe for trust.

Am I just trying to have my cake and eat it, by suggesting that Bush's tactic will serve the Save Darfur Coalition's laudable aim in the long run? Quite probably. This whole issue is far more complex than I can hope to discuss here, but then anything which involves balancing human suffering against the sloth of governments has a certain amount of simplicity: the suffering should stop. But it won't happen like that, and we must do the best we can. It may be slow, but it's something. And, I believe, it's often best achieved not by radical boat-rocking or ignorant collusion, but by proper, reasoned moderation. Nothing is perfect, but from where I'm standing moderation and compromise is the least worst option.


1 If you're so inclined, you can download your own countdown here. Read on.
2 It was drowned out by the Democrats (no fault of their own) but things may be looking up. Back to top.
3 This being probably the only, and certainly the greatest, example. Onward.

Is this a blog I see before me?

What's this? A blog? Radical. What has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun, as they say. So why bother?

Well, here's the thing. The blogosphere may be noisy, but it's the left and right which are the most crowded. Hoist a virtual butterfly-net into the opinion-rich ether, and what you catch tends to have only one wing. There are plenty of vocal bloggers bringing you their own brand of common sense, free thinking or progressive politics. But the middle is a bit sparse, in our view. The moderates are missing!

Your present authors, then, are a loose-knit cabal of deep-thought-types who, on the whole, believe that moderation is not just an insipid compromise between the people with the big ideas. Instead, we think it's the best way for us to conduct ourselves as a national (and international) community - and that goes for politics, the media, and pretty much everything else.

Ah, politics and the media - topics about which everybody is talking, but few, it sometimes seems, are really listening. Ironic, then, that we're adding our online voices to the clamour. True, but we have to admit that we hope for a few readers (at least!) who, like us, have been listening out for the voice of reason, moderation, and good sense - not the right claiming to be the voice of the long-suffering majority, or the left laying claim to the opinions of the people, or even the media thinking on our behalf, but genuine open-mindedness on any and every issue. We think people might be looking for that, and we hope that this is where they'll find it - and contribute to it.

So if you like a good, reasoned debate without going over the top, welcome. If you value tolerance and respect for their own sake, rather than because they are banner issues for a wider agenda, then this could be the place for you. If you believe you know better, then this is probably also the place for you, because we hope you will join us in debate and, who knows, you might just persuade us. Allons, as they say, y.