Alex Massie

So, it seems that dreams of a referendum next year have been dashed. 2010, once the Year of the Referendum, will now be plebiscite-free. No referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and no referendum on the Act of Union either. This my be good news for voters but it's tough on hacks who'll need to find something else to write about. But, for a moment, let's consider some of the implications of this. I'll leave the Lisbon question to one side for now and reiterate my suspicion that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are helping, not hindering Alex Salmond, by agreeing to delay nay referendum until after the next Holrood elections. Granted, the SNP may not remain the largest party, nor form even a minority ministry in Edinburgh after the 2011 election.

So I was wrong. It was a mistake to suggest that the alleged Neather Plot - that is, the conspiracy to "swamp" Britain with Labour-voting imigrants - was the kind of cockamamie scheme that could only be the work of over-excited junior clever chaps at the Home Office. Not so! It turns out that it's even simpler than that: the scheme didn't exist at all. Remember, Mr Neather originally claimed that a report from Downing Street's Performance and Innovation Unit saw immigration as a massive political opportunity for the government: But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

Conspiracies are all the rage these days. And since this has turned into Immigration Week here one might as well address the Neather Brouhaha. This, British readers will need no reminding, refers to the uncovering of the nefarious New Labour plan to destroy Britain and spike the Tories' guns forever by destroying this green and pleasant land and turning it into a multi-cultural hellhole. We are led to understand that this was indeed a deliberate plot, apparently borrowed from the Democrats' presumed determination to make the United States a Spanish-speaking Banana Republic. The evidence [sic] for this rests upon two paragraphs from an article written by a former government speechwriter.

Brother Liddle is right to despair at the latest local government absurdity: banning parents from children's playgrounds unless they've undergone a criminal background check to prove that they're not paedophiles. There would appear to be no limit to local government lunacy. O tempora, O mores indeed. This sort of thing, however, also poses a problem for David Cameron. The Tories' "localism agenda" is by some way their most interesting and, at least potentially, important idea. But there's one obvious drawback: it means giving more power to local councils. And, as we are reminded on a daily basis, local councils are more than amply-stocked with fools. Decentralisation is an admirable and, I would argue, necessary idea.

So, the expenses scandal may finally be coming towards a close. We can only hope so. The leaks emanating from the Kelly report suggest that MPs will only be able to claim for rent, not mortgages, on their second homes. This seems reasonable. Less sensible, however, is the proposal that MPs be banned from employing members of their family. Apart from the obvious potential for legal challenges to this proposal, it's manifestly unfair and ridiculous in equal measure. In the first place, it's not clear that MPs should be singled out in this fashion. Secondly, it creates the absurd situation in which it would, presumably, be OK for an MP to employ his mistress but decidedly not OK for him to employ his wife.

I've often written that the modern Republican party's obsession with Ronald Reagan obscures as much as it illuminates. The deification of the Gipper isn't a great substitute for addressing the particular problems the party - and the United States - faces today. Asking "What would Reagan do?" can't provide the answers to every issue. Nevertheless, there's at least one aspect of Reagan's career that all political parties might bear in mind: his generosity of spirit and, correspondingly, the empathy he felt, genuinely I believe, for people whose circumstances were very different from his own.

Everyone, naturally, is all flustered and boggled by Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tomorrow. This has occasioned near record-breaking amount hand-wringing even though the BNP are, whisper it, less popular than the Greens. When you're beaten by the loopy eco-warriors you know you have a popularity problem. Chris Dillow reminds us just how few BNPers there really are: Nothing, in other words, can help the BNP as much as our apparent determination to take these clowns and clods seriously. In doing so we elevate their status and grant them massively more influence than they either have or merit. Judging from all the attention they've received this week you'd think they were going to be running the country pretty soon. But they're not.