Fraser Nelson

Seeing Nick Griffin playing the ostracised martyr on television is sickening, and underlines the futility of banning him. Some 8,000 are invited to the Queen’s garden party, there was zero chance that Her Majesty would allowed within 50 metres of him. So his daft blog, asking readers to suggest questions he’d put to the Queen, was an irrelevance. His whole political schtick is that ‘I represent a million ordinary people, and the establishment won’t listen to them’. The more you ban him from things, the louder he shouts this message. What happened today is grist to his mill.   Sky News interviewed guests outside, who thought it unfair that he was banned, given that all MEPs are automatically invited and have been for years.

What is the purpose of the welfare state? To protect British people from unemployment, or to protect them from jobs like fruit-picking and working in Pret A Manger? I listened to Farming Today* earlier, in which they interviewed the Eastern Europeans that we import en masse to do jobs that Brits used to do. Having done the job myself in my younger days (I come from a part of the world where the October break is called the 'tattie holidays' so kids can dig potatoes), I can attest that it's bloody hard work for a paltry reward. But it pays no less than the minimum wage. Without immigration, we'd be forced to find a proper solution to this problem: that welfare has priced a lot of British people out of this particular market.

Vince Cable faced next to no questioning on his hugely controversial plans for a graduate tax on Today this morning. Instead he was allowed to make an annoucement, was thanked as "Doctor Cable" by a reverential Jim Naughtie, and left to trundle back up Mount Sinai where the BBC seems to think he lives. There are plenty hard questions to ask. The main one is what I regard as a national scandal: young people being missold useless degrees that benefit neither students nor society. They get fed this line, about how graduates earn more, and are led to believe that the letters MA after your name mean an extra £7k or more, for life.

Perhaps the most sinister side of the environmentalist movement is the idea of an “optimal population,” where human life is seen as a menace. The Optimal Population Trust has today said that there are 45 million too many people living in Britain – which, for a country of 60 million, is quite some statement. The peculiar thing is that this “problem” may well have a solution in the form of the human race failing to reproduce. The hands of the world population clock are slowing. The natural population replacement level, 2.1 kids per woman, is achieved by no European country (pdf here). England stands at a respectable 1.75, Scotland at 1.6 and Italy at a dismal 1.2.

Last night, I met a man who changed my life. Not that he knew it. Shakil Khan from Spotify is part of the team that has delivered what is – to me – the most lifestyle-changing innovation since Sky Plus. For the uninitiated, it has a seemingly limitless database of music all for £10 a month, and it basically means I listen to music again. I had, stupidly, spent days digitally archiving my CD collection but it was so much hassle to play it that I’d given up. Wire up Spotify – from an iPhone or laptop – and you can instantly play a whole load of stuff that you thought you could never afford, or find.

I’m in Stockholm today to celebrate the summer solstice. It’s a magical part of the year, best illustrated by the newspaper column (below) giving times for sunrise and sunset in various parts of Sweden. In Kiruna there’s just a dash – the sun doesn’t rise or set in this part of the year. (The same is true in winter, the poor things). Normally, the Swedes disguise their pagan festivals with a Christian veneer (like Santa Lucia) but today’s all-out dance-round-the-fertility-pole without apology. It’s like a cross between the Waltons, Woodstock and the Wicker Man.

Vince Cable is announcing to Metro that "We do not want to make such deep cuts to transport, energy, science research and universities." Really? According to whom? The science budget, which has shot from £1.3bn to an indefensible £3.7bn, is a prime example of a cost that should not be borne by the taxpayer. Scientists are best left to get on with this themselves, and companies are more than capable of funding research. On energy, again, there are many expensive vanity projects just begging for the axe. Given that Cable is in charge of the universities brief - the most important part of his otherwise non-job - you can expect him to want to protect it from cuts. But to lobby openly like this is not something that Theresa May or Liam Fox would do.