Fraser Nelson

It feels like an Irish wake here at Labour party conference. People are happy to see each other, but sad at the circumstances of the gathering. I'm blogging this from the reception of Brighton Grand Hotel - the designated conference hotel is always the main venue for getting bladdered, and for nursing a morning hangover. It seems that every third person is a journalist. Ministers, who would once pass journalists aloofly, now stop to say hello. This is how oppositions behave. Talk turns quickly to the post defeat leadership election and the nightmares that await. I featured in a "meet some evil right wingers" freak show fringe meeting, chaired by Polly Toynbee, which was packed in a way it wouldn't have been even last year.

Jack Straw has announced that the BNP edition of Question Time will be aired on 22 October and that he will be Labour's choice to take on Nick Griffin. Great news for the BNP. Labour should have sent a street fighter, not a desk general. Jon Cruddas is far and away the best BNP baiter in the Labour party, touring Dagenham council houses and talking voters out of supporting Griffin's party. Straw has in the past been accused of bending brutish foreign policy to assuage Muslims in his Blackburn constituency, and the closest he gets to BNP fighting is writing pieces for his local newspaper telling Muslims not to wear the veil when visiting him in his constituency office.

I do miss not being behind the counter at CoffeeHouse as much now that I’ve moved back of shop. You don’t get much BNP debate in the mainstream media – which is, of course, part of the problem. So I thought I’d respond to the comments from my recent post via another post.   Jeremy Watson and Vulture ask why I’m so keen to trash the BNP and Griffin – and ask if I’m guilty of the same kneejerk liberal reaction that I accuse others of. A fair point: ‘racist’ can seem like a playground chant, and any rebuttal of the BNP needs more detail to be credible. The Westminster parties’ failure to grasp this, in my opinion, has led to the BNP’s rise.  Yet I oppose them for the racism reason.

James Purnell has just spoken at The Spectator’s Paths to Prosperity conference, with sideburns bushier than ever after the summer. He was doing an on-stage interview with Andrew Neil and was quite firm on the release of al-Megrahi. "He should have died in jail” said Purnell. “I would have left him in jail." I suspect the freedom to say such things is one of the reasons that Purnell quit government. He later took questions (quite often rude ones) from the floor. Sir Richard Sykes had been on earlier, talking about the dismal state of British education, and Purnell was asked why he couldn’t just agree that schools had gone downhill too. He drew the line at trashing Labour’s record on education. But I think we can see Purnell set off into his own orbit.

How worried should we be about national debt? I just had a rather enjoyable spat with Will Hutton on Simon Mayo's Five Live programme. The situation is atrocious, I said. And that set him off: why did I use such a word? I replied that we are spending more in debt interest than educating our children or defending the realm. That is a dismal state of affairs, and will soon become even worse. Forget about the economics, it is a moral failure to blithly keep spending now and knowingly saddle the next generation with billions upon billions of our debt to pay off. Hutton said all this was hysterical, that an 80 percent debt ratio has been managed before and will be managed again. But last time, I said, the debt was the price of winning a war.

xxx New template: Six templates: 3. Line chart, no nav, decile x-axis: ywulob 6. Date x-axis, with navigator: efubow 7. Area chart: azuseb 8. Column chart, no nav, disappearing values above each bar: ekusyq 9. Line chart with linked series: opigab 10. Bar chart: orekyg GRAPH 3. Line chart with decile x-axis. Code: ywulob Click here to edit: https://cloud.highcharts.com/charts/ywulob Could you implement an option so I can easily turn off the flag. When I've tried turning it off in the code other bits of the chart start to go wrong! Graph 6: Line chart with date x-axis and navigator: efubow Click here to edit: https://cloud.highcharts.

From the offset, Gaddafi seemed to have a strange faith in the Scottish authorities. Al-Megrahi would have a fair trial in Scotland, he said, because the judges would not face “pressures from intelligence services nor to a British Government order.” It was as if he thought Scotland was already an independent country, hostile to England. At the time (1999), some wondered if he was trying to stir up mischief in the year the Scottish Parliament was being set up. But I doubt he could have imagined just how devolution would work in his favour - that al-Megrahi would be a political football that these first-time politicians in Edinburgh could not resist kicking.

Given how potentially transformative the Tory schools policy could be, it’s surprising it hasn’t attracted more enemies. But in school policy, silence is deceptive. The enemies of reform tend to operate under the radar. Local authorities, whose grip over state education is threatened, will lobby their local MP. It’s crucial to understand here that Tory councils are just as bad. They fought Kenneth Baker’s plans for direct grant (i.e. quasi-independent) schools with as much energy as Labour councils did. And already, you can hear Tory MPs voicing questions about the Gove “Swedish schools” policy – and they join a harder Labour critique. I thought I’d run through a few here. 1.