Melanie McDonagh

It was pretty well apparent at the outset that the Equality Act 2010 – the so-called Socialism in a Single Clause law – spelt trouble and now it is the Catholic Church that may run foul of Harriet Harman’s pet project. The Catholic Education Service in England and Wales has written to Catholic secondary schools to get them to encourage pupils and staff to sign the online petition against the Government’s gay marriage proposals.

A few years ago, The Spectator, in an inspired notion for the Easter issue, asked a number of prominent individuals whether they believed in the Resurrection. And among the surprises was George Galloway, who replied emphatically in the affirmative: ‘Yes, I believe in the Resurrection. I believe God restored the life of Jesus of Nazareth and took him to his bosom. The example of suffering and sacrifice followed by vindication is central to my religious belief.

The Chancellor didn't even bother to hide the thick end of the wedge as he inserted the thin end into the Sunday trading laws. He declared yesterday that restrictions on Sunday trading would be lifted for the duration of the Olympics and Paralympics on the basis that ‘It would be a great shame if the country had a “closed for business” sign on it.’ And he went on to remark, ‘maybe we will learn some lessons from it’. What might those be, do you suppose? That people, left to themselves, will shop all day, every day and should therefore be able to?

No sooner does Baroness Warsi denounce militant secularists who try to marginalise Christianity than, bang on cue, up surfaces Richard Dawkins with a survey commissioned by his Foundation for Reason and Science intended to demonstrate that Christianity is a minority pursuit. His Ipsos MORI poll, published today, is intended to unpick that bit of the 2001 census which found that more than 70 per cent of respondents identify themselves as Christian.

Most Spectator readers have probably heard by now of Alain de Botton's latest, Religion for Atheists, in which he argues that the benefits of religion are too great to be confined to believers — not least because he wrote the Diary column for this week's magazine. And for those who haven't yet read about the book, let alone read it, they need look no further than Terry Eagleton's brilliant demolition of the argument in The Guardian. Mr de Botton is, he makes clear, in a very long and not entirely creditable line of those who find religion intolerable for themselves but useful for others, notably the servant classes: Matthew Arnold and Auguste Comte in particular. Indeed Mr de Botton himself acknowledges that his big idea is not new.

So Lord Falconer’s commission, funded by Sir Terry Pratchett, has concluded that there is a ‘strong case’ for assisted suicide, has it? Well, there’s a thing. Given their previous form and the composition of the committee, it would have been remarkable if they’d decided that, on balance, the law works perfectly well — which is what one of their witnesses, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keith Starmer, said. On the whole, partly because some anti-euthanasia bodies refused to participate and partly because people with a blatant opposition to assisted dying weren’t invited to sit on it, the composition and conclusions of the body reflected the opinions of those who set it up.

Michael Gove has said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with the revelations in today’s Telegraph that a chief examiner of the Welsh examination board, WJEC, steered teachers attending his board’s fee-paying advice session so flagrantly in the direction of what was likely to feature in the next examination, it amounted, as the man said, to ‘cheating’. The irony of the thing is that those teachers who did not pay £230 a session for his assistance are likely to do much better by their pupils: the obliging examiner was telling the teachers about the cycle of examination questions — in other words, which bit of the syllabus was not going to feature in the questions.

It's tempting to respond to the BMA's extraordinary proposal to ban smoking in cars with a Thin End of the Wedge argument. Ban smoking even on the part of an unaccompanied adult, sitting in a car by the side of the road? How long before they're banning it in the home, eh? But hold it right there. The proposal isn't just scary for where it might lead. It's scary all by itself. The notion that a grown up can be barred from self-harm by smoking a fag by himself, in his own car, his own space, on the basis that it might kill him sooner rather than later, should be unthinkable in a free society.