Ross Clark

So, the United Nations weapons inspectors are ready to go in, and this time they are not going to be put off their scent by feeble excuses. They will not be satisfied until every single weapon has been destroyed. Every slipper, every cane, every outstretched bare hand must go: the UN committee on the rights of the child has ruled Mr Blair's government to be an international pariah because it has failed to ban the smacking of children. 'We are talking about alternative forms of disciplining children because we are not saying children should not be disciplined,' the committee chairman, Jacob Doek, told reporters last week. 'But is it necessary to hit them over the head or kick them in the butt?

One might have thought that the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed - recently awarded £200,000 each in libel damages against the authors of a local government report which made fantastic claims of child abuse - would sound a warning to the government to avoid joining the general hysteria about paedophilia. But not a bit of it. The Home Office's taskforce on child protection has proposed to make it a criminal offence to 'groom' children via the Internet with intent to commit a sexual offence. Nobody doubts that the Internet has been used by paedophiles to make contact with children, and it is of course vital for parents to supervise their children's use of a computer.

'Fair trade' coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of success, to establish a 'coffee purity act'. Under these provisions, all raw or 'green' coffee imported to America would have to show a moisture content of between 8 and 13 per cent and would have to contain no extraneous matter such as leaves and twigs. Few would fancy a twig or two floating around in their cappuccino, but that is not the point.