Nick Cohen

I don't usually engage with the "decent left"/"pro-war left"/whatever gabble, but this is ridiculous. Sadly, the Evening Standard's web presence is still too impossibly dire to link to, so this has had to wait.

Kelly said she wouldn't change the way social housing was allocated in response to the success of the BNP in using anger about immigrants jumping the queue. It's not a great idea to surrender ground to neo-Nazis, but she is going to come under pressure to change her mind from good people on the Left who have realised that giving priority to immigrants fosters racism, while giving priority to single mothers provides a perverse incentive to single motherhood and the poverty it brings.

Nick Cohen, 10/05/06.

I've got a little list, of single mothers who get pregnant just to jump the housing list..

Peter Lilley, Conservative Party conference, 1995 (I think).

Can you spot the difference? Whatever becomes of you, it's your fault. Poverty is a question of morals. The mob must be punished to make them better people. It's all the fault of the women. You'll thank me.

What I would love to know is why thinking that it was right to invade Iraq requires becoming a rather unusually stupid junior minister from the Thatcher government in about 1985 on all other issues, at the same time as arguing that you really, really are the deep heart of the revolution.