How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Working lives are for the state to influence. Unemployment makes people unhappy. So does instability.

The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions, and most others, are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies.

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition.