But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

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

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.

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

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?

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are converted into luxury loft living, a Labour government - yes, a Labour government - is deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith schools.