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Duncan O’Leary over at Demos Greenhouse looks on the bright side for the Tory party. The news stories may have been division, division and more division (oh, and dumping Europe) over the last six months, but at least, he says, the Tories have had a proper debate about the future.

But has it done them any good? The public side had been bad: Party members bickering with each other in public, visions of ideological purity, tight elections, rule changes – it’s like Labour in the 1980s, except it’s also like the Tories in the 1950s (another period where Labour had stolen all their clothes).

And as for the policy debate, there have been a few volleys fired into the air (War in Iraq – bad, apparently. School vouchers – good. No, wait! bad), but frankly, who cares? The Tories won’t be writing their manifesto for another three years, that’s plenty of time to have gone through at least 720° by then. Look at the 1992 Labour manifesto, then look at the 1997 Labour manifesto. Really, the Tories policies will be settled by the winner in the light of the party and the nation, not in the light of any internal debate at the moment.

There is one winner here – and he’s in China.

Socialist and presidential outsider Jack Lang has published a book (Changer), with his proposals for (among other things) political and constitutional reform in France, including 4 year terms for public office, renewable once, and the end of the cumul – the practice of multiple office-holding. Le Figaro discusses.

And so, like a fairly distant relative who’s been ill for a long time, the European constitution project is dead. Has to go down as one of Europe’s many wasted opportunities, and it won’t be the last.

Link via Fistful of Euros.

The Enlightenment has ended in America. It was nice while it lasted.

Why? Take a look at the depressing and astonishing results from a survey on creationism, reported in the New York Times today.

In brief, 64% of Americans are open to the idea of teaching creationist pseudoscience alongside established science, while 38% don’t want evolution taught at all. 42% believed in strict creationism – that current living things have existed in their current forms since the beginning of time.

One of the researchers involved in survey is quoted in the NYT, saying that the results on the education questions are “a reflection of American pragmatism”. That just won’t do. It’s a reflection of American stupidity, or perhaps irrationality, but it’s about as far from pragmatism as it’s possible to get.

There is, of course, no science in support of creationism, and lots of science in support of evolution. Evolution is only semantically a theory – in practice it is self-evidently, obviously true.

The last comment on this – another disheartening statistic for fans of democracy – is that 41% of respondents wanted the parents to decide on what science was taught to their children. At last, a chance for the Flat Earth Society, not to mention the eugenicists. Perhaps the next step is going to be parental choice in the field of history.

Norman Birnbaum remembers Solidarity on the 25th anniversary of its founding.

Ken Clarke has announced that he’s going to stand for the Tory leadership.

I lost a lot of respect for him a few days back when he pandered to the sceps by saying that Britain won’t join the euro for at least ten years. It seems to be playing well with the Tories, though. Norman Lamont was just on Newsnight gloating about the ‘failure’ of the Euro (a popular meme – apparently the euro was designed to solve every economic problem in all of Europe, but sadly, it’s only succeeded in creating a new international reserve currency and bringing ten European countries into a stable currency union).

But for all my frustrations with the knee-jerk scepticism of the British political signoria, I can’t see it as a good sign for the Tory party that the only candidate with well-known views feels he has to jettison them to have a chance of success. Again, the question arises – just what are the Tories for, Mummy?