God, Happiness and Twitter. And what nearly happened in Nottingham

I shall be travelling for most of this week and so will not be posting as frequently as I have in the past fortnight. I'd just like to muse a little about my appearance on BBC Question Time last week (I think it should still be available on the BBC i-player for a while), and on some reactions to it.  On Saturday, under a heavy disguise, I at last penetrated the strange world that is 'Twitter', a place where Stephen Fry is accounted a genius and where I appear to be unpopular. I'll say more about that in a moment.

As it happens, it was not a specially controversial edition of the programme. And the London audience was a good deal less one-sided than the one I met in Norwich a few months ago.  During the unbroadcast warm-up question (on the English diet versus the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones) we all had a reasonable amount of fun with deep-fried Mars Bars. The only topic on which I was first up – and so obliged to answer the exact question, as asked – was about the St Paul's encampment. But it was a legal query about whether new laws are needed to shift the tents. Plainly, they aren't. If the Cathedral, or the City Corporation, wanted to use the law to move the campers, then they could do. But they don't. So I had to use valuable time explaining this obvious fact, rather than giving my opinions on the camp.

It was only when Benjamin Zephaniah started telling us what Jesus would have thought  (how does he know?) that I had the chance to come back and give some opinions. As it happened, I'd spent much of Wednesday at St Paul's (I hope my account of this will find its way here at some point) , and so I had some fairly definite views – namely that the camp is silly and self-righteous (though most of the campers are perfectly nice) and they should all go home. This doesn't strike me as particularly controversial. I also mentioned the fact that Jesus Christ rather plainly and repeatedly made it clear that he was not interested in worldly power, a scriptural truth which led many 'Twitter' posters (see below) to chide me for not knowing my Bible. I should have thought 'My Kingdom is not of this World' and 'Render unto Caesar…', not to mention His conversation with Pilate, and His instruction to Peter to sheath his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane all make this perfectly plain. But perhaps there is a missing Fifth Gospel according to St Polly Toynbee, where things are otherwise.

As for my views on public sector pensions, they are positively mainstream. How can the public sector expect other taxpayers, many of them with reduced pensions or no pensions at all, to pay to protect government employees from the problems that everyone in private industry has long been suffering? Likewise on the Euro crisis, I can with some justification point out that I was called rude names by 'mainstream' people for opposing the whole silly scheme at the start. But I cannot in all conscience claim that I have an easy solution to the present mess, and I feel very sorry for the ordinary Greeks who are being collectively punished for the failures and mistakes of their elite.

When fathers' access to their children after divorce came up, I thought the point was that there is too much divorce, and said it was only reasonable that divorce law should be reformed to distinguish between couples who have children, and couples who don't. Once again, this seems to me to be so blazingly obvious that it isn't in the least bit adventurous. Personally, I'm against divorce at all, but I recognise that this isn't a position I can, or should,  force on anyone else. I just hope that one day it becomes the general view again. The people who most need defending are the children, who I think are always the innocent victims of marriage break-up – and also of the general decline of stable two-parent families.

All right, I own up to a piece of slight mischief when the obscure subject of Prince Charles's legal rights as Duke of Cornwall came up. I feel an increasingly need to be frank about my dislike for democracy, a thing far too many people confuse with liberty. At the moment, most people , brought up and brainwashed into believing that democracy has been fought for over the centuries, when in fact it was pretty willingly handed over by cynical politicians who saw its advantages to them. That is, they realised that it gave them the power to bribe people with their own money.

The real foundation of our civilisation lie elsewhere – the Rule of Law, the 1689 Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act, and of course Jury Trial, the very core of Anglosphere liberty. Democracy is largely ignorant of these things and often hostile to them. It has certainly been used to undermine Jury Trial and the presumption of innocence, under the pretext of 'crackdowns' on crime or terror.

Two simple points that people need to digest – Hitler's National Socialists came to power through democracy and couldn't have done so without it. And Hong Kong's form of government, hardly democratic at all, is even so far preferable to that in the People's Republic of China, possessing freedom of thought, speech and the press . Why? Liberty and the Rule of Law, inherited from Britain. These facts show that democracy is not invariably good in itself, nor is it essential to the existence of a civilised and free polity. In which case it is surely  possible for civilised people to have doubts about it.

Pure democracy would be mob rule, so I teasingly said that I was rather glad that we weren't a democracy, but that democracy was restrained by law, tradition and constitutional monarchy. Well, and so I am, and I wish more people realised how lucky we were that our 'democratic' politicians, incompetent, inexperienced, power-mad, are restrained by such things. This led to an amusing clash with Ed Balls , during which I won applause for saying I thought I could have done a better job of governing the country than he had. Well, couldn't I?

And at the end we were asked what we thought were the things that led most surely to happiness. I should point out here that we were in Westminster Hall, equalled only by Hagia Sophia (The Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople (Istanbul if you insist) in its age, majesty and size, full of the past, never wholly light, never wholly warm, immensely disturbing to the modern mind. Outside the small lit area of the stage and the seats, in the chilly darkness, linger the imprints and echoes of almost a thousand years of English history.  Could Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I, have tussled here over the nature of kingship, without leaving any trace behind in the wood and the stones? And what about all the thousands and thousands of others, not so well remembered?

Perhaps that is why I instantly knew what I would have to answer to that question – faith in God.  It was the answer all my forbears would have given, and understood. In fact, all those thousands of ghosts would have been baffled if nobody had mentioned the Almighty.

I also knew that it would earn me some derision. And it was exactly because of that that I decided to say it anyway. Some of you will know what I mean. Others (for whom I feel a bit sorry) won't.

The following morning a colleague told me that I was 'trending',  whatever that meant, on 'Twitter'. Well, I had a pretty good idea what it would mean, as it happened.  And when on Saturday I slipped through a side entrance into the world of Twitter, I found a long list of semi-literate comments expressing the desire to hit me or kick me, commenting on my lack of beauty,  calling me unprintable names, telling me I was stupid. It was rather comforting, because the people involved were all so limited. I know you can't say much in a Twitter posting. But these were hopelessly inarticulate people, who thought it enough to say that they loathed me, and never felt the need to say why. In all cases, the fact that I disagreed with them was enough, and – with a tiny number of exceptions – they could feel sure that their fellow Fry fans would say 'amen', or whatever Atheists say instead of 'amen', to that. 

By the way, I had heard that a certain BBC radio person had posted a number of uncomplimentary remarks about me on Twitter. But I have been unable to trace these. Is it possible they have been deleted? If so, did any contributors here notice or record them, or do they know how to recover deleted tweets? If so, I should be interested to go into the matter, fascinated as I am by BBC impartiality.

Oh, and Nottingham. A few days ago I received an invitation to debate the death penalty at a student society in Nottingham( I shan't at present name the society, or the person involved,  as I suppose the whole thing may have been a prank). It was at very short notice and the writer was very pressing, saying that I was the ideal person etc, etc, so much so that I assumed the original speaker had pulled out at the last minute. Though I have a rather full diary at the moment, I reluctantly agreed. On the grounds that the case ought to be made properly if it was going to be made at all. But a few hours later the student society told me that they planned to 'pair' me with Nick Griffin, of the BNP, who would be speaking alongside me. I said that in that case I certainly wouldn't be there. And I gave the student society a large piece of my mind.

How could they have thought otherwise? Easy. To such people all 'right-wing' persons are equally evil, and I am indistinguishable from the BNP. Such people, like the 'Twitter' mob genuinely believe that I am some sort of National Socialist.   Thus does the BNP help to poison all debate. How I wish it would shrivel away.