My peccadillos and passions

I thought it might be helpful to give you an idea of what’s pulling my chain at the moment, so here goes:

1. Cash for Honours — Labour’s hubris knows no bounds as I explained in my Statesman column last week. Nick Cohen was spot on in this weekend’s Observer: if Scotland Yard holds its nerve the detectives have the capacity to find the smoking gun of corruption (in all three major parties) if it is there.

2. Whitehall’s mistaken pact with radical Islam — an ongoing sore on the body politic. I made my position clear in a pamphlet for David Cameron’s favourite think tank, Policy Exchange earlier this year. Some within the government (Ruth Kelly at least) seem to have recognised belatedly that the traditional self-appointed leaders of the Muslim community have a lot of work to do before they can prove their genuine commitment to integration and community cohesion. The Tory MP Paul Goodman also raised the issue (and gave a very generous plug to the pamphlet) during the Queen’s speech debate.

3. Bangladesh — January’s elections will be a struggle between the forces of secularism and Islamism. We ignore the ripples of this far-distant country’s politics at our peril. For the 300,000- strong British Bangladeshi community the results of the ballot, which pits the secularist, Bengali-identified Awami League against the governing Bangladeshi National Party and its Islamist allies, matter a great deal. As the country descends into violence, this should matter here too, but few media outlets are covering this – except the New Statesman of course.

4. The Future of the Left — I’ve been reading a preview copy of Nick Cohen’s new book, What’s Left?. Nick and I disagree on many things, most obviously and painfully on the wisdom of intervention in Iraq. But What’s Left? should be read by everyone who considers themselves on the Left of British politics not least because it challenges so fundamentally the idea that being a leftie makes you a good person!

5. Iraq — An ill-conceived project in a noble cause. I was an agnostic, but now I believe intervention was catastrophic and has created the conditions for the very Islamist resurgence in the Middle East that it was designed to curb. I still believe there is much to be written about the spin and propaganda war that drove us to the real thing in 2002-3. Watch this space for more on the Williams draft of the WMD dossier.