I’ve been sitting back and enjoying the show that is the ongoing farce of the Chinese Olympics. I have two main reasons for not taking a stand. Firstly, I’m quite ambivalent about the Olympics in general and so singling out China feels a little hypocritical. Secondly, I’m acutely aware that in a sense both sides are right and both sides need each other in order to progress.

Simply put, if the Olympics were not being held in China this summer, the profile of Tibet would not be as high as it is now (higher than it has been at any point in the past 12 years in my view). So is this a case of the pro-Olympics people being right - that the Olympics is raising these issues? Well yes, up to a point. But if it wasn’t for the protesters opposing the Olympics these issues would not be getting an airing.

One thing in particular though that does amuse me is this constant hailing of “Olympian values”. What are these exactly? I get the whole world coming together thing, but is there really anything noble in a bunch of athletes doggedly competing with one another to see who is best? These pressures lead to athletes taking performance enhancing drugs; the Russians and the Chinese have traditionally taken this to extremes, hothousing athletes in order to wave their medal successes around as a status symbol proving their political ideologies are superior. Hitler tried the same trick, only to be made to look like a fool. What is so great about all this global willy waving?

And if there is something noble about the Olympics, how come the IOC don’t insist that countries who host the games must abide by, for example, minimal human rights criteria? If you want to join the EU, the price you have to pay is to sort out your human rights record. As a result, Turkey is actively doing so. What is stopping the IOC from doing the same? One can only infer that egalitarianism isn’t an Olympian value.

Arguably, the truth is quite the opposite. One thing the IOC do insist on is that host nations pass laws to stop companies from being able to use the word “Olympics” in order to promote themselves unless they are official sponsors of the events. Freedom of speech comes second fiddle to worshiping at the altar of capitalism. This is a price which China had far less of a problem with paying than the UK.

Olympian values then seem to be rooted entirely in body fascism, ruthless competition, vainglorious pride and the worst excesses of monopolistic commercial practice. These are the values that the Olympics variously inspires and insists upon. If supporters of the Games wish us to treat them as anything other than a political football, then perhaps they should get their own house in order first?

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention here was the comment by the police chief in charge of handling the Olympics protests yesterday who made the extraordinary claim that under the law, if you supported the Olympic torch on Sunday you were not regarded as a protester and vice versa. Apart from the fact that under the strict letter of the law this is balls, think about it for a second. If you are a supporter of freedom and democracy, the government considers you a potential enemy of the state. If you are an apologist for a repressive dictatorship, the government considers you to be friendly. Good night.

It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Apparently the 21st century political equivalent of having a punch up beside the bike shed after school is to have a live debate on 18 Doughty Street.

Having had one with Mr Blaney not that long ago - and lived to tell the tale - the one thing I will say about him is that he has a curious attitude towards the individual and the state. The crimes of an individual - in Nelson Mandela’s case the violent reprisals of the ANC - are always unforgivable. The crimes of the state - in this case the Tory government’s refusal to criticise South Africa’s system of apartheid - is always justifiable. Philip Lawrence’s murderer should be exterminated. The system of human rights that protects me from being abused by the state should be abolished.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but support for a system whereby the rights of the individual are always considered to be subservient to the interests of the state is support for the sort of totalitarianism that Uncle Joe would be comfortable with. Apparently however, we are to regard this as true “Thatcherism”. Thanks for clarifying, Donal.

The only exception to the rule that murder is murder is murder, as Donal himself pointed out during our debate on the Doughty News Hour, is Tony Martin (or St Tony as I understand he is known amongst certain members of the swivel-eyed fringe). Martin, let us not forget, shot a man in the back of the head as he was running away from him. At the very least, one would have thought, Mandela’s tacit support for necklacing by the ANC and Tony Martin’s laughably named ’self-defence’ could be described as both morally abhorrent. Sadly however, simple consistency is too much to ask.

Full programme over on 18DS.

Frances Lawrence has been doing the rounds on TV and radio today, expressing her outrage at the fact that her husbands murderer will not now be deported when he finishes his sentence. For liberals, issues such as these place us in a tricky position. No-one wishes to cause Frances Lawrence or her family any further grief, but what if pretty much everything she says is utterly wrong?

First of all, the Human Rights Act is a sideshow here. The real issue is that we are members of the EU and as an EU citizen Learco Chindamo has freedom of movement within the community. There has to be a compelling reason to not only send him back to Italy - a place he left when he was six - and not allow him to come back. Now, if he was a threat to the Lawrence family, or indeed anyone, then that might be a reason for keeping him in prison. But how is that a reason for keeping him in Italy?

Bizarrely, if the guy was a UK citizen, we wouldn’t even be having this debate. This isn’t, ultimately, about whether ‘criminals’ should have more rights than ‘victims’. This is a debate about whether ‘British criminals’ should have more rights than Italian ones. More than that, this is a debate about whether the perpetrators of media-friendly crimes should be treated more severely than the perpetrators of the majority of crimes that the media couldn’t give two hoots about. Chindamo would not be embroiled in this row if he’s murdered another black kid, as that is just black-on-black crime and therefore to be disregarded. If his victim had been Stephen rather than Phillip (I’ve seen at least one person get these 90s Lawrences confused), we’d have never heard of either the murderer or the victim.

He’s currently serving life imprisonment and having served 12 years is now entitled to parole. But that doesn’t mean he will automatically be released now. But more to the point, he’s spent his entire youth in confinement. This is not, as Frances Lawrence puts it, someone who is free “to pick and choose how he wants to live his life.” Iain Dale seems to think he’s had a light sentence. Call me a bleeding heart, but I most certainly don’t. His life has been thrown away - he isn’t going to just walk away. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it; just don’t tell me that 12 years of imprisonment at an impressionable age is something you can just shrug off. Is it so outrageous to suggest that someone like Chindamo - who clearly had a young chaotic life - having served his sentence, should be allowed to try to rehabilitate in the country he has spent 21 of his 27 years in? Are there really no grounds for even an inch of compassion for this pathetic creature? Are we really so keen to create another Hindley-esque monster to tell campfire stories about?

What should the alternative be? There are plenty of Tories - including if I recall their own Shadow Home Secretary - who believe that what should have happened is that Learco Chindamo should have been marched off to a gas chamber on his 16th birthday (because obviously you don’t murder children in cold blood - that would be inhumane), as they do in many US states. Short of that though, at some point the guy was going to be released. If he’d been given a minimum sentence of 30 years, I can guarantee that Iain would have been writing in 2025 “So a headmaster’s life is only worth thirty years. That is perhaps just as big a scandal as the abuse of the Human Rights Act.”

Meanwhile, Home Office Minister Tony McNulty claims that by committing a heinous crime, Chindamo has “forfeited his human rights.” This is now familiar New Labour rhetoric. To counter the Tories’ call for no-one to have any rights at all, Labour prefer to say that only the innocent should have rights. But how far should this go? If Chindamo has forfeited his rights, then presumably torturing him in prison would have been fair game? Indeed, how far does ‘heinous’ go? Speeding and killing a child is pretty heinous. Pinching from pension funds is pretty heinous. Where do you draw the line? Get a judge to decide? They’re supposed to be the problem in the first place!

Writing as an atheist, and a rationalist, whatever happened to those very Christian concepts of redemption and forgiveness? Whatever happened to hating the sin but loving the sinner? I find it hard to see how a society can function without these principles and stay sane (even Sharia law has a certain crude concept of rehabilitation). Yet a lot of the same people who are first in line to denounce how ‘family (Christian) values’ have been lost seem to have no truck with the idea that such values ought to apply to them as well.

How did society fail Frances Lawrence? Fundamentally, by not letting her get over it. The media have lapped her up as a cause celebre, endlessly reinforcing her quiet sense of outrage by having to rehearse it to camera ad nauseum. The Home Office clearly mislead her by confidently assuring her Chindamo would be deported when they surely had scant grounds for believing it. And the criminal justice system has failed her by not letting her confront directly the man who destroyed her family. I suspect that half an hour in a room together would do both Frances Lawrence and Learco Chindamo a lot of good. It would enable Mrs Lawrence show Chindamo the effects of his crime and force Chindamo to confront his evil act. She’s correct to say that Chindamo’s lawyers reassurances that they are unlikely to meet in the street is missing the point, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that restorative justice is of huge benefit to the victim. The right however would prefer it if victims held onto their sense of injustice. It saddens me that she will now be used as their preferred political football of choice for the next 48 hours. Scrapping the Human Rights Act won’t bring her husband back and it won’t get her justice.

Ahh, you’ve got to laugh:

Forty-two members of the General Synod of the Church of England have issued the challenge to their national leaders as the Government considers a fully elected second chamber, and whether the 26 bishops of the state church should keep their exclusive places on the coveted red benches.

In a letter signed by lay members of the Church’s ruling body, the bishops were told that the arguments for retaining the unique privileges enjoyed by the Church of England in the upper house would be severely negated unless the bishops, enblock, turned up to vote against the introduction of the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation Regulations) 2007 when debated by the Lords on Wednesday.

So, in short, if they don’t all vote to entrench homophobia (which, given their attendance records, is very unlikely), then there’s no point to them. Some of us might argue that if they do vote in such a way, the case for kicking the Bishops out of the Lords speaks for itself.