This week we were asking readers what they thought the parties should do in a hung parliament: if no party has an overall majority, should there be a cross-party national government. When the pages went to press last night, a big majority – 88% – opposed a grand coalition, preferring, one assumes, minority government or a narrower coalition.

Overnight, about 200 Ramsay MacDonalds came to our site and overturned the result with their late surge in support of cross-party rule. Either that, or a single extremely committed Robert Mugabe overturned the result with some elementary computer trickery.

Whatever happened, around 200 extra votes came in in the space of a few hours, changing the result to 59% in favour and 41% against. Which is why the result on the site and the result in the magazine are so different.

Just as well our online poll is just a bit of fun and doesn’t actually decide anything important…

Physics for Future Presidents exposes some of the myths. All that elaborate, yet partial and incoherent, security at airports is to prevent an occurrence of an event that would never happen again. When 9/11 occured there was no real necessity for the terrorists to call up weapons, at the time the trained response for cabin crew was to believe hijackers and do what they demanded, which was normally an uneventful diversion to Havana.

Post Twin Towers, no group of passengers will allow themselves to be used as part of a gigantic petrol bomb; rather they’ll charge the hijackers and tear them apart or die in the attempt. The learning curve was steep. But it only took an hour. After the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon the passengers on the fourth plane did exactly that.

Anyway, why guard airports but not train and bus stations?

We have been shown the destruction of Hiroshima and imagine it happening in our cities. Yet terrorists and rogue states don’t have access to that level of weaponry. North Korea has tested two nuclear weapons, and neither has properly detonated, although it is in the interest of a malign partnership between Pyongyang’s military and US neocons to collude in pretending the contrary. Were Pyongyang to suicidally sell such a device to a terrorist group its yield of one kiloton would have a blast radius of 150m and its power would be less than that released during the attack on the Twin Towers (1.8 kilotons).

How many would die would depend on the location. Hit Wembley on cup final day and it’s 100,000. Stick it on top of an unreliable missile with a dodgy guidance system and the probable number of deaths directly caused by the explosion would be double figures or less. Which is why US intelligence would be better off monitoring DHL than North Korea’s missile programme.

Richard Muller continues in the same vein to punture the myths around the anthrax attack in the US. It was not a sucessful attempt to kill five people but a failure to kill hundreds of thousands. Regarding the claim that we are running out of fossil fuels, we are running out of oil but we have coal for hundreds of years. Chernobyl killed 4,000 and Bhopal 20,000. While electric cars, recycling and solar power may be comfort blankets for the green middle-classes they do not solve the problems of greenhouse gases.

Physics for Future Presidents is iconoclastic in its treatment of global warning. It’s not arguing that we shouldn’t take the threat seriously, but makes the point that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is partial science transforming (albeit high levels of) probability into certainties. Yet whether global warming is man made or not is largely irrelevant. The solution to the adverse consequences is to lower the production of greenhouse gases to stop the atmosphere becoming a better blanket to keep heat in.

This book should be compulsory reading for Labour candidates. It might have helped Tony Blair with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Was he convinced by the dodgy science or was it just a prop for his faith?

As Muller writes, Mark Twain is often quoted as saying: “The trouble with most folks isn’t their ignorance. It’s knowin’ so many things that ain’t so.” Ironically, this quote isn’t even from Twain – as if to illustrate the aphorism itself. The quote is correctly attributed to Josh Billings, a 19th century humourist. And how he would have laughed at the state we’re in.

He also has to negotiate with the power whose legality and ethics he might be questioning. That allows for some creative tension – not least since the UN Charter empowers the Secretary General to raise issues before the Security Council.

Since the UN’s headquarters is in New York, there is an extra complication. Much of the world media takes its cue from the American media, whose editorial views of the organisation tend to be somewhat jaundiced. Even on the liberal wing of American politics, UN resolutions on the Middle East are depicted as prejudiced and preposterous. That the US can usually only muster a few dependent Pacific atolls to vote with it on Israel is seen as the rest of the world being out of step. On the right, they are more consistent. They question the very existence of the organisation – let alone American membership of it.

So when Ban Ki-moon took office, he had many strikes against him. He had a foreign accent: he was South Korea’s foreign minister, which prejudiced leftists against him almost as much as his support from George Bush and John Bolton. That did not help across the Democratic spectrum either. Conservatives regard any UN Secretary General with suspicion – even if their own administration had nominated him.

It did not help that South Korea is almost beyond the event horizon – in the depths of a geopolitical black hole, with China, Japan, the US and Russia surrounding it and an eccentric neighbour in Pyongyang necessarily taking up a lot of policy attention. This meant that, initially, Ban was prone to accept American and Israeli views of the Middle East.

He inadvertently damned himself in the early stages by joking that the Korean press corps used to call him “the slippery eel” for his skill in evading tough questions.

Other journalists did not notice his sense of humour. The stereotype stuck: Ban was an evasive, boring bureaucrat who did what he was told. The few, unflattering profiles of him were widely accepted as standard – even though one was from a neo-conservative who was unhappy that Ban had not lived up to Bolton’s expectations, while another was a leaked, tendentious report from a Norwegian diplomat who had not secured the UN job she wanted.

In fact, almost unnoticed, Ban has secured $10.5 million “reimbursement” for the damage the Israel Defence Forces did to UN facilities in Gaza. This is a first for the UN, whose premises have often been targeted, and it depended on maintaining relations with Israel even while standing up for UN principles.

Israeli ministers queue up to meet Ban, even though his statements are often far more forthright than his predecessors, “As far as Gaza is concerned, I was horrified by seeing what had happened to the UN and to many thousands of Palestinians”, he told me.

He has shown an attachment to principle that is inconsistent with the caricature. When he was running for office, I asked him about the International Criminal Court and the “responsibility to protect”. He could – and, by all the rules of diplomacy and elections, should – have prevaricated. He could have said he would implement UN decisions. He did not. He declared his unequivocal support for them even though Bolton had made it his sworn task to kill off the ICC.

I asked Ban about this last week and he remembered. “That was from my conviction. When I was foreign minister, I visited Rwanda and saw the Massacre Memorial. I was so saddened and horrified by what I saw. I was convinced the international community had to take steps to prevent anything like what had happened there. I wrote in the guest book that there must be no repetition of these crimes.”

He speaks to President Omar Bashir of Sudan to try to bring peace there, but when I asked about the ICC indictment, he replied: “The ICC case has given a very strong message to the international community, that there can never be – and will not be – any impunity. In that regard it created a very important message around the world.

“I believe in being straightforward with leaders, who are very difficult to deal with – regardless of whom – but I am still able to maintain relationships with them. Most of my senior advisors were quite surprised by how outspoken I was – because I was speaking from my own conviction.”

Indeed, last year, he told the US House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee that the US was being a “deadbeat” about its UN dues, earning a rebuke even from the White House spokesman. But it was a closed meeting, from which a disgruntled congressman had leaked the comments, and the dues are now paid – making Ban the first solvent Secretary General for decades.

The lack of public profile is a mixed blessing. At least Rupert Murdoch’s minions have not yet been on his case yet. But Ban Ki-moon deserves more attention and support.

The Tories’ new ad might look foolish if it was more open about how the Conservative Party itself is funded. More at the Tribune Blog.

More here.

It is a convenient distraction indeed from the rather more murky issues going on in their own back yard.

Hugh Muir has already written about this at some length, and I find it difficult to disagree with a single thing he says.There is no equivalence in the first place between individual political fund donations from ordinary people, and tax dodging chains of companies with the obvious purpose of avoiding laws on foreign influence on British elections. Muir is also right about a whole host of other things, which I shall not go further into here.

The Tories seem to be saying that the hundred years of legal political representation afforded by their choice to begin a political party is somehow comparable to their recent buy out on the part of someone who refuses to contribute tax to this country, despite their fundamentally questionable standards of honesty over the whole thing, leaving the plebs to pick up the tab.

The union link can be subjected to public debate all day, but the fact remains that union political funds are open and subject to scrutiny. Above board. They always have been.

Can the Tories say the same of the man they are trying to get out of the public consciousness? They will talk about Unite at their convenience. But when will they answer the key questions?

-Why all the obfuscation around Bearwood Corporate Services?
-When did William Hague and David Cameron become aware of Lord Ashcroft’s tax status? Have they been honest about this?
-Why did they not inform the public or make the nature of these donations apparent?
-Why did Lord Ashcroft tell us ten years ago that he would pay UK tax, before proceeding to land his chunk of the burden on other taxpayers?
-Why did invitees from the Conservative Party refuse to assist the Electoral Commission with its investigations into Lord Ashcroft?

Still no answers from them, predictably. Let’s talk about Unite!

There is also a question for the press and other media to consider.

Why are you spending so much time covering publicly declared donations, under a long established system subject to long political acceptance, consented to by union members… without first finishing up the as yet completely unanswered questions above?

Would reporting that Labour and the unions come out much cleaner get in the way of your election plans? Or have you just allowed yourselves to be bumped?

Update: Iain Dale thinks Labour should change its name. To ‘Labour’, presumably?

Smithson appears to show a correlation between the Tory lead over Labour for the past three years and the price of petrol. The cheaper it is to drive, he says, the closer Labour gets in the polls.

He could have gone further. The only time in Labour’s first two terms that the Tories briefly edged ahead in the polls was in during the 2000 fuel protests. If high fuel prices can make William Hague more popular than Blair was during his honeymoon, then they are a very potent political force.

Moreover, Smithson points out that this is even more of an issue in the marginals:

For the English middle-sized towns, where many of the marginals are, private motoring can be a hugely sensitive issue.

For compared with the big conurbations it’s in these places where public transport can be very limited that the motor car is more essential for every day life. Anything that makes motoring more expensive or difficult is politically toxic.

There is of course one big difference between fuel price rises today and those a decade ago, even if it’s not immediately obvious to consumers. The fuel protests in 2000 were in response to repeated increases in fuel duty against a backdrop of low prices on the commodities markets. The reason for the big rises in fuel prices recently is the increased price of fuel on the wholesale markets – which is down to demand outstripping supply.

But does the electorate see the difference? Smithson’s analysis suggests not – with massive policy implications for the future.

It’s a fascinating collection of the poetry and prose which inspired three generations of a remarkable family: Isaac Foot, Liberal MP for Bodmin, Minister for Mines and vice-president of the Methodist Conference; his son Michael, leader of the Labour Party; and grandson Paul, a member of the SWP and editor of Socialist Worker.

Isaac was a great admirer of Oliver Cromwell and his selections, from a commonplace book he kept, include pieces by John Milton, who served as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, including extracts from Paradise Lost, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, the lines beginning “Cromwell, our chief of men” and Areopagitica.

Michael includes selections from Jonathan Swift, including his famous Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country; William Hazlitt; William Wordsworth; John Keats; Lord Byron; Adrian Mitchell; Tony Harrison; UA Fanthorpe and Derek Walcott.

Paul’s include extracts from Queen Mab and The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley as well as Paul’s trhilling – and pointed –explication of the work of a man he considered the revolutionary poet par excellence.