We are eight weeks away from an (as yet unannounced) General Election in Britain, and the political parties’ mad clamour for headlines has begun.  Savage criticism from one side follows scornful demolition by the other.  Policy launch follows publicity stunt.  Either way, it seems certain that we are to have more of everything.  Britain’s far-seeing and benevolent politicians are deciding how they can make our lives wonderful.  In fact, very, very wonderful.  How could you ever think it will be otherwise?

Politicians love to talk about hospitals, schools, nursery places, police on the beat … all the many ways in which they can spend your money better than you can.  These things are, apparently, what the electorate most wants to hear about.  They are managerial politics, the politics of consensus, of ideological neutrality.  They are, therefore, safe and comfortable for all concerned.  They are what the political establishment most wants to talk about.

They are not, though, why men and women enter politics in the first place.  The psychoses of power aside, ideas are what make politicians.  The whole point of politics in the West is to make or remake society according to more radical ideas than those which govern us today.  We are living, to bowdlerise Keith Joseph’s splendid phrase, in an age of ratchet liberalism.

Thus amid the welter of pre-election speechifying and point-scoring my antennae immediately twitched at an article in today’s Independent titled “Homophobic abuse to become an offence”.  For here is the real political agenda, quite distinct from talk of cancelled hospital operations and university tuition charges.

The article begins, “Gays are to be protected from homophobic abuse by a catch-all equality law that will make it illegal for the first time to shout homophobic insults or discriminate against gay couples. The Government aims to bring in a single equality Act after the election that will ban hotel owners from refusing rooms to gays.”

The background to this proposal shows how the ratchet operates.  Last July Stephen Nock, a homosexual living in London, tried to book a room with double bed for himself and his boyfriend at a “Bed & Breakfast” in the wild and mountainous North-West of Scotland.  Now, the b&b – Cromasaig in Kinlochewe, Wester Ross – is a family home.  The owners, Liz and Tom Forrest, didn’t want that kind of trade.  Renting a double bed to two homosexuals entailed a certain complicity in an act which Liz and Tom saw as a perversion.  And that is what Tom perhaps somewhat bluntly said to Mr Nock in an e-mail extending his hospitality if the two homosexuals settled for a twin-bed room.

Evidently, Mr Nock didn’t appreciate the offer because the result, in Tom’s words, was that in no time he got “stitched up”.  Homosexual political activists and a prurient press began to shit upon him from a very great moral height.

A weak man would have buckled.  Tom Forrest is not a weak man.  When he was accused of homophobia he replied, “I have no hatred or fear of poofs.  I just do not approve of unnatural acts being performed in my home.”  Even when a woman from the National Tourism Board of Scotland arrived to re-educate him -  Cromasaig was listed on its website so presumably she thought she had a duty to do so – he remained true to his down-to-earth principles.

He asked her if she thought homosexual sex was natural.  “Yes,” she replied.

“There is no point in talking to people like that,” Tom told the press.  “It’s obvious which side they are on.  If that’s the sort of organisation they are, they are welcome to it.”

Well, Tom brought a smile to a lot of ordinary people’s faces and he has been rewarded.  “We have had messages from people congratulating us from as far away as California and more accommodation inquiries than you can ever imagine,” he told the press.  One message from someone in Middlesex read, “Thank God there is a man who will stand up to some of the daft changes to the laws of this land.  You have spoken for the majority of people who think like you but are too afraid to say so.”

Too afraid to say so.  Yes, the majority is cowed into silence.  But it is also atomised and incapable of self-organisation in its own interests.  The Party that should naturally serve as its rallying point is simply not Conservative anymore.  We no longer live in an age - a Conservative age – when politicians of the right can be relied upon to entrench the life-long love of man and woman in our mores and protect the population from deviance.  We live in a liberal age, and have done for a very long while. 

Liberalism has developed – devolved, to be precise - into the pursuit of cultural destruction, the vehicles for which are alien populations, culturally masculinised women and Tom Forrest’s unwanted “poofs”.  Tom, like you and me, is the enemy of liberalism.  But it has spied him out and determined to attend to his backwardness.  Will liberalism explain itself to him, then?  Will it seek to demonstrate its rightness and reasonableness?  Will it exhibit its famed tolerance?  No, of course not.  The lock of this ratchet operates with a hammer blow.  It uses the full weight of the law.  Liberalism will make it illegal for “the provider of goods or services, such as shops, restaurants or hotels to refuse to serve someone if they are gay.”  Even if that means accepting buggery under your own roof.  Liberalism, therefore, is oppression.  It is anti-freedom, anti-Nature.  In its aims and its methods it has become actual evil.

The proposed new Equality Law, which will follow the usual New Labour review, will be drafted at the end of next year.  Reviews, by the way, are an integral part of the ratchet’s winding system.  They give cultural politics an appearance of sober deliberation when, actually, the moving spirit is distinctly Jacobin.  This one will look at all equalities legislation including, I see, exemptions for clubs for men only.  There is no sign yet that clubs for women only are under the same threat of extinction.  But, of course, men are also atomised, passive victims in the culture war.  There are no male activists agitating for equal rights to silky- smooth, hydrated and nourished skin.  Or if there are, they are the kind of males who also insist upon a double-bed for themselves and the boyfriend when next they go roamin in the gloamin.

The ratchet, meanwhile, will just keep turning.