“Sadly, community leaders have been unable to guarantee to us that there will be no repeat of the illegal and violent activities we witnessed on Saturday. It is now clear that we cannot guarantee the safety of our audiences. Very reluctantly, therefore, we have decided to end the current run of the play purely on safety grounds.”

Stuart Rogers, executive director, Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

“We congratulate the theatre for making its decision after we exercised our democratic rights to protest. There are no winners and no losers. The end result is that commonsense has prevailed.”

Kim Kirpaljit Kaur Brom, spokesman for the Sikh protesters.

And the question left behind amid the bricks and broken glass:  Will a longer exposure of Sikhs to British law and the British way of doing things make the slightest difference to the way they do things?

Naturally, the issue is being spoken of purely as one of free expression, thus proving that we do not possess the freedom of expression requisite to do full justice to it.

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OK, let’s get it over with.  It can’t be a surprise anyway.  So, here goes.  I am that perennially dissatisfied, lip-pursing, inflexible animal, that teeth-grinding, curtain-twitching, unwilling observer of the willingly self-destructive, that moral fish out of water, that antique … a social conservative.  Variously known as a behaviour fascist, authority freak, anal retention expert, fun Hun and all-round intolerant bastard.

There.  Now I’ve said it.  Doesn’t feel any better though.  Whoever said confession is good for the soul, or whichever Viennese doktor said whatever Viennese doktors used to say on such horizontally confidential matters, was l-y-i-n-g.

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I stand in no danger of falling foul of any religious hate speech law.  It would be entirely invidious of me, as the father of a twelve year girl, to attempt to put into words my opinion of Iranian justice or Sharia and the nature and worth of the religious “judges” - I cannot call them men - who dispense it.

Speed the day when they will receive the same quality of justice for their crimes, which are many and which are real.

Helmut Schmidt was a leader of the left-liberal SPD and Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1982. He recently gave an interview to a Hamburg newspaper in which he spoke freely about his attitudes to Turkey joining the EU.

He told the newspaper that though he supported favourable trade deals for Turkey, he opposed Turkish membership of the EU. Why? His answer was as follows:

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My recent piece, No native voices, kicked off with a hat-tip to John Ray for a link to a Charles Bremner article in The Times.  Now Mark Richardson has posted a link to the same article.

Bremner drew attention to the remarkable law passing through the French lower house, prohibiting “defaming a person or a group of persons on account of their sex or their sexual orientation.” The punishment is a prison sentence of up to six months or a £15,000 fine.

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“There is a basic code from Finland to Portugal. Turkey has a different history. But this is not the largest obstacle. How much would it cost?”

Edward Stoiber, Bavarian Prime Minister and CDU leader, speaking of the 407 to 262 vote by the European Parliament to open EU entry talks with Turkey.

Turkey has won the sympathy vote.  It has won the geopolitical vote.  It has won the moral vote.  But cost conquers all.

Another summit, another   deal.  The Telegraph reports an EU diplomat lauding Mr Blair as the saviour of the summit, with the Dutch who hold the EU presidency.  “Blair played a phenomenal role … drafting the compromise text, saving the Turks from themselves.”

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What do liberals think about the family? I have recently read two commentaries on the changing family by liberal writers. Here is the start of one of these items, an editorial from the Melbourne Age newspaper:

“Until the 1960s, the script for family life was predictable, says David de Vaus, professor of sociology at La Trobe University. “The script was boy meets girl, fall in love, get married, set up house, woman stops work to have babies. Then he retires at 65 and one of them dies.” Since then, slowly but steadily, Australians have been tearing up the template.

“As Professor de Vaus documents in his statistical analysis Diversity and Change in Australian Families, the norms once imposed by one’s family, gender, class or ethnic group have largely fallen away. What remains, for better or worse, are individual choices.”

The editorialist is here taking a negative view of traditional family life, on the basis that it is “predictable”, based on a “template” or on imposed norms, and that it lacks individual choice.

Why take this view? The answer is that liberals believe, as a first principle, that to be fully human we must be self-created by our own will and reason. Therefore, a consistent liberal will think that our freedom as humans depends on choosing our own life patterns.

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I am grateful to John for this link to Charles Bremner’s Times article on the forthcoming hate speech Bill in France.  It ties in, of course, with David Blunkett’s decision to insert a clause protecting Muslim sensibilities into his Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill.  A high-class article in today’s Telegraph by Charles Moore argues against that injustice more eloquently than can I.

We do not lack compelling arguments against a religious hate speech law or, for once, compelling arguers.  To their credit, Liberal Democrat MPs and, it’s said, many Labour ones, too, are also disturbed by this attack on freedom.  I don’t suppose more than one in ten non-Muslims sees it as anything other than another unjust imposition on the real British peoples.  But that one in ten evidently includes our political and juridical elite as well as all the little bees who work so busily in the public and voluntary sectors to neuter us and make Britain safe for minorities.

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