Back from a long drive in the heavy rain, passing the time listening to BBC radio Any Questions for the first time in years. (Note for non-Brits: this is a veteran deeply earnest current affairs programme featuring four panellists of differing views answering questions from a live audience from a local venue somewhere in the UK.)

Tonight’s episode featured two prominent British professional women of unrelentingly progressive views.

Maybe it was the awful weather, but I found it dispiriting to hear them opine at gloomy length about why British women are not breaking through the Glass Ceiling despite so many measures designed over decades to promote ‘equality’, then, scarcely pausing for breath, make various crass remarks against Sarah Palin (yes, including disparaging her hairstyle).

(Note: back in the USA latter-day left-feminism likewise has simply collapsed under the strain, so we have to look to conservative white men to explain things.)

Most such BBC and other media debates in the UK are depressing for another reason, namely the unimaginative range of views expressed and the underlying assumption that if there is a problem somewhere in society we all need More Government to help tackle it.

As I swerved through floodwaters I found myself howling for someone to throw in one or two rabid libertarian thoughts now and again. One of the male panelists, a Republican American of course, was somewhere in that area but not with much élan.

Lots of agonising also from the two women about the deep divisions within the Labour Party and the ‘dangers’ of the party splitting irrevocably. I would have said that politics is a market-place too, and that it does no harm for a large ruling party to crash and burn now and again when it has run out of intellectual and moral juice.

There’ll always be another politician coming along to vote for.

Maybe we need a quite different form of politics – one based upon the state fearing the people, not the other way round. 

Politics not all about treating citizens like criminals. The horrible demise of the Labour Party could set a powerful example for a few years and so be just the job.