Odi et amor Radio 4

The Moral Maze yesterday was hilarious in a profoundly depressing sort of a way.Listen to it with a soothing hot drink. It was about cloning: a panel vaguely against cloning fails miserably either to appreciate or to defend its remarkable inconsistency in accepting contraception and abortion while being worried about cloning. Their attempts to show up John Harris as a heartless beast while he pointed out the manifest holes in their views were - interesting... (Bruce Anderson was somewhat less ludicrous than the others, though.)

This was, however, followed by an excellent fifteen-minute devastation by Simon Heffer of the notion that 'progress' is per se a Good Thing. (Unfortunately, it can't be heard again on the Beeb website.) Most timeous, given Labour's magnificently meaningless new slogan: Britain, forward not back! How many hours of focus-grouping did it take to come up with something so completely devoid of signification (or indeed significance)? They might as well have run with "We'll do Good Things, and we're really modern - you like modern things, don't you?" That seems to be the general notion intended, even if it's just a trifle less catchy.