The great divide: MPs and voters

So that's it, then. By a majority of 71, our parliamentary representatives have decided it should remain legal to destroy fully formed, sentient and viable human life in the womb.

What a crushing week this has been for upholders of traditional thinking about humanity.

First MPs give the go-ahead to experiments on hybrid animal-human embryos. Then they decide doctors need no longer take a child's need for a father into account when offering IVF treatment to single women and lesbian couples.

Pro-choice campaigners

Majority of voters want a reduction in abortion time limit but MPs disagreed

Now they say it's all right to go on aborting healthy foetuses up to 24 weeks old  -  in spite of living, breathing evidence that babies born weeks earlier can grow into happy and healthy children.

But it's not only the politicians' intellectual and moral vacuity that brings us to the edge of despair. Equally disturbing is their increasing isolation from those they are supposed to represent.

Apart from a hedonistic, self-obsessed (and admittedly growing) minority, Britain is not in fact an amoral country. It is full of decent, responsible citizens who think and care deeply about the value of human life and the family.

We know from opinion polls that the great majority  -  including two-thirds of doctors and three-quarters of women  -  want a reduction in the abortion time-limit.

We would hazard, too, that most have deep reservations about crossing human and animal cells, while vast numbers are uncomfortable about encouraging women to rear children without fathers.

But who speaks for that majority in the incestuous Westminster village, where MPs hop from Commons bar to radio and TV studio, thinking more about impressing each other (and the party Whips) than their constituents?

It's not only moral traditionalists who have just cause for anger this week. It's everyone who cares about representative democracy.

How to beat crime

From the streets of Merseyside comes stunning new evidence that where there's a will, there's a devastatingly effective way to beat crime.

No, we don't mean the Government's &pound;650million initiatives to rehabilitate teenage offenders, now found to have had 'no measurable impact' on youth crime.

The breakthrough has been achieved by the zero tolerance policing pioneered in New York  -  cracking down all forms of lawbreaking from petty vandalism to the worst violence.

Even allowing for the modern police chief's weakness for spin, the results in Merseyside have been sensational. Since the policy began in 2005, violent crime is down 38 per cent; car theft down 51 per cent, burglaries down 23 per cent...

What's more, Bernard Hogan-Howe has managed to fund his strategy by internal savings and using reserves.

What are the rest of the country's chief constables waiting for?

Goodbye! to dignity

Throughout the Queen's reign, has anything more seriously compromised her dignity than her photographs in Hello! magazine, fixed up in a squalid £500,000 deal between her grandson Peter Phillips and the publishers?

What were her advisers thinking of, allowing her to be commercially exploited at a supposedly private wedding in the pages of a trashy celebrity WAG-mag?

Over recent years, real progress has been made towards re-establishing the trust between Crown and people, which took so many knocks in the Nineties. Now all that has been put in jeopardy.

Mr Phillips and the Palace courtiers should be deeply ashamed.

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