You might like to sign...

...the Westminster Declaration of Conscience.

The new Govt will not get anywhere unless it roots its policies in an acceptance of the centrality of marriage and family life as the foundation of our community and the common good. All efforts to cut crime, improve basic literacy, reduce public vandalism and drunkeness, foster social cohesion, and enable people to cope with economic difficulties, will founder without this.

While on the subject of Westminster: earlier this week, I passed the Houses of Parliament en route to a meeting in Victoria Street. There was a barrier across the road leading down towards Millbank, and with the current encampment in Parliament Square making the whole place looking like a rather unsuccessful pop festival, I thought the closure of the road might be connected with that, and asked what what was happening. "Nothing untoward Madam, just the State Opening", the policeman told me, and indeed today's papers show the usual stately scene - ermine robes, Queen in crown and cloak, mace, deferential chaps in knee-britches and wigs, the lot. I'm glad it's still going on, and the cameras seem to have avoided focussing on the extraordinary background scenes and concentrated on the stateliness within the Parliament building.

It's good that Britain can still manage to achieve a proper State Opening (amazing, actually, that this wasn't abolished along with so much else, in the last 13 years). But the current messy protesters and campers in Parliament Square do make us look ridiculous. We're all for freedom of speech, and indeed an end to the war as their banners proclaim...but they are not contributing to anything very creative or useful by turning one of the most important squares of Europe into a squalid dump. They aren't really convicning anyone of anything by putting up makeshift sleeping accomodation on the lawn and turning their backs on us all as they attend to the neccessarily messy domestic tasks that such a campsite requires.