'Such courts are handing down rulings that are likely to breach fundamental principles of British law … "The reality is that for many Muslims, Sharia courts are part of an institutionalised atmosphere of intimidation backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat … many of them are discriminatory against women and non-Muslims". Some "transgress human rights standards as they are applied by British courts".

Examples include: a Muslim woman should not have fertility treatment; may not under any circumstances marry a non-Muslim man unless he converts to Islam; may be coerced by her husband to have sex; a man may divorce his wife without telling her about it … a woman, who is restricted in leaving her home and driving a car, cannot marry anyone she chooses.

It is "a challenge to what we believe to be the rights and freedoms of the individual, to our concept of a legal system based on what Parliament enacts" and to the right of everyone to live in a society free from ethnic-religious division or claims to superiority, or special "above-the-law" status. Far from helping integration, any further encouragement of Sharia will only "undermine the efforts of British Muslims struggling to evolve a version of Islam consistent with a tolerant and pluralistic society".'

'This [the Labour trouncing in European Parliament elections] is not a defeat. It is a humiliation. And on exactly what question of principle was Labour brought so low? The main if not the sole "issue" appears to be the self-love and the self-pity of a prime minister – Gordon Brown – who has never won a general election or even a contested leadership election within his own party. He is in power only in order to be in power. For many years he waited as a resentful dauphin, swallowing his envy and bile. And then, like the fruit of the medlar tree, he went rotten before he was ripe.

In a party that used to pride itself on open debate, you hear dreadful whispers about carpet-biting, furniture-hurling spasms by someone whose contorted face reproduces the awful slobbering mask of a weak king.

Brown managed to insult the Queen, and the veterans of D-day on the Normandy beaches, for no better reason than that he wanted to hog the entire stage for himself. He got booed by the crowd on an occasion that is usually almost supernaturally silent, and then he contrived to make an idiot of himself by alluding to Omaha beach – a near-totemic name for anyone with a sense of history – as "Obama beach." Enough is enough.'

'When all our entertainment can fit on a microchip, James Wolcott asks, how will we display our superior tastes to houseguests, fellow subway riders, and potential mates?'