1. Steve Bell on David Cameron and the Eurosceptics – cartoon
2. Steve Bell on Britain’s policy on Syria – cartoon
3. Cameron had the chance to defy the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and remake his party. He failed | Steve Richards

Will the Labour leader read the riot act to Google?

• It must have seemed a no-brainer. The people who rule the 21st century offering a platform to the man who would run the country. And so it was little surprise that Ed Miliband made himself available. He wasn't to know that in the intervening period, his hosts Google would be reborn as public enemy No 1; castigated as tax-dodging "evil" by Margaret Hodge, the Labour chair of the public accounts committee; condemned by Vince Cable as "immoral". So what will he do now, as keynote speaker on Wednesday at the Google conference Big Tent UK, alongside Google's top man Eric Schmidt. He'll send a message says the party: "loud and clear". Something PM Dave was apparently reluctant to do when he met Schmidt yesterday? Perhaps he will speak truth to power? A first time for everything.

• Now what was it we said about the enforced departure of Peter Davies, the former un-PC supermayor given his marching orders by the electorate of Doncaster a fortnight ago? "He came, he served. But the mess he caused can be rectified." Here's a matter from the supermayor years that recently needed sorting. When he was being patted on the back by the Daily Mail and the self-styled Campaign Against Political Correctness for socking it to the lefties his administration cut funding to ethnic minority groups. When they complained, a letter was sent justifying the cuts. It was signed, not by the mayor, but Nadeem Murtuja, then one of the council's most senior minority employees. This, one assumes, was to head off accusations that the cuts were discriminatory. And perhaps it might have done just that. But what we now know is that, in fact, Murtuja never signed it at all; it was never his decision. His signature was electronically inserted without his consent. The council has apologised "unreservedly". Davies has gone, of course, and Labour's Ros Jones runs Doncaster now. One wonders what other legacy items she will find in the coming weeks.

• While attention is focused on Ukip's talisman Nigel Farage, what are we to make of the party's other talent, chairman Stuart Agnew. The Ukip MEP for Eastern England (and former Rhodesian ranger) is certainly colourful enough to take his place alongside the idealists, waifs and oddballs who proudly wear the colours. A fixture on the pundit circuit, he's due to debate with Will Hutton at Hertford College Oxford next month on the EU, and there'll be no problem recognising him on arrival. The registration number of his car is EU03 OUT.

• On the subject of Oxford, is the Murdoch name still toxic at his alma mater? Readers will recall that Rupert was a bit of a red when at Worcester College six decades ago. Time and experience changed him drastically, as we know. But he never forgot Oxford, and some of the Murdoch millions found their way back to endow an annual News International visiting professor of broadcast media. Big names sat on that chair: ex-ITN editor Stewart Purvis, film and TV producer Stephen Garrett and, in 2011, the writer and editor Matthew Engel. But since the Milly Dowler affair and the closure of the News of the World, the chair has sat empty. Will it ever be filled again?

• An innovative answer, meanwhile, to the rodent problem at the all-new citadel of truth that is Broadcasting House. Someone has officially rota-ed a kitten – black with pointy ears – to deal with it. "There's been a never-happen event and someone has saved a picture of their cat in the rota folder. If anyone recognises it can they pls return it to the rightful owner," says the sniffy guardian of the work schedules. "I've deleted it." Quite right. A serious problem demands a serious solution.

• Finally this from the exciting new commercial brand that is Melanie Phillips in the Mail. Under the headline The more abuse Mr Gove gets from teachers, the more you know he's right, she says: "Sometimes, you can gauge someone's quality from the enemies they make. By that standard, education secretary Michael Gove is a person of the highest quality." After his barracking by the headteachers, it's Brand Mel to the aid of the education secretary. If that doesn't mark this out as a time of crisis for Michael Gove, nothing will.

twitter: @hugh_muir

1. Ed Miliband must work to change voters’ minds on poverty | Ellie Mae O’Hagan
2. Stephen Bates’s diary: Sun down at the Reform Club
3. Stephen Bates’s diary: It’s the Wars of the roses again. And this time it’s on Facebook

Having rejected the diplomatic option of talking to Assad, neither the US nor Britain can lead from behind

It was only a matter of time before a proxy war between regional powers turned into a battlefield in which foreign fighters openly engaged in combat. Hezbollah's fighters had been present in Syria for some time, but their overt role in the fight for a strategic border town linking Damascus to Homs and the regime's core support in the Alawite hinterland is, potentially, a game-changer. If it ever had been an open question whether conditions could be produced that would allow Iran and Hezbollah to relinquish their support for Bashar Assad, in favour of a transitional regime that would offer guarantees to the minority Alawite community, that has now been answered.

Whatever happens in the town of Qusair, both Hezbollah and Iran are now signalling that Assad's fate has become a matter of existential survival for them, too. The regime's victory, or defeat, will become a victory or defeat for its allies. This makes any attempt at intra-Syrian reconciliation – already a faint hope, after the vicious sectarianism shown first by the regime and latterly, alas, by some rebels – virtually impossible. Syria of any description, either the north and east, still held by the rebels, or the south and west, held by the regime, is no longer master of its own territory or fate.

Factionalism is rife. The dominant, or at least most cohesive, fighting group on the rebel side, Jabhat al-Nusra, is funded and armed by non-state actors, as is al-Qaida, to which the Sunni jihadi group has vowed its allegiance. There are splits between rebel units on the ground and the Syrian opposition in Turkey and Doha. A further cleavage has opened between Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, on the one side – all determined not to let the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood gain control of Syria – and Qatar and Turkey on the other, which back other brotherhood-dominated regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. If Sunni al-Qaida is fighting Shia Hezbollah in Qusair, the Sunni regimes of the Gulf are doing a good job undermining each other's foreign policy as well.

Did the Israeli strikes provoke Hezbollah's move? As Vladimir Putin told Binyamin Netanyahu in no uncertain terms, they certainly prompted Russia into sending Assad S300 surface-to-air missiles. The involvement of the best armed and trained Shia militia in the region was perhaps only a matter of time. The foreign secretary, William Hague, said there was a compelling case for lifting the EU arms embargo, dispatching weapons in "carefully controlled circumstances". This is provocative. We have lost leverage over rebel groups. Having rejected the diplomatic option of talking to Assad for so long, neither US nor Britain — nor Russia on its side — can "lead from behind" in Syria. A military conflict is no place for back-seat drivers.

1. This is Syria’s great chance for change | Jonathan Steele
2. Syria: the first conflict of the post-superpower era | John Kampfner
3. Syria crisis: battle for Qusair – live updates

If the Tories do not pull themselves together very soon the party will have forfeited its case for re-election

What, and for whom, does today's – and tomorrow's – Conservative party stand? In various periods in the past, it has been possible to answer that question with some clarity. Before 1832, the party stood for the landed interest. After 1867, it added the flag, the union and the shopkeeper too. In the first half of the 20th century, the Tories were for empire and against socialism. After 1945, they began an historic compromise with social democracy. After 1979 this was turned on its head, in a break with the one-nation past. Yet, throughout much of its history and most of these twists and turns, the party has embodied the Prince of Salina's dictum in Lampedusa's novel The Leopard – that things must change in order that things remain the same. But today?

There was a time when David Cameron promised a serious return to the pragmatic tradition. The years have exposed, sadly in many ways, the shallowness of his modernisation project. He embraced progressive and open social principles while leaving much of the narrow old thinking, which had taken the party to three crushing defeats since 1997, untouched. The Tory party that has turned in on itself again over Europe, and now over the issue of gay marriage, a principled happiness-creating reform that is now widely supported, reflects Mr Cameron's wider failure. It is a party that is pulling against itself, unsure where its conservatism and its electoral self-interest lie, forgetting that its principal task in the voters' eyes is to govern the country well.

The enduring narrowness and division are partly Mr Cameron's doing. But they are in large part Lady Thatcher's poisonous and still not properly recognised legacy. All this is reflected both in the leadership's reported taunts against the party's "swivel-eyed loons" and in the grassroots unhappiness over Mr Cameron's handling of the EU referendum issue, as well as in yesterday's backward-looking divisions and contortions over gay rights.

All modern political parties face the danger that they can cease to look, feel and talk like the country they seek to govern. The Tories face this problem in a particularly dramatic way. Their membership is either disproportionately elderly, disproportionately obsessive about one or two issues, or both. As a result, they constantly risk appearing – and being – out of touch with the world that is inhabited by those whose support they need for re-election. The history of the past 20 years ought to have taught the Tories, in particular, that they have to listen to the electorate, not just the people who share their prejudices, if they are to broaden their appeal and win elections. Mr Cameron came close, but he is now slipping back into the past. As Lord Ashcroft, who is nothing if not a true Tory, said on Monday, the party urgently needs to move beyond Europe and even beyond claiming to be clearing up their predecessors' mess.

Three years ago, and with the Labour government increasingly discredited, the case for a new government in this country was a plausible one. The voters agreed, and chose the Conservatives to provide that new start, but not with full-hearted confidence, hence the coalition government. The voters' hesitation has been richly vindicated. In the past few months, the Tories have turned increasingly inward and obsessive. They have been weakly led by Mr Cameron. They appear far more interested in the threat from Ukip to their party than in the issues that face the country.

But they get the response fundamentally wrong, even to that. The appeal of Ukip is not confined to either Europe or opposition to gay marriage. It is about rejecting all the existing parties in difficult times. That is why the Tory reflex to make stands that expose their divisions may actually boost Ukip rather than deflate it. The events of the past 24 hours over gay marriage are a case in point. They are a warning of what Lord Ashcroft calls a spiral of irrelevance. He is right about that danger. If the Tory party does not pull itself together very soon it will have forfeited any case it might still have had for re-election.

1. David Cameron and Europe: a question of leadership | Editorial
2. Britain and Europe: a recipe for irrelevance
3. Cameron had the chance to defy the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and remake his party. He failed | Steve Richards

It is crucial that all sides approach June's international conference with hope as well as caution

When Ban Ki-moon opens the promised international conference on Syria in Geneva next month, the war-ravaged country will experience the first sliver of hope it has dared to feel for months. A year has gone by since Russia and the United States approved guidelines for a transition to a more democratic and pluralistic Syria and it is a tragedy that so many lives have been wasted without any effort to implement the guidelines.

It has required several U-turns to bring about a new conference to discuss the issue. The US has dropped its precondition that Bashar al-Assad step down in advance of talks. Unlike Hillary Clinton, John Kerry seems to realise that Assad's forces cannot be defeated without full-scale US intervention – a prospect that Barack Obama will not permit – and that prolonged conflict only strengthens al-Qaida and the other jihadis who have swarmed into Syria. For his part, Assad has dropped his demand that the armed opposition lay down its guns before he sends his people to meet them. His prime minister and several other ministers are expected in Geneva.

The Syrian opposition is the obstacle, or at least some of them. The secular nationalists in the National Co-ordination Body for Democratic Change promoted the Geneva idea and will attend keenly. The Syrian National Coalition, which is backed by western governments as well as Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is still reluctant to turn up without a commitment that Assad's departure is assured. To their credit, British and other western diplomats are urging them not to boycott and thereby hand Assad a propaganda victory.

A joker in the pack remains the British and French wish, matched by some senior officials in Washington, to lift the embargo on arms supplies to the rebels. Here too a U-turn is needed. Otherwise, there may be a temptation to tell the rebels that as long as they attend and behave with dignity they will get their weapons if the conference fails. This would be a recipe for disaster and an obvious invitation for the rebels to sabotage the conference by being unreasonable.

Far better to kick the arms issue into the long grass and concentrate on ensuring that the Geneva conference is not a one-day jamboree but the start of a serious process. A war that has taken so many lives, involves so many disparate armed groups, and is compounded by so much foreign interference cannot be ended in 48 hours. So the Geneva meeting needs to create working committees that will concentrate patiently on constitutional reform, humanitarian access, detainee release, local ceasefires and the re-introduction of UN observers. These steps can lead to a reduction of violence and the gradual return of displaced people to rebuild their homes.

Fairly early in the process there needs to be a coalition government of national unity that includes ministers from the opposition as well as from the current regime, as last year's guidelines spelt out. This will take political courage on all sides, since al-Qaida and the other fundamentalists who have joined the fight are likely to denounce rebels who take part as collaborationists, or even assassinate them. The hardliners are in Syria for the long haul and even if the main opposition groups were to make a peace agreement, Syria is probably doomed to face a long-term armed insurgency in parts of the country, as well as regular suicide bombings in its main cities, for years to come. The precedent of today's Iraq is all too likely to affect Syria too.

But, while the Geneva conference has to be viewed with caution as well as hope, it is crucial that all sides treat it properly as a genuine chance for change. Looking to score propaganda points or undermining it so as to renew the armed struggle with greater intensity will not serve Syria's interests or those of its neighbours.

A quarter of the country's people have lost their homes. Nearly 100,000 have lost their lives. The time for a more far-sighted approach is now.

1. The horror of the Syrian video is the horror of war | Jonathan Jones
2. For Syria, the civil war is still to come
3. Cameron had the chance to defy the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and remake his party. He failed | Steve Richards

That Margaret Hodge and Nigel Farage are arousing passions shows how sick we are of the professional political class

Suddenly there are new faces on our television screens, and new, agitated, indignant voices on the airwaves. Some are old or plummy-toned, some have grey hair, some are young and working class, some are anxious suburban commuters. Many of them are women. It is the raging rows over Ukip, gay marriage, Europe and swivel-eyed loons that have given these people a political presence.

They are noticeable because their presence at the centre of political debate is a novelty. We have grown accustomed to seeing almost all the important issues facing the country debated between groups of urbane, Westminster-based, fortysomething men. This month's eruption of anger over how politics is run has highlighted just how narrow, insulated and unrepresentative our political discussions and our political representation are. It's no wonder that so many people are feeling angry.

Nigel Farage's full-page advertisement in the Daily Telegraph today , accusing the Tories of being run by a "bunch of college kids who've never had a proper job in their lives", tapped cleverly into a vein of Conservative anger. This isn't solely a Tory problem. Its activists and defectors are feeling overlooked, but it's a Labour issue too. "In my time, the Commons has been taken over by the professional political classes," one long-serving MP said to me. "Where are the working classes? Where are the trade unionists? Where are the George Browns or the Ernie Bevins or the people who've had years of experience in other jobs? How does an outsider break in? "

The figures remind us of how startlingly different MPs' backgrounds are to the rest of the country. Fewer than a third of Labour MPs are women, and the Tories only manage a sixth. The Lib Dems, those famously earnest egalitarians, have a disgracefully tiny proportion: one in eight.

MPs do no better on privilege and class. Seven per cent of the nation attends private school. More than half of all Tory MPs did so, as did 40% of the Lib Dems, and 15% of the Labour party. A third of all Tories are or were company directors or executives, an occupation shared with just 0.2% of the population. And whereas 30% of the population are in blue-collar manual jobs, only 5% of MPs come from such a background, down from 15% when Thatcher came to power.

After sex and class, age is the third discriminator. Politics used to be a profession that valued long memories and varied life experience. American politics still does, with almost half its legislators aged over 60. In Britain, where more than a fifth of the population are of pension age, just 17% of MPs are in the same category.

The trouble with the way the Commons operates now is that once MPs arrive, every single one of those existing differences is amplified. The people chosen by party leaders to sit on the frontbenches are, as a group, male, privileged, and relatively young. A high proportion of them, from the party leaders downwards, have worked in political posts for almost their entire careers. On both sides of the house, having an Oxbridge education is a huge advantage. A third of coalition MPs are Oxbridge graduates, but two thirds of the cabinet went there. In just the same way, a sixth of Labour MPs but more than a third of the shadow cabinet went to those two universities.

The stranglehold that a single demographic has over our politics might have looked defensible if the electorate were confident that this group knew what they were doing. That's not so now. The polls show support for all three main parties falling sharply as a general, fearful pessimism settles in. Meanwhile, the rise of a couple of unconventional, overlooked political figures demonstrates just what a mistake it is for party leaders to keep assuming that talent, potential and popular appeal can only be found in a narrow group.

The two politicians who are currently doing most to drive the political agenda, create change and arouse passions are Nigel Farage on the right and Margaret Hodge on the left. They couldn't be more different from the careful, smooth-skinned, smooth-talking male political elite. They are both spirited, fearless, occasionally indiscreet, and engaging. Farage drinks, smokes and charms the Britain that thinks it's been abandoned; Hodge is almost single-handedly using her ruthless intelligence, curiosity and determination to expose the cosy arrangements that have allowed a great swath of giant companies to escape paying tax.

Characters like these aren't rated by either of their respective sides. They're too original, or too old, or the wrong class, or the wrong sex. Margaret Hodge spent the 13 years of Labour government only ever being given junior jobs, because she didn't fit the younger male mould. It was only when she chose her own path by standing for the chairmanship of the public accounts committee that she had the freedom to shine.

Party leaders don't want irreverent, troublesome, freethinking mavericks. Otherwise, why have the very able MPs Gisela Stuart and Andrea Leadsom not been given jobs? They prefer, as do bosses the world over, the chumocracy; people who will defer to and think like them. But the world's too complex and uncomfortable a place for that. Groupthink isn't working, and the electorate can see it. Too many of us look at parliament and feel that people like us are excluded. It's time the bright, the difficult, the grey-haired and the underprivileged were given a voice, not just on the airwaves or on the net, but at the centre of power.

Twitter: @jennirsl

1. Let me go with my headphones on | Jenni Murray
2. Labour can win in 2015, and shift the battleground of British politics | Andrew Harrop
3. Guardian/ICM poll: none of the above | Editorial

The wealthy in America and Britain no longer resemble the prewar elite, but appearances cannot mask how cut off they are from the rest of us

"Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."

At its core, The Great Gatsby is the story of an American caste system. Jimmy Gatz, a Dakota farm kid turned army captain, tags along with fellow officers to a party, where he glimpses a woman from a different world. In his uniform, the penniless Gatz is not fenced off from Daisy Fay by the usual "indiscernible barbed wire". But in order to marry her, he must erase his history and turn into someone else: Jay Gatsby, former Oxford man, possessor of a vast fortune obscure in its origins but all too visible in its expenditure on parties and hydroplanes and shirts "piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high".

The rest you know – if not from F Scott Fitzgerald then perhaps from Baz Luhrmann's new film version. Although he normally can't see a subtlety without sending in a wrecking ball, Luhrmann has left intact the sense of tremendous human waste. At the top are the "careless people", such as Daisy and husband Tom Buchanan – and then there's everyone else, who cannot gain even a toehold in 1920s America except through some form of shadiness. The chasm between rich and poor puts the American Dream off-limits to most Americans. In Fitzgerald's telling, those such as Gatsby who gave it a shot were doomed to failure. As indeed, was the entire economy. The Jazz Age was followed by the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the Great Depression.

And yet, 90 years on from The Great Gatsby we are in a world that Fitzgerald would have recognised. Last year, the head of Barack Obama's in-house economic thinktank, Princeton professor Alan Krueger, unveiled a graph of what he dubbed "The Gatsby Curve". On the horizontal axis was measured economic inequality; plotted out vertically was to what extent children's chances of success were determined by their parents' wealth. At the bottom of the graph were countries such as Denmark and Sweden: relatively equal societies where children stand a reasonable chance of getting as far as their talent and hard work allowed. But at the top were the UK and the US: societies marked by a massive wealth gap, where poorer children are born with the dice already heavily loaded against them.

In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels. Last year, prize-winning economic geographer Danny Dorling gave a speech in which he plotted how Britain's annual income had been divvied up down the ages. In 1923 the richest 1% of Britons took almost a quarter – 23.3% – of all income received. After the second world war came a long period of greater fairness so that by 1979 that proportion had dropped to only 6%. Then came Thatcher and Blair and soaraway inequality. By 2006, the year before the crash, we weren't quite at a Gatsby-esque divide, but we were heading that way: the top 1% of Britons were taking 15% of all income received in the country. This cash is then turned into houses, shares and other assets so that now the top 1% hold over 50% of all Britain's marketable wealth. And so inequality is passed down the generations. Today's headlines offer endless examples. The average London house now costs over half a million, or more than 19 times what the average British worker makes in a year. A Labour MP points out that of the 159 top civil servants, only five went to comprehensives.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg both know there is a problem with a society that only gives rich kids a chance. Both have made speeches denouncing the lack of social mobility in Britain; the government even has a social mobility strategy. Yet Clegg refuses to accept that there's a link between inequality and immobility. Despite academics advising him otherwise. Despite Alan Milburn's report on Britain's top jobs for the Cabinet Office last year that found: "A majority of employees offering the best-paid graduate jobs target … only 19 universities. The students who attend those 19 universities disproportionately spent their childhoods in the south of England."

The wealthy in America and Britain no longer resemble the prewar elite. They work, for one thing, and you may find the odd ethnic minority or woman in their ranks. But appearances cannot mask how cut off they are from the rest of us. It is still the case that 70% of high court judges were privately educated, even though only 7% of British children attend fee-paying schools. Last week, the Sunday Times reported that Bristol University tutors are considering treating applicants from state schools as "disadvantaged". We used to talk of oppressed minorities; now, it seems, we are in the age of oppressed vast majority.

For those state-school children whose parents can afford it, there is private tuition. Again, this is a world the young Gatsby would have recognised, with his hour each evening devoted to practising "elocution, poise and how to attain it". But for parents who don't need to scrimp and save, there are plenty more places to spend your money to gain advantage for your offspring. If you can, visit the Westminster school website. The insitution attended by our deputy prime minister is holding an auction of internships, often donated by alumni or present parents. For £500 you can buy your teenager two weeks with designer Amanda Wakeley; £600 a spell with a private-equity firm on Jermyn Street; while £300 buys work experience at Coutts.

Fitzgerald would have recognised such a world. Because this is what a 21st-century caste system looks like.

1. The Great Gatsby – video interviews
2. Great Gatsby: what high school book should Baz Luhrmann take on next? Open thread
3. Cannes 2013: Judge The Great Gatsby on box office, says Baz Luhrmann

1. Russian space lizards return to Earth
2. Major Tim Peake stole my space age daydream | Suzanne Moore
3. Space Oddity: Russia’s Soyuz returns from ISS to David Bowie tune

Leading Tory MPs is far harder than herding a sackful of kittens

No sign of David Cameron in the Commons chamber. Perhaps he was lying in a darkened room, or consulting a hermit on top of a Himalayan mountain. His party appears to be disintegrating into endless factions beneath him. Loonies versus sort-of sane. Swivel-eyed against glass eyed.

Herding cats? By comparison, a sackful of kittens would be as easy to marshal as the Brigade of Guards. If they were football fans, hordes of police would be needed to keep Tory MPs at opposite ends of the stadium.

On Monday we started the last stages of the gay marriage bill, beginning with the timetable. Peter Bone (D, Wellingborough), the skull beneath the skin, laid down a marker.

There wasn't enough time for the debate. "It was really appalling when Labour did it; it is absolutely appalling when we do it!" he said. "You're worse than that lot!" – not the message Cameron was hoping for.

Sir Peter Bottomley (C, Worthing W) was, I think, in favour of gay marriage, which he compared to the Reform Act, the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. MPs love to believe they are on the cusp of history.

Sir Gerald Howarth (C, Aldershot) said that the Commons might have voted in favour by a large majority, but only a minority of Tories had backed it.

A new constitutional tenet: a bill doesn't just need most MPs; it needs the support of most MPs who agree with Sir Gerald!

Edward Leigh (C, Gainsborough) thought they ought not to be considering the bill at all: "We should be concentrating on the catastrophic destruction of the public finances created by the party opposite!"

Another constitutional innovation: MPs should not pass laws if they could be abusing the Labour party instead.

Next we were onto protection for people who opposed gay marriage, whether ministers of religion or teachers. According to the amendment, teachers would not have to discuss gay marriage if they were opposed.

I wondered what would happen when – and if – Elton John gets married, an event which, making one of Jay Gatsby's parties look like a Methodist tea party in scout hut, may just make it onto the TV news, so undoing all the dogged silence of some teachers.

Daniel Byles, (C, N. Warwicks) thought the chaos was good news, proof that MPs were in tune with the public.

"The nation is deeply divided, and we have shown that we are in touch with the nation by our own divisions." Eh?

The bonkitude was not confined to opponents. Stephen Doughty (Lab, Cardiff & Penarth) wanted us to follow the example of the New Zealand parliament where legalising gay marriage had led to "a feeling of happiness and the singing of love songs!" MPs were baffled.

What should they be singing? Smokey Robinson's I Second That Motion, obviously, Here Come The Grooms, or Going To The Non-judgmental Chapel Of Love, perhaps

Edward Leigh was back. He feared that the bill might allow people to be "beastly" to each other. "Freedom of conscience does not mean freedom to be beastly to anyone!"

He was asked about teachers.

Should a science teacher be allowed to teach creationism? Mr Leigh thought yes, "if creationism became a quasi-religious belief, which in fact it already is." So people who think dinosaur bones have been planted by Satan to stop people believing in Genesis should be set loose in our schools – provided they believed it sincerely.

Mr Leigh tackled the optical issue. "My wife says as I get older, I am sometimes cross-eyed. I am not swivel-eyed, but if you called me cross-eyed I could take you to court!"

This was getting crazier. Sir Gerald said that it didn't matter what parliament decided: "We have ceded our powers to the European Court of Human Rights." Bingo! He had melded the two great hate-Cameron issues into one!

The prime minister must feel he's at the end of The Great Gatsby, "beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".

1. Martin Rowson on the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ row – cartoon
2. David Cameron ally: Tory activists are mad, swivel-eyed loons
3. Cameron had the chance to defy the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and remake his party. He failed | Steve Richards

We have to stop state legislators from sneaking creationist and revisionist textbooks into public schools

Louisiana's legislators are continuing their legislative jihad to keep the theory of evolution out of the state's public school science classrooms. On 1 May, legislators killed a bill to repeal Louisiana's creationism law, the misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA).

The law allows non-science to be snuck into science classrooms by teachers who use supplemental materials to "critique" politically controversial (but not scientifically controversial) theories, including evolution and climate science. Despite this loophole for creationism created by the LSEA, educators are still required to teach "material presented in the standard textbook", which includes the theory of evolution.

These biology textbooks are a major problem for creationists, whose next goal is to throw them out, and they have allies in the Louisiana legislature who are willing to help.

House Bill 116, sponsored by Frank Hoffmann, a state representative, would throw out Louisiana's biology books – it passed the Louisiana State House by a 73-22 vote. This is the third bill Hoffmann has sponsored to remove biology textbooks since they were adopted by the state board of education, in 2010.

When our board of education adopted life science textbooks, creationists fought hard to block their approval. At that time, Wired pointed out that these textbooks are "well-respected, and used widely in US high schools."

The Baton Rouge Advocate reported that in 2010, the state board of education received a large number of complaints that intelligent design wasn't included in textbooks. One vocal opponent, Winston White, complained:

"It is like Charles Darwin and his theory is a saint. You can't touch it."

Winston White's father, Judge Darrell White, is one of the founders of the Louisiana Family Forum, a powerful creationist lobbying group. Judge White echoed his son's sentiments at a board of education hearing. He called evolution "mindless nihilism" and claimed that teaching it in public schools would cause another Columbine shooting. The New Orleans Lens described the scene:

"[White] said one of the Columbine killers wore a shirt that read 'natural selection,' and held up a similar shirt for emphasis, and implied that Baton Rouge might be in danger of a similar massacre."

Yes. You read that right. I was at that hearing and sat in shock as Judge White implied that teaching evolution caused Dylan Klebold to shoot up his school. Creationists in Louisiana suggest that state-approved biology textbooks will lead to mass murder.

When the state board ultimately approved the textbooks – a huge victory for science education – Fox News pointed out that Louisiana "rejected calls by conservatives to include references to the debate over evolution and the religious-based concepts of intelligent design or creationism in state-approved biology textbooks."

It's clear that the opposition to these biology textbooks comes from creationists who are trying to sneak religion into public school classrooms.

Representative Hoffmann, the legislator sponsoring the bill to throw out science textbooks, was one of the sponsors of the state creationism law. He also meddled in the initial adoption process of the science textbooks.

At that time, creationist complaints swamped the state board, which had initially punted the textbooks' approval to a little-known committee that included Representative Hoffmann and his partner-in-creationism, Senator Ben Nevers – another sponsor of the LSEA. (Nevers recently made news by stating that he wanted the United States Supreme Court to reverse its decision to overturn Louisiana's 1981 law that mandated the teaching of creationism.) The pair managed to get themselves appointed leaders of this committee.

The Baton Rouge Advocate noted that Hoffmann argued "the books under review were not consistent with the spirit of the (Louisiana Science Education Act)." Of course, the spirit of the act is to teach creationism to students. What Representative Hoffmann meant is that these textbooks taught evolution and didn't have a trace of intelligent design or creationism, and thus he considers them a problem.

Hoffmann and Nevers voted against these biology textbooks, and they lost. The board of education adopted the textbooks and required evolution be taught in public school science classes, despite their complaints.

That's where Hoffmann's new bill comes in. After losing the fight in 2010, he realized had an uphill battle, because the state board listens to scientists. His bill would take control of textbooks away from the state and give it to friendlier audience – local school boards, who would be able to choose whatever books they want.

Representative Hoffmann claims the current bill isn't his latest salvo in a war against evolution, but given his record and his constituents' complaints, he's reminding me of Shakespeare. The legislator doth protest too much.

It's also worth noting that this bill could harm history education too, by allowing revisionist history textbooks to be used, which has become a problem in our neighboring state of Texas.

I asked the Texas Freedom Network, an organization which defends civil and religious liberties, about revisionist history standards there. Dan Quinn, their communications director reminded me that the people who are attacking evolution nationally are "the same people who took a wrecking ball to the social studies standards." Quinn said:

"[We have] social studies standards in Texas today that question the separation of church and state, challenge the fact that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War and claim that the red baiting tactics of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s were somehow justified."

The Texas Observer said that Texan conservative factions even "recommended removing references to African-American and Latino figures like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from some social-studies standards" because "the curriculum contained an 'overrepresentation of minorities'."

Luckily, that specific push documented failed, but because this bill takes away state oversight from textbook selection, this type of revisionist history could be brought into Louisiana's classrooms with ease.

Representative Hoffmann's bill is bad legislation and a message must be sent to the Louisiana legislature. We have to ask them to reject this bill, and not to allow revisionist history or even more creationism into public schools.

• Editor's note: a previous version of this article misspelled Representative Frank Hoffmann's name and has been corrected accordingly

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