This evening, in St Margaret Ward Roman Catholic high school, Stoke-on-Trent is set to become the first city to sign up to the 10:10 pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 10% during 2010…

… Out in the cavernous main hall, waiting for the bingo to start, members Dave Athersmith and Julie Hulme agree: “We car-share to come here. We’ve all got to do our bit, haven’t we?” John Clowes, a retired ceramic tilemaker of 76 (“There’s tiles of mine in the Houses of Parliament”) has just had his loft insulated, and turns everything off at the mains at night. “It’s the young people you need to worry about,” he says. “Those electronic games. What happened to a kickaround in the street?” (In two days in Stoke, by the way, I met only three people prepared to dismiss climate change as a notion cooked up by a control-crazed government (or as one local put it, “absolute bollocks”). Most confessed to at least some concern.)

It’s conventional wisdom that the stout yeomen of the working classes will have no truck with all this environmental nonsense: conventional wisdom, that is, amongst rightwing or otherwise anti-crusty middle class types. Contra this, the potteries has had its own experience with anthropogenic climate change and its consequences well within living memory. Also, allotments:

The 40-odd families who make up the association’s membership are doing their bit for 10:10, says Anderson. Most now harvest water in butts from their shed and greenhouse roofs, rather than use mains. “And quite a few are looking into using small wind turbines or solar panels, rather than paraffin, to heat and light the greenhouses in winter. Also, we recycle everything here; nothing gets taken off the site in a skip, nothing goes for landfill. We’ll make our 10% target.”

Of course, the more the membership grows, the less friends and family have to shop: Anderson alone supplies his 89-year-old mother and her eight children, 31 grandchildren, 64 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. That’s a lot fewer trips to the supermarket.

It’s not just trips to the shops at issue in a place like Stoke. While it’s unlikely that people will absolutely need whatever food they get from allotments, it’s also likely that a lot of it comes in very handy. Overall, the article reads like a city trying to organise itself around principles of economy rather than the environment as such, partly in the hope trhat maybe someday some jobs will come of it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was this approach which sustained environmentalism in the future, especially if the recovery we’re supposedly on the verge of concentrates less wealth upwards and leaves more tranches of the population behind.

This Bill will set out the rights we enjoy and the responsibilities we owe as members of society.

A Bill of Rights is a constitutional document. Constitutions can be more or less permissive in the rights they afford the citizen. Most have a mechanism by which more rights can be added, or which override previously accepted rights. Offhand, I can’t think of a constitution which sets out obligations to the state as a basic condition of citizenship, on which the enjoyment of rights is conditional.

Or as Jack Straw explains it here:

In a democracy, rights tend to be ‘vertical’ – guaranteed to the individual by the state to constrain the otherwise overweening power of the state. Responsibilities, on the other hand, are more ‘horizontal’ – they are the duties we owe to each other, to our ‘neighbour’ in the New Testament sense. But they have a degree of verticality about them too, because we owe duties to the community as a whole.

…with the state being the means of enforcing responsibilities to the “community as a whole”, after deciding what those responsibilities are.

There’s a traditional way of doing this. Parliament decides what we shouldn’t do and passes a law prohibiting it, or it legalizes some previously illicit form of behaviour or activity. We obey the law and mobilize politically to change it if we don’t like what it says. But the government seems to have more on its mind than that. From back in 2006:

“Should we be aiming for a more explicit statement of the contract that covers both the service offered by the public sector (what is in and what is not) and what is expected from citizens (beyond paying taxes and obeying the law)”

 Apparently the answer is yes. The traditional debate along the communitarian/libertarian axis has concerned what actually constitutes a right and how many of them there should be. A right itself is inalienable. You possess it by virtue of being human. Once you conflate rights with responsibilities, then you abandon the idea that there is any such thing as an inalienable right at all. Welcome to the Bill of Obligations and Privileges.

I give no credence whatsoever to rumours that Senator Barack Hussein Obama believes himself to be the twelfth imam. And I have no time at all for those who put about the scurrilous rumour that Senator Hussein secretly intends to appoint Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as Vice President. But, sadly, these rumours are now in the public domain. Isn’t it time my esteemed colleague Senator Saddam cleared them up once and for all?

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My esteemed colleague Senator BinLaden Obama has made forthright and eloquent denials of the rumours that he believes himself to be the twelfth imam and that he intends secretly to appoint Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as his running mate. Yet it cannot be denied that rumours that Senator Hussein Bin Laden Saddam Mullah Omar believes himself to be the twelfth imam and intends to appoint Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as co-emir of Americastan remain within the public domain.

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Some say that the Holy Qu’ran urges believers to tell the truth at all times. Others say that it permits dissembling in the furtherance of religious objectives. Wherever the truth lies, we cannot fail to be impressed by the forthright and eloquent way in which Senator Allah has denied rumours that he believes himself to be the twelfth imam and intends to appoint Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as co-emir of Americastan with particular responsibility for the imposition of Sharia law. Yet, regrettably, these rumours persist.

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There comes a time when we must ask ourselves: can we trust the future of our party and our great nation to a man dogged by damaging rumours – rumours of the twelfth imam coming to deliver vengeance to unbelievers with fire and sword – rumours that simply refuse to go away?

You read it here first.

The Porter view has become fashionable because it allows the middle classes to pretend to be victims, too. But it is decadence for mainly privileged people to obsess over imaginary Big Brother attacks on themselves, when others all around them are suffering badly from neglect by the state – or sometimes from real aggression by government. Indignation is precious, not to be squandered on illusory threats, but saved for real injustices.

Blimey: how to unpick this lot? I like the idea that there’s a finite lump of indignation which has to be saved for special occasions, non-renewable and somehow outside the self. The lump of indignation fallacy, you might say. I like the idea as well that you’re supposed to balance your income against your freedom.

I’ve always been mildly annoyed by Polly’s self-presentation as the reborn conscience of Labour when her active political life was spent in an organization trying to destroy it and replace it, to wit the SDP. She even stuck around for a time when it dwindled to being a kind of cult of David Owen. But I think that does give us a clue to her particular attitude to the state.

SDP types always presented themselves as the voice of moderation, but their actual objection to both left and right really seemed to lie in the fact that these uncouth barbarians actually wanted to force the state to do things; that they thought of it as a means not an end. No, says Polly, leave my precious state alone. It is my good intentions made manifest.

Her argument seems to be that the state may interfere with your liberties, but that simply proves that it has the power to meet your needs. Conversely, the state may choose not to meet your needs, but to protest about its withdrawal of your liberties means that these needs will never be met. It never seems to occur to her that the preservation of freedom is a precondition for the ability to get the state to meet whatever needs you think should be met. It’s not a coincidence that nearly all states with political liberty are to a greater or lesser extent welfare states. People always vote themselves at least some of the keys to the treasury, and behind those votes there has historically been the kind of political agitation that only free societies permit. If you want a place where the individual pays for everything from primary school onwards, by contrast, try China.