21st December:

It's the Winter soltice today - a time when people all over Britain will seek out ancient standing stones to dance naked around. For 2 minutes. Before running back inside for a warming bowl of soup.

Reports today suggest that UK historian David Irving may soon be released from prison in Austria after serving 10 months of a 3 year sentence for denying the Holocaust.

11 countries in the world currently have laws against Holocaust denial, but the UK has traditionally resisted calls to create such legislation. And with good reason, I think.

On the face of it, Mr. Irving is part of a small group of people who have suggested that the scale of the Holocaust was, to put it bluntly, grossly exaggerated. Whilst the vast majority of people, your congenial host included, may find these views unpalatable, I question the wisdom of (and need for) legislation that makes these views punishable by a prison sentence.

Let’s face it, whether 2 or 6 or 26 million people died in concentration camps, I don‘t think any reasonable person would deny that it was a dark moment in humanity’s history and should never be allowed to happen again. Nor do I think that the same reasonable people would believe that the views held by Mr. Irving are representative of the public at large. Is it not therefore sufficient to simply write off Mr. Irving’s views as being unworthy of our attention and let him spout off in the corner facing the wall? Do we have to make an example of him and throw him in jail? It’s a potentially worrying affair…

I’m also a little unnerved by those people who have demanded the most punitive of sentences for Mr. Irving and those who may share his views. What do we achieve by sending a man to jail for 10 years for expressing an opinion? Is this justice?

Certainly, those of us who have never experienced war or ethnic cleansing first-hand cannot begin to imagine how terrible it must be. It is perhaps a little too easy for people of my generation to say ‘forgive and forget’ never having had our lives touched in this way. However, our generation is our generation, and many of us do question the wisdom of jailing Holocaust deniers just as much as we question the value of chasing octogenarian ex-members of the Nazi party across South America 60 years after the war in the quest for ‘justice’.

Many Jewish people will have found Mr. Irving’s views offensive. Many Muslim people were offended by cartoons that appeared in a certain Danish newspaper. I am offended by Pete Doherty. How do we rank 'offensivness' and how do we decide when legal intervention is required and what the nature of that intervention should be?

Apart from deporting Pete Doherty, of course. That’s a no-brainer.