Transport for London have intervened to block advertisements promoting ‘gay conversions’ that were due to run on the side of London’s buses next week.

The adverts were part of a campaign by fundamentalist Christians to promote ‘reparative therapy’ which they believe can ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.

One thing about the gay gene conjecture I don’t like is that it makes for weedy politics. The essential proposition is ‘don’t blame me, I can’t help it’. It is, I suppose, suitable for a movement which now aspires to nothing more radical than the right to get married like everyone else.

There’s clearly no obligation on anyone to be any more radical than they actually are just because they ride the other bus, and, if female, get off at Hebden Bridge. On the other hand, this is one of those occasions when a bit of radical vim and vigour might do some good because it’s one of those issues where more speech could be the answer. Let the evangelicals put their ads on buses. And let the gays go unto the lamaseries of the evangelicals and proseletize under the slogan ‘we’re gay because we want to be and it’s fucking great’ or something equally suave, and perhaps hand out illustrated leaflets. By the time the dust settled I bet you’d have far more transfers from the Jesus column to Sodom than vice versa.

So, it's parenting that's responsible for last year's riots. Speaking in that capacity, there's a pretty good chance I'd have been proud of a kid of mine who took part in the 1981 riots. Last year's riots, not so much. But then I don't really know. Maybe the political aspect of 1981 seems good to me now because I'm missing my youth, and maybe the greed and  violence shown last year seems that way as a function of my middle age. Such is the condition of being a parent.

Having said that, after seeing the justice on offer after last year's riots there is absolutely no way I'd give my kid up to the cops if I knew he was involved last year, provided his involvement was limited to potential property crime. You have a responsibility to make your kids face justice, but also a responsibility to protect them from revenge. It is, in fact, the same responsibility.

I’ve said before here that Crumpsall, where I live, has a relatively low rate of unemployment for Manchester but the highest rate of underemployment in the city: lots of families with two part time jobs or one low paid full time and one part time. I mentioned this in connection to the payday loan storefronts that have proliferated locally since 2010 and the sense they gave of a neighbourhood circling the plughole.

One thing that hasn’t been much mentioned in budget coverage are the cuts in working family tax credits announced in 2010 but due to take effect this April. It’s these in particular which are really going to get the drain gurgling round here, especially since the raising of the tax threshold will dump more people into an income level where far more money will be taken from them because they’ve gone over the trigger limit. Being a cynic, I wonder if that wonderful measure was done partly in the expectation that this would happen. Well, the local Peacock’s clothing store shut down a few weeks back, so there’s another storefront available for our lovable local vulture lenders.

 It’s different from living in Hulme: that was a neighbourhood that had already hit bottom, and there was a kind of resilience, even the occasional bout of optimism, available from knowing things couldn’t actually get any worse. We’ve gone to the dogs. And here they are: the dogs. Nice doggie. Woof. Of course those were the days when it was believed that jobs were created through the concentration of capital in the organisation of the firm or through state agency. In the absence of those things, you got the dole. These days, it’s fashionable to believe that jobs are created by goading the jobless into spectacular acts of willpower and performative humility: so I guess the folk down in M15 are being shovelled wholesale into the maw of A4E these days.

But it’s something else living in a working neighbourhood, which in normal times flails along with its collective head just above the water, being gradually and through the systematic application of government policy suffering a kind of collective punishment; and the organic commerce which had evolved to serve it beginning to go down with it. The top end of Cheetham Hill Road was always low-margin.  Shops would come and go, but there always seemed to be somebody else ready to have a try. These days it’s looking more than a bit gap toothed.  It’s an odd feeling watching financial repression happen around you; like living in the middle of a crime in progress.

The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the Communist quite unquestionable. “He who works not, neither shall he eat.” And as all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labor service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labor Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic re-birth of the country, have problems of compulsory labor service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labor power – an almost inexhaustible reservoir – and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization.

You'll note that this is much more systematic than Chris 'Lev Davidovich' Grayling's current plan to help out his Party's business mates by giving them free labour underwritten by the taxpayer. On the other hand, Leon and friends did pay his conscripts, at least nominally.