We Liberal Democrats are accused of wanting to spend more money on everything. So here's an idea for saving it. Close the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Demolish it. And, if ploughing the ground with salt is a bit extreme, then at least sell the filing cabinets.
Enter MEMBER OF THE BEVERIDGE GROUP: "What we need is an ethic of public service."
But this department doesn't do anything. Take Monday's question time. There they sat. Tessa Jowell ("We don't come here to have fun, children"). Kim Howells (art school radical and Marxist union official turned Blairite yes man). Richard Caborn (Old Labour beardie minister of sport: doesn't like tennis – or much else).
Why? These days major cultural and sporting projects are financed from lottery funds. Rightly, these decisions are made at arm's length from the government. So ministers have little to say about them. All they can do is welcome British success in the Oscars or mourn Ben Hollioake.
Tim Yeo asked about digital broadcasting. Everyone agrees that it is the future and that its success depends on competition. So where do the travails of ITV digital leave us? Howells first said he could not possibly speculate on things like that. When Yeo persisted, he accused him of undermining important companies. So that's one salary we could save.
If you are not convinced, look at his views on the distribution of music. Seizing on the flimsy pretext of a question from Mike Gapes (he does, he does), Howells declared that a great part of society (that's us, the voters) has a strange attitude to the stealing of intellectual property rights through the Internet. The distributors have to convince us that there will be no music in future unless this practice is stopped.
He was supported by Pete Wishart, the Scottish Nationalist from North Tayside. As House Points first saw Wishart at Portree Community Centre on Skye where he was playing with the band Runrig, this was not so surprising.
But I doubt if anyone without a vested interest will believe Howells' claim that it is only global media corporations that stand between us and the death of music. If all his department can do is act as their cheerleaders, we really should close it down.
There are some debates in which both sides are insufferable. The smacking of children is a good example. Monday's discussion of hunting was another.
Suddenly Conservatives who happily voted through Clause 28 emerged as supporters of minority rights. People who shrugged off the collapse of coal and steel claimed to lie awake worrying about the loss of a few hundred rural jobs.
On the other side, MPs who routinely ignore majority opinion on hanging demanded the end of hunting because that is what most people want. And those who have never said a word against factory farming became terribly interested in animal welfare.
The most depressing thing about Monday was the division it revealed in British society. Not the divide between town and country, which is largely an invention of the pro-hunting lobby – Colin Pickthall, in whose West Lancashire constituency the Waterloo Cup is held, pointed out that most hare coursing enthusiasts are from the city.
No, it was the class divide. To Pickthall and many of his colleagues, people go hunting because they are wicked. He asked why they don't just say: "I like hunting animals and, even more, I like seeing them killed." The idea that most hunt followers never see a fox killed from one year to the next does not occur to them. It reminds you of the way Margaret Thatcher demonised football supporters.
Where were the foxes in all this? Tony "Becontree" Banks complained that some hunts put out carcasses to feed them. They had even been introduced to the Isle of Wight to provide sport. Nor would any animal who happened to be in the public gallery have been encouraged by Bill Etherington from Sunderland North. He told the House we could be sure that foxes would be kept down somehow. After all, we no longer have wolves and bears in this country.
Macaulay famously wrote that the Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. There was a lot of that attitude around in Monday's debate.
Will there be more or fewer foxes if hunting is banned? Will they die more or less horribly? Few speeches cast any light on the questions that matter to the fox in the street.
There is no polite way of saying this: Tony Banks has gone mad. Utterly mad. He's Becontree — two stops past Barking.
On Friday, in one 20-minute speech, he called for the following. Paramilitary patrols of railway stations. Routine arming of police officers. Compulsory community service for all teenagers. And a compulsory DNA register, compiled as part of the birth registration process.
Yes, Banks gone from the loony left to the loony right. But he is an amusing fellow and a friend to fluffy animals. He also supports the legalisation of drugs, which must make him an honorary Liberal Democrat. So let's try to take his contribution seriously.
Behind it was an aching nostalgia for the certainties of the Britain in which he grew up. "There was more respect in those days, not just for the law and the police, but among people for each other and for the communities in which they lived."
This golden age when everyone was neighbourly and bobbies clipped youngsters around the ear always slips a little further back in time when you try to pin it down. Pick up a newspaper from 1950s, and it will be full of scares about American horror comics and the rise in delinquency since the War. But it's hard deny that Britain has become a more violent place since Banks' boyhood.
You can blame it on the Thatcher years. Bus conductors, park keepers and railway guards disappeared in the name of economy. We even lost our red telephone boxes. The result was a lonely public world with plenty of CCTV cameras but few friendly official faces.
But we liberals have played a part too. Because we have a keen sense that authority be misused, we tend to distrust all authority figures. We are suspicious, not just of the police, but of teachers and parents too. Yet children must have discipline, and if it does not come in these benign forms it will come from elsewhere. So we should not be that surprised by the modern glut of welfare professionals or Jack Straw's curfews.
So let's pause before calling Banks mad. After all, they said Galileo was mad. They said Einstein was mad. They said my Uncle Albert was mad.
Mind you, he was mad.
This column is given over to the speech of the week. On Tuesday Plaid Cyrmru had the one debate they are allowed to initiate each year. They chose the subject of the steel industry (it's a metal we used to make in Britain, children) and the Mittal affair. Adam Price from East Carmarthen and Dinefwr led for them. Here are some edited highlights.
"The Prime Minister said that LNM was a British company, which it is not. Those at Downing street argued that it was owned by a British parent company – another false statement. The Prime Minister's official spokesperson said that Mr Mittal was a British citizen – he is not – and that the donation came after the election, but it actually came before. It was said that Mr. Mittal had given money to the Tories – another untruth that had to be retracted. It was claimed that the letter was signed after the deal was agreed – not true; a late bid from the French company triggered the letter. It was said that the letter was drafted and signed unchanged – wrong again. The original draft was written on 19 July including the words 'my friend Lakshmi Mittal', which Jonathan Powell removed to avoid embarrassing the Prime Minister."
"We have been assured that the Prime Minister had not met Mr. Mittal bilaterally and did not know about the donation. Again, that is untrue. Mr. Mittal, according to his official spokeswoman, had met the Prime Minister on several occasions, most recently at a celebration dinner for 15 of Labour's biggest donors just weeks after the general election. Four weeks later, the Prime Minister signed the letter."
"Finally, it was claimed that the Prime Minister writes frequent letters to heads of state on behalf of businesses, but when the BBC checked the list of countries, not one of them could confirm ever having received such a letter, and the Government have refused to provide any example, citing that familiar excuse – commercial confidentiality. Ten lines of defence have been uttered by the Prime Minister's official spokesman, but later retracted in one of the most appallingly inept cover-ups that this country has ever seen."
Wonderful stuff. It makes you feel like burning someone's weekend cottage down.
Britain has gone curling crazy. The nation is entranced by this combination of bowls and housework staged on ice. And we are all familiar with its terminology too. ("Has Hamish got the hammer?" "No, it's just the way his kilt falls.")
But judging by Monday's questions to Tessa Jowell, curlers should treat offers of government help with a long broom. Not just because Jowell resembles a headmistress who won't let children near the ice in case it is slippery. And not just because she would insist on talking about "the curling community".
For if the Wembley experience is a guide, things will go like this. Jowell announces a new national curling centre, to be financed with lottery money. Impressive bids arrive from Scotland, but a London venue is chosen. Hotels are planned for the site and then scrapped, that nice Trevor Brooking goes on the radio every day, but no foundations are dug.
And if it is ever built? On Monday Jowell said of Wembley: "I made it clear in December that there is a difference between being athletics capable and actually being able to host athletics events." Apply that to curling, and I think it means that even if you get a building it won't have any ice.
Amateurism in providing facilities is a scandal, but among competitors it is immensely attractive. One of the best things about curling is the way the game is obviously played for fun. To the commercial world sport is just another way of making money, and most politicians treat it as a form of therapy for youngsters or a continuation of the Empire by other means.
If Britain does want imperial glory, we will have to be more cunning. We were told that Salt Lake City was our most successful games since 1936. No one mentioned the way we got our gold that year. A team of Canadian ice hockey players with Scottish ancestry was recruited to play as Great Britain and duly won the tournament.
Which suggests a plan. We should tell Shane Warne we are prepared to forgive his great grandfather's spot of sheep stealing and set about proving that van Nistelrooy is an old Wiltshire name. We can't leave it all to the curlers.