A helpful Commons attendant once explained the Budget debate to me: "It goes on for days and they all say the same thing."
Instead, let's board the House Points time machine and set the dial for 1911. We are going to see where the current controversy began. Lloyd George and Charles Masterman are putting the National Health Insurance Bill through parliament.
The doctors are not keen. Sir James Barr, chairman of the BMA, believes it will "destroy individual effort and increase the spirit of dependence," and that "only loafers and wastrels will benefit".
The British Medical Journal says that if you wanted to abolish the medical profession it would be "hardly possible to conceive a scheme better calculated to achieve that end than this present Bill". Letters to the Lancet call it "a bold and sinister attempt to degrade our calling" and "an attempt to capture and enslave our profession".
Nor are the newspapers enthusiastic. The Daily Mail has declared its opposition to "the hateful task of collecting this unpopular tax thus thrust upon Mr Lloyd George's hapless victims". For, "it is not only 3d a week we shall lose, but our independence, self-respect and character". (No, the Mail doesn't change much. Sometimes I wonder if it was worth buying this thing.) And a reader says: "If the Insurance Bill becomes law it will be advisable for us to leave England."
Meanwhile, the Evening News is warning that "we shall never boast of freedom again if we let this measure past," and writing feelingly of "these days of highly paid servants".
The cost of employer insurance for domestic staff is uppermost in many minds. Five aristocrats have founded a League of Protest and called a public meeting. As we arrive, Lady Desart is reaching her peroration:
"This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror."
Later, when the government sends servants a circular about the new scheme, the headmaster of Eton will accuse it of "interfering with home life to an unprecedented degree".
And if you listen carefully you can hear the Conservative leader pledging to repeal the act as soon as he comes into office.
No, it's not Iain Duncan Smith. It's Andrew Bonar Law. But I understand your confusion.
Paddy Ashdown goes off to Bosnia-Herzegovina next month as the new High Representative of the Peace Implementation Council. Once there he will have the power to pass laws by decree and dismiss elected politicians – even prime ministers and presidents – if he thinks they are being obstructive.
It is a great deal more power than our combined efforts ever won him in Britain, and he takes all our good wishes with him.
For Liberals have always been internationalists, and we have always supported the concept of international law. Ever since Mr Gladstone settled with the United States over the sinking of the Alabama (really, if you are not prepared to do the reading there is no point coming to these seminars) we have sought to establish justice between states. We have wanted them to settle their disputes by negotiation rather than through war.
In recent years a new doctrine has grown up, and it is one many Liberals have supported. Human rights have become the basis of foreign policy, and governments and politicians who do not measure up have been seen as illegitimate. Slobodan Milosevic is on trial in The Hague, and many wish that General Pinochet had been tried too. (House Points would have forced him to stay on the Wentworth Estate permanently: "Not another round with Bruce Forsyth, please.")
But who decides when states have failed? Liberals have traditionally supported the United Nations, but the rise of the human rights doctrine has coincided with a decline in its authority. These days it is the USA and her allies who call the shots. Paddy's new employer, the Peace Implementation Council, is a self-selected group of largely Western states and agencies. This is not so surprising in a world with only one superpower. America's military spending is greater than that of the next eight largest powers combined.
We are all partial in our moral judgements, we all have material interests. This is true of governments as well as people, and the United States is certainly no exception as its policy in the Middle East shows.
To call the West's current approach to international affairs "lynch-mob justice" is unfair, but there is something of the Wild West possee about it. And somehow the fact that Tony Blair is riding with them in a white hat does not settle all our doubts.
We don't see much of Tony Blair at Westminster these days. Having solved Britain's problems in his first term he is working on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, when he tries to be statesmanlike he sounds as though he is about to burst into tears.
But where do his ideas come from? The other day I watched a video which unexpectedly cast some light on that question.
If… was made in 1968 by Lindsay Anderson and starred a young Malcolm McDowell. It is set in a public school and has all the elements you would expect (i.e. homoeroticism and a good caning scene). Less expectedly, it ends with the governors, staff and parents being gunned down from rooftops by rebellious pupils.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Nigel de Gruchy.
You always had to be 16 to really appreciate If…, but time has not been kind to it. Even in 1968, the idea that a public school made a good symbol for wider society must have looked creaky. And an age in which school massacres really happen is bound to see the film in a different light.
But the headmaster charcater continues to fascinate. Some of his lines are strangely familiar. Take: "Britain is a powerhouse of ideas, experiment, imagination. On everything from pop music to pig breeding, from atom power stations to mini skirts. That is the challenge we have got to meet." Or: "Changes are happening so fast that even as I speak these words are out of date."
That's right. New Labour and the Third Way were born here.
Maybe the spin doctors have not been watching this film, but the platitudes Anderson was lampooning more than 30 years ago have resurfaced at the heart of this government. The young Blair, we know, went to Fettes – the Eton of Scotland. It is easy to imagine him as one of the simpering boys who accompany the head in If….
By the way, in the final scene the headmaster appeals to the rebels on the roof: "Boys, boys, I understand you. Listen to reason and trust me. Trust me."
He is shot.
This week I want to talk to you about carrots. Look harmless, don't they? Nice feathery tops. Tapering orange bodies. The sort of thing any rabbit might nibble. But beware.
Before the Commons rose for Easter, there was the usual debate where backbenchers champion favourite causes. Second up was our own Paul Tyler on the dangers of organophosphates.
Developed in Germany as a nerve agent during World War II, these pesticides are widely used in household products and (at government insistence) agriculture. They have been the centre of health concern since the 1970s, with farmworkers complaining of mystery illnesses and fatigue. Some scientists even suspect they played a role in the genesis of BSE. Tyler chairs the all-party organophosphate group. It sounds like we need one.
But it was not farmworkers under discussion: it was vegetable eaters. The Food Standards Agency had just issued guidance that fruit and vegetables need not be washed before eating to protect us from pesticide residues. To Tyler and Angela Browning, who intervened to support him, this was an outrage. The agency had caved in to commercial pressures and reversed its previous advice.
I wonder. Do we need government to tell us to wash our vegetables? Can't we work out for ourselves that grit does nothing for a navarin of lamb? And ministers get involved too. It used to be Browning herself, and Stephen Twigg offered his views when replying to the debate. Versatile fellow this Twigg. First he saw off Michael Portillo and now he's an expert on parsnip hygiene.
And peeling? Tyler invoked the preventive principle, which he rendered as "if in doubt, don't". Again, I wonder. We know that a high-fibre diet is good for you but have much less evidence that pesticide traces are harmful. If this campaign scares us off carrots and makes us reach for the chicken nuggets instead, we will be less healthy as a result.
"Just don't do it" is the motto of our insecure age. But if earlier generations had adopted it we would enjoy little of the technology or medicine we take for granted. I sometimes think the greatest achievement of the Green movement has been to make people terrified of the natural world – carrots and all.