Tough love is the last thing we need right now

"Tough love" cropped up in Christmas Eve's Birds of a Feather - which probably indicates that it's truly arrived. It comes from America, and therapy: when you're sick of your wastrel teenagers, you no longer give them money to go and get stoned, you tellthem never to speak to you again. Camille Paglia claimed to believe in tough love before launching a stream of invective against her dear friend Madonna: "When she speaks she sounds stupid. She has a megalomania to be great in every area. I coul d have saved that book Sex in three hours." Sometimes a person could do without being loved toughly.

It isn't as if tough love has a track record: Kurt Cobain's friends threatened to abandon him if he didn't check into detox, but was he bothered? He was so much not bothered that he had to be kidnapped by Nirvana's guitarist, and even then he managed to buy a shotgun before leaving Seattle. We all know what followed; a generation is still in mourning. But none of this has deterred the politicians who have popularised tough love - first, to characterise Bill Clinton's domestic policies, latter ly to describe Labour's attempts to rationalise welfare without hurting the recipients of child benefit and mortgage interest tax-relief. They like its oxymoronic appeal to the haves and have-nots, and imagine we'll all hear only the bit we want to hear.

But when you think back to Beveridge's sonorous phrases: "Want is only one of five giants on the road of reconstruction . . . the others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness" and compare these with the Beavis and Butthead utterances of modern po liticians, "heh heh . . . tough love," it's scarcely surprising there's no feel-good factor.

PAUL Johnson last week applauded the Government's plan for a Best of British conference at which we can show off to the rest of the world (talk about desperation); but warned we must pick the right things to boast about. Chief among them, he suggested, should be the English language. Fond of English as I am, its fecundity and reach are no longer some kind of tribute to Britain. Gone are the days when Wordsworth gave the world "pedestrian" or J S Mill "utilitarianism". We're still making up words, but for ourselves: Americans have resisted the temptation to bonk, and Australians wouldn't know a luvvie if one kissed them. We, by contrast, have acquired political correctness, all sorts of nasty things from Hell and tough love.

When we were still giving the world words, we specialised in the muscularly practical: wellingtons, cardigans and sandwiches. The Americans offer two types of verbal import: the macho and the wry. The British disdain the former: we're too nice, frankly, to talk of people as "humanware", or "prioritising" when we mean having priorities, or "buzz-groups" for groups talking. But the wry words are a joy, and should shut up all those old bores who disapprove of neologisms. I am fond, in all senses, of grossing out (to eat huge amounts), and sad, as in "what a sad haircut", and seagulls, as in those well-travelled executives who "come in, make a lot of noise, crap on everything in sight, then fly away".

THIS MONTH the European Human Rights Commission will consider kinky sex, deciding whether the British Government must answer two test cases brought by three men and two women who claim their freedom to engage in consensual sado-masochistic acts has been undermined following a House of Lords ruling (in the Operation Spanner case) that it's criminal to leave more than a transient or trifling mark on another person's body.

All very well, except that when the Law Commission came to draft a statute, it exempted sports injuries, even though sportsmen seem constantly to be in intensive care - thanks to other sportsmen accidentally on purpose treading on their heads. Disciplineof children was also excluded, suggesting that it's fine to leave marks on a child who doesn't want to be slapped about, but not an adult who does. What was really being punished, it seems, was homosexuality - a point made openly by one of the judges who said he hoped a stint in jail would turn the men heterosexual.

Even being kissed against your will is revolting: no sexual act, and no extenuating circumstance makes coercion acceptable. But, equally, there's no evidence that people who want to stick safety pins though the genitals of someone else who is longing to have a safety pin stuck in their bottom poses any risk to society at all.

THIS IS the season for reviews of the year, and quizzes to make you feel guilty about not having read them properly. I think I've got the pancreases sorted out now: it was Dennis Potter's that was called Rupert, and Gillian Taylforth who said her boyfriend's had to be relieved with a lot of bending about in Range Rovers. It's also the season for reading horoscopes and planning how this year is going to be better informed/less of a mess than last year. According to one, I can expect unprecedented accomplishments in areas I have never previously considered. I have considered most areas, so this would have to be something like mud-wrestling or plumbing. Or party-going: I was shocked to discover I wasn't at a single one of Harper's and Queen's parties of the year.

Where was I in June when the beau monde was eating "exquisite crab claws with chilli mayonnaise and cod roe sauce, followed by strawberries dipped in melted chocolate"? Only one event sounded like anything I'd attended, April's reeling party at which allfood "was on paper plates, put in a black plastic bag afterwards". This sounded remarkably like my son's birthday party. Except that the reeling party took a ferry to Calais at 4am to watch the unveiling of a statue to Emma Hamilton, and eve ryone at myson's birthday party was in bed by 9.30pm, shattered.