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To allow only women to apply for some parliamentary constituencies is a bad idea that deserves support. Discrimination ought not to be countered by discrimination. Prestigious jobs in public life should be awarded on merit. Local parties should be free to choose. First-rate women have made it in politics anyway, even to the <a href="http://wwww.lpearls.com">freshwater pearl</a> office of prime minister. It would be better to have all-talented-people shortlists, would it not?

These are all serious objections to the idea that shortlists should be reserved for women. And yet David Cameron’s conversion to the idea deserves our support. This newspaper has been tough on the Conservatives because the party has not been hospitable to women candidates. It is only fair to acknowledge that all-women shortlists, despite the objections to them, are a serious attempt to address the problem.

The argument for this bad idea is that it is a minor, and <a href="http://wwww.lpearls.com">freshwater pearl jewelry</a> temporary, infringement of meritocracy with evidently just consequences. The Labour Party introduced all-women shortlists 14 years ago because talented women were not winning open selections. Procedures dominated by male trade unionists were sexist, sometimes explicitly and sometimes subtly. The change meant that many more women joined the Labour benches and more women served in Cabinet.

For whatever reason, Conservative associations have preferred male candidates. In the 2005 Parliament, 17 out of 196 Tory MPs were women. If the Conservative Party wins a <a href="http://wwww.lpearls.com">pearl necklace</a> majority in the next Parliament, there will be, after the current round of selections, 60 Tory women. That is still not enough. All-women shortlists can help and that makes a bad idea a good idea.

The second round of the presidential election will, hopefully, be less blatantly rigged than the first, but it will not by any objective criteria be free and fair. If it were, President Karzai would probably win, as he probably would have done in a first round. This has less to do with his talents than it does with his ethnicity as a Pashtun.

Most Afghans vote tribally and Pashtuns are the <a href="http://wwww.lpearls.com">freshwater pearl</a> largest group. In the southern districts where security is at its worst, turnout was woeful and the Taleban actively kept people from the polls. Here Pashtuns are a sizeable majority. For disenfranchised Pashtuns, to be ruled by another Pashtun may be just about bearable. Being ruled by Dr Abdullah may not be. Although his father was Pashtun, he is a veteran of the Northern Alliance, and perceived as a Tajik, from Afghanistan’s second-largest group. His Cabinet would be likely to be Tajik-dominated, and he would be a very easy man for the Taleban to mobilise against.

Could it happen? It is unlikely. Dr Abdullah’s bedrock of <a href="http://wwww.lpearls.com">freshwater pearl jewelry</a> support is in the north, where the Afghan winter may already be biting. His success would also require the construction of a coalition of minor Pashtun parties, and there is no indication that such a thing would be possible.

This is for the best. Dr Abdullah must surely have a future near the helm of Afghanistan, but his victory in these elections could divide the country. The return of Mr Karzai to office, ideally in some form of power-sharing arrangement, is not just the more likely outcome, but also, depressing as it may sound, the more desirable. It was important for Dr Abdullah to <a href="http://www.iepearl.com">wholesale pearl earrings</a> have the chance to replace Mr Karzai but it is also important that he does not succeed.

Hamid Karzai deserves some credit. His supporters were not the only people to have conspired to rig the presidential election in August. They just managed to rig it better than anybody else.

His decision now to allow a run-off vote between himself and his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah was an important move and is a personal gamble. It was also the right move to make. In a <a href="http://www.iepearl.com">pearl jewelry</a> putative democracy such as Afghanistan, the election process is as important as the winner. Thanks to Mr Karzai’s concession, that process has inched closer towards respectabil-ity. Now we must think about the result.

Mr Karzai is by no means the ideal person to lead Afghanistan. His Government’s integrity has been questionable — the Transparency International index of corruption ranks Afghanistan at 176th out of 180 countries — and some of the laws it has passed have been downright objectionable, such as the one <a href="http://www.iepearl.com">pearl jewelry wholesale</a> that condoned marital rape.

The current President is a frequent impediment to the interests of his country, and some of the alliances that he has made, particularly with warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, would turn even the strongest of stomachs. His chief rival by contrast emerges from the quagmire of the past few months with much to recommend him.
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Dr Abdullah has done well to rein in the unrest that could have been fomented in the <a href="http://www.iepearl.com">wholesale pearl earrings</a> north by August’s rigged election. He has campaigned on an admirable platform for reform of Afghanistan’s moribund Constitution, advocating a prime ministerial system and elected provincial governors. And yet, if he were to win, Afghanistan would have a problem.

Second, the panel and David Dimbleby should nevertheless make sure that they are well briefed on Mr Griffin’s many unsavoury comments on topics such as immigration (“The ultimate aim for me and the BNP remains an all-white Britain”), Hitler (“Yes, Adolf went a bit too far”) and the Holocaust (“It is well known that the chimneys from the gas chambers at Auschwitz are fake”). Mr Griffin likes to travel light, leaving his past behind. Often he is allowed to <a href="http://www.cnwpearl.com">pearl jewelry</a> do so, by interlocutors who do not know much about him. Tonight, he should not be able to get away with this trick.

This leads to a third point. There is a tension within the BNP between those — like Mr Griffin — who crave respectability and want to broaden the party’s appeal and the hard core, who wish to be ideologically pure. One of the best chances to destroy the party lies in increasing this tension and hoping that it <a href="http://www.cnwpearl.com">pearl jewelry wholesale</a> ultimately splits the fascist movement, as it did in the 1980s. The BNP leader will have a dilemma tonight. He will see this as a golden opportunity to enter the mainstream, but will also be acutely aware that his activists and internal rivals will be watching. The panel and Mr Dimbleby will need to exploit this predicament deftly.

All of which means that tonight will be a testing one. It <a href="http://www.cnwpearl.com">pearl necklace</a> will test the BBC, which having chosen to invite Mr Griffin now needs to make sure that their programme generates light as well as heat. It will test the panel, who will need to do much more than simply turn up and look outraged. Most of all, it will test the audience at home and in the studio. By tomorrow, we will know more about the maturity of our democracy and our multi-ethnic society.

Has anybody read that Nazis are going to march in New Jersey, you know?” says Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan. “We should go down there, get some guys together, you know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.” His friend responds: “There was this devastating satirical piece on that on the oped page of the Times. It is devastating.” But Allen is having none of it: “Well, a satirical piece in the <a href="http://www.inflatable-wholesaler.com">inflatable</a> Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.”

It is not hard, on the day when Nick Griffin is due to appear on the BBC Question Time, to understand Allen’s position. To dignify the British National Party with a seat on a debating panel hardly seems to “get right to the point”. Yet it never seemed to occur to Allen that his comparative advantage over fascists lies in writing satire rather than using baseball bats. And as democrats, our comparative advantage over Mr Griffin definitely lies in debating with him rather than fighting his party on the streets. For this reason, if none other, the BBC’s invitation to Mr Griffin should be welcomed.

Yet it would be complacent to regard victory in <a href="http://www.inflatable-wholesaler.com">inflatable tent</a> debate against the BNP leader as being assured. Mr Griffin is not as clever as he thinks he is. His reaction to criticism by General Sir Mike Jackson — which was, essentially, that the general would be hanged come the revolution — shows that he is better attuned to the audience in right- wing meeting rooms than he is to the opinion of the broader public. Nevertheless, he has had years of practice in giving slippery and semi-plausible answers to aggressive questions. And he is likely to be on his mettle. He has been preparing for this edition of Question Time all his adult life.

So how should panel, audience and editors <a href="http://www.inflatable-wholesaler.com">inflatable slides</a> deport themselves? First, they should try to remember, however hard it may be, that while Mr Griffin has been invited on the show, the programme is not about him. He is the leader of a very small party with very little support. As far as possible, the questions and the answers should not be determined entirely by his presence.