Eerier things have happened, I’ve no doubt, but my Saturday Ramble column written yesterday and titled, What if Labour were to win? is eerie enough for a Sunday morning.

We awoke to a dark, rainy dawn, right in the middle of the Conservative’s Spring Conference in Brighton, and to a Sunday Times headline: Brown on course to win election. A You Gov poll puts the Tories just two points ahead, not enough to overtake Labour.

Of course, that number presumes an even swing across the country, which won’t materialize. Oddly, the poll result was altered between the first and second editions. The change clipped three points off the Tory lead, according to Greg Dyke on the Marr show.

It’s certainly not as bad as that. However, I don’t resile from the scenario that a very low turnout could work against them, even though that upsets the conventional wisdom.

Syntagma will be watching David Cameron’s keynote speech today with hawk eyes and bats’ ears for some attempt to plug this hole in his strategy. (See Election Notebook tomorrow).

The depressing new slogan, “Vote for change” is relying too much on Brown’s unpopularity. Those of us who follow politics are aware of the technical detail of the policy agenda, but most voters aren’t. They need a good solid reason to go out and vote. Here’s a list of possibilities:

1. Announce a post-election enquiry into Labour’s cynical and destructive immigration policy, which has many people I know seething with anger. The announcement will be enough, and would mean the party will not need to elaborate on immigration during the campaign. It would, though, whack the ball into Labour’s court, something that shamefully hasn’t happened yet.
2. Cancel the TV debates, they will bore the electorate and give voters a reason to stay at home.
3. Offer some broad, sweeping incentives to vote. A promise of a trade-only agreement with Europe would galvanize the core vote and suck in Ukip supporters, as well as some in the BNP.

I believe that would win a comfortable majority for the blues.

Some Conservative bloggers frequently complain that the Daily Telegraph is not a Cameroon paper, nor even a Tory one for that matter.

Strangely, I find a strong congruity of purpose between my own views and many of the writers on the paper. Although I agree with Iain Dale that Simon Heffer’s evisceration of George Osborne yesterday was way over the top of the previous top, Janet Daley and Charles Moore both got to the heart of what is a widely perceived problem: David Cameron has not hooked the Tory core vote.

As I pointed out yesterday in Saturday Ramble, it could cost them dear. A supporting, but intelligently critical, newspaper should be listened to, not rubbished.

I hear that Dave is going to talk about his “patriotic duty” today at the spring conference. I do hope he gives hard examples that will resonate with the faithful. If it’s all window decoration, it will not heal the gap.

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We don’t want “change” per se, we want improvement.

Is this Dave going all Obama on us? Times change, but change remains an empty slogan.

I can’t get worked up about Ukip’s Nigel Farage’s attack on Herman Rumpy Dumpy’s appearance and personality in the so-called European parliament.

For one thing, I don’t regard jibes at what someone can’t help as fair game. While I despise what the man stands for: increased European integration, his personal characteristics are the sphere of shock-jock comedians, not politicians or decent people.

Or is Farage more alternative comedian than politician?

Equality Bill hardliners are probably delighted that it will put pressure on schools not to insist on girls wearing skirts. The reason? It may offend trans-sexuals.

I’ve strained my mind to its limit but I can’t make tail nor tail of it.

If we are to follow this to its logical conclusion, what about Transylvanian vampires? Won’t they feel let down by laws against biting people?

With the massive intake of migrants from Eastern Europe under Labour, there must be at least a couple of dozen now in the country.

I don’t expect the bruvvers to bother too much about them, though, as they seem to be mainly Counts and so inevitably Tory voters.

Let’s hear it for the bloodsuckers, especially as there are few jobs in the City for them now.

Boris Johnson, or BoJo in common parlance, is conspicuously AWOL from the Conservative election battle so far.

Remember his effort at the Party Conference in Manchester? A couple of corkers like that would go down a treat during what promises to be an arid and humourless campaign. Labour has no one to match him.

When the Duke of Wellington surveyed his men before the Battle of Waterloo, he remarked, “I don’t know about the French, but they scare the wits out of me.”

He might say the same about Boris.

John Evans

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Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

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