When I did my Bloodsport short story (Carver, outraged by the betrayal of his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan - takes a potshot at an oh-so-fictional Prime Minister) a corporate lawyer examining the press release became very nervous when I suggested that lives were being lost in Afghanistan due to the government's failure to provide adequate equipment. I pointed out that my opinion wasn't exactly controversial: Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, had made precisely the same point, as had numerous other senior Army officers and assorted politicians (including Labour ones). Besides which, even this utterly corrupt, discredited, incompetent and generally f*cked-up administration hasn't yet made it an offence to criticize the conduct of its absurd overseas adventures.

Now it turns out that there was an official report sitting in the MoD saying precisely the same thing. Naturally the government attempted to suppress it. Naturally it was leaked. And as that came out, so a predictably incompetent cover-up was being cobbled together to cloak the squalid negotiations that led to the release of a convicted terrorist on supposedly 'compassionate' grounds - compassion being just what one ought to display, apparently, to someone convicted for his role in an act of terrorism that left 270 people dead.

Now, I don't think that one has to belong to any particular political ideology to be disgusted by the acts that are daily carried out in our name. The relentless attacks on civil liberties, freedom of information, the right to conduct ones life free of surveillance, ID cards, DNA swabs and so forth should outrage anyone of a liberal disposition just as much as a conservative one. And yet ... and yet ... where are the creative voices screaming in outrage at the way we are being governed? Where are the great novels, TV series, movies or plays denouncing the grotesque combination of paranoia, centralization, authoritarianism and gross incompetence that characterises the Brown government?

Answer: nowhere. And the reason, I fear is that the British publishing, TV and movie industries are run almost entirely by people who take it as axiomatic that any left-ish government is progressive and therefore good, and any right-ish government is repressive and therefore bad.

In July, for example, Ben Stephenson, the BBC's drama commissioning controller stated: "We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking".

Because, of course, anyone to the right of centre is, by definition, a fascistic fuckwit whose opinions can and should be discounted, a priori, as being unworthy of discussion or dissemination ... unless, of course it is to criticize them.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't quite get that. Left-wing progressives don't exactly have a great record when it comes to those traditional progressive causes of liberty, fraternity and equality. The two greatest mass-murderers of the past century - Stalin and Mao - were communist and the third, Hitler, was, lest we forget, a National Socialist. I'm not saying they have the monopoly on evil, far from it ... but nor do they have the monopoly on moral righteousness or, come to that, intellectual coherence.

The upper-middle-class 'progressives' of the creative industries (the kind who oppose private schools, but always find an excuse to send their kids to one), do, however, have a near-monopoly on smugness, hypocrisy and self-delusion. They can't ever get their heads around the concept that their side keeps f*cking up.

Right now, our government is carrying out acts of both omission and commission which would rightly arouse howls of outrage if they were being perpetrated by a Tory government. Yet the creative community remains silent.

Still, what else should one expect? This summer saw the release, and swift disappearance of The Boat That Rocked, Richard Curtis's film about pirate radio. The film depicted the pirates' battle against the British government, portrayed in all its elephantine stupidity and conservative fuddy-duddiness by Kenneth Brangah. In fact, of course, the pirates were closed down by Harold Wilson's Labour government, specifically its groovy young Postmaster General, Anthony Wedgewood Benn ... or plain old Tony Benn as he later preferred to be called.

If left-wing creatives can't even admit that Labour shut down Radio Caroline, there's not a hope in hell they will face up to the Blair/Brown government's role in faking the Iraq WMD evidence, driving David Kelly to his death, causing the British Army to be defeated and humiliated in Basra, leaving it equally vulnerable and under-equipped in Afghanistan and leaving the rest of us living in the world's most spied-upon state. So I guess we libertarian righties will just have to do it for them ...