Are you gay, Iranian and an asylum seeker being deported to your home country by the British Government? Yes, you may be liable to execution, following thousands whose sexual preferences have fallen foul of Tehran's clerical law. But Home Secretary Jacqui Smith reckons you should be OK so long as you are "discreet".

In a big, bad world, out and proud Persians may not be your top priority. But stop and think about this for a moment. In our name, ministers are deporting people to face imprisonment and even death for their sexuality, and the best we can offer is some helpful advice to be "discreet". Are we saying the same of those whose ethnicity, political beliefs, faith or creed requires similar discretion? You may be Jewish, Kurdish, Sunni, Christian or anti-Mugabe, but please go home and don't be flamboyant about it.

Do you suppose Jacqui Smith would have contemplated saying that 12 years ago, when Labour was still an idealistic opposition? Or 12 years before that, as a leftist student leader at Oxford University? Has it all descended to merely positioning, to out-tough their Commons opponents on asylum seekers? Is there any principle left in this?

The same blunt approach to reflecting and generating public fear was in the "42 day" debate over detention without charge. Lacking any evidence base, this was built up into a test of political virility, which Labour only won by the murkiest of means. The government is apparently content that it manoeuvred the Tories into appearing soft on terrorism. It makes a sort of sense in the politics of the Westminster village, but they are so focused on political positioning that they lose sight of what they stand for. Is there any place for liberty in Labour thinking?

Gordon Brown has long tried to tie his politics into history and Labour roots, and he never tires of telling us where he came from and how it shaped him. He was at it again yesterday, the tale of Kirkcaldy manse life somehow symbolic of a generation of post-war social mobility. Let's ignore the fact that sons of manses have been socially mobile for many generations, or that he sometimes seems stuck in boyhood memory, and look at what he said next: that the British should embrace more of "a work ethic, a learning ethic, and aiming high".Again, you can see what he's driving at, but a sermon on aspiration from Downing Street simply grates on the public. They see a man who spent 10 years taking the credit for economic growth, as if it had nothing to do with individual people's work ethic and learning ethic - people getting on, getting educated, supporting their kids, setting up businesses, taking risks, spending, saving, investing. More than any Treasury policy, that's what sustained 10 years of growth. There may be rich electoral rewards for the politician who admits as much, talking the language of co-operation between government and governed. But it won't be Mr Brown.

Deeply sceptical and fearful of inflation, the public watched the Prime Minister go to Saudi Arabia this weekend to ask oil exporters to pump more into supplying demand and please would they recycle their vast surpluses into alternative energy technology? Does anyone suppose the sheikhs were any less bewildered than his audience back home? More likely they thought: "We'll keep our sole resource's financial and geopolitical clout, thank you, and we'll put our oil money into our vast sovereign wealth funds - maybe you should have tried the same yourself, Gordon".

In any case, if they looked in detail at the government's renewable energy record, they might find delay and botching of carbon capture technology, with a prototype project in Peterhead abandoned and taken up in Abu Dhabi instead. And if the mission is to get seed funding into Orkney wave farms, there have to be more effective means of doing that than a Prime Ministerial day-trip to Jeddah. Again, a problem is addressed, ministers are seen to be doing something, it is inappropriate to the task, and it crumbles to dust.

The vogue notion that could replace this inept, lecturing tone is that of "nudges". Embraced in Conservative thinking, this American import says those in power have diminishing ability to tell you what to do, but will change behaviour through gentle peer group hints that you should reduce your energy use, downsize your car, reduce alcohol intake and count calories.

Recent election results and dismal polling suggest it is not a nudge the public want to give Gordon Brown. It is a hefty boot up the backside. At his first anniversary, the famous clunking fist merely clunks, the rhetoric hollow and out of touch.

And as gay men face deportation to Iran, as we are told we need more work ethic, habeas corpus is ignored, and we beg Arabs to embrace wave power, the spindle on Gordon Brown's moral compass spins unpredictably, looking for magnetic moral north but too often finding another scapegoat.