Gordon Gump does it again!

Having staked his prestige on a cut-costs solution to the admission of Gurkhas to the United Kingdom - a shameful, squalid move designed to limit as many as possible from qualifying - our stumbling Prime Minister found himself on the wrong end of a humiliating defeat yesterday, only the third vote the Government has lost since 1997. The worrying thing for Brown is that the defeat was ensured not just by the Conservatives and Liberals voting together but by a sizeable number of Labour MPs who defied the Prime Minister's strictures and voted against him.






This really is the panic button for Gordon. The bells are tolling for Mr Brown's stewardship of the United Kingdom and he appears to be losing more respect and authority by the day. And today there is a vote on his proposals over MPs expenses. He must be shaking in his shoes

Obama and the Israel problem

President Barack Obama has just celebrated his first 100 days in office and declared himself 'pleased but not satisfied'. I think this is about the right tone to strike since America is still deep in financial crisis and unemployment is running at nearly 9%, the highest for many years.



But the President also has reasons to be cheerful. He is still riding high in the popularity stakes and he has taken some very brave decisions. His approaches to Iran, to Venezuela and to Raul Castro's Cuba have been giant strides towards opening windows of dialogue with nations America has shunned for years. His Presidency is a wonderful breath of fresh air in terms of approach.






But soon, in May, he may be faced with one of his biggest challenges as he hosts the new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington DC. And it is here that Mr Obama needs to show a different side of change and talk extremely toughly. It is imperative that the new American administration shows that it regards steps towards an independent Palestinian state as a number one priority and concedes nothing to Israeli vacillating on the issue.





This is going to be tough. America has, since Israel's birth, given the Jewish state virtually unqualified support and there is a powerful Jewish lobby running through the American political system. But the President will need to take on all of that, and the intransigent Mr Netanyahu, if the current , totally unacceptable, situation in Palestine is to be changed.



Israeli politicians are already talking about discussions on a Palestinian state as 'premature' instead preferring to talk of options to lighten the economic problems without actually ceding anything. The Israelis continue to expand their settlements on the West Bank in direct contravention of UN resolutions to stop, and Mr Obama may well have to risk a lot of unpopularity with the Jewish lobby at home as well as the Israelis themselves by threatening some form of sanctions if the Israelis refuse to comply.



It is a difficult issue for the American President and he has my sympathy, for, in microcosm, I have experienced the frustrations of criticising the actions of the Israeli state. I have some dearly treasured Jewish friends but this issue is so often a stumbling block that I have taken to avoiding it. For many Jews it seems, a criticism of Israel is seen as close to anti semitism and a failure to understand the intense drive to protect Israel's borders at all costs.



While recognising the need for Israel's security, the Jewish state can not continue its political and military policy in Gaza, in Lebanon, on the West Bank without continuing to lose the world's sympathy..and heaven knows it has managed to lose enough. President Obama has to do more than talk tough to Netanyahu. The Israelis have to be brought, kicking and screaming if necessary, to a conference table with their Palestinian counterparts and a deal hammered out for a viable, independent Palestinian state as a matter of urgency.

Oh Lord, please Brown retire on 'health grounds'!

Gordon Brown should quit and quit now. Can't his advisers persuade him to develop a long dormant dicky heart or perhaps, more credibly, some mental condition. I don't care that pundits will say it would cost the Labour Party the next general election. They have already lost the next General Election. The public of Britain can't wait to get rid of them. Not because the Tories will be any better but simply because they are anybody but the Incapability Brown/Scrounger Smith/Manipulative McNulty/ New (and hopelessly adrift) Labour. Labour desperately needs renewal. It needs to find a path of honour and decency and with this gaggle of clowns and rank amateurs at the helm it is simply floating along, its only target the sole object of re-election.






Brown has no judgement. Not a scrap. Now the idiot is digging his heels in and defending his proposed quick fix for MPs expenses with a standard attendance allowance. Can he not see how the public would perceive that? Has he not taken soundings from the European Parliament where such a system is already in place? SISO they call it there. Sign in and Sod off. How is that going to restore the image of our tarnished politicians. The current system is dreadful but it is right that an alternative be properly thought out and intelligently implemented by a commission set up to fully research the task. Why does Brown think his quick fixes will not be seen through as an attempt to prop up his ailing party?.



Then back to the Damian McBride issue and Brown's belated apology on a building site for something he knew nothing about and was horrified to discover. Ian Hislop on this week's 'Have I got news for you?' almost blatantly accused Brown of lying. It beggars belief, he said, that a personal advisor can sit in the same room coming up with fancy schemes to discredit the opposition and his boss knows nothing about them. And it does. As I have said in earlier posts, once a plotter always a plotter. Brown's wonderful line showing his mastery of the situation was replayed to hoots of laughter in the studio. "I am prepared to take full personal responsibility for what has happened, and therefore the person responsible has been dismissed." If only!!



Frankly Brown's attempts at being Prime Minister are rapidly becoming a joke. He may see his future as world economic guru but his attempts at running the nation are rapidly subsiding into farce. There have been rumours for some months of a potential leadership challenge very soon. Normally these things subside to nothing and are stuff of the Fleet Street rumour mill but I believe there are many Labour MPs who believe as I do that the government is probably doomed anyway but absolutely for sure under this guy.



Blair's warnings about allowing Brown into this job have been borne out with interest. Rarely has a politician been found so wanting. The sad fact is that, should a successful challenge take place, it will simply produce more of the same and not the renewal that the REAL Labour Party so desperately needs. I am, however, getting to the point of thinking we who love Labour and its ideal can worry about that later. For now any alternative will do.

Cervical cancer jabs and Birmingham schools

I commented some months back on the wonderful breakthrough of the HPV jab giving Britain's girls the opportunity to enjoy a life with minimal risk of cervical cancer.

And indeed there is a marvellous opportunity to ensure total coverage by administering the injection in schools. I can't understand, therefore, why Birmingham has decided on a sort of half and half approach to this. Half the city is going to administer the injection at school and the other half have decided it's the GP's responsibility. It would seem that the problem lies, not with the schools, but whether you are lucky enough to live in an area of Primary Care Trust responsibility which has decided to sponsor school visits

This seems ridiculous. Surely the only way to ensure that all the girls who qualify for the injection receive it is through a common policy, namely via visits to the schools. What is happening seems a recipe for a mess. Schools are going to have to check that girls have not been injected at a GP's surgery, and GP's practices are going to have to waste time ensuring that the girls have not been injected at school.

The worst part, of course, is that the PCTs who choose to leave it to the GP are also risking that some girls will not get the jab at all.

Surely there is a Department of Health issue here which should ensure a common policy across the board.

Appalling pub toilets

I was going to head this 'Pissed off' but I thought that was rather too coarse and low for a blog of this gravitas (ahem!!) but I am horrified at the state of the toilets in some of the pubs I visit. As I mentioned in an earlier thread I suffer from colitis so, unfortunately, my necessary visits often involve more than just leaping in and out for a leak.

I can't believe that either the management of the pubs concerned or their owners are prepared to let this situation continue. Are they not ashamed? A good evening out in a smart bar can be spoilt by the visit to the toilets which often as not have flooded floors, no toilet paper and the locks broken.




I'm sure my native city is far from the only offender, British traditions in this area traditionally erring on the side of the disgusting. We could take lessons from the Germans in terms of providing public facilities and where severe fines are imposed by an active inspectorate on premises which fall below an acceptable standard.

I accept that the state of the 'loos' is just negligence but I am puzzled by what seems to be the deliberate policy of removing door locks. Do they expect to catch armies of graffiti fiends or maybe some homosexual tryst? God knows but I do find this to be another black mark on pub loos. I'm not particularly a retiring violet but nobody wants some guy blundering in and saying 'sorry mate' as you sit there with trousers round your ankles, hardly at your most dignified.

Anyway there is one site which clearly feels as I do!! They've had the good idea of giving red, amber and green flashes against the pubs visited by their readers, dependent on the quality of their toilets. Dark green is excellent, light green good, amber average, light red is bad, and - if you visit premises marked dark red - take a clothes peg for your nose, your own loo paper and anti nausea pills. I hope their name and shame policy has some effect!

What do we actually sell any more?

I was watching a Midlands News item today about the recession biting deeply and hitting , quote, "one of Birmingham's most important industries" which turned out to be conference centres and arenas. Which made me wonder, not for the first time, what Birmingham actually survives on these days.

This is a city spawned by the industrial revolution and its hallmark was that it made things that people wanted to buy. Birmingham made cars, one of the biggest manufacturers in Europe if not the world, until the eventual collapse in 2005 of Austin Rover.






We made motor cycles at BSA, short for Birmingham Small Arms, and its name gives evidence of our other major industry - we made guns. We made bicycles, jewellery, chocolate and glass. We had something tangible to offer, a disparate range of production items we could sell to the world.

We lost our major car plant in 2005, motor bikes to the Italians and later the far east years before that. Other industries simply became redundant but, it seems to me, have never been replaced. Everything the consumer wants - TVs, DVD players, washing machines, cars, bikes - all made in the far east or somwhere not in the UK

Now we seem to sell that intangible of intangibles - 'services'. We sell conference space and arena shows and all the peripheral stuff - the pretty girls and the razzmatazz that goes with it. We are a dependency economy, dependent on other companies outside the city - and many from abroad - seeing Birmingham as a market stall on which to lay out their goods. So we are Mr 10% - we take the commission for providing a pretty setting for other people to sell stuff.

In a current review of Birmingham, two of its industries are described as finance and tourism. Well forgive me, love my city though I do, I would hardly count on its future as a tourist destination and , even if it were the Rome of the Midlands, what sort of an industry is 'tourism'.? That's for the likes of Majorca and the Bahamas,with precious little else going for it, not a major city with a massive potential workforce.

It was announced this week that Birmingham has suffered more than most under the recession. Well I don't think that's greatly surprising. When you have what was once a major manufacturing city now vulnerable to the whims of other people's businesses because we specialise in service industries and entertainment, then in a recession those are going to be cut back pretty quickly.

I have watched the renaissance of Birmingham with some admiration and more than a little worry. The bars, restaurants and clubs which have sprung up on our canal side are very impressive and a joy to take visitors.




But I come back to where the money comes from? What is sustaining this growth of leisure and entertainment, these comparitively rich kids who come into the city and spend £25 on a meal and £4 on a pint of lager? Where does their money come from? And is this recession, now seen to be the worst since the second world war and counting, going to finally blow apart the apparent prosperity of Birmingham as a facade that cannot be sustained?

Mad Dogs and Englishmen!

Now assuming you are English, did you wake up this morning and remember it was St Georges Day? No nor me. We are incredibly underwhelmed in England by our national day, despite the efforts of a few to hold fetes etc, always highlighted by the BBC Midland News, ever desperate for a decent story, but by and large it seems to go by largely without celebration.




It seems to be part and parcel of the English languid approach to nationalism. There are more St Georges flags around when England play football than on our national day. There have been a number of theories put forward as to why this is, none of which totally convince. Some people have said its since England has become a multi cultural nation with more ethnic races who have no ties to our traditional saint (who wasn't English anyway). I think this is rubbish because I never recall St Georges Day having a very high profile when I was a child over 50 years ago either.

Maybe its because we have a sort of sense of general contentment about ourselves without having to go in for nationalist excess. That's the version I like anyway. I am happy that the English generally don't go for the overt kind of nationalism seen in the United States which can be so easily perverted to a political path by unscrupulous politicians when the Commander-in-Chief is also the President.

I'm told that St Georges Day is making a comeback, possibly because commercial interests are encouraging it, but maybe partly because of the devolution of Scotland and Wales, making the English think more about their Englishness than Britishness.

Anyway its all hypothesis. But despite the changes in the demographics of the nation there are still a few old English diehards left. I went for lunch at my local pub today which is where I realised it was St Georges Day, simply because one of the elderly regulars with whom I am on chatting terms and who usually shows up in his cardigan and flannels, turned up in a blue suit and panama hat, sporting a massive rose in his lapel and determinedly sat outside to advertise that he had remembered the day.

He was soon back in the lounge, complaining that the kids playing bowls were taking the mickey out of his hat. There aren't many of his ilk left, God bless 'em!

Cameron should be grateful he's on the opposite benches

Alistair Darling today delivered a budget in which he knew he couldn't win. The economic situation is dire, he was facing the inevitability of massive borrowing - £175 billion this year and £700 billion over the next 5 years. Total national debt will peak at 80% of Gross Domestic Product virtually double the 'top line' figure set by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor, and we will not be back in balance - at best - until 2018.




Could it be worse? Darling did at least attempt to boost the economy through job creation measures, desperately needed, but his hands were necessarily tied by the balancing act of trying to please everyone at a time when the piggy bank was empty and the need to borrow so much money.

The interesting thing is that criticism has mainly been that he hasn't committed enough funds to boost business, boost housing or benefit the poor. All this probably true but he was on a hiding to nothing. The criticism has come from business leaders and economists alike and it puts the Conservatives approach under the microscope.

David Cameron was able to manufacture some outrage and passion over the 'utter mess' Brown and Darling had made of the economy, and, of course, there were enthusiastic cheers for the sentiment from the Tory benches.




However let's stop a moment. Cameron may be getting his day in the sun at Labour's expense, sneering at Brown's claims during the good years that 'boom and bust are over'. But it's a good job for Cameron that no one really puts the opposition proposals under the spotlight until an election is called. So he and George Osborne can continue blaming Labour's mishandling of the economy with impunity.

But what is their solution? To sit tight, to save money, to not spend our way out of recession. The interesting thing is hardly any of the world's leading economists agree with them. Because that means deflation, a squeezing of commerce, no money circulating to get the economy moving again. And Cameron and his policies really should be put under the spotlight. But they won't be until they become possibly relevant, two or three months before an election.

So I advise David Cameron to cash in while he can. When his policies begin to be dissected, line by line, in the light of the world global crisis, my suspicion is that 'the great white hope' of our monied classes will begin to look horribly naked.

Britain pilloried again on child welfare

There have been three reports in as many years on the state of child welfare across the world, by UNICEF in 2007, Save the Children in 2008 and now the Child Poverty Action Group. In only one, the simplest in terms of expectation, did Britain come out anything like smiling and that was the 8th place in a world poll of Save the Children and they simply took the mortality rate of under 5s, the number of under 5s who are underweight and the number of infants enrolled in school.

In the other polls which asked far more wide ranging questions, Britain came bottom in the world in the UNICEF poll of rich nations (see below) and now, in the CPAG survey, a miserable 24th out of 29 countries in Europe. These are not figures to be proud of, particularly after 12 years of Labour government. Only Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta were lower than the UK, and given our relative wealth, that's a pretty depressing set of nations to be lumbered with.




The CPAG has acknowledged, in fairness, that the British government is trying to tackle the problem through Sure Start, the Children's Plan and tax credits but says more funding needs to be allocated to the problems.

The issues that seem to have done for us are primarily the high numbers of children living in families with nobody in work and in bad environments, added to the poor rate of pick up on immunisation - a really serious worry - , the inability of British children to communicate well with parents and, another major problem, bad diet and consequent child obesity.

The Dutch came top of the list for child welfare, followed by the Scandinavian countries and Britain clearly has a tough job to get among the leaders, where a nation as rich as ourselves ought to be. Tax policy is clearly an issue, and the reluctance of New Labour to commit to a tax policy which meets the nation's social needs, instead trying to avoid Tory flak of being a 'tax and spend' party, is a majo factor.

We need to go back to basics, unlikely under the present lot, and determine how much we need to spend to provide the United Kingdom with the social framework it deserves, rather than how much can we afford to tax people without giving the Tories ammunition. Labour has simply fallen between two fences, neither satisfying the country's social welfare needs or satisfying the electorate that it is necessarily the sounder choice.

Of course there will be those who read the statistics and immediately blame one parent families and the breakdown of the family unit in the UK for much of this. But Scandinavia, which is frequently lauded to the skies, has almost abandoned traditional marriage as a precursor to raising children and most kids are brought up outside a traditional married environment. The difference is that state policy and high taxation has allowed more flexibility in the way children are targetted for benefit, regardless of the status of their parents.

It's not just the government, of course. There needs to be a substantial mind set change on diet, particularly among poorer families, on the provision of junk food for children. The statistics on child obesity make horrifying reading, and while the problem is growing across most socio-economic groups, it is among the poor that the issue is most significant. The common excuse that other foods are too expensive is simply not true and there is a fixed food attitude problem which needs urgent re-education if Britain is to make any strides out of this rather ignominious depth.

This week there is a budget and it is yet to be seen whether Alistair Darling will grasp the nettle and allocate the resources necessary to boost the well being of Britain's children to the degree required to drag us out of this rather shameful position. I'm not holding my breath.

A triumph for substance over superficiality

Another non political post - but I suppose everyone who watches TV is now aware of the triumph of Scotland's Susan Boyle in the 'Britain's got talent' show last week. I didn't watch the show (and no I'm not just saying that for snobby effect) but once her success was reported on, I watched the clip on 'You Tube'.

Neither the show nor her choice of material is really my cup of tea, but it was hard to avoid a glow of delight to see a middle aged woman who, by her own admission is no oil painting and dresses in a somewhat frumpy manner, wipe that cynical leer off the face of Simon Cowell by suddenly turning from ugly duckling to swan as soon as she opened her mouth.

By any bookies odds she must have looked a non starter, a middle aged, rather plain, spinster from a Scottish village who lived alone except for her cat, suddenly producing such a wonderful singing voice. It was gratifying to see the ever supercilious Cowell reduced to embarrassed confusion, along with Piers Morgan and for the audience to react in the way that they did, suddenly realising that there was real talent up there on the stage.

Ms Boyle herself was a breath of fresh air. She must have been aware that her age and appearance was making her the subject of cruel cynical sneers and laughter before she opened her mouth. It was a real triumph of the human spirit to overcome that in front of such a large audience - most people would have been riddled with nerves in any case - and to produce the performance she did.

AS she said afterwards 'I wasn't bothered about my hair do and my frock - after all its not a beauty contest is it?" No it shouldn't be but in an entertainment business which lauds the superficial and cosmetic over real talent, Susan Boyle has raised a standard for those who have to rely on natural talent and not the art of the cosmetician.

I don't know how far she will go in her belatedly discovered show biz career but she has my warmest wishes for success.

Formula One living up to expectations!

Well it's nice to get away from scheming politicians and violent policemen every now and again, so I was delighted with the triumph of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber for Red Bull in today's Chinese Formula One Grand Prix in Shanghai.







Being a British sporting patriot (I'm not very overtly patriotic in other ways) I would like to see Button or Hamilton win the title at the end of the year, but it's great to see the hopes of some competitive racing this year coming to fruition. Any way Red Bull is a British team so if it wins the constructor's championship that would be good too. It makes for a much better contest in any sport when rivals are closely matched and it really does look as if the changes to the aerodynamics of F1 cars this year have resulted in a more even playing field and that can only be good for the spectators and the sport which was beginning to die of an excess of technology.

Vettel seems at his best in the wet. He won at Monza last year in similar conditions and did the same again today. It was a good result for Aussie teammate Webber who has had some appalling fortune with cars and finishes of late.

I'm pleased that F1 had the courage to grasp this nettle and make so many radical changes. The results are now being seen in what looks like being one of the most competitive seasons in years.

I was sadly reminded yesterday of how much things have changed over the years in terms of car safety in design, for F1 deaths are now, thankfully, a rare event. I was watching a documentary on my all time favourite driver Jim Clark, killed at Hockenheim in 1968 after hitting a tree at 174mph in a season where 6 other drivers were also killed. I love excitement and risk but that kind of price was way too much to pay.

The plot thickens

It seems difficult to get away from the Damian Green affair and the shadowy motives of either the British government and/or the police, particularly as it has now been revealed that a key target of the police search through Green's e-mails was the name of Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty.



Now we know that Ms Chakrabarti causes smoke to come out of the nose of Andy Burnham, for one, after his scathing comments about her relationship with David Davis - “late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls”. OK the government doesn't like her affinity to Davis, nor I suspect do they like her strong mobilisation of opinion against the 42 day detention proposals, but is Shami Chakrabarti really considered to be a danger to the state, a security risk worthy of investigation - or is this a politically motivated group of people, working off political beefs against someone, in her role as protector of human rights, who appears to thwart their objectives at every turn?

Whatever the truth it seems pretty clear that there was no connection to Damian Green and the leaks and it appears no one told Ms Chakrabarti that she was under suspicion for anything.

This is all starting to sound even more off the wall and out of control and reflects very badly on the government in general.

In a separate development today, Alice Mahon, the former left wing Labour MP has resigned from the party in disgust over what she describes as 'the last straw' of the appalling Damian McBride e-mails but her anger and disillusion is more widely aimed at the direction in which the Labour Party is headed.



In remarks which must reflect the feelings of so many she said 'When Gordon Brown took over as leader, I really felt we might move further in the direction of being a principled and caring party. I couldn't have been more wrong."


And so say many of us!

Our freedoms are being eaten away by stupidity

The Crown Prosecution Service yesterday decided there was no case to answer against Damian Green, the Conservative Shadow Immigration spokesman, over leaks of government information, and the result has been a total humiliation for Jacqui Smith and the Home Office.

I know Smith was not initially responsible for calling in the police. But she is the senior Minister in the Department and she had the power to call the dogs off before this got out of hand. She should have assessed whether any of this stuff really was a breach of national security or whether someone was acting out of pique because so many leaks were taking place. It should never have been allowed to get to a situation where an Opposition MP, doing his job as he saw it, was threatened by the police with life imprisonment, as appears to have been the case. But as with other things she doesn't seem to have had her eye on the ball, doesn't seem to have seen the possible fall-out of such a dramatic step and did nothing about it. It seems to me she has no credibility left and simply has to go, sooner rather than later.



Even the police it seems were at odds on how to proceed. Sir Paul Stephenson, now head of the Met, clashed with Bob Quick who led the commons enquiry. Quick, who resigned last week over his own stupid security breach, was adamant that the full weight of the law be thrown at Green while Stephenson advocated a more informal series of steps, clearly aware of the danger of such precedent.

The government seems to be more than just error prone at the moment, it appears, in many key areas, to be downright incompetent and that starts at the top. Whatever my opinion of Tony Blair, particularly after Iraq, I think his judgment that Gordon Brown was not a natural leader of the party was spot on. Look at the Damien McBride affair. Brown appears not to have known what was going on despite the man being his policy adviser. He took ages to apologise for what was done and then did so yesterday in Scotland, clearly aware that his rather distant 'regrets' were not cutting it. But is Brown as innocent as he makes out? When Blair was Prime Minister, it was well known that Brown and his cabal plotted incessantly against Brown's enemies. Does anyone remember Charlie Whelan and the Mandelson home loan affair? Another enemy of Brown's was outed by Brown's spin doctor, presumably with his boss's approval. Has Brown the plotter really changed that much now he has the top job?

And as for the ludicrous misuse of the Terrorism Bill, there is a video on You Tube of Brummie film maker Darren Pollard filming the police from his front garden.



The consequence is that two worthies from the West Midlands Police knock on his door and demand that he stop filming them 'because it's illegal'. Pollard is made of stronger stuff and demands that they show him where in British law it is illegal to film policemen and eventually they walk away, tails between their legs. But the sting in the tail is that from this month, it will be illegal to film the police under certain conditions where, presumably they are involved in anti terrorist work. But you can bet your bottom dollar the police will interpret this as freely as they like.

And yesterday two Austrian tourists, a man and his young son, were stopped by police in London because they were filming a bus depot in Walthamstow, and told to delete the pictures as they constituted an offence of 'photographing transport' under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The police took their passport numbers and hotel addresses. For Christ's sake...if it wasn't so pathetically sad it would be funny. But two keen tourists say they will never come to Britain again. The government is allowing us to slide into a situation where we will soon be policed like Albania and not the UK



I don't think the government necessarily intends this kind of ludicrous excess. But once again rushed legislation without adequate controls is allowing the police, once given an inch, to take a mile - again I'm sure believing that they are fulfilling their duties under the Act.

But we need to slow down. This government, instead of panicking in the face of Islamic extremism and continuing to bring in new laws (Over 3000 since 1997 and counting) seriously needs to sit down and assess the legislation we already have. And they need to strike a better balance between necessary control and the erosion of freedoms which we have long cherished. At present I see a frightening lurch into authoritarianism.

And Brown needs to be Prime Ministerial. We need to stop looking at appropriate quotas of women, blacks, asians or any other politically correct criterion which has so driven this Labour government , and pick the best Ministers for the job. At present they ain't there! Brown has a limited amount of time to make the Labour government even barely credible and if he continues to play Nero while his party burns around him, then he will deserve what he gets at the polls. The saddest part is that the alternative of a Conservative government sickens me to the stomach, maybe a nausea I could tolerate if I thought it had any likelihood of being more efficient, more competent, less error strewn than the shambles we have in office now. The pity is I don't..and they have an ethos which is total anathema to me.

If 'Respect' stands in my Constituency they may well get my vote and that's sad in a way, because it will be a disillusioned angry protest. I could never consider the idea of voting Conservative but to vote again for this Fred Karno's Army of incompetent amateurs currently trying to drive the country into an authoritarian abyss is more than I can stomach.

How do we best police the police?

This week has produced a plethora of reminders that our police are very removed from the 'Dixon of Dock Green' image some of our, particularly, right-wing newspapers would like to portray them. There have been two incidents from the recent G20 summit, one of which resulted in a man's death and poignant reminders today from Hillsborough 20 years ago when not only were the police responsible, by neglect, for the 96 deaths which occurred there but further compounded their sins by lying about what actually happened. Yet no single police officer - not even David Duckenfield the officer in charge - faced criminal prosecution.




Matthew Parris, journalist and himself a former Conservative politician, wrote in 'The Times' this week that he believed the Conservative Party since the war had made a grave mistake in promoting the view that any criticism of the police was close to seditious and would lead to a breakdown of respect for law and order.

What has happened as a result is a situation whereby investigation into police actions by the media is strongly discouraged and the police are allowed to police themselves, not always that convincingly. Parris made the point that if the unfortunate Ian Tomlinson, who died after being struck by a police officer at the G20 summit. had been hit by anyone else in broad daylight and the attack had been recorded in such clear detail, the assailant would already be in custody. As it is the policeman concerned has been 'withdrawn' from the headlines and the force again has pulled the security curtain around one of its own.

Today Britain's top cop, Sir Paul Stephenson, Head of the Metropolitan Police, has expressed disquiet at the pictures which have been emerging from the G20 summit and has invited Her Majestys Commissioners of Police to investigate policing methods at events like the G20. Now this procedure in itself is concerning. The boss of the very force whose officers stand accused of violent conduct is the man who decides whether to invite Police Commissioners in to investigate procedure.

The British tradition, as Parris again points out, is to keep the police out of politics...or to be more accurate, to keep the way the police do their job out of the reach of politicians. Parris makes the point that the police are a public service, just as firefighters, sewerage workers and council employees are, and should be equally accountable. They appear as a cost line on my council tax statement just as does every other public service.

But for some reason, it has been seen as appropriate to bestow an 'untouchable' status on the police force, supported by the argument that to allow them to be at the beck and call of politicians would pervert the nature of their role. That tradition has, of course, been broken this year when the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, effectively sacked the previous Head of the Met, Sir Ian Blair, a man he hasnt even the power to appoint.

Parris argues that to politicise the police within the remit of local politicians would give more accountability than does the present system, and would replicate the kind of system seen in the United States.

Simply looking at the Sir Ian Blair situation highlights one glaring weakness in the current system. The Home Secretary appoints the Head of the Met, rather in the way Prime Ministers appoint Archbishops of Canterbury, and have little say thenceforth in how they operate. It took Boris Johnson, who effectively overturned the rule book and said 'I may not be able to sack you but I can withdraw the cooperation of my officers' to make Blair's position untenable.

There are a bewildering array of interests which currently have some involvement in running the Met but the lines are drawn in a bewildering and inefficient fashion.

My answer would be similar to that of Parris. Lets put the Met under the total control of the London mayor and lets have other police forces directly answerable to an elected local political body. Already there are police authorities which have the responsibility of overseeing our regional police forces and these bodies need to be structured differently within the electoral system and given many more teeth. There would be problems but none that could not be overcome.

The biggest obstacle to change is likely to be the police service itself which is certain to guard its privileged position of virtual immunity from close political oversight with a jealous determination. This has to be overcome in the interests of greater accountability and , I believe, a better police service.

Is Brown really in charge?

Hope everyone had a Happy Easter!! Better in fact than Gordon Brown, who has been faced with the revelations that Damien McBride his former Press Advisor wrote some e mails for a Labour blog which never saw the light of day, e- mails containing scurrilous and unsubstantiated comments about members of the Conservative Party including David Cameron and George Osborne.

McBride clearly feels that he is unlucky and has been 'betrayed' by Paul Staines who writes a blog called 'Guido Fawkes' and who came by these mails and chose to publish them. Has McBride considered that a senior press man in a Labour Government should not be stooping to this kind of juvenile level at all, whether or not the results were intended for publication?

It does make one wonder how much authority Gordon Brown really has over his team. Even now it seems to have taken him a long time to recognise the severity of what has been done and how much damage could have been done to his own prestige and that of his government.

Now, belatedly, Brown is calling for 'a tighter code of conduct'. But it all seems very vacuous and very late. At present this government seems to be mired in sleaze, given the row over expenses and now a rather nasty bit of obscene libel. And I don't get the impression that the Prime Minister is really thumping the table and getting these people into line. I think he needs to become pro-active, rather than reactive, very quickly and start demonstrating some Prime Ministerial authority. At present he simply appears to be carried along by events.

A government with its head in the clouds

Well it would be seem that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is having a cavalier existence these days, either fiddling her expenses or, like Mr Gladstone, saving fallen women...or so she apparently believes. The proposed new legislation on prostitution would make it a criminal offence by the male customer if he pays for sex with a woman who is controlled by pimps.

How ludicrous is that? Can you imagine the conversation? "How much for a ten minute quickie, luv - but I must see written evidence that you are working alone, entirely unconscripted and not subject to force or duress in any way!' Its total bananas.

But of course the government is not mad. It knows that placing the onus in this way is unfair - and it doesn't care. As the holier than thou Mrs Smith said yesterday 'there will be no more excuses for those who pay for sex'. Perhaps there should be no more excuses for those who pay a lot more of taxpayers money to keep their homes but enough of that.

Someone should confront her on this but nobody in politics has the guts to break ranks on an issue which is seen as 'morally justified'. But what is wrong with paying for sex if it is a mutually agreed contract? Not every woman making a living from supplying sexual services has been dragged here from Romania or Albania, not every one has been forced into it by evil men with gold jewellery and flashy BMWs either. And it is clearly totally unfair to put a criminal onus on men who are not in a position to know the truth. People have paid sex for all sorts of reasons and I don't believe, provided there is no force or coercion, that should be a criminal offence.



As one 'punter' interviewed on TV said yesterday, it is an accommodation shrouded in shame and lies..on both sides. The man wants to remain anonymous, the girl is hardly going to admit she is controlled by anybody and thus lose business. All that will happen is that the trade will be driven ever further underground.

I have said before that while I have supported the Labour Party all my life with its creed of social welfare there are times when that falls over the edge into Victorian nannying. It is no good Mrs Smith proclaiming 'no more excuses for paid sex'. Paid sex has been in existence since the dawn of time and will continue to be so. The government needs to start looking at this from a different perspective.

A rather unsavoury analogy of how the government is operating with regard to prostitution might be the of the old British gentry before flush toilets were invented who just threw unsavoury matter into the cellar and let the servants clear it into the sewers, pretending it wasn't there.

This is no way to go on or to keep the girls engaged in the trade safe. The government needs to bite the bullet on its Victorian hang-ups and start thinking seriously about tolerance zones where the girls involved in the trade can be properly housed, pay rent, be medically examined and supervised..and basically be reasonably safe. This is the way to deal with the issue not these petty ludicrous impositions on the man who pays..and especially to impose criminal sanctions when he is hardly likely to be in possession of the facts which turn him into a criminal.

Are British standards of behaviour getting worse?

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers is the latest organisation to reflect a decline in standards of both childrens behaviour with a quarter of teachers reporting that they had been attacked to some degree by a pupil and, even worse, nearly 40% reported that they had been attacked by a parent.

There were reports of six year olds 'losing it', becoming so violent that they trashed a computer and cases of six year olds attacking teachers with scissors. Many teachers said they had lost confidence as a result and, in some cases, were seeking to retrain in other professions.

I know there have been violent children down the ages, but surely not on this scale. What is happening and why? Are we simply seeing the products of a parental generation which had no respect for authority either? I used to be a governor of an inner city Birmingham school which was one of the first to install a metal grille in front of the entry door to keep out violent parents. Dreadful situation.

Are we generally declining in terms of behavioural standards in this country? You look around at almost every part of the social fabric and its hard to argue. TV entertainers don't understand boundaries. Look at Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand and the despicable performance over Andrew Sachs's grand-daughter. Drive on Birmingham's roads and watch the idiotic performance of young drivers who think it's clever to weave in and out of lanes almost shaving your wing off, then respond with a finger or worse if you hoot in protest. I've seen two young men get out of a car and kick a guy's headlights in because he hooted a protest at their illegal overtaking. Kids carrying knives and this week two young boys, 9 and 10, seriously injured with knives carried by others of a similar age. And these are just a few examples of situations I don't believe would have happened 15 or 20 years ago.



These things are always tricky. I suppose the first question is...is my assumption true? Are we simply getting an impression from the media that society has become less tolerant and more violent? I would suspect there is enough evidence to prove things are worsening.

Maybe faith has a part to play in this. I'm not religious but I can readily understand that in times gone by religion provided a creed to live by which seems to have been eroded as we become more and more godless a society. So what can we do? It's certainly not an issue that can be dealt with through legislation, but maybe there are initiatives that could be launched in communities to try and get people to calm down. As a society we seem to be living on a dangerous edge and if the present situation continues, will the country be worth living in in ten or fifteen years time?

Looks like a great Formula One season in the making

One of my 'background' sporting interests, way behind football and cricket, has been motor racing, but my interest has been elevated by circumstances this season. I do some DJ-ing for an American internet radio station and they have asked me to send a regular Formula One report to their weekly NASCAR show and thus keep the Americans in tune with 'European' Motor Racing.

I couldn't have picked a better year with the new rules completely turning the 2008 form book upside down and the new Brawn Mercedes team rising from the ashes of the Honda pull out and winning the first two races of the new season, both with Jensen Button at the wheel. I am delighted for Button, a guy I've long thought was a better driver than his record suggests and who has been in uncompetitive cars for the last few years. So at present we have one British world champion possibly superceded by another, unless McLaren can get their act together pretty quickly.



The racing has been first class and there is little doubt that the rules governing the aerodynamics has produced more of a level playing field which , although Brawn seem to be setting the pace after two races, they are not dominating in the way McLaren and Ferrari have done in years gone by. Any of BMW Sauber, Toyota, Red Bull or Williams could come through to challenge Brawn's current supremacy.

Formula One needed some kind of an injection to make the racing more competitive and to give the spectators something to enthuse over. Of course the one thing rules cannot resolve and that's the weather, sadly proven today when the Malaysian Grand Prix was abandoned after a torrential downpour after 32 laps. Not that Button was to unhappy - he was in the lead and got the points - but unsatisfactory for race fans and the organisers.

What a breath of fresh air!

The power of the American President could never be under rated, but today was a refreshing and stark example of how the perception of an entire nation can change when the rest of the world hears the man who holds that office.

Today at the end of the G20 summit we all heard an American President admit first of all America's culpability in the economic crisis that grips the world. Some might say he could do little else. But he did so in a way which did not hedge bets but was clear and concise, and said it was now America's responsibility to help fix the mess.



Barack Obama talked about American leadership and how his nation should not be embarrassed by its strength and power but how that power was best used when America listened and showed some humility. He talked about America forging international partnerships rather than imposing its will on the world. He talked about a world of different cultures which America would try to understand and deal with rather than confront.

It made the policies of his predecessor and the PNAC think-tank which pushed the proposal that America should impose itself more forcefully and particularly in the middle east, seem a hideous nightmarish memory rather than a hideous nightmarish reality which killed thousands and from which America and Britain are still trying to recover.

I believe this man means what he says. I only hope he is not dragged down by the economic crisis or shot by some lunatic in mid term. He may not be able to save the world's economy overnight but already, in just over 2 months, Barack Obama has changed the world's perception of the United States which had fallen to the most grievous low. Let us all hope he is given the support and the enthusiasm back home to continue doing so for 8 years